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Supplementary Note to Editions of 1910 and 1914

REMARKS ON THE GROWTH OF PARTY: ITS PERVERSIONS AND THE REMEDIES APPLIED

It may be well to add here a few further observations, suggested by recent events, on the party system.

The government of the United States, and of every state, and of every city, was originally intended and expected to be conducted by the people as a whole through their elected representatives, who, being the best and wisest, were to act for the whole people in their common interest. But, within a few years of its establishment, the government, both in the nation and in the states, and subsequently in the cities also, was seized upon by party, which has ever since controlled it and worked it, so that no other way of working it has even been thought of, or can now be easily imagined. Out of party there naturally grew the machine, i.e., an elaborate system of party organization created for the purpose of selecting candidates and securing their election by the people. The machine is the offspring of two phenomena, both natural, though both unforeseen. One was the deficiency of public zeal among the citizens, a deficiency not indeed more marked here than in other countries but here more unfortunate. The other was the excess of private zeal among the politicians, who perceived that public work could be turned to private gain. Thus the Spoils System sprang into being, office being the prize of party victory.

But the action of these factors was mightily increased by the influence of democratic theory pushed to extremes. The doctrine of human equality was taken to imply that one man was just as good as another for public office. The doctrine of popular sovereignty was applied by giving the election of nearly all officials in state, county, and city to the voters and by choosing the officials for very short terms. The consequence of this was that it became impossible for the voters, in such large communities as states and great cities, to know who were the fittest men to choose for the large number of elective offices. Hence the action and power of the machine became inevitable. Since the voters could not possibly select the numerous candidates needed, it stepped in and selected them. Since the incessant elections required a great deal of work, it stepped in and conducted the elections.

These evils grew with the increasing size of the communities and the increasing wealth of the country, which threw into the hands of legislatures and officials immense opportunities for bestowing favours on unscrupulous groups of men bent on gain. It is easy for such men to influence a legislature, and it was well worth their while to do so.

At last a point was reached at which the evils aroused the public conscience and were felt to be injuring the whole community. How were they to be dealt with? Human intelligence, by a sort of natural law, chooses the path of least resistance, and instead of trying to root out an evil altogether, oftens seeks to discover some expedient which will get round the evil and avoid its worst consequences. So in this instance the voters, instead of destroying the machine or setting it right by ejecting the professionals and making a party organization truly represent the whole party and the principles the party stands for, resorted to the plan of creating statutory primaries, that is to say, of duplicating elections by holding a party election to choose candidates as preliminary to the general election for choosing officials. Already, instead of trying to reform the legislatures, which had largely lost public confidence by their subservience to the machine and to powerful private interests, they had limited the powers and shortened the sittings of the legislatures; and were turning to the state governor whenever he happened to be a strong and upright man, encouraging him to lead and restrain the legislature so far as his legal powers went. And now at last they have begun to supersede the legislature by taking to themselves the direct power of lawmaking through the institution of the referendum and the initiative, these being in their essence an effort to get rid, not only of the evils incident to the selfishness of legislatures and their amenability to improper influences, but also of party itself, as a force which divides the people and prevents them from taking the shortest way to accomplish their will.

All this beautiful series of constitutional developments in state and city government has evolved itself naturally and logically within little more than a century. The constant element in the series has been democractic theory, i.e., the faith in unlimited and direct popular choice and the doctrine that one man is as fit for public office as another. These doctrines, largely abstract in their origin, rooted themselves in mens’ minds, under conditions which made them seem reasonable, in small communities, where the citizens were nearly on a level in education and intelligence, and where the questions of government that arose were within the range of an ordinary man’s knowledge. When such notions came to be applied to huge communities like the states and the vast modern cities, their inapplicability was manifest, while at the same time the need for an organization to work the party system became more evident. Improvements in the representative system might have seemed to be the obvious remedy, but unfortunately the same changes had so injured, and at last discredited, the legislatures of states and cities that the efforts for reform took a different line.

Since 1894, when the preceding chapters on the party system were last revised, public opinion has become more impatient of the rule of the machine, and more sensitive to scandals, while “good citizens” have begun to show more activity in their campaign for purity. “Boss rule” seems to be losing its hold in some of the cities, and the tendency to emancipate them from the state legislatures and stimulate the inhabitants to frame better schemes of government and take a more constant interest in their working has gained ground. Accordingly, although the facts set forth above are still so far generally true that the statements can properly be allowed to stand, it may safely be said that the sky is brighter in 1914 than it was in 1894.

Part IV

Public Opinion

chapter 76

The Nature of Public Opinion

In no country is public opinion so powerful as in the United States: in no country can it be so well studied. Before I proceed to describe how it works upon the government of the nation and the states, it may be proper to consider briefly how it is formed, and what is the nature of the influence which it everywhere exercises upon government.

What do we mean by public opinion? The difficulties which occur in discussing its action mostly arise from confounding opinion itself with the organs whence people try to gather it, and from using the term, sometimes to denote everybody’s views, that is, the aggregate of all that is thought and said on a subject, sometimes merely the views of the majority, the particular type of thought and speech which prevails over other types.

The simplest form in which public opinion presents itself is when a sentiment spontaneously rises in the mind and flows from the lips of the average man upon his seeing or hearing something done or said. Homer presents this with his usual vivid directness in the line which frequently recurs in the Iliad when the effect produced by a speech or event is to be conveyed: “And thus anyone was saying as he looked at his neighbour.” This phrase describes what may be called the rudimentary stage of opinion. It is the prevalent impression of the moment. It is what any man (not every man) says i.e., it is the natural and the general thought or wish which an occurrence evokes. But before opinion begins to tell upon government, it has to go through several other stages. These stages are various in different ages and countries. Let us try to note what they are in England or America at the present time, and how each stage grows out of the other.

A businessman reads in his newspaper at breakfast the events of the preceding day. He reads that Prince Bismarck has announced a policy of protection for German industry, or that Mr. Henry George has been nominated for the mayoralty of New York. These statements arouse in his mind sentiments of approval or disapproval, which may be strong or weak according to his previous predilection for or against protection or Mr. Henry George, and of course according to his personal interest in the matter. They rouse also an expectation of certain consequences likely to follow. Neither the sentiment not the expectation is based on processes of conscious reasoning—our businessman has not had time to reason at breakfast—they are merely impressions formed on the spur of the moment. He turns to the leading article in the newspaper, and his sentiments and expectations are confirmed or weakened according as he finds that they are or are not shared by the newspaper writer. He goes down to his office in the train, talks there to two or three acquaintances, and perceives that they agree or do not agree with his own still faint impressions. In his business office he finds his partner and a bundle of other newspapers which he glances at; their words further affect him, and thus by the end of the day his mind is beginning to settle down into a definite view, which approves or condemns Prince Bismarck’s declaration or the nomination of Mr. George. Meanwhile a similar process has been going on in the minds of others, and particularly of the journalists, whose business it is to discover what people are thinking. The evening paper has collected the opinions of the morning papers, and is rather more positive in its forecast of results. Next morning the leading journals have articles still more definite and positive in approval or condemnation and in prediction of consequences to follow; and the opinion of ordinary minds, hitherto fluid and undetermined, has begun to crystallize into a solid mass. This is the second stage. Then debate and controversy begin. The men and the newspapers who approve Mr. George’s nomination argue with those who do not; they find out who are friends and who opponents. The effect of controversy is to drive the partisans on either side from some of their arguments, which are shown to be weak; to confirm them in others, which they think strong; and to make them take up a definite position on one side. This is the third stage. The fourth is reached when action becomes necessary. When a citizen has to give a vote, he votes as a member of a party; his party prepossessions and party allegiance lay hold on him, and generally stifle any individual doubts or repulsions he may feel. Bringing men up to the polls is like passing a steam roller over stones newly laid on a road: the angularities are pressed down, and an appearance of smooth and even uniformity is given which did not exist before. When a man has voted, he is committed: he has thereafter an interest in backing the view which he has sought to make prevail. Moreover, opinion, which may have been manifold till the polling, is thereafter generally twofold only. There is a view which has triumphed and a view which has been vanquished.

In examining the process by which opinion is formed, we cannot fail to note how small a part of the view which the average man entertains when he goes to vote is really of his own making. His original impression was faint and perhaps shapeless; its present definiteness and strength are mainly due to what he has heard and read. He has been told what to think, and why to think it. Arguments have been supplied to him from without, and controversy has imbedded them in his mind. Although he supposes his view to be his own, he holds it rather because his acquaintances, his newspapers, his party leaders all hold it. His acquaintances do the like. Each man believes and repeats certain phrases, because he thinks that everybody else on his own side believes them, and of what each believes only a small part is his own original impression, the far larger part being the result of the commingling and mutual action and reaction of the impressions of a multitude of individuals, in which the element of pure personal conviction, based in individual thinking, is but small.

Everyone is of course predisposed to see things in some one particular light by his previous education, habits of mind, accepted dogmas, religious or social affinities, notions of his own personal interest. No event, no speech or article, ever falls upon a perfectly virgin soil: the reader or listener is always more or less biased already. When some important event happens, which calls for the formation of a view, these preexisting habits, dogmas, affinities, help to determine the impression which each man experiences, and so far are factors in the view he forms. But they operate chiefly in determining the first impression, and they operate over many minds at once. They do not produce variety and independence; they are soon overlaid by the influences which each man derives from his fellows, from his leaders, from the press.

Orthodox democratic theory assumes that every citizen has, or ought to have, thought out for himself certain opinions, i.e., ought to have a definite view, defensible by arguments, of what the country needs, of what principles ought to be applied in governing it, of the men to whose hands the government ought to be entrusted. There are persons who talk, though certainly very few who act, as if they believed this theory, which may be compared to the theory of some ultra-Protestants that every good Christian has or ought to have, by the strength of his own reason, worked out for himself from the Bible a system of theology. But one need only try the experiment of talking to that representative of public opinion whom the Americans call “the man in the cars,” to realize how uniform opinion is among all classes of people, how little there is of that individuality in the ideas of each individual which they would have if he had formed them for himself, how little solidity and substance there is in the political or social beliefs of nineteen persons out of every twenty. These beliefs, when examined, mostly resolve themselves into two or three prejudices and aversions, two or three prepossessions for a particular leader or section of a party, two or three phrases or catchwords suggesting or embodying arguments which the man who repeats them has not analyzed. It is not that these nineteen persons are incapable of appreciating good arguments, or are unwilling to receive them. On the contrary, and this is especially true of the working classes, an audience is usually pleased when solid arguments are addressed to it, and men read with most relish the articles or leaflets, supposing them to be smartly written, which contain the most carefully sifted facts and the most exact thought. But to the great mass of mankind in all places, public questions come in the third or fourth rank among the interests of life, and obtain less than a third or a fourth of the leisure available for thinking. It is therefore rather sentiment than thought that the mass can contribute, a sentiment grounded on a few broad considerations and simple trains of reasoning; and the soundness and elevation of their sentiment will have more to do with their taking their stand on the side of justice, honour, and peace, than any reasoning they can apply to the sifting of the multifarious facts thrown before them, and to the drawing of the legitimate inferences therefrom.

It may be suggested that this analysis, if true of the uneducated, is not true of the educated classes. It is less true of that small class which in Europe specially occupies itself with politics; which, whether it reasons well or ill, does no doubt reason. But it is substantially no less applicable to the commercial and professional classes than to the working classes; for in the former, as well as in the latter, one finds few persons who take the pains, or have the leisure, or indeed possess the knowledge, to enable them to form an independent judgment. The chief difference between the so-called upper, or wealthier, and humbler strata of society is that the former are less influenced by sentiment and possibly more influenced by notions, often erroneous, of their own interest. Having something to lose, they imagine dangers to their property or their class ascendency. Moving in a more artificial society, their sympathies are less readily excited, and they more frequently indulge the tendency to cynicism natural to those who lead a life full of unreality and conventionalisms.

The apparent paradox that where the humbler classes have differed in opinion from the higher, they have often been proved by the event to have been right and their so-called betters wrong (a fact sufficiently illustrated by the experience of many European countries during the last half-century1 ), may perhaps be explained by considering that the historical and scientific data on which the solution of a difficult political problem depends are really just as little known to the wealthy as to the poor. Ordinary education, even the sort of education which is represented by a university degree, does not fit a man to handle these questions, and it sometimes fills him with a vain conceit of his own competence which closes his mind to argument and to the accumulating evidence of facts. Education ought, no doubt, to enlighten a man; but the educated classes, speaking generally, are the property-holding classes, and the possession of property does more to make a man timid than education does to make him hopeful. He is apt to underrate the power as well as the worth of sentiment; he overvalues the restraints which existing institutions impose; he has a faint appreciation of the curative power of freedom, and of the tendency which brings things right when men have been left to their own devices, and have learnt from failure how to attain success. In the less-educated man a certain simplicity and openness of mind go some way to compensate for the lack of knowledge. He is more apt to be influenced by the authority of leaders; but as, at least in England and America, he is generally shrewd enough to discern between a great man and a demagogue, this is more a gain than a loss.

While suggesting these as explanations of the paradox, I admit that it remains a paradox. But the paradox is not in the statement, but in the facts. Nearly all great political and social causes have made their way first among the middle or humbler classes. The original impulse which has set the cause in motion, the inspiring ideas that have drawn men to it, have no doubt come from lofty and piercing minds, and minds generally belonging to the cultivated class. But the principles and precepts these minds have delivered have waxed strong because the masses have received them gladly, while the wealthiest and educated classes have frowned on or persecuted them. The most striking instance of all is to be found in the early history of Christianity.

The analysis, however, which I have sought to give of opinion applies only to the nineteen men out of twenty, and not to the twentieth. It applies to what may be called passive opinion—the opinion of those who have no special interest in politics, or concern with them beyond that of voting, of those who receive or propagate, but do not originate, views on public matters. Or, to put the same thing in different words, we have been considering how public opinion grows and spreads, as it were, spontaneously and naturally, But opinion does not merely grow; it is also made. There is not merely the passive class of persons; there is the active class, who occupy themselves primarily with public affairs, who aspire to create and lead opinion. The processes which these guides follow are too well known to need description. There are, however, one or two points which must be noted, in order to appreciate the reflex action of the passive upon the active class.

The man who tries to lead public opinion, be he statesman, journalist, or lecturer, finds in himself, when he has to form a judgment upon any current event, a larger measure of individual prepossession, and of what may be called political theory and doctrine, than belongs to the average citizen. His view is therefore likely to have more individuality, as well as more intellectual value. On the other hand, he has also a stronger motive than the average citizen for keeping in agreement with his friends and his party, because if he stands aloof and advocates a view of his own, he may lose his influence and his position. He has a past, and is prevented, by the fear of seeming inconsistent, from departing from what he has previously said. He has a future, and dreads to injure it by severing himself ever so little from his party. He is accordingly driven to make the same sort of compromise between his individual tendencies and the general tendency which the average citizen makes. But he makes it more consciously, realizing far more distinctly the difference between what he would think, say, and do, if left to himself, and what he says and does as a politician, who can be useful and prosperous only as a member of a body of persons acting together and professing to think alike.

Accordingly, though the largest part of the work of forming opinion is done by these men—whom I do not call professional politicians, because in Europe many of them are not solely occupied with politics, while in America the name of professionals must be reserved for another class—we must not forget the reaction constantly exercised upon them by the passive majority. Sometimes a leading statesman or journalist takes a line to which he finds that the mass of those who usually agree with him are not responsive. He perceives that they will not follow him, and that he must choose between isolation and a modification of his own views. A statesman may sometimes venture on the former course, and in very rare cases succeed in imposing his own will and judgment on his party. A journalist, however, is almost invariably obliged to hark back if he has inadvertently taken up a position disagreeable to his clientèle, because the proprietors of the paper have their circulation to consider. To avoid so disagreeable a choice, a statesman or a journalist is usually on the alert to sound the general opinion before he commits himself on a new issue. He tries to feel the pulse of the mass of average citizens; and as the mass, on the other hand, look to him for initiative, this is a delicate process. In European countries it is generally the view of the leaders which prevails, but it is modified by the reception which the mass give it; it becomes accentuated in the points which they appreciate; while those parts of it, or those ways of stating it, which have failed to find popular favour, fall back into the shade.

This mutual action and reaction of the makers or leaders of opinion upon the mass, and of the mass upon them, is the most curious part of the whole process by which opinion is produced. It is also that part in which there is the greatest difference between one free country and another. In some countries, the leaders count for, say, three-fourths of the product, and the mass for one-fourth only. In others we may find these proportions reversed. In some countries the mass of the voters are not only markedly inferior in education to the few who lead, but also diffident, more disposed to look up to their betters. In others the difference of intellectual level between those who busy themselves with politics and the average voter is far smaller. Perhaps the leader is not so well instructed a man as in the countries first referred to; perhaps the average voter is better instructed and more self-confident. Where both of these phenomena coincide, so that the difference of level is inconsiderable, public opinion will evidently be a different thing from what it is in countries where, though the constitution has become democratic, the habits of the nation are still aristocratic. This is the difference between America and the countries of Western Europe.

chapter 77

Government by Public Opinion

We talk of public opinion as a new force in the world, conspicuous only since governments began to be popular. Statesmen, even in the last generation, looked on it with some distrust or dislike. Sir Robert Peel, for instance, in a letter written in 1820, speaks with the air of a discoverer, of “that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion.”

Yet opinion has really been the chief and ultimate power in nearly all nations at nearly all times. I do not mean merely the opinion of the class to which the rulers belong. Obviously the small oligarchy of Venice was influenced by the opinion of the Venetian nobility, as the absolute czar is influenced now by the opinion of his court and army. I mean the opinion, unspoken, unconscious, but not the less real and potent, of the masses of the people. Governments have always rested and, in special cases apart, must rest, if not on the affection, then on the reverence or awe, if not on the active approval, then on the silent acquiescence, of the numerical majority. It is only by rare exception that a monarch or an oligarchy has maintained authority against the will of the people. The despotisms of the East, although they usually began in conquest, did not stand by military force but by popular assent. So did the feudal kingdoms of mediaeval Europe. So do the despotisms of the sultan (so far, at least, as regards his Mussulman subjects), of the shah, and of the Chinese emperor. The cases to the contrary are chiefly those of military tyrannies, such as existed in many of the Greek cities of antiquity, and in some of the Italian cities of the Renaissance, and such as exist now in the so-called republics of Central and South America. That even the Roman Empire, that eldest child of war and conquest, did not rest on force but on the consent and goodwill of its subjects is shown by the smallness of its standing armies, nearly the whole of which were employed against frontier enemies, because there was rarely any internal revolt or disturbance to be feared. Belief in authority, and the love of established order, are among the strongest forces in human nature, and therefore in politics. The first supports governments de jure, the latter governments de facto. They combine to support a government which is de jure as well as de facto. Where the subjects are displeased, their discontent may appear perhaps in the epigrams which tempered the despotism of Louis XV in France, perhaps in the sympathy given to bandits like Robin Hood, perhaps in occasional insurrections like those of Constantinople under the Eastern emperors. Of course, where there is no habit of combination to resist, discontent may remain for some time without this third means of expressing itself. But, even when the occupant of the throne is unpopular, the throne as an institution is in no danger so long as it can command the respect of the multitude and show itself equal to its duties.

In the earlier or simpler forms of political society public opinion is passive. It acquiesces in, rather than supports, the authority which exists, whatever its faults, because it knows of nothing better, because it sees no way to improvement, probably also because it is overawed by some kind of religious sanction. Human nature must have something to reverence, and the sovereign, because remote and potent and surrounded by pomp and splendour, seems to it mysterious and half divine. Worse administrations than those of Asiatic Turkey and Persia at this moment can hardly be imagined, yet the Mohammedan population show no signs of disaffection. The subjects of Darius and the subjects of Theebaw obeyed as a matter of course. They did not ask why they obeyed, for the habit of obedience was sufficient. They could, however, if disaffected, have at any moment overturned the throne, which had only, in both cases, an insignificant force of guards to protect it. During long ages the human mind did not ask itself—in many parts of the world does not even now ask itself—questions which seem to us the most obvious. Custom, as Pindar said, is king over all mortals and immortals, and custom prescribed obedience. When in any society opinion becomes self-conscious, when it begins to realize its force and question the rights of its rulers, that society is already progressing, and soon finds means of organizing resistance and compelling reform.

The difference, therefore, between despotically governed and free countries does not consist in the fact that the latter are ruled by opinion and the former by force, for both are generally ruled by opinion. It consists rather in this, that in the former the people instinctively obey a power which they do not know to be really of their own creation, and to stand by their own permission; whereas in the latter the people feel their supremacy, and consciously treat their rulers as their agents, while the rulers obey a power which they admit to have made and to be able to unmake them—the popular will. In both cases force is seldom necessary, or is needed only against small groups, because the habit of obedience replaces it. Conflicts and revolutions belong to the intermediate stage, when the people are awakening to the sense that they are truly the supreme power in the state, but when the rulers have not yet become aware that their authority is merely delegated. When superstition and the habit of submission have vanished from the whilom subjects, when the rulers, recognizing that they are no more than agents for the citizens, have in turn formed the habit of obedience, public opinion has become the active and controlling director of a business in which it was before the sleeping and generally forgotten partner. But even when this stage has been reached, as has now happened in most civilized states, there are differences in the degree and mode in and by which public opinion asserts itself. In some countries the habit of obeying rulers and officials is so strong that the people, once they have chosen the legislature or executive head by whom the officials are appointed, allow these officials almost as wide a range of authority as in the old days of despotism. Such people have a profound respect for government as government, and a reluctance, due either to theory or to mere laziness, perhaps to both, to interfere with its action. They say, “That is a matter for the administration; we have nothing to do with it;” and stand as much aside or submit as humbly as if the government did not spring from their own will. Perhaps they practically leave themselves, as did the Germans of Bismarck’s day, in the hands of a venerated monarch and a forceful minister, giving these rulers a free hand so long as their policy moves in accord with the general sentiment of the nation, and maintains its glory. Perhaps while frequently changing their ministries, they nevertheless yield to each ministry, and to its executive subordinates all over the country, an authority great while it lasts, and largely controlling the action of the individual citizen. This seems to be still true of France. There are other countries in which, though the sphere of government is strictly limited by law, and the private citizen is little inclined to bow before an official, the habit has been to check the ministry chiefly through the legislature, and to review the conduct of both ministry and legislature only at long intervals, when an election of the legislature takes place. This has been, and to some extent is still, the case in Britain. Although the people rule, they rule not directly, but through the House of Commons, which they choose only once in four or five years, and which may, at any given moment, represent rather the past than the present will of the nation.

I make these observations for the sake of indicating another form which the rule of the people may assume. We have distinguished three stages in the evolution of opinion from its unconscious and passive into its conscious and active condition. In the first it acquiesces in the will of the ruler whom it has been accustomed to obey. In the second conflicts arise between the ruling person or class, backed by those who are still disposed to obedience, on the one hand, and the more independent or progressive spirits on the other; and these conflicts are decided by arms. In the third stage the whilom ruler has submitted, and disputes are referred to the sovereign multitude, whose will is expressed at certain intervals upon slips of paper deposited in boxes, and is carried out by the minister or legislature to whom the popular mandate is entrusted. A fourth stage would be reached, if the will of the majority of the citizens were to become ascertainable at all times, and without the need of its passing through a body of representatives, possibly even without the need of voting machinery at all. In such a state of things the sway of public opinion would have become more complete, because more continuous, than it is in those European countries which, like France, Italy, and Britain, look chiefly to parliaments as exponents of national sentiment. The authority would seem to remain all the while in the mass of the citizens. Popular government would have been pushed so far as almost to dispense with, or at any rate to anticipate, the legal modes in which the majority speaks its will at the polling booths; and this informal but direct control of the multitude would dwarf, if it did not supersede, the importance of those formal but occasional deliverances made at the elections of representatives. To such a condition of things the phrase, “rule of public opinion,” might be most properly applied, for public opinion would not only reign but govern.

The mechanical difficulties, as one may call them, of working such a method of government are obvious. How is the will of the majority to be ascertained except by counting votes? How, without the greatest inconvenience, can votes be frequently taken on all the chief questions that arise? No country has yet surmounted these inconveniences, though little Switzerland with its referendum and initiative has faced and partially dealt with some of them, and some of the American states are treading in the same path. But what I desire to point out is that even where the machinery for weighing or measuring the popular will from week to week or month to month has not been, and is not likely to be, invented, there may nevertheless be a disposition on the part of the rulers, whether ministers or legislators, to act as if it existed; that is to say, to look incessantly for manifestations of current popular opinion, and to shape their course in accordance with their reading of those manifestations. Such a disposition will be accompanied by a constant oversight of public affairs by the mass of the citizens, and by a sense on their part that they are the true governors, and that their agents, executive and legislative, are rather servants than agents. Where this is the attitude of the people on the one hand and of the persons who do the actual work of governing on the other, it may fairly be said that there exists a kind of government materially, if not formally, different from the representative system as it presented itself to European thinkers and statesmen of the last generation. And it is to this kind of government that democratic nations seem to be tending.

The state of things here noted will find illustration in what I have to say in the following chapters regarding opinion in the United States. Meanwhile a few remarks may be hazarded on the rule of public opinion in general.

The excellence of popular government lies not so much in its wisdom—for it is as apt to err as other kinds of government—as in its strength. It has been compared, ever since Sir William Temple, to a pyramid, the firmest based of all buildings. Nobody can be blamed for obeying it. There is no appeal from its decisions. Once the principle that the will of the majority, honestly ascertained, must prevail, has soaked into the mind and formed the habits of a nation, that nation acquires not only stability, but immense effective force. It has no need to fear discussion and agitation. It can bend all its resources to the accomplishment of its collective ends. The friction that exists in countries where the laws or institutions handed down from former generations are incompatible with the feelings and wishes of the people has disappeared. A key has been found that will unlock every door.

On the other hand, such a government is exposed to two dangers. One, the smaller one, yet sometimes troublesome, is the difficulty of ascertaining the will of the majority. I do not mean the difficulty of getting all citizens to vote, because it must be taken that those who do not vote leave their will in the hands of those who do, but the difficulty of obtaining by any machinery yet devised a quite honest record of the results of voting. Where the issues are weighty, involving immense interests of individual men or groups of men, the danger of bribery, of force, and still more of fraud in taking and counting votes, is a serious one. When there is reason to think that ballots have been tampered with, the value of the system is gone; and men are remitted to the old methods of settling their differences.

The other danger is that minorities may not sufficiently assert themselves. Where a majority has erred, the only remedy against the prolongation or repetition of its error is in the continued protests and agitation of the minority, an agitation which ought to be conducted peaceably, by voice and pen, but which must be vehement enough to rouse the people and deliver them from the consequences of their blunders. But the more complete the sway of majorities is, so much the less disposed is a minority to maintain the contest. It loses faith in its cause and in itself, and allows its voice to be silenced by the triumphant cries of its opponents. How are men to acquiesce promptly and loyally in the decision of a majority, and yet to go on arguing against it? How can they be at once submissive and aggressive? That conceit of his own goodness and greatness which intoxicates an absolute monarch besets a sovereign people also, and the slavishness with which his ministers approach an Oriental despot may reappear in the politicians of a Western democracy. The duty, therefore, of a patriotic statesman in a country where public opinion rules, would seem to be rather to resist and correct than to encourage the dominant sentiment. He will not be content with trying to form and mould and lead it, but he will confront it, lecture it, remind it that it is fallible, rouse it out of its self-complacency. Unfortunately, courage and independence are plants which a soil impregnated with the belief in the wisdom of numbers does not tend to produce; nor is there any art known to statesmen whereby their growth can be fostered.

Experience has, however, suggested plans for lessening the risks incident to the dominance of one particular set of opinions. One plan is for the people themselves to limit their powers, i.e., to surround their own action and the action of their agents with restrictions of time and method which compel delay. Another is for them so to parcel out functions among many agents that no single one chosen indiscreetly, or obeying his mandate overzealously, can do much mischief, and that out of the multiplicity of agents differences of view may spring which will catch the attention of the citizens.

The temper and character of a people may supply more valuable safeguards. The country which has worked out for itself a truly free government must have done so in virtue of the vigorous individuality of its children. Such an individuality does not soon yield even to the pressure of democratic conditions. In a nation with a keen moral sense and a capacity for strong emotions, opinion based on a love of what is deemed just or good will resist the multitude when bent on evil; and if there be a great variety of social conditions, of modes of life, of religious beliefs, these will prove centres of resistance to a dominant tendency, like rocks standing up in a river, at which he whom the current sweeps downwards may clutch. Instances might be cited even from countries where the majority has had every source of strength at its command—physical force, tradition, the all but universal persuasions and prejudices of the lower as well as of the higher classes—in which small minorities have triumphed, first by startling and then by leavening and convincing the majority. This they have done in virtue of that intensity of belief which is oftenest found in a small sect or group, not because it is small, but because if its belief were not intense it would not venture to hold out at all against the adverse mass. The energy of each individual in the minority makes it in the long run a match for a majority huger but less instinct with vitality. In a free country more especially, ten men who care are worth a hundred who do not.

Such natural compensations as this occur in the physical as well as in the spiritual and moral world, and preserve both. But they are compensations on which the practical statesman cannot safely rely, for they are partial, they are uncertain, and they probably tend to diminish with the progress of democracy. The longer public opinion has ruled, the more absolute is the authority of the majority likely to become, the less likely are energetic minorities to arise, the more are politicians likely to occupy themselves, not in forming opinion, but in discovering and hastening to obey it.

chapter 78

How Public Opinion Rules in America

It was observed in last chapter that the phrase “government by public opinion” is most specifically applicable to a system wherein the will of the people acts directly and constantly upon its executive and legislative agents. A government may be both free and good without being subject to this continuous and immediate control. Still this is the goal toward which the extension of the suffrage, the more rapid diffusion of news, and the practice of self-government itself, necessarily lead free nations; and it may even be said that one of their chief problems is to devise means whereby the national will shall be most fully expressed, most quickly known, most unresistingly and cheerfully obeyed. Delays and jerks are avoided, friction and consequent waste of force are prevented, when the nation itself watches all the play of the machinery and guides its workmen by a glance. Towards this goal the Americans have marched with steady steps, unconsciously as well as consciously. No other people now stands so near it.

Of all the experiments which America has made, this is that which best deserves study, for her solution of the problem differs from all previous solutions, and she has shown more boldness in trusting public opinion, in recognizing and giving effect to it, than has yet been shown elsewhere. Towering over presidents and state governors, over Congress and state legislatures, over conventions and the vast machinery of party, public opinion stands out, in the United States, as the great source of power, the master of servants who tremble before it.

For the sake of making clear what follows, I will venture to recapitulate what was said in an earlier chapter as to the three forms which government has taken in free countries. First came primary assemblies, such as those of the Greek republics of antiquity, or those of the early Teutonic tribes, which have survived in a few Swiss cantons. The whole people met, debated current questions, decided them by its votes, chose those who were to carry out its will. Such a system of direct popular government is possible only in small communities, and in this day of large states has become a matter rather of antiquarian curiosity than of practical moment.

In the second form, power belongs to representative bodies, parliaments and chambers. The people in their various local areas elect men, supposed to be their wisest or most influential, to deliberate for them, resolve for them, choose their executive servants for them. They give these representatives a tolerably free hand, leaving them in power for a considerable space of time, and allowing them to act unchecked, except in so far as custom, or possibly some fundamental law, limits their discretion. This is done in the faith that the chamber will feel its responsibility and act for the best interests of the country, carrying out what it believes to be the wishes of the majority, unless it should be convinced that in some particular point it knows better than the majority what the interests of the country require. Such a system has long prevailed in England, and the English model has been widely imitated on the continent of Europe and in the British colonies.

The third is something between the other two. It may be regarded either as an attempt to apply the principle of primary assemblies to large countries, or as a modification of the representative system in the direction of direct popular sovereignty. There is still a legislature, but it is elected for so short a time and checked in so many ways that much of its power and dignity has departed. Ultimate authority is not with it, but with the people, who have fixed limits beyond which it cannot go, and who use it merely as a piece of machinery for carrying out their wishes and settling points of detail for them. The supremacy of their will is expressed in the existence of a constitution placed above the legislature, although capable of alteration by a direct popular vote. The position of the representatives has been altered. They are conceived of, not as wise and strong men chosen to govern, but as delegates under specific orders to be renewed at short intervals.

This is the form established in the United States. Congress sits for two years only. It is strictly limited by the Constitution, and by the coexistence of the state governments, which the Constitution protects. It has (except by way of impeachment) no control over the federal executive, which is directly named by and responsible to the people. So, too, the state legislatures sit for short periods, do not appoint the state executives, are hedged in by the prohibitions of the state constitutions. The people frequently legislate directly by enacting or altering a constitution. The principle of popular sovereignty could hardly be expressed more unmistakably. Allowing for the differences to which the vast size of the country gives rise, the mass of the citizens may be deemed as directly the supreme power in the United States as the Assembly was at Athens or Syracuse.1 The only check on the mass is that which they have themselves imposed, and which the ancient democracies did not possess, the difficulty of changing a rigid constitution. And this difficulty is serious only as regards the federal Constitution.

As this is the most developed form of popular government, so is it also the form which most naturally produces what I have called government by public opinion. Popular government may be said to exist wherever all power is lodged in and issues from the people. Government by public opinion exists where the wishes and views of the people prevail, even before they have been conveyed through the regular law-appointed organs, and without the need of their being so conveyed. As in a limited monarchy the king, however powerful, must act through certain officers and in a defined legal way, whereas in a despotism he may act just as he pleases, and his initial written on a scrap of paper is as sure of obedience as his full name signed to a parchment authenticated by the Great Seal or the countersignature of a minister, so where the power of the people is absolute, legislators and administrators are quick to catch its wishes in whatever way they may be indicated, and do not care to wait for the methods which the law prescribes. This happens in America. Opinion rules more fully, more directly, than under the second of the systems described above.

A consideration of the nature of the state governments as of the national government will show that legal theory as well as popular self-confidence gives birth to this rule of opinion. Supreme power resides in the whole mass of citizens. They have prescribed, in the strict terms of a legal document, the form of government. They alone have the right to change it, and that only in a particular way. They have committed only a part of their sovereignty to their executive and legislative agents, reserving the rest to themselves. Hence their will, or in other words, public opinion, is constantly felt by these agents to be, legally as well as practically, the controlling authority. In England, Parliament is the nation, not merely by a legal fiction, but because the nation looks to Parliament only, having neither reserved any authority to itself nor bestowed any elsewhere. In America, Congress is not the nation, and does not claim to be so.

The ordinary functions and business of government, the making of laws, the imposing of taxes, the interpretation of laws and their execution, the administration of justice, the conduct of foreign relations, are parcelled out among a number of bodies and persons whose powers are so carefully balanced and touch at so many points that there is a constant risk of conflicts, even of deadlocks. Some of the difficulties thence arising are dealt with by the courts, as questions of the interpretation of the Constitution. But in many cases the intervention of the courts, which can act only in a suit between parties, comes too late to deal with the matter, which may be an urgent one; and in some cases there is nothing for the courts to decide, because each of the conflicting powers is within its legal right. The Senate, for instance, may refuse the measures which the House thinks necessary. The president may veto bills passed by both houses, and the houses may not have a two-thirds majority to pass them over his veto. Congress may urge the president to adopt a certain course of action, and the president may refuse. The president may propose a treaty to the Senate and the Senate may reject it. In such cases there is a stoppage of governmental action which may involve loss to the country. The master, however, is at hand to settle the quarrels of his servants. If the question be a grave one, and the mind of the country clear upon it, public opinion throws its weight into one or other scale, and its weight is decisive. Should opinion be nearly balanced, it is no doubt difficult to ascertain, till the next election arrives, which of many discordant cries is really the prevailing voice. This difficulty must, in a large country, where frequent plebiscites are impossible, be endured; and it may be well, when the preponderance of opinion is not great, that serious decisions should not be quickly taken. The general truth remains that a system of government by checks and balances specially needs the presence of an arbiter to incline the scale in favour of one or other of the balanced authorities, and that public opinion must therefore be more frequently invoked and more constantly active in America than in other countries.

Those who invented this machinery of checks and balances were anxious not so much to develop public opinion as to resist and build up breakwaters against it. No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the American Revolution. They had made a revolution in the name of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights: they were penetrated by a sense of the dangers incident to democracy. They conceived of popular opinion as aggressive, revolutionary, unreasoning, passionate, futile, and a breeder of mob violence. We shall presently inquire whether this conception has been verified. Meantime be it noted that the efforts made in 1787 to divide authority and, so to speak, force the current of the popular will into many small channels instead of permitting it to rush down one broad bed, have really tended to exalt public opinion above the regular legally appointed organs of government. Each of these organs is too small to form opinion, too narrow to express it, too weak to give effect to it. It grows up not in Congress, not in state legislatures, not in those great conventions which frame platforms and choose candidates, but at large among the people. It is expressed in voices everywhere. It rules as a pervading and impalpable power, like the ether which, as physicists say, passes through all things. It binds all the parts of the complicated system together and gives them whatever unity of aim and action they possess.

There is also another reason why the opinion of the whole nation is a more important factor in the government of the United States than anywhere in Europe. In Europe there has always been a governing class, a set of persons whom birth, or wealth, or education has raised above their fellows, and to whom has been left the making of public opinion together with the conduct of administration and the occupancy of places in the legislature. The public opinion of Germany, Italy, France, and England has been substantially the opinion of the class which wears black coats and lives in good houses, though in the two latter countries it has begun of late years to be affected by the opinion of the classes socially lower. Although the members of the British Parliament now obey the mass of their constituents when the latter express a distinct wish, still the influence which plays most steadily on them and permeates them is the opinion of a class or classes and not of the whole nation. The class to which the great majority of members of both houses belong (i.e., the landowners and the persons occupied in professions and in the higher walks of commerce) is the class which chiefly forms and expresses what is called public opinion. Even in these days of vigilant and exacting constituencies one sees many members of the House of Commons the democratic robustness or provincial crudity of whose ideas melts like wax under the influence of fashionable dinner parties and club smoking rooms. It is a common complaint that it is hard for a member to “keep touch” with the opinion of the masses.

In the United States public opinion is the opinion of the whole nation, with little distinction of social classes. The politicians, including the members of Congress and of state legislatures, are, perhaps not (as Americans sometimes insinuate) below, yet certainly not above the average level of their constituents. They find no difficulty in keeping touch with outside opinion. Washington or Albany may corrupt them, but not in the way of modifying their political ideas. They do not aspire to the function of forming opinion. They are like the Eastern slave who says “I hear and obey.” Nor is there any one class or set of men, or any one “social layer,” which more than another originates ideas and builds up political doctrine for the mass. The opinion of the nation is the resultant of the views, not of a number of classes, but of a multitude of individuals, diverse, no doubt, from one another, but, for the purposes of politics far less diverse than if they were members of groups defined by social rank or by property.

The consequences are noteworthy. Statesmen cannot, as in Europe, declare any sentiment which they find telling on their friends or their opponents in politics to be confined to the rich, or to the governing class, and to be opposed to the general sentiment of the people. In America you cannot appeal from the classes to the masses. What the employer thinks, his workmen think.2 What the wholesale merchant feels, the retail storekeeper feels, and the poorer customers feel. Divisions of opinion are vertical and not horizontal. Obviously this makes opinion more easily ascertained, while increasing its force as a governing power, and gives the people, that is to say, all classes in the community, a clearer and stronger consciousness of being the rulers of their country than European peoples have. Every man knows that he is himself a part of the government, bound by duty as well as by self-interest to devote part of his time and thoughts to it. He may neglect this duty, but he admits it to be a duty. So the system of party organizations already described is built upon this theory; and as this system is more recent, and is the work of practical politicians, it is even better evidence of the general acceptance of the doctrine than are the provisions of constitutions. Compare European countries, or compare the other states of the New World. In the so-called republics of Central and South America a small section of the inhabitants pursue politics, while the rest follow their ordinary avocations, indifferent to elections and pronunciamentos and revolutions. In Germany, and in the German and Slavonic parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, people think of the government as a great machine which will go on, whether they put their hand to it or not, a few persons working it, and all the rest paying and looking on. The same thing is largely true of republican France, and of semi-republican Italy, where free government is still a novelty, and local self-government in its infancy. Even in England, though the eighty years that have passed over her since the great Reform Act have brought many new ideas with them, the ordinary voter is still far from feeling, as the American does, that the government is his own, and he individually responsible for its conduct.

chapter 79

Organs of Public Opinion

How does this vague, fluctuating, complex thing we call public opinion—omnipotent yet indeterminate, a sovereign to whose voice everyone listens, yet whose words, because he speaks with as many tongues as the waves of a boisterous sea, it is so hard to catch—how does public opinion express itself in America? By what organs is it declared, and how, since these organs often contradict one another, can it be discovered which of them speak most truly for the mass? The more completely popular sovereignty prevails in a country, so much the more important is it that the organs of opinion should be adequate to its expression, prompt, full, and unmistakable in their utterances. And in such European countries as England and France, it is now felt that the most successful party leader is he who can best divine from these organs what the decision of the people will be when a direct appeal is made to them at an election.

I have already observed that in America public opinion is a power not satisfied with choosing executive and legislative agents at certain intervals, but continuously watching and guiding those agents, who look to it, not merely for a vote of approval when the next general election arrives, but also for directions which they are eager to obey, so soon as they have learnt their meaning. The efficiency of the organs of opinion is therefore more essential to the government of the United States than even to England or to France.

An organ of public opinion is, however, not merely the expression of views and tendencies already in existence, but a factor in further developing and moulding the judgment of the people. Opinion makes opinion. Men follow in the path which they see others treading; they hasten to adopt the view that seems likely to prevail. Hence every weighty voice, be it that of a speaker, or an association, or a public meeting, or a newspaper, is at once the disclosure of an existing force and a further force influencing others. This fact, while it multiplies the organs through which opinion is expressed, increases the difficulty of using them aright, because every voice seeks to represent itself as that of the greater, or at least of a growing number.

The press, and particularly the newspaper press, stands by common consent first among the organs of opinion. Yet few things are harder than to estimate its power, and state precisely in what that power consists.

Newspapers are powerful in three ways—as narrators, as advocates, and as weathercocks. They report events, they advance arguments, they indicate by their attitude what those who conduct them and are interested in their circulation take to be the prevailing opinion of their readers. In the first of these regards the American press is the most active in the world. Nothing escapes it which can attract any class of readers. It does not even confine itself to events that have happened, but is apt to describe others which may possibly have happened, however slight the evidence for them: pariter facta atque infecta canebat. This habit affects its worth as an historic record and its influence with sober-minded people. Statesmen may be heard to complain that once an untrue story has been set flying they cannot efface the effect however complete the contradiction they may give it; and injustice is thus frequently done. Sometimes, of course, there is deliberate misrepresentation. But more often the erroneous statements are the natural result of the high pressure under which the newspaper business is carried on. The appetite for news, and for highly spiced or “sensational” news, is enormous, and journalists working under keen competition and in unceasing haste are disposed to take their chance of the correctness of the information they receive.

Much harm there is, but sometimes good also. It is related of an old barrister that he observed: “When I was young I lost a good many causes which I ought to have won, and now, that I have grown old and experienced, I win a good many causes which I ought to lose. So, on the whole, justice has been done.” If in its heedlessness the press often causes pain to the innocent, it does a great and necessary service in exposing evildoers, many of whom would escape were it never to speak except upon sufficient evidence. It is a watchdog whose noisy bark must be tolerated, even when the person who approaches has no bad intent. No doubt charges are so promiscuously and often so lightly made as to tell less than they would in a country where the law of libel was more frequently appealed to. But many abuses are unveiled, many more prevented by the fear of publicity.

Although the leading American newspapers contain far more nonpolitical matter than those of Europe, they also contain, especially of course before any important election, more domestic political intelligence than any, except perhaps two or three, of the chief English journals. Much of it is inaccurate, but partisanship distorts it no more than in Europe, perhaps less. The public has the benefit of hearing everything it can wish, and perhaps more than it ought to wish, to know about every occurrence and every personality. The intelligence is not quite of the same kind as in England or France. There are fewer reports of speeches, because fewer speeches of an argumentative nature are made, but more of the schemes and doings of conventions and political cliques, as well as of the sayings of individuals.

As the advocates of political doctrines, newspapers are of course powerful, because they are universally read and often ably written. They are accused of unfairness and vituperation, but I doubt if there is any marked difference in this respect between their behaviour and that of European papers at a time of excitement. Nor could I discover that their arguments were any more frequently than in Europe addressed to prejudices rather than to reason; indeed they are less markedly party organs than are those of Britain. In America, however, a leading article carries less weight of itself, being discounted by the shrewd reader as the sort of thing which the paper must of course be expected to say, and is effective only when it takes hold of some fact (real or supposed), and hammers it into the public mind. This is what the unclean politician has to fear. Mere abuse he does not care for, but constant references to and comments on misdeeds of which he cannot clear himself tell in the long run against him.

The influence attributed to the press is evidenced not only by the posts (especially foreign legations) frequently bestowed upon the owners or editors of leading journals, but by the current appeals made to good party men to take in only stanch party papers, and by the threats to “read out” of the party journals which show a dangerous independence. Nevertheless, if the party press be estimated as a factor in the formation of opinion, whether by argument or by authority, it must be deemed less powerful in America than in Europe, because its average public is shrewder, more independent, less readily impressed by the mysterious “we.” I doubt if there be any paper by which any considerable number of people swear; and am sure that comparatively few quote their favourite journal as an oracle in the way many persons still do in England. The vast area of the republic and the absence of a capital prevent any one paper from winning its way to predominance, even in any particular section of the country. Herein one notes a remarkable contrast to the phenomena of the Old World. Although the chief American newspapers are, regarded as commercial properties, “bigger things” than those of Europe, they do not dominate the whole press as a few journals do in most European countries. Or, to put the same thing differently, in England, and much the same may be said of France and Germany, some twenty newspapers cover nine-tenths of the reading public, whereas in America any given twenty papers would not cover one-third.

In those cities, moreover, where one finds really strong papers, each is exposed to a severer competition than in Europe, for in cities most people look at more than one newspaper. The late Mr. Horace Greeley, who for many years owned and edited the New York Tribune, is probably the only case of an editor who, by his journalistic talent and great self-confidence, acquired such a personal influence over multitudes of readers as to make them watch for and follow his deliverances. He was to the later Whig party and the earlier Republican party much what Katkoff was to the National party in Russia between 1870 and 1880, and had, of course, a far greater host of readers.

It is chiefly in its third capacity, as an index and mirror of public opinion, that the press is looked to. This is the function it chiefly aims at discharging; and public men feel that in showing deference to it they are propitiating, and inviting the commands of, public opinion itself. In worshipping the deity you learn to conciliate the priest. But as every possible view and tendency finds expression through some organ in the press, the problem is to discover which views have got popular strength behind them. Professed party journals are of little use, though one may sometimes discover from the way they advance an argument whether they think it will really tell on the opposite party, or use it only because it falls within their own programme. More may therefore be gleaned from the independent or semi-independent journals, whereof there are three classes: papers which, like two or three in the great cities, generally support one party, but are apt to fly off from it when they disapprove its conduct, or think the people will do so; papers which devote themselves mainly to news, though they may give editorial aid to one or other party according to the particular issue involved; and papers not professedly, or primarily political. Of this last class the most important members are the religious weeklies, to whose number and influence few parallels can be discovered in Europe. They are mostly either neutral or somewhat loosely attached to their party, usually the Republican party, because it began as the Free Soil party, and includes, in the North, the greater number of serious-minded people. It is only on great occasions, such as a presidential election, or when some moral issue arises, that they discuss current politics at length. When they do, great is their power, because they are deemed to be less “thirled” to a party or a leader, because they speak from a moral standpoint, and because they are read on Sunday, a time of leisure, when their seed is more likely to take root. The other weekly and monthly magazines used to deal less with politics than did the three leading English monthlies, but some of them are now largely occupied with political or politico-social topics, their influence seems to grow with the increasing amount of vigorous writing they contain.

During presidential contests much importance is attributed to the attitude of the leading papers of the great cities, for the revolt of anyone from its party—as, for instance, the revolt of several Republican papers during the election of 1884 and that of many Democratic papers in 1896—indicates discontent and danger. Where a schism exists in a state party, the bosses of one or other section will sometimes try to capture and manipulate the smaller country papers so as to convey the impression that their faction is gaining ground. Newspapers take more notice of one another, both by quoting from friendly sheets and by attacking hostile ones, than is usual in England, so that any incident or witticism which can tell in a campaign is at once taken up and read in a day or two in every city from Detroit to New Orleans.

The Americans have invented an organ for catching, measuring, and indicating opinion, almost unknown in Europe, in their practice of citing the private deliverances of prominent men. Sometimes this is done by publishing a letter, addressed not to the newspaper but to a friend, who gives it the publicity for which it was designed. Sometimes it is announced how the prominent man is going to vote at the next election. One may often notice short paragraphs stating that Judge So-and-So, or Dr. Blank, an eminent clergyman, is going to “bolt” the presidential or state ticket of his party; and perhaps the reasons assigned for his conduct follow. Of the same nature, but more elaborate, is the interview, in which the prominent man unbosoms himself to a reporter, giving his view of the political position in a manner less formal and obtrusive but not less effective than that of a letter to the editor. Sometimes, at the editor’s suggestion, or of his own motion, a brisk reporter waits on the leading citizen and invites the expression of his views, which is rarely refused, though, of course, it may be given in a guarded and unsatisfying way. Sometimes the leading citizen himself, when he has a fact on which to comment, or views to communicate, sends for the reporter, who is only too glad to attend. The plan has many conveniences, among which is the possibility of disavowing any particular phrase as one which has failed to convey the speaker’s true meaning. All these devices serve to help the men of eminence to impress their ideas on the public, while they show that there is a part of the public which desires such guidance.

Taking the American press all in all, it seems to serve the expression, and subserve the formation, of public opinion more fully than does the press of any part of the European continent, and not less fully than that of England. Individual newspapers and those who write in them may enjoy less power than is the case in some countries of the Old World; but if this be so, the cause is to be found in the fact that the journals lay themselves out to give news rather than views, that they are less generally bound to a particular party, and that readers are, except at critical moments, less warmly interested in politics than are educated Englishmen, because other topics claim a relatively larger part of their attention. The American press may not be above the moral level of the average good citizen—in no country does one either expect or find it to be so—but it is above the level of the machine politicians in the cities. In the war waged against these worthies the bolder and stronger newspapers have on occasion given powerful aid to the cause of reform by dragging corruption to light.

While believing that a complete picture of current opinion can be more easily gathered from American than from English journals, I do not mean to imply that they supply all a politician needs. Anyone who has made it his business to feel the pulse of his own must be sensible that when he has been travelling abroad for a few weeks, he is sure, no matter how diligently he peruses the leading home papers of all shades, to “lose touch” of the current sentiment of the country in its actuality. The journals seem to convey to him what their writers wish to be believed, and not necessarily what the people are really thinking; and he feels more and more as weeks pass the need of an hour’s talk with four or five discerning friends of different types of thought, from whom he will gather how current facts strike and move the minds of his countrymen. Every prudent man keeps a circle of such friends, by whom he can test and correct his own impressions better than by the almost official utterances of the party journals. So in America there is much to be learnt from conversation with judicious observers outside politics and typical representatives of political sections and social classes, which the most diligent study of the press will not give, not to add that it occasionally happens that the press of a particular city may fall, for a time, under potent local influences which prevent it from saying all that ought to be said.

Except during electoral campaigns, public meetings play a smaller part in the political life of the United States than in that of Western Europe. Meetings were, of course, more frequent during the struggle against slavery than they need be in these quieter times, yet the difference between European and American practice cannot be wholly due to the more stirring questions which have latterly roused Europeans. A meeting in America is usually held for some practical object, such as the selection of candidates or the creation of an organization, less often as a mere demonstration of opinion and means of instruction. When instruction is desired, the habit is to bring down a man of note to give a political lecture, paying him from $75 to $100, or perhaps even $150, nor is it thought unbecoming for senators and ex-senators to accept such fees. The meetings during an election campaign, which are numerous enough, do not always provide argumentative speaking, for those who attend are assumed to be all members of one party, sound already, and needing nothing but an extra dose of enthusiasm; but since first the protective tariff and thereafter silver and the currency became leading issues, the proportion of reasoning to declamation has increased. Members of Congress do not deliver such annual discourses to their constituents as it has become the fashion for members of the House of Commons to deliver in England; and have indeed altogether an easier time of it as regards speaking, though a far harder one as regards the getting of places for their constituents. American visitors to England seem surprised and even a little edified when they find how much meetings are made to do there in the way of eliciting and cultivating opinion among the electors. I have often heard them praise the English custom, and express the wish that it prevailed in their own country.

As the ceaseless desire of every public man is to know which way the people are going, and as the polls are the only sure index of opinion, every election, however small, is watched with close attention. Now elections are in the United States as plentiful as revolutions in Peru. The vote cast for each party in a city, or state legislature district, or congressional district, or state, at the last previous election, is compared with that now cast, and inferences drawn as to what will happen at the next state or presidential election. Special interest attaches to the state pollings that immediately precede a presidential election, for they not only indicate the momentary temper of the particular voters but tell upon the country generally, affecting that large number who wish to be on the winning side. As happens in the similar case of what are called “by-elections” to the House of Commons in England, too much weight is generally attributed to these contests, which are sometimes, though less frequently than in England, decided by purely local causes. Such elections, however, give the people opportunities of expressing their displeasure at any recent misconduct chargeable to a party, and sometimes lead the party managers to repent in time and change their course before the graver struggle arrives.

Associations are created, extended, and worked in the United States more quickly and effectively than in any other country. In nothing does the executive talent of the people better shine than in the promptitude wherewith the idea of an organization for a common object is taken up, in the instinctive discipline that makes everyone who joins in starting it fall into his place, in the practical, businesslike turn which the discussions forthwith take. Thus in 1884, the cattlemen of the farther West, finding difficulties in driving their herds from Texas to Wyoming and Montana, suddenly convoked a great convention in Chicago which presented a plan for the establishment of a broad route from South to North, and resolved on the steps proper for obtaining the necessary legislation. Here, however, we are concerned with associations only as organs for focussing and propagating opinion. The greater ones, such as the temperance and total abstinence societies, ramify over the country and constitute a species of political organization which figures in state and even in presidential contests. Nearly every “cause,” philanthropic, economic, or social, has something of the kind. Local associations or committees are often formed in cities to combat the machine politicians in the interests of municipal reform; while every important election calls into being a number of “campaign clubs,” which work while the struggle lasts, and are then dissolved. For these money is soon forthcoming; it is more plentiful than in Europe, and subscribed more readily for political purposes.

Such associations have great importance in the development of opinion, for they rouse attention, excite discussion, formulate principles, submit plans, embolden and stimulate their members, produce that impression of a spreading movement which goes so far towards success with a sympathetic and sensitive people. Possunt quia posse videntur is doubly true in America as regards the spectators as well as the actors, because the appearance of strength gathers recruits as well as puts heart into the original combatants. Unexpected support gathers to every rising cause. If it be true that individuality is too weak in the country, strong and self-reliant statesmen or publicists too few, so much the greater is the value of this habit of forming associations, for it creates new centres of force and motion, and nourishes young causes and unpopular doctrines into self-confident aggressiveness. But in any case they are useful as indications of the tendencies at work and the forces behind these tendencies. By watching the attendance at the meetings, the language held, the amount of zeal displayed, a careful observer can discover what ideas are getting hold of the popular mind.

One significant difference between the formation and expression of opinion in the United States and in Europe remains to be noted. In England and Wales over half of the population was in 1911 to be found in sixty cities with a population exceeding 50,000. In France opinion is mainly produced in, and policy, except upon a few of the broadest issues, dictated by, the urban population, though its number falls much below that of the rural. In America the cities with a population exceeding 50,000 inhabitants were in 1910 one hundred and nine with an aggregate population of about 24,500,000, little more than 25 percent of the total population. The number of persons to the square mile was in 1911 618 in England and Wales, and was in the continental United States (1910), 30.9. Hence those influences formative of opinion which city life produces, the presence of political leaders, the influence they personally diffuse, the striking out and testing of ideas in conversation, may tell somewhat less on the American than on the English people, crowded together in their little island, and would tell much less but for the stronger social instincts of the Americans and the more general habit of reading daily newspapers.

In endeavouring to gather the tendencies of popular opinion, the task of an American statesman is in some respects easier than that of his English compeer. As social distinctions count for less in America, the same tendencies are more generally and uniformly diffused through all classes, and it is not necessary to discount so many special points of difference which may affect the result. As social intercourse is easier, and there is less gêne between a person in the higher and one in the humbler ranks, a man can better pick up in conversation the sentiments of his poorer neighbours. Moreover, the number of persons who belong to neither party, or on whom party allegiance sits loosely, is relatively smaller than in England, so the unpredictable vote—the doubtful element which includes those called in England “armchair politicians”—does not so much disturb calculations. Nevertheless, the task of discerning changes and predicting consequences is always a difficult one, in which the most skilful observers may err. Public opinion does not tell quite so quickly or quite so directly upon legislative bodies as in England, not that legislators do not wish to know it, but that the interposition of the machine acts to some extent as a sort of nonconductor. The din of voices is incessant, the parties are in many places nearly balanced. There are frequent small changes from which it would be rash to infer any real movement of opinion, even as he who comes down to the beach must watch many wavelets break in ripples on the sand before he can tell whether the tide be ebbing or flowing.

It may be asked how, if the organs of public opinion give so often an uncertain sound, public opinion can with truth be said not only to reign but to govern. The answer is that a sovereign is not the less a sovereign because his commands are sometimes misheard or misreported. In America everyone listens for them. Those who manage the affairs of the country obey to the best of their hearing. They do not, as has been heretofore the case in Europe, act on their own view, and ask the people to ratify: they take the course which they believe the people at the moment desire. Leaders do not, as sometimes still happens in England, seek to force or anticipate opinion; or if they do, they suffer for the blunder by provoking a reaction. The people must not be hurried. A statesman is not expected to move ahead of them; he must rather seem to follow, though if he has the courage to tell the people that they are wrong, and refuse to be the instrument of their errors, he will be all the more respected. Those who fail because they mistake eddies and cross currents for the main stream of opinion, fail more often from some personal bias, or from vanity, or from hearkening to a clique of adherents, than from want of materials for observation. A man who can disengage himself from preconceptions, who is in genuine sympathy with his countrymen, and possesses the art of knowing where to look for typical manifestations of their sentiments, will find the organs through which opinion finds expression more adequate as well as more abundant in America than they are in any other country.

chapter 80

National Characteristics as Moulding Public Opinion

As the public opinion of a people is even more directly than its political institutions the reflection and expression of its character, it is convenient to begin the analysis of opinion in America by noting some of those general features of national character which give tone and colour to the people’s thoughts and feelings on politics. There are, of course, varieties proper to different classes, and to different parts of the vast territory of the Union; but it is well to consider first such characteristics as belong to the nation as a whole, and afterwards to examine the various classes and districts of the country. And when I speak of the nation I mean the native Americans. What follows is not applicable to the recent immigrants from Europe, and, of course, even less applicable to the Southern Negroes.

The Americans are a good-natured people, kindly, helpful to one another, disposed to take a charitable view even of wrongdoers. Their anger sometimes flames up, but the fire is soon extinct. Nowhere is cruelty more abhorred. Even a mob lynching a horse thief in the West has consideration for the criminal, and will give him a good drink of whisky before he is strung up. Cruelty to slaves was rare while slavery lasted, the best proof of which is the quietness of the slaves during the war when all the men and many of the boys of the South were serving in the Confederate armies. As everybody knows, juries are more lenient to offences of all kinds but one, offences against women, than they are anywhere in Europe. The Southern “rebels” were soon forgiven; and though civil wars are proverbially bitter, there have been few struggles in which the combatants did so many little friendly acts for one another, few in which even the vanquished have so quickly buried their resentments. It is true that newspapers and public speakers say hard things of their opponents; but this is a part of the game, and is besides a way of relieving their feelings: the bark is sometimes the louder in order that a bite may not follow. Vindictiveness shown by a public man excites general disapproval, and the maxim of letting bygones be bygones is pushed so far that an offender’s misdeeds are often forgotten when they ought to be remembered against him.

All the world knows that they are a humorous people. They are as conspicuously the purveyors of humour to the nineteenth century as the French were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth. Nor is this sense of the ludicrous side of things confined to a few brilliant writers. It is diffused among the whole people; it colours their ordinary life, and gives to their talk that distinctively new flavour which a European palate enjoys. Their capacity for enjoying a joke against themselves was oddly illustrated at the outset of the Civil War, a time of stern excitement, by the merriment which arose over the hasty retreat of the Federal troops at the battle of Bull Run. When William M. Tweed was ruling and robbing New York, and had set on the bench men who were openly prostituting justice, the citizens found the situation so amusing that they almost forgot to be angry. Much of President Lincoln’s popularity, and much also of the gift he showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so.

That indulgent view of mankind which I have already mentioned, a view odd in a people whose ancestors were penetrated with the belief in original sin, is strengthened by this wish to get amusement out of everything. The want of seriousness which it produces may be more apparent than real. Yet it has its significance; for people become affected by the language they use, as we see men grow into cynics when they have acquired the habit of talking cynicism for the sake of effect.

They are a hopeful people. Whether or no they are right in calling themselves a new people, they certainly seem to feel in their veins the bounding pulse of youth. They see a long vista of years stretching out before them, in which they will have time enough to cure all their faults, to overcome all the obstacles that block their path. They look at their enormous territory with its still only half-explored sources of wealth, they reckon up the growth of their population and their products, they contrast the comfort and intelligence of their labouring classes with the condition of the masses in the Old World. They remember the dangers that so long threatened the Union from the slave power, and the rebellion it raised, and see peace and harmony now restored, the South more prosperous and contented than at any previous epoch, perfect good feeling between all sections of the country. It is natural for them to believe in their star. And this sanguine temper makes them tolerant of evils which they regard as transitory, removable as soon as time can be found to root them up.

They have unbounded faith in what they call the people and in a democratic system of government. The great states of the European continent are distracted by the contests of republicans and monarchists, and of rich and poor—contests which go down to the foundations of government, and in France are further embittered by religious passions. Even in England the ancient Constitution is always under repair, and while many think it is being ruined by changes, others hold that still greater changes are needed to make it tolerable. No such questions trouble American minds, for nearly everybody believes, and everybody declares, that the frame of government is in its main lines so excellent that such reforms as seem called for need not touch those lines, but are required only to protect the Constitution from being perverted by the parties. Hence a further confidence that the people are sure to decide right in the long run, a confidence inevitable and essential in a government which refers every question to the arbitrament of numbers. There have, of course, been instances where the once insignificant minority proved to have been wiser than the majority of the moment. Such was eminently the case in the great slavery struggle. But here the minority prevailed by growing into a majority as events developed the real issues, so that this also has been deemed a ground for holding that all minorities which have right on their side will bring round their antagonists, and in the long run win by voting power. If you ask an intelligent citizen why he so holds, he will answer that truth and justice are sure to make their way into the minds and consciences of the majority. This is deemed an axiom, and the more readily so deemed because truth is identified with common sense, the quality which the average citizen is most confidently proud of possessing.

This feeling shades off into another, externally like it, but at bottom distinct—the feeling not only that the majority, be it right or wrong, will and must prevail, but that its being the majority proves it to be right. This idea, which appears in the guise sometimes of piety and sometimes of fatalism, seems to be no contemptible factor in the present character of the people. It will be more fully dealt with in a later chapter.

The native Americans are an educated people, compared with the whole mass of the population in any European country except Switzerland, parts of Germany, Norway, Iceland, and Scotland; that is to say, the average of knowledge is higher, the habit of reading and thinking more generally diffused, than in any other country. They know the Constitution of their own country, they follow public affairs, they join in local government and learn from it how government must be carried on, and in particular how discussion must be conducted in meetings, and its results tested at elections. The town meeting was for New England the most perfect school of self-government in any modern country. In villages, men used to exercise their minds on theological questions, debating points of Christian doctrine with no small acuteness. Women in particular, pick up at the public schools and from the popular magazines far more miscellaneous information than the women of any European country possess, and this naturally tells on the intelligence of the men. Almost everywhere one finds women’s clubs in which literary, artistic, and social questions are discussed, and to which men of mark are brought to deliver lectures.

That the education of the masses is nevertheless a superficial education goes without saying. It is sufficient to enable them to think they know something about the great problems of politics; insufficient to show them how little they know. The public elementary school gives everybody the key to knowledge in making reading and writing familiar, but it has not time to teach him how to use the key, whose use is in fact, by the pressure of daily work, almost confined to the newspaper and the magazine. So we may say that if the political education of the average American voter be compared with that of the average voter in Europe, it stands high; but if it be compared with the functions which the theory of the American government lays on him, which its spirit implies, which the methods of its party organization assume, its inadequacy is manifest. This observation, however, is not so much a reproach to the schools, which at least do what English schools omit—instruct the child in the principles of the Constitution—as a tribute to the height of the ideal which the American conception of popular rule sets up.

For the functions of the citizen are not, as has hitherto been the case in Europe, confined to the choosing of legislators, who are then left to settle issues of policy and select executive rulers. The American citizen is virtually one of the governors of the Republic. Issues are decided and rulers selected by the direct popular vote. Elections are so frequent that to do his duty at them a citizen ought to be constantly watching public affairs with a full comprehension of the principles involved in them, and a judgment of the candidates derived from a criticism of their arguments as well as a recollection of their past careers. The instruction received in the common schools and from the newspapers, and supposed to be developed by the practice of primaries and conventions, while it makes the voter deem himself capable of governing, does not completely fit him to weigh the real merits of statesmen, to discern the true grounds on which questions ought to be decided, to note the drift of events and discover the direction in which parties are being carried. He is like a sailor who knows the spars and ropes of the ship and is expert in working her, but is ignorant of geography and navigation; who can perceive that some of the officers are smart and others dull, but cannot judge which of them is qualified to use the sextant or will best keep his head during a hurricane.

They are a moral and well-conducted people. Setting aside the colluvies gentium which one finds in Western mining camps, and which popular literature has presented to Europeans as far larger than it really is, setting aside also the rabble of a few great cities and the Negroes of the South, the average of temperance, chastity, truthfulness, and general probity is somewhat higher than in any of the great nations of Europe. The instincts of the native farmer or artisan are almost invariably kindly and charitable. He respects the law; he is deferential to women and indulgent to children; he attaches an almost excessive value to the possession of a genial manner and the observance of domestic duties.

They are also—and here again I mean the people of native American stock, especially in the Eastern and Middle states, on the whole, a religious people. It is not merely that they respect religion and its ministers, for that one might say of Russians or Sicilians, not merely that they are assiduous churchgoers and Sunday school teachers, but that they have an intelligent interest in the form of faith they profess, are pious without superstition, and zealous without bigotry. The importance which some still, though all much less than formerly, attach to dogmatic propositions, does not prevent them from feeling the moral side of their theology. Christianity influences conduct, not indeed half as much as in theory it ought, but probably more than it does in any other modern country, and far more than it did in the so-called ages of faith.

Nor do their moral and religious impulses remain in the soft haze of self-complacent sentiment. The desire to expunge or cure the visible evils of the world is strong. Nowhere are so many philanthropic and reformatory agencies at work. Zeal outruns discretion, outruns the possibilities of the case, in not a few of the efforts made, as well by legislation as by voluntary action, to suppress vice, to prevent intemperance, to purify popular literature.

Religion apart, they are an unreverential people. I do not mean irreverent— far from it; nor do I mean that they have not a great capacity for hero worship, as they have many a time shown. I mean that they are little disposed, especially in public questions—political, economical, or social—to defer to the opinions of those who are wiser or better instructed than themselves. Everything tends to make the individual independent and self-reliant. He goes early into the world; he is left to make his way alone; he tries one occupation after another, if the first or second venture does not prosper; he gets to think that each man is his own best helper and adviser. Thus he is led, I will not say to form his own opinions, for even in America few are those who do that, but to fancy that he has formed them, and to feel little need of aid from others towards correcting them. There is, therefore, less disposition than in Europe to expect light and leading on public affairs from speakers or writers. Oratory is not directed towards instruction, but towards stimulation. Special knowledge, which commands deference in applied science or in finance, does not command it in politics, because that is not deemed a special subject, but one within the comprehension of every practical man. Politics is, to be sure, a profession, and so far might seem to need professional aptitudes. But the professional politician is not the man who has studied statesmanship, but the man who has practised the art of running conventions and winning elections.

Even that strong point of America, the completeness and highly popular character of local government, contributes to lower the standard of attainment expected in a public man, because the citizens judge of all politics by the politics they see first and know best—those of their township or city—and fancy that he who is fit to be selectman, or county commissioner, or alderman, is fit to sit in the great council of the nation. Like the shepherd in Virgil, they think the only difference between their town and Rome is in its size, and believe that what does for Lafayetteville will do well enough for Washington. Hence when a man of statesmanlike gifts appears, he has little encouragement to take a high and statesmanlike tone, for his words do not necessarily receive weight from his position. He fears to be instructive or hortatory, lest such an attitude should expose him to ridicule; and in America ridicule is a terrible power. Nothing escapes it. Few have the courage to face it. In the indulgence of it even this humane race can be unfeeling.

They are a busy people. I have already observed that the leisured class is relatively small, is in fact confined to a few Eastern cities. The citizen has little time to think about political problems. Engrossing all the working hours, his avocation leaves him only stray moments for this fundamental duty. It is true that he admits his responsibilities, considers himself a member of a party, takes some interest in current events. But although he would reject the idea that his thinking should be done for him, he has not leisure to do it for himself, and must practically lean upon and follow his party. It astonished me in 1870 and 1881 to find how small a part politics play in conversation among the wealthier classes and generally in the cities. Since 1896 there has been a livelier and more constant interest in public affairs; yet even now business matters so occupy the mind of the financial and commercial classes, and athletic competitions the minds of the uneducated classes and of the younger sort in all classes, that political questions are apt, except at critical moments, to fall in the background.1 In a presidential year, and especially during the months of a presidential campaign, there is, of course, abundance of private talk, as well as of public speaking, but even then the issues raised are largely personal rather than political in the European sense. But at other times the visitor is apt to feel—more, I think, than he feels anywhere in Britain—that his host has been heavily pressed by his own business concerns during the day, and that when the hour of relaxation arrives he gladly turns to lighter and more agreeable topics than the state of the nation. This remark is less applicable to the dwellers in villages. There is plenty of political chat round the store at the cross roads, and though it is rather in the nature of gossip than of debate, it seems, along with the practice of local government, to sustain the interest of ordinary folk in public affairs.2

The want of serious and sustained thinking is not confined to politics. One feels it even more as regards economical and social questions. To it must be ascribed the vitality of certain prejudices and fallacies which could scarcely survive the continuous application of such vigorous minds as one finds among the Americans. Their quick perceptions serve them so well in business and in the ordinary affairs of private life that they do not feel the need for minute investigation and patient reflection on the underlying principles of things. They are apt to ignore difficulties, and when they can no longer ignore them, they will evade them rather than lay siege to them according to the rules of art. The sense that there is no time to spare haunts an American even when he might find the time, and would do best for himself by finding it.

Someone will say that an aversion to steady thinking belongs to the average man everywhere. True. But less is expected from the average man in other countries than from a people who have carried the doctine of popular sovereignty further than it has ever been carried before. They are tried by the standard which the theory of their government assumes. In other countries statesmen or philosophers do, and are expected to do, the solid thinking for the bulk of the people. Here the people are supposed to do it for themselves. To say that they do it imperfectly is not to deny them the credit of doing it better than a European philosopher might have predicted.

They are a commercial people, whose point of view is primarily that of persons accustomed to reckon profit and loss. Their impulse is to apply a direct practical test to men and measures, to assume that the men who have got on fastest are the smartest men, and that a scheme which seems to pay well deserves to be supported. Abstract reasonings they dislike, subtle reasonings they suspect; they accept nothing as practical which is not plain, downright, apprehensible by an ordinary understanding. Although openminded, so far as willingness to listen goes, they are hard to convince, because they have really made up their minds on most subjects, having adopted the prevailing notions of their locality or party as truths due to their own reflection.

It may seem a contradiction to remark that with this shrewdness and the sort of hardness it produces, they are nevertheless an impressionable people. Yet this is true. It is not their intellect, however, that is impressionable, but their imagination and emotions, which respond in unexpected ways to appeals made on behalf of a cause which seems to have about it something noble or pathetic. They are capable of an ideality surpassing that of Englishmen or Frenchmen.

They are an unsettled people. In no state of the Union is the bulk of the population so fixed in its residence as everywhere in Europe; in some it is almost nomadic. Except in the more stagnant parts of the South, nobody feels rooted to the soil. Here today and gone tomorrow, he cannot readily contract habits of trustful dependence on his neighbours. Community of interest, or of belief in such a cause as temperance, or protection for native industry, unites him for a time with others similarly minded, but congenial spirits seldom live long enough together to form a school or type of local opinion which develops strength and becomes a proselytizing force. Perhaps this tends to prevent the growth of variety in opinion. When a man arises with some power of original thought in politics, he is feeble if isolated, and is depressed by his insignificance, whereas if he grows up in favourable soil with sympathetic minds around him, whom he can in prolonged intercourse permeate with his ideas, he learns to speak with confidence and soars on the wings of his disciples. One who considers the variety of conditions under which men live in America may certainly find ground for surprise that there should be so few independent schools of opinion.

But even while an unsettled, they are nevertheless an associative, because a sympathetic people. Although the atoms are in constant motion, they have a strong attraction for one another. Each man catches his neighbour’s sentiment more quickly and easily than happens with the English. That sort of reserve and isolation, that tendency rather to repel than to invite confidence, which foreigners attribute to the Englishman, though it belongs rather to the upper and middle class than to the nation generally, is, though not absent, yet less marked in America.3 It seems to be one of the notes of difference between the two branches of the race. In the United States, since each man likes to feel that his ideas raise in other minds the same emotions as in his own, a sentiment or impulse is rapidly propagated and quickly conscious of its strength. Add to this the aptitude for organization which their history and institutions have educed, and one sees how the tendency to form and the talent to work combinations for a political or any other object has become one of the great features of the country. Hence, too, the immense strength of party. It rests not only on interest and habit and the sense of its value as a means of working the government, but also on the sympathetic element and instinct of combination ingrained in the national character.

They are a changeful people. Not fickle, for they are if anything too tenacious of ideas once adopted, too fast bound by party ties, too willing to pardon the errors of a cherished leader. But they have what chemists call low specific heat; they grow warm suddenly and cool as suddenly; they are liable to swift and vehement outbursts of feeling which rush like wildfire across the country, gaining glow, like the wheel of a railway car, by the accelerated motion. The very similarity of ideas and equality of conditions which makes them hard to convince at first makes a conviction once implanted run its course the more triumphantly. They seem all to take flame at once, because what has told upon one, has told in the same way upon all the rest, and the obstructing and separating barriers which exist in Europe scarcely exist here. Nowhere is the saying so applicable that nothing succeeds like success. The native American or so-called Know-Nothing party had in two years from its foundation become a tremendous force, running, and seeming for a time likely to carry, its own presidential candidate. In three years more it was dead without hope of revival. Now and then, as for instance in the elections of 1874–75, and again in those of 1890, there comes a rush of feeling so sudden and tremendous, that the name of tidal wave has been invented to describe it.

After this it may seem a paradox to add that the Americans are a conservative people. Yet anyone who observes the power of habit among them, the tenacity with which old institutions and usages, legal and theological formulas, have been clung to, will admit the fact. Moreover, prosperity helps to make them conservative. They are satisfied with the world they live in, for they have found it a good world, in which they have grown rich and can sit under their own vine and fig tree, none making them afraid. They are proud of their history and of their Constitution, which has come out of the furnace of civil war with scarcely the smell of fire upon it. It is little to say that they do not seek change for the sake of change, because the nations that do this exist only in the fancy of alarmist philosophers. There are nations, however, whose impatience of existing evils, or whose proneness to be allured by visions of a brighter future, makes them underestimate the risk of change, nations that will pull up the plant to see whether it has begun to strike root. This is not the way of the Americans. They are no doubt ready to listen to suggestions from any quarter. They do not consider that an institution is justified by its existence, but admit everything to be matter for criticism. Their keenly competitive spirit and pride in their own ingenuity have made them quicker than any other people to adopt and adapt inventions. Telephones were in use in every little town over the West, while in the city of London men were just beginning to wonder whether they could be made to pay. The Americans have doubtless of late years become, especially in the West, an experimental people, so far as politics and social legislation are concerned, and there is today less reverence for the national Constitution itself than there was in the generation that fought through the Civil War. The growing discontent with existing social conditions, the growing resentment at the power which the possessors of great wealth have been able to exercise, have disposed many persons to desire changes in political arrangements under which such things are possible.

Yet we may still say that as respects the fundamentals of their government, the American people are still a conservative people, in virtue both of the deep instincts of their race and of that practical shrewdness which recognizes the value of permanence and solidity in institutions. They are conservative in their fundamental beliefs, in the structure of their governments, in their social and domestic usages. They are like a tree whose pendulous shoots quiver and rustle with the lightest breeze, while its roots enfold the rock with a grasp which storms cannot loosen.

chapter 81

Classes as Influencing Opinion

These are some of the characteristics of American opinion in general, and may, if I am right in the description given, be discovered in all classes of the native white population. They exist, however, in different measure in different classes, and the above account of them needs to be supplemented by some remarks on the habits and tendencies of each class. I do not, of course, propose to describe the present opinions of classes, for that would require an account of current political questions: my aim is merely to state such general class characters as go to affect the quality and vigour of opinion. Classes are in America by no means the same thing as the greater nations of Europe. One must not, for political purposes, divide them as upper and lower, richer and poorer, but rather according to the occupations they respectively follow and the conditions of life that constitute their environment. Their specific characters, as a naturalist would say, are less marked even in typical individuals than would be the case in Europe, and are in many individuals scarcely recognizable. Nevertheless, the differences between one class and another are sufficient to produce distinctly traceable influences on the political opinion of the nation, and to colour the opinions, perhaps even to determine the political attitude, of the district where a particular class predominates.

I begin with the farmers, because they are, if not numerically the largest class, at least the class whose importance is most widely felt. As a rule they are owners of their land; and as a rule the farms are small, running from forty or fifty up to three hundred acres. In a few places, especially in the West, large landowners let farms to tenants, and in some parts of the South one finds big plantations cultivated by small tenants, often Negroes. But far more frequently the owner tills the land and the tiller owns it. The proportion of hired labourers to farmers is therefore very much smaller than in England, partly because farms are usually of a size permitting the farmer and his family to do much of the work by themselves, partly because machinery is more extensively used, especially in the level regions of the West. The labourers, or, as they are called, the “hired men,” do not, taking the country as a whole, form a social stratum distinct from the farmers, and there is so little distinction in education or rank between them that one may practically treat employer and employed as belonging to the same class.

The farmer is a keener and more enterprising man than in Europe, with more of that commercial character which one observes in Americans, far less anchored to a particular spot, and of course subject to no such influences of territorial magnates as prevail in England, Germany, or Italy. He has now, in such states as Illinois and Wisconsin, realized what applied science can do for agriculture. He is so far a businessman as sometimes to speculate in grain or bacon. Yet he is not free from the usual defects of agriculturists. He is obstinate, tenacious of his habits, not readily accessible to argument. His way of life is plain and simple, and he prides himself on its simplicity, holding the class he belongs to to be the mainstay of the country, and regarding city folk with a mixture of suspicion and jealousy, because he deems them as inferior to himself in virtue as they are superior in adroitness, and likely to outwit him. Sparing rather than stingy in his outlays, and living largely on the produce of his own fields, he has so little ready money that small sums appear large to him; and as he fails to see why everybody cannot thrive and be happy on $1,500 a year, he thinks that figure a sufficient salary for a county or district official, and regulates his notions of payment for all other officials, judges included, by the same standard. To belong to a party and support it by his vote, seems to him part of a citizen’s duty, but his interests in national politics are secondary to those he feels in agriculturists’ questions, particularly in the great war against monopolies and capitalists, which the power and in some cases the tyranny of the railroad companies has provoked in the West. Naturally a grumbler, as are his brethren everywhere, finding his isolated life dull, and often unable to follow the causes which depress the price of produce, he is the more easily persuaded that his grievances are due to the combinations of designing speculators. The agricultural newspaper to which he subscribes is of course written up to his prejudices, and its adulation of the farming class confirms his belief that he who makes the wealth of the country is tricked out of his proper share in its prosperity. Thus he now and then makes desperate attempts to right himself by legislation, lending too ready an ear to politicians who promise him redress by measures possibly unjust and usually unwise. In his impatience with the regular parties, he has been apt to vote for those who call themselves a people’s or farmer’s party, and who dangled before him the hope of getting “cheap money,” of reducing the expenses of legal proceedings, and of compelling the railroads to carry his produce at unremunerative rates. However, after all said and done, he is an honest, kindly sort of man, hospitable, religious, patriotic: the man whose hard work has made the West what it is. It is chiefly in the West that one must now look for the well-marked type I have tried to draw, yet not always in the newer West; for, in regions like northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Dakota, the farming population is mainly foreign—Scandinavian and German—while the native Americans occupy themselves with trading and railroad management. However, the Scandinavians and Germans acquire in a few years many of the characteristics of the native farmer, and follow the political lead given by the latter. In the early days of the Republic, the agriculturists were, especially in the middle and the newer parts of the Southern states, the backbone of the Democratic party, sturdy supporters of Jefferson, and afterwards of Andrew Jackson. When the opposition of North and South began to develop itself and population grew up beyond the Ohio, the pioneers from New England who settled in that country gave their allegiance to the Whig party; and in the famous “log cabin and hard cider” campaign, which carried the election of General Harrison as president, that worthy, taken as a type of the hardy backwoodsman, made the Western farmer for the first time a noble and poetical figure to the popular imagination. Nowadays he is less romantic, yet still one of the best elements in the country. He stood by the Union during the war, and gave his life freely for it. For many years afterwards his vote now carried the Western, and especially the Northwestern states for the Republican party, which is to him still the party which saved the Union and protected the Negro.

The shopkeepers and small manufacturers may be said to form a second class, though in the smaller towns, of the West especially, their interests are so closely interwoven with those of the cultivators, and their way of life so similar, that there is little special to remark about them. In the larger towns they are sharper and more alive to what is passing than the rural population, but their intellectual horizon is not much wider. A sort of natural selection carries the more ambitious and eager spirits into the towns, for the native American dislikes the monotony and isolation of a farm life with its slender prospect of wealth. To keep a store in a “corner lot” is the ambition of the keen-witted lad. The American shopkeeper, it need hardly be said, has not the obsequiousness of his European congener, and is far from fancying that retail trade has anything degrading about it. He is apt to take more part in local politics than the farmer, but less apt to become a member of a state legislature, because he can seldom leave his store as the farmer can at certain seasons leave his land. He reads more newspapers than the farmer does, and of course learns more from current talk. His education has been better, because city schools are superior to country ones. He is perhaps not so certain to go solid for his party. He has less ground of quarrel with the railroads, but if connected with a manufacturing industry, is of course more likely to be interested in tariff questions, or, in other words, to be a Protectionist. His occupation, however, seldom gives him any direct personal motive for supporting one party more than another, and he has less of that political timidity which Europeans take to be the note of the typical bourgeois than the retail dealer of France or England.

The working men, by which I mean those who toil with their hands for wages, form a less well-marked class than is the case in most parts of Europe, and have not so many subclasses within their own body, though of course the distinction between skilled and unskilled labour makes itself felt, and one may say, speaking generally, that all unskilled labourers are comparatively recent immigrants. The native workpeople are of course fairly educated; they read the daily newspapers, while their women may take a weekly religious journal and a weekly or monthly magazine; many of them, especially in the smaller cities, belong to a congregation in whose concerns they are generally interested. Many are total abstainers. Their wives have probably had a longer schooling and read more widely than they do themselves. In the smaller towns both in New England and the West, and even in some of the large cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, the better part of them own the houses they live in, wooden houses in the suburbs with a little verandah and a bit of garden, and thus feel themselves to have a stake in the country. Their womankind dress with so much taste that on Sunday, or when you meet them in the steam cars, you would take them for persons in easy circumstances. Till the latter part of last century, strikes were less frequent than in England, nor, in spite of the troubles of recent years, has there hitherto existed any general sense of hostility to employers. This is due partly to the better circumstances of the workmen, partly to the fact that the passage from the one class to the other is easy and frequent. Thus, notwithstanding the existence of so-called Labour parties, and the recent creation of a vast organization embracing all trades over the whole Union, there has been less of collective class feeling and class action among workmen than in England,1 certainly much less than in France or Germany. Politicians have of late years begun to pose as the special friends of the working man. Although in a country where the popular vote is omnipotent there seems something absurd in assuming that the working man is weak and stands in need of special protection, still the great power of capital, the illegitimate means by which that power acts upon legislatures, the growing disparities of fortune, and the fact that rich men bear less than their due share of taxation, have furnished a basis for labour agitation. While contributing as many recruits to the army of professional politicians as do the other classes, the wage-earning class is no more active in political work than they are, and furnishes few candidates for state or federal office. Till recently little demand was made for the representation of labour as labour either in Congress or in state legislatures. There are of course many members who have begun life as operatives; but very few in Congress (though some in the state legislatures) whose special function or claim it is to be the advocates of their whilom class. Such progress as Communistic or Socialistic movements have made has been chiefly among the immigrants from Central Europe, Germans, Slavs, and Italians, with a smaller contingent of Irish and Swedish support, but it is not easy to say how great this progress is, for the educated classes had known and cared very little about the growth of new doctrines among the workers until the recent outbreak of Anarchist violence at Chicago in 1886 turned all eyes upon a new source of peril to civilization. One question, however, which never fails to excite the workmen is the introduction of cheap foreign labour, and the bringing in of workmen to fill the place of strikers. A statute forbids the landing in the country of persons coming under a contract to work. In the Pacific states the feeling against the Chinese, who took lower wages, often one-half of what whites obtain, was for a time not merely the prime factor in Californian state politics, but induced the Senate to ratify treaties and Congress to pass acts, the last one extremely stringent, forbidding their entry. One trade, however, the Chinese are permitted to follow, and have now almost monopolized, that of washermen—one cannot say, washerwomen. Even a small city rarely wants its Chinese laundry. The entry, early in the present century, of a large number of Japanese, roused similar antagonism, and led to negotiations with the government of Japan by which the influx was stopped.

It will be gathered from what I have said that there is no want of intelligence or acuteness among the working people. For political purposes, and setting apart what are specifically called labour questions, there is really little difference between them and other classes. Their lights are as good as those of farmers or traders, their modes of thinking similar. They are, however, somewhat more excitable and more easily fascinated by a vigorous personality, as the success of General Benjamin F. Butler among the shoemakers of his Massachusetts district proved. A powerful speaker with a flow of humour and audacity will go farther with them than with the more commercially minded shopkeeper, or the more stolid agriculturist, if indeed one can call any American stolid.

The ignorant masses of such great cities as New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, San Francisco, together with the dangerously large “tramp” class, are hardly to be reckoned with the working class I have been describing, but answer better to what is called in England “the residuum.” They are no longer Irish and Germans, for these races have moved upward in the social scale, but chiefly Poles and other Slavs, Italians, Negroes, and such native Americans as have fallen from their first estate into drink and penury. The most recent immigrants can hardly be said to possess political opinions, for they have not had time to learn to know the institutions of their new country. But as to the earlier incomers, and especially the Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians, one may note three sentiments which have affected them, besides adhesion to the party which snapped them up when they landed, or which manipulates them by leaders of their own race. One of these sentiments is religious sympathy. Such of them as are Roman Catholics are ready to stand by whichever party may obtain the favour, or be readiest to serve the interests, of their church.2 Another is the protection of the liquor traffic. The German loves his beer, and deems a land where this most familiar of pleasures is unattainable no land of freedom, while the Irishman stands by a trade in which his countrymen are largely engaged. And, thirdly, the American-Irish were for a time largely swayed by dislike of England, which has made them desire to annoy her, and if possible to stir up a quarrel between her and the land of their adoption. This feeling began to decline after 1886, and is now confined to a comparatively small part of the population of Irish origin.

The European reader must not suppose that this lowest section of the labouring class is wholly composed of immigrants, nor that all of the city-dwelling immigrants belong to it, for there are many foreigners whose education and skill places them at once on a level with the native American workmen.3 Its importance in politics arises less from its number, than from the cohesion, in every great city, of so much of it as is massed there. Being comparatively ignorant, and for the most part not yet absorbed into the American population, it is not moved by the ordinary political forces, nor amenable to the ordinary intellectual and moral influences, but “goes solid” as its leaders direct it, a fact which gives these leaders exceptional weight, and may enable them, when parties are nearly balanced, to dictate their terms to statesmen. The disposition to truckle to the forces of disorder, and to misuse the power of pardoning offenders, which prominent state officials have sometimes evinced, is due to the fear of the so-called “Labour vote,” a vote which would have much less power were the suffrage restricted to persons who have resided fifteen or twenty years in the country. Nevertheless the immigrants are not so largely answerable for the faults of American politics as the stranger might be led by the language of many Americans to believe. There is a disposition in the United States to use the immigrants, and especially the Irish, much as the cat is used in the kitchen to account for broken plates and food which disappears. The cities have no doubt suffered from the immigrant vote. But New York was not an Eden before the Irish came; and would not become an Eden were they all return to green Erin, or move on to arid Arizona.

The capitalist class consists of large merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and railroad men, with a few great land speculators and directors of trading or carrying companies. How much capacity and energy, how much wealth and influence there is in this small class everybody knows. It includes the best executive ability of the country, and far more ability than is devoted to the public service of the state. Though such persons do not, and hardly could, hold aloof from politics—some of them are indeed zealous party men—their interest lies chiefly in using politics for their own purposes, and especially in resisting the attacks with which they are threatened, sometimes by the popular movement against monopolists and great corporations, sometimes by men anxious to reduce the present high tariff which the manufacturers declare to be essential to their industries. One-half of the capitalists are occupied in preaching laissez faire as regards railroad control, the other half in resisting it in railroad rate matters, in order to have their goods carried more cheaply, and in tariff matters in order to protect industries threatened with foreign competition. Yet they manage to hold well together. Their practical talent does not necessarily imply political insight, any more than moral elevation, nor have they generally the taste or leisure to think seriously about the needs of the state. In no country does one find so many men of eminent capacity for business, shrewd, inventive, forcible, and daring, who have so few interests and so little to say outside the sphere of their business knowledge.

But the wealthy have many ways of influencing opinion and the course of events. Some of them own, others find means of inspiring, newspapers. Many are liberal supporters of universities and colleges, and it is alleged that they occasionally discourage the promulgation, by college teachers, of opinions they dislike. Presidents of great corporations have armies of officials under their orders, who cannot indeed be intimidated, for public opinion would resent that, yet may be suffered to know what their superior thinks and expects. Cities, districts of country, even states or territories, have much to hope or fear from the management of a railway, and good reason to conciliate its president. Moreover, as the finance of the country is in the hands of these men and every trader is affected by financial changes, as they control enormous joint-stock enterprises whose shares are held and speculated in by hosts of private persons of all ranks, their policy and utterances are watched with anxious curiosity, and the line they take determines the conduct of thousands not directly connected with them. A word from several of the great financiers would go a long way with leading statesmen. They are for the most part a steadying influence in politics, being opposed to sudden changes which might disturb the money market or depress trade, and especially opposed to complications with foreign states. They are therefore par excellence the peace party in America, for though some might like to fish in troubled waters, the majority would have far more to lose than to gain.

There remains the group of classes loosely called professional men, of whom we may dismiss the physicians as neither bringing any distinctive element into politics, nor often taking an active interest therein, and the journalists, because they have been considered in treating of the organs of opinion, and the clergy as inhibited by public feeling from direct immixture in political strife. In the antislavery and Free Soil struggles, ministers of religion were prominent, as they are now in the temperance movement, and indeed will always be when a distinctly moral issue is placed before the country. But in ordinary times, and as regards most questions, they find it prudent to rest content with inculcating such sound principles as will elevate their hearers’ views and lead them to vote for the best men. Some few, however, of exceptional zeal or unusually well-assured position do appear on political platforms, and, like the late Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, justify their courage by their success. The Roman Catholic prelates have great influence with their flocks, but are so sensible of the displeasure which its exercise would cause among the native Americans as to be guarded in political action, allowing themselves a freer hand in promoting temperance or other moral causes. Some of them have been among the most prominent and influential figures in the country.

The lawyers, who are both barristers and attorneys in one, there being no such distinction of the profession into two branches as exists in Britain and France, are of all classes that which has most to do with politics.4 From their ranks comes a large part, probably a half, and apparently the better half, of the professional politicians. Those who do not make politics a business have usually something to do with it, and even those who have little to do with it enjoy opportunities of looking behind the scenes. The necessities of their practice oblige them to study the federal Constitution and the constitution of their own state, as well as to watch current legislation. It is therefore from the legal profession that most of the leading statesmen have been drawn, from the days of Patrick Henry, John Jay, and John Adams down to those of Abraham Lincoln and the presidential candidates of the last generation. Hence both in great cities and in small ones the lawyer is favourably placed for influencing opinion. If he be a man of parts, he is apt to be the centre of local opinion, as Lincoln was in Springfield, where he practised law and made his reputation.5 When in some great community like New York or Boston a demonstration is organized, some distinguished advocate, such as Charles O’Conor was in New York, such as Rufus Choate was in Boston, used to be selected for the oration of the day, because he had the power of speech, and because everybody knew him. Thus the lawyers, if less powerful in proportion to their numbers than the capitalists, are perhaps equally powerful as a whole, since more numerous and more locally active. Of course it is only on a very few professional questions that they act together as a class. Their function is to educate opinion from the technical side, and to put things in a telling way before the people. Whether the individual lawyer is or is not a better citizen than his neighbours, he is likely to be a shrewder one, knowing more about government and public business than most of them do, and able at least to perceive the mischiefs of bad legislation, which farmers or shopkeepers may faintly realize. Thus on the whole the influence of the profession makes for good, and though it is often the instrument by which harm is wrought, it is as often the means of revealing and defeating the tricks of politicians, and of keeping the wholesome principles of the Constitution before the eyes of the nation. Its action in political life may be compared with its function in judicial proceedings. Advocacy is at the service of the just and the unjust equally, and sometimes makes the worse appear the better cause, yet experience shows that the sifting of evidence and the arguing of points of law tend on the whole to make justice prevail.

There remain the men of letters and artists, an extremely small class outside a few Eastern cities, and the teachers, especially those in colleges and universities. The influence of literary men has been felt more through magazines than through books, for native authorship suffered severely, till the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1891, from the deluge of cheap English reprints. That of the teachers tells primarily on their pupils and indirectly on the circles to which those pupils belong, or in which they work when they have left college. For a long time, and especially during the struggle between free trade and protection and in the earlier days of the municipal reform movement in the latter part of last century, “college professors” used to be denounced by the professional politicians as unpractical, visionary, pharisaical, “kid-gloved,”“high-toned,”“un-American,” the fact being that an impulse towards the improvement of party methods, civil service reform and tariff reform, was coming from the universities, and was felt in the increased political activity of the better educated youth. The new generation of lawyers, clergymen, and journalists, of teachers in the higher schools and indeed of businessmen also, many of whom now receive a university education, have been inspired by the universities, at first chiefly by the older and more highly developed institutions of the Eastern states, but latterly by the universities of the West also, with a more serious and earnest view of politics than has prevailed among the richer classes since the strain of the Civil War passed away. Their horizon has been enlarged, their patriotism tempered by a sense of national shortcomings, and quickened by a higher ideal of national well-being. The confidence that all other prosperity will accompany material prosperity, the belief that good instincts are enough to guide nations through practical difficulties, errors which led astray so many worthy people in the last generation, are being dispelled, and a juster view of the great problems of democratic government presented. The seats of learning and education are at present among the most potent forces making for progress and the formation of sound opinion in the United States, and they increase daily in the excellence of their teachers no less than in the number of their students.

Before quitting this part of the subject a few general observations are needed to supplement or sum up the results of the foregoing inquiry.

There is in the United States no such general opposition as in continental Europe of richer and poorer classes, no such jealousy or hostility as one finds in France between the bourgeoisie and the operatives, not even that touch of antagonism which may now be noted in Australia. Class distinctions do exist for the purposes of social intercourse. But it is only in the larger cities that the line is sharply drawn between those who call themselves gentlemen and those others to whom, in talk among themselves, the former set would refuse this epithet.

There is no one class or set of men whose special function it is to form and lead opinion. The politicians certainly do not. Public opinion leads them.

Still less is there any governing class. The class whence most officeholders come corresponds, as respects education and refinement, to what would be called the lower middle class in Europe. But officeholders are not governors.

Such class issues as now exist or have recently existed, seldom, or to a small extent, coincide with issues between the two great parties. They are usually toyed with by both parties alike, or if such a question becomes strong enough to be made the basis of a new party, such a party will usually stand by itself apart from the two old and regular organizations.

In Europe, classes have become factors in politics either from interest or from passion. Legislation or administration may have pressed hardly on a class, and the class has sought to defend and emancipate itself. Or its feelings may have been wounded by past injury or insult, and it may seek occasions for revenge. In America the latter cause has never existed, and till recently neither was the former apparent, though of late years complaints have been made that the law deals unfairly with labour unions.6 Hence classes are not prime factors in American politics or in the formation of native political opinion. In the main, political questions proper have held the first place in a voter’s mind, and questions affecting his class the second.7 The great strikes which have of late years convulsed large sections of the country, and the labour agitation which has accompanied them, have brought new elements of class passion and class interest upon the scene.

The nation is not an aggregate of classes. They exist within it, but they do not make it up. You are not struck by their political significance as you would be in any European country. The people is one people, although it occupies a wider territory than any other nation, and is composed of elements from many quarters.

Even education makes less difference between various sections of the community than might be expected. One finds among the better instructed many of those prejudices and fallacies to which the European middle classes are supposed peculiarly liable. Among the less instructed of the native Americans, on the other hand, there is a comprehension of public affairs, a shrewdness of judgment, and a generally diffused interest in national welfare, exceeding that of the humbler classes in Europe. They have shown, and notably on several occasions within the present century, a power of responding to the appeals made to them by a highminded and courageous leader which has startled and quelled the machine politicians, and cheered the hearts of those who have faith in popular government.

This is the strong point of the nation. This is what gives buoyancy to the vessel of the state, enabling her to carry with apparent ease the dead weight of ignorance which European immigration continues to throw upon her decks.

chapter 82

Local Types of Opinion—East, West, and South

Both the general tendencies and the class tendencies in the development of public opinion which I have attempted to sketch, may be observed all over the vast area of the Union. Some, however, are more powerful in one region, others in another, while the local needs and feelings of each region tend to give a particular colour to its views and direction to its aims. One must therefore inquire into and endeavour to describe these local differences, so as, by duly allowing for them, to correct what has been stated generally with regard to the conditions under which opinion is formed, and the questions which evoke it.

In an earlier chapter I have classified the states into five groups, the Northeastern or New England states, the Middle states, the Northwestern states, the Southern states, and the states of the Pacific slope. For the purposes of our present inquiry there is no material difference between the first two of these groups, but the differences between the others are significant. It is needless to add that there are, of course, abundance of local differences within these divisions. Pennsylvania, for instance, is for many purposes unlike Ohio. Georgia stands on a higher level than Louisiana. Idaho is more raw than Illinois. To go into these minor points of divergence would involve a tedious discussion, and perhaps confuse the reader after all, so he must be asked to understand that this chapter endeavours to present only the general aspect which opinion wears in each section of the country, and that what is said of a section generally, is not meant to be taken as equally applicable to every state within it.

In the Eastern states the predominant influence is that of capitalists, manufacturers, merchants—in a word, of the commercial classes. The East finds the capital for great undertakings all over the country, particularly for the making of railroads, the stock of which is chiefly held by Eastern investors, and the presidents whereof often have their central office in New York, though the line may traverse the Western or Southern states. The East also conducts the gigantic trade with Europe. It ships the grain and the cattle, the pork and the petroleum, it finances the shipping of much of the cotton, it receives and distributes nearly all the manufactured goods that Europe sends, as well as most of the emigrants from the ports of the Old World.1 The arms of its great bankers and merchants stretch over the whole Union, making those commercial influences which rule in their own seat potent everywhere. Eastern opinion is therefore the most quickly and delicately sensitive to financial movements and to European influences, as well as the most firmly bound to a pacific policy. As in the beginning of the century, trade interests made Massachusetts and Connecticut anxious to avoid a breach with England, to whose ports their vessels plied, so now, though the shipping which enters Eastern ports is chiefly European (British, Norwegian, German, French), the mercantile connections of American and European merchants and financiers are so close that an alarm of war might produce widespread disaster.

The East is also, being the oldest, the best educated and if no longer the most intellectually active yet perhaps the most intellectually polished, quarter of the country.2 Not only does it contain more men of high culture, but the average of knowledge and thought (excluding the mob of the great cities and some backward districts in the hills of Pennsylvania) is higher than elsewhere. Its literary men and eminent teachers labour for the whole country, and its cities, which show the lowest element of the population in their rabble, show also the largest number of men of light and leading in all professions. Although very able newspapers are published in the West as well as in the East, still the tone of Eastern political discussion is more generally dignified and serious than in the rest of the Union. The influences of Europe, which, of course, play first and chiefly upon the East, are, so far as they affect manners and morality, by no means an unmixed good. But in the realm of thought Europe and its criticism are a stimulative force, which corrects any undue appreciation of national virtues, and helps forward sound views in economics and history. The leisured and well-read class to be found in some Eastern cities is as cosmopolitan in tone as can be found anywhere in the world, yet has not lost the piquancy of its native soil. Its thought appropriates what is fresh and sound in the literature or scientific work of Germany, England, and France more readily than any of those countries seems to learn from each of the others. These causes, added to the fact that the perversions of party government have been unusually gross among the irresponsible masses that crowd these very cities, has roused a more strenuous opposition to the so-called “machine” than in other parts of the country. The Eastern voter is less bound to his party, more accustomed to think for himself, and to look for light, when he feels his own knowledge defective, to capable publicists. When, either in federal or state or city politics, an independent party arises, repudiating the bad nominations of one or both of the regular organizations, it is here that it finds its leaders and the greatest part of its support. There has also been in New England something of the spirit of Puritanism, cold and keen as glacier air, with its high standard of public duty and private honour, its disposition to apply the maxims of religion to the conduct of life, its sense, much needed in this tenderhearted country, that there are times when Agag must be hewn in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. If the people of New England and rural New York had been left unpolluted by the turbid flood of foreign immigration, they would be the fittest of any in the world for a pure democratic government. Evils there would still be, as in all governments, but incomparably less grave than those which now tax the patriotism of the party which from these states holds up the banner of reform for the whole Union.

It is impossible to draw a line between the East and the West, because the boundary is always moving westward. In 1870 Ohio was typically Western in character; now it has as much in common with Connecticut or New York as with Kansas or Minnesota. The most distinctive elements in the Western states are the farming class, which here attains its greatest strength, and the masses of Germans and Scandinavians, who fill whole districts, often outnumbering the native Americans. For many years these immigrants contributed so much more largely to the voting than to the thinking power of the newer states, that their presence was one of the main reasons why the political power of the West exceeded its political capacity. They are honest, industrious, and worthy people, the parents of good American citizens, useful men to clear the woods and break up the prairie, and now, having learnt the institutions of the country, they are no longer behind their native born neighbors in political intelligence, nor less ready to try experiments in legislation and in the reform of election methods. The predominance of the agricultural interest has the faults and merits indicated in the account already given of the farming class. Western opinion is politically unenlightened, still dislikes theory, and holds the practical man to be the man who, while discerning keenly his own interest, discerns nothing else beyond the end of his nose. It has boundless confidence in the future of the country, of the West in particular, of its own state above all, caring not much for what the East thinks, and still less for the judgment of Europe. It feels sure everything will come right, and thinks “cheap transportation” to be the one thing needful. Reckless in enterprises, it is stingy in paying its officials, judges included. Good-natured and indulgent to a fault, it is nevertheless displeased to hear that its senator lives in luxury at Washington. Its townsfolk are so much occupied in pushing their towns, between whose newspapers there is a furious rivalry—they hate one another as Athens hated Thebes, or Florence, Pisa—its rich men in opening up railroads, its farmers in their household and field toil, labour being scarce and dear, that politics were for a long time left to the politicians, who, however, were not the worst specimens of their class, and the ordinary voter stuck steadily to his party, disliking “independents” and “bolters.” Now, however, the wave of what is called “radicalism” which has from time to time surged up along and beyond the Mississippi, has brought a keener interest into political reform and legislative work, and that splendid energy which the Western men showed when, in the Civil War days, their stouthearted, large-limbed regiments poured down to Southern battlefields has thrown more of itself than it had done since those days, into plans for improving the methods of politics and curbing what is held to be the excessive power of combined wealth. The Western man is no more disposed than formerly to listen to philosophical reasonings, or trouble himself about coming dangers, but his sentiment as well as his interest has been so enlisted in these plans, that he is not likely soon to drop them.

The West may be called the most distinctively American part of America, because the points in which it differs from the East are the points in which America as a whole differs from Europe. But the character of its population differs in different regions, according to the parts of the country from which the early settlers came. Now the settlers have generally moved along parallels of latitude, and we have therefore the curious result that the characteristics of the older states have propagated themselves westward in parallel lines, so that he who travels from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains will find fewer differences to note than he who, starting from Texas, travels north to Manitoba. Thus northern Ohio was filled from New England and western New York, and in its turn colonized northern Illinois, Michigan, and much of the farther Northwest. Southern Ohio and Illinois, together with a great part of Indiana, were peopled from Virginia and Kentucky, and the somewhat inferior quality of these early settlers is still traceable. Missouri was colonized from the slave states, and retains traces of their character.3 Kansas lies just west of Missouri, but it received in the days of the Free Soil struggle many Puritan immigrants from the free states, and shows, though it used to be called the state of “cranks,” a high type of political intelligence. The Scandinavians are chiefly in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the two Dakotas, the Germans numerous in Iowa also, and indeed all over these newer states, including Texas. So far back as 1870 Milwaukee was a German rather than an American city,4 and in 1890 it appeared that there were townships in Wisconsin in which the tax lists had for years been kept in German, and counties in which a paid interpreter was required to enable the business of the courts to be transacted. Oklahoma, into which settlers have swarmed from all parts of the Northwest as well as the Southwest, is preeminently the land of sanguine radicalism and experimental legislation. New Mexico and Arizona were, till Congress in 1910 passed an act for their admission as states, still Territories, and the former has a large Mexican element. Yet over them, too, the network of party organization has been spread, though, of course, the sparser population feeds a feebler political life.

The Pacific slope, as its inhabitants call it, geographically includes the states of Oregon and Washington, but Oregon and Washington resemble the Northwestern states in so many respects that she may better be classed therewith. California and Nevada on the other hand, to whom we may now add Arizona, are distinctly peculiar. They are more Western than the states I have just been describing, with the characteristics of those states intensified and some new features added. They are cut off by deserts and barren mountain ranges from the agricultural part of the Mississippi basin, nor is population ever likely to become really continuous across this wilderness. Mining industries play a larger part in them than in any other state, except Colorado. Their inhabitants are unsettled and fluctuating, highly speculative, as one may expect those who mine and gamble in mining stocks to be. They used to be chiefly occupied with questions of their own, such as Oriental immigration, the management of the great Central and Southern Pacific railroad system, which has been accused of dominating the trade and industries of California; and the reconcilement of the claims of miners and agriculturists to the waters of the rivers, which each set seeks to appropriate, and which the former claims the right to foul. Now forces and tendencies, generally similar, are at work on both sides of the Rocky Mountains, and so are the issues which occupy men’s minds. Yet public opinion is here, in spite of the proverbial shrewdness, energy, and hardihood of the men of the Pacific, somewhat more fitful and gusty, less amenable to the voice of sober reason, and less deferential to the authority of statesmen, or even of party than anywhere else in the Union. “Interests,” such as those of a great mine-owning group, or of a railroad, are immensely powerful, and the reactions against them not less so.

Of the South, the solid South, as it is often called, because its presidential vote has since 1876 been cast almost entire for the Democrats, some account will be found in three later chapters, one sketching its history since the war ended, two others describing the condition of the Negro and his relations to the whites. Here, therefore, I will speak only of the general character of political opinion and action in the former slave states. The phenomena they present are unexampled. Equality before the law is in theory absolute and perfect, being secured by the federal Constitution. Yet the political subjection of a large part (in one state a majority) of the population is no less complete.

There are three orders of men in the South.

The first is the upper or educated class, including the children of the planting aristocracy which ruled before the Civil War, together with the Northern men who have since 1865 settled in the towns for the purposes of trade or manufacture. Of this order more than nine-tenths—those in fact who have survived from the old aristocracy, together with those who have since arisen from the humbler class, and with most of the newer arrivals—belong to the Democratic party. Along with the high spirit and self-confidence which belong to a ruling race, these Southern men showed an enlargement of view and an aptitude for grasping decided and continuous lines of policy, in fact, a turn for statesmanship as contrasted with mere politics, which was less common in the North, because less favoured by the conditions under which ambition has in the North to push its way. The Southern man who entered public life had a more assured position than his rival from a Northern state, because he represented the opinion of a united body who stood by him, regarding him as their champion, and who expected from him less subservience to their instructions. He did not need to court so assiduously the breath of popular favour. He was not more educated or intelligent; and had lived in a less stimulating atmosphere. But he had courage and a clear vision of his objects, the two gifts essential for a statesman; while the united popular impulse behind him supplied a sort of second patriotism. The element of gain entered somewhat less into Southern politics, partly because the country is poor and though the South begins to be commercialized, the sensitiveness on the “point of honour” and a flavour of punctiliousness in manners, recall the olden time. Opinion in the slave states before the war, in spite of the divisions between Democrats and Whigs, was generally bold, definite, and consistent, because based on a few doctrines. It was the opinion of a small class who were largely occupied with public affairs, and fond of debating them upon first principles and the words of the federal constitution. It has preserved this quality, while losing its old fierceness and better recognizing the conditions under which it must work in a federal republic. On the other hand, the extreme strength of party feeling, due to the extreme sensitiveness regarding the Negro, has prevented the growth of independent opinion, and of the tendency which in the North is called Mugwumpism. And although the leading statesmen are not inferior to those whom the North sends to Washington, the total number of thoughtful and enlightened men is, in proportion to the population, smaller than in the Northeast, smaller even than in such Western states as Illinois or Ohio.

I have used the past tense in describing these phenomena, because the South is changing, and the process is now scarcely swifter in the West than in those parts of Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama where the coal and iron deposits have recently been opened up. Most parts, however, are still thinly settled by whites, and so poor that a traveller finds it hard to understand how, when still poorer, the people managed to resist for four years the armies of the wealthy and populous North. There is therefore less eagerness and hopefulness than in the West, less searching discussion and elaborate organization than in the East, less of everything that is characteristically democratic. The machine has, in some states, been brought to no such terrible perfection as in the North, because the need of it was not felt where one party was sure of victory, and because talent or social position usually designated the men to be selected as candidates, or the men whose voice would determine the selection. Of late years, however, the aristocratic element in Southern politics has grown weaker, and merits that were deemed characteristic of Southern statesmen are more rarely seen. Those who regret that there has not been, since the Civil War generation died out, a stronger group of leaders sent from the South to Washington, attribute the fact to the superior attractions of a business career in a region which is growing and developing so fast and to the departure of some of the ablest intellects to Northern cities where they expect to find a larger field for their talents.

The second order consists of those who used to be called the mean whites. Their condition strengthens the impression of half civilization which the rural districts of the South produce upon the traveller, and which comes painfully home to him in the badness of the inns. While slavery lasted, these whites were, in the lowlands of the planting states, a wretched, because economically superfluous, class. There was no room for them as labourers, because the slaves did the work on the plantations; they had not the money to purchase land and machinery for themselves, nor the spirit to push their way in the towns, while the system of large slave-worked properties made, as the latifundia did long ago in Italy, the cultivation of small farms hopeless, and the existence of a thriving free peasantry impossible. The planters disliked these whites and kept them off their estates as much as possible; the slaves despised them, and called them “poor white trash.” In South Carolina and the Gulf states, they picked up a wretched livelihood by raising some vegetables near their huts, and killing the wild creatures of the woods, while a few hung round the great houses to look out for a stray job. Shiftless, ignorant, improvident, with no aims in the present nor hopes for the future, citizens in nothing but the possession of votes, they were a standing reproach to the system that produced them, and the most convincing proof of its economic as well as moral failure. In the northerly slave states, they were better off, and in the highlands of Western Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, where there were few or no slaves, they had, along with much rudeness and ignorance, the virtues of simple mountaineers. Their progress since the war has been marked, both near the mining and manufacturing towns, which give work and furnish markets, and in the cotton-bearing uplands, where many have acquired farms and prospered as tillers of the soil. Everywhere, however, they remain, in point of education and enlightenment, behind the small farmers or artisans of the North and West. Before the war they followed, as a matter of course (except in the mountains, where the conditions were different), the lead of the planting class, not more out of deference to it than from aversion to the Negroes. The less a man had to be proud of, the more proud was he of his colour. Since the war, they have been no less anxious than their richer neighbours to exclude the Negroes from any share in the government. But they are no longer mere followers. They have begun to think and act for themselves, and, though one of the first signs of independence was shown in the acceptance of the impractiable projects that were for a time advocated by the Farmers’ Alliance, they have become a body which has views, and with whose views it is necessary to reckon.

The Negroes constitute nearly one-third of the population of the old slave states, and in two states (Mississippi and South Carolina) they are in a majority, being nearly equal to the whites in Louisiana and Georgia. Though their presence is the dominant factor in Southern politics, they cannot be said to form or influence opinion; and it is not their votes, but the efforts made to prevent them from voting, that have influenced the course of events. I reserve for subsequent chapters an account of their singular positions.

Remembering that of the whole population of the Union, nearly one-third is in the Southern states, and that the majority of that one-third, viz., the lower part of the poor whites and nearly all the Negroes, has no political knowledge or capacity, nothing that can be called rational opinion, and remembering also the large mass of recently arrived and ignorant immigrants, it will be seen how far the inhabitants of the United States are from being a democracy enlightened through and through. If one part of the people is as educated and capable as that of Switzerland, another is as ignorant and politically untrained as that of Russia.

Of the four divisions of the country above described, the West (including Oregon and Washington) has already the largest vote, and since it grows faster than the others, will soon be indisputably sovereign. But as it grows, it loses some of its distinctive features, becoming more like the East, and falling more and more under Eastern influences, both intellectual and financial. It must not therefore be supposed that what is now typically Western opinion will be the reigning opinion of the future. The Pacific states will in time be drawn closer to those of the Mississippi Valley, losing something of such specific quality as they still possess; and centres of literary activity, such as now exist chiefly in the Atlantic states, will be more and more scattered over the whole country. Opinion will therefore be more homogeneous, or at least less local, in the future than it has been in the past; even as now it is less determined by local and state influences than it was in the earlier days of the Republic.

chapter 83

The Action of Public Opinion

The last few chapters have attempted to explain what are the conditions under which opinion is formed in America, what national qualities it reflects, how it is affected by class interests or local circumstances, as well as through what organs it manifests itself. We must now inquire how it acts, and for this purpose try to answer three questions.

By whom is public opinion formed? i.e., by the few or by the many?

How does it seek to grasp and use the legal machinery which the constitutions (federal and state) provide?

What means has it of influencing the conduct of affairs otherwise than through the regular legal machinery?

It may serve to illustrate the phenomena which mark the growth of opinion in America if we compare them with those of some European country. As Britain is the country in which public opinion has been longest and with least interruption installed in power, and in which the mass of the people are more largely than elsewhere interested in public affairs,1 Britain supplies the fittest materials for a comparison.

In Britain political supremacy belongs to the householder voters, who number (over the whole United Kingdom) about 7,500,000, being rather less than two-thirds of the adult male population. Public opinion ought in theory to reside in them. Practically, however, as everybody knows, most of them have little that can be called political opinion. It is the creation and possession of a much smaller number.

An analysis of public opinion in Britain will distinguish three sets of persons—I do not call them classes, for they do not coincide with social grades—those who make opinion, those who receive and hold opinion, those who have no opinions at all.

The first set consists of practical politicians (i.e., a certain number of members of the Lower House and a smaller fraction of members of the Upper, together with men taking an active part in local party organizations), journalists and other public writers, and a small fringe of other persons, chiefly professional men, who think and talk constantly about public affairs. Within this set of men, who are to be counted by hundreds rather than by thousands, it is the chiefs of the great parties who have the main share in starting opinion, the journalists in propagating it. Debates in Parliament do something, and the speeches which custom, recent, but strong and increasing, requires the leaders to deliver up and down the country, and which are of course reported, replace Parliament when it is not sitting. The function of the dozen best thinkers and talkers in each party is now not merely, as in the last generation, to know and manage Parliament, to watch foreign affairs, and prepare schemes of domestic legislation, but to inspire, instruct, stimulate, and attach the outside public. So too members of the houses of Parliament find that the chief utility of their position lies in its enabling them to understand the actualities of politics better than they could otherwise do, and to gain a hearing outside for what they may have to say to their fellow countrymen. This small set of persons constitutes what may be called the working staff of the laboratory; it is among them, by the reciprocal action and reaction on one another of the chiefs, the followers, and the press, that opinion receives its first shape.2

The second set of persons consists of those who watch public affairs with a certain measure of interest. When an important question arises, they look at the debates in Parliament or some platform deliverance by a leader, and they have at all times a notion of what is passing in the political world. They now and then attend a public meeting. They are not universally, but now pretty largely, enrolled as members of some political association. When an election arrives they go to vote of their own accord. They talk over politics after dinner or coming into town by a suburban train. The proportion of such persons is larger in the professional classes (and especially among the lawyers) than in the mercantile, larger in the upper mercantile than among the working men of the towns, larger among skilled than unskilled artisans, larger in the North than in the South, larger among the town workmen than among the newly enfranchised agricultural labourers. It varies in different parts of the country, and is perhaps relatively smaller in London than in other cities. If still less than a third of the total number of voters, it is nevertheless an increasing proportion.3

The third set includes all the rest of the voters. Though they possess political power, and are better pleased to have it, they do not really care about it—that is to say, politics occupy no appreciable space in their thoughts and interests. Some of them vote at elections because they consider themselves to belong to a party, or fancy that on a given occasion they have more to expect from the one party than from the other; or because they are brought up on election day by someone who can influence them. The number who vote tends to increase with the importation of party into municipal and other local contests; and from the same cause some now enrol themselves in party associations. Others will not take the trouble to go to the polls. No one, except on the stump, can attribute independent political thinking to this mass of persons, because their knowledge and interest, though growing under the influence of the privileges they enjoy, are still slight. Many have not even political prepossessions, and will stare or smile when asked to which party they belong. They count for little except at elections, and then chiefly as instruments to be used by others. So far as the formation or exercise of opinion goes, they may be left out of sight.4

It is obviously impossible to draw a sharp line between the second set and the third, or to estimate their relative numbers, because when politics are dull many persons subside into indifference whom the advent of a crisis may again arouse. And of course there are plenty of people in the second set who though interested in politics, have no sort of real knowledge or judgment about them. Such considerations, however, do not touch the point of the present analysis, which is to distinguish between the citizens who originate opinion (the first set), those who hold and somewhat modify it (the second set), and those who are rather to be deemed, and then only when they come to the poll, mere ballot markers. The first set do the thinking; they scatter forth the ideas and arguments. The second set receive and test what is set before them. What their feeling or judgment approves they accept and give effect to by their votes; what they dislike or suspect is refused and falls dead, or possibly sets them the other way. The measure of the worth of a view or proposal—I do not mean its intrinsic worth, but its power of pleasing the nation—is however not merely the breadth of the support it obtains, but also the zeal which it inspires in those who adopt it. Although persons in the second set usually belong to one or other party,5 and are therefore prima facie disposed to accept whatever comes from their party leaders, yet the degree of cordiality with which they accept indicates to a leader how their minds are moving, and becomes an element in his future calculations. Thus the second set, although rather receptive than creative, has an important function in moulding opinion, and giving it the shape and colour it finally takes when it has crystallized under the influence of a party struggle. The third set can scarcely be called a factor in the formation of opinion, except in so far as one particular proposal or cry may sometimes prove more attractive to it than another. It has some few fixed ideas or prejudices which a statesman must bear in mind, but in the main it is passive, consisting of persons who either follow the lead of members of the first or second set, or who are so indifferent as to refuse to move at all.

The United States present different phenomena. There what I have called the first set is extremely small. The third set is relatively smaller than in Britain, and but for the recent immigrants and the Negroes would be insignificant. It is in the second set that opinion is formed as well as tested, created as well as moulded. Political light and heat do not radiate out from a centre as in England. They are diffused all through the atmosphere, and are little more intense in the inner sphere of practical politicians than elsewhere. The ordinary citizens are interested in politics, and watch them with intelligence, the same kind of intelligence (though a smaller quantity of it) as they apply to their own business. They are forced by incessant elections to take a more active part in public affairs than is taken by any European people. They think their own competence equal to that of their representatives and officebearers; and they are not far wrong. They do not therefore look up to their statesmen for guidance, but look around to one another, carrying to its extreme the principle that in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom.

In America, therefore, opinion is not made but grows. Of course it must begin somewhere; but it is often hard to say where or how. As there are in the country a vast number of minds similar in their knowledge, beliefs, and attitude, with few exceptionally powerful minds applying themselves to politics, it is natural that the same idea should occur to several or many persons at the same time, that each event as it occurs should produce the same impression and evoke the same comments over a wide area. When everybody desires to agree with the majority, and values such accord more highly than the credit of originality, this tendency is all the stronger. An idea once launched, or a view on some current question propounded, flies everywhere on the wings of a press eager for novelties. Publicity is the easiest thing in the world to obtain; but as it is attainable by all notions, phrases, and projects, wise and foolish alike, the struggle for existence—that is to say, for public attention—is severe.

I do not, of course, deny that here, as everywhere else in the world, some one person or group must make a beginning, but seek to point out that, whereas in Europe it is patent who does make the beginning, in America a view often seems to arise spontaneously, and to be the work of many rather than of few. The individual counts for less, the mass counts for more. In propagating a doctrine not hitherto advocated by any party the methods used are similar to those of England. A central society is formed, branch societies spring up over the country, a journal (perhaps several journals) is started, and if the movement thrives, an annual convention of its supporters is held, at which speeches are made and resolutions adopted. If any striking personality is connected with the movement as a leader, as Garrison was with Abolitionism, he cannot but become a sort of figurehead. Yet it happens more rarely in America than in England that an individual leader gives its character to a movement, partly because new movements less often begin among, or are taken up by, persons already known as practical politicians.

As regards opinion on the main questions of the hour, such as the extension of slavery long was, and questions affecting railways, trusts, the currency, the tariff, are now, it rises and falls, much as in any other country, under the influence of events which seem to make for one or other of the contending views. There is this difference between America and Europe, that in the former speeches seem to influence the average citizen less, because he is more apt to do his own thinking; newspaper invective less, because he is used to it; current events rather more, because he is better informed of them. Party spirit is probably no stronger in America than in England, so far as a man’s thinking and talking go, but it tells more upon him when he comes to vote.

An illustration of what has been said may be found in the fact that the proportion of persons who actually vote at an election to those whose names appear on the voting list is larger in America than in Europe. In some English constituencies this percentage is from 60 to 70 per cent, though at exciting moments it is larger than this, taking the country as a whole. At the general election of 1910 it exceeded 80 per cent. In America 80 per cent may be a fair average, taking presidential elections, which call out the heaviest vote, and in some recent contests this proportion was exceeded. Something may be ascribed to the more elaborate local organization of American parties; but against this ought to be set the fact that the English voting mass includes not quite two-thirds, the American nearly the whole, of the adult male population, and that the English voters are the more solid and well-to-do part of the population.

Is there, then, in the United States, no inner sphere of thinkers, writers, and speakers, corresponding to what we have called the “first set” in England?

There are individual men corresponding to individuals in that English set, and probably quite as numerous. There are journalists of great ability, there are a few literary men, clergymen and teachers, a good many lawyers, some businessmen, some few politicians. But they are isolated and unorganized, and do not constitute a class. Most of them are primarily occupied with their own avocations, and have only spare time to give to political thinking or writing. They are nearly all resident in or near the Eastern and four or five of the largest Western cities, and through many large tracts of country scarce any are to be found. In England the profession of opinion-making and leading is the work of specialists; in America, except as regards the few journalists and statesmen aforesaid, of amateurs. As the books of amateurs have merits which those of professional book writers are apt to want, so something is gained by the absence of the professional element from American political opinion. But that which these amateurs produce is less coherent, less abundant, and less promptly effective upon the mass of the citizens than the corresponding English product. In fact, the individual Americans whom we are considering can (except the journalists and statesmen aforesaid) be distinguished from the mass of citizens only by their superior intellectual competence and their keener interest in public affairs. (Of the “professional politicians” there is no question, because it is in the getting and keeping of places that these gentlemen are occupied.) We may therefore repeat the proposition, that in America opinion does not originate in a particular class, but grows up in the nation at large, though, of course, there are leading minds in the nation who have more to do with its formation than the run of their fellow citizens. A good instance of the power such men may exercise is afforded by the success of the civil service reform movement, which began among a few enlightened citizens in the Eastern states, who by degrees leavened, or were thought to be leavening, the minds of their fellows to such an extent that the politicians were forced, sorely against the grain, to bring in and pass the appropriate legislation. Other instances may be found in the swift success obtained by those who advocated the secret or “Australian” ballot, a measure not specially desired by the “politicians,” and in the spread of the recent legislation establishing statutory primaries, which was advocated in the West by a comparatively small number of reformers and then found support from a large body of citizens who had come to dislike the machine and its ways.

An illustration of a different kind, but not less striking, was the victory of the agitation for international copyright. A few literary men, seconded after a while by a very few publishers, had for weary years maintained what seemed a hopeless struggle for the extension to foreign authors of the right to acquire copyright in America, theretofore reserved to citizens only. These men were at first ridiculed. People asked how they could expect that the nation, whose chief reading was in European books, sold very cheap because the author received no profit, would raise the price of these books against itself? Neither Republicans nor Democrats had anything to gain by passing the bill, and Congress, by large majorities, rejected or refused to advance (which came to the same thing) every bill presented to it. The agitators, however, persevered, receiving help from a sympathetic press, and so worked upon the honour and good sense of the people that Congress at last came round. The hostile interests fought hard, and extorted some concessions. But in 1891 the bill was passed.6

We may now ask in what manner opinion, formed or forming, is able to influence the conduct of affairs?

The legal machinery through which the people are by the constitution (federal and state) invited to govern is that of elections. Occasionally, when the question of altering a state constitution comes up, the citizen votes directly for or against a proposition put to him in the form of a constitutional amendment; but otherwise it is only by voting for a man as candidate that he can (except of course in the states which have adopted the initiative and referendum) give expression to his views, and directly support or oppose some policy. Now, in every country, voting for a man is an inadequate way of expressing one’s views of policy, because the candidate is sure to differ in one or more questions from many of those who belong to the party. It is especially inadequate in the United States, because the strictness of party discipline leaves little freedom of individual thought or action to the member of a legislature, because the ordinary politician has little interest in anything but the regular party programme, and because in no party are the citizens at large permitted to select their candidate, seeing that he is found for them and forced on them by the professionals of the party organization. While, therefore, nothing is easier than for opinion which runs in the direct channel of party to give effect to itself frequently and vigorously, nothing is harder than for opinion which wanders out of that channel to find a legal and regular means of bringing itself to bear upon those who govern either as legislators or executive officers. This is the weak point of the American party system, perhaps of every party system, from the point of view of the independent-minded citizen, as it is the strong point from that of the party manager. A body of unorganized opinion is therefore helpless in the face of compact parties. It is obliged to organize. When organized for the promotion of a particular view or proposition it has in the United States three courses open to it.

The first is to capture one or other of the great standing parties, i.e., to persuade or frighten that party into adopting this view as part of its programme, or, to use the technical term, making it a plank of the platform, in which case the party candidates will be bound to support it. This is the most effective course, but the most difficult; for a party is sure to have something to lose as well as to gain by embracing a new dogma. Why should such parties as those of America have lately been troubling themselves with taking up new questions, unless they are satisfied they will gain thereby? Their old dogmas are indeed worn threadbare, but have been hitherto found sufficient to cover them.

The second course is for the men who hold the particular view to declare themselves a new party, put forward their own programme, run their own candidates. Besides being costly and troublesome, this course would be thought ridiculous where the view or proposition is not one of first-rate importance, which has already obtained wide support. Where however it is applicable, it is worth taking, even when the candidates cannot be carried, for it serves as an advertisement, and it alarms the old party, from which it withdraws voting strength in the persons of the dissidents.

The third is to cast the voting weight of the organized promoters of the doctrine or view in question into the scale of whichever party shows the greatest friendliness, or seems most open to conversion. As in many states the regular parties are pretty equally balanced, even a comparatively weak body of opinion may decide the result. Such a body does not necessarily forward its own view, for the candidates whom its vote carries are nowise pledged to its programme.7 But it has made itself felt, shown itself a power to be reckoned with, improved its chances of capturing one or other of the regular parties, or of running candidates of its own on some future occasion. When this transfer of the solid vote of a body of agitators is the result of a bargain with the old party which gets the vote, it is called “selling out”; and in such cases it sometimes happens that the bargain secures one or two offices for the incoming allies in consideration of the strength they have brought. But if the new group be honestly thinking of its doctrines and not of the offices, the terms it will ask will be the nomination of good candidates, or a more friendly attitude towards the new view.

These are the ways in which either the minority of a party, holding some doctrine outside the regular party programme, or a new group aspiring to be a party, may assert itself at elections. The third is applicable wherever the discipline of the section which has arisen within a party is so good that its members can be trusted to break away from their former affiliation, and vote solid for the side their leaders have agreed to favour. It is a potent weapon, and liable to be abused. But in a country where the tide runs against minorities and small groups it is most necessary. The possibility of its employment acts as a check on the regular parties, disposing them to abstain from legislation which might irritate any body of growing opinion and tend to crystallize it as a new organization, and making them more tolerant of minor divergences from the dogmas of the orthodox programme than their fierce love of party uniformity would otherwise permit.

So far we have been considering the case of persons advocating some specific opinion or scheme. As respects the ordinary conduct of business by officials and legislators, the fear of popular displeasure to manifest itself at the next elections is, or course, the most powerful of restraining influences. Under a system of balanced authorities, such fear helps to prevent or remove deadlocks as well as the abuse of power by any one authority. A president (or state governor) who has vetoed bills passed by Congress (or his state legislature) is emboldened to go on doing so when he finds public opinion on his side; and Congress (or the state legislature) will hesitate, though the requisite majority may be forthcoming, to pass these bills over the veto. A majority in the House of Representatives, or in a state legislative body, which has abused the power of closing debate by the “previous question” rule, may be frightened by expressions of popular disapproval from repeating the offence. When the two branches of a legislature differ, and a valuable bill has failed, or when there has been vexatious filibustering, public opinion fixes the blame on the party primarily responsible for the loss of good measures or public time, and may punish it at the next election. Thus, in many ways and on many occasions, though not so often or so fully as is needed, the vision of the polls, seen some months or even years off, has power to terrify and warn selfish politicians. As the worth of courts of law is to be estimated not merely by the offences they punish and the causes they try, but even more by the offences from which the fear of penalties deters bad men, and by the payments which the prospect of a writ extracts from reluctant debtors, so a healthy and watchful public opinion makes itself felt in preventing foolish or corrupt legislation and executive jobbery. Mischief is checked in America more frequently than anywhere else by the fear of exposure, or by newspaper criticisms on the first stage of a bad scheme. And, of course, the frequency of elections—in most respects a disadvantage to the country—has the merit of bringing the prospect of punishment nearer.

It will be asked how the fear is brought home, seeing that the result of a coming election must usually be uncertain. Sometimes it is not brought home. The erring majority in a legislature may believe they have the people with them, or the governor may think his jobs will be forgotten. Generally, however, there are indications of the probable set of opinion in the language held by moderate men and the less partisan newspapers. When some of the organs of the party which is in fault begin to blame it, danger is in the air, for the other party is sure to use the opening thus given to it. And hence, of course, the control of criticism is most effective where parties are nearly balanced. Opinion seems to tell with special force when the question is between a legislative body passing bills or ordinances, and a president, or governor, or mayor, vetoing them, the legislature recoiling whenever they think the magistrate has got the people behind him. Even small fluctuations in a vote produce a great impression on the minds of politicians.

The constancy or mutability of electoral bodies is a difficult phenomenon to explain, especially where secret voting prevails, and a dangerous one to generalize on. The tendency of the electoral vote in any constituency to shift from Tory to Whig or Whig to Tory, used in England to be deemed to indicate the presence of a corrupt element. It was a black mark against a borough. In America it sometimes deserves the same interpretation, for there are corruptible masses in not a few districts. But there are also cases in which it points to the existence of an exceptionally thoughtful and unprejudiced element in the population, an element which rejects party dictation, and seeks to cast its vote for the best man. The average American voter is more likely to consider himself attached to a party than the English, and is, I think, less capricious, and therefore if a transfer of votes from one party to the other does not arise from some corrupt influence, it betokens serious disapproval on the part of the bolters. In the United States fluctuations are most frequent in some of the less sober and steady Western states, and in some of the most enlightened, such as New York and Massachusetts. In the former the people may be carried away by a sudden impulse; in the latter there is a section which judges candidates more by personal merits than by party professions.

These defects which may be noted in the constitutional mechanism for enabling public opinion to rule promptly and smoothly, are, in a measure, covered by the expertness of Americans in using all kinds of voluntary and private agencies for the diffusion and expression of opinion. Where the object is to promote some particular cause, associations are formed and federated to one another, funds are collected, the press is set to work, lectures are delivered. When the law can profitably be invoked (which is often the case in a country governed by constitutions standing above the legislature), counsel are retained and suits instituted, all with the celerity and skill which long practice in such work has given. If the cause has a moral bearing, efforts are made to enlist the religious or semireligious magazines, and the ministers of religion.8 Deputations proceed to Washington or to the state capital, and lay siege to individual legislators. Sometimes a distinct set of women’s societies is created, whose action on and through women is all the more powerful because the deference shown to the so-called weaker sex enables them to do what would be resented in men. Once in Iowa, when a temperance ticket was being run at the elections, parties of ladies gathered in front of the polling booths and sang hymns all day while the citizens voted. Everyone remembers what was called the “Women’s Whisky War” when, in several Western states, bands of women entered the drinking saloons and, by entreaties and reproaches, drove out the customers. In no country has any sentiment which touches a number of persons so many ways of making itself felt; though, to be sure, when the first and chief effort of every group is to convince the world that it is strong, and growing daily stronger, great is the difficulty of determining whether those who are vocal are really numerous or only noisy.

For the promotion of party opinion on the leading questions that divide or occupy parties, there exist, of course, the regular party organizations, whose complex and widely ramified mechanism has been described in an earlier chapter. Opinion is, however, the thing with which this mechanism is at present least occupied. Its main objects are the selection of the party candidates and the conduct of the canvass at elections. Traces of the other purpose remain in the practice of adopting, at state and national conventions, a platform, or declaration of principles and views, which is the electoral manifesto of the party, embodying the tenets which it is supposed to live for. A convention is a body fitted neither by its numbers nor its composition for the discussion and sifting of political doctrines; but, even if it were so fitted, that is not the work to which its masters would set it. A “platform” is invariably prepared by a small committee, and usually adopted by the general committee, and by the convention, with little change. Its tendency is neither to define nor to convince, but rather to attract and to confuse. It is a mixture of denunciation, declamation, and conciliation. It reprobates the opposite party for their past misdeeds, and “views with alarm” their present policy. It repeats the tale of the services which the party of those who issue it has rendered in the past, is replete with sounding democratic generalities, and attempts so to expand and expound the traditional party tenets as to make these include all sound doctrines, and deserve the support of all good citizens. Seldom in recent years have either platforms or the process that produces them had a powerful influence on the maturing and clarification of political opinion. However, in such times as that which immediately preceded the Civil War, and again in the silver struggle of 1896, conventions have recorded the acceptance of certain vital propositions, and rejection of certain dangerous proposals, by one or other of the great parties, and they may again have to do so, not to add that an imprudent platform may lay a party open to damaging attacks. When any important election comes off, the party organization sends its speakers out on stumping tours, and distributes a flood of campaign literature. At other times opinion moves in a different plane from that of party machinery, and is scarcely affected by it.

One might expect that in the United States the thoughts of the people would be more equably and uniformly employed on politics than in European countries. The contrary is the case. Opinion, no doubt, is always alive and vigilant, always in process of formation, growth, and decay. But its activity is less continuous and sustained than in Europe, because there is a greater difference between the spring tide of a presidential campaign year and the neap tides of the three off years than there is between one year and another under the European system of chambers which may be dissolved and ministries which may be upset at any moment. Excitement at one time is succeeded by exhaustion at another. America suffers from a sort of intermittent fever—what one may call a quintan ague. Every fourth year there come terrible shakings, passing into the hot fit of the presidential election; then follows what physicians call “the interval”; then again the fit. In Europe the persons who move in what I have called the inner sphere of politics, give unbroken attention to political problems, always discussing them both among themselves and before the people. As the corresponding persons in America are not organized into a class, and to some extent not engaged in practical politics, the work of discussion has been left to be done, in the three “off years,” by the journalists and a few of the more active and thoughtful statesmen, with casual aid from such private citizens as may be interested. Now many problems require uninterrupted and what may be called scientific or professional study. Foreign policy obviously presents such problems. The shortcomings of modern England in the conduct of foreign affairs have been not unreasonably attributed to the fact that, while the attention of her statesmen is constantly distracted from them by domestic struggles, her people have not been accustomed to turn their eyes abroad except when some exciting event, such as the Egyptain troubles of 1882–85 or the Bulgarian massacre of 1876, forces them to do so. Hence a state like Germany, where a strong throne keeps a strong minister permanently in power for a long period, obtains advantages which must be credited not wholly to the wisdom of the statesmen but also to the difficulties under which their rivals in more democratic countries labour. America has had few occasions for giving her attention to foreign affairs, but some of her domestic problems are such as to demand that careful observation and unbroken reflection which neither her executive magistrates, nor her legislatures, nor any leading class among her people now give.

Those who know the United States and have been struck by the quantity of what is called politics there, may think that this description underrates the volume and energy of public political discussion. I admit the endless hubbub, the constant elections in one district or another, the paragraphs in the newspapers as to the movements or intentions of this or that prominent man, the reports of what is doing in Congress and in the state legislatures, the decisions of the federal courts in constitutional questions, the rumours about new combinations, the revelations of ring intrigues, the criticisms on appointments. It is nevertheless true that in proportion to the number of words spoken, articles printed, telegrams sent, and acts performed, less than is needed is done to form serious political thought, and bring practical problems towards a solution. I once travelled through Transylvania with Mr. Leslie Stephen in a peasant’s wagon, a rude, long, low structure filled with hay. The roads were rough and stony, the horses jangled their bells, the driver shouted to the horses and cracked his whip, the wheels clanked, the boards rattled, we were deafened and shaken and jolted. We fancied ourselves moving rapidly so long as we looked straight in front, but a glance at the trees on the roadside showed that the speed was about three miles an hour. So the pother and din of American politics keep the people awake, and give them a sense of stir and motion, but the machine of government carries them slowly onward. Fortunately they have no need to hurry. It is not so much by or through the machinery of government as by their own practical good sense, which at last finds a solution the politicians may have failed to find, that the American people advance. When a European visitor dines with a company of the best citizens in such a city as Chicago or Boston, Cleveland or Baltimore, he is struck by the acuteness, the insight, the fairness with which the condition and requirements of the country are discussed, the freedom from such passion or class feeling as usually clouds equally able Europeans, the substantial agreement between members of both the great parties as to the reforms that are wanted, the patriotism which is so proud of the real greatness of the Union as frankly to acknowledge its defects, the generous appreciation of all that is best in the character or political methods of other nations. One feels what a reserve fund of wisdom and strength the country has in such men, who so far from being aristocrats or recluses, are usually the persons whom their native fellow townsmen best know and most respect as prominent in business and in the professions. In ordinary times the practical concern of such men with either national or local politics is no greater, possibly less, than that of the leaders of business in an English town towards its municipal affairs. But when there comes an uprising against the bosses, it is these men who are called upon to put themselves at the head of it; or when a question like that of civil service reform has been before the nation for some time, it is their opinion which strikes the keynote for that of their city or district, and which shames or alarms the professional politicians. Men of the same type, though individually less conspicuous than those whom I take as examples, are to be found in many of the smaller towns, especially in the Eastern and Middle states, and as time goes on their influence grows. Much of the value of this most educated and reflective class in America consists in their being no longer blindly attached to their party, because more alive to the principles for which parties ought to exist. They may be numerically a small minority of the voters, but as in many states the two regular parties command a nearly equal normal voting strength, a small section detached from either party can turn an election by throwing its vote for the candidate, to whichever party he belongs, whom it thinks capable and honest. Thus a comparatively independent group wields a power in elections altogether disproportionate to its numbers, and by a sort of side wind can not only make its hostility feared, but secure a wider currency for its opinions. What opinion chiefly needs in America in order to control the politicians is not so much men of leisure, for men of leisure may be dilettantes and may lack a grip of realities, but a more sustained activity on the part of the men of vigorously independent minds, a more sedulous effort on their part to impress their views upon the masses, and a disposition on the part of the ordinary well-meaning but often inattentive citizens to prefer the realities of good administration to outworn party cries.

chapter 84

The Tyranny of the Majority

The expression “tyranny of the majority” is commonly used to denote any abuse by the majority of the powers which they enjoy, in free countries under and through the law, and in all countries outside the law. Such abuse will not be tyrannous in the sense of being illegal, as men called a usurper like Dionysius of Syracuse or Louis Napoleon in France a tyrant, for in free countries whatever the majority chooses to do in the prescribed constitutional way will be legal. It will be tyrannous in the sense of the lines

O it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

That is to say, tyranny consists in the wanton and improper use of strength by the stronger, in the use of it to do things which one equal would not attempt against another. A majority is tyrannical when it decides without hearing the minority, when it suppresses fair and temperate criticism on its own acts, when it insists on restraining men in matters where restraint is not required by the common interest, when it forces men to contribute money to objects which they disapprove and which the common interest does not demand, when it subjects to social penalties persons who disagree from it in matters not vital to the common welfare. The element of tyranny lies in the wantonness of the act, a wantonness springing from the insolence which sense of overwhelming power breeds, or in the fact that it is a misuse for one purpose of authority granted for another. It consists not in the form of the act, which may be perfectly legal, but in the spirit and temper it reveals, and in the sense of injustice and oppression which it evokes in the minority.

Philosophers have long since perceived that the same tendencies to a wanton or unjust abuse of power which exist in a despot or a ruling oligarchy may be expected in a democracy from the ruling majority, because they are tendencies incidental to human nature.1 The danger was felt and feared by the sages of 1787, and a passage in the Federalist (No. 50) dwells on the safeguards which the great size of a federal republic, and the diverse elements of which it will be composed, offer against the tendency of a majority to oppress a minority.

Since Tocqueville dilated upon this as the capital fault of the American government and people, Europeans, already prepared to expect to find the tyranny of the majority a characteristic sin of democratic nations, have been accustomed to think of the United States as disgraced by it, and on the strength of this instance have predicted it as a necessary result of the growth of democracy in the Old World. It is therefore worth while to inquire what foundation exists for the reproach as addressed to the Americans of today.

We may look for signs of this tyranny in three quarters: firstly, in the legislation of Congress; second, in the constitutions and statutes of the states; third, in the action of public opinion and sentiment outside the sphere of law.

The federal Constitution, which has not only limited the competence of Congress but hedged it round with many positive prohibitions, has closed some of the avenues by which a majority might proceed to abuse its powers. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, opportunities for debate, are all amply secured. The power of taxation, and that of regulating commerce, might conceivably be used to oppress certain classes of persons, as, for instance, if a prohibitory duty were to be laid on certain articles which a minority desired and the majority condemned the use of. But nothing of the sort has been attempted. Whatever may be thought of the expediency of the present tariff, which, no doubt, favours one class, it cannot be said to oppress any class. In its political action, as, for instance, during the struggle over slavery, when for a while it refused to receive Abolitionist petitions, and even tried to prevent the transmission by mail of Abolitionist matter, and again during and after the war in some of its reconstruction measures, the majority, under the pressure of excitement, exercised its powers harshly and unwisely. But such political action is hardly the kind of action to which the charge we are examining applies.

In the states, a majority of the citizens may act either directly in enacting (or amending) a constitution, or through their legislature by passing statutes. We might expect to find instances of abuse of power more in the former than in the latter class of cases, because though the legislature is habitually and the people of the state only intermittently active, the legislatures have now been surrounded by a host of constitutional limitations which a tyrannical majority would need some skill to evade. However, one discovers wonderfully little in the state constitutions now in force of which a minority can complain. These instruments contain a great deal of ordinary law and administrative law. If the tendency to abuse legislative power to the injury of any class were general, instances of it could not fail to appear. One does not find them. There are some provisions strictly regulating corporations, and especially railroads and banks, which may perhaps be unwise, and which in limiting the modes of using capital apply rather to the rich than to the masses. But such provisions cannot be called wanton or oppressive.

The same remark applies to the ordinary statutes of the states, so far as I have been able to ascertain their character. They can rarely be used to repress opinion or its expression, because the state constitutions contain ample guarantees for free speech, a free press, and the right of public meeting. For the same reason, they cannot encroach on the personal liberty of the citizen, nor on the full enjoyment of private property. In all such fundamentals the majority has prudently taken the possible abuse of its power out of the hands of the legislature.

When we come to minor matters, we are met by the difficulty of determining what is a legitimate exercise of legislative authority. Nowhere are men agreed as to the limits of state interference. Some few think that law ought not to restrict the sale of intoxicants at all; many more that it ought not to make the procuring of them, for purposes of pleasure, difficult or impossible. Others hold that the common welfare justifies prohibition. Some deem it unjust to tax a man, and especially an unmarried man, for the support of public schools, or at any rate of public schools other than elementary. To most Roman Catholics it seems unjust to refuse denominational schools a share of the funds raised by taxing, among other citizens, those who hold it a duty to send their children to schools in which their own faith is inculcated. Some think a law tyrannical which forbids a man to exclude others from ground which he keeps waste and barren, while others blame the law which permits a man to reserve, as they think, tyrannically, large tracts of country for his own personal enjoyment. So any form of state establishment or endowment of a particular creed or religious body will by some be deemed an abuse, by others a wise and proper use of state authority. Remembering such differences of opinion, all I can say is that even those who take the narrower view of state functions will find little to censure in the legislation of American states. They may blame the restriction or prohibition of the sale of intoxicants. They may think that the so-called “moral legislation” for securing the purity of literature, and for protecting the young against various temptations, attempts too much. They may question the expediency of the legislation intended for the benefit of working men. But there are few of these provisions which can fairly be called wanton or tyrannical, which display a spirit that ignores or tramples on the feelings or rights of a minority. The least defensible statutes are perhaps those which California has aimed at the Chinese (who are not technically a minority since they are not citizens at all), and those by which some Southern states have endeavoured to accentuate the separation between whites and Negroes, forbidding them to be taught in the same schools or colleges or to travel in the same cars.

We come now to the third way in which a majority may tyrannize, i.e., by the imposition of purely social penalties, from mere disapproval up to insult, injury, and boycotting. The greatest of Athenian statesmen claimed for his countrymen that they set an example to the rest of Greece in that enlightened toleration which does not even visit with black looks those who hold unpopular opinions, or venture in any wise to differ from the prevailing sentiment. Such enlightenment is doubtless one of the latest fruits and crowns of a high civilization, and all the more to be admired when it is not the result of indifference, but coexists with energetic action in the field of politics or religion or social reform.

If social persecution exists in the America of today, it is only in a few dark corners. One may travel all over the North and West, mingling with all classes and reading the newspapers, without hearing of it. As respects religion, so long as one does not openly affront the feelings of one’s neighbours, one may say what one likes, and go or not go to church. Doubtless a man, and still more a woman, will be better thought of, especially in a country place or small town, for being a church member and Sunday school teacher. But no one is made to suffer in mind, body, or estate for simply holding aloof from a religious or any other voluntary association. He would be more likely to suffer in an English village. Even in the South, where a stricter standard of orthodoxy is maintained among the clergy of the Protestant bodies than in the North or West, a layman may think as he pleases. It is the same as regards social questions, and of course as regards politics. To boycott a man for his politics, or even to discourage his shop in the way not uncommon in some parts of rural England and Ireland, would excite indignation in America; as the attempts of some labour organizations to boycott firms resisting strikes have aroused strong displeasure. If in the South a man took to cultivating the friendship of Negroes and organizing them in clubs, or if in the Far West a man made himself the champion of the Indians, he might find his life become unpleasant, though one hears little of recent instances of the kind. In any part of the country he who should use his rights of property in a hard or unneighbourly way, who, for instance, should refuse all access to a waterfall or a beautiful point of view, would be reprobated and sent to Coventry. I do not know of such cases; perhaps the fear of general disapproval prevents their arising.

In saying that there is no social persecution, I do not deny that in some places, as, for instance, in the smaller towns of the West, there may sometimes have been too little allowance for difference of tastes and pursuits, too much disposition to expect every family to conform to the same standard of propriety, and follow the same habits of life. A person acting, however innocently, without regard to the beliefs and prejudices of his neighbours might be talked about, and perhaps looked askance upon. Many a man used to the variety of London or Washington would feel the monotony of Western life, and the uniform application of its standards, irksome and even galling. But, so far as I could ascertain, he would have nothing specific to complain of. And these Western towns become every day more like the cities of the East. Taking the country all in all, it is hard to imagine more complete liberty than individuals or groups enjoy either to express and propagate their views, or to act as they please within the limits of the law, limits which, except as regards the sale of intoxicants, are drawn as widely as in Western Europe.

In the earlier half of last century it was very different. Congress was then as now debarred from oppressive legislation. But in some Northern states the legislatures were not slow to deal harshly with persons or societies who ran counter to the dominant sentiment. The persecution by the legislature of Connecticut, as well as by her own townsfolk, of Miss Prudence Crandall, a benevolent Quakeress who had opened a school for Negro children, is a well-remembered instance. A good many rigidly Puritanic statutes stood unrepealed in New England, though not always put in force against the transgressor. In the slave states laws of the utmost severity punished whosoever should by word or act assail the “peculiar institution.” Even more tyrannical than the laws was the sentiment of the masses. In Boston a mob, a well-dressed mob, largely composed of the richer sort of people, hunted Garrison for his life through the streets because he was printing an Abolitionist journal; a mob in Illinois shot Elijah Lovejoy for the same offence; and as late as 1844 another Illinois crowd killed Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, who, whatever may be thought of his honesty or his doctrines, was as much entitled to the protection of the laws as any other citizen. In the South, as everyone knows, there was a reign of terror as regards slavery. Anyone suspected of Abolitionism might think himself lucky if he escaped with tar and feathers, and was not shot or flogged almost to death. This extreme sensitiveness was of course confined to a few burning questions; but the habit of repressing by law or without law obnoxious opinions was likely to spread, and did spread, at least in the South, to other matters also. As regards thought and opinion generally over the Union, Tocqueville declares:

Je ne connais pas de pays où il règne, en général, moins d’indépendance d’esprit et de véritable liberté de discussion qu’en Amerique. La majorité trace un cercle formidable autour de la pensée. Au dedans de ces limites, l’écrivain est libre, mais malheur a lui s’il ose en sortir! Ce n’est pas qu’il ait à craindre un auto-da-fé, mais il est en butte à des dégoûts de tout genre et à des persécutions de tous les jours. La carrière politique lui est fermée: il a offensé la seule puissance qui ait la faculté de l’ouvrir. On lui refuse tout, jusqu’à la gloire.—Vol. ii, ch. 7.

He ascribes not only the want of great statesmen, but the low level of literature, learning, and thought, to this total absence of intellectual freedom.

It is hard for anyone who knows the Northern states now to believe that this can have been a just description of them so lately as 1832. One is tempted to think that Tocqueville’s somewhat pessimistic friends in New England, mortified by the poverty of intellectual production around them, may have exaggerated the repressive tendencies in which they found the cause of that poverty. We can now see that the explanation was erroneous. Freedom does not necessarily increase fertility. As they erred in their diagnosis, they may have erred in their observation of the symptoms.

Assuming, however, that the description was a just one, how are we to explain the change to the absolute freedom and tolerance of today, when every man may sit under his own vine and fig tree and say and do (provided he drink not the juice of that vine) what he pleases, none making him afraid?

One may suspect that Tocqueville, struck by the enormous power of general opinion, may have attributed too much of the submissiveness which he observed to the active coercion of the majority, and too little to that tendency of the minority to acquiescence which will be discussed in the next succeeding chapter. Setting this aside, however, and assuming that the majority did in those days really tyrannize, several causes may be assigned for its having ceased to do so. One is the absence of violent passions. Slavery, the chief source of ferocity, was to the heated minds of the South a matter of life or death; Abolitionism seemed to many in the North a disloyal heresy, the necessary parent of disunion. Since the Civil War there has been no crisis calculated to tempt majorities to abuse their legal powers. Partisanship has for years past been more intense in Great Britain—not to say Ireland—and France than in America. When Tocqueville saw the United States, the democratic spirit was in the heyday of its youthful strength, flushed with self-confidence, intoxicated with the exuberance of its own freedom. The first generation of statesmen whose authority had restrained the masses, had just quitted the stage. The anarchic teachings of Jefferson had borne fruit. Administration and legislation, hitherto left to the educated classes, had been seized by the rude hands of men of low social position and scanty knowledge. A reign of brutality and violence had set in over large regions of the country. Neither literature nor the universities exercised as yet any sensible power. The masses were so persuaded of their immense superiority to all other peoples, past as well as present, that they would listen to nothing but flattery, and their intolerance spread from politics into every other sphere. Our European philosopher may therefore have been correct in his description of the facts as he saw them: he erred in supposing them essential to a democratic government. As the nation grew, it purged away these faults of youth and inexperience, and the stern discipline of the Civil War taught it sobriety, and in giving it something to be really proud of, cleared away the fumes of self-conceit.

The years which have passed since the war have been years of immensely extended and popularized culture and enlightenment. Bigotry in religion and in everything else has been broken down. The old landmarks have been removed: the habits and methods of free inquiry, if not generally practised, have at least become superficially familiar; the “latest results,” as people call them, of European thought have been brought to the knowledge of native Americans more fully than to the masses of Europe. At the same time, as all religious and socio-religious questions, except those which relate to education, are entirely disjoined from politics and the state, neither those who stand by the old views, nor those who embrace the new, carry that bitterness into their controversies which is natural in countries where religious questions are also party questions, where the clergy are a privileged and salaried order, where the throne is held bound to defend the altar, and the workman is taught to believe that both are leagued against him. The influence of these causes will, it may be predicted, be permanent. Should passion again invade politics, or should the majority become convinced that its interests will be secured by overtaxing the few, one can imagine the tendency of fifty years ago reappearing in new forms. But in no imaginable future is there likely to be any attempt to repress either by law or by opinion the free exercise and expression of speculative thought on morals, on religion, and indeed on every matter not within the immediate range of current politics.

If the above account be correct, the tyranny of the majority is no longer a blemish on the American system, and the charges brought against democracy from the supposed example of America are groundless. As tyranny is one of those evils which tends to perpetuate itself, those who had been oppressed revenging themselves by becoming oppressors in their turn, the fact that a danger once dreaded has now disappeared is no small evidence of the recuperative forces of the American government, and the healthy tone of the American people.

chapter 85

The Fatalism of the Multitude

One feature of thought and sentiment in the United States needs special examination because it has been by most observers either ignored or confounded with a phenomenon which is at bottom quite different. This is a fatalistic attitude of mind, which, since it disposes men to acquiesce in the rule of numbers, has been, when perceived, attributed to or identified with what is commonly called the tyranny of the majority. The tendency to fatalism is never far from mankind. It is one of the first solutions of the riddle of the earth propounded by metaphysics. It is one of the last propounded by science. It has at all times formed the background to religions. No race is naturally less disposed to a fatalistic view of things than is the Anglo-American, with its restless self-reliant energy,

Nil actum reputans dum quid restaret agendum,

its slender taste for introspection or meditation. Nevertheless even in this people the conditions of life and politics have bred a sentiment or tendency which seems best described by the name of fatalism.

In small and rude communities, every free man, or at least every head of a household, feels his own significance and realizes his own independence. He relies on himself, he is little interfered with by neighbours or rulers.1 His will and his action count for something in the conduct of the affairs of the community he belongs to, yet common affairs are few compared to those in which he must depend on his own exertions. The most striking pictures of individualism that literature has preserved for us are those of the Homeric heroes, and of the even more terrible and self-reliant warriors of the Norse sagas, men like Ragnar Lodbrog and Egil, son of Skallagrim, who did not regard even the gods, but trusted to their own might and main. In more developed states of society organized on an oligarchic basis, such as were the feudal kingdoms of the Middle Ages, or in socially aristocratic countries such as most parts of Europe have remained down to our own time, the bulk of the people are no doubt in a dependent condition, but each person derives a certain sense of personal consequence from the strength of his group and of the person or family at the head of it. Moreover, the upper class, being the class which thinks and writes, as well as leads in action, impresses its own type upon the character of the whole nation, and that type is still individualistic, with a strong consciousness of personal free will, and a tendency for each man, if not to think for himself, at least to value and to rely on his own opinion.

Let us suppose, however, that the aristocratic structure of society has been dissolved, that the old groups have disappeared, that men have come to feel themselves members rather of the nation than of classes, or families, or communities within the nation, that a levelling process has destroyed the ascendency of birth and rank, that large landed estates no longer exist, that many persons in what was previously the humbler class have acquired possession of property, that knowledge is easily accessible and the power of using it not longer confined to the few. Under such conditions of social equality the habit of intellectual command and individual self-confidence will have vanished from the leading class, which creates the type of national character, and will exist nowhere in the nation.

Let us suppose, further, that political equality has gone hand in hand with the levelling down of social eminence. Every citizen enjoys the same right of electing the representatives and officials, the same right of himself becoming a representative or an official. Everyone is equally concerned in the conduct of public affairs, and since no man’s opinion, however great his superiority in wealth, knowledge, or personal capacity, is legally entitled to any more weight than another’s, no man is entitled to set special value on his own opinion, or to expect others to defer to it; for pretensions to authority will be promptly resented. All disputes are referred to the determination of the majority, there being no legal distinction between the naturally strong and the naturally weak, between the rich and the poor, between the wise and the foolish. In such a state of things the strong man’s self-confidence and sense of individual force will inevitably have been lowered, because he will feel that he is only one of many, that his vote or voice counts for no more than that of his neighbour, that he can prevail, if at all, only by keeping himself on a level with his neighbour and recognizing the latter’s personality as being every whit equal to his own.

Suppose, further, that all this takes place in an enormously large and populous country, where the governing voters are counted by so many millions that each individual feels himself a mere drop in the ocean, the influence which he can exert privately, whether by his personal gifts or by his wealth, being confined to the small circle of his town or neighbourhood. On all sides there stretches round him an illimitable horizon; and beneath the blue vault which covers that horizon there is everywhere the same busy multitude with its clamour of mingled voices which he hears close by. In this multitude his own being seems lost. He has the sense of insignificance which overwhelms us when at night we survey the host of heaven and know that from even the nearest star this planet of ours is invisible.

In such a country, where complete political equality is strengthened and perfected by complete social equality, where the will of the majority is absolute, unquestioned, always invoked to decide every question, and where the numbers which decide are so vast that one comes to regard them as one regards the largely working forces of nature, we may expect to find certain feelings and beliefs dominant in the minds of men.

One of these is that the majority must prevail. All free government rests on this belief, for there is no other way of working free government. To obey the majority is, therefore, both a necessity and a duty, a duty because the alternative would be ruin and the breaking up of laws.

Out of this dogma there grows up another which is less distinctly admitted, and indeed held rather implicitly than consciously, that the majority is right. And out of both of these there grows again the feeling, still less consciously held, but not less truly operative, that it is vain to oppose or censure the majority.

It may seem that there is a long step from the first of these propositions to the second and third; and that, in fact, the very existence of a minority striving with a majority implies that there must be many who hold the majority to be wrong, and are prepared to resist it. Men do not at once abandon their views because they have been outvoted; they reiterate their views, they reorganize their party, they hope to prevail, and often do prevail in a subsequent trial of strength.

All this is doubtless involved in the very methods of popular government. But it is, nevertheless, true that the belief in the rights of the majority lies very near to the belief that the majority must be right. As self-government is based on the idea that each man is more likely to be right than to be wrong, and that one man’s opinion must be treated as equally good with another’s, there is a presumption that when twenty thousand vote one way and twenty-one thousand another, the view of the greater number is the better view. The habit of deference to a decision actually given strengthens this presumption, and weaves it into the texture of every mind. A conscientious citizen feels that he ought to obey the determination of the majority, and naturally prefers to think that which he obeys to be right. A citizen languidly interested in the question at issue finds it easier to comply with and adopt the view of the majority than to hold out against it. A small number of men with strong convictions or warm party feeling will, for a time, resist. But even they feel differently towards their cause after it has been defeated from what they did while it had still a prospect of success. They know that in the same proportion in which their supporters are dismayed, the majority is emboldened and confirmed in its views. It will be harder to fight a second battle than it was to fight the first, for there is (so to speak) a steeper slope of popular disapproval to be climbed. Thus, just as at the opening of a campaign, the event of the first collisions between the hostile armies has great significance, because the victory of one is taken as an omen and a presage by both, so in the struggles of parties success at an incidental election works powerfully to strengthen those who succeed, and depress those who fail, for it inspires self-confidence or self-distrust, and it turns the minds of waverers. The very obscurity of the causes which move opinion adds significance to the result. So in the United States, when the elections in any state precede by a few weeks a presidential contest, their effect has sometimes been so great as virtually to determine that contest by filling one side with hope and the other with despondency. Those who prefer to swim with the stream are numerous everywhere, and their votes have as much weight as the votes of the keenest partisans. A man of convictions may insist that the arguments on both sides are after the polling just what they were before. But the average man will repeat his arguments with less faith, less zeal, more of a secret fear that he may be wrong, than he did while the majority was still doubtful; and after every reassertion by the majority of its judgment, his knees grow feebler till at last they refuse to carry him into the combat.

The larger the scale on which the majority works, the more potent are these tendencies. When the scene of action is a small commonwealth, the individual voters are many of them personally known to one another, and the causes which determine their votes are understood and discounted. When it is a moderately sized country, the towns or districts which compose it are not too numerous for reckoning to overtake and imagination to picture them, and in many cases their action can be explained by well-known reasons which may be represented as transitory. But when the theatre stretches itself to a continent, when the number of voters is counted by many millions, the wings of imagination droop, and the huge voting mass ceases to be thought of as merely so many individual human beings no wiser or better than one’s own neighbours. The phenomenon seems to pass into the category of the phenomena of nature, governed by far-reaching and inexorable laws whose character science has only imperfectly ascertained, and which she can use only by obeying. It inspires a sort of awe, a sense of individual impotence, like that which man feels when he contemplates the majestic and eternal forces of the inanimate world. Such a feeling is even stronger when it operates, not on a cohesive minority which had lately hoped, or may yet hope, to become a majority, but on a single man or small group of persons cherishing some opinion which the mass disapproves. Thus out of the mingled feelings that the multitude will prevail, and that the multitude, because it will prevail, must be right, there grows a self-distrust, a despondency, a disposition to fall into line, to acquiesce in the dominant opinion, to submit thought as well as action to the encompassing power of numbers. Now and then a resolute man will, like Athanasius, stand alone against the world. But such a man must have, like Athanasius, some special spring of inward strength; and the difficulty of winning over others against the overwhelming weight of the multitude will, even in such a man, dull the edge of hope and enterprise. An individual seeking to make his view prevail, looks forth on his hostile fellow countrymen as a solitary swimmer, raised high on a billow miles from land, looks over the countless waves that divide him from the shore, and quails to think how small the chance that his strength can bear him thither.

This tendency to acquiescence and submission, this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the fatalism of the multitude. It is often confounded with the tyranny of the majority, but is at bottom different, though, of course, its existence makes abuses of power by the majority easier, because less apt to be resented. But the fatalistic attitude I have been seeking to describe does not imply any compulsion exerted by the majority. It may rather seem to soften and make less odious such an exercise of their power, may even dispense with that exercise, because it disposes a minority to submit without the need of a command, to renounce spontaneously its own view and fall in with the view which the majority has expressed. In the fatalism of the multitude there is neither legal nor moral compulsion; there is merely a loss of resisting power, a diminished sense of personal responsibility and of the duty to battle for one’s own opinions, such as has been bred in some peoples by the belief in an overmastering fate. It is true that the force to which the citizen of the vast democracy submits is a moral force, not that of an unapproachable Allah, nor of the unchangeable laws of matter. But it is a moral force acting on so vast a scale, and from causes often so obscure, that its effect on the mind of the individual may well be compared with that which religious or scientific fatalism engenders.

No one will suppose that the above sketch is intended to apply literally to the United States, where in some matters legal restrictions check a majority, where local self-government gives the humblest citizen a sphere for public action, where individualism is still in many forms and directions so vigorous. An American explorer, an American settler in new lands, an American man of business pushing a great enterprise, is a being as bold and resourceful as the world has ever seen. All I seek to convey is that there are in the United States signs of such a fatalistic temper, signs which one must expect to find wherever a vast population governs itself under a system of complete social and political equality, and which may grow more frequent as time goes on.

There exist in the American Republic several conditions which specially tend to create such a temper.

One of these is the unbounded freedom of discussion. Every view, every line of policy, has its fair chance before the people. No one can say that audience has been denied him, and comfort himself with the hope that, when he is heard, the world will come round to him. Under a repressive government, the sense of grievance and injustice feeds the flame of resistance in a persecuted minority. But in a country like this, where the freedom of the press, the right of public meeting, the right of association and agitation have been legally extended, and are daily exerted, more widely than anywhere else in the world, there is nothing to awaken that sense. He whom the multitude condemns or ignores has no further court of appeal to look to. Rome has spoken. His cause has been heard and judgment has gone against him.

Another is the intense faith which the Americans have in the soundness of their institutions, and in the future of their country. Foreign critics have said that they think themselves the special objects of the care of Divine Providence. If this be so, it is matter neither for surprise nor for sarcasm. They are a religious people. They are trying, and that on the largest scale, the most remarkable experiment in government the world has yet witnessed. They have more than once been surrounded by perils which affrighted the stoutest hearts, and they have escaped from these perils into peace and prosperity. There is among pious persons a deep conviction—one may often hear it expressed on platforms and from pulpits with evident sincerity—that God has specially chosen the nation to work out a higher type of civilization than any other state has yet attained, and that this great work will surely be brought to a happy issue by the protecting hand that has so long guided it. And, even when the feeling does not take a theological expression, the belief in what is called the “mission of the Republic” for all humanity is scarcely less ardent. But the foundation of the Republic is confidence in the multitude, in its honesty and good sense, in the certainty of its arriving at right conclusions. Pessimism is the luxury of a handful; optimism is the private delight, as well as public profession, of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, for nowhere does the individual associate himself more constantly and directly with the greatness of his country.

Now, such a faith in the people, and in the forces that sway them, disposes a man to acquiescence and submission. He cannot long hold that he is right and the multitude wrong. He cannot suppose that the country will ultimately suffer because it refuses to adopt what he urges upon it. As he comes of an energetic stock, he will use all proper means to state his views, and give them every chance of prevailing. But he submits more readily than an Englishman would do, ay, even to what an Englishman would think an injury to his private rights. When his legal right has been infringed, he will confidently proceed to enforce at law his claim to redress, knowing that even against the government a just cause will prevail. But if he fails at law, the sense of his individual insignificance will still his voice. It may seem a trivial illustration to observe that when a railway train is late, or a waggon drawn up opposite a warehouse door stops the streetcar for a few minutes, the passengers take the delay far more coolly and uncomplainingly than Englishmen would do. But the feeling is the same as that which makes good citizens bear with the tyranny of bosses. It is all in the course of nature. Others submit; why should one man resist? What is he that he should make a fuss because he loses a few minutes, or is taxed too highly? The sense of the immense multitude around him presses down the individual; and, after all, he reflects, “things will come out right” in the end.

It is hard adequately to convey the impression which the vastness of the country and the swift growth of its population make upon the European traveller. I well remember how it once came on me after climbing a high mountain in an Eastern state. All around was thick forest; but the setting sun lit up peaks sixty or seventy miles away, and flashed here and there on the windings of some river past a town so far off as to seem only a spot of white. I opened my map, a large map, which I had to spread upon the rocks to examine, and tried to make out, as one would have done in England or Scotland, the points in the view. The map, however, was useless, because the whole area of the landscape beneath me covered only two or three square inches upon it. From such a height in Scotland the eye would have ranged from sea to sea. But here when one tried to reckon how many more equally wide stretches of landscape lay between this peak and the Mississippi, which is itself only a third of the way across the continent, the calculation seemed endless and was soon abandoned. Many an Englishman comes by middle life to know nearly all England like a glove. He has travelled on all the great railroads; there is hardly a large town in which he has not acquaintances, hardly a county whose scenery is not familiar to him. But no American can be familiar with more than a small part of his country, for his country is a continent. And all Americans live their life through under the sense of this prodigious and daily growing multitude around them, which seems vaster the more you travel, and the more you realize its uniformity.

We need not here inquire whether the fatalistic attitude I have sought to sketch is the source of more good or evil. It seems at any rate inevitable; nor does it fail to produce a sort of pleasure, for what the individual loses as an individual he seems in a measure to regain as one of the multitude. If the individual is not strong, he is at any rate as strong as anyone else. His will counts for as much as any other will. He is overborne by no superiority. Most men are fitter to make part of the multitude than to strive against it. Obedience is to most sweeter than independence; the Roman Catholic church inspires in its children a stronger affection than any form of Protestantism, for she takes their souls in charge, and assures them that, with obedience, all will be well.

That which we are presently concerned to note is how greatly such a tendency as I have described facilitates the action of opinion as a governing power, enabling it to prevail more swiftly and more completely than in countries where men have not yet learned to regard the voice of the multitude as the voice of fate. Many submit willingly; some unwillingly, yet they submit. Rarely does anyone hold out and venture to tell the great majority of his countrymen that they are wrong.

Moreover, public opinion acquires a solidity which strengthens the whole body politic. Questions on which the masses have made up their minds pass out of the region of practical discussion. Controversy is confined to minor topics, and however vehemently it may rage over these, it disturbs the great underlying matters of agreement no more than a tempest stirs the depths of the Atlantic. Public order becomes more easily maintained, because individuals and small groups have learned to submit even when they feel themselves aggrieved. The man who murmurs against the world, who continues to preach a hopeless cause, incurs contempt, and is apt to be treated as a sort of lunatic. He who is too wise to murmur and too proud to go on preaching to unheeding ears, comes to think that if his doctrine is true, yet the time is not ripe for it. He may be in error; but if he is right, the world will ultimately see that he is right even without his effort. One way or another he finds it hard to believe that this vast mass and force of popular thought in which he lives and moves can be ultimately wrong. Securus judicat orbis terrarum.

chapter 86

Wherein Public Opinion Fails

Without anticipating the criticism of democratic government to be given in a later chapter, we may wind up the examination of public opinion by considering what are its merits as a governing and overseeing power, and, on the other hand, what defects, due either to inherent weakness or to the want of appropriate machinery, prevent it from attaining the ideal which the Americans have set before themselves. I begin with the defects.

The obvious weakness of government by opinion is the difficulty of ascertaining it. English administrators in India lament the impossibility of learning the sentiments of the natives, because in the East the populations, the true masses, are dumb. The press is written by a handful of persons who, in becoming writers have ceased to belong to the multitude, and the multitude does not read. The difficulties of Western statesmen are due to an opposite cause. The populations are highly articulate. Such is the din of voices that it is hard to say which cry prevails, which is swelled by many, which only by a few, throats. The organs of opinion seem almost as numerous as the people themselves, and they are all engaged in representing their own view as that of the “people.” Like other valuable articles, genuine opinion is surrounded by many counterfeits. The one positive test applicable is that of an election, and an election can at best do no more than test the division of opinion between two or three great parties, leaving subsidiary issues uncertain, while in many cases the result depends so much on the personal merits of the candidates as to render interpretation difficult. An American statesman is in no danger of consciously running counter to public opinion, but how is he to discover whether any particular opinion is making or losing way, how is he to gauge the voting strength its advocates can put forth, or the moral authority which its advocates can exert? Elections cannot be further multiplied, for they are too numerous already. The referendum, or plan of submitting a specific question to the popular vote, is the logical resource, but it is troublesome and costly to take the votes of millions of people over an area so large as that of one of the greater states; much more then is this method difficult to apply in federal matters. This is the first drawback to the rule of public opinion. The choice of persons for offices is only an indirect and often unsatisfactory way of declaring views of policy, and as the elections at which such choices are made come at fixed intervals, time is lost in waiting for the opportunity of delivering the popular judgment.

The framers of the American Constitution may not have perceived that in labouring to produce a balance, as well between the national and state governments as between the executive and Congress, in weakening each single authority in the Government by dividing powers and functions among each of them, they were throwing upon the nation at large, that is, upon unorganized public opinion, more work than it had ever discharged in England, or could duly discharge in a country so divided by distances and jealousies as the United States then were. Distances and jealousies have been lessened. But as the progress of democracy has increased the self-distrust and submission to the popular voice of legislators, so the defects incident to a system of restrictions and balances have been aggravated. Thus the difficulty inherent in government by public opinion makes itself seriously felt. It can express desires, but has not the machinery for turning them into practical schemes. It can determine ends, but is less fit to examine and select means. Yet it has weakened the organs by which the business of finding appropriate means ought to be discharged.

American legislatures are bodies with limited powers and sitting for short terms. Their members are less qualified for the work of constructive legislation, than are those of most European chambers. They are accustomed to consider themselves delegates from their respective states and districts, responsible to those districts, rather than councillors of the whole nation labouring for its general interests; and they have no executive leaders, seeing that no official sits either in Congress or in a state legislature. Hence if at any time the people desire measures which do not merely repeal a law or direct an appropriation, but establish some administrative scheme, or mark out some positive line of financial policy, or provide some body of rules for dealing with such a topic as bankruptcy, railroad or canal communications, the management of public lands, and so forth, the people cannot count on having their wishes put into tangible workable shape. When members of Congress or of a state legislature think the country desires legislation, they begin to prepare bills, but the want of leadership and of constructive skill often prevents such bills from satisfying the needs of the case, and a timidity which fears to go beyond what opinion desires, may retard the accomplishment of the public wish; while, in the case of state legislatures, constructive skill is seldom present. Public opinion is slow and clumsy in grappling with large problems. It looks at them, talks incessantly about them, complains of Congress for not solving them, is distressed that they do not solve themselves. But they remain unsolved. Vital decisions have usually hung fire longer than they would have been likely to do in European countries. The war of 1812 seemed on the point of breaking out over and over again before it came at last. The absorption of Texas was a question of many years. The extension of slavery question came before the nation in 1819; after 1840 it was the chief source of trouble; year by year it grew more menacing; year by year the nation was seen more clearly to be drifting towards the breakers. Everybody felt that something must be done. But it was the function of no one authority in particular to discover a remedy, as it would have been the function of a cabinet in Europe. I do not say the sword might not in any case have been invoked, for the temperature of Southern feeling had been steadily rising to war point. But the history of 1840–60 leaves an impression of the dangers which may result from fettering the constitutional organs of government, and trusting to public sentiment to bring things right. Some other national questions, less dangerous, but serious, are now in the same condition. The currency question has been an incessant source of disquiet, and it is now many years since the campaign against trusts began. The question of reducing the surplus national revenue puzzled statesmen and the people at large longer than a similar question would be suffered to do in Europe, and when solved in 1890 by the passage of the dependent pension bill, was solved to the public injury in a purely demagogic or electioneering spirit. I doubt whether any European legislature would have so openly declined the duty of considering the interests of the country, and abandoned itself so undisguisedly to the pursuit of the votes of a particular section of the population. And the same thing holds, mutatis mutandis, of state governments. In them also there is no set of persons whose special duty it is to find remedies for admitted evils. The structure of the government provides the requisite machinery neither for forming nor for guiding a popular opinion, disposed of itself to recognize only broad and patent facts, and to be swayed only by such obvious reasons as it needs little reflection to follow. Admirable practical acuteness, admirable ingenuity in inventing and handling machinery, whether of iron and wood or of human beings, coexist, in the United States, with an aversion to the investigation of general principles as well as to trains of systematic reasoning.1 The liability to be caught by fallacies, the inability to recognize facts which are not seen but must be inferentially found to exist, the incapacity to imagine a future which must result from the unchecked operation of present forces, these are indeed the defects of the ordinary citizen in all countries, and if they are conspicuous in America, it is only because the ordinary citizen, who is more intelligent there than elsewhere, is also more potent.

It may be replied to these observations, which are a criticism as well upon the American frame of government as upon public opinion, that the need for constructive legislation is small in America, because the habit of the country is to leave things to themselves. This is not really the fact. A great state has always problems of administration to deal with; these problems do not become less grave as time runs on, and the hand of government has for years past been more and more invoked in America for many purposes thought to be of common utility with which legislation did not formerly intermeddle.

There is more force in the remark that we must remember how much is gained as well as lost by the slow and hesitating action of public opinion in the United States. So tremendous a force would be dangerous if it moved rashly. Acting over and gathered from an enormous area, in which there exist many local differences, it needs time, often a long time, to become conscious of the preponderance of one set of tendencies over another. The elements both of local difference and of class difference must be (so to speak) well shaken up together, and each part brought into contact with the rest, before the mixed liquid can produce a precipitate in the form of a practical conclusion. And in this is seen the difference between the excellence as a governing power of opinion in the whole Union, and opinion within the limits of a particular state. The systems of constitutional machinery by which public sentiment acts are similar in the greater and in the smaller area; the constitutional maxims practically identical. But public opinion, which moves slowly, and, as a rule, temperately, in the field of national affairs, is sometimes hasty and reckless in state affairs. The population of a state may be of one colour, as that of the Northwestern states is preponderantly agricultural, or may contain few persons of education and political knowledge, or may fall under the influence of a demagogue or a clique, or may be possessed by some local passion. Thus its opinion may want breadth, sobriety, wisdom, and the result be seen in imprudent or unjust measures. The constitution of California of 1879, the legislation of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, which beginning with the Granger movement has from time to time annoyed and harassed the railroads without establishing a useful control over them, the tampering with their public debts by several states, are familiar instances of follies, to use no harder name, which local opinion approved, but which would have been impossible in the federal government, where the controlling opinion is that of a large and complex nation, and where the very deficiencies of one section or one class serve to correct qualities which may exist in excess in some other.

The sentiment of the nation at large, being comparatively remote, acts but slowly in restraining the vagaries or curing the faults of one particular state. The dwellers on the Pacific coast care very little for the criticism of the rest of the country on their anti-Hindu or anti-Japanese violence; Pennsylvania and Virginia disregarded the best opinions of the Union when they so dealt with their debts as to affect their credit; those parts of the South in which homicide goes unpunished, except by the relatives of the slain, are unmoved by the reproaches and jests of the more peaceable and well-regulated states. The fact shows how deep the division of the country into self-governing commonwealths goes, making men feel that they have a right to do what they will with their own, so long as the power remains to them, whatever may be the purely moral pressure from those who, though they can advise, have no title to interfere. And it shows also, in the teeth of the old doctrine that republicanism was fit for small communities, that evils peculiar to a particular district, which might be ruinous in that district if it stood alone, become less dangerous when it forms part of a vast country.

We may go on to ask how far American opinion succeeds in the simpler duty, which opinion must discharge in all countries, of supervising the conduct of business, and judging the current legislative work which Congress and other legislatures turn out.

Here again the question turns not so much on the excellence of public opinion as on the adequacy of the constitutional machinery provided for its action. That supervision and criticism may be effective, it must be easy to fix on particular persons the praise for work well done, the blame for work neglected or ill-performed. Experience shows that good men are the better for a sense of their responsibility and ordinary men useless without it. The free governments of Europe and the British colonies have gone on the principle of concentrating power in order to be able to fix responsibility. The American plan of dividing powers, eminent as are its other advantages, makes it hard to fix responsibility. The executive can usually allege that it had not received from the legislature the authority necessary to enable it to grapple with a difficulty; while in the legislature there is no one person or group of persons on whom the blame due for that omission or refusal can be laid. Suppose some gross dereliction of duty to have occurred. The people are indignant. A victim is wanted, who, for the sake of the example to others, ought to be found and punished, either by law or by general censure. But perhaps he cannot be found, because out of several persons or bodies who have been concerned, it is hard to apportion the guilt and award the penalty. Where the sin lies at the door of Congress, it is not always possible to arraign either the Speaker or the dominant majority, or any particular party leader. Where a state legislature or a city council has misconducted itself, the difficulty is greater, because party ties are less strict in such a body, proceedings are less fully reported, and both parties are apt to be equally implicated in the abuses of private legislation. Not uncommonly there is presented the sight of an exasperated public going about like a roaring lion, seeking whom it may devour, and finding no one. The results in state affairs would be much worse were it not for the existence of the governor with his function of vetoing bills, because in many cases, knowing that he can be made answerable for the passage of a bad measure, he is forced up to the level of a virtue beyond that of the natural man in politics. This tendency to look to him has recently tended to increase his power; and the disposition to seek a remedy for municipal misgovernment in enlarging the functions of the mayor illustrates the same principle.

Although the failures of public opinion in overseeing the conduct of its servants are primarily due to the want of appropriate machinery, they are increased by its characteristic temper. Quick and strenuous in great matters, it is heedless in small matters, overkindly and indulgent in all matters. It suffers weeds to go on growing till they have struck deep root. It has so much to do in looking after both Congress and its state legislature, a host of executive officials, and perhaps a city council also, that it may impartially tolerate the misdoings of all till some important issue arises. Even when jobs are exposed by the press, each particular job seems below the attention of a busy people or the anger of a good-natured people, till the sum total of jobbery becomes a scandal. To catch and to hold the attention of the people is the chief difficulty as well as the first duty of an American reformer.

The long-suffering tolerance of public opinion towards incompetence and misconduct in officials and public men generally, is a feature which has struck recent European observers. It is the more remarkable because nowhere is executive ability more valued in the management of private concerns, in which the stress of competition forces every manager to secure at whatever price the most able subordinates. We may attribute it partly to the good nature of the people, which makes them overlenient to nearly all criminals, partly to the preoccupation with their private affairs of the most energetic and useful men, who therefore cannot spare time to unearth abuses and get rid of offenders, partly to an indifference induced by the fatalistic sentiment which I have already sought to describe. This fatalism acts in two ways. Being optimistic, it disposes each man to believe that things will come out right whether he “takes hold” himself or not, and that it is therefore no great matter whether a particular ring or boss is suppressed. And in making each individual man feel his insignificance, it disposes him to leave to the multitude the task of setting right what is everyone else’s business just as much as his own. An American does not smart under the same sense of personal wrong from the mismanagement of his public business, from the exaction of high city taxes and their malversation, as an Englishman would in the like case. If he suffers, he consoles himself by thinking that he suffers with others, as part of the general order of things, which he is no more called upon than his neighbours to correct.

It may be charged as a weak point in the rule of public opinion, that by fostering this habit it has chilled activity and dulled the sense of responsibility among the leaders in political life. It has made them less eager and strenuous in striking out ideas and plans of their own, less bold in propounding those plans, more sensitive to the reproach, even more feared in America than in England, of being a crotchet-monger or a doctrinaire. That new or unpopular ideas are more frequently started by isolated thinkers, economists, social reformers, than by statesmen, may be set down to the fact that practical statesmanship indisposes men to theorizing. But in America the practical statesman is apt to be timid in advocacy as well as infertile in suggestion. He seems to be always listening for the popular voice, always afraid to commit himself to a view which may turn out unpopular. It is a fair conjecture that this may be due to his being by his profession a far more habitual worshipper as well as observer of public opinion, than will be the case with men who are by profession thinkers and students, men who are less purely Americans of today, because under the influence of the literature of past times as well as of contemporary Europe. Philosophy, taking the word to include the historical study of the forces which work upon mankind at large, is needed by a statesman not only as a consolation for the disappointments of his career, but as a corrective to the superstitions and tremors which the service of the multitude implants.

The enormous force of public opinion is a danger to the people themselves, as well as to their leaders. It no longer makes them tyrannical, but it fills them with an undue confidence in their wisdom, their virtue, and their freedom. It may be thought that a nation which uses freedom well can hardly have too much freedom; yet even such a nation may be too much inclined to think freedom an absolute and all-sufficient good, to seek truth only in the voice of the majority, to mistake prosperity for greatness. Such a nation, seeing nothing but its own triumphs, and hearing nothing but its own praises, seems to need a succession of men like the prophets of Israel to rouse the people out of their self-complacency, to refresh their moral ideals, to remind them that the life is more than meat, and the body more than raiment, and that to whom much is given of them shall much also be required. If America has no prophets of this order, she fortunately possesses two classes of men who maintain a wholesome irritation such as that which Socrates thought it his function to apply to the Athenian people. These are the instructed critics who exert a growing influence on opinion through the higher newspapers, and by literature generally, and the philanthropic reformers who tell more directly upon the multitude, particularly through the churches. Both classes combined may not as yet be doing all that is needed. But the significant point is that their influence represents not an ebbing but a flowing tide. If the evils they combat exist on a larger scale than in past times, they, too, are more active and more courageous in rousing and reprehending their fellow countrymen.

chapter 87

Wherein Public Opinion Succeeds

In the examination of the actualities of politics as well as of forms of government, faults are more readily perceived than merits. Everybody is struck by the mistakes which a ruler makes, or by evils which a constitution fails to avert, while less praise than is due may be bestowed in respect of the temptations that have been resisted, or the prudence with which the framers of the government have avoided defects from which other countries suffer. Thus the general prosperity of the United States and the success of their people in all kinds of private enterprises, philanthropic as well as gainful, throws into relief the blemishes of their government, and makes it the more necessary to point out in what respects the power of public opinion overcomes those blemishes, and maintains a high level of good feeling and well-being in the nation.

The European observer of the working of American institutions is apt to sum up his conclusions in two contrasts. One is between the excellence of the Constitution and the vices of the party system that has laid hold of it, discovered its weak points, and brought in a swarm of evils. The Fathers, he says, created the Constitution good, but their successors have sought out many inventions.1 The other contrast is between the faults of the political class and the merits of the people at large. The men who work the machine are often selfish and unscrupulous. The people, for whose behoof it purports to be worked, and who suffer themselves to be “run” by the politicians, are honest, intelligent, fair-minded. No such contrast exists anywhere else in the world. Either the politicians are better than they are in America, or the people are worse.

The causes of this contrast, which to many observers has seemed the capital fact of American politics, have been already explained. It brings out the truth, on which too much stress cannot be laid, that the strong point of the American system, the dominant fact of the situation, is the healthiness of public opinion, and the control which it exerts. As Abraham Lincoln said in his famous contest with Douglas, “With public sentiment on its side, everything succeeds; with public sentiment against it, nothing succeeds.”

The conscience and common sense of the nation as a whole keep down the evils which have crept into the working of the Constitution, and may in time extinguish them. Public opinion is a sort of atmosphere, fresh, keen, and full of sunlight, like that of the American cities, and this sunlight kills many of those noxious germs which are hatched where politicians congregate. That which, varying a once famous phrase, we may call the genius of universal publicity, has some disagreeable results, but the wholesome ones are greater and more numerous. Selfishness, injustice, cruelty, tricks, and jobs of all sorts shun the light; to expose them is to defeat them. No serious evils, no rankling sore in the body politic, can remain long concealed, and when disclosed, it is half destroyed. So long as the opinion of a nation is sound, the main lines of its policy cannot go far wrong, whatever waste of time and money may be incurred in carrying them out. It was observed in the last chapter that opinion is too vague and indeterminate a thing to be capable of considering and selecting the best means for the end on which it has determined. The counterpart of that remark is that the opinion of a whole nation, a united and tolerably homogeneous nation, is, when at last it does express itself, the most competent authority to determine the ends of national policy.2 In European countries, legislatures and cabinets sometimes take decisions which the nation, which had scarcely thought of the matter till the decision has been taken, is ultimately found to disapprove. In America, men feel that the nation is the only power entitled to say what it wants, and that, till it has manifested its wishes, nothing must be done to commit it. It may sometimes be long in speaking, but when it speaks, it speaks with a weight which the wisest governing class cannot claim.

The frame of the American government has assumed and trusted to the activity of public opinion, not only as the power which must correct and remove the difficulties due to the restrictions imposed on each department, and to possible collisions between them, but as the influence which must supply the defects incidental to a system which works entirely by the machinery of popular elections. Under a system of elections one man’s vote is as good as another, the vicious and ignorant have as much weight as the wise and good. A system of elections might be imagined which would provide no security for due deliberation or full discussion, a system which, while democratic in name, recognizing no privilege, and referring everything to the vote of the majority, would in practice be hasty, violent, tyrannical. It is with such a possible democracy that one has to contrast the rule of public opinion as it exists in the United States. Opinion declares itself legally through elections. But opinion is at work at other times also, and has other methods of declaring itself. It secures full discussion of issues of policy and of the characters of men. It suffers nothing to be concealed. It listens patiently to all the arguments that are addressed to it. Eloquence, education, wisdom, the authority derived from experience and high character, tell upon it in the long run, and have, perhaps not always their due influence, but yet a great and growing influence. Thus a democracy governing itself through a constantly active public opinion, and not solely by its intermittent mechanism of elections, tends to become patient, tolerant, reasonable, and is more likely to be unembittered and unvexed by class divisions.

It is the existence of such a public opinion as this, the practice of freely and constantly reading, talking, and judging of public affairs with a view to voting thereon, rather than the mere possession of political rights, that gives to popular government that educative and stimulative power which is so frequently claimed as its highest merit. Those who, in the last generation, were forced to argue for democratic government against oligarchies or despots, were perhaps inclined, if not to exaggerate the value of extended suffrage and a powerful legislature, at least to pass too lightly over the concomitant conditions by whose help such institutions train men to use liberty well. History does not support the doctrine that the mere enjoyment of power fits large masses of men, any more than individuals or classes, for its exercise. Along with that enjoyment there must be found some one or more of various auspicious conditions, such as a direct and fairly equal interest in the common welfare, the presence of a class or group of persons respected and competent to guide, an absence of religious or race hatreds, a high level of education, or at least of intelligence, old habits of local self-government, the practice of unlimited free discussion. In America it is not simply the habit of voting but the briskness and breeziness of the whole atmosphere of public life, and the process of obtaining information and discussing it, of hearing and judging each side, that form the citizen’s intelligence. True it is that he would not gain much from this process did it not lead up to the exercise of voting power: he would not learn so much on the road did not the polling booth stand at the end of it. But if it were his lot, as it is that of the masses in some European countries, to exercise his right of suffrage under few of these favouring conditions, the educational value of the vote would become comparatively small. It is the habit of breathing as well as helping to form public opinion that cultivates, develops, trains the average American. It gives him a sense of personal responsibility stronger, because more constant, than exists in those free countries of Europe where he commits his power to a legislature. Sensible that his eye ought to be always fixed on the conduct of affairs, he grows accustomed to read and judge, not indeed profoundly, sometimes erroneously, usually under party influences, but yet with a feeling that the judgment is his own. He has a sense of ownership in the government, and therewith a kind of independence of manner as well as of mind very different from the demissness of the humbler classes of the Old World. And the consciousness of responsibility which goes along with this laudable pride, brings forth the peaceable fruits of moderation. As the Greeks thought that the old families ruled their households more gently than upstarts did, so citizens who have been born to power, born into an atmosphere of legal right and constitutional authority, are sobered by their privileges. Despite their natural quickness and eagerness, the native Americans are politically patient. They are disposed to try soft means first, to expect others to bow to that force of opinion which they themselves recognize. Opposition does not incense them; danger does not, by making them lose their heads, hurry them into precipitate courses. In no country does a beaten minority take a defeat so well. Admitting that the blood of the race counts for something in producing that peculiar coolness and self-control in the midst of an external effervescence of enthusiasm, which is the most distinctive feature of the American masses, the habit of ruling by public opinion and obeying it counts for even more. It was far otherwise in the South before the war, but the South was not a democracy, and its public opinion was that of a passionate class.

The best evidence for this view is to be found in the educative influence of opinion on newcomers. Anyone can see how severe a strain is put on democratic institutions by the influx every year of nearly a million of untrained Europeans. Being in most states admitted to full civic rights before they have come to shake off European notions and habits, these strangers enjoy political power before they either share or are amenable to American opinion.3 They follow blindly leaders of their own race, are not moved by discussion, exercise no judgment of their own. This lasts for some years, probably for the rest of life with those who are middle-aged when they arrive. It lasts also with those who, belonging to the more backward races, remain herded together in large masses, and makes them a dangerous element in manufacturing and mining districts. But the younger sort, when, if they be foreigners, they have learnt English, and when, dispersed among Americans so as to be able to learn from them, they have imbibed the sentiments and assimilated the ideas of the country, are thenceforth scarcely to be distinguished from the native population. They are more American than the Americans in their desire to put on the character of their new country. This peculiar gift which the Republic possesses of quickly dissolving and assimilating the foreign bodies that are poured into her, imparting to them her own qualities of orderliness, good sense, and a willingness to bow to the will of the majority, is mainly due to the all-pervading force of opinion, which the newcomer, so soon as he has formed social and business relations with the natives, breathes in daily till it insensibly transmutes him. Their faith, and a sentiment of resentment against England, long kept among the Irish a body of separate opinion, which for a time resisted the solvent power of its American environment. But the public schools finished the work of the factory and the newspapers. The Irish immigrant’s son is now an American citizen for all purposes.

It is chiefly the faith in publicity that gives to the American public their peculiar buoyancy, and what one may call their airy hopefulness in discussing even the weak points of their system. They are always telling you that they have no skeleton closets, nothing to keep back. They know, and are content that all the world should know, the worst as well as the best of themselves. They have a boundless faith in free inquiry and full discussion. They admit the possibility of any number of temporary errors and delusions. But to suppose that a vast nation should, after hearing everything, canvassing everything, and trying all the preliminary experiments it has a mind to, ultimately go wrong by mistaking its own true interests, seems to them a sort of blasphemy against the human intelligence and its Creator.

They claim for opinion that its immense power enables them to get on with but little government. Some evils which the law and its officers are in other countries required to deal with are here averted or cured by the mere force of opinion, which shrivels them up when its rays fall on them. As it is not the product of any one class, and is unwilling to recognize classes at all, for it would stand self-condemned as un-American if it did, it discourages anything in the nature of class legislation. Where a particular section of the people, such, for instance, as the Western farmers or the Eastern operatives, think themselves aggrieved, they clamour for the measures thought likely to help them. The farmers legislated against the railroads, the labour party asks an eight-hour law. But whereas on the European continent such a class would think and act as a class, hostile to other classes, and might resolve to pursue its own objects at whatever risk to the nation, in America national opinion, which everyone recognizes as the arbiter, mitigates these feelings, and puts the advocates of the legislation which any class demands upon showing that their schemes are compatible with the paramount interest of the whole community. To say that there is no legislation in America which, like the class legislation of Europe, has thrown undue burdens on the poor, while jealously guarding the pleasures and pockets of the rich, is to say little, because where the poorer citizens have long been a numerical majority, invested with political power, they will evidently take care of themselves. But the opposite danger might have been feared, that the poor would have turned the tables on the rich, thrown the whole burden of taxation upon them, and disregarded in the supposed interest of the masses what are called the rights of property. Not only has this not been attempted—it has been scarcely even suggested (except, of course, by professed Collectivists as part of a reconstruction of society), and it excites no serious apprehension. Thee is nothing in the machinery of government that could do more than delay it for a time, did the masses desire it. What prevents it is the honesty and common sense of the citizens generally, who are convinced that the interests of all classes are substantially the same, and that justice is the highest of those interests. Equality, open competition, a fair field to everybody, every stimulus to industry, and every security for its fruits, these they hold to be the self-evident principles of national prosperity.

If public opinion is heedless in small things, it usually checks measures which, even if not oppressive, are palpably selfish or unwise. If before a mischievous bill passes, its opponents can get the attention of the people fixed upon it, its chances are slight. All sorts of corrupt or pernicious schemes which are hatched at Washington or in the state legislatures are abandoned because it is felt that the people will not stand them, although they could be easily pushed through those not too scrupulous assemblies. There have been instances of proposals which took people at first by their plausibility, but which the criticism of opinion riddled with its unceasing fire till at last they were quietly dropped. It was in this way that President Grant’s attempt to annex San Domingo failed. He had made a treaty for the purpose, which fell through for want of the requisite two-thirds majority in the Senate, but he persisted in the scheme until at last the disapproval of the general public, which had grown stronger by degrees and found expression through the leading newspapers, warned him to desist. After the war, there was at first in many quarters a desire to punish the Southern leaders for what they had made the North suffer. But by degrees the feeling died away, the sober sense of the whole North restraining the passions of those who had counselled vengeance; and, as everyone knows, there was never a civil war or rebellion, whichever one is to call it, followed by so few severities.

Public opinion often fails to secure the appointment of the best men to places, but where undivided responsibility can be fixed on the appointing authority, it prevents, as those who are behind the scenes know, countless bad appointments for which politicians intrigue. Considering the power of party managers over the federal executive, and the low sense of honour and public duty as regards patronage among politicians, the leading posts are filled, if not by the most capable men, yet seldom by bad ones. The judges of the Supreme Court, for instance, are, and have always been, men of high professional standing and stainless character. The same may be, though less generally, said of the upper federal officials in the North and West. That no similar praise can be bestowed on the exercise of federal patronage in the Southern states since the war, is an illustration of the view I am stating. As the public opinion of the South (that is to say, of the whites who make opinion there) was steadily hostile to the Republican party, which commanded the executive during the twenty years from 1865 to 1885, the Republican party managers were indifferent to it, because they had nothing to gain or to lose from it. Hence they made appointments without regard to it. Northern opinion knows comparatively little of the details of Southern politics and the character of officials who act there, so that they might hope to escape the censure of their supporters in the North. Hence they jobbed their patronage in the South with unblushing cynicism, using federal posts there as a means not merely of rewarding party services, but also of providing local white leaders and organizers to the coloured Southern Republicans. Their different behaviour there and in the North therefore showed that it was not public virtue, but the fear of public opinion, that was making their Northern appointments on the whole respectable, while those in the South were at that time so much the reverse. The same phenomenon has been noticed in Great Britain. Jobs are frequent and scandalous in the inverse ratio of the notice they are likely to attract.4

In questions of foreign policy, opinion is a valuable reserve force. When demonstrations are made by party leaders intended to capture the vote of some particular section, the native Americans only smile. But they watch keenly the language held and acts done by the State Department (Foreign Office), and, while determined to support the president in vindicating the rights of American citizens, would be found ready to check any demand or act going beyond their legal rights which could tend to embroil them with a foreign power. There is still a touch of spread-eagleism and an occasional want of courtesy and taste among public speakers and journalists when they refer to other countries; and there is a determination in all classes to keep European interference at a distance. But among the ordinary native citizens one finds (I think) less obtrusive selfishness, less chauvinism, less cynicism in declaring one’s own national interests to be paramount to those of other states, than in any of the great states of Europe. Justice and equity are more generally recognized as binding upon nations no less than on individuals. Whenever humanity comes into question, the heart of the people is sound. The treatment of the Indians reflects little credit on the Western settlers who have come in contact with them, and almost as little on the federal government, whose efforts to protect them have been often foiled by the faults of its own agents, or by its own want of promptitude and foresight. But the wish of the people at large has always been to deal generously with the aborigines, nor have appeals on their behalf, such as those made by the late Mrs. Helen Jackson, ever failed to command the sympathy and assent of the country.

Throughout these chapters I have been speaking chiefly of the Northern states and chiefly of recent years, for America is a country which changes fast. But the conduct of the Southern people, since their defeat in 1865, illustrates the tendency of underlying national traits to reassert themselves when disturbing conditions have passed away. Before the war the public opinion of the slave states, and especially of the planting states, was practically the opinion of a class—the small and comparatively rich landowning aristocracy. The struggle for the defence of their institution had made this opinion fierce and intolerant. To a hatred of the Abolitionists, whom it thought actuated by the wish to rob and humiliate the South, it joined a misplaced contempt for what it deemed the moneygrubbing and peace-at-any-price spirit of the Northern people generally. So long as the subjugated states were ruled by arms, and the former “rebels” excluded by disfranchisement from the government of their states, this bitterness remained. When the restoration of self-government, following upon the liberation of the Confederate prisoners and the amnesty, had shown the magnanimity of the North, its clemency, its wish to forget and forgive, its assumption that both sides would shake hands and do their best for their common country, the hearts of the Southern men were conquered. Opinion went round. Frankly, one might almost say cheerfully, it recognized the inevitable. It stopped those outrages on the Negroes which the law had been unable to repress. It began to regain “touch” of, it has now almost fused itself with, the opinion of the North and West. No one Southern leader or group can be credited with this; it was the general sentiment of the people that brought it about. Still less do the Northern politicians deserve the praise of the peacemakers, for many among them tried for political purposes to fan or to rekindle the flame of suspicion in the North. It was the opinion of the North generally, more liberal than its guides, wich dictated not merely forgiveness, but the restoration of equal civic rights. Nor is this the only case in which the people have proved themselves to have a higher and a truer inspiration than the politicians.

It has been observed that the all-subduing power of the popular voice may tell against the appearance of great statesmen by dwarfing aspiring individualities, by teaching men to discover and obey the tendencies of their age rather than rise above them and direct them. If this happens in America, it is not because the American people fail to appreciate and follow and exalt such eminent men as fortune bestows upon it. It has a great capacity for loyalty, even for hero worship. “Our people,” said an experienced American publicist to me, “are in reality hungering for great men, and the warmth with which even pinchbeck geniuses, men who have anything showy or taking about them, anything that is deemed to betoken a strong individuality, are followed and glorified in spite of intellectual emptiness, and perhaps even moral shortcomings, is the best proof of the fact.” Henry Clay was the darling of his party for many years, as Jefferson, with less of personal fascination, had been in the preceding generation. Daniel Webster retained the devotion of New England long after it had become clear that his splendid intellect was mated to a far from noble character. A kind of dictatorship was yielded to Abraham Lincoln, whose memory is cherished almost like that of Washington himself. Whenever a man appears with something taking or forcible about him, he becomes the object of so much popular interest and admiration that those cooler heads who perceive his faults, and perhaps dread his laxity of principle, reproach the proneness of their less discerning countrymen to make an idol out of wood or clay. The career of Andrew Jackson is a case in point, though it may be hoped that the intelligence of the people would estimate such a character more truly today than it did in his own day. I doubt if there be any country where a really brilliant man, confident in his own strength, and adding the charm of a striking personality to the gift of popular eloquence, would find an easier path to fame and power, and would exert more influence over the minds and emotions of the multitude. Such a man, speaking to the people with the independence of conscious strength, would find himself appreciated and respected.

Controversy is still bitter, more profuse in personal imputations than one expects to find it where there are no grave issues to excuse excitement. But in this respect also there is an improvement. Partisans are reckless, but the mass of the people lends itself less to acrid partisanship than it did in the times just before the Civil War, or in those first days of the Republic which were so long looked back to as a sort of heroic age. Public opinion grows more temperate, more mellow, and assuredly more tolerant. Its very strength disposes it to bear with opposition or remonstrance. It respects itself too much to wish to silence any voice.

Part V

Illustrations & Reflections

[This Part contains some illustrations, drawn from recent American history, of the working of political institutions and public opinion, together with observations on several political questions for which no suitable place could be found in the preceding Parts.]

chapter 88

The Tammany Ring in New York City

Although I have described in previous chapters the causes which have induced the perversion and corruption of democratic government in great American cities, it seems desirable to illustrate more fully, from passages in the history of two such cities, the conditions under which those causes work and the forms which that perversion takes. The phenomena of municipal democracy in the United States are the most remarkable and least laudable which the modern world has witnessed; and they present some evils which no political philosopher, however unfriendly to popular government, appears to have foreseen, evils which have scarcely showed themselves in the cities of Europe, and unlike those which were thought characteristic of the rule of the masses in ancient times. I take New York and Philadelphia as examples because they are older than Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, larger than Boston and Baltimore. And I begin with New York, because she displayed on the grandest scale phenomena common to American cities, and because the plunder and misgovernment from which she has suffered have become specially notorious over the world.

From the end of the eighteenth century the state and (somewhat later) the city of New York were, more perhaps than any other state or city, the seat of intrigues and the battleground of factions. Party organizations early became powerful in them, and it was by a New York leader—Marcy, the friend of President Jackson—that the famous doctrine of “the Spoils to the Victors” was first formulated as already the practice of New York politicians. These factions were for a long time led, and these intrigues worked, by men belonging to the upper or middle class, to whom the emoluments of office were desirable but not essential. In the middle of the century, however, there came a change. The old native population of the city was more and more swollen by the immigration of foreigners: first of the Irish, especially from 1846 onwards; then also of the Germans from 1849 onwards; finally of Polish and Russian Jews, as well as of Italians and of Slavs from about 1883 onwards. Already in 1870 the foreign population, including not only the foreign both but a large part of their children who, though born in America, were still virtually Europeans, constituted a half or perhaps even a majority of the inhabitants; and the proportion of foreigners has since then grown still larger.1 These newcomers were as a rule poor and ignorant. They knew little of the institutions of the country, and had not acquired any patriotic interest in it. But they received votes. Their numbers soon made them a power in city and state politics, and all the more so because they were cohesive, influenced by leaders of their own race, and not, like the native voters, either disposed to exercise, or capable of exercising, an independent judgment upon current issues. From among them there soon emerged men whose want of book-learning was overcome by their natural force and shrewdness, and who became apt pupils in those arts of party management which the native professional politicians had already brought to perfection.

While these causes were transferring power to the rougher and more ignorant element in the population, the swift developments of trade which followed the making of the Erie Canal and opening up of railway routes to the West, with the consequent expansion of New York as a commercial and financial centre, had more and more distracted the thoughts of the wealthier people from local politics, which required more time than busy men could give, and seemed tame compared with that struggle over slavery, whereon, from 1850 to 1865, all patriotic minds were bent. The leading men, who fifty years earlier would have watched municipal affairs and perhaps borne a part in them, were now so much occupied with their commercial enterprises or their legal practice as to neglect their local civic duties, and saw with unconcern the chief municipal offices appropriated by persons belonging to the lower strata of society.

Even had these men of social position and culture desired to retain a hold in city politics, the task would not have been easy, for the rapid growth of New York, which from a population of 108,000 in 1820 had risen to 209,000 in 1830, to 813,000 in 1860, and to 942,000 in 1870, brought in swarms of strangers who knew nothing of the old residents, and it was only by laboriously organizing these newcomers that they could be secured as adherents. However laborious the work might be, it was sure to be done, because the keenness of party strife made every vote precious. But it was work not attractive to men of education, nor suited to them. It fell naturally to those who themselves belonged to the lower strata, and it became the source of the power they acquired.

Among the political organizations of New York the oldest and most powerful was the Tammany Society. It is as old as the federal government, having been estabished under the name of the Columbian Society in 1789, just a fortnight after Washington’s inauguration, by an Irish American called William Mooney, and its purposes were at first social and charitable rather than political. In 1805 it entitled itself the Tammany Society, adopting, as is said, the name of an Indian chief called Tammanend or Tammany, and clothing itself with a sort of mock Indian character. There were thirteen tribes, with twelve “sachems” under a grand sachem, a “sagamore” or master of ceremonies, and a “wiskinski” or doorkeeper. By degrees, and as the story goes, under the malignant influence of Aaron Burr, it took a strongly political tinge as its numbers increased. Already in 1812 it was a force in the city, having become a rallying centre for what was then called the Republican and afterwards the Democratic party; but the element of moral aspiration does not seem to have become extinct, for in 1817 it issued an address deploring the spread of the foreign game of billiards among young men of the upper classes. At one time, too, it possessed a sort of natural history museum, which was ultimately purchased by the well-known showman, P. T. Barnum. Till 1822 it had been governed by a general meeting of its members, but with its increased size there came a representative system; and though the Society proper continued to be governed and its property held by the “sachems,” the control of the political organization became vested in a general committee consisting of delegates elected at primary meetings throughout the city, which that organization was now beginning to overspread. This committee, originally of thirty-three members, numbered seventy-five in 1836, by which time Tammany Hall had won its way to a predominant influence on city politics. Of the present organization I shall speak later.

The first sachems had been men of some social standing, and almost entirely native Americans. The general democratization, which was unfortunately accompanied by a vulgarization, of politics that marked the time of Andrew Jackson, lowered by degrees the character of city politicians, turning them into mere professionals whose object was lucre rather than distinction or even power. This process told on the character of Tammany, making it more and more a machine in the hands of schemers, and thus a dangerous force, even while its rank and file consisted largely of persons of some means, who were interested as direct taxpayers in the honest administration of municipal affairs. After 1850, however, the influx from Europe transformed its membership while adding to its strength. The Irish immigrants were, both as Roman Catholics and in respect of such political sympathies as they brought with them, disposed to enter the Democratic party. Tammany laid hold of them, enrolled them as members of its district organizations, and rewarded their zeal by admitting a constantly increasing number to posts of importance as district leaders, committeemen, and holders of city offices. When the Germans arrived, similar efforts were made to capture them, though with a less complete success. Thus from 1850 onwards Tammany came more and more to lean upon and find its chief strength in the foreign vote. Of the foreigners who have led it, most have been Irish. Yet it would be wrong to represent it, as some of its censors have done, as being predominantly Irish in its composition. There have always been and are now a vast number of native Americans among the rank and file, as well as a few conspicuous among its chiefs. It contains many Germans, possibly one-half of the German voters who can be reckoned as belonging to any party. And today the large majority of the Russian and Polish Jews (very numerous in some parts of the city), of the Czechs and other Austro-Hungarian Slavs, and possibly also of the Italians, obey its behests, even if not regularly enrolled as members. For the majority of these immigrants are Democrats, and Tammany has been and is the standard bearer of the Democratic party in the city. It has had rivals and enemies in that party. Two rival machines (now long since extinct)—Mozart Hall, formerly led by Mr. Fernando Wood, and the “County Democracy,” guided for some years by the late Mr. Hubert O. Thompson—at different times confronted, and sometimes even defeated it; while at other times “making a deal” with it for a share in municipal spoils. Once, as we shall presently see, it incurred the wrath of the best Democrats of the city. Still it has on the whole stood for and been at most times practically identified with the Democratic party, posing on the Fourth of July as the traditional representative of Jeffersonian principles; and it has in that capacity grown from the status of a mere private club to be an organization commanding a number of votes which used to be sufficient not only to give it the mastery of the city but even to turn the balance in the great State of New York, and thereby, perhaps, to determine the result of a presidential election.

I must, however, return to those early days when Tammany was young and comparatively innocent, days when the machine system and the Spoils System were still but half developed, and when Chancellor Kent could write (in 1835), that “the office of assistant alderman could be pleasant and desirable to persons of leisure, of intelligence, and of disinterested zeal for the wise and just regulation of the public concerns of the city”! In 1834 the mayoralty was placed in the direct gift of the people. In 1842 all restrictions on the suffrage in the city were removed, just before the opening of an era when they would have been serviceable. In 1846 the new constitution of the state transferred the election of all judges to the people. In 1857 the state legislature, which had during the preceding twenty years been frequently modifying the municipal arrangements, enacted a new charter for the city. The practice of New York state had been to pass special laws regulating the frame of government for each of its cities, instead of having one uniform system for all municipalities. It was an unfortunate plan, for it went far to deprive New York of self-government by putting her at the mercy of the legislature at Albany, which, already corrupt, has been apt to be still further corrupted by the party leaders of the city, who could usually obtain from it such statutes as they desired. As I am not writing a municipal history of New York, but merely describing the action in that history of a particular party club, no more need be said of the charter and statutes of 1857 than that they greatly limited the powers of the Common Council. The chief administrative functions were vested in the mayor and the heads of various departments, while the power of raising and appropriating revenues was divided between a body called the Board of Supervisors and the legislature. Of the heads of the departments, some were directly chosen by the people, others appointed by the mayor, who himself held office for two years. To secure for their adherents some share in the offices of a city with a large Democratic majority, the legislature, then controlled by the Republicans, created a number of new boards for city administration, most of these members were to be appointed by the governor of the state. The police of the city in particular, whose condition had been unsatisfactory, were now placed under such a board, wholly independent of the municipal authorities, a change which excited strong local opposition and led to a sanguinary conflict between the old and the new police.

This was the frame of municipal government when the hero who was to make Tammany famous appeared upon the scene. The time was ripe, for the lowest class of voters, foreign and native, had now been thoroughly organized and knew themselves able to control the city. Their power had been shown in the success of a demagogue, the first of the city demagogues, named Fernando Wood, who by organizing them had reached the mayoral chair from beginnings so small that he was currently reported to have entered New York as the leg of an artificial elephant in a travelling show. This voting mob were ready to follow Tammany Hall. It had become the Acropolis of the city; and he who could capture it might rule as tyrant.2

William Marcy Tweed was born in New York in 1823, of a Scotch father and an American mother. His earliest occupation was that of a chairmaker—his father’s trade; but he failed in business, and first became conspicuous by his energy in one of the volunteer fire companies of the city, whereof he was presently chosen foreman. These companies had a good deal of the club element in them, and gave their members many opportunities for making friends and becoming known in the district they served. Tweed had an abounding vitality, free and easy manners, plenty of humour, though of a coarse kind, and a jovial, swaggering way which won popularity for him among the lower and rougher sort of people. His size and corpulency made it all the easier for him to support the part of the genial good fellow; and it must be said to his credit, that though he made friends lightly, he was always loyal to his friends. Neither shame nor scruples restrained his audacity. Forty years earlier these qualities would no more have fitted him to be a popular leader than Falstaff’s qualities would have fitted him to be the chancellor of King Henry V; and had anyone predicted to the upper classes of New York that the boisterous fireman of 1845, without industry, eloquence, or education, would in 1870 be ruler of the greatest city in the western world, they would have laughed him to scorn. In 1850, however, Tweed was elected alderman, and soon became noted in the Common Council, a body already so corrupt (though the tide of immigration had only just begun to swell) that they were commonly described as the forty thieves. He came out of it a rich man, and was presently sent to Washington as member for a district of the city. In the wider arena of Congress, however, he cut but a poor figure. He seems to have spoken only once, and then without success. In 1857 he began to repair his fortunes, shattered at the national capital, by obtaining the post of public school commissioner in New York, and soon afterwards he was elected to the Board of Supervisors, of which he was four times chosen president. There his opportunities for jobbery and for acquiring influence were much enlarged. “Heretofore his influence and reputation had both been local, and outside of his district he had hardly been known at all. Now his sphere of action embraced the whole city, and his large figure began to loom up in portentous magnitude through the foul miasma of municipal politics.”3

Tweed was by this time a member of Tammany Hall, and in 1863 he was elected permanent chairman of the general committee. Not long after he and his friends captured the inner stronghold of the Tammany Society, a more exclusive and hitherto socially higher body; and he became grand sachem, with full command both of the Society, with its property and traditional influence, and of the political organization. This triumph was largely due to the efforts of another politician, whose fortunes were henceforward to be closely linked with Tweed’s, Mr. Peter B. Sweeny, a lawyer of humble origin but with some cultivation and considerable talent. The two men were singularly unlike, and each fitted to supply the other’s defects. Sweeny was crafty and taciturn, unsocial in nature and saturnine in aspect, with nothing to attract the crowd, but skilful in negotiation and sagacious in his political forecasts. He was little seen, preferring to hatch his schemes in seclusion; but his hand was soon felt in the arrangement by which the hostility of Mozart Hall, the rival Democratic organization, was removed, its leader Fernando Wood, obtaining a seat in Congress, while Tammany was thus left in sole sway of the Democratic vote of the city. The accession of Mozart Hall brought in another recruit to the Tammany group, Mr. A. Oakey Hall. This person was American by origin, better born and educated than his two associates. He was a lawyer by profession, and had occasionally acted as a lobbyist at Albany, working among the Republican members, for he then professed Republican principles—as Mr. Sweeny had worked occasionally among the Democrats. He had neither the popular arts, such as they were, of Tweed nor the stealthy astuteness of Sweeny, and as he never seemed to take himself seriously, he was not taken seriously by others. But he was quick and adroit, he had acquired some influence among the Mozart Hall faction; and his position as member of a well-known legal firm seemed to give a faint tinge of respectability to a group which stood sadly in need of that quality. He had been elected district attorney (public prosecutor) in 1862, by a combination of Mozart Hall with the Republicans (having been previously assistant district attorney), and had thus become known to the public. A fourth member was presently added in the person of Richard B. Connolly, who had become influential in the councils of Tammany. This man had been an auctioneer, and had by degrees risen from the secretaryship of a ward committee to be, in 1851, elected county clerk (although not then yet naturalized as a citizen), and in 1859 state senator. His friends, who had seen reason to distrust his exactness as a counter of votes, called him Slippery Dick. His smooth manner and insinuating ways inspired little confidence, nor do his talents seem to have gone beyond a considerable skill in figures, a skill which he was soon to put to startling uses. Another man of importance, who was drawn over from the Mozart Hall faction, was Albert Cardozo, a Portuguese Jew, only twenty-six years of age, but with legal talents only less remarkable than the flagrant unscrupulousness with which he prostituted them to party purposes. He was now, through Tammany influence, rewarded for this adhesion by being elected to one of the chief judgeships of the city; and two other equally dishonest minions of the Tweed group were given him as colleagues in the persons of George Barnard and John H. McCunn.

In 1865 Tweed and the other Tammany chiefs, to whom fortune and affinity of aims had linked him, carried for the mayoralty one of their number, Mr. John T. Hoffman, a man of ability, who might have had a distinguished career had he risen under better auspices; and at the election of 1868 they made a desperate effort to capture both the state and the city. Frauds of unprecedented magnitude, both in the naturalizing of foreigners before the election and in the conduct of the election itself, were perpetrated. The average number of persons naturalized by the city courts had been, from 1856 to 1867, 9,200. In 1868 this number rose to 41,000, and the process was conducted with unexampled and indecent haste by two of the judges whom Tammany had just placed on the bench to execute its behests. False registrations, repeating on a large scale, and fraudulent manipulation of the votes given rolled up for Tammany a majority sufficient to secure for its friend Hoffman the governorship of the state. The votes returned as cast in New York City were 8 per cent in excess of its total voting population. The vacancy caused by Hoffman’s promotion was filled by the election of Mr. Hall. Thus at the beginning of 1869 the group already mentioned found itself in control of the chief offices of the city, and indeed of the state also.4 Hall was mayor; Sweeny was city chamberlain, that is to say, treasurer of the city and county; Tweed was street commissioner and president of the Board of Supervisors; Connolly, comptroller, and thus in charge of the city finances. Meanwhile their nominee, Hoffman, was state governor, able to veto any legislation they disliked, while on the city bench they had three apt and supple tools in Cardozo, Barnard, and McCunn. Other less conspicuous men held minor offices, or were leagued with them in managing Tammany Hall, and through it, the city. But the four who have been first named stood out as the four ruling spirits of the faction, to all of whom, more or less, though not necessarily in equal measure, the credit or discredit for its acts attached; and it was to them primarily, though not exclusively, that the name of the Tammany Ring came to be thenceforth applied.5

Having a majority in the state legislature, the ring used it to procure certain changes in the city charter which, while in some respects beneficial, as giving the city more control over its own local affairs, also subserved the purposes of its actual rulers. The elective Board of Supervisors was abolished, and its financial functions transferred to the recorder and aldermen. The executive power was concentrated in the hands of the mayor, who also obtained the power of appointing the chief municipal officers, and that for periods varying from four to eight years. He exercised this power (April 1870) by appointing Tweed commissioner of public works, Sweeny commissioner of parks, and (in pursuance of a subsequent enactment) Connolly comptroller. In a new board, called the Board of Apportionment, and composed of the mayor (Hall), the comptroller (Connolly), the commissioner of public works (Tweed), and the president of the board of parks (Sweeny), nearly all authority was now practically vested, for they could levy taxes, appoint the subordinate officials, lay down and enforce ordinances.6 Besides his power of appointing heads of departments, the mayor had the right to call for reports from them in whatever form he pleased, and also the sole right of impeachment, and he had further, in conjunction with the comptroller, to allow or revise the estimate the board was annually to submit, and to fix the salary of the civil judges. The undisguised supremacy which this new arrangement, amounting almost to dictatorship (purchased, as was believed, by gross bribery conducted by Tweed himself in the state legislature at Albany), conferred upon the quattuorvirate was no unmixed advantage, for it concentrated public attention on them, and in promising them impunity it precipitated their fall.

In the reign of the ring there is little to record beyond the use made by some of them of the opportunities for plunder, which this control of the municipal funds conferred. Plunder of the city treasury, especially in the form of jobbing contracts, was no new thing in New York, but it had never before reached such colossal dimensions. Two or three illustrations may suffice.

Large schemes of street-opening were projected, and for this purpose it became necessary to take and pay compensation for private property, and also, under the state laws, to assess betterment upon owners whose property was to be benefited. Sweeny, who knew something of the fortunes amassed in the rebuilding of Paris under the prefecture of Baron Haussmann, and was himself an admirer (and, as was said, an acquaintance) of Louis Napoleon, was credited with knowing how to use public improvements for private profit. Under the auspices of some members of the ring, commissioners for the carrying out of each improvement were appointed by the ring judges—in the famous case of the widening of Broadway by Cardozo in a perfectly novel manner. Those members and their friends then began quietly to purchase property in the spots which were eventually taken by the commissioners, and extravagant compensation was thereupon awarded to them, while other owners, who enjoyed no secret means of predicting the action of the commissioners, received for similar pieces of land far smaller sums, the burden of betterment also being no less unequally distributed as between the ringsters and other proprietors. In this way great sums passed from the city to those whom the ring favoured, in certain cases with commissions to some of its members.7 Among the numerous contracts by which the city treasury was depleted, not a few were afterwards discovered to have been given for printing to three companies in which Tweed and his intimates were interested. Nearly $3,000,000 were paid to them within two years for city printing and stationery. Other contracts for wood-paving and concrete were hardly less scandalous.

The claims outstanding against the Board of Supervisors, previous to 1870, furnished another easy and copious source of revenue, for under a statute which the ring had procured these claims, largely fraudulent or fictitious, were to be examined and audited by an ad interim board of audit composed of the mayor, the comptroller, and Tweed. The board delegated the duties of auditing to an ex-bankrupt creature of Tweed’s named Watson, who had been appointed city auditor, and who went to work with such despatch that in three and a half months he had presented warrants for claims to the amount of $6,312,000 to the members of the ad interim board—for the board itself seems to have met only once—on whose signature these bills were accordingly paid out of the city treasury.8 Subsequent investigation showed that from 65 to 85 per cent of the bills thus passed were fictitious, and of the whole Tweed appears to have received 24 per cent. But all the other financial achievements of the ring pale their ineffectual fires beside those connected with the erection and furnishing of the county courthouse. When designed in 1868 its cost was estimated at $250,000. Before the end of 1871 a sum variously estimated at from $8,000,000 to $13,000,000 (£1,600,000 to £2,600,000) had been expended upon it, and it was still unfinished. This was effected, as was afterwards proved in judicial proceedings, by the simple method of requiring the contractors, many of whom resisted for a time, to add large sums to their bills, sums which were then appropriated by Tweed, Connolly, and their minions or accomplices.9 Nothing could have been more direct or more effective. The orders were given by Tweed, the difference between the real and the nominal charge was settled by the contractor with him or with the auditor, and the bills, passed and signed by the members of the Board of Supervisors or Board of Apportionment (as the case might be), were approved by the auditor Watson and were paid out of the city funds at the bank. The proceeds were then duly divided, his real charges, or perhaps a little more, going to the contractor, and the rest among the boss and his friends.

Under such a system there was nothing surprising in the growth of the city debt. Fresh borrowing powers as well as taxing powers had been obtained from the state legislature, and they were freely used. According to the published report of the committee which subsequently investigated the city finances, the bonded debt of the city rose from $36,293,000 at the beginning of 1869, to $97,287,000 in September 1871; that is, by $61,000,000. Adding to this the floating debt incurred during the same two years and eight months, viz., $20,000,000, the total price which the city paid for the privilege of being ruled by Tammany during those thirty-two months reached $81,000,000, or more than twice the amount of the debt as it stood in 1868.10 And for all this there was hardly anything in the way of public improvements to show.

What, it may be asked, did the people of New York, and in particular the taxpayers at whose expense these antics were proceeding, think of their rulers, and how did they come to acquiesce in such a government, which, not content with plundering them, had degraded justice itself in the person of the ring judges, and placed the commerce and property of the city at the mercy of unscrupulous and venal partisans? I was in New York in the summer of 1870, and saw the ring flourishing like a green bay tree. Though the frauds just described were of course still unknown, nobody had a word of respect for its members. Tweed, for instance, would never have been invited to any respectable house. I was taken to look at Justices Barnard and Cardozo as two of the most remarkable sights of the city; and such indeed they were. I inquired why such things were endured, not merely patiently, but even with a sort of amused enjoyment, as though the citizens were proud of having produced a new phenomenon the like whereof no other community could show. It was explained to me that these things had not come suddenly, but as the crown of a process of degradation prolonged for some fifteen years or more which had made corruption so familiar as to be no longer shocking. The respectable leaders of the Democratic party had, with few exceptions, winked at the misdeeds of those who commanded a vote which they needed for state and national purposes. The press had been largely muzzled by lavish payments made to it for advertising, and a good many minor journals were actually subsidized by the ring. The bench, though only partially corrupt, was sufficiently in league with the ring for the sanction which the law required from it in certain cases to be unavailable as a safeguard. As for the mass of citizens, on whose votes this structure of iniquity had been reared, nearly half of them were practically strangers to America, amenable to their own clubs and leaders, but with no sense of civic duty to their new country nor likely to respond to any appeals from its statesmen. Three-fourths or more of them paid little or nothing in the way of direct taxes and did not realize that the increase of civil burdens would ultimately fall upon them as well as upon the rich. Moreover, the ring had cunningly placed on the payrolls of the city a large number of persons rendering comparatively little service, who had become a body of janizaries, bound to defend the government which paid them, working hard for it at elections, and adding, together with the regular employees, no contemptible quota to the total Tammany vote.11 As for the boss, those very qualities in him which repelled men of refinement made him popular with the crowd.

I asked what under such circumstances the respectable citizens proposed to do. My friends raised their eyebrows. One, of a historical turn, referred to the experience of Rome in the days of Clodius and Milo, and suggested the hiring of gladiators.

“These be thy gods, O Democracy: these are the fruits of abstract theory in politics. It was for this then that the yoke of George the Third was broken and America hailed as the dayspring of freedom by the peoples of Europe—that a robber should hold the keys of the public treasury, and a ruffian be set to pollute the seat of justice.” So might the shade of Alexander Hamilton have spoken, if permitted to revisit, after seventy years, the city his genius had adorned. Yet it was not such a democracy as Jefferson had sought to create and Hamilton to check that had delivered over to Tweed and to Barnard the greatest city of the Western world. That was the work of corruptions unknown to the days of Jefferson and Hamilton, of the Spoils System, of election frauds, of the gift of the suffrage to a host of ignorant strangers, and above all of the apathy of those wealthy and educated classes, without whose participation the best-framed government must speedily degenerate.

In the autumn of 1870 the ring seemed securely seated. Tweed, the master spirit, was content to scoop in money, and enjoy the licentious luxury which it procured him; though some declared that he had fixed his eyes upon the American legation in London. Sweeny preferred the substance to the ostentation of power; and Connolly’s tastes were as vulgar as Tweed’s, without the touch of open-handedness which seemed to palliate the latter’s greed. Cardozo, however, had his ambitions, and hungered for a place on the supreme federal bench; while Hall, to whom no share in the booty was ever traced, and who may not have received any, was believed to desire to succeed Hoffman as governor of the state, when that official should be raised by the growing influence of Tammany to the presidency of the United States. No wonder the ring was intoxicated by the success it had already won. It had achieved a fresh triumph in reelecting Hall as mayor at the end of 1870; and New York seemed to lie at its feet.

Its fall came suddenly; and the occasion sprang from a petty personal quarrel. A certain O’Brien, conspicuous as a leader in a discontented section of the Democratic party, was also personally sore because he had received an office below his hopes, and cherished resentment against Sweeny, to whom he attributed his disappointment. A henchman of his named Copeland, employed in the auditor’s office, happened to find there some accounts headed “county liabilities” which struck him as suspicious. He copied them and showed them to O’Brien, who perceived their value, and made him copy more of them, in fact a large part of the fraudulent accounts relating to the furnishing of the court house. Threatening the ring, with the publication of these compromising documents, O’Brien tried to extort payment of an old claim he had against the city; but after some haggling the negotiations were interrupted by the accidental death of Watson, the auditor. Ultimately O’Brien carried his copies to the New York Times, a paper which had already for some months past been attacking Tammany with unwonted boldness. On the 8th of July, 1871, it exposed the operations of the ring; and denounced its members, in large capitals, as thieves and swindlers, defying them to sue it for libel. Subsequent issues contained extracts from the accounts copied by Copeland; and all were summed up in a supplement, published on July 29th and printed in German as well as English, which showed that a sum of nearly $10,000,000 in all had been expended upon the courthouse, whose condition everybody could see, and for armoury repairs and furnishings. Much credit is due to the proprietor of the Times, who resisted threats and bribes offered him on behalf of the ring to desist from his onslaught and perhaps even more to the then editor, the late Mr. Louis J. Jennings, whose conduct of the campaign was full of fire and courage. The better classes of the city were now fully aroused, for the denials or defences of the mayor and Tweed found little credence. On September 4th a meeting of citizens was held, and a committee of seventy persons, many of them eminent by ability, experience, or position, formed to investigate the frauds charged, which by this time had drawn the eyes of the whole state and country. It is needless to recount the steps by which Connolly, the person most directly implicated, and the one whom his colleagues sought to make a scapegoat of, was forced to appoint as deputy an active and upright man (Mr. A. H. Green), whose possession and examination of the records in the comptroller’s office proved invaluable. The leading part in the campaign was played by Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, chairman of the Democratic party in the state, afterwards governor of the state, and in 1876 candidate for the federal presidency against Mr. Hayes. Feeling acutely the disgrace which the ring had brought upon the Democratic party, he was resolved by pursuit and exposure to rid the party of them and their coterie once for all; and in this he was now seconded by all the better Democrats. But much was also due to the brilliant cartoons of Mr. Thomas Nast, whose rich invention and striking drawing presented the four leading members of the ring in every attitude and with every circumstance of ignominy.12 The election for state offices held in November was attended by unusual excitement. The remaining members of the ring, for Connolly was now extinct and some of the minor figures had taken to flight, faced in boldly, and Tweed in particular, cheered by his renomination in the Democratic state convention held shortly beforehand, and by his reelection to the chairmanship of the general committee of Tammany, now neither explained nor denied anything, but asked defiantly in words which in New York have passed into a proverb, “What are you going to do about it?” His reliance on his own district of the city, and on the Tammany masses as a whole, was justified, for he was reelected to the state senate and the organization gave his creatures its solid support. But the respectable citizens,who had for once been roused from their lethargy, and who added their votes to those of the better sort of Democrats and of the Republican party, overwhelmed the machine, notwithstanding the usual election frauds undertaken on its behalf. Few of the ring candidates survived, and the ring itself was irretrievably ruined. Public confidence returned, and the price of real estate advanced. Sweeny forthwith announced his withdrawal from public life, and retired to Canada. The wretched Connolly was indicted and found so few friends that he remained in jail for six weeks before he could procure bail. Tweed, though dispirited by the murder of his boon-companion, the notorious Fisk (who had been carrying through the scandalous Erie railroad frauds by the help of the ring judges), stood his ground with characteristic courage, and refused to resign the office to which the mayor had appointed him. However, in December he was arrested,13 but presently released on insignificant bail by Judge Barnard. The state assembly, in which the reformers had now a majority, soon afterwards took steps to impeach Barnard, McCunn, and Cardozo. Cardozo resigned; the other two were convicted and removed from the bench. The endless delays and minute technicalities of the courts of New York protracted Tweed’s trial till January 1873, when, after a long hearing, the jury were discharged because unable to agree. He was thereupon rearrested, and upon his second trial in November, when special efforts had been made to secure a trustworthy jury, was found guilty and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. After a while the court of appeals released him, holding the sentence irregular, because cumulative; he was then rearrested in a civil suit by the city, escaped, was caught in Spain, identified by a caricature, and brought back to prison, where he died in 1876. Hall was thrice tried. On the first occasion the death of a juryman interrupted the proceedings; on the second the jury disagreed; on the third he obtained a favourable verdict. Connolly fled the country and died in exile. None of the group, nor of Tweed’s other satellites, ever again held office.

This was the end of the Tweed Ring. But it was not the end of Tammany. Abashed for the moment, the stooping earthward while the tempest swept by, that redoubtable organization never relaxed its grip upon the New York masses. It was only for a few months that the tempest cleared the air. The “good citizens” soon forgot their sudden zeal. Neglecting the primaries, where indeed they might have failed to effect much, they allowed nominations to fall back into the hands of spoilsmen, and the most important city offices to be fought for by factions differing only in their names and party badges, because all were equally bent upon selfish gain. Within five years from the overthrow of 1871, Tammany was again in the saddle, and the city government practically in the nomination of Mr. John Kelly, tempered by the rival influence of the ex-prize fighter Morrissey. In 1876 a vigorous pen, reviewing the history of the preceding eight years, and pointing out how soon the old mischiefs had reappeared, thus described the position:

A few very unscrupulous men, realizing thoroughtly the changed condition of affairs, had organized the proletariat of the city; and, through the form of suffrage, had taken possession of its government. They saw clearly the facts of the case, which the doctrinaires, theorists, and patriots studiously ignored or vehemently denied. They knew perfectly well that New York City was no longer a country town, inhabited by Americans and church-goers, and officered by deacons. They recognized the existence of a very large class which had nothing, and availed themselves of its assistance to plunder those who had something. The only way to meet them effectually and prevent a recurrence of the experience is for the friends of good government equally to recognize facts and shape their course accordingly. The question then is a practical one.

If New York, or any other great city in America which finds itself brought face to face with this issue, were an independent autonomy,—like Rome or many of the free cities of the Middle Ages,—the question would at once be divested of all that which in America makes if difficult of solution. Under these circumstances the evil would run its course, and cure itself in the regular and natural way. New York would have a Cæsar within six months. Whether he came into power at the head of the proletariat or seized the government as the conservator of property would make no difference. The city would instinctively find rest under a strong rule. The connection which exists, and necessarily can never be severed, between the modern great city and the larger State, closes this natural avenue of escape. New York City is tied to New York State, and must stumble along as best it may at its heels. It is guaranteed a government republican in form, and consequently a radical remedy for the evil must be found within that form, or it cannot be found at all, and the evil must remain uncured.

The thing sought for then is to obtain a municipal government, republican in form, in which property, as well as persons, shall be secured in its rights, at the cost of a reasonable degree only of public service on the part of the individual citizen. The facts to be dealt with are few and patent. On the one side a miscellaneous population, made up largely of foreigners, and containing an almost preponderating element of vice, ignorance, and poverty, all manipulated by a set of unscrupulous professional politicians; on the other a business community, engrossed in affairs, amassing wealth rapidly, and caring little for politics. Between the two the usual civic population, good and bad, intent on pleasure, art, literature, science, and all the myriad other pursuits of metropolitan life. The two essential points are the magnitude and the diversified pursuits of the population, and its division into those who have and those who have not.

Bearing these facts, which cannot be changed, in mind, then a few cardinal principles on which any successful municipal government, republican in form, must rest, may safely be formulated. In the first place, the executive must be strong and responsible; in the second place, property must be entitled to a representation as well as persons; in the third place, the judiciary must be as far removed as possible from the political arena. In other words, justice must be made as much as possible to descend from above. Curiously enough, each of these principles, instead of being a novelty, is but a recurrence to the ancient ways.14

These counsels, and many others like them, were not taken to heart. Since 1871 the frame of municipal government was frequently tinkered with. A comprehensive scheme of reform, proposed by a strong commission which Governor Tilden appointed in 1876, failed to be carried; and though great progress has been made in the way of better ballot and election laws and some progress in the way of civil service reform, the Spoils System still throve, repeaters still voted in large numbers, and election returns could still be manipulated by those who control the city government. There have been some excellent mayors, such as Mr. Hewitt, for the catastrophe of 1871 has never been forgotten by Tammany, whose chieftains sometimes find it prudent to run reputable candidates. No more Barnards or Cardozos have disgraced the bench, for the bar association is vigorous and watchful; and when very recently a judge who had been too subservient to a suspected state boss was nominated by the influence of that gentleman to one of the highest judicial posts in the state, the efforts of the association, well supported in the city, procured his defeat by an overwhelming majority.

Nevertheless, Tammany has held its ground; and the august dynasty of bosses goes on. When Mr. John Kelly died some time ago, the sceptre passed to the hands of the not less capable and resolute Mr. Richard Croker, once the keeper of a liquor saloon, and for some short time the holder of a clerkship under Tweed himself.15 Mr. Croker, like Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, held no civic office, but, as chairman of the Tammany subcommittee on organization, controlled all city officials, while, by the public avowal of the Speaker of the House of Assembly, during the session of 1893, “all legislation (i.e., in the state legislature at Albany) emanated from Tammany Hall, and was dictated by that great statesman, Richard Croker.”16 Ultimately Mr. Croker, like the emperors Diocletian and Charles V, abdicated the crown. He retired to the enjoyment of an estate and a racing stud in Ireland, and Mr. Charles F. Murphy reigned in his stead.

The reader will expect some further words to explain how the Tammany of today is organized, by what means it holds its power, and what sort of government it gives the city.

Each of the thirty-five “assembly districts” in the boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx annually elects a certain number of members, varying from 60 to 270, to sit on the general committee of Tammany Hall, which has long claimed to be, and at present is, the “regular” Democratic organization of the city. The committee is thus large, numbering several thousand persons, and on it there also sit the great chiefs who are above taking district work. Each district has also a “leader” who is always on the general committee; and the thirty-five leaders form the executive committee of the Hall, which has also other committees, including that on finance, whereof Mr. Croker was chairman. Each election district has, moreover, a district committee, with the “leader” (appointed by the assembly district leader) as chairman and practically as director. This committee appoints a captain for every one of the voting precincts into which the district is divided. There are about 1,100 such precincts, and these 1,100 captains are held responsible for the vote cast in their respective precincts. The captain is probably a liquor seller, and as such has opportunities of getting to know the lower class of voters. He has often some small office, and usually some little patronage, as well as some money, to bestow. In each of the thirty-five districts there is a party headquarters for the committee and the local party work, and usually also a clubhouse, where party loyalty is cemented over cards and whiskey, besides a certain number of local “associations,” called after prominent local politicians, who are expected to give an annual picinic, or other kind of treat, to their retainers. A good deal of social life, including dances and summer outings, goes on in connection with these clubs.17

Such an organization as this, with its tentacles touching every point in a vast and amorphous city, is evidently a most potent force, especially as this force is concentrated in one hand—that of the boss of the Hall. He is practically autocratic; and under him these thousands of officers, controlling probably nearly 200,000 votes, move with the precision of a machine.18 However, it has been not only in this mechanism, which may be called a legitimate method of reaching the voters, that the strength of Tammany has lain. Its control of the city government gave it endless opportunities of helping its friends, of worrying its opponents, and of enslaving the liquor dealers. Their licenses were at its mercy, for the police could proceed against or wink at breaches of the law, according to the amount of loyalty the saloonkeeper shows to the Hall. From the contributions of the liquor interest a considerable revenue was raised; more was obtained by assessing officeholders, down to the very small ones; and, perhaps, most of all by blackmailing wealthy men and corporations, who found that the city authorities have so many opportunities of interfering vexatiously with their business that they preferred to buy them off and live in peace.19 The worst form of this extortion was the actual complicity with criminals which consists in sharing the profits of crime. A fruitful source of revenue, roughly estimated at $1,000,000 a year has been derived, when the party was supreme at Albany, from legislative blackmailing in the legislature, or, rather, from undertaking to protect the great corporations from the numerous “strikers,” who threaten them there with bills. A case has been mentioned in which as much as $60,000 was demanded from a great company; and the president of another is reported to have said (1893): “Formerly we had to keep a man at Albany to buy off the ‘strikers’ one by one. This year we simply paid over a lump sum to the Ring, and they looked after our interests.” But of all their engines of power none was so elastic as their command of the administration of criminal justice. The mayor appointed the police justices, now called city magistrates, usually selecting them from certain Tammany workers, sometimes from the criminal class, not often from the legal profession. These justices were often Tammany leaders in their respective districts.20 Said a distinguished publicist of those days:

The police captain of the precinct, the justice of the police court, and the district leader of the Tammany organization are all leagued together to keep the poor in subjection and prevent the rich from interfering. Their means of annoyance for a poor man are endless. They can arrest him on small pretences, prevent his getting employment from the city, or city contractors, pursue him for allowing his goods to remain on the sidewalk, and for not cleaning off the snow promptly, tax him heavily, or let him go free. All these means of persecution are freely resorted to, so that the poor, and especially the foreign poor, are really as much in subjection to Tammany as the Italians to the Camorra. The source of it all is the character of the mayor. He appoints the police commissioners, and the commissioners appoint the captains, and he appoints the police justices also, and is responsible for their quality. When the act under which the present justices act was under consideration in the legislature, the proviso that all appointees should be lawyers of a certain standing at the bar was stricken out, so that the mayor has a completely free hand in selection, and the result is that most of those dealers, gamblers, or simple adventurers, who have lived from the age of twenty by holding small offices, such as doorkeepers or clerks of the minor city courts.

Now there is in the moral sphere of city government nothing so important as what I may call the administration of petty justice, that is, justice among the poor, ignorant, and friendless, the class who cannot pay lawyers or find bail, and especially that very large class in the cities on our eastern coast, of poor foreigners who know nothing of our laws and constitutions, and to whom the police magistrate or the police captain represent the whole government of the country, Federal, State, and municipal, who accept without a murmur any sentence which may be pronounced on them, or any denial of justice which may overtake them. They get all their notions of the national morality, and really their earliest political training, from their contact with these officers and with the district “leader.” Upon their experience with these people it depends very much what kind of citizens they will become, they and their children after them. Well, one of the very first lessons they learn is that they can have no standing in court unless they are members of the Tammany Society, or as simple voters they have a “pull,” that is, some sort of occult influence with the magistrate. In default of this their complaints are dismissed, and they are found guilty and sent up to “the Island,” or held in bail which they cannot procure, or in some manner worsted.21

With such sources of power it is not surprising that Tammany Hall should have commanded the majority of the lower and the foreign masses of New York, though it has never been shown to hold an absolute majority of all the voters of the city. Its local strength is fairly well proportioned to the character of the local population; and though there are plenty of native Americans among the rank and file as well as among the leaders, still it has been from the poorer districts, inhabited by Jews, Irish, Germans, Italians, Bohemians, that its heaviest vote has come.22 These poor people do not support it because it is vicious. They like it and think it a good thing; it satisfies their instincts of combination and good fellowship; it is often all the government they know. Mr. Merwin puts the attitude of the better sort of Tammany adherents, and particularly of the native American, when he writes:

The Tammany man dislikes and despises the Anglomania of what is called “society” in New York; he distrusts the people who compose “society” and believes them at heart out of sympathy with American principles, whereas Tammany in his view is a concrete protest against monarchy and monarchical arrangements of society. He considers that Tammany is, on the whole, a good body, that it gives New York a good government, that it stands for what is manly and patriotic. It troubles him somewhat that a few of the leaders are said to be acquiring ill-gotten gains; and if the scandal increases he will overthrow those leaders and appoint others in their stead. Meanwhile Tammany is his party, his church, his club, his totem. To be loyal to something is almost a necessity of all incorrupt natures, and especially of the Celtic nature. The Tammany man is loyal to Tammany.

In truth there is very little in New York to suggest any higher ideal. What kind of a spectacle does the city present to a man working his way up from poverty to wealth,—to one, for instance, who began as a “tough,” and ends as a capitalist? The upper class—at least the richer class, the class chiefly talked about in the papers—is, with exceptions, of course, given over to material luxury and to ostentation. It is without high aims, without sympathy, without civic pride or feeling. It has not even the personal dignity of a real aristocracy. Its sense of honour is very crude. And as this class is devoted to the selfish spending, so the business class is devoted to the remorseless getting of money.23

To this description of the attitude of the Tammany rank and file it may be added that, as few of them pay any direct taxes, they have no sense of the importance of economy in administration. True it is that they ultimately pay, through their rent and otherwise, for whatever burdens are laid on the city. But they do not perceive this—and as the lawyers say, De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio. The government of the rich by the manipulation of the votes of the poor is a new phenomenon in the world; and where the rich have little contact with the poor, and the poor little respect for the rich, happy results can hardly be expected. Apart from the abuse of the minor criminal justice, apart from the blackmailing of innocent men as well as of offenders, apart from the impunity which the payment of blackmail secures to some forms of vice,24 apart from such lapses from virtue as that of the aldermen who sold the right of laying a railroad in Broadway—twenty-two out of the twenty-four were indicted for bribery—the actual administration of the city injured and offended the ordinary citizen less than might have been expected. The police force, often as they were made the engine of extortion or the accomplice in vice, are an efficient force, though harsh in their methods, and they keep life and property secure.25 The fire department is well managed; the water supply is copious; the public schools have been usually, though not invariably, “kept out of politics.” If the government has been wasteful in details, it was seldom conspicuously extravagant; and the rulers who grew rich through it have done so by indirect methods, and not out of the city treasury. Scandals like those of Tweed’s time have not recurred. The city debt was reduced between 1876 and 1894 to $104,000,000, though it must be added that the swift increase of the wealth of the city enabled a rate of taxation moderate for the United States ($1.85 to $1.79 on the valuation of property) to produce an immense revenue.26 Considering what by origin, by training, by environment, and by tastes and habits, are the persons who rule the city through Tammany—considering the criminal element among them and their close association with the liquor saloons, it may excite surprise that the government, corrupt as it has been, was not also more wasteful.27

Those who have grasped the singular condition of New York and its population, will find it less surprising that this government should have proved itself so hard to overthrow. In 1890 a great effort to overthrow it was made. A section of the Democrats leagued itself with the Republicans to bring out what was understood to be “a joint ticket,” while the independent reformers blessed the alliance, and endorsed its candidates.28 Success had been hoped for; but Tammany routed its adversaries by 23,000 votes. It turned out that about 30,000 Republicans had not voted—some because their bosses, secretly friendly to Tammany, did not canvass them, some because they did not care to vote for anything but a Republican ticket, some out of sheer indifference and laziness. This proved that strongly entrenched as Tammany is, Tammany could be overthrown if the “good citizens” were to combine for municipal reform, setting aside for local purposes those distinctions of national party which have nothing to do with city issues. The rulers of “the wigwam,” as Tammany is affectionately called, do not care for national politics, except as a market in which the vote they control may be sold. That the citizens of New York should continue to rivet on their necks the yoke of a club which is almost as much a business concern as one of their own dry-goods stores, by dividing forces which, if united, would break the tyranny that has lasted for two generations—this indeed seems strange, yet perhaps no stranger than other instances of the power of habit, of laziness, of names and party spirit. In 1894, Tammany was defeated, and the improved government that for some years followed made the “better element” see more clearly what they might gain by reform. Victory came at last in 1902, by which time Greater New York, consisting of four boroughs added to the old city, had come into being under the new charter. In the two succeeding elections candidates for the mayoralty supported by Tammany were successful; but these elections are too near the time at which I write to be proper subjects for discussion here. Suffice it to say that the mayors between 1902 and 1913 gave the city a much purer and more efficient administration than it had enjoyed before, and that in 1913 a split in the party due to a quarrel between the boss and the governor of the state brought upon Tammany a crushing disaster. Although there are departments of the government, such as the police and the police magistrates, that may still be open to grave criticism, the sky of New York was in 1914 brighter than it had been for many years, bright enough to encourage the hope that the clouds which remain will ultimately pass away.

chapter 89

The Philadelphia Gas Ring

Philadelphia, though it has not maintained that primacy among American cities which in the days of the Revolution was secured to it by its population and its central position, is still one of the greatest cities in America, with a population of about a million.1 Though the element of recent immigrants is much smaller than in New York or Boston or Chicago,2 the old Quaker character has died out, or remains perceptible only in a certain air of staid respectability which marks the city as compared with the luxury of New York and the tumultuous rush of Chicago. It has of late years been strongly Republican in its politics, partly because that party obtained complete ascendency during the war, partly because Pennsylvania is a Protectionist state, owing to her manufacturing industries, and Philadelphia, as the stronghold of protection, is attached to the party which upholds those doctrines. During the Civil War the best citizens were busily absorbed in its great issues, and both then and for some time after, welcomed all the help that could be given to their party by any men who knew how to organize the voters and bring them up to the polls; while at the same time their keen interest in national questions made them inattentive to municipal affairs. Accordingly, the local control and management of the party fell into the hands of obscure citizens, men who had their own ends to serve, their own fortunes to make, but who were valuable to the party because they kept it in power through their assiduous work among the lower class of voters. These local leaders formed combinations with party managers in the state legislature which sits at Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and with a clique managed from Washington by a well-known senatorial family, which for a long time controlled the Pennsylvania vote in Republican National Conventions and in Congress. They were therefore strongly entrenched, having powerful allies, both in state politics and in federal politics. Since they commanded the city vote, both these sets of politicians were obliged to conciliate them; while the commercial interests of Philadelphia in the maintenance of a protective tariff pressed so strongly on the minds of her leading merchants and manufacturers as to make them unwilling to weaken the Republican party in either state or city by any quarrel with those who commanded the bulk of its heavy vote.

The obscure citizens of whom I have spoken had begun by acquiring influence in the primaries, and then laid their hands on the minor, ultimately also on the more important, city offices. They sometimes placed men of good social standing in the higher posts, but filled the inferior ones, which were very numerous, with their own creatures. The water department, the highway department, the tax department, the city treasurer’s department, the county commissioner’s office, fell into their hands. A mayor appointed by them filled the police with their henchmen till it became a completely partisan force. But the centre of their power was the Gas Trust, administered by trustees, one of whom, by his superior activity and intelligence, secured the command of the whole party machinery, and reached the high position of recognized boss of Philadelphia. This gentleman, Mr. James M‘Manes, having gained influence among the humbler voters, was appointed one of the Gas Trustees, and soon managed to bring the whole of that department under his control. It employed (I was told) about two thousand persons, received large sums, and gave out large contracts. Appointing his friends and dependants to the chief places under the Trust, and requiring them to fill the ranks of its ordinary workmen with persons on whom they could rely, the boss acquired the control of a considerable number of votes and of a large annual revenue. He and his confederates then purchased a controlling interest in the principal horsecar (street tramway) company of the city, whereby they became masters of a large number of additional voters. All these voters were of course expected to act as “workers,” i.e., they occupied themselves with the party organization of the city, they knew the meanest streets and those who dwelt therein, they attended and swayed the primaries, and when an election came round, they canvassed and brought up the voters. Their power, therefore, went far beyond their mere voting strength, for a hundred energetic “workers” mean at least a thousand votes. With so much strength behind them, the Gas Ring, and Mr. M‘Manes at its head, became not merely indispensable to the Republican party in the city, but in fact its chiefs, able therefore to dispose of the votes of all those who were employed permanently or temporarily in the other departments of the city government—a number which one hears estimated as high as twenty thousand.3 Nearly all the municipal offices were held by their nominees. They commanded a majority in the Select Council and Common Council. They managed the nomination of members of the state legislature. Even the federal officials in the customhouse and post office were forced into a dependent alliance with them, because their support was so valuable to the leaders in federal politics that it had to be purchased by giving them their way in city affairs. There was no getting at the Trust, because “its meetings were held in secret, its published annual report to the city councils was confused and unintelligible, and (as was subsequently proved) actually falsified.”4 Mr. M‘Manes held the payrolls under lock and key, so that no one could know how many employees there were, and it was open to him to increase their number to any extent. The city councils might indeed ask for information, but he was careful to fill the city councils with his nominees, and to keep them in good humour by a share of whatever spoil there might be, and still more by a share of the patronage.

That so vast and solid an edifice of power, covering the whole of a great city, should be based on the control of a single department like the Gas Trust may excite surprise. But it must be remembered that when a number of small factions combine to rule a party, that faction which is a little larger, or better organized, or better provided with funds, than the others, obtains the first place among them, and may keep it so long as it gives to the rest a fair share of the booty, and directs the policy of the confederates with firmness and skill. Personal capacity, courage, resolution, foresight, the judicious preference of the substance of power to its display, are qualities whose union in one brain is so uncommon in any group of men that their possessor acquires an ascendency which lasts until he provokes a revolt by oppression, or is seen to be leading his party astray. And by the admission even of his enemies, Mr. M‘Manes possessed these qualities. His origin was humble, his education scanty, but he atoned for these deficiencies by tact and knowledge of the world, with a quietly decorous demeanour veiling an imperious will. He knew how to rule without challenging opposition by the obtrusion of his own personality, nor does he seem to have used his power to plunder the city for his own behoof. The merit of the system was that it perpetuated itself, and in fact grew stronger the longer it stood. Whenever an election was in prospect, the ward primaries of the Republican party were thronged by the officers and workpeople of the Gas Trust and other city departments, who secured the choice of such delegates as the ring had previously selected in secret conclave. Sometimes, especially in the wards inhabited by the better sort of citizens, this “official list” of delegates was resisted by independent men belonging to the Republican party; but as the chairman was always in the interest of the ring, he rarely failed so to jockey these independents that even if they happened to have the majority present they could not carry their candidates. Of course it seldom happened that they could bring a majority with them, while argument would have been wasted on the crowd of employees and their friends with which the room was filled, and who were bound, some by the tenure of their office, others by the hope of getting office or work, to execute the behests of their political masters. The delegates chosen were usually officeholders, with a sprinkling of public works contractors, liquor dealers, always a potent factor in ward politics, and office expectants. For instance, the convention of 13th January 1881, for nominating a candidate for mayor, consisted of 199 delegates, 86 of whom were connected with some branch of the city government, 9 were members of the city councils, 5 were police magistrates, 4 constables, and 23 policemen, while of the rest some were employed in some other city department, and some others were the known associates and dependants of the ring. These delegates, assembled in convention of the party, duly went through the farce of selecting and voting for persons already determined on by the ring as candidates for the chief offices. The persons so selected thereby became the authorized candidates of the party, for whom every good party man was expected to give his vote. Disgusted he might be to find a person unknown, or known only for evil, perhaps a fraudulent bankrupt, or a broken-down bar keeper, proposed for his acceptance, but his only alternative being to vote for the Democratic nominee, who was probably no better, he submitted, and thus the party was forced to ratify the choice of the boss. The possession of the great city offices gave the members of the ring the means not only of making their own fortunes, but of amassing a large reserve fund to be used for “campaign purposes.” Many of these offices were paid by fees and not by salary. Five officers were at one time in the receipt of an aggregate of $223,000, or an average of $44,600 each. One, the collector of delinquent taxes, received nearly $200,000 a year. Many others had the opportunity, by giving out contracts for public works on which they received large commissions, of enriching themselves almost without limit, because there was practically no investigation of their accounts.5 The individual official was of course required to contribute to the secret party funds in proportion to his income, and while he paid in thousands of dollars from his vast private gains, assessments were levied on the minor employees down to the very policemen. On one occasion each member of the police force was required to pay $25, and some afterwards a further tax of $10, for party purposes. Anyone who refused, and much more, of course, anyone who asserted his right to vote as he pleased, was promptly dismissed. The fund was spent in what is called “fixing things up,” in canvassing, in petty bribery, in keeping barrooms open and supplying drink to the workers who resort thither, and, at election times, in bringing in armies of professional personators and repeaters from Washington, Baltimore, and other neighbouring cities, to swell the vote for the ring nominees. These men, some of them, it is said, criminals, others servants in the government departments in the national capital, could of course have effected little if the election officials and the police had looked sharply after them. But those who presided at the voting places were mostly in the plot, being ring men and largely city employees, while the police—and herein not less than in their voting power lies the value of a partisan police—had instructions not to interfere with the strangers, but allow them to vote as often as they please, while hustling away keen-eyed opponents.6

This kind of electioneering is costly, for secrecy must be well paid for, and in other ways also the ring was obliged to spend heavily. Regarding each municipal department chiefly as a means of accumulating subservient electors, it was always tempted to “create new voting stock” (to use the technical expression), i.e., to appoint additional employees. This meant additional salaries, so the taxpayers had the satisfaction of knowing that the sums they paid went to rivet on their necks the yoke of the bosses, just as a Greek tyrant exacted from the citizens money to hire the mercenaries who garrisoned the Acropolis. And there was of course a vast deal of peculation in nearly all the departments; because clerks who had it in their power to disclose damaging secrets had little to fear, either from a superior or from the councilmen who had procured their appointment. Thus the debt of the city rose rapidly. In 1860 it stood at about $20,000,000 (£4,000,000). In 1881 it had reached $70,000,000 (£14,000,000). Taxation rose in proportion, till in 1881 it amounted to between one-fourth and one-third of the net income from the property on which it was assessed, although that property was rated at nearly its full value.7 Yet withal the city was badly paved, badly cleansed, badly supplied with gas (for which a high price was charged), and with water.8 That such a burden should have been borne, with so little to show for it, was all the more surprising, because in Philadelphia there is a larger number of well-to-do working people, owning the houses they lived in, than in any other city of the Union.9 It might have been expected, therefore, that since the evils of heavy rating and bad administration pressed directly on an unusually large number of electors, the discontent would have been universal, the demand for reform overwhelming.10

But how was reform to be effected? Three methods presented themselves. One was to proceed against the gas trustees and other peculators in the courts of the state. But to make out a case the facts must first be ascertained, the accounts examined. Now the city departments did not publish all their accounts, or published them in a misleading and incomplete form. The powers which should have scrutinized them and compelled a fuller disclosure, were vested in the councils of the city, acting by their standing committees. But these councils were mainly composed of members or nominees of the ring, who had a direct interest in suppressing inquiry, because they either shared the profits of dishonesty, or had placed their own relatives and friends in municipal employment by bargains with the peculating heads of departments. They therefore refused to move, and voted down the proposals for investigation made by a few of their more public-spirited colleagues.11

Another method was to turn out the corrupt officials at the next election. The American system of short terms and popular elections was originally due to a distrust of the officials, and expressly designed to enable the people to recall misused powers. The astuteness of professional politicians had, however, made it unavailable. Good citizens could not hope to carry candidates of their own against the tainted nominees of the ring, because the latter having the “straight” or “regular” party nominations would command the vote of the great mass of ordinary party men, so that the only effect of voting against them would at best be to let in the candidates of the opposite, i.e., the Democratic, party. Those candidates were usually no better than the Republican ring nominees, so where was the gain? And the same reason, joined to party hostility, forbade good Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates. The Democrats, to be sure, might have taken advantage of Republican discontent by nominating really good men, who would in that case have been carried by the addition of the Republican “bolting” vote to the regular Democratic vote. But the Democratic wire-pullers, being mostly men of the same stamp as the Gas Ring, did not seek a temporary gain at the expense of a permanent disparagement of their own class. Political principles are the last thing which the professional city politician cares for. It was better worth the while of the Democratic chiefs to wait for their turn, and in the meantime to get something out of occasional bargains with their (nominal) Republican opponents, than to strengthen the cause of good government at the expense of the professional class.12

The third avenue to reform lay through the action of the state legislature. It might have ordered an inquiry into the municipal government of Philadelphia, or passed a statute providing for the creation of a better system. But this avenue was closed even more completely than the other two by the control which the city ring exercised over the state legislature. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives was notoriously a tainted body, and the Senate no better, or perhaps, as some think, worse. The Philadelphia politicians, partly by their command of the Philadelphia members, partly by the other inducements at their command, were able to stop all proceedings in the legislature hostile to themselves, and did in fact, as will appear presently, frequently balk the efforts which the reformers made in that quarter. It was enough for their purpose to command one house; indeed, it was practically enough to command the committee of that one house to which a measure is referred. The facilities for delay are such that a reforming bill can be stifled without the need of open opposition.

This was the condition of the Quaker City with its 850,000 people; these the difficulties reformers had to encounter. Let us see how they proceeded.

In 1870, a bill was passed by the state legislature at Harrisburg, at the instigation of the city ring, then in the first flush of youthful hope and energy, creating a Public Buildings Commission for the city of Philadelphia, a body with an unlimited term of office, with power to enlarge its numbers, and fill up vacancies among its members, to tax the city and to spend the revenue so raised on buildings, practically without restriction or supervision. When this act, which had been passed in one day through both houses, without having been even printed, came to the knowledge of the better class of citizens, alarm arose, and an agitation was set on foot for its abrogation. A public meeting was held in March 1871, a committee formed, with instructions to proceed to Harrisburg, and have the act repealed. The committee went to Harrisburg and urged members of both houses to support a repealing bill introduced into the state Senate. In May this bill passed the Senate, in which there was then a Democratic majority, five Republican members voting for it. However, a committee of the (Republican) House of Representatives reported against the repeal, influenced by interested persons from Philadelphia, and (as is generally believed) influenced by arguments weightier than words; so the Commission was maintained in force. The incident had, however, so far roused a few of the better class of Republicans, that they formed a Municipal Reform Association, whose career has been summarized for me by an eminent citizen of Philadelphia, in the words which follow:

The Association laboured earnestly to check the tide of misgovernment. Its task was a difficult one, for the passions aroused by the war were still vigorous, the reconstruction in progress in the South kept partisanship at a white heat, and fealty to party obligations was regarded as a sacred duty by nearly all classes. Consequently it had no newspaper support to depend upon, and as a rule it met with opposition from the leaders of both political organizations. Moreover, the laws regulating the registry of voters and the conduct of elections had been so framed as to render fraud easy and detection difficult. Undeterred by these obstacles, the Association set itself vigorously to work; it held public meetings, it issued addresses and tracts, it placed tickets in the field consisting of the better candidates of either party, and when neither had made passable nominations for an office it put forward those of its own. It continued in active existence for three or four years, and accomplished much of what it set out to do. Occasionally it succeeded in defeating specially objectionable candidates, and in electing better men to the city councils; the increase in the public debt was checked, the credit of the city was improved, and economy began to be practised in some of the departments; salaries were substituted for fees in the public offices; the election laws were revised and honest elections became possible; prosecutions were instituted against offenders, and enough convictions were secured to serve as a wholesome warning. The services of the Association were especially apparent in two directions. It contributed largely to the agitations which secured the calling of a convention in 1873 to revise the State constitution, it had a salutary influence with the convention, and it aided in obtaining the ratification of the new constitution by the people. Still more important was its success in arousing the public conscience, and in training a class of independent voters who gradually learned to cast their ballots wihout regard to so-called party fealty. It thus opened the way for all subsequent reforms, and when its members, wearied with its thankless task, one by one withdrew, and the Association disbanded, they could feel that not only was the condition of the city materially improved, but that their successors in the Sisyphæan labour would have a lighter burden and a less rugged ascent to climb. One important result of the attention which they had drawn to municipal mismanagement was the passage of an act of legislature, under which, in 1877, the governor of the State appointed a commission of eleven persons to devise a plan for the government of cities. This commission made a report proposing valuable improvements, and submitted it, with a bill embodying their suggestions, to the State legislature in 1878. The legislature, however, at the bidding of the Rings, for Pittsburg and other cities have their Rings as well as Philadelphia, smothered the bill, and all efforts to pass it failed till 1885.

In the course of 1880, the horizon began to clear.13 Several honest and outspoken men who had found their way into the two councils of the city, denounced the prevailing corruption, and by demands of inquiry began to rouse the citizens. A correspondent of a New York paper obtained facts about the management of the Gas Trust which, when published, told seriously on opinion. At the November election, while Philadelphia cast a heavy vote in favour of General Garfield as Republican candidate for the presidency, and for the Republican nominees for the offices of state auditor general, and judge of the state Supreme Court, she returned as city controller, a young Democrat, who having, with the help of the Municipal Reform Association, found his way into that office at the last preceding election, had signalized himself by uprightness and independence. The Republican bosses did their utmost against him, but the vote of independents among the Republicans, joined to that of the Democratic party (whose bosses, although secretly displeased with his conduct, did not openly throw him over), carried him in. Thirteen days afterwards, under the impulse of this struggle, an energetic citizen convened a meeting of leading merchants to set on foot a movement for choosing good men at the elections due in February 1881. This meeting created a committee of one hundred businessmen, including a large number of persons bearing the oldest and most respected names in Philadelphia. All were Republicans, and at first they endeavoured to effect their purposes by means, and within the limits of, the Republican party. They prepared a declaration of principles, containing their programme of municipal reform, and resolved to support no candidate who would not sign it. Soon the time came for making nominations for the three offices to be filled up, viz., those of mayor, receiver of taxes, and city solicitor. For mayor, the “regular” Republican party, controlled by Mr. M‘Manes, nominated Mr. Stokley, who was then in office, a man against whom no fraud could be charged, but whose management of the police force and subservience to the boss had made him suspected by earnest reformers. At first, in the belief that he was prepared to subscribe their declaration, the One Hundred gave him their nomination; but when it turned out that he, influenced by the ring, refused to do so, they withdrew their “indorsement,” and perceived that the time had come for a bolder course. Since they must resist the ring Republicans, they invited the cooperation of the Democratic party in choosing a good man. The novelty of the circumstances, and the opportunity of doing a good stroke for their party and their city at once, brought to the front the best element among the Democrats. Overruling their bosses by a sudden movement, the Democratic convention nominated Mr. King for the mayoralty, a bold and honest man, whom, though a Democrat, the Committee of One Hundred promptly accepted. For the not less important office of receiver of taxes, the One Hundred had nominated Mr. Hunter, a Republican, who had approved his public spirit by upright service in the common council. The ring Republicans had taken for their candidate an unknown man, supposed to be a creature of Mr. M‘Manes; and everything now turned on the conduct of the Democratic nominating convention. It was strongly urged by the feeling of the people to accept Mr. Hunter. But the Democratic bosses had no mind to help a reformer, and even among the better men, the old dislike to supporting a person belonging to the opposite party was strong. A passionate struggle in the Democratic convention, round whose doors a vast and eager crowd had gathered, resulted in the carrying by a small majority of a regular party candidate named M‘Grath against Mr. Hunter. Thereupon the delegates who supported Hunter seceded, and marched, escorted and cheered by excited crowds, to the rooms of the One Hundred, where they organized themselves afresh as an independent convention, and nominated Hunter. Immense enthusiasm was evoked in both parties by this novel and unexpectedly bold action. Independent Democrats organized clubs and committees in Hunter’s cause, and the movement spread so fast that ten days before the election, M‘Grath retired, leaving the regular Democrats free to cast their votes for the Republican Hunter, along with the Democratic King. Only one chance was now left to the Gas Ring—the lavish expenditure of money, and the resort to election frauds. They assessed the police, about 1,300 in number, $20 a head to replenish the campaign fund, levying assessments on the other city departments also. Preparations for repeating and ballot box stuffing were made as in former days, but the energy of the One Hundred, who, while they issued a circular to clergymen of all denominations requesting them to preach sermons on the duty of electors, issued also notices threatening prosecution against anyone guilty of an election fraud, and organized a large force of volunteer citizens to look after the police, so much frightened the ringsters and their dependents, that the voting was conducted with fairness and purity. The excitement on the polling day was unprecedented in municipal politics, and the success of the reform candidates who were chosen, King by a majority of six thousand, Hunter by twenty thousand, was welcomed with transports of joy. Astræa had returned—the “City of Independence” was again a city of freedom.

The Committee of One Hundred, to whose efforts the victory was mainly due, was kept on foot to carry on and perfect the work of reform. It recommended candidates at the spring and fall elections during the three years that followed, obtaining for them a measure of success encouraging, no doubt, yet less complete than had been expected. It retained counsel to aid in a suit instituted against the gas trustees, which resulted in disclosing scandalous waste and fraud, and has led to a great improvement in the management of that department. It induced the state legislature to reduce the salaries of a number of overpaid officials, and to place on a permanent basis the salaries of judges which had hitherto been voted annually. The mayor, whom it had carried in 1881, stopped the assessment of the police for “campaign purposes,” and rigidly restrained them from joining in the nominating conventions or interfering with voters at the polls. The tax office was reorganized by the new receiver, and the income which its employees depleted turned into the city treasury. The system of banking city monies, which had been used for political purposes, was reformed under an ordinance of the city councils, secured by the efforts of the committee. The lists of voters, which had been carelessly and sometimes corruptly made up, were set to rights, and capable men appointed assessors instead of the ward politicians, often illiterate, to whom this duty had been previously entrusted. An inspector of highways was engaged by the committee to report cases in which contractors were failing to do the work in repairing streets and drains for which they were paid, and frauds were unearthed by which the city had been robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Gross abuses in the management of the city almshouse and hospital were revealed; a new administration was installed, which in its first year saved the city $80,000, while the conviction and imprisonment of the chief offenders struck wholesome terror into evildoers in other departments. Finally, the committee undertook the prosecution of a large number of persons accused of fraud, repeating, personation, violence, tampering with ballot boxes, and other election offences, and by convicting some and driving others from the city, so much reduced these misdemeanours that in the end of 1883 the city elections were pronounced to show a clean bill of health.14

Work so various and so difficult cost the members of the Committee of One Hundred, who were nearly all men actively engaged in business, and had passed a self-denying ordinance binding themselves to accept no personal political advantage, an infinitude of time and trouble. Accordingly, when they found that the candidates, whom they had recommended at the election of February 1884, had been rejected in favour of other candidates, who made similar professions of reform, but seemed less likely, from their past history, to fulfil those professions, they determined to wind up and dissolve the committee. It had done great things and its failure to carry its candidates at this last election was due partly to the intrusion into municipal politics of the national issue of the protective tariff (the most burning of all questions to Philadelphians), partly to that languor which creeps over voters who fancy that by doing their duty strenuously for some years they have mortally wounded the power of corruption and need not keep up the fight till it is stone dead.

The situation was thus shortly afterwards summed up by competent writers:

The committee of One Hundred fought the Ring at every point and at all points for city and county officers, the council, and the legislature, the plan being to unite for the nominations of the two great parties and endorse one or the other of the candidates, or even nominate candidates of their own. They sent tickets to every citizen, and created the class of “vest-pocket voters”—men who come to the polls with their tickets made up, to the confusion of “the boys.” They changed for a while the complexion of councils, elected a reform mayor and receiver of taxes, caused the repeal of the infamous Delinquent Tax Collections Bill, and the equally notorious and obnoxious Recorder’s Bill, and generally made a more decent observance of the law necessary throughout the city. In its nature, however, the remedy was esoteric and revolutionary, and therefore necessarily ephemeral. It could not retain the spoils system and thereby attract the workers. Its candidates, when elected, often betrayed it and went over to the regulars, who, they foresaw, had more staying qualities. Its members became tired of the thankless task of spending time and money in what must be a continuous, unending battle. The people became restive, and refused their support to what jarred on their conservative ideas and what they were pleased to call the dictation of an autocratic, self-constituted body. The cry was raised: “Who made thee a ruler and judge over us?”

In 1883 the committee’s candidate for controller was defeated in a pitched battle, and the following spring the reform mayor was beaten by over 7000 votes by the most advanced type of a machine politician, who has since been impeached by his own party in Common Council for pecuniary malfeasance.15

Since 1884 there have been many changes in the city administration, which I touch on but briefly, because it is to the Gas Ring episode that this chapter is devoted. A bill for reforming municipal government by the enactment of a new city charter, approved by the One Hundred, came before the state legislature in 1883. It was there smothered by the professionals at the instance of the Gas Ring. When it reappeared in the legislature of 1885 circumstances were more favourable. The relations between the state boss of Pennsylvania and the city ring headed by Boss M‘Manes were strained. The state boss seems, while wishing to cripple the city ring by cutting off some of its patronage, to have thought that it would be well to conciliate the good citizens of Philadelphia by giving his powerful support to a reform measure. He was the more drawn to this course because the mayor of Philadelphia, whose appointing power would be enlarged by the bill, was, although not a “high-class politician,” far from friendly to the Gas Trust. Long discussions of the bill in the press and at meetings had produced some effect even on the state legislature at Harrisburg; nor was there wanting in that body a small section of good members willing to help reform forward. Many leaders and most newspapers had in the course of the discussions been led to commit themselves to an approval of the bill, while not expecting it to pass. Thus, in 1885, the opposition in the legislature ceased to be open and direct, and came to turn on the question when the bill, if passed, should take effect. Its promoters prudently agreed to let its operation be delayed till 1887; and having thus “squared” some of their opponents, and outmanœuvred others, they ran it through. Public opinion and a righteous cause counted for something in this triumph, but even public opinion and righteousness might have failed but for the feud between Mr. M‘Manes and the state boss.

The new city charter did some good. By bringing gas management under the control of the city executive, it extinguished the separate gas trust, and therewith quenched the light of Mr. M‘Manes, who ceased to be formidable when his patronage departed, and thereafter became “a black number,” free to devote his interest to theological questions, for he was a champion of orthodoxy in his church. Municipal administration gained by the concentration of power and responsibility in the mayor and the executive heads of departments whom he appoints. The councils, however, remained bad bodies, few of the members respected, many of them corrupt. They continued to be nominated by a clique of machine politicians, and this clique they obeyed, paying some regard to the interests of their respective wards, but none to those of the city. Reformers thought that to give them a salary might lessen their temptations, since it seemed impossible to raise their tone. In the stead of Mr. M‘Manes, the state boss (a man even less trusted by the good citizens) reigned for a time through his lieutenants; and so tight was his grip of the city, that when, in 1890, the suspicions he aroused had provoked a popular uprising which overthrew his nominee for the state governorship, turning over to the other party some thirty thousand votes, he was still able to hold Philadelphia—rich, educated, staid, pious Philadelphia—by a large majority. Elections continued to be tainted with fraud and bribery; the politicians still refused the enactment of adequate laws for a secret ballot and the publication of election expenses. A menacing power was wielded by the great local corporations, including the railroad and streetcar companies. Whether by the use of money, or, as is thought more probable, by influencing the votes of their employees, or by both methods, these corporations seemed to hold the councils in the hollow of their hands. One of them secured from the city legislature, at a merely nominal figure, a public franchise, which, while it made the streets more dangerous, added to the market price of its stock about $6,600,000. And this was done by a two-thirds majority over the veto of the mayor, in the teeth of an active agitation conducted by the most worthy citizens. Against scandals like this the best city charter furnishes little protection. They can be cured only by getting upright councils, and these again can be secured only by having free instead of cooked nominations, honest elections, and a far more constantly active interest in the welfare of city than the mass of the voters have hitherto evinced. Philadelphia is not the only city in which private corporations have proved more than a match for public interests, and in which such corporations have netted immense profits, that ought to have gone to reduce the burdens of the people.16

Against these evils strenuous campaigns have been from time to time conducted by various associations of “good citizens,” some permanent, some formed for a special occasion. These associations, of which it is enough to say that they have been worthy successors of the Committee of One Hundred, have included nearly all those whom high personal character is united to a sense of public duty. But their members have hitherto formed so small a proportion of the voters that it is only when some glaringly bad candidate is nominated or outrageous job perpetrated that their efforts tell in an election. In 1912, however, they gained a sudden victory, carrying as mayor a veteran reformer who had been one of the foremost fighters in February 1881.

The history of all these efforts and of the failure to effect any thorough and permanent improvement in municipal conditions in this great city would stretch to a volume, were it given with the fulness needed to explain why the forces that make for misgovernment have proved so exceptionally strong. The episode I have selected is enough for the present purpose.

The European reader may have found four things surprising in the foregoing narrative—the long-suffering of the taxpayers up till 1881; the strength of party loyalty, even in municipal affairs where no political principle is involved; the extraordinary efforts required to induce the voters to protect their pockets by turning a gang of plunderers out of office; and the tendency of the old evils to reappear as soon as the ardour of the voters cools. He will be all the more surprised when he learns that most of the corrupt leaders in Philadelphia have been not men of foreign birth, but Americans born and bred, and that in none of the larger cities was the percentage of recent immigrants so small. The general causes of municipal misgovernment have been already set forth, but it may be well to repeat that the existence of universal suffrage in a gigantic city imposes a vast amount of work on those who would win an election. Nothing but a very complete and very active ward organization, an organization which knows every house in every street, and drops upon the new voter from Europe as soon as residence and the oath have made him a citizen, can grapple with the work of bringing up these multitudes to the poll. It was their command of this local organization, their practice in working it, the fact that their employees were a trained and disciplined body whose chief business was to work it—services in the gas or water or some other department being a mere excuse for paying the “workers” a salary—that gave the Gas Ring and its astute head their hold upon the voting power of the city, which all the best Republicans, with frequent aid from the Democrats, found it so hard to shake. It was the cohesion of this organization, the indifference of the bulk of its members to issues of municipal policy and their responsiveness to party names and cries, that enabled the henchmen of the state boss to reestablish a selfish tyranny and with impunity to sacrifice the interests of the city to those of rich and vote-controlling corporations.

The moral of the whole story is, however, best given in the words of four eminent Philadelphians. I multiply testimonies because Philadelphia is a peculiarly instructive instance of the evils which everywhere infect municipal government. Her social and economic conditions are far more favourable than those of New York or Chicago, and the persistence of those evils in her is, therefore, a more alarming symptom than the grosser scandals which have disgraced those cities with their masses of recent immigrants.

Two of them wrote me as follows in 1888. One said:

Those who study these questions most critically and think the most carefully fear more for the Republic from the indifference of the better classes than the ignorance of the lower classes. We hear endless talk about the power of the Labour vote, the Irish vote, the German vote, the Granger vote, but no combination at the ballot box today is as numerous or powerful as the stay-at-home vote. The sceptre which is stronger to command than any other is passed by unnoticed, not because outworn in conflict, but because rusted and wasted in neglect. The primary, the caucus, and the convention are the real rulers of America, and the hand which guides these is the master. Here again the stay-at-home vote is still more responsible. In New York City in 1885 there were 266,000 voters; of these 201,000 voted at the regular election and between 20,000 and 25,000 voted at the primary. This proportion would hold good the country over, and it appears that one out of every four does not vote at all, and nine out of every ten do not attend the primaries. It can therefore easily be seen that it is very easy to control the primaries, and granting strong party fealty how difficult it is to run an independent ticket against the machine.

The other, Mr. Henry C. Lea, the distinguished historian, said:

Your expression of surprise at the mal-administration of Philadelphia is thoroughly justified. In existing social conditions it would be difficult to conceive of a large community of which it would appear more safe to predicate judicious self-government than ours. Nowhere is there to be found a more general diffusion of property or a higher average standard of comfort and intelligence—nowhere so large a proportion of landowners bearing the burden of direct taxation, and personally interested in the wise and honest expenditure of the public revenue. In these respects it is almost an ideal community in which to work out practical results from democratic theories. I have often speculated as to the causes of failure without satisfying myself with any solution. It is not attributable to manhood suffrage, for in my reform labours I have found that the most dangerous enemies of reform have not been the ignorant and poor but men of wealth, of high social position and character, who had nothing personally to gain from political corruption, but who showed themselves as unfitted to exercise the right of suffrage as the lowest proletariat, by allowing their partisanship to enlist them in the support of candidates notoriously bad who happened by control of party machinery to obtain the “regular” nominations.

The nearest approach which I can make to an explanation is that the spirit of party blinds many, while still more are governed by the mental inertia which renders independent thought the most laborious of tasks, and the selfish indolence which shrinks from interrupting the daily routine of avocations. In a constituency so enormous the most prolonged and strenuous effort is required to oppose the ponderous and complicated machinery of party organization, which is always in the hands of professional politicians who obtain control over it by a process of natural selection, and who thus are perfectly fitted for the work. Recalcitrants are raw militia who take the field with overwhelming odds against them, both in numbers and discipline. Even though they may gain an occasional victory, their enthusiasm exhausts itself and they return to more congenial labours, while the “regular” is always on duty, and knows, with Philip II, that time and he can overcome any other two.

A third wrote in 1893:

The great majority of the voters take no interest in local politics. They refuse to attend the party primaries, and can rarely be induced to do more than spend a few minutes once a year in voting at city elections. Many refuse to vote at all, or yield only to corrupt inducements or to the solicitations of interested friends. The result is that combinations of unworthy leaders and mercenary henchmen are enabled to control the nominating conventions of both parties; and when election day comes, the people can do nothing but choose between two tickets dictated by equally corrupt men and nominated by similar methods.

A fourth, writing in 1894, observed:

The most characteristic feature of the situation is the supremacy of the Republican party, which has an immense majority in the city. Politically, therefore, the controlling party managers and the class from which reform leaders might be expected to come are in accord (manufacturing interests being the most important); and the advantages to be derived by persons in business in a large way from standing well with the managers of the dominant party are sufficiently great to check in no small degree individual inclination to strive for better conditions. As elsewhere in America, it is not the natural leaders in the community, the men who have succeeded in business or in the professions, who are party leaders, but men who are of no importance in any other connection. This fastens upon us an impersonal rule, those who exercise it not being influenced by public opinion, which would certainly act as a restraint upon men of standing. . . . The councils are dominated by the party managers who nominated them, and corporations who pay wages, in one way or another, to a considerable portion of the members.

When these comments were written Philadelphia was erecting a magnificent city hall, the loftiest building of its kind in the United States, with a tower, 510 feet in height, which far overtops Cologne Cathedral and the Pyramid of Cheops and St. Peter’s at Rome. The thoughts of the traveller who is taken to admire it naturally turn to what goes on beneath its ample roof, and he asks whether the day will arrive when Philadelphian voters will take to heart the painful lessons of the past, and when the officials who reign in this municipal palace will become worthy of so superb a dwelling and of the city where the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution first saw the light. His Philadelphian friends reply that such a day will doubtless arrive. But though the situation was better in 1913 than it had been for many a long year, they have seen too many disappointments to feel sure that Astræa has “come to stay.”

chapter 90

Kearneyism in California

I.

The Character of California

What America is to Europe, what Western America is to Eastern, that California is to the other Western states. The characteristics of a new and quickly developed colonial civilization are all strongly marked. It is thoroughly American, but most so in those points wherein the Old World differs from the New. Large fortunes are swiftly made and not less swiftly spent. Changes of public sentiment are sudden and violent. The most active minds are too much absorbed in great business enterprises to attend to politics; the inferior men are frequently reckless and irresponsible; the masses are impatient, accustomed to blame everything and everybody but themselves for the slow approach of the millennium, ready to try instant, even if perilous, remedies for a present evil.

These features belong more or less to all the newer and rougher commonwealths. Several others are peculiar to California—a state on which I dwell the more willingly because it is in many respects the most striking in the whole Union, and has more than any other the character of a great country, capable of standing alone in the world. It has a superb climate, noble scenery, immense wealth in its fertile soil as well as in its minerals and forests. Nature is nowhere more imposing nor her beauties more varied.

It grew up, after the cession by Mexico and the discovery of gold, like a gourd in the night. A great population had gathered before there was any regular government to keep it in order, much less any education or social culture to refine it. The wildness of that time passed into the blood of the people, and has left them more tolerant of violent deeds, more prone to interferences with, or supersessions of, regular law, than are the people of most parts of the Union.

The chief occupation of the first generation of Californians was mining, an industry which is like gambling in its influence on the character, with its sudden alternations of wealth and poverty, its long hours of painful toil relieved by bouts of drinking and merriment, its life in a crowd of men who have come together from the four winds of heaven, and will scatter again as soon as some are enriched and others ruined, or the gold in the gulch is exhausted. Moreover, mining in this region means gambling, not only in camps among the miners, but among townsfolk in the shares of the mining companies. Californians of all classes have formed the habit of buying and selling in the mining exchanges, with effects on the popular temper both in business and in politics which everyone can understand. Speculation becomes a passion, patient industry is distasteful; there is bred a recklessness and turbulence in the inner life of the man which does not fail to express itself in acts.

When California was ceded to the United States, land speculators bought up large tracts under Spanish titles, and others, foreseeing the coming prosperity, subsequently acquired great domains by purchase, either from the railways which had received land grants, or directly from the government. Some of these speculators, by holding their lands for a rise, made it difficult for immigrants to acquire small freeholds, and in some cases checked the growth of farms. Others let their land on short leases to farmers, who thus came into a comparatively precarious and often necessitous condition; others established enormous farms, in which the soil is cultivated by hired labourers, many of whom are discharged after the harvest—a phenomenon rare in the United States, which, as everybody knows, is a country of moderately sized farms, owned by persons who do most of their labour by their own and their children’s hands. Thus the land system of California presents features both peculiar and dangerous, a contrast between great properties, often appearing to conflict with the general weal, and the sometimes hard pressed small farmer, together with a mass of unsettled labour thrown without work into the towns at certain times of the year.1

Everywhere in the West the power of the railways has excited the jealousy of the people. In California, however, it has roused most hostility, because no state has been so much at the mercy of one powerful corporation. The Central Pacific Railway, whose main line extends from San Francisco to Ogden in Utah, where it meets the Union Pacific and touches the Denver and Rio Grande system, had been up till 1877, when my narrative begins, the only route to the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic,2 and therefore possessed immense influence over the trade of the whole state. It was controlled by a small knot of men who had risen from insignificance to affluence, held nearly all the other railway lines in California, employed an enormous number of clerks and workmen, and made the weight of their hand felt wherever their interest was involved. Alike as capitalists, as potentates, and as men whose rise to gigantic wealth seemed due as much to the growth of the state as to their own abilities, and therefore to come under the principle which is called in England that of the “unearned increment,” they excited irritation among the farming and trading class, as well as among the labourers. As great fortunes have in America been usually won by unusual gifts, any envy they can excite is tempered by admiration for the ability shown in acquiring them. The common people felt a kind of pride in the late Mr. A. T. Stewart, and feel it now even in that flagrant “monopolist,” Mr. Jay Gould. But while these particular railway magnates were men of talent, there were also in California millionaires who had grown rich merely by lucky speculation. They displayed their wealth with a vulgar and unbecoming ostentation. They did not, as rich men nearly always do in the Atlantic states, bestow a large part of it on useful public objects. There was therefore nothing to break the wave of suspicious dislike.

Most of the Western states have been peopled by a steady influx of settlers from two or three older states. Minnesota, for instance, and Iowa have grown by the overflow of Illinois and Ohio, as well as by immigration direct from Europe. But California was filled by a sudden rush of adventurers from all parts of the world. They came mostly via Panama, for there was no transcontinental railway till 1869, and a great many came from the Southern states. This mixed multitude, bringing with it a variety of manners, customs, and ideas, formed a society more mobile and unstable, less governed by fixed beliefs and principles, than one finds in such Northwestern communities as I have just mentioned. Living far away from the steadying influences of the Eastern states, the Californians have developed, and are proud of having done so, a sort of Pacific type, which, though differing but slightly from the usual Western type, has less of the English element than one discovers in the American who lives on the Atlantic side of the Rocky Mountains. Add to this that California is the last place to the west before you come to Japan. That scum which the westward moving wave of emigration carries on its crest is here stopped, because it can go no farther. It accumulates in San Francisco, and forms a dangerous constituent in the population of that great and growing city—a population perhaps more mixed than one finds anywhere else in America, for Frenchmen, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, and the children of Australian convicts abound there, side by side with Negroes, Germans, and Irish. Of the Chinese one need not speak; for, though they numbered in 1880 some twelve thousand, have a large quarter to themselves, and have given rise to the dominant question in Pacific coast politics, they do not themselves join in any political movement, but mingle as little with the whites as oil with water.

California, more than any other part of the Union, is a country by itself, and San Francisco a capital. Cut off from the more populous parts of the Mississippi Valley by an almost continuous desert of twelve hundred miles, across which the two daily trains move like ships across the ocean, separated from Oregon on the north by a wilderness of sparsely settled mountain and forest, it grew up in its own way and acquired a sort of consciousness of separate existence. San Francisco dwarfed the other cities, for in those days Los Angeles had not risen to importance, and was a commercial and intellectual centre and source of influence for the surrounding regions, more powerful over them than is any Eastern city over its neighbourhood. It was a New York which has got no New England on one side of it, and no shrewd and orderly rural population on the other, to keep it in order. Hence both state and city were, and in a sense still are, less steadied by national opinion than any other state or city within the wide compass of the Union.

These facts in Californian history must be borne in mind in order to understand the events I am about to sketch.3 They show how suited is her soil to revolutionary movements. They suggest that movements natural here are much less likely to arise in other parts of the Union.

II.

The Sand Lot Party

In 1877 California was suffering from “hard times.” The severe commercial depression which began in the Eastern states in 1873, and touched the lowest point about 1876, had reached the Pacific coast, and was aggravated there by a heavy fall in mining stocks. The great bonanza finds some years before had ushered in a period of wild speculation. Everybody gambled in stocks from railroad kings down to maidservants. Stocks had now fallen, and everybody was hard hit. The railroad kings could stand their losses, but the clerks and shop assistants and workmen suffered, for their savings were gone and many were left heavily in debt, with their houses mortgaged and no hope of redemption. Trade was bad, work was scarce, and for what there was of it the Chinese, willing to take only half the ordinary wages, competed with the white labourer. The mob of San Francisco, swelled by disappointed miners from the camps and labourers out of work, men lured from distant homes by the hope of wealth and ease in the land of gold, saw itself on the verge of starvation, while the splendid mansions of speculators, who fifteen years before had kept little shops, rose along the heights of the city, and the newspapers reported their luxurious banquets. In the country the farmers were scarcely less discontented. They too had “gone into stocks,” their farms were mortgaged, and many of them were bankrupt. They complained that the railroads crushed them by heavy freight rates, and asked why they, the bone and sinew of the country, should toil without profit, while local millionaires and wealthy Eastern bondholders drew large incomes from the traffic which the plough of the agriculturist and the pickaxe of the miner had created.

Both in the country and in the city there was disgust with politics and the politicians. The legislature was composed almost wholly either of office-seekers from the city or of petty country lawyers, needy and narrow-minded. Those who had virtue enough not to be “got at” by the great corporations had not intelligence enough to know how to resist their devices. It was a common saying in the state that each successive legislature was worse than its predecessor. The meeting of the representatives of the people was seen with anxiety, their departure with relief. Some opprobrious epithet was bestowed upon each. One was “the legislature of a thousand drinks”; another “the legislature of a thousand steals.” County government was little better; city government was even worse. The judges were not corrupt, but most of them, as was natural considering the scanty salaries assigned to them, were inferior men, not fit to cope with the counsel who practised before them. Partly owing to the weakness of juries, partly to the intricacies of the law and the defects of the recently adopted code, criminal justice was halting and uncertain, and malefactors often went unpunished. It became a proverb that you might safely commit a murder if you took the advice of the best lawyers.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans had done, nor seemed likely to do, anything to remove these evils or to improve the lot of the people. They were only seeking (so men thought) places or the chance of jobs for themselves, and could always be bought by a powerful corporation. Working men must help themselves; there must be new methods and a new departure. Everything, in short, was ripe for a demagogue. Fate was kind to the Californians in sending them a demagogue of a mean type, noisy and confident, but with neither political foresight nor constructive talent.

Late in 1877 a meeting was called in San Francisco to express sympathy with the men then on strike at Pittsburg in Pennsylvania. Their riotous violence, which had alarmed the respectable classes all over America, had gratified the discontented railroad operatives of California, then meditating a strike of their own against a threatened reduction of wages. Some strong language used at this meeting, and exaggerated by the newspapers, frightened the businessmen into forming a sort of committee of public safety, with the president of the famous Vigilance Committee of 1856, a resolute and capable man, at its head. Persons enrolled by it paraded the streets with sticks for some days to prevent any attack on the Chinese, but it was soon perceived that there was no real danger, and the chief result of the incident was further irritation of the poorer classes, who perceived that the rich were afraid of them, and therefore disposed to deal harshly with them. Shortly after came an election of municipal officers and members of the state legislature. The contest, as is the custom in America, brought into life a number of clubs and other organizations, purporting to represent various parties or sections of a party, and among others a body calling itself the “Workingmen’s Trade and Labour Union,” the secretary of which was a certain Denis Kearney.4 When the election was over, Kearney declared that he would keep his union going, and form a working man’s party. He was Irish by birth, and though in business as a drayman, had some experience as a sailor, and held a master’s certificate. He had borne a good character for industry and steadiness till some friend “put him into stocks,” and the loss of what he hoped to gain is said to have first turned him to agitation. He had gained some faculty in speaking by practice at a Sunday debating club called the Lyceum of Self Culture. A self-cultivating lyceum sounds as harmless as a social science congress, but there are times when even mutual improvement societies may be dangerous. Kearney’s tongue, loud and violent, soon gathered an audience. On the west side of San Francisco, as you cross the peninsula from the harbour towards the ocean, there was a large open space, laid out for building, but not yet built on, covered with sand, and hence called the Sand Lot. Here the mob had been wont to gather for meetings; here Kearney formed his party. At first he had mostly vagabonds to listen, but one of the two great newspapers took him up. These two, the Chronicle and the Morning Call, were in keen rivalry, and the former, seeing in this new movement a chance of going ahead, filling its columns with sensational matter, and increasing its sale among working men, went in hot and strong for the Sand Lot party. One of its reporters is credited with having dressed up Kearney’s speeches into something approaching literary form, for the orator was an imperfectly educated man, with ideas chiefly gathered from the daily press. The advertisement which the Chronicle gave him by its reports and articles, and which he repaid by advising working men to take it, soon made him a personage; and his position was finally assured by his being, along with several other speakers, arrested and prosecuted on a charge of riot, in respect of inflammatory speeches delivered at a meeting on the top of Nob Hill, one of the steep heights which make San Francisco the most picturesque of American cities. The prosecution failed, and Kearney was a popular hero. Clerks and the better class of citizens now began to attend his meetings, though many went from mere curiosity, as they would have gone to a circus: the W.P.C. (Workingman’s Party of California) was organized as a regular party, embracing the whole state of California, with Kearney for its president. The gathering on the Sand Lot to which all those “eager for new things,” as the discontented class were of old time called, flocked every Sunday afternoon to cheer denunciations of corporations and monopolists, and to “resolute” against the rich generally, became a centre of San Francisco politics, and through the reports of some newspapers and the attacks of others, roused the people of the entire state. The Morning Call had now followed the lead of the Chronicle, trying to outbid it for the support of the working men. There was nothing positive, nothing constructive or practical, either in these tirades or in the programme of the party, but an open-air crowd is not critical, and gives the loudest cheers to the strongest language. Kearney was not without shrewdness and address: he knew how to push himself to the front, and win the reputation of rugged honesty: he always dressed as a workman and ran for no office, and while denouncing politicians as thieves and capitalists as bloodsuckers, while threatening fire and the halter if the demands of the people were not granted, he tried to avoid direct breaches of the law. On one occasion he held a gathering beside the mansions of the Central Pacific magnates on Nob Hill, pointed to them and to a bonfire which marked the place of the meeting, and while telling the people that these men deserved to have their houses burned, abstained from suggesting that the torch should be applied then and there. Another time he bade the people wait a little till his party had carried their candidate for the governorship of the state: “Then we shall have the control of the militia and the armouries; then we can go down to the Pacific Mail Company’s dock and turn back the steamers that come in bringing the Chinese.”5 Immense enthusiasm was evoked by these harangues. He was crowned with flowers; he was, when released from prison on one occasion, drawn in triumph by his followers in his own dray; newspaper reporters thronged around to interview him; prominent politicians came to seek favours from him on the sly. Discontent among the working class was the chief cause that made the new party grow, for grow it did; and though San Francisco was the centre of its strength, it had clubs in Sacramento and the other cities, all led by the San Francisco convention which Kearney swayed. But there were further causes not to be passed over. One was the distrust of the officials of the state and the city. The municipal government of San Francisco was far from pure. The officials enriched themselves, while the paving, the draining, the lighting were scandalously neglected; corruption and political jobbery had found their way even into school management, and liquor was sold everywhere, the publicans being leagued with the heads of the police to prevent the enforcement of the laws. Another was the support given to their countryman by the Irish, here a discontented and turbulent part of the population, by the lower class of German immigrants, and by the longshoremen, also an important element in this great port, and a dangerous element (as long ago as Athens) wherever one finds them. The activity of the Chronicle counted for much, for it was ably written, went everywhere, and continued to give a point and force to Kearney’s harangues, which made them more effective in print than even his voice had made them to the listening crowds. Some think that the monied classes at this juncture ought to have bought up the Chronicle (supposing they could have done so secretly), and its then editor and proprietor has been much maligned if he would have refused to be bought up.6 The newspapers certainly played a great part in the movement; they turned the Workingman’s Party into a force by representing it to have already become one. Most important of all, however, was the popular hatred of the Chinese. This is so strong in California that any party which could become its exponent rode on the crest of the wave. The old parties, though both denouncing Chinese immigration in every convention they held, and professing to legislate against it, had failed to check it by state laws, and had not yet obtained federal laws prohibiting it. They had therefore lost the confidence of the masses on this point, while the Sand Lot party, whose leaders had got into trouble for the ferocity of their attacks on the Chinese, gained that confidence, and became the “anti-Mongolian” party par excellence. Like Cato with his Delenda est Carthago, Kearney ended every speech with the words, “And whatever happens, the Chinese must go.”

Meanwhile, where were the old parties, and what was their attitude to this new one? It is so hard in America to establish a new movement outside the regular party lines, that when such a movement is found powerful we may expect to find that there exist special causes weakening these lines. Such forces existed in California. She lies so far from the Atlantic and Mississippi states, and has been so much occupied with her own concerns—even the War of Secession did not interest her as it did the country east of the Rocky Mountains—that the two great national parties have had a comparatively weak hold on the people. The Chinese question and the railroad question dwarfed the regular party issues. Neither party had shown itself able to deal with the former—both parties were suspected of having been tampered with on the latter. Both had incurred the discredit which follows every party in hard times, when the public are poor, and see that their taxes have been ill-spent. The Sand Lot party drew its support chiefly from the Democrats, who here, as in the East, have the larger share of the rabble: hence its rise was not unwelcome to the Republicans, because it promised to divide and weaken their old opponents; while the Democrats, hoping ultimately to capture it, gave a feeble resistance. Thus it grew the faster, and soon began to run a ticket of its own at city and state elections. It carried most of the city offices, and when the question was submitted to the people whether a new constitution should be framed for California, it threw its vote in favour of having one and prevailed.

“The hoodlums”7 and other ragamuffins who had formed the audience at the first Sand Lot meetings could not have effected this. But the W.P.C. now got a heavy vote in San Francisco from the better sort of workingmen, clerks, and small shopkeepers. In the rural districts they had still more powerful allies. The so-called Granger movement had spread from the upper Mississippi states into California, and enlisted the farmers in a campaign against the railroads and other “monopolists” and corporations. To compel a reduction of charges for goods and passengers, to prevent the railroad from combining with the Panama Steamship Company, to reduce public expenditure, to shift more taxation on to the shoulders of the rich, and generally to “cinch” capital—these were the aims of the Granger party; nor will anyone who knows California think them wholly unreasonable. The only way to effect them was by a new constitution, not only because some could not have been attained under the then existing constitution (passed in 1849 and amended in several points subsequently), but also because the people have more direct control over legislation through a convention making a constitution than they have over the action of a legislature. The delegates to a convention go straight from the election to their work, have not time to forget, or to devise means of evading, their pledges, are less liable to be “got at” by capitalists. They constitute only one house, whereas the legislature has two. There is no governor to stand in the way with his veto. The rarity and importance of the occasion fixes public attention. Thus a new constitution became the object of the popular cry, and a heavy vote in favour of having it was cast by the country farmers as well as by decent working people in the towns just because it promised a new departure and seemed to get behind the old parties. As often happens, the “good citizens,” who ought to have seen the danger of framing a new constitution at a time of such excitement, were apathetic and unorganized.

Next came, in the summer of 1878, the choice of delegates to the convention which was to frame the new constitution. The Workingman’s Party carried many seats in the convention, but its nominees were ignorant men, without experience or constructive ideas.8 Among the lawyers, who secured a large representation, there were some so closely bound by business ties to the great corporations as to be disposed to protect the interests of these corporations, as well as those of the legal profession. In justice to many of them it must be added that their respect for the principles of the common law and for sound constitutional doctrine led them to do their best to restrain the wild folly of their colleagues. However, the workingmen’s delegates, together with the more numerous and less corruptible delegates of the farmers, got their way in many things and produced that surprising instrument by which California is now governed.

III.

The New Constitution

An able Californian writer gives the following account of the Constitution of 1879:

The new Constitution adopted in May, 1879 made radical changes in almost every department of the Government. It completely changed the judicial system, and thereby rendered necessary an alteration of almost all the laws relating to civil and criminal procedure. It revolutionized the working, and to a great extent the scope of the legislative department, lopping off special and local legislation, and obliging the objects heretofore obtained by such legislation to be covered by general law. As a part of this revolution, it required a new plan of county, township, and city organization, with the idea partly of forcing the same general laws upon all local governments, and partly of investing such local governments with power to legislate for themselves. But the main underlying spirit of the new instrument was an attack upon capital under the specious name of opposition to monopolies. To use an expressive Californian phrase, capital, and especially accumulated capital, wherever it was found, was to be “cinched.”9 With this object in view, cheap labour was to be driven out of the country, and corporations so restricted and hampered in their operations as to be unable to make large profits. The cry was that there were unjust discriminations on the part of railroads, and extortionate rates on the part of water and gas companies; that vicious practices were indulged in by mining corporations; that fair day’s wages for fair day’s labour could not be obtained; that rich men rolled in luxury, and that poor men were cramped with want. It may be admitted that there were some grounds for these complaints. But it does not follow that capital was any more tyrannical or corporations more unconscionable than by their very nature they are compelled to be.10

Some of the above points, and particularly the changes in local government and in the judicial system, lie outside the scope of the present narrative, and I therefore confine myself to inquiring how far the objects aimed at by the Sand Lot party were attained through the constitution whose enactment it had secured. They and the Grangers, or farmers’ party, which made common cause with them, sought to deal with four questions in which lay the grievances chiefly complained of by discontented Californians. These were:

The general corruption of politicians, and bad conduct of state, county, and city government
Taxation, alleged to press too heavily on the poorer classes
The tyranny of corporations, especially railroads
The Chinese

Let us see what remedies the constitution applied to each of these. The cry of the Sand Lot party had been: “None but honest men for the offices.” To find the honest men, and, having found them, to put them in offices and keep them there, is the great problem of American politics. The contributions made to its solution by the convention of 1879 were neither novel nor promising. Its main results may be summed up under the four heads above-mentioned.11

1.It restricts and limits in every possible way the powers of the state legislature, leaving it little authority except to carry out by statutes the provisions of the constitution. It makes “lobbying,” i.e., the attempt to corrupt a legislator, and the corrupt action of a legislator, felony.
2.It forbids the state legislature or local authorities to incur debts beyond a certain limit, taxes uncultivated land equally with cultivated, makes sums due on mortgage taxable in the district where the mortgaged property lies, authorizes an income tax, and directs a highly inquisitorial scrutiny of everybody’s property for the purposes of taxation.
3.It forbids the “watering of stock,” declares that the state has power to prevent corporations from conducting their business so as to “infringe the general well-being of the State”; directs the charges of telegraph and gas companies, and of water-supplying bodies, to be regulated and limited by law; institutes a railroad commission with power to fix the transportation rates on all railroads and examine the books and accounts of all transportation companies.
4.It forbids all corporations to employ any Chinese, debars them from the suffrage (thereby attempting to transgress the Fifteenth Amendment of the federal Constitution), forbids their employment on any public works, annuls all contracts for “coolie labour,” directs the legislature to provide for the punishment of any company which shall import Chinese, to impose conditions on the residence of Chinese, and to cause their removal if they fail to observe these conditions.

It also declares that eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s work on all public works.

When the constitution came to be submitted to the vote of the people, in May 1879, it was vehemently opposed by the monied men, who of course influence, in respect of their wealth, a far larger number of votes than they themselves cast. Several of the conservative delegates had, I was told, abstained from putting forth their full efforts to have the worst proposals rejected by the convention in the belief that when the people came to consider them, they would ensure the rejection of the whole instrument. Some of its provisions were alleged to be opposed to the Constitution of the United States, and therefore null. Others were denounced as ruinous to commerce and industry, calculated to drive capital out of the country. The struggle was severe, but the Granger party commanded so many rural votes, and the Sand Lot party so many in San Francisco (whose population is nearly a third of that of the entire state), that the constitution was carried, though by a small majority, only 11,000 out of a total of 145,000 citizens voting. Of course it had to be enacted as a whole, amendment being impossible where a vote of the people is taken.

The next thing was to choose a legislature to carry out the constitution. Had the same influences prevailed in this election as prevailed in that of the constitutional convention, the results might have been serious. But fortunately there was a slight reaction, now that the first and main step seemed to have been taken. The Republicans, Democrats, and Sand Lot party all ran “tickets,” and owing to this division of the working men’s and the Granger vote between Kearneyite candidates and the Democrats, the Republicans secured a majority, though a small one. Now the Republicans are in California, as they would themselves say, the moderate or conservative party, or as their opponents said, the party of the rich and the monopolists. Their predominance made the legislature of 1880 a body more cautious than might have been expected. Professing hearty loyalty to the new constitution, the majority showed this loyalty by keeping well within the letter of that instrument, while the working men and farmer members were disposed to follow out by bold legislation what they called its spirit. Thus the friends and the enemies of the constitution changed places. Those who had opposed it in the convention posed as its admirers and defenders; while those who had clamoured for and carried it now began to wish that they had made its directions more imperative. The influence and the money of the railroad and the other great corporations were of course brought into play, despite the terrors of a prosecution for felony, and became an additional “conservative force” of great moment.

Thus a series of statutes was passed which gave effect to the provisions of the constitution in a form perhaps as little harmful as could be contrived, and certainly less harmful than had been feared when the constitution was put to the vote. Many bad bills, particularly those aimed at the Chinese, were defeated, and one may say generally the expectations of the Sand Lot men were grievously disappointed.

While all this was passing, Kearney had more and more declined in fame and power. He did not sit either in the constitutional convention or in the legislature of 1880. The mob had tired of his harangues, especially as little seemed to come of them, and as the candidates of the W.P.C. had behaved no better in office than those of the old parties. He had quarrelled with the Chronicle. He was, moreover, quite unfitted by knowledge or training to argue the legal, economical, and political questions involved in the new constitution, so that the prominence of these questions threw him into the background. An anti-Chinese agitation, in which the unemployed marched about San Francisco, calling on employers to discharge all Chinese workmen, caused some alarm in the winter of 1879–80, but Kearney was absent at the time, and when he returned his party was wavering. Even his prosecution and imprisonment on what seems to have been a somewhat trivial charge gave only a brief revival to his popularity. The W.P.C. was defeated in a city election in March 1880 by a combination of the better class of Democrats with the Republicans, and soon after expired.

When I was in San Francisco in the fall of 1881, people talked of Kearney as a spent rocket. Some did not know whether he was in the city. Others said that the capitalists had rendered him harmless by the gift of a new dray and team. Not long afterwards he went East, and mounted the stump on behalf of the Labour party in New York. He proved, however, scarcely equal to his fame, for mob oratory is a flower which does not always bear transplantation. Though he lived till 1906, he was never again a leading figure in California politics, and was, indeed, in 1883, no longer deemed a force to be regarded. And now, as the Icelandic sagas say, he is out of the story.

After the session of 1880, Californian politics resumed their old features. Election frauds are said to have become less frequent since glass ballot boxes were adopted, whereby the practice of stuffing a box with papers before the voters arrive in the morning has been checked. But the game between the two old parties goes on as before. What remained of the Sand Lot group was reabsorbed into the Democratic party, out of which it had mainly come, and to which it had strong affinities. The city government of San Francisco is much what it was before the agitation—a few years later, under Boss Buckley, it was even worse—nor does the legislature seem to be any purer or wiser. When the railroad commission had to be elected, the railroad magnates managed so to influence the election, although it was made directly by the people, that two of the three commissioners chosen were, or soon afterwards came, under their influence, while the third was a mere declaimer. None of them possessed the practical knowledge of railway business needed to enable them to deal, in the manner contemplated by the constitution, with the oppressions alleged to be practised by the railroads; and the complaints of those oppressions seemed in 1883 to be as common as formerly. I enquired in that year why the railroad magnates had not been content to rely on certain provisions of the federal Constitution against the control sought to be exerted over their undertaking. The answer was that they had considered this course, but had concluded that it was cheaper to capture a majority of the commission. The passing of the Interstate Commerce Act by Congress was expected to bring about a change in the situation, but that act disappointed its promoters; and the tyranny of the Southern Pacific Railroad (as it is now called, for it has absorbed the Central Pacific line) remained severe. In July 1894, when the dispute between the Pullman Company and their employees in Illinois gave rise to a railway strike over large parts of the West, the mobs which attacked the depots and wrecked the trains in California seem to have been regarded by the mass of the people with a sympathy which can be attributed to nothing but the general hostility felt to the railroad company which had so long lain like an incubus on the state.

Some of the legislation framed under the Constitution of 1879 was soon pronounced by the supreme court of the state invalid, as opposed to that instrument itself or to the federal Constitution. So far as the condition of the people at large was affected, it is not so much to the constitution as to the general advance in prosperity that they owe what they have gained. However, the restrictions imposed on the legislature (as regards special legislation) and on local authorities (as regards borrowing and the undertaking of costly public works) have proved beneficial. Congress passed statutes stopping Chinese immigration, and the subsequent influx of Japanese labourers was reduced in 1908 to small dimension. The net result of the whole agitation was to give the monied classes in California a fright; to win for the state a bad name throughout America, and, by checking for a time the influx of capital, to retard her growth just when prosperity was reviving over the rest of the country; to worry, without seriously crippling, the great corporations, and to leave the working classes and farmers where they were. No great harm was done, and the constitution, pruned and trimmed by the courts, and frequently amended, usually in a ‘radical’ sense, ultimately came to work tolerably. Since those days, other states have enacted constitutions no less rash and no less drastic in some of their provisions.

IV.

Observations on the Movement

I would leave the reader to draw a moral for himself, were he not likely to err, as I did myself, till corrected by my Californian friends, by thinking the whole movement more serious than it really was.

It rose with surprising ease and swiftness. The conditions were no doubt exceptionally favourable. No other population in America furnished so good a field for demagogy. But the demagogue himself was not formidable. He did not make the movement, but merely rode for a moment on the crest of the wave. Europeans may say that a stronger man, a man with knowledge, education, and a fierce tenacity of fibre, might have built up a more permanent power, and used it with a more destructive effect. But Californians say that a strong man would not have been suffered to do what Kearney did with impunity. Kearney throve—so they allege—because the solid classes despised him, and felt that the best thing was to let him talk himself out and reveal his own hollowness.

The movement fell as quickly as it rose. This was partly due, as has been said, to the incompetence of the leader, who had really nothing to propose and did not know how to use the force that seemed to have come to his hands. Something, however, must be set down to the credit of the American party system. The existing parties are so strong, and are spread over so wide an area, that it is very difficult to create a new party. Resting on a complex local organization, and supported by the central organization for the purposes of federal politics, they can survive a temporary eclipse in a particular state, while a new party cannot count itself permanent till it has established some such organization, central as well as local. This may operate badly in keeping old parties alive, when they deserve to die. But it operates well in checking the growth or abridging the life of mischievous local factions. That fund of good sense, moreover, which lies at the bottom of nearly every native American mind, soon produces a reaction against extreme measures. When the native voters, especially those who owned even a little property, had relieved their minds by voting for the new constitution, they felt they had gone far enough in the direction of change, and at the election of a legislature voted for moderate men. Support from this class having been withdrawn, the Sand Lot rabble ceased to be dangerous; and although threats of violence were abundant, and sometimes bloodthirsty, there was very little sedition or disorder.

Every stump orator in the West says a great deal more than he means, and is promptly discounted by his hearers. The populace of San Francisco has now and again menaced the Chinese quarter and the docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which brought the Chinese over, until Congress checked them. Once the Chinese armed in defence of Chinatown, and twice during these agitations a committee of public safety was formed to protect the banks and keep order in the streets. But many people doubt whether order was really endangered. The few attacks made on Chinese stores were done by small bands of hoodlums, who disappeared at the sight of the police. The police and militia seem to have behaved well all through. Moreover, any serious riot would in San Francisco be quelled speedily and severely by the respectable classes, who would supersede the municipal authority if it seemed to fear, or to be secretly leagued with, the authors of sedition. Even the meetings of the various political parties were scarcely ever disturbed or “bulldozed” by their opponents. When the Kearneyites once or twice molested Democratic meetings, they were so promptly repelled, that they desisted for the future.

There was very little of conscious or constructive communism or socialism in the movement. Kearney told the working men that the rich had thriven at their expense, and talked of hanging thieves in office, and burning the houses of capitalists. But neither he nor any other demagogue assailed the institution of property. The farmers, whose vote carried the new constitution, owned their farms, and would have recoiled from suggestions of agrarian socialism. And in fact the new constitution, although it contains provisions hostile to capital, “is anything but agrarian or communistic, for it entrenches vested rights, especially in land, more thoroughly than before. . . . It is anything but a working man’s Constitution; it levies a poll tax without exemption; disfranchises a considerable portion of the floating labour vote; prevents the opening of public works in emergencies, and in various ways which working men, even in their present stage of enlightenment, may easily see, sacrifices the interests of the labouring classes, as well as the capitalists, to what the landowners regard as their interests.”12 A solitary Parisian communist who was elected to the convention “exercised no influence, and was expelled from the party for refusing to support the new Constitution.” There were some rich men, and lawyers connected with the great corporations, among the candidates and supporters of the Sand Lot party. Others of the same class who tried secretly to use it had probably their selfish ends to serve, but would have been less willing to increase its strength had they regarded it as an attack on property in general. Theoretical Communism has not yet much hold upon native Americans, while its practical application does not commend itself to farmers who own their land and workmen who own their houses. The belief which prevailed in the Eastern states that the movement had a communistic character was therefore a mistaken one.

More mischief would have been done but for the existence of the federal Constitution. It imposed a certain check on the convention, who felt the absurdity of trying to legislate right in the teeth of an overruling instrument. It has been the means of upsetting some of the clauses of the Constitution of 1879, and some of the statutes passed by the legislature under them, and has discouraged attempts to pass others.

On the whole, not much evil has been wrought, at least not much compared with what was feared in the state itself, and believed in the East to have resulted. The better sort of Californians two years after were no longer alarmed, but seemed half ashamed and half amused when they recollected the scenes I have described. They felt somewhat as a man feels when he awakes unrefreshed after a night of bad dreams. He fears at first that his parched tongue and throbbing head may mean that he has caught a fever. But when he has breakfasted and is again immersed in work, these sensations and apprehensions disappear together. After all, said the lawyers and bankers of San Francisco, we are going on as before, property will take care of itself in this country, things are not really worse so far as our business is concerned.

Neither are things better. It is natural to suppose that a shock, however short, must make a difference to a community, and affect its future fortunes. If this shock has so affected California, the results are not yet apparent. Though the new constitution has not altered the economic condition of the workmen and farmers, it might have been thought that the crisis, which suddenly startled this busy and (in San Francisco) luxurious society, would rouse good citizens to a more active interest in politics, make them see the necessity of getting better men into the offices and the legislature, and, indeed, of purifying public life altogether. But these consequences do not seem to have followed. In the stress and hurry of Californian life, impressions pass swiftly away. Good citizens are disposed to stand aside; and among the richer there are those who look forward to a time when, having made their fortunes, they will go East to spend them. San Francisco in particular continued to be deplorably misgoverned, and has passed from the tyranny of one ring to that of another, with no change save in the persons of those who prey upon her, and in the fact that there is now a well organized Labour party which in 1909 carried its candidate for mayor. The earthquake of 1906 was incidentally the means of unveiling corruptions which led to a temporary purification of city politics; but there was presently a relapse. It may be that another social and political shock is in store for the Golden State, a shock which, now that socialistic doctrines have made more progress, might be more violent than that of 1879, yet still within legal limits, for there seems no danger, in spite of such outbreaks as marked the great railway strikes of 1894, of mere mob law and anarchy. The forces at the disposal of order are always the stronger. It may on the other hand be that as society settles down from the feverish instability of these early days, as the mass of the people acquire a more enlightened view of their true interests, as those moral influences which count for so much in America assert their dominion more widely, the present evils will slowly pass away. The president of the Vigilance Committee of 1856 told me that all he had seen happen in San Francisco, since the days when it was a tiny Spanish mission station, made him confident that everything would come out straight. Probably he is right. American experience shows that the optimists generally are. But as respects the municipal government of this great city his prophecy was in 1910 still awaiting fulfillment.

EPILOGUE TO THIS AND THE TWO LAST PRECEDING CHAPTERS

The illustrations given in these three chapters of perversions of popular government carry their moral with them, and only a few parting comments are needed.

Neither of the two great political parties has had in respect of the events narrated a better record than its rival. If the Tammany Ring sheds little lustre upon the Democrats of New York, the Gas Ring of Philadelphia is no more creditable to the Republicans of Pennsylvania.

Both in New York and in Philadelphia there was nothing truly political in the character and career of the rings. Tammany had been for thirty years a selfish combination of men who had purely personal ends to serve; and Tweed in particular was a mere vulgar robber. So the Gas Ring strove and throve, and its successors have striven and thriven, solely to secure patronage and gain to their respective members. True indeed it is that neither in New York nor in Philadelphia could the rings have won their way to power without the connivance of chiefs among the national parties, who needed the help of the vote the rings controlled; true also that that vote would never have become so large had not many citizens looked on the rings as the “regular” organizations, and heirs of the local party traditions. But neither ring had ever any distinctive principles or proposals; neither ever appealed to the people on behalf of a doctine or a scheme calculated to benefit the masses. Lucre, with office as a means to lucre, was their only aim, the party for the sake of the party their only watchword.

What, then, are the salient features of these two cases, and what the lessons they enforce? They are these. The power of an organization in a multitude; the facility with which the administrative machinery of government may be made the instrument of private gain; the disposition of the average respectable citizen to submit to bad government rather than take the trouble of overthrowing it. These are not wholly new phenomena, but they are hardly such as would have been looked for in the United States; and not one of them was feared when Tocqueville wrote.

Very different, and far less discreditable to those concerned, was the case of California. The movement which gave birth to the new constitution was a legitimate political movement. It was crude in its aims, and tainted with demagogism in its methods. But it was evoked by real evils; and it sought, however ignorantly, the public good. Kearney had no sordid personal ends to serve, and gained for himself nothing more solid than notoriety. His agitation was essentially the same as that which has appeared in the Western states under the forms of Grangerism, the Farmers’ Alliance, and Populism, an effort to apply political remedies to evils, real or supposed, which are mainly economic rather than political, and only a part of which legislation can remove. Similar movements must from time to time be expected; all that can be hoped is to keep them within constitutional lines, and prevent them from damaging the credit and retarding the prosperity of the states they affect. Nothing is more natural than that those who suffer from hard times and see that a few men grow rich while the vast majority remain poor should confound the mischiefs which arise from state or city maladministration and from the undue power which the laws have permitted corporations to acquire with other hardships due to the constitution of human nature and the conditions of the world we live in, and should, possessing the whole power of the state, strike out wildly at all three at once. In a country so little restrained by ancient traditions or deference to the educated class as is Western America, a country where the aptitude for politics is so much in advance of economic wisdom, it is less surprising that these storms should sometimes darken the sky than that they should uproot so little in their course.

chapter 91

The Home of the Nation

There are three points wherein the territories which constitute the United States present phenomena new in the annals of the world. They contain a huge people whose blood is becoming mixed in an unprecedented degree by the concurrent immigration of numerous European races. We find in them, besides the predominant white nation, ten millions of men belonging to a dark race, thousands of years behind in its intellectual development, but legally equal in political and civil rights. And thirdly, they furnish an instance to which no parallel can be found of a vast area, including regions very dissimilar in their natural features, occupied by a population nearly the whole of which speaks the same tongue, and all of which lives under the same institutions. Of these phenomena the first two, already more than once referred to, are dealt with in later chapters. The third suggests to us thoughts and questions which cannot pass unnoticed. No one can travel in the United States without asking himself whether this immense territory will remain united or be split up into a number of independent communities; whether, even if it remain united, diverse types of life and character will spring up within it; whether and how far climatic and industrial conditions will affect those types, carrying them farther from the prototypes of Europe. These questions, as well as other questions regarding the future local distribution of wealth and population, open fields of inquiry and speculation too wide to be here explored. Yet some pages may well be given to a rapid survey of the geographical conditions of the United States, and of the influence those conditions have exerted and may, so far as can be foreseen, continue to exert on the growth of the nation, its political and economical development. Beginning with a few observations first on the orography of the country and then upon its meteorology, we may consider how mountain ranges and climate have hitherto affected the movement of colonization and the main stream of political history. The chief natural sources of wealth may next be mentioned, and their possible effect indicated upon the development of population in particular areas, as well as upon the preservation of the permanent unity of the Republic.

One preliminary remark must not be omitted. The relation of geographical conditions to national growth changes, and with the upward progress of humanity the ways in which Nature moulds the fortunes of man are always varying. Man must in every stage be for many purposes dependent upon the circumstances of his physical environment. Yet the character of that dependence changes with his advance in civilization. At first he is helpless, and, therefore, passive. With what Nature gives in the way of food, clothing, and lodging he must be content. She is strong, he is weak; so she dictates his whole mode of life. Presently, always by slow degrees, but most quickly in those countries where she neither gives lavishly nor yet presses on him with a discouraging severity, he begins to learn how to make her obey him, drawing from her stores materials which his skill handles in such wise as to make him more and more independent of her. He defies the rigours of climate; he overcomes the obstacles which mountains, rivers, and forests place in the way of communications; he discovers the secrets of the physical forces and makes them his servants in the work of production. But the very multiplication of the means at his disposal for profiting by what Nature supplies brings him into ever closer and more complex relations with her. The variety of her resources, differing in different regions, prescribes the kind of industry for which each spot is fitted; and the competition of nations, growing always keener, forces each to maintain itself in the struggle by using to the utmost every facility for production or for the transportation of products. Thus certain physical conditions, whether of soil or of climate, of accessibility of inaccessibility, or perhaps of such available natural forces as waterpower, conditions of supreme importance in the earlier stages of man’s progress, are now of less relative moment, while others, formerly of small account, have received their full significance by our swiftly advancing knowledge of the secrets of Nature and mastery of her forces. It is this which makes the examination of the influence of physical environment on the progress of nations so intricate a matter; for while the environment remains, as a whole, constant, its several parts vary in their importance from one age to another.1 A certain severity of climate, for instance, which retarded the progress of savage man, has been found helpful to semi-civilized man, in stimulating him to exertion, and in maintaining a racial vigour greater than that of the inhabitants of those hotter regions where civilization first arose. And thus in considering how man’s lot and fate in the western continent have been affected by the circumstances of that continent, we must have regard not only to what he found on his arrival there, but to the resources which have been subsequently disclosed. Nor can this latter head be exhausted, because it is impossible to conjecture what still latent forces or capacities may be revealed in the onward march of science, and how such a revelation may affect the value of the resources now known to exist or hereafter to be explored.

It is only on a very few salient points of this large and complex subject that I shall touch in sketching the outlines of North American geography and noting some of the effects on the growth of the nation attributable to them.

The territory of the United States extends nearly 3,000 miles east and west from the Bay of Fundy to the mouth of the Columbia River, and 1,400 miles north and south from the Lake of the Woods to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston. Compared with Europe, the physical structure of this area of 3,025,000 square miles2 (excluding Alaska) is not only larger in scale, but far simpler. Instead of the numerous peninsulas and islands of Europe, with the bold and lofty chains dividing its peoples from one another, we find no isles (except Long Island) of any size on the two coasts of the United States, only one large peninsula (that of Florida), and only two mountain systems. Not only the lakes and rivers, but the plains also, and the mountain ranges, are of enormous dimensions. The coast presents a smooth outline. No great inlets, such as the Mediterranean and the Baltic, pierce the land and cut off one district from another, furnishing natural boundaries behind which distinct nations may grow up.

This vast area may be divided into four regions—two of level country, two, speaking roughly, of mountain. Beginning from the Atlantic, we find a strip which on the coast is nearly level, and then rises gradually westwards into an undulating country. It varies in breadth from thirty or forty miles in the north to two hundred and fifty in the south, and has been called by geographers the Atlantic Plain and Slope. Behind this strip comes a range, or rather a mass of generally parallel ranges, of mountains. These are the Alleghenies, or so-called “Appalachian system,” in breadth from one hundred to two hundred miles, and with an average elevation of from two to four thousand feet, some few summits reaching six thousand. Beyond them, still further to the west, lies the vast basin of the Mississippi and its tributaries, 1,100 miles wide and 1,200 miles long. Its central part is an almost unbroken plain for hundreds of miles on each side the river, but this plain rises slowly westward in rolling undulations into a sort of plateau, which, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, has attained the height of 5,000 feet above the sea. The fourth region consists of the thousand miles that lie between the Mississippi basin and the Pacific. It includes three not entirely disconnected mountain ranges, the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada (continued northwards in the Cascade Range), and the much lower Coast Range (or rather series of roughly parallel ranges), which runs along the shore of the ocean. This region is generally mountainous, though within it there are some extensive plateaux and some wide valleys. Most of it is from 4,000 to 8,000 feet above the sea, with many summits exceeding 14,000, though none reaches 15,000. A considerable part of it, including the desert of Nevada, does not drain into the ocean, but sees its feeble streams received by lakes or swallowed up in the ground.

Before we consider how these natural divisions have influenced, and must continue to influence, American history, it is well to observe how materially they have affected the climate of the continent, which is itself a factor of prime historical importance. Two points deserve special notice. One is the great extent of temperate area which the continent presents. As North America is crossed by no mountain chains running east and west, corresponding to the Alps and Pyrenees in Europe, or to the Caucasus, Himalaya, and Altai in Asia, the cold winds of the north sweep down unchecked over the vast Mississippi plain, and give its central and southern parts, down to the Gulf of Mexico, winters cooler than the latitude seems to promise, or than one finds in the same latitudes in Europe. Nor ought the influence of the neighbouring seas to pass unregarded. Europe has, south of the narrow Mediterranean, a vast reservoir of heat in the Sahara: North America has the wide stretch of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, with no region both hot and arid beyond. Thus Tennessee and Arkansas, in the latitude of Andalusia and Damascus, have a winter like that of Edinburgh twenty degrees further to the north; and while the summer of Minnesota, in latitude 45°, is as hot as that of Bordeaux or Venice in the same latitude, the winter is far more severe. Only the lowlands along the Atlantic coast as far north as Cape Hatteras have a high winter as well as summer temperature, for they are warmed by the hot water of the Gulf Stream, just as the extreme northeastern coast is chilled by the Polar current which washes it. The hilly country behind these southern Atlantic lowlands—the western parts of the two Carolinas, northern Georgia and Alabama—belongs to the Appalachian system, and is high enough to have cool and in parts even severe winters.

The other point relates to the amount of moisture. The first two of our four regions enjoy an ample rainfall. So do the eastern and the central parts of the Mississippi basin. When, however, we reach the centre of the continent, some four hundred miles west of the Mississippi, the air grows dry, and the scanty showers are barely sufficient for the needs of agriculture. It is only by the help of irrigation that crops can be raised all along the east foot of the Rocky Mountains and in the valleys of the fourth region, until we cross the Sierra Nevada and come within two hundred miles of the Pacific. In much of this Rocky Mountain region, therefore, stock rearing, or “ranching,” as it is called, takes the place of tillage, though the recently invented methods of “dry farming” have enlarged the cultivable area. In some districts there is not enough moisture even to support grass. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada there lie vast deserts, the largest that which stretches westward from the Great Salt Lake,3 a desert of clay and stones rather than of sand, bearing only alkaline plants with low, prickly shrubs, and, apparently, destined to remain, save in some few spots where brooks descend from the mountains,4 eternally sterile and solitary. Lofty as these environing mountains are, they bear scarce any perpetual snow, and no glaciers at all south of the fortieth parallel of north latitude.5 The great peaks of Colorado lie little further south than the Pennine Alps, which they almost equal in height, but it is only in nooks and hollows turned away from the sun that snow lasts through the summer, so scanty is the winter snowfall and so rapidly does evaporation proceed in the dry air. That same general north and south direction of the American mountain ranges, which gives cool winters to the Southern states, cuts off the westborne rainclouds from the Pacific, and condemns one-half or more of our fourth region to aridity. On the other hand, northwestern California, with the western parts of Oregon and Washington, washed by the Japan current, enjoy both a moderate and a humid—in some places very humid—climate, which, along the Pacific coast north of latitude 43°, resembles that of southwestern England.

Reserving for the moment a consideration of the wealth-producing capacities of the regions at whose physical structure and climate we have glanced, let us note how that structure and climate have affected the fortunes of the people.

Whoever examines the general lines of a nation’s growth will observe that its development has been guided and governed by three main factors. The first is the preexisting character and habits of the race out of which the nation grows. The second is the physical aspect of the land the nation is placed in, and the third embraces the international concomitants of its formation—that is to say, the pressure of other nations upon it, and the external political circumstances which have controlled its movement, checking it in one direction or making it spread in another. The first of these factors may, in the case of the American people, be assumed as known, for their character and habits were substantially English.6 To the second I will return presently. The third factor has been in the United States so unusually simple that one may dismiss it in a few sentences. In examining the origin of such nations as the German or French or Russian or Swiss or Spanish, one must constantly have regard to the hostile or friendly races or powers which acted on them; and these matters are, for the earlier periods of European history, often obscure. About America we know everything, and what we know may be concisely stated. The territory now covered by the United States was, from a political point of view, practically vacant when discovered in the end of the sixteenth century; for the aborigines, though their resistance was obstinate in places, and though that resistance did much to form the character of the Western pioneers, may be left out of account as a historical force. This territory was settled from three sides, east, south, and west, and by three European peoples. The Spaniards and French occupied points on the coast of the Gulf. The Spaniards took the shores of the Pacific. The English (reckoning among the English the cognate Dutchmen and Swedes) planted a series of communities along the Atlantic coast. Of these three independent colonizations, that on the Gulf was feeble, and passed by purchase to the Anglo-Americans in 1803 and 1819. That on the Pacific was still more feeble, and also passed, but by conquest, to the Anglo-Americans in 1848. Thus the occupation of the country has been from its eastern side alone (save that California received her immigrants by sea between 1847 and 1867), and the march of the people has been steadily westward and southwestward. They have spread where they would. Other powers have scarcely affected them. Canada, indeed, bounds them on the north, but not till about 1890 did they begin to settle in the rich wheat lands of her Northwest, while from 1860 onwards there has been a considerable immigration from eastern Canada into the bordering parts of the United States. Like the Spaniards in South America, like the British in Australia, like the Russians in Siberia, the Anglo-Americans have had a free field; and we may pass from the purely political or international factor in the development of the nation to consider how its history has been affected by those physical conditions which have been previously noted.

The English in America were, when they began their march, one people, though divided into a number of autonomous communities; and, to a people already advanced in civilization, the country was one country, as if destined by nature to retain one and undivided whatever nation might occupy it.

The first settlements were in the region described above as the Atlantic Plain and Slope. No natural boundary, whether of water or mountain or forest, divided the various communities. The frontier line which bounded each colony was an artificial line—a mere historical accident. So long as they remained near the coast, nature opposed no obstacle to their cooperation in war, nor to their free social and commercial intercourse in peace. When, however, they had advanced westwards as far as the Alleghenies, these mountains barred their progress, not so much in the North, where the valley of the Hudson and Mohawk gave an easy path inland, as in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Carolina. The dense, tangled, and often thorny underwood, even more than the high steep ridges, checked the westward movement of population, prevented the settlers from spreading out widely, as the Spaniards dispersed themselves over Central and South America, and helped, by inducing a comparatively dense population, to build up compact commonwealths on the Atlantic coast. So, too, the existence of this rough and, for a long time, almost impassable mountain belt, tended to cut off those who had crossed it into the western wilderness from their more polished parent stock, to throw them on their own resources in the struggle with the fierce aborigines of Kentucky and Ohio, and to give them that distinctive character of frontiersmen which was so marked a feature of American history during the first half of the nineteenth century, and has left deep traces on the Western men of today.

When population began to fill the Mississippi basin the essential physical unity of the country became more significant. It suggested to Jefferson, and it led Congress to approve, the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon, for those who had begun to occupy the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers felt that they could not afford to be cut off from the sea to which these highways of commerce led. Once the stream of migration across, and around the southern extremity of, the Alleghenies had begun to flow steadily, the settlers spread out in all directions over the vast plain, like water over a marble floor. The men of the Carolinas and Georgia filled Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas; the men of Virginia and Kentucky filled southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri; the men of New England, New York, and Ohio filled Michigan, northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. From the source to the mouth of the Mississippi there was nothing to break them up or keep them apart. Every Western state, except where it takes a river as a convenient boundary, is bounded by straight lines, because every state is an artificial creation. The people were one, and the wide featureless plain was also one. It has been cut into those huge plots we call states, not because there were physical or racial differences requiring divisions, but merely because political reasons made a federal seem preferable to a unitary system. As the size of the plain showed that the nation would be large, so did the character of the plain promise that it would remain united. When presently steamers came to ply upon the rivers, each part of the vast level was linked more closely to the others; and when the network of railways spread itself out from the East to the Mississippi, the Alleghenies practically disappeared. They were no longer a barrier to communication. Towns sprang up in their valleys; and now the three regions, which have been described as naturally distinct, the Atlantic slope, the Alleghenies, and the Mississippi basin, have become, economically and socially as well as politically, one country, though the dwellers in the wilder parts of the broad mountain belt still lag far behind their neighbours of the eastern and western lowlands.

When, however, the swelling tide of emigration reached the arid lands at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, its course was for a time stayed. This fourth region of mountain and desert, lying between the prairies of the Mississippi affluents and the Pacific Ocean, was, except its coast line, a practically unknown land till its cession by Mexico in 1846, and the inner and higher parts of it remained unexplored for some twenty years longer. As it was mostly dry and rugged, there was little to tempt settlers, for vast tracts of good land remained untouched in the central Mississippi plain. Many years might have passed before it began to fill up, but for the unexpected finding of gold in California. This event at once drew in thousands of settlers; and fresh swarms followed as other mines, principally of silver, began to be discovered in the inland mountain ranges; till at last for the difficult and dangerous wagon tract there was substituted a railway, completed in 1869, over mountains and through deserts from the Missouri to the Pacific. Had the Americans of 1850 possessed no more scientific resources than their grandfathers in 1790, the valleys of the Pacific coast, accessible only by sea round Cape Horn, or across the Isthmus of Panama, would have remained isolated from the rest of the country, with a tendency to form a character and habits of their own, and possibly disposed to aim at political independence. This, however, the telegraph and the railways have prevented. Yet the Rocky Mountains have not, like the Alleghenies, disappeared. The populous parts of California, Oregon, and Washington still find that range and the deserts a far more effective barrier than are the lower and narrower ridges on the eastern side of the continent. The fourth region remains a distinct section of the United States, both geographically and to some extent in its social and industrial aspects. All this was to be expected. What need not have happened, and might even have been thought unlikely, was the easy acquisition by the Anglo-Americans of California, Oregon, and Washington, regions far removed from the dominions which the Republic already possessed. Had the competition for unappropriated temperate regions been half as keen in 1840 as it was fifty years later for tropical Africa (a less attractive possession) between Germany, France, and Britain, some European power might have pounced upon these territories. They might then have become and remained a foreign country to the United States, and have had few and comparatively slight relations with the Mississippi basin. It is not nature, but the historical accident which left them in the hands of a feeble power like Mexico, that has made them now, and, so far as can be foreseen, for a long future, members of the great federation.

In the southeast as well as in the west of the North American continent, climate has been a prime factor in determining the industrial and political history of the nation. South of the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude, although the winters are cool enough to be reinvigorative, and to enable a race drawn from Northern Europe to thrive and multiply,7 the summers, are, in the lowest grounds, too hot for such a race to sustain hard open-air work, or to resist the malaria of the marshy coast lands. Thus when very soon after the settlement of Virginia, and for nearly two centuries afterwards, natives of the tropics were imported from Africa and set to till the fields, this practice was defended on the ground of necessity, though the districts in which white people cannot work have now been shown to be very few indeed. By this African labour large crops of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar were raised, and large profits made; so that, while in the Northeastern states slavery presently died out, and the Negroes themselves declined in numbers, all the wealth and prosperity of the South came to depend upon slave labour, and slavery became intertwined with the pecuniary interests as well as the social habits of the ruling class. Thus a peculiar form of civilization grew up, so dissimilar from that of the Northern half of the country, that not even the large measure of state independence secured under the federal Constitution could enable the two sections to live together under the same government. Civil war followed, and for a time it seemed as if the nation were to be permanently rent in twain. Physical differences—differences of climate, and of all those industrial and social conditions that were due to climate—were at the bottom of the strife. Yet Nature herself fought for imperilled unity. Had the seceding states been divided from the Northern states by any natural barrier, such as a mountain range running from east to west across the continent, the operations of the invading armies would have been incomparably more difficult. As it was, the path into the south lay open, and the great south-flowing rivers of the West helped the invader. Had there not existed, in the Allegheny Mountains, a broad belt of elevated land, thrusting into the revolted territory a wedge of white population which, as it did not own slaves (for in the mountains there were scarce any), did not sympathize with secession, and for the most part actively opposed it, the chances of the Southern Confederates would have been far greater. The Alleghenies interrupted the cooperation of their Eastern and Western armies, and furnished recruits as well as adherents to the North; and it need hardly be added that the climatic conditions of the South made its white population so much smaller, and on the whole so much poorer, than that of the North, that exhaustion came far sooner. He who sees the South even today, when it has in many places gained vastly since the war, is surprised not that it succumbed, but that it was able so long to resist.

With the extinction of slavery, the political unity of the country was secured, and the purpose of nature to make it the domain of a single people might seem to have been fulfilled. Before we inquire whether this result will be a permanent one, so far as physical causes are concerned, another set of physical conditions deserves to be considered, those conditions, namely, of earth and sky, which determine the abundance of useful products, that is to say, of wealth, and therethrough, of population also.

The chief natural sources of wealth are fertile soils, mineral deposits, and standing timber.8 Of these three the last is now practically confined to three districts—the hills of Maine, the Alleghenies, and the ranges of the Pacific coast, especially in Washington, with a few spots in the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. Elsewhere, though there is a great deal of wooded country, the cutting and exporting of timber, or, as it is called beyond the Atlantic, “lumber,” is not (except perhaps in Michigan) an important industry which employs or enriches many persons. It is, moreover, one which constantly declines, for the forests perish daily before fires and the axe far more swiftly than nature can renew them.

As no nation possesses so large an area of land available for the sustenance of man, so also none of the greatest nations can boast that out of its whole domain, so large a proportion of land is fit for tillage or for stock-rearing. If we except the stony parts of New England and eastern New York, where the soil is thinly spread over crystalline rocks, and the sandy districts which cover a considerable area in Virginia and North Carolina, nearly the whole of the more level tracts between the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains is good agricultural land, while in some districts, especially on the upper Mississippi, this land has proved remarkably rich. Which soils will in the long run turn out most fertile, cannot yet be predicted. The prairie lands of the Northwest have needed least labour and have given the largest returns to their first cultivators; but it is doubtful whether this superiority will be maintained when protracted tillage has made artificial aids necessary, as has already happened in not a few places. Some of the soils in the Eastern and Southern states are said to improve with cultivation, being rich in mineral constituents. Not less rich than the Mississippi prairies, but far smaller in area, are the arable tracts of the Pacific slope, where, in Washington especially, the loam formed by the decomposition of the trappean rocks is eminently productive. In the inner parts of the Rocky Mountain region and between the Rockies and the Pacific coast, lie many plains and valleys of great natural fertility, but dependent, so deficient is the rainfall, upon an artificial supply of water. The construction of irrigation works, and the sinking of artesian wells has, since 1890, brought large areas under cultivation, the discovery of dry farming methods promises to make available others where irrigation cannot be employed, and it is probable that much more may still be done to reclaim tracts which were not long ago deemed hopelessly sterile. The Mormon settlements on the east and to the south of Great Salt Lake wre the first considerable districts to be thus reclaimed by patient industry.

In estimating mineral resources, it is well to distinguish between mines of gold, silver, copper, and lead on the one hand, and those of coal and iron on the other. The former are numerous, and have given vast wealth to a few lucky speculators. In some parts of the Rockies and the ranges linking them to the Sierra Nevada, the traveller saw, even as early as 1881, silver mining claims staked out on every hill. But these mines are uncertain in their yield; and the value of silver is subject to great fluctuations. The growth of electrical industries has of late years enhanced the importance of copper, also a metal the price of which oscillates violently. Coal and iron present a surer, if less glittering gain, and they are needed for the support of many gigantic undertakings. Now, while gold, silver, and lead are chiefly found in the Rocky Mountain and Sierra Nevada system, copper mainly in the West and on Lake Superior, the greatest coal and iron districts9 are in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and along the line of the Alleghenies southwards into Alabama. It is chiefly in the neighbourhood of coal deposits that manufactures develop, yet not exclusively, for the waterpower available along the foot of the New England hills led to the establishment of many factories there, which still remain and flourish under changed conditions, receiving their coal, however, largely by sea from Nova Scotia. Mineral oils, first largely exploited in Pennsylvania, and then in Ohio, have been discovered in many other regions, and most recently in Texas, Oklahoma, and California.

What has been the result of these conditions, and what do they promise?

First: An agricultural population in the Mississippi basin already great, and capable of reaching dimensions from which imagination recoils, for though the number of persons to the square mile will be less than in Bengal or Egypt, where the peasants’ standard of comfort is incomparably lower than that of the American farmer, it may be as dense as in the most prosperous agricultural districts of Europe.

Secondly: An industrial population now almost equalling the agricultural,10 concentrated chiefly in the Northeastern states and along the skirts of the Alleghenies, and in large cities springing up here and there where (as at Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis) commerce plants its centres of exchange and distribution. This industrial population grows far more swiftly than the agricultural, and the aggregate value of manufactured products increases faster from census to census than does that of the products of the soil.

Thirdly: A similar but very much smaller agricultural and industrial population along the Pacific, five-sixths of it within eighty miles of the coast.

Fourthly: Between the Mississippi basin and this well-peopled Pacific shore a wide and very thinly inhabited tract, sometimes quite arid, and therefore a wilderness, sometimes showing grass-bearing hills with sheep or cattle, and a few ranchmen upon the hill slopes, more rarely valleys which irrigation has taught to wave with crops. And here and there through this tract, redeeming it from solitude, there will lie scattered mining towns, many of them quick to rise and almost as quick to vanish, but others destined, if placed in the centre of a mining district, to maintain a more permanent importance.

Thus the enormous preponderance of population will be on the eastern side of the continental watershed. It was so in 1910—five millions on the Pacific side out of a total continental population of nearly ninety-two millions—it is likely to remain so. The face of the nation will be turned eastward; and, to borrow a phrase of Lowell’s, the front door of their house will open upon the Atlantic, the back door upon the Pacific. Faint and few, so far as we can now predict, though far greater than at this moment, and likely to increase rapidly after the opening of the Panama Canal, will be the relations maintained with Eastern Asia and Australia across the vast expanse of that ocean compared with those that must exist with Europe, to which not only literature and social interests, but commerce also, will bind America by ties growing always closer and more numerous.

That the inhabitants of this territory will remain one nation is the conclusion to which, as already observed, the geography of the continent points. Considerations of an industrial and commercial kind enforce this forecast. The United States, with nearly all the vegetable staples of the temperate zone, and many that may be called subtropical, has within its borders a greater variety of products, mineral as well as vegetable, than any other country, and therefore a wider basis for internal interchange of commodities. Free Trade with other countries, desirable as it may be, is of less consequence where a vast home trade, stretching across a whole continent, has its freedom secured by the Constitution. The advantages of such freedom to the wheat and maize growers of the West, to the cotton and rice and sugar planters of the Gulf States, to the orange growers of Florida and the vine and fruit growers of California, to the cattle men of the West and the horse breeders of Kentucky and Idaho, to the lumbermen of Maine and Washington, to the coal and iron men of Pennsylvania and the Allegheny states, to the factories of New England, both employers and workmen, as well as to the consuming populations of the great cities, are so obvious as to constitute an immense security against separatist tendencies. Such advantages, coupled with the social and political forces discussed in other chapters, are now amply sufficient to hold the Pacific states to the Union, despite the obstacles which nature has interposed. In earlier stages of society these obstacles might well have proved insurmountable. Had communication been as difficult in the middle of the nineteenth century as it was in the sixteenth, the inhabitants of the Pacific coast might have formed a distinct nationality and grown into independent states; while in the inner recesses of the wide mountain land other and probably smaller communities would have sprung up, less advanced in culture, and each developing a type of its own. But the age we live in favours aggregation.The assimilative power of language, institutions, and ideas, as well as of economic and industrial forces, is enormous, especially when this influence proceeds from so vast a body as that of the American people east of the Rocky Mountains, compared to which the dwellers on the western slope are still but few. The failure of the Mormon attempt to found a state is an instance to show how vain is the effort to escape from these influences; for even without an exertion of the military power of the United States, they must soon, by the natural process of colonization, have been absorbed into its mass. There is, accordingly, no such reason to expect detachment now as there might have been had neither railroads nor telegraphs existed, and California been accessible only round Cape Horn or across the Isthmus. Now seven great trunk lines cross the continent; and though much of the territory which lies between the populous margin of the Pacific and the cities of Colorado, Nebraska, and Dakota is and must remain wild and barren, many settlements, mining, pastoral, and even agricultural, have begun to spring up in this intervening space, and the unpeopled gaps are narrowing day by day. Especially along the line of the more northerly railroads, population, though it must always be sparse, may become practically continuous. A close observer can, however, detect some differences in character between Californians and the Americans of the Eastern and Mississippi states; and it is possible, though perhaps hardly probable, that when immigration has ceased, and the Pacific coasts and valleys are peopled by the great grandchildren of Californians and Oregonians, this difference may become more marked, and a Pacific variety of the American species be discernible.

We have so far been proceeding on the assumption that the inhabitants of the United States will be in the future what they have been during the last three generations. It must, however be admitted that two agents are at work which may create differences between those who occupy different parts of the country greater than any which now exist. One of these is immigration from Europe, whereof I will only say that reasons have been given in a later chapter for doubting whether it will substantially alter the people in any section of the country, so strong is the assimilative power which the existing population exerts on the newcomers.11 Large as it has been, it has nowhere yet affected the English spoken; and one may indeed note that though there are marked differences of pronunciation there are, as respects the words, hardly any dialectic variations over the vast area of the Union. The other is climate. Now climatic influences seem to work but slowly on a national type already moulded and, so to speak, hammered into a definite shape by many centuries. The English race is, after all, a very recent arrival in America. Few, indeed, of the progenitors of the present dwellers in the South have been settled there for two centuries; that is to say, the present generation is at most only the sixth on which the climate has had time to tell. It is therefore quite possible that, when five or six more centuries have passed, the lowlanders of the Gulf states may, under the enervating heat of their summers, together with the desistance from physical exertion which that heat compels, have become different from what they now are; though the comparative coolness and consequent reinvigorative powers of the winters, and the infiltration into their population of newcomers from the hardier North, will be influences working in the contrary direction.12 The moral and social sentiments predominant in a nation, and the atmosphere of ideas it breathes, tend, as education is more and more diffused, and the movements of travel to and fro become constantly brisker, to be more and more powerful forces in producing similarity of character, and similarity of character tells on the man’s whole life and constitution.

A like question has been raised regarding the whole people of the United States as compared with the European stocks whence they sprung. The climate of their new country is one of greater extremes of heat and cold, and its air more generally stimulative, than are the climate and air of the British Isles, or even of Germany and Scandinavia. That this climate should, given sufficient time, modify the physical type of a race, and therewith even its intellectual type, seems only natural. Arctic winters and scanty nutriment have, in nine centuries, markedly reduced the stature of the Norwegians who inhabit Iceland, a country which has received practically no admixture of foreign blood, while the stern conditions of their lonely life have given them mental and moral habits distinguishable from those of the natives of modern Norway. But the problem is an obscure one, for many elements besides climate enter into it; and history supplies so few cases in point, that the length of time required to modify a physical type already settled for centuries is matter for mere conjecture. There have been many instances of races from cold or damp countries settling in warmer or dryer ones; but in all of these there has been also a mixture of blood, which makes it hard to say how much is to be attributed to climatic influences alone. What can be stated positively is, that the English race has not hitherto degenerated physically in its new home; in some districts it may even seem to have improved. The tables of life-insurance companies show that the average of life is as long as in Western Europe. People walk less and climb mountains less than they do in England, but quite as much physical strength and agility are put forth in games, and these are pursued with as much ardour. It was noted in the War of Secession that the percentage of recoveries from wounds was larger than in European wars, and the soldiers in both armies stood well the test of the long marches through rough and sometimes unhealthy regions to which they were exposed, those, perhaps, faring best who were of the purest American stock, i.e., who came from the districts least affected by recent immigration.13 It has, however, already been remarked that the time during which physical conditions have been able to work on the Anglo-American race is much too short to enable any but provisional conclusions to be formed; and for the same reason it is premature to speculate upon the changes in character and intellectual tastes which either the natural scenery of the American continent, and in particular its vast central plain, or the occupations and economic environment of the people, with their increasing tendency to prefer urban to rural life, may in the course of ages produce. The science of ethnographic sociology is still only in its infancy, and the working of the causes it examines is so subtle that centuries of experience may be needed before it becomes possible to determine definite laws of national growth.

Let us sum up the points in which physical conditions seem to have influenced the development of the American people, by trying to give a short answer to the question, What kind of a home has Nature given to the nation?

She has furnished it with resources for production, that is, with potential wealth, ampler and more varied than can be found in any other country—an immense area of fertile soil, sunshine and moisture fit for all the growths of the temperate, and even a few of the torrid, zone, a store of minerals so large as to seem inexhaustible.

She has given it a climate in which the foremost races of mankind can thrive and (save in a very few districts) labour, an air in most regions not only salubrious, but more stimulating than that of their ancient European seats.

She has made communication easy by huge natural watercourses, and by the general openness and smoothness of so much of the continent as lies east of the Rocky Mountains.

In laying out a vast central and almost unbroken plain, she has destined the largest and richest region of the country to be the home of one nation, and one only. That the lands which lie east of this region between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic, and those which lie west of it between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, are also occupied by that one nation is due to the fact that before the colonization of the central region had gone far, means of communication were invented which made the Alleghenies cease to be a barrier, and that before the Pacific coast had been thickly settled, the rest of the country was already so great in population, wealth, and power that its attraction was as irresistible as the Moon finds the attraction of the Earth to be.

Severing its home by a wide ocean from the old world of Europe on the east, and by a still wider one from the half old, half new, world of Asia and Australasia on the west, she has made the nation sovereign of its own fortunes. It need fear no attacks nor even any pressure from the military and naval powers of the eastern hemisphere, and it has little temptation to dissipate its strength in contests with them. It has no doubt a strong neighbour on the North, but a friendly one, linked by many ties of interest as well as kinship, and not likely ever to become threatening. It had on the South neighbours who might have been dangerous, but fortune favoured it by making one of them hopelessly weak, and obliging the other, strong as she was, to quit possession at a critical moment. Thus is it left to itself as no great state has ever yet been in the world; thus its citizens enjoy an opportunity never before granted to a nation, of making their country what they will to have it.

These are unequalled advantages. They contain the elements of immense defensive strength, of immense material prosperity. They disclose an unrivalled field for the development of an industrial civilization. Nevertheless, students of history, knowing how unpredictable is the action of what we call moral causes, that is to say, of emotional and intellectual influences as contrasted with those rooted in physical and economic facts, will not venture to base upon the most careful survey of the physical conditions of America any bolder prophecy than this, that not only will the state be powerful and the wealth of its citizens prodigious, but that the nation will probably remain one in its government, and still more probably one in speech, in character, and in ideas.

chapter 92

The Latest Phase of Immigration

Since the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of the Christian Era, when vast displacements of population took place in Europe and Western Asia, carrying many Teutonic and Slavonic tribes out of their ancient seats into the territories of the Roman Empire, no age has seen migrations of the races of men comparable in magnitude to those which have since 1845 poured like a flood into the United States.1 These new settlers have come from all parts of Europe except France, which few leave, and Spain, whose emigrants go to the Spanish-speaking parts of the New World. Latterly some have come from the Levant also.

The immigration falls into three periods, or rather consists of three successive streams, each of which brought on the scene a new race or group of races, while the former streams still continued to flow, though with a diminished volume.

Ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century there had been a steady but slender influx of settlers, which did not exceed 20,000 per annum until 1820. From that number it rose slowly with the prosperity of the country, and latterly with the cheaper and more rapid transportation by steam vessels, till 1842, when 100,000 entered. With the years 1845–46, the time of the terrible famine in Ireland, begins the first or Irish period of the full rush of immigration.2 In the ten years 1845–55, more than 1,250,000 people came from Ireland to the United States. The largest number was in 1851, when 221,253 landed. Thenceforward the flow was generally large, varying greatly, but seldom below 30,000 and sometimes as high as 80,000. Of late years it has tended to decrease, and in 1913 was only 27,876; the total from 1820 to 1909, inclusive, being 4,218,107, a number equal to the whole population of Ireland in 1909. Upon the top of this Celtic immigration there soon after came a second great wave, and this time from the Teutonic parts of Europe. The arrivals from Germany rose suddenly in 1852 from 72,000 to 145,000, and in 1854 reached 215,000, a number only once thereafter exceeded, viz., in 1882, when the total was 250,000. Since 1894 there has been a decline, and in 1913 only 34,329 immigrants came from Germany. The total number from 1820 till 1909 was 5,320,312.

Somewhat later began the inrush from the three Scandinavian countries. Insignificant till 1849, the number suddenly rose in 1866 to 13,000, and thereafter reached from 30,000 to 50,000 during many years, the highest tide-mark being 105,000 in 1882. In 1913 the number was 32,267, and the total from 1820 to 1909 is given as 1,896,139.

All this time the immigration from the rest of Europe had been trifling, except of course that from Great Britain, whence there came a steady though never copious stream. But in 1880 the theretofore small flow from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy rose swiftly, and in 1882 there was also an increase from Italy and Russia. The great prosperity then reigning in the United States was causing a strong indraught, and the immigration from all quarters reached a volume not equalled thereafter till 1907. From 1882 onwards other parts also of Europe have been affected; and after 1890, as the arrivals from Ireland and Germany began slowly to decline, Central and Southern Europe became the main source of the gigantic flood of new immigrants, whose total numbered in 1882, 789,000 and in 1913, 1,197,892. Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Magyars, Finns, Russians—these last nearly all Jews—Slovenes, Roumans (mostly from Transylvania), and Greeks, with a smaller number of Armenians, Syrians, and Bulgarians, have (taken together) latterly far outnumbered the entering Teutons, as the Italians have far outnumbered the Irish. It is computed that over eight millions in all entered between 1900 and the end of 1909, and that over thirty millions have entered in the seventy years between 1840 and 1913, twice what the total white population of the United States was in the former year.

The population of the United States was in 1840 almost wholly—perhaps as to seven-eighths—of British origin, i.e., roughly two-thirds Teutonic and one-third Celtic. Now it is a remarkable fact that in the immigration of the next fifty years, 1840–90, the Teutonic and Celtic elements which entered corresponded pretty nearly to the proportions which those two elements bore to one another in the population of 1840, Teutons, including Germans, Scandinavians, and English from the Teutonic parts of Britain, constituting about two-thirds, Irish about one-third, of the whole. Thus the racial composition of the American people as a whole was not markedly altered during that half-century, the proportion of Teutons to Celts remaining about the same. Neither was the proportion of religious persuasions much altered, for though nearly all the Irish and many Germans were Roman Catholics, all the Scandinavians, nearly all the English, and a majority of the Germans were Protestants.

Far otherwise is it with the third influx. New elements, hitherto unrepresented in the American people, and unlike either the Teuton or the Celt, have now been added. The American people of the future will be an amalgam from a much greater number of component elements than had entered into it theretofore. Moreover, these new accretions, except the Jews, Greeks, some of the Roumans, the Finns, and the Armenians, belong almost wholly to the Roman Church, so that if the children of the immigrants remain connected with that church, its share of the population will be relatively larger.

The chief causes of great migrations have in time past been four: (1) war; (2) political or religious oppression; (3) the desire of a growing population to find fresh land to cultivate; (4) the movement of labour from regions where it is abundant and cheap to regions where it is scarce and dear. Of these four, the first has not been operative in the present case, and the second only as respects Jews and Armenians. It is the third, and latterly even more markedly the fourth cause, that have brought about this vast outflow from the Old World to the New. The stirring of men’s minds out of their fixed and ancient ways has reached even the illiterate peasantry of backward regions, and made them desire to better their condition. But the outflow has been accelerated and increased by two facts without precedent in earlier times. One is the extraordinary cheapness and swiftness of transportation by sea, the other the facilities which modern methods of advertising have enabled steamship companies to use, and which they have strenuously used, to induce the peasants of the most secluded corners of Europe to seek new homes beyond the ocean.3 Some indeed come, not to settle, but to earn money and return. Yet these also help the movement, for those immigrants, especially Italians and Austro-Hungarian Slavs, who return home with their earnings after working for some months or a year in America, scatter abroad tales of the high wages they have gained, and thus excite the curiosity and eagerness of their neighbours. So the impulse spreads, and more and more are drawn from their humble homes to the Western Land of Promise.

The quality of the earlier immigrants, Irish and Teutonic, is too well known to need description. Many were uneducated, the Scandinavians probably least so, but they were intelligent peasants, of strong stocks, industrious, energetic, and capable of quickly accommodating themselves to the conditions of their new land and blending with its people. The Slavs and Italians from Central and Southern Europe are also peasants, and also industrious.4 But they, and nearly all others of the newly arrived races, arrive more largely illiterate than the Germans or Irish, and are on a lower grade of civilization. The Jews and Greeks are more frequently small traders than agriculturists, but are also illiterate, and very clannish, less inclined than any other group to mix with native Americans or other immigrants. This third stream of newcomers, taken in all its elements, is, therefore, socially below the two earlier ones, and in every way more alien to American habits and standards.

It was the increase of this new flood that led to the passing of immigration laws more stringent than had previously been thought needful, laws which have established a system of rigorous tests for admission, following on a law forbidding labourers to be imported under a contract to work if there are any persons in the United States who are unemployed in the particular kind of work. Under the present laws an average number slightly exceeding one per cent are annually rejected. A growing zeal for sanitary measures and an alarm at the entrance of many persons likely to prove undesirable citizens had much to do with this legislation, but something must also be ascribed to the desire of the labour unions to keep out as many as possible of those who come as competitors for labour, willing to take lower wages than those received by the workmen who were already American citizens.5 Public opinion did not wish to see the established standard of wages and living reduced.

The difference between these recent immigrants and the Germans and Scandinavians who preceded them appears in this also, that whereas the former started at once for the land, and set themselves to fell the woods or till the prairies of the West, the bulk of the later comers have either, like the Jews and Greeks, flocked into the cities and taken to the life of retail trading or of handicrafts and petty industries there, or have, like the Slovaks and Poles and Italians, found occupation in the mining districts or in railway construction and other forms of unskilled work.6 Today most of the hard, rough toil of the country is everywhere done by recent immigrants from Central or Southern Europe, or (to a smaller extent in the North and scarcely at all in the West) by Negroes. The Irish and the urban part of the German population have risen in the scale, and no longer form the bottom stratum.

Few indeed among the Slavonic or Italian immigrants have either the knowledge of the country or the enterprise or the capital needed to take up a farm, small as is the capital needed even now, when land is not so abundant as in 1890. But already one hears of Poles and Finns in New England and Bohemians in Iowa, and a few Russians (not Jewish) in one or two places settling down to cultivate little plots of ground, and doubtless the number of those who spread out in this way will go on increasing. At present, however, it is chiefly in New York and the country all round it, in Chicago and in the mining regions of Pennsylvania and the West, such for instance as Colorado, that the traveller is struck by the presence of a population obviously non-American and not even West European. The Jews, who occupy a large district in New York, and seem likely to remain a city-dwelling folk, form nearly one-fourth of its population. Both they and the Italians are numerous in Boston, though that ancient home of Puritanism is now rather an Irish than an American city.7 In parts of New Jersey and southern New York one may in asking one’s way along the roads find hardly anyone who can speak either English or German. So in Pennsylvania the Bible Society distributes copies of the New Testament in forty-two languages, while forty-nine are said to be spoken in New York City. In Chicago there are fourteen groups, of not less than ten thousand persons each, speaking foreign languages. The foreign-born and their offspring constituted in 19108 more than one-third of the total population of the country and rather more than half of the white population of the Northern and Western states, for it need hardly be said that there has been practically no immigration into the Southern states either of Celts, Teutons, or Slavs, though a little of Italians into Louisiana and of Germans into Texas. The older South (Virginia and the Carolinas) is the most purely English part of the United States.

A certain part of this recent immigration is transitory. Italians and Slovaks, for instance, after they have by thrift accumulated a sum which is large for them, return to their native villages, and carry back with them new notions and habits which set up a ferment among the simple rustics of a Calabrian or North Hungarian Valley.9 For the United States the practice has the double advantage of supplying a volume of cheap unskilled labour when employment is brisk and of removing it when employment becomes slack, so that the number of the unemployed, often very large when a financial crisis has brought bad times, is rapidly reduced, and there is more work for the permanently settled part of the labouring class. It is the easier to go backwards and forwards, because two-thirds among all the races, except the Jews, are men, either unmarried youths or persons who have left their wives behind. (Many, however, bring out their wives afterwards.) Nor are there many children. Four-fifths of the whole who enter are stated to be between fourteen and forty-five years of age.

Between those of the new immigrants who work in mines or on the construction of public works and the native Americans there is very little contact and practically no admixture. Even in the cities the Italians and the Jews keep to themselves, often occupying poor quarters exclusively their own. Sometimes, however, a group of Magyars or Czechs, working on a quarry or in a factory, will awaken the kindly interest of their neighbours who may, perhaps, build a chapel for them and gather their growing boys into a Young Men’s Christian Association. On the whole, however, they seem to be left pretty much to the mercies, not always tender, of their employers. The condition of many who toil in the coal mines and iron furnaces of Pennsylvania is described as wretched. But they earn as much in two months as they would have earned in a year at home. Thus the outdraught from Europe continues, and has now excited so much disquiet in Hungary, as threatening a scarcity of labour, that the government has been taking steps to discourage the departure of the peasants.10

That the recent immigrants should contribute largely to the crime of the districts where they abound is only natural, for everywhere it is from the poorest and least educated class that the largest proportion of offenders come. Fourteen per cent of the aliens over ten years of age in New York State are illiterate. This fact, their strange tongues, and, for the first few years, a certain want of finish in their personal habits, have created among native Americans a prejudice against them which is not altogether just, for the great majority are, when they come, simple, honest folk, who, having heard of America as the land of freedom and prosperity, are prepared to love it and to serve it by hard and patient work.

The more ignorant, and especially those who go to seek employment in mines, quarries, and railroad construction, do not apply for citizenship. In 1906 a statute was passed placing the naturalization of alien immigrants under the supervision of the Bureau of Immigration, and providing, among other things, that the applicant for naturalization must be neither an anarchist nor a polygamist, must intend to make the United States his home, and must be able to speak English. Adherence to anarchist or polygamist opinions is indeed also made one of the grounds for refusing entrance to an immigrant. The object of the law was, however, not merely to exclude undesirable persons from citizenship, but to prevent persons who might desire to return to their country of origin with the character of American citizens, from acquiring that character and the protection abroad which it implies. The early immigrants, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians, usually applied for and obtained citizenship very soon after their arrival. The political organizations laid hold of them and got them enrolled, desiring their votes. The more recent immigrants, and especially the Italians and Slavs, show less desire, and have not been looked after by the parties with the same assiduity. In 1900 more than half of the immigrants of those races were still aliens. It is generally the more ignorant, and especially those who do not settle on the land, who so remain. The Jewish immigrants, ignorant as they often are, are keen-witted, and as they mean to stay in America, they appreciate the advantage of becoming citizens at once. Numbering in New York about a million all told, they are already a power in politics. Many have joined Tammany Hall, and as they are even more cohesive than the Irish, their share in the control of that organization promises to be a large one.

Not a few of the immigrants have brought with them from Russia or Eastern Germany or Poland, the tenets of Socialism, and some few the doctrines of a revolutionary anarchism. The murder of President McKinley by such an one (born, however, in America), together with the inflammatory harangues delivered by adherents of this extreme creed, have done much to draw on them, even on those who nowise deserve it, the suspicion of native Americans.

If the influence in politics of the new immigrants has as yet been slender in proportion to their numbers, this is not merely because many of them still remain nonvoters, but also because they have not had time to learn to care about political topics. Those Southern Italians, for instance, who vote are said to be generally led to do so by pecuniary inducements. The first question which really lays hold on and appeals directly to the newcomer from strange lands, the first thing that brings him into direct touch with American life, is a labour dispute. Little as he has known of such matters before, a leader of his own race and tongue can easily draw him into a labour union, and when he is in it, and especially when a strike begins, no one can be more ardent or combative. Some unions have racial sections, which debate in their own language, and soon master the facts of the situation. If they are led by one not of their own race, he is usually an Irishman, such is the Irish aptitude for leadership. Employers who have brought together foreigners and put their faith in them as strikebreakers have sometimes been wofully disappointed. Indeed, the Pole or Slovak follows a militant chief more blindly than a native American would. He has less to lose, and his standard of comfort is so low that the privations of a strike affect him less.

In enquiring how far these newest comers are intermingling with the preexisting population, one must carefully distinguish between the original immigrants and their children born in the United States. The latter attend the common schools—in places where truancy laws are enforced—mix with the native inhabitants, grow up speaking English, and mostly forget their own language before they reach manhood. So far from desiring to remember it and to cling to their old nationality, they are eager to cast it away and to become in every sense Americans. Often they treat their parents, because foreign-born, with a sort of contempt. However slight may be their social contact with their native neighbours, they receive the same instruction, they tend to form the same habits of life, they read the same newspapers, they frequent the same public entertainments, and the more capable rise before long into positions where they are not merely units in a herd of workers “bossed” by an American or Irish foreman, but have a chance of forcing their own way upward. Exactly how far they intermarry outside their own race is not easy to say, but we may safely assume that those who have been born in the United States, or, entering very young, have grown up under American influences, find their race no insurmountable obstacle to alliances with those of native stock. There are more men than women among them, and the men try to marry into a social stratum a little above their own, a native American girl, if possible, or an Irish one. In such a land as the United States distinctions of race, unless marked by distinctions of colour, count for little.

Both as respects social admixture, however, and as respects propensity to crime, one must emphasize the difference between immigrants settling in large cities, or in mining regions, and those who are scattered out into smaller cities or country districts. In the latter they soon tend to mingle with the other residents, and the children grow up under similar and fairly wholesome conditions. But in such places as New York or Chicago they keep to themselves, often in streets inhabited entirely by those of the same race. It is difficult for parents who must themselves toil all day long to retain any control over children who enjoy the license and are exposed to the temptations of a vast city. Accordingly, the percentage of juvenile crime among the children of the foreign-born is more than twice as great as it is among children of native white parents.11 This is so easily explicable by the conditions under which they live that it need not be taken to indicate moral inferiority. It has often happened that when people of rude and simple habits come into a more civilized environment they lose their best native qualities and acquire the vices of civilization before its virtues. Out of this transitory phase the children of the immigrants may ere long pass.

Of the East Asiatic races that have entered the United States on the Pacific side of the continent it has not been necessary to speak in this chapter, because their immigration has been stopped. Statutes passed at the urgent instance of Californian workingmen, who disliked the competition of Chinese coolies, exclude all Chinese, except persons of the educated class, such as merchants, students, and travellers for pleasure; while under an arrangement made with the Japanese government in 1908, the influx of Japanese labourers, which was rising rapidly, has also been stopped. In 1910 there were in the United States 56,756 foreign-born Chinese, and it is possible that the number may increase slightly by illicit importation on the frontiers of Mexico and Canada. In 1910 there were 67,744 foreign-born Japanese; and since then many have departed and scarce any have arrived. Neither they, nor Chinese, nor Malays, nor Hindus, can be naturalized, but the children of these races, born in the United States, are born citizens, and may vote if registered, so any large addition to their numbers is all the more deprecated. It is needless to add that they remain quite distinct from the white inhabitants. The feeling against the entrance of the yellow races, less strong against the Chinese than it was in 1880, and qualified among the employers by the desire to have plenty of steady labour, is still strong enough to maintain the policy of exclusion, and does not seem likely to disappear in any period which can at present be foreseen. A like feeling exists in Australia and has there dictated an even more rigid warning off of all Asiatics. The humanitarian sentiment towards other races which was so strong in the middle of last century has visibly declined. No one, except a fruit grower who wants Japanese labourers for his orchards, openly complains of the exclusion,12 and the all too frequent outrages perpetrated by whites upon men of a different colour excite less censure than they would have done in the last generation.

Two large questions remain to be considered. The first is, Will European immigration continue from 1910 till 1960 on a scale similar to that of the years 1860 to 1910, during which more than twenty millions have arrived? To answer this question we must consider two sets of facts: first, the capacity of Europe to send emigrants out, and secondly the attractiveness for immigrants of the United States.

It has already been noted that the number coming from Ireland now averages only about one-sixth of what it was from 1847 to 1854. The Ireland of 1910 has about half as many people as she had in 1845, and her agricultural conditions are so much more favourable now than they were then that the motives for expatriation are less. It is therefore probable that henceforth fewer Irishmen will leave their country. So also as to Germany. She sends out from one-fourth to one-fifth of the number that came in the years between 1881 and 1891. The drop in Norse and Swedish immigration is less marked, but it averaged from 1905 to 1909 less than a half of what it was between 1880 and 1893. One may fairly conclude such surplus population as there was when the large outflow began has now been drained off, so that what will in future depart will be merely any natural excess of population beyond those for whom there is opportunity enough at home. In the Scandinavian countries, especially in Sweden, a scarcity of labour has begun to be felt, and the government deplores even such emigration as still continues.

As respects the new sources of migration—Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia—no decline is yet evident, and the fluctuations which are recorded seem to depend on the state of the labour market in America. But it may be assumed that what has happened in Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia will presently happen in Southeastern Europe also. The large outflow of peasants will leave more land available for the next generation. Wages will rise as labour grows scarcer, so there will be less reason for emigrating. As these countries were not overpopulated in the sense in which Ireland was overpopulated in 1840, the overflow which marked the years from 1890 to 1910 can hardly last much longer, unless, indeed, the sluices be raised in Russia. From that vast multitude of peasants new Slavonic millions might come, were the government to permit their departure. At present they emigrate mostly to Siberia.

The other side of the question relates to the attraction which America has exercised. Will the prospects of comfort and freedom she offers continue to stir the hopes of the European peasantry as they have done? Land is in the fertile West already scarcer and higher in price than it was, and virgin land is almost unattainable, except in the limited areas which are being made available by irrigation or by the new processes of dry farming. Those who leave Europe to till the soil elsewhere have now quite as great, if not greater, allurements in Canada or Argentina, and many who might formerly have gone to the United States are now seeking one or other of those countries. On the other hand, there is still a great demand for unskilled labour in the mine and the quarry and the forest, as well as for the construction of railroads. This is likely to continue for many a year to come, though every now and then a passing depression of trade may intervene to throw multitudes out of work.

It may therefore be expected that the natives of those parts of Europe, such as Russia, Poland, and South Italy, where wages are lowest and conditions least promising, will continue their movement to the United States until there is a nearer approach to an equilibrium between the general attractiveness of life for the poorer classes in the Old World and in the New. But the stream is likely to diminish in volume, as the outflow from a reservoir diminishes with the falling level of the water within. We must not expect the forty years from 1910 to 1950 to show an addition of twenty millions coming from without to the population of the United States, as did the forty years from 1870 to 1910.

The vast majority of the immigrants enter by the port of New York, and are on their arrival sent to Ellis Island, a rocky islet in the Hudson River, where they are inspected by officers of the Immigration Bureau before being permitted to proceed to their several destinations. In the great hall where they are penned together like sheep, there are a number of iron staircases, by which the immigrants mount from the ground floor to the floor above where they are inspected under the stringent provisions of the law. The spectator, as he stands listening to the incessant tramp, tramp of the feet of the men, women, and children as their shoes ring upon these iron steps, seems to hear the races of the Old World marching like an army into the New, and thinks of the tribes from Northern Europe who climbed the steep rock-paths over the Alpine passes whence they descended into the Roman Empire. Those came as conquerors; these come as humble suppliants for entrance into the land of a people rich and strong. But their coming cannot but affect that people. There were in the United States only forty-eight millions of white people, when the ten millions from Central and Southern Europe who have arrived since 1885 began to enter, an addition to the nation such as no nation ever received before. These ten millions, whose children are now counted by millions more, have indeed hardly yet begun to blend with the older population. But they must ultimately do so. Already they tell on the social and economic life of the country. Long before the end of the century their blood will have been largely mingled with that of the Anglo-American and Irish and German inhabitants. Thus the reflection is forced upon us, What changes in the character and habits of the American people will this influx of new elements make—elements wholly diverse not only in origin but in ideas and traditions, and scarcely less diverse from the Irish and Teutonic immigrants of previous years than from the men of predominantly English stock who inhabited the country befre the Irish or the Continental Teutons arrived?

This is the crucial question to which every study of the immigrant problem leads up. It is a matter of grave import for the world, seeing that it is virtually a new phenomenon in world history, because no large movement of the races of mankind from one region of the earth to another has ever occurred under conditions at all resembling these. But it is primarily momentous for the United States, and that all the more so because these new immigrants go to swell the class which already causes some disquietude, the class of unskilled labourers, the poorest, the most ignorant, and the most unsettled part of the population.

In the United States the uneasiness which this invasion excites takes shape in the question so often on men’s lips, Will the new immigrants be good Americans? In the most familiar sense of these words the enquiry can be easily answered. If by the words “good Americans” is meant “patriotic Americans,” patriotic they will be. They will be proud of America, loyal to the flag, quick to discard their European memories and sentiments, eager to identify themselves with everything distinctive of their new country. Within a few years the Italian or the Magyar, the Pole or the Rouman deems himself an American even if he be not yet a citizen. Much more do his children glory in the flag under which they were born. So far as politics are concerned, the unity and the homogeneity of the nation will not ultimately suffer.

Neither is there ground for apprehending any decline in the intellectual quality or practical alertness of the composite people of the future. Nearly all the instreaming races are equal in intelligence to the present inhabitants. Of the acuteness of Jews and Greeks and Italians it is superfluous to speak. One is told that the children of these stocks are among the brightest in the public schools, and that in New York they use the public libraries more than any others do. So, too, the Poles and the Czechs are naturally gifted races, quite as apt to learn as are the Germans, even if less solid and persistent. Than the Armenians there is no abler race in the world. A blending of races has often in past times been followed by an increase in intellectual fertility. It is possible that from among the Jews and Poles with their musical faculty, or the Italians with their artistic faculty, there may arise those who, stimulated by the new opportunities that surround them here, will carry the creative power of the country to a higher level of production in those branches of art than it has yet reached.

Whether the ethical quality of the nation will be affected, it is more difficult to conjecture. Of the races that are now entering, some have suffered in their birthland from economic and political conditions unfavourable to veracity and courage. Others, banded together against authority, have become prone to violence. But there are others, the Piedmontese and Lombards for instance, who come of a manly and industrious stock. The Czechs and the Poles, the Magyars and the Slovenes, do not appear to one who has seen them in their European homes to have less than their Teutonic neighbours of the virtues that belong to simple peasant folk. If the new immigrants or their children are found to sink below the average of conduct in the class they enter and show themselves more disorderly or dishonest than the native American, this will happen, not because the races are naturally more criminal, but rather because the conditions under which they begin life in their new country are unfavourable. The immigrant is cut loose from his old ties and from the influences that restrained him. He is far from his parents and his priest. He has no longer the public opinion of his neighbours to regard, no longer any disapproval of the local magnate to fear. He does not see round him the signs of a vigilant, even if oppressive, public authority which were conspicuous in his native village. In the rough, unsettled, perhaps homeless, life he leads, a tossing atom in a seething crowd who toil for employers with whom they have no healthy human relation, propensities towards evil are apt to spring into activity, and the softer feelings as well as the sense of duty to perish from inanition. The immigrant’s child is in one way better placed, for he is influenced by his American school teachers and school companions, but in another way worse, because the traditions and habits of the simple life of rural Europe have for him faded away altogether, if indeed he ever knew them. He starts in life as an American, but without the fundamental ideas and ingrained traditions of the New Englander or Virginian of the old stock, for these ideas and sentiments do not go with the language and the right to vote. Whether his religion will cling to him remains to be seen. Its power is at any rate likely to be weaker, perhaps least weak among the Jews, whom their faith and their habits hold apart. Though they also are divided into sects some of which render slight or no obedience to the Mosaic law, they show much less tendency to blend with the rest of the population than do the other races. How long the Greeks and the Armenians will be kept distinct by loyalty to their ancient churches I will not venture to predict. Among all the immigrants the grasp of religion seems to loosen; many are lost to their church in the second and even more in the third generation.

So far we have been considering the influence of the immigrant on American society as a member of it, not so much in the way of influencing others, as in that of constituting one of a body whose conduct forms a part of the average conduct of the inhabitants of the country.

There is, however, another aspect of the matter, really different though apt to be confounded with that already considered. It is this, What difference to the national type of character will be produced by the infusion of these new strains of blood? Before the year 1950 arrives, the children and grandchildren of the immigrants who have entered since 1885 will be distinguished from other Americans only by their surnames, and sometimes by their features and complexion.13 They will no longer be Poles or Italians or Slovaks, but Americans. They will have intermarried with the original Anglo-Americans, and with other immigrants, so that the generation born in 1950 will contain racial elements quite diverse from any that were present a century before. In some parts of the country these racial elements may be so largely represented, that prima facie one would expect them to be traceable in the physical and mental characteristics of the inhabitants. When a stream of whitish hue receives a reddish stream with even one-third its volume, it runs thenceforth with water of an altered tint. Will something similar happen to the people of the United States?

Here let us pause to note a significant factor in the situation. It has been observed since about 1870 that the fecundity of the original Anglo-American race tends to decline. Benjamin Franklin considered six children to constitute the normal American family. The average is now slightly above two children, and the percentage of childless marriages much larger than formerly. Birth-rate statistics show that whereas the number of births to the thousand of population is in Hungary about 40, in Germany 36, in England and Scotland, Norway and Denmark 30, it is in Massachusetts and Michigan only 25, in Rhode Island and Connecticut 24. In some states of the Union it is doubtless higher than in these four. But in all the Northern states it is much smaller among native-born Americans than among the immigrants. In Massachusetts the birth rate of the foreign-born is three times as large as that among the native-born, and the decline in fecundity among American-born as compared with foreign-born all over the Union is indubitable. Thus we have the fact, not only that far more than half the total white population was in 1910 either foreign or the offspring of foreigners, but the further fact, that at least twice as many children were then being born to the foreign-born as to the native-born. Should immigration continue on a large scale, and should this disparity in the fertility of the foreign and the native stocks also continue, the white population, which was in 1840 almost wholly Anglo-American, and in 1910 half native and half foreign, may in 1950 be three-fourths or more of foreign blood, i.e., three-fourths of all the inhabitants of the United States may be the offspring of those who have entered America since 1840.

Two qualifying facts may deserve mention. One is that a large part, possibly one-half, of these three-fourths of foreign stock to be expected in 1950 may probably be the descendants of those who have come from the United Kingdom, from Germany, and from Scandinavia, and the smaller part, perhaps 15 to 25 per cent of the total white population, the children of immigrants from Central and Southern Europe. The other is that the fecundity of the foreign stock already shows signs of declining in their new American environment. It is certainly greater among the immigrants than among their offspring born in the United States. The latter seem to be caught by the desire to reach a higher standard of living and rise in the social scale, a desire apt to express itself, among the ambitious, in taking a native American or an Irish wife. Thus, in the second generation, families tend to be smaller; and so by 1950 the birth rate of the children of foreigners may have sunk to the native American level.

Be these things as they may—and of course all forecasts must be speculative where the data are still so imperfect—the problem confronts us: What will be the result on the American people of this infusion we see beginning of a great volume of new blood drawn from races unlike the original Anglo-American stock?

In the problem there are two factors. One is the hereditary race character, by which an average Italian or Jew or Pole is born different from the average American of British ancestry. As racial quality shows itself in the lines of the face and the colour of hair and eyes, so is it also distinguishable in certain intellectual and emotional traits. The virtues and the faults of a Tuscan are not quite the same as those of a Prussian.

The other factor is the environment in which a child grows up to manhood and by which his character is moulded. An Italian or Polish infant, brought up in an American family and mixing during youth only with Americans, may in manhood still retain some racial traits, but they will be far less marked than if he had grown up in Naples or Krakow among people of his own nation. What is the relative importance of these two factors, heredity and environment? When ten or twelve millions of Italians, Poles, and other “new immigrants” have intermarried with Americans, will their offspring give evidence in physical and mental quality of a diverse element brought into the nation, or will the social forces at work which are moulding all persons born in America overlay and end by obliterating these racial differences?

(1) Scientific students are so far from agreed as to many of the phenomena of hereditary transmission that while stating that side of the problem, I will not venture to discuss it. But the other side is within the field of any observer who gives steady attention to the facts. So let us note some facts that show what in the United States the power of environment is capable of effecting.

The climate and food in North America are different from those that have helped to form in past centuries the type of each of these European races. Some observers claim to have already discovered among the American-born children of certain among the immigrant stocks, such as Jews and Southern Italians, physical divergences, particularly in skull form, from the normal European characteristics of the race as examined in the foreign-born parents of these children.14 The enquiry is still incomplete, but some sort of divergence may well be expected after there has been time enough for the new conditions to work, and if physical structure is affected in the way which the observations made on Jews and Italians indicate, much more may mental changes follow.

(2) The immigrants belong to so many different races that no one race can in the long run maintain any distinctive type. Even should the first generation born in the United States tend to marry each within its own race, the next generation will not; and before the end of the twentieth century all will have been commingled, and the blood of the nation of that time will have been the product of many different strains. So the intellectual and moral character of the future American, whether or no altered by qualities added from these new races, will not bear a mark distinctive of any one of them. Large as may be the contribution of all the immigrants taken together, the contribution of each taken separately will be too small to leave a permanent trace. Neither the four and a half millions of Irishmen nor the five million of Germans who have come since 1845, though they may possibly have modified the national character, have added anything that can be called distinctively Irish or distinctively German.

(3) The point in which the present case of race fusion most differs from all preceding cases, is in the immense assimilative potency of the environment. Never before did less advanced races come into a country and people which possessed a like capacity for permeating newcomers with its ways of thinking, its tastes, its habits of life. The American type of civilization, whether in its material and economic, or in its social and political aspect, is at least as distinctive as any the Old World can show. The effigy and device—so to speak—which the American die impresses on every kind of metal placed beneath its stamp, is sharp and clear. The schools, the newspapers, the political institutions, the methods of business, the social usages, the general spirit in which things are done, all grasp and mould and remake a newcomer from the first day of his arrival, and turn him out an American far more quickly and more completely than the like influences transform a stranger into a citizen in any other country. Nowhere is life so intense; nowhere are men so proud of the greatness and prosperity of their country. These things strengthen the assimilative force of American civilization, because here the ties that held the stranger to the land of his birth are quickly broken and soon forgotten. His transformation is all the swifter and more thorough because it is a willing transformation.

Even, therefore, should another ten millions pour in from Southern and Eastern Europe, even should this infusion of new blood affect the quality of the nation in some way not yet to be foreseen, the type seems destined to stand, retaining the features that make it distinctively American. Changes in national character there will of course be, for a nation is always changing, even if it receives no accretions from without. It changes with the events that befall it and the influences that play on it from age to age. As the Americans of 1850, who had not yet been affected by immigration, were different from those of 1750, so the Americans of a.d. 2000 will in any case be different from those of 1900, nor will it be then possible to determine how much of the difference should be ascribed to the addition of new racial elements, how much to the working of other economic and moral causes. Thus the problem of ascertaining the effect of the commingling of a group of widely diverse and less advanced racial stocks with a stock and a civilization of unusual assimilative power may be no nearer solution then than it is now.

If the incoming of these masses of uneducated European peasants should, as some fear, be followed by a decline, either generally or in the places where they chiefly settle, of respect for the law and of the ethical standards generally, the cause will lie not so much in any moral inferiority of the immigrants as in the unfavourable conditions which surround them and their offspring in a land with whose people they have little in common, and where most of them are huddled together in the slums of vast cities, having lost one set of guiding influences before they have gained another. In these conditions there does lie a danger, and it is the greater because the aggregation of multitudes of men in huge industrial centres where the social relations that in former generations linked the poorer to the richer and more educated scarcely exist today, is itself a phenomenon of serious import. Grave and urgent, therefore, is the need for efforts to reach and befriend the immigrants and to form in their children high ideals of American citizenship. Much is already being done. The teachers in the schools of some of the cities realize the need and are devoting themselves in a worthy spirit to the work. So, too, in many places the churches, wisely avoiding whatever savours of proselytism, as well as the university and neighbourhood “settlements” and the Young Men’s Christian Associations, are trying to get hold of the neglected strangers and help them to “find themselves” in their unfamiliar surroundings. Yet much more needs to be done, for in these cities and in the mining regions the opportunities of natural and wholesome human contact between the educated class and these new elements in the labouring class are but scanty.

That there is ground for anxiety in the presence of this vast and growing multitude of men ignorant and liable to be misled cannot be denied. One often hears the wish expressed that it had been found possible to withhold electoral power from them till they had lived long enough in the country to imbibe its spirit and be familiar with its institutions. While sharing this anxiety, I must add that it is least felt by those who know the immigrants best. The public-spirited and warmhearted men and women who work among them are not despondent. They declare that the immigrants respond quickly to any touch of personal kindness, and that not a few soon show themselves nowise inferior to other persons in the same grade of life. Great is the stimulative and educative as well as the assimilative power of the American environment.

chapter 93

The South Since the War

Though in the preceding chapters I have sought, so far as possible, to describe the political phenomena of America in general terms, applicable to all parts of the Union, it has often been necessary to remind the reader that the conditions of the Southern states, both political and social, are in some respects exceptional, one may almost say, abnormal. The experience of this section of the country has been different from that of the more populous and prosperous North, for the type of its civilization was till thirty years ago determined by the existence of slavery. It has suffered, and has been regenerated, by a terrible war. It is still confronted by a peculiar and menacing problem in the presence of a mass of Negroes much larger than was the whole population of the Union in 1800, persons who, though they are legally and industrially members of the nation, are still virtually an alien element, unabsorbed and unabsorbable. In the present chapter I propose to sketch in brief outline the fortunes of the Southern states since the war, and their present economic and social condition, reserving for the two chapters which follow an equally succinct account of the state of the coloured population, and their relations, present and prospective, to the whites.

The history and the industrial situation of the Southern states cannot be understood without a comprehension of their physical conditions. That part of them which lies east of the Mississippi consists of two regions. There is what may be called the plantation country, a comparatively level, low, and fertile region, lying along the coast of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and stretching up the basin of the Mississippi River. And there is the highland region, a long, broad tongue of elevated land stretching down from the north into this level plantation country, between the thirty-ninth and the thirty-third parallels of north latitude. Although the mountain country encloses within its network of parallel ridges many fertile valleys, while upon its outer slopes, where they sink to the plain, there is plenty of good land, the greater part of its area is covered by thick forests, or is too steep and rough for tillage. To men with capital and to the better sort of settlers generally, it was uninviting, and thus while the rest of the South was being occupied and brought under cultivation, it long remained thinly peopled and in many districts quite wild, with scarcely any roads and no railways. As the soil was not fit for tobacco, cotton, rice, or sugar, the planters had no motive to bring slave labour into it, not to add that the winter cold made it no fit dwelling place for the swarthy children of the tropics. Hence this region was left to be slowly and sparsely peopled by the poorest of the whites, and a race of small farmers and woodmen grew up. They were rude and illiterate, cut off from the movements of the world, and having little in common with the inhabitants of the low country east and west of them, yet hardy and vigorous, with the virtues, and some of the fierceness, of simple mountaineers, honest among themselves, and with a dangerously keen sense of personal honour, but hostile to the law and its ministers. While the whole cultivation of the plain country of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky was done by Negroes, and these states, more particularly Virginia and the Carolinas, were ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy planters, Negroes were scarcely to be seen in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee, and the scanty white population of these mountains had no influence on the conduct of public affairs. Hence when the Civil War broke out, this race of hillmen, disliking slavery, and having no love for the planters, adhered to the Union cause, and sent thousands of stalwart recruits into the Union armies. Even today, though, as we shall presently see, it has been much affected by the running of railways through it, the opening of mines and the setting up of iron works, the mountain land of the South remains unlike the plain country both in the character of its inhabitants and in the physical conditions which have created that character, conditions which, as will appear in the sequel, are an important factor in the so-called Negro problem.

Excluding these highlanders—and excluding also the three border states which did not secede, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—there were at the end of the war three classes of persons in the South. There was the planting aristocracy, which the war had ruined. The elder men had seen their estates laid waste, such savings as they possessed exhausted, their whole Negro property, estimated (over the whole country) at nearly $20,000,000, gone from them into freedom. Of the younger men, a large part had fallen in the field. All, old and young, had no capital left with which to work the estates that still remained in their hands. Land and Negroes had been their only wealth, for there were practically no manufactures and little commerce, save at the half dozen seaports; credit was gone; and everything, even the railroads, was in ruins. Thus the country was, as a whole, reduced to poverty, and the old plantation life broken up forever.

The second class consisted of the poor or, as they were often called, “mean” whites, who, in the lowlands and outside the few cities, included all the white population below the level of the planters. On them, too, slavery had left its hateful stamp. Considering themselves above field labour, for which in any case they were little disposed in the hot regions along the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts, they contracted habits of idleness and unthrift; they were uneducated, shiftless, unenterprising, and picked up their living partly by a languid cultivation of patches of land, and by hunting, partly by hanging about the plantations in a dependent condition, doing odd jobs and receiving occasional aid. To them the war brought good, for not only was labour dignified by the extinction of slavery, but their three or four years of service in the Confederate armies called out their finer qualities and left them more of men than it found them. Moreover with the depression of the planting oligarchy their social inferiority and political subservience became less marked.

The third class were the Negroes, then about four millions in number, whose sudden liberation threw a host of difficulties upon the states where they lived, and upon the federal government, which felt responsible not only for the good order of the reconquered South, but in a special manner for those whose freedom its action had procured. They were—even the majority of the (comparatively few) free blacks in the towns—illiterate, and scarcely more fit to fend for themselves and guide their course as free citizens than when they or their fathers had been landed from the slave ship.

In this state of things, three great problems presented themselves to the federal government whose victorious armies were occupying the South. How should the state governments in the states that had seceded and been conquered be reestablished? What provision should be made for the material support and protection in personal freedom of the emancipated slaves? To what extent should not merely passive but also active civil rights—that is to say, rights of participating in the government as electors or officials—be granted to these freedmen?

The solution of these problems occupied twelve eventful years from 1865 to 1877, and constitutes one of the most intricate chapters in American history. I must refrain from discussing either the party conflicts at Washington, or the subtle legal questions that were raised in Congress and in the courts, and be content with touching on the action taken by the federal and state governments so far and only so far as it affected the relations of the Negroes and the whites.

The first action was taken by the Southern states themselves. Conformably to his amnesty proclamation of 1863, President Lincoln had recognized new state governments, loyal to the Union, in Tennessee and Louisiana, as he had previously done in Arkansas. When the war had ended, the other reconquered states (except Texas) took a course similar to that which the loyalists of those states had taken. The white inhabitants, except those excluded by the terms of President Johnson’s amnesty proclamation of May 1865, chose conventions; these conventions enacted new constitutions; and under these constitutions, new state legislatures were elected. These legislatures promptly accepted the amendment (the thirteenth) to the federal Constitution by which (in 1865) slavery had been abolished, and then went on to pass laws for the regulation of Negro labour and against vagrancy, laws which, though represented, and probably in good faith, as necessary for the control of a mass of ignorant beings suddenly turned adrift, with no one to control them and no habits of voluntary industry or thrift, kept the Negroes in a state of inferiority, and might have been so worked as to reduce a large part of them to practical servitude. This was a false move, for it excited alarm and resentment at the North; and it was accompanied by conflicts here and there between the whites, especially the disbanded Confederate soldiers, and the coloured people; conflicts the more regrettable because the slaves had, during the war, behaved excellently towards the defenceless white women and children on the plantations, and had given their former masters little or nothing to revenge. It was, therefore, in a suspicious temper that Congress approached the question of the resettlement of the South. The victors had shown unexampled clemency to the vanquished, but they were not prepared to kiss and be friends in the sense of at once readmitting those whom they deemed and called “rebels” to their old full constitutional rights. Slavery, which at the beginning of the war they had for the most part disclaimed the purpose to abolish, had now become utterly detestable to them, and the Negro an object of special sympathy. They felt bound to secure for him, after all they had done and suffered, the amplest protection. It might perhaps have been wiser to revert to the general maxims of American statesmanship, and rely upon the natural recuperative forces and the interest which the South itself had in reestablishing order and just government. But the Northern leaders could not be expected to realize how completely the idea of another revolt had vanished from the minds of the Southern people, who, in a characteristically American fashion, had already accepted the inevitable, perceiving that both slavery and the legal claim to secede were gone forever. And these leaders—more particularly those who sat in Congress—were goaded into more drastic measures than reflection might have approved by the headstrong violence of President Andrew Johnson, who, as a Southern states’ rights man of the old type, had announced that the states were entitled to resume their former full rights of self-government, and who, while stretching his powers to effect this object, had been denouncing Congress in unmeasured terms. Very different might have been the course of events had the patient wisdom of Lincoln lived to guide the process of resettlement.

Under the influence of these sentiments, Congress refused to allow the members elected from the reconquered states to take their seats, and enacted a statute establishing a Freedmen’s Bureau, armed with large powers for the oversight and support of the liberated Negroes. Passed in 1865, and in 1866 continued for two years longer, this act practically superseded the legislation of the reconquered states regarding the coloured people. Congress then passed and proposed for acceptance by the states (June 1866) an amendment (the fourteenth) to the federal Constitution, which conferred citizenship, state as well as federal, on all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, forbade legislation by a state abridging the privileges or immunities of a citizen of the United States, and provided for reducing the representation in Congress of any state in proportion to the number of its citizens excluded from the suffrage. As all danger of a return of slavery had already vanished, it was a tremendous forward move to put this pressure upon the Southern states to confer full voting rights upon their Negroes. These states, however, would probably have done well to accept the amendment, and might perhaps have accepted it had they realized what was the temper of the party dominant at the North. But they complained of the proposal to cut down representation in respect of excluded citizens, arguing that there were Northern states where colour was a ground of exclusion, and which, nevertheless, would suffer much less than the Southern states because the number of their coloured residents was far smaller; and they also resented a provision of the amendment which disqualified from voting or office all persons who having ever taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States had been concerned in “insurrection or rebellion against the same.” Accordingly all these states, except Tennessee, rejected the amendment. This further stimulated the anger and suspicion of Congress, whic proceeded (March 2, 1867) to pass the so-called Reconstruction Act (a bill “to provide efficient governments for the insurrectionary States”) designed to create legitimate governments in the states not yet readmitted to the Union (ignoring the governments set up by the white inhabitants), and to determine the conditions proper for their readmission. By this act these states, that is, the whole seceding South except Tennessee, were divided into five military districts, each to be governed by a brigadier-general of the Federal army, until such time as a state convention should have framed a new constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment have been ratified and the state have been duly readmitted. The delegates to each convention were to be elected by all the male citizens, excluding such as, having previously sworn to support the federal Constitution, had been concerned in the late rebellion; and it was to these same voters that the new constitution when framed was to be submitted for ratification. This provision, while it admitted the Negroes to be voters and delegates to the conventions, debarred from both functions most of the leading whites, and left the conventions to be “run” by those few whites who had remained faithful to the Union, and by adventurers who had come from the North in the track of the Federal armies. The Reconstruction Act was duly carried out; conventions were held; constitutions granting equal suffrage to all, blacks and whites, were enacted, and new state governments installed accordingly, in which, however, the leading white men of each state, since not yet pardoned, could obtain no place either as legislators or as officials. By this procedure, six states were in 1868 readmitted to Congress, as having satisfied the conditions imposed, and the remaining states within the two years following. In July 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment became a part of the Constitution, having been accepted by three-fourths of the states, and in March 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding the voting right of citizens to be “denied or abridged an account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude,” also became by similar acceptance part of the Constitution and binding on all the states. With this, and with the passing in 1870 and 1871 of penal laws, commonly called the Force Acts, intended to protect the Negroes in the exercise of the suffrage, the direct interference of the federal legislature ended. In 1872, by the general Amnesty Act, it readmitted the great bulk of the ex-Confederates to full political rights.

Meanwhile, how had things been going in the Southern states themselves? All the leading whites having been disqualified from voting or taking part in the government, the only factors or forces left were:

First, such whites as had adhered to the Union throughout the war—in most states neither a numerous nor an influential body
Secondly, a vast mass of Negroes suddenly set free, and absolutely destitute, not only of political experience, but even of the most rudimentary political ideas
Thirdly, men sent down from the North as agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or otherwise in connection with the federal government, and persons who had come of themselves in the hope of profiting by such opportunities for enrichment as the abnormal conditions of the country might create

The voting strength was, of course, with the Negroes, especially in South Carolina and the Gulf states (except Texas); and a certain number were chosen to sit in the legislatures and to fill the less important offices. In the legislatures of South Carolina and Mississippi, they formed the majority; and from the latter state they sent one of themselves to the federal Senate. But leadership, of course, fell to the whites, who alone were capable of it, and chiefly to those white adventurers whose scanty stock of portable property won for them the name of “carpetbaggers.” They organized the Negroes for elections, state and local, they tampered with the electoral lists and stuffed the ballot boxes,1 they “ran” the legislatures. They pounced upon the lucrative places, satisfying Negro claims with posts of less consequence,2 they devised the various methods by which taxation was increased, debt rolled up, offices created and lavishly paid, frauds of every kind perpetrated for the benefit of themselves and their friends. Such a saturnalia of robbery and jobbery has seldom been seen in any civilized country, and certainly never before under the forms of free self-government. The coloured voters could hardly be blamed for blindly following the guides who represented to them the party to which they owed their liberty; and as they had little property, taxation did not press upon them nor the increase of debt alarm them. Those among the Negroes to whom the chief profit accrued were the preachers, who enjoyed a sort of local influence, and could sometimes command the votes of their fellows, and the legislators, who were accustomed, in South Carolina, for instance, to be paid a few dollars for every bill they passed.3 But nine-tenths of the illicit gains went to the whites. Many of them were persons of infamous character who ultimately saved themselves from justice by flight. For the time they enjoyed absolute impunity, without even that check which public opinion imposes on the worst rulers when they themselves belong to the district which they rule.

The position of these adventurers was like that of a Roman provincial governor and his suite in the later days of the Republic, or an English official in the East Indies in the earlier days of the Company’s conquests, save that they had less to fear from subsequent prosecution than Verres, and less from a parliamentary enquiry than the companions of Clive. The very securities with which the federal system surrounds state autonomy contributed to encourage their audacity. The national government was not responsible, because the whole machinery of state government was in form complete and to all outward appearance in normal action. But as voting power lay with those who were wholly unfit for citizenship, and had no interest, as taxpayers, in good government, as the legislatures were reckless and corrupt, the judges for the most part subservient, the Federal military officers bound to support what purported to be the constitutional authorities of the state, Congress distant and little inclined to listen to the complaints of those whom it distrusted as rebels,4 greed was unchecked and roguery unabashed. The methods of plunder were numerous. Every branch of administration became wasteful. Public contracts were jobbed, and the profits shared. Extravagant salaries were paid to legislators; extravagant charges allowed for all sorts of work done at the public cost. But perhaps the commonest form of robbery, and that conducted on the largest scale, was for the legislature to direct the issue of bonds in aid of a railroad or other public work, these bonds being then delivered to contractors who sold them, shared the proceeds with the governing ring, and omitted to execute the work. Much money was however taken in an even more direct fashion from the state treasury or from that of the local authority; and as not only the guardians of the public funds, but even, in many cases, the courts of law, were under the control of the thieves, discovery was difficult and redress unattainable. In this way the industrious and property-holding classes saw the burdens of the state increase, with no power of arresting the process. In North Carolina, $14,000,000 worth of railroad bonds were issued, and no railway made. In Alabama, the state debt rose in four years from $8,356,000 to $25,503,000, with little or nothing to show for it. In Mississippi, the state levy had been ten cents on the $100 of assessed value of lands. In 1874 it had risen to fourteen times that rate. In South Carolina, the state debt leapt in four years from $5,407,000 to $18,515,000, and Governor Moses, not content with his share of the plunder, openly sold his pardons, of which he granted 457 in two years. But the climax was reached in Louisiana, where, in a single year, the state debt was increased fourfold, and the local debt twofold, while in four years’ time the total state and city indebtedness was rolled up by the sum of $54,000,000, all of which went to the spoilers, and nothing to permanent improvements.

Whether owing to those amiable traits in the national character which often survive the sterner virtues, or to the fact that the thieves were too busy filling their pockets to have leisure for other outrages, this misgovernment was accompanied by less oppression and cruelty than might have been expected. Some such acts there doubtless were, particularly in the rougher districts of the extreme Southwest; and in several states the dominant faction, not satisfied with the presence of Federal troops, sought to preserve order by creating bodies of state guards or state police, or a Negro militia. In Mississippi the coloured people were enrolled in a “Loyal League.” Unlike the federal civil officials, who were often disreputable and unscrupulous partisans, sometimes most improperly combining the headship of the local Republican organization with an office demanding impartiality,5 the federal military officers, though their conduct was sometimes impugned, seem on the whole to have behaved with uprightness and good sense, making their military control as gentle as such a thing ever can be. Nor did the Negroes, untutored as they were, and jubilant in their new freedom, show the turbulence or the vindictiveness which might have been looked for in a less kindly race. Nevertheless, disorders broke out. A secret combination, called the Ku Klux Klan, said to have been originally formed in Tennessee by youths for purposes of amusement, spread rapidly through the country, and became credited with the numerous petty outrages which, during 1868, and the following years, were perpetrated upon Negroes, and (less frequently) upon whites supposed to be in sympathy with Negroes, in the rural South. Many of these outrages were probably the work of village ruffians who had no connection with any organization, still less any political motive. But the impossibility of discovering those who committed them, and the absence of any local efforts to repress them, showed the profound discontent of the better class of whites with the government which the coloured vote had installed, while unfortunately confirming Congress in its suspicion of the former rebels as being still at heart enemies of the Union and the Negro. No open resistance to the Federal troops was attempted; but neither their activity nor the penal laws passed by Congress were effective in checking the floggings, house-burnings, and murders which during these years disgraced some districts. Meanwhile, the North grew weary of repression, and began to be moved by the accounts that reached it of “carpetbag government.” A political reaction, due to other causes, had made itself felt in the North; and the old principle of leaving the states to themselves gained more and more upon the popular mind, even within the still dominant Republican party. Though some of its prominent leaders desired, perhaps not without a view to party advantage, to keep down the South, they were overborne by the feeling, always strong in America, that every community to which self-government has been granted must be left to itself to work out its own salvation, and that continued military occupation could not be justified where no revolt was apprehended. The end came in 1876–77. Between 1869 and 1876 the whites had in every Southern state, except South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, regained control of the government, and in 1876 those three states were also recovered.6 The circumstances were different, according to the character of the population in each state. In some a union of the moderate white Republicans with the Democrats, brought about by the disgust of all property holders at the scandals they saw and at the increase to their burdens as taxpayers, had secured legitimately chosen majorities, and ejected the corrupt officials. In some the same result was attained by paying or otherwise inducing the Negroes not to go to the polls, or by driving them away by threats or actual violence. Once possessed again of a voting majority, the whites, all of whom had by 1872 been relieved of their disabilities, took good care, by a variety of devices, legal and extra-legal, to keep that majority safe; and in no state has their control of the government been since shaken. President Hayes withdrew, in 1877, such Federal troops as were still left at the South, and none have ever since been despatched thither.

This sketch has been given, not so much because it is a curious phase in the history of democracy, and one not likely ever to recur, either in the United States or elsewhere, as because it has determined and explained the whole subsequent course of events and the present attitude, whereof more anon, of the Southern people. That Congress made some mistakes is proved by the results. Among those results must be reckoned not merely the load of needless debt imposed upon the Southern states, and the retardation of their recovery from the losses of the war, but the driving of all their respectable white citizens into the Democratic party and their alienation from the Republicans of the North, together with the similar aggregation of the Negroes in the Republican party, and consequent creation of a so-called “colour line” in politics. Habits of lawlessness have moreover been perpetuated among the whites, and there was formed in both parties the pernicious practice of tampering with elections, sometimes by force and sometimes by fraud, a practice which strikes at the very root of free popular government.

But was the great and capital act of the Republican party when it secured the grant of the suffrage to the Negroes en bloc one of those mistakes? To nearly all Europeans such a step seemed and still seems monstrous. No people could be imagined more hopelessly unfit for political power than this host of slaves; and their unfitness became all the more dangerous because the classes among whom the new voters ought to have found guidance were partly disfranchised and partly forced into hostility. American eyes, however, saw the matter in a different light. To them it has been an axiom, that without the suffrage there is no true citizenship, and the Negro would have appeared to be scarcely free had he received only the private and passive, and not also the public and active, rights of a citizen. “I realized in 1867,” said General Wade Hampton, one of the most distinguished leaders of the South, “that when a man had been made a citizen of the United States, he could not be debarred from voting on account of his colour. Such exclusion would be opposed to the entire theory of republican institutions.”7 It is true that there were Northern states, such as even the New England Connecticut and the half New England Ohio, as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, in which persons of colour were so debarred.8 But the Abolitionist movement and the war had given an immense stimulus to the abstract theory of human rights, and had made the Negro so much an object of sympathy to the Northern people, that these restrictions were vanishing before the doctrine of absolute democratic equality and the rights of man as man. There was, moreover, a practical argument of some weight. The gift of the suffrage presented itself to the Northern statesmen as the alternative to continuance of military government. Without the suffrage, the Negro might have been left defenceless and neglected, unimproved and unimproving. In the words of another eminent Southern statesman, Mr. Justice Lamar, “In the unaccustomed relation into which the white and coloured people of the South were suddenly forced, there would have been a natural tendency on the part of the former masters, still in the possession of the land and intelligence of the country and of its legislative power, to use an almost absolute authority, and to develop the new freedman according to their own idea of what was good for him. This would have resulted in a race distinction, and in such incidents of the old system as would have discontented the negro and dissatisfied the general sentiment of the country. If slavery was to be abolished, there could be nothing short of complete abolition, free from any of the affinities of slavery; and this would not have been effected so long as there existed any inequality before the law. The ballot was therefore a protection of the negro against any such condition, and enabled him to force his interests upon the consideration of the South.”9

The American view that “the suffrage is the sword and shield of our law, the best armament that liberty offers to the citizen,” does not at once commend itself to a European, who conceives that every government is bound to protect the unenfranchised equally with the enfranchised citizen. But it must be remembered that in the United States this duty is less vigilantly performed than in England or Germany, and that there were special difficulties attending its performance under a federal system, which leaves the duty, save where federal legislation is involved, to the authorities of the several states.

It has been usual to charge those who led Congress with another and less noble motive for granting electoral rights to the Negroes, viz., the wish to secure their votes for the Republican party. Motives are always mixed; and doubtless this consideration had its weight. Yet it was not a purely selfish consideration. As it was by the Republican party that the war had been waged and the Negro set free, the Republican leaders were entitled to assume that his protection could be secured only by their continued ascendancy. That ascendancy was not wisely used. But the circumstances were so novel and perplexing, that perhaps no statesmanship less sagacious than President Lincoln’s could have handled them with success.

With the disappearance of the carpetbag and Negro governments, the third era in the political history of the South since the war began. The first had been that of exclusively white suffrage; the second, that of predominantly Negro suffrage. In the third, universal suffrage and complete legal equality were soon perceived to mean in practice the full supremacy of the whites. To dislodge the coloured man simply as a coloured man from his rights was impossible, for they were secured by the federal Constitution which prevails against all state action. The idea of disturbing them by formal legislative action was scarcely entertained. But the more they despaired of getting rid of the amendment, the more resolved were the Southern people to prevent it from taking any effect which could endanger their supremacy. They did not hate the Negro, certainly not half so much as they hated his white leaders by whom they had been robbed. “We have got,” they said, “to save civilization,” and if civilization could be saved only by suppressing the coloured vote, they were ready to suppress it. This was the easier, because, while most of the carpetbaggers had fled, nearly all the respectable whites of the South, including those who had been Whigs before the war and who had opposed secession, were now united in the New Democratic, or rather anti-Negro, party. A further evidence of the power of the motives which have swayed them may be found in the fact that nearly every Northern man who has of late years gone South for commercial purposes, has before long ranged himself with this anti-Negro party, whatever his previous “affiliations” may have been.

The modes of suppression have not been the same in all districts and at all times. At first there was a good deal of what is called “bulldozing,” i.e., rough treatment and terrorism, applied to frighten the coloured men from coming to or voting at the polls. Afterwards, the methods were less harsh. Registrations were so managed as to exclude Negro voters, arrangements for polling were contrived in such wise as to lead the voter to the wrong place so that his vote might be refused; and, if the necessity arose, the Republican candidates were counted out, or the election returns tampered with. “I would stuff a ballot box,” said a prominent man, “in order to have a good, honest government”; and he said it in good faith, and with no sense of incongruity. Sometimes the local Negro preachers were warned or paid to keep their flocks away. More humorous devices were not disdained, as when free tickets to a travelling circus were distributed among the Negroes, and the circus paid to hold its exhibition at a place and hour which prevented them from coming to vote. South Carolina enacted an ingenious law providing that there should be eight ballot boxes for as many posts to be filled at the election, that a vote should not be counted unless placed in the proper box, and that the presiding officer should not be bound to tell the voter which was the proper box in which each vote ought to be deposited. Illiterate Negroes so often voted in the wrong box, the boxes being frequently shifted to disconcert instructions given beforehand, that a large part of their votes were lost, while the illiterate white was apt to receive the benevolent and not forbidden help of the presiding officer.

Notwithstanding these impediments, the Negro long maintained the struggle, valuing the vote as the symbol of his freedom, and fearing to be reenslaved if the Republican party should be defeated. Leaders and organizers were found in the federal officeholders, of course all Republicans, a numerous class—Mr. Nordhoff, a careful and judicious observer, says there were in 1875 three thousand in Georgia alone—and a class whose members virtually held their offices on condition of doing their political work; being liable to be removed if they failed in their duty, as the sultan used to remove a vali who sent up too little money to Stamboul. After 1884, however, when the presidency of the United States passed to a Democrat, some of these officeholders were replaced by Democrats and the rest became less zealous. It was, moreover, already by that time clear that the whites, being again in the saddle, meant to stay there, and the efforts of the Republican organizers grew feebler as they lost hope. Their friends at the North were exasperated, not without reason, for the gift of suffrage to the Negroes had resulted in securing to the South a larger representation in Congress and in presidential elections than it enjoyed before the war, or would have enjoyed had the Negroes been left unenfranchised. They argued, and truly, that where the law gives a right, the law ought to secure the exercise thereof; and when the Southern men replied that the Negroes were ignorant, they rejoined that all over the country there were myriads of ignorant voters, mostly recent immigrants whom no one thought of excluding. Accordingly in 1890, having a majority in both houses of Congress and a president of their own party, the Republican leaders introduced a bill subjecting the control of federal elections to officers to be appointed by the president, in the hope of thus calling out a full Negro vote, five-sixths of which would doubtless have gone to their party. The measure appeared to dispassionate observers quite constitutional, and the mischief it was designed to remedy was palpable. It excited, however, great irritation at the South, uniting in opposition to it nearly all whites of every class, while no corresponding enthusiasm on its behalf was evoked at the North. It passed the House, but was dropped in the Senate under the threat of an obstructive resistance by the (then Democratic) minority. Secure, however, as the dominance of the whites seemed to be against either Northern legislation or Negro revolt, the Southern people remained uneasy and sensitive on the subject, and have been held together in a serried party phalanx by this one colour question, to the injury of their political life, which is thus prevented from freely developing on the lines of the other questions that from time to time arise. So keen is their recollection of the carpetbag days, so intense the alarm at any possibility of their return, that internal dissensions, such as those which the growth of the Farmers’ Alliance party and (later) of the Populist party evoked, were seldom permitted to give Republican candidates a chance of a seat in Congress or of any considerable state office.

These remarks apply to the true South, and neither to the mountain regions, where, owing to the absence of the Negro element, there is, save in the wider valleys, still a strong Republican party, nor to the border states, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, in which the coloured voters are not numerous enough to excite alarm. When it is desired to eliminate their influence on elections, a common plan is to bribe them. In Louisville one is told that quite a small payment secures abstention. To induce them to vote for a Democrat is, to their credit be it said, much more costly.

This horror of Negro supremacy is the only point in which the South cherishes its old feelings. Hostility to the Northern people has virtually disappeared. No sooner was Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House known over the country, than the notion of persisting in efforts for secession and the hope of maintaining slavery expired. With that remarkable power of accepting an accomplished fact which in America is compatible with an obstinate resistance up to the moment when the fact becomes accomplished, the South felt that a new era had arrived to which they must forthwith adapt themselves. They were not ashamed of the war. They were and remain proud of it, as one may see by the provisions made by not a few states for celebrating the birthday of General Robert E. Lee or of ex-President Jefferson Davis, and by the zeal with which the monuments of the Civil War and its battlefields are cared for. Just because they felt that they had fought well, they submitted with little resentment, and it became a proverb among them that the two classes which still cherished bitterness were the two classes that did not fight—the women and the clergy. Even when fresh hostility was aroused by the reconstructive action of Congress in 1866 and 1867, and the abuses of carpetbag rule, no one dreamt of renewing the old struggle. Not, however, till the whites regained control, between 1870 and 1876, did the industrial regeneration of the country fairly begin. Two discoveries coincided with that epoch which have had an immense effect in advancing material prosperity, and changing the current of men’s thoughts. The first was the exploration of the mineral wealth of the highland core of the country. In the western parts of Virginia and North Carolina, in the eastern parts of Tennessee, the northern parts of Georgia and Alabama, both coal and iron, not to speak of other minerals, have been found in enormous quantities, and often in such close juxtaposition that the production of pig iron and steel can be carried on with exceptional cheapness. Thus, Northern capital has been drawn into the country; Southern men have had a new field for enterprise, and have themselves begun to accumulate capital; prosperous industries have been created, and a large working-class population, both white and coloured, has grown up in many places, while the making of new railways has not only given employment to the poorer classes, but has stimulated manufacture and commerce in other directions. The second discovery was that of the possibility of extracting oil from the seeds of the cotton plant, which had formerly been thrown away, or given to hogs to feed on. The production of this oil has swelled to great proportions, making the cultivation of cotton far more profitable, and has become a potent factor in the extension of cotton cultivation and the general prosperity of the country. Most of the crop now raised, which usually exceeds eleven millions of bales, and in 1908 exceeded thirteen and a half millions (being more than thrice that which was raised, almost wholly by slave labour, before the war), is now raised by white farmers; while the mills which spin and weave it into marketable goods are daily increasing and building up fresh industrial communities. The methods of agriculture have been improved; and new kinds of cultivation introduced: the raising of fruit, for instance (in Florida particularly of oranges), has become in certain districts a lucrative industry. Nor has the creation of winter health resorts in the beautiful mountain land of North Carolina, and further south in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, been wholly without importance, for the Northern people who flock thither learn to know the South, and themselves diffuse new ideas among the backward population of those districts. Thus from various causes there has come to be a sense of stir and movement and occupation with practical questions, and what may be called a commercialization of society, which has, in some places, transformed Southern life. Manual labour is no longer deemed derogatory by the poorer whites (who are less of a distinct class than they used to be), nor commerce by the sons of the old planting aristocracy. Farmers no doubt complain, as they do everywhere in the United States; yet it is a good sign that the average size of farms has been, in the Southeastern states, decreasing, the number of farmers and also the number of owners increasing, while the number of tenants who paid their rent in money instead of in kind almost doubled between 1880 and 1890. As capital, which used to be chiefly invested in slaves, has increased and become more generally diffused, it is more and more placed in permanent improvements, and especially in city buildings. Cities indeed have largely grown and are still growing, especially of course in the mining regions; and in the cities a new middle class has sprung up, formed partly by the elevation of the poorer class and partly by the depression of the old planting class, which has made the contrast between the social equality of Northern and the aristocratic tone of Southern society far less marked than it was before the war.

While slavery lasted the South was, except of course as regarded the children of planters and of the few merchants, an illiterate country. Even in 1870 the Southeastern states had only 30 per cent of their population of school age enrolled as school attendants, and the South Central and Western states only 34 per cent. The Reconstruction constitutions of 1867–70 contained valuable provisions for the establishment of schools; and the rise of a new generation, which appreciates the worth of education and sees how the North has profited by it, has induced a wholesome activity. The percentage of children enrolled to school age population has risen steadily.10 It is no doubt true that the sum expended on schools is very unequal in the various states—Arkansas, for instance, spent in 1910–11 more than Mississippi or North Carolina, though her population is smaller than that of either of those states; true, also, that the expenditure is much less than in the North or West—Washington, for instance, spends more than twice as much as Arkansas, with very little more wealth; true, further, that the average number of days the schools were kept was in 1910–11 smaller in the Southern states (130.6 in the Southeastern states, 127.8 in the South Central, as compared with 179.8 in the Northeastern states). Still the progress is great, when one considers the comparative poverty of the Southern states, and the predominantly rural character of their very sparse population.

Anyone seeking to disparage the South need not want for points to dwell upon. He might remark that illiteracy is far more common than in the North or West; that there is little reading even among those who can read—one need only walk through the streets of a Southern city and look into the few bookstores to be convinced of this—and far less of that kind of culture which is represented by lecture courses or by literary and scientific journals and societies. He would observe that hotels, railway stations, refreshment rooms, indeed all the material appliances of travelling comfort in which the North shines, are still on a lower level, and that the scattered population so neglects its roads that they are in some places impassable. Life, he might say, is comparatively rough, except in a few of the older cities, such as Richmond and Charleston; it has in many regions the character of border life in a half-settled country. And above all, he might dilate upon the frequency of homicide, and the small value that seems to be set upon human life, if one may judge from the imperfect and lenient action of the courts, which, to be sure, is often supplemented by private vengeance. Yet to the enumeration of these and other faults born of slavery and the spirit which slavery fostered, it would be rightly answered that the true way to judge the former slave states, is to compare them as they are now with what they were when the war ended. Everywhere there is progress; in some regions such progress, that one may fairly call the South a new country. The population is indeed unchanged, for it is only lately that settlers have begun to come from the North, and no part of the United States has within the present century received so small a share of European immigration.11 Slavery was a fatal deterrent while it lasted, and of late years the climate, the presence of the Negro, and the notion that work was more abundant elsewhere, have continued to deflect in a more northerly direction the stream that flows from Europe. But the old race, which is, except in Texas (where there is a small Mexican and a larger German element) and in Louisiana, a pure English and Scoto-Irish race, full of natural strength, has been stimulated and invigorated by the changed conditions of its life. It has made great advances in almost every direction. Schools are better and more numerous. The roads are being improved. Cotton mills are rising in some places, iron-works in others. It sees in the mineral and agricultural resources of its territory a prospect of wealth and population rivalling those of the Middle and Western states. It has recovered its fair share of influence in the national government. It has no regrets over slavery, for it recognizes the barbarizing influence that slavery exerted. Neither does it cherish any dreams of separation. It has now a pride in the Union as well as in its state, and is in some ways more fresh and sanguine than the North, because less cloyed by luxury than the rich are there, and less discouraged by the spread of social unrest than the thoughtful have been there. But for one difficulty the South might well be thought to be the most promising part of the Union, that part whose advance is likely to be swiftest, and whose prosperity will be not the least secure.

This difficulty, however, is a serious one. It lies in the presence of ten millions of Negroes.

chapter 94

Present and Future of the Negro1

The total coloured population of the United States was in 1900, 8,840,789, and in 1910 it was 9,828,294, a number far greater than that of the English people in the reign of Queen Anne, and one which might anywhere but in North America be deemed to form a considerable nation. Of this total, probably nine millions are in the old slave states, and it is of these only that the present chapter will speak.2 To understand their distribution in these states, the reader will do well to recall what was said in the last preceding chapter regarding the physical features of the South, for it is by those features that the growth of the coloured population in the various regions of the country has been determined. Though man is of all animals, except perhaps the dog, that which shows the greatest capacity for supporting all climates from Borneo to Greenland, it remains true that certain races of men thrive and multiply only in certain climates. As the races of Northern Europe have been hitherto unable to maintain themselves in the torrid zone, so the African race, being of tropical origin, dwindles away wherever it has to encounter cold winters. In what used to be called the border states—Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—the coloured element increases but slowly.3 In West Virginia, East Kentucky, East Tennessee, and Western North Carolina, the Negro is practically unknown in the highest and coolest spots, and in the other parts of that elevated country has scarcely been able to hold his own. It is in the low warm regions that lie near the Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico, and especially in the sea islands of South Carolina and on the banks of the lower Mississippi that he finds the conditions which are at once most favourable to his development and most unfavourable to that of the whites. Accordingly it is the eight states nearest the Gulf—South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—that contain more than half the Negro population, which in two of them, South Carolina and Mississippi, exceeds the number of the whites. In Louisiana, where the two races were equal in 1890, the whites had in 1910 a majority of 227,212. These eight states showed an increase of the coloured population, from 1880 to 1890, at the rate of 18.4 per cent,4 while in the rest of the South the rate was only 5.1 per cent; from 1900 to 1910 the rate was 14.6. It is thus clear that the Negro center of population is more and more shifting southward, and that the African is leaving the colder, higher, and drier lands for regions more resembling his ancient seats in the Old World.

A not less important question is the proportion between the Negroes and the whites. In 1790 the Negroes were 19.3 per cent or nearly one-fifth of the whole population of the Union. In 1880 they were 13.1 per cent; in 1890, 11.9 per cent; in 1910, 10.7 per cent. The rate of increase of the Negro population of the whole country from 1900 to 1910 was 11.2 per cent, while that of the whites was 22.3. Even in the former slave states (which receive very few immigrants from Europe) the increase of the whites during that decade was 25.1, that of the Negroes only 11.1 per cent, or about one-half the rate shown by the whites,5 while in the eight black states mentioned above the percentage of increase of the white population is 27.4, that of the Negroes only 14.6. It thus appears that except in certain parts of these eight states, where physical conditions favourable to the growth of the coloured population prevail, the whites increase everywhere faster than the Negroes, and the latter constitute a relatively decreasing element.6 This fact, suspected previously was placed beyond doubt by the census of 1890. It is the dominating fact of the political and social situation.

Of the economic and industrial state of the whole nine millions it is hard to speak in general terms, so different are the conditions which different parts of the country present. In one point only are those conditions uniform. Everywhere, alike in the border states and in the farthest South, in the cities, both great and small, and in the rural districts, the coloured population constitute the poorest and socially lowest stratum, corresponding in this respect to the new immigrants in the Northern states, although, as we shall presently observe, they are far more sharply and permanently divided than are those immigrants from the classes above them. They furnish nine-tenths of the unskilled labour, and a still larger proportion of the domestic and hotel labour. Some, a comparatively small but possibly growing number, have found their way into the skilled handicrafts, such as joinery and metal work; and many are now employed in the mines and iron foundries of Southeastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama, where they receive wages sometimes equal to those paid to the white workmen, and are even occasionally admitted to the same trade unions.7 In textile factories they are deemed decidedly inferior to the whites; the whirr of the machinery is said to daze them or to send them to sleep. On the other hand, they handle tobacco better than the whites, and practically monopolize the less skilled departments of this large industry, though not cigar making, for which Spaniards or Cubans are deemed best. In the cities much of the small retail trade is in their hands, as are also such occupations as those of barber (in which however they are said to be yielding to the whites), shoe-black, street vendor of drinks or fruit, together with the humbler kinds of railway service. In the rural districts the immense majority are either hired labourers or tenants of small farms, the latter class becoming more numerous the further south one goes into the hot and malarious regions, where the white man is less disposed to work on his own land. Of these tenants many—and some are both active and thrifty—cultivate upon a system of crop-sharing, like that of the métayers in France. Not a few have bought plots of land, and work it for themselves. Of those who farm either their own land or that for which they pay rent, an increasing number are raising crops for the market, and steadily improving their condition. Others, however, are content with getting from the soil enough food to keep their families; and this is more especially the case in the lower lands along the coast, where the population is almost wholly black, and little affected by the influences either of commerce or of the white race. In these hot lowlands the Negro lives much as he lived on the plantations in the old days, except that he works less, because a moderate amount of labour produces enough for his bare subsistence. No railway comes near him. He sees no newspaper. He is scarcely at all in contact with anyone above his own condition. Thus there are places, the cities especially, where the Negro is improving industrially, because he has to work hard and comes into constant relation with the whites; and other places, where he need work very little, and where, being left to his own resources, he is in danger of relapsing into barbarism. These differences in his material progress in different parts of the country must be constantly borne in mind when one attempts to form a picture of his present intellectual and moral state.

The phenomena he presents in this latter aspect are absolutely new in the annals of the world. History is a record of the progress towards civilization of races originally barbarous. But that progress has in all previous cases been slow and gradual. In the case of the chief Asiatic and European races, the earlier stages are lost in the mists of antiquity. Even the middle and later stages, as we gather them from the writings of the historians of antiquity and from the records of the Dark and Middle Ages, show an advance in which there is nothing sudden or abrupt, but rather a process of what may be called tentative development, the growth and enlargement of the human mind resulting in and being accompanied by a gradual improvement of political institutions and of the arts and sciences. In this process there are no leaps and bounds; and it is the work, not of any one race alone, but of the mingled rivalry and cooperation of several. Utterly dissimilar is the case of the African Negro, caught up in and whirled along with the swift movement of the American democracy. In it we have a singular juxtaposition of the most primitive and the most recent, the most rudimentary and the most highly developed, types of culture. Not greater is the interval which separates the chipped flints of the Stone Age from the Maxim gun of today. A body of savages is violently carried across the ocean and set to work as slaves on the plantations of masters who are three or four thousand years in advance of them in mental capacity and moral force. They are treated like horses or oxen, are kept at labour by the lash, are debarred from even the elements of education, have no more status before the law, no more share in the thought or the culture of their owner than the sheep which he shears. The children and grandchildren of those whom the slaveship brought to the plantation remain like their parents, save indeed that they have learnt a new and highly developed tongue and have caught up so much of a new religion as comes to them through preachers of their own blood. Those who have housework to do, or who live in the few and small towns, pick up some knowledge of white ways, and imitate them to the best of their power. But the great mass remain in their notions and their habits much what their ancestors were in the forests of the Niger or the Congo. Suddenly, even more suddenly than they were torn from Africa, they find themselves, not only freed, but made full citizens and active members of the most popular government the world has seen, treated as fit to bear an equal part in ruling, not themselves only, but also their recent masters. Rights which the agricultural labourers of England did not obtain till 1885 were in 1867 thrust upon these children of nature, whose highest form of pleasure had hitherto been to caper to the strains of a banjo.

This tremendous change arrested one set of influences that were telling on the Negro, and put another set in motion. The relation of master and servant came to an end, and with it the discipline of compulsory labour and a great part of such intercourse as there had been between the white and the black races. Very soon the whites began to draw away from the Negro, who became less a friend in fact the more he was an equal in theory. Presently the mixture of blood diminished, a mixture which may have been doing something for the blacks in leavening their mass—only slightly on the plantations, but to some extent in the towns and among the domestic servants—with persons of superior capacity and talent. On the other hand, there were immediately turned on the freedman a volume of new forces which had scarcely affected him as a slave. He had now to care for himself, in sickness and in health. He might go where he would, and work as much or as little as he pleased. He had a vote to give, or to sell. Education became accessible; and facilities for obtaining it were accorded to him, first by his Northern liberators, and thereafter, though insufficiently, by his old masters also. As he learned to read and to vote, a crowd of modern American ideas, political, social, religious, and economic, poured in upon him through the newspapers. No such attempt has ever been made before to do for a race at one stroke what in other times and countries Nature has spent centuries in doing. Other races have desired freedom and a share in political power. They have had to strive, and their efforts have braced and disciplined them. But these things were thrust upon the Negro, who found himself embarrassed by boons he had not thought of demanding.

To understand how American ideas work in an African brain, and how American institutions are affecting African habits, one must consider what are the character and gifts of the Negro himself.

He is by nature affectionate, docile, pliable, submissive, and in these respects most unlike the Red Indian, whose conspicuous traits are pride and a certain dogged inflexibility. He is seldom cruel or vindictive—which the Indian often is—nor is he prone to violence, except when spurred by lust or drink. His intelligence is rather quick than solid; and though not wanting in a sort of shrewdness, he shows the childishness as well as the lack of self-control which belongs to the primitive peoples. A nature highly impressionable, emotional, and unstable is in him appropriately accompanied by a love of music, while for art he has—unlike the Red Indian—no taste or turn whatever. Such talent as he has runs to words; he learns languages easily and speaks fluently, but shows no capacity for abstract thinking, for scientific inquiry, or for any kind of invention. It is, however, not so conspicuously on the intellectual side that his weakness lies, as in the sphere of will and action. Having neither foresight nor “roundsight,” he is heedless and unthrifty, easily elated and depressed, with little tenacity of purpose, and but a feeble wish to better his condition. Sloth, like that into which the Negroes of the Antilles have sunk, cannot be generally charged upon the American coloured man, partly perhaps because the climate is less enervating and nature less bountiful. Although not so steady a workman as is the white, he is less troublesome to his employers, because less disposed to strike. It is by his toil that a large part of the cotton, rice, and sugar crop of the South is now raised. But anyone who knows the laborious ryot or coolie of the East Indies is struck by the difference between a race on which ages of patient industry have left their stamp and the volatile children of Africa.

Among the modes or avenues in and by which the influences of white America are moulding the Negro, five deserve to be specially noted, those of the schools, of the churches, of literature, of industry, and of business or social relations.

Looking merely at the figures, elementary education would seem to have made extraordinary progress. In the former slave states there were, in 1907–8, 54.36 per cent of the coloured population of school age enrolled on the books of some school, the percentage of white pupils to the white population of school age in the same states being 70.34, and the percentage of enrolments to population over the whole United States 69.32.8 In these states the coloured people were in 1910 33.1 per cent of the total population, and the coloured pupils 31.47 per cent of the total school enrolments. A smaller percentage of them than of white children is, therefore, on the books of the schools; but when it is remembered that in 1865 only an infinitesimally small percentage were at school at all, and that in many states it was a penal offence to teach a Negro to read, the progress made is remarkable. Between 1877 and 1908, while the white pupils in the common schools of the South increased 156 per cent, the coloured pupils increased 191 per cent. It must not, however, be concluded from these figures that nearly the whole of the coloured population are growing up possessed even of the rudiments of education. The ratio of attendance to school enrolment was, indeed, in 1908 almost as good for the Negroes as for the whites (62.18 against 66.13), the Negroes, both parents and children, having a desire for instruction. But the school terms are so short in most of the Southern states that a good many of whites and a far larger number of coloured children receive too little teaching to enable them to read and write with ease. Thus out of the Negroes in the old slave states over ten years of age, nearly 33.4 per cent were in 1910 returned as illiterates. That the amount of higher education—secondary, collegiate, or university education—obtained by the Negroes is not only absolutely small, but incomparably smaller than that obtained by the whites, is no more than might be expected from the fact that they constitute the poorest part of the population. The total number of institutions of this description was in 1908 as follows:9

10Including preparatory and primary departments of universities.
Normal and Industrial schools,	53, with 17,711 pupils.
Secondary schools,	35, with 8,774 pupils.
Universities and colleges,10	47, with 18,859 pupils.
Schools of theology,	14, with 792 pupils.
Schools of law,	3, with 93 pupils.
Schools of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy,	3, with 789 pupils.

These universities are, of course, on a comparatively humble scale, and most of them might rather be called secondary schools. The grants made by the state governments nearly all go to elementary education, and the institutions which provide higher education for the Negro are quite unequal to the demands made upon them. Swarms of applicants for admission have to be turned away from the already overcrowded existing upper and normal schools and colleges; and thus the supply of qualified teachers for the coloured schools is greatly below the needs of the case. The total number is at present only 33,000, with 1,800,000 pupils to deal with. In the white schools, with 4,692,927 pupils, there are 116,539 teachers, a proportion (about 1 teacher to 40 pupils) obviously much too low, and too low even if we allow for the difference between enrolment and attendance. But the proportion in the coloured schools is lower still (1 to 55), and the teachers themselves are less instructed. The need for secondary and normal schools is, therefore, still urgent, though much has been and is being done by Northern benevolence for this admirable purpose.11 There is something pathetic in the eagerness of the Negroes, parents, young people, and children, to obtain instruction. They seem to think that the want of it is what keeps them below the whites, just as in the riots which broke out in South Carolina during Sherman’s invasion, the Negro mob burnt a library at Columbia because, as they said, it was from the books that “the white folks got their sense.” And they have a notion (which, to be sure, is not confined to them) that it is the want of book-learning which condemns the vast bulk of their race to live by manual labor, and that, therefore, by acquiring such learning they may themselves rise in the industrial scale.

In the days of slavery, religion was practically the only civilizing influence which told upon the plantation hands. But religion, like everything else that enters the mind, is conditioned by the mental state of the recipient. Among the Negroes, it took a highly emotional and sensational form, in which there was little apprehension of doctrine and still less of virtue, while physical excitement constantly passed into ecstasy, hysterics, and the other phenomena which accompany what are called in America camp meetings. This form it has hitherto generally retained. The evils have been palpable, but the good has been greater than the evil; and one fears to conjecture what this vast mass of Africans might have been had no such influence been at work to soften and elevate them, and to create a sort of tie between them and their masters. Christianity, however, has been among the Negroes as it often was in the Dark Ages and as it is in some countries even today, widely divorced from morality. The Negro preachers, the natural and generally the only leaders of their people, are (doubtless with noble exceptions) by no means a model class, while through the population at large religious belief and even religious fervour are found not incompatible with great laxity in sexual relations and a proneness to petty thefts. Fortunately, here also there is evidence of improvement. The younger pastors are described as being more rarely lazy and licentious than were those of the older generation; their teaching appeals less to passion and more to reason. As it is only coloured preachers who reach Negro congregations, the importance of such an improvement can hardly be overestimated. There is, of course, an enormous difference between the coloured churches in the cities, especially those of the border states, where one finds a comparatively educated clergy and laity, with ideas of decorum modelled on those of their white neighbors, and the pure Negro districts further south,12 in some of which, as in parts of Louisiana, not merely have the old superstitions been retained, but there have been relapses into the Obeah rites and serpent worship of African heathendom. How far this has gone no one can say. There are parts of the lower Mississippi valley as little explored, so far as the mental and moral condition of the masses is concerned, as are the banks of the Congo and the Benué.

From what has been said of the state of education, it will have been gathered that the influence of books is confined to extremely few, and that even of newspapers to a small fraction of the coloured people. Nevertheless, the significance of whatever forms the mind of that small fraction must not be underestimated. The few thousands who read books or magazines, the few tens of thousands who see a daily paper, acquire the ideas and beliefs and aspirations of the normal white citizen, subject of course to the inherent differences in race character already referred to. They are in a sense more American than the recent immigrants from Central Europe and from Italy, who are now a substantial element in the population of the Middle and Western states. Within this small section of the coloured people are the natural leaders of the millions who have not yet attained to what may be called the democratic American consciousness. And the number of those upon whom books and newspapers play, in whom democratic ideas stimulate discontent with the present inferiority of their people, is steadily, and in some districts, rapidly increasing. The efforts of those who are best fitted to lead have been hitherto checked by the jealousy which the mass is apt to feel for those who rise to prominence; but this tendency may decline, and there will be no reason for surprise if men of eloquence and ambition are one day found to give voice to the sentiments of their brethren as Frederick Douglass did.13

The influence of industry is another name for the influence of self-help. As a slave, the Negro was no doubt taught to give steady, though unintelligent, labour; and this was probably a step forward from his condition in Africa. But labour all of it performed under supervision, and none of it followed by any advantage to the labourer except relief from the lash, labour whose aim was to accomplish not the best possible but the least that would suffice, did nothing to raise the character or to train the intelligence. Every day’s work that the Negro has done since he became a freedman has helped him. Most of the work is rough work, whether on the land or in the cities, and is done for low wages. But the number of those who, either as owners or as tenant farmers, raise their own crops for the market, and of those who are finding their way into skilled employments, is an always increasing number. To raise crops for the market is an education in thrift, foresight, and business aptitude, as well as in agriculture; to follow a skilled industry is to train the intelligence as well as the hand, and the will as well as the intelligence. The provision for the instruction of the young Negroes in any handicraft is still quite inadequate, though such institutions at Hampton and Tuskegee have set admirable examples,14 and the need of means for imparting it is even more urgent than is that of secondary schools. It is satisfactory to know that the necessity is beginning to be recognized, and some effort made to provide industrial training. The first person to point out that it was the thing most needful, was the founder of Hampton, one of the noblest characters of his time, the late General S. C. Armstrong.

Against the industrial progress of the Negro there must be set two depressing phenomena. One is the increase of insanity, marked since emancipation, and probably attributable to the increased facilities which freedom has given for obtaining liquor, and to the stress which independence and education have imposed on the undeveloped brain of a backward race. The other, not unconnected with the former, is the large amount of crime. Most of it is petty crime, chiefly thefts of hogs and poultry, but there are also a good many crimes against women. Seventy per cent of the convicts in Southern jails are Negroes;15 and though one must allow for the fact that they are the poorest part of the population and that the law is probably more strictly enforced against them than against the whites, this is a proportion double that of their numbers.16 Even in the District of Columbia more than half the arrests are among the coloured people, though they are only one-third of the inhabitants.

The most potent agency in the progress of the humbler and more ignorant sections of a community has always been their intercourse with those who are more advanced. In the United States it is by their social commixture with the native citizens that European immigrants become so quickly assimilated, the British in two or three years, the Germans and Scandinavians in eight or ten. But the precondition of such commixture is the absence of race repulsion and especially the possibility of intermarriage. In the case of the American Negro, the race repulsion exists, and fusion by intermarriage is deemed impossible. The day of his liberation was also the day when the whites began to shun intercourse with him, and when opinion began to condemn, not merely regular marriage with a person of colour, for that had been always forbidden, but even an illicit union.

To understand the very peculiar phenomena which mark the relations of the two races, one must distinguish between the Northern and Southern states.

In the North there was before the war a marked aversion to the Negro and a complete absence of social intercourse with him. The Negroes were, of course, among the poorest and least educated persons in the community. But the poorest white looked down upon them just as much as the richest; and in many states they enjoyed no political rights. The sympathy felt for them during the Civil War, the evidence of courage and capacity for discipline they gave as soldiers in the Federal Army, and the disposition to protect them which the Republican party showed during the Reconstruction period, modified this aversion; and in the North they are not subject to any legal disabilities. They are occasionally admitted to some inferior political office, or even to a seat in a state legislature. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union receives them as members, and so does the Grand Army of the Republic, though they are grouped in distinct “posts.” People sometimes take pleasure in going out of their way to compliment them. A coloured student was once chosen by his companions at Harvard University to be the “class orator” of the year; and I know of cases in which the lawyers of a city have signed memorials recommending a coloured barrister for appointment to an important federal office. Nevertheless, there is practically no social intermixture of white and coloured people. Except on the Pacific coast, a Negro never sits down to dinner with a white man, in a railway refreshment room. You never encounter him at a private party. He is not received in a hotel of the better sort, no matter how rich he may be. He will probably be refused a glass of soda water at a drug store. He is not shaved in a place frequented by white men, not even by a barber of his own colour. He worships in a church of his own. No native white woman would dream of receiving his addresses. Kindly condescension is the best he can look for, accompanied by equality of access to a business or profession. Social equality is utterly out of his reach, and in many districts he has not even equality of economic opportunity, for the white labourer may refuse to work with him and his colour may prove a bar to his obtaining employment except of the lowest kind.

In the South, on the other hand, the whites had before the war no sense of personal repulsion from the Negro. The domestic slave was in the closest relation with his master’s family. Sometimes he was his master’s trusted friend. The white child grew up with the black child as its playmate. The legal inequality was so immense that familiarity was not felt to involve any disturbance of the attitude of command. With emancipation there must needs come a change; but the change would have come more gently, and left a better relation subsisting, had it not been for the unhappy turn which things took in the Reconstruction period under the dominance of the Negro vote. The white people were then thoroughly frightened. They thought that the aim of the North was to force them to admit not only the civic but the social equality of the freedmen, and they resolved, if one can apply the language of deliberate purpose to what was rather an unconscious and uncontrollable impulse, to maintain the social inferiority of the Negro as well as to exclude him from political power. They declare that they know him better and like him better than the Northern people do. That there is not among the educated whites of the South any hostility to the race as a race is true enough. The sons of the planters, and of the better class generally, have kindly recollections of their former slaves, and get on well with their Negro servants and workmen; while among the freedmen, now comparatively few, there is still a loyal attachment to the children of their former masters. The poor whites, however, dislike the Negroes, resent the slightest assumption of equality on the part of the latter,17 and show their hatred by violence, sometimes even by ferocity, when any disturbance arises or when a Negro fugitive has to be pursued. Except so far as it is involved in domestic service, the servants in the South being nearly all Negroes, there is now little intercourse between whites and blacks. In many states the law requires the railroad and even the streetcar companies to provide separate cars for the latter, though there are cities, such as Baltimore and Washington, where the same cars are used by both races. In most parts of the South a person of colour cannot enter a public refreshment room used by the whites except as the servant of a white; and one may see the most respectable and, possibly, even educated coloured woman, perhaps almost white, forced into the coloured car among rough Negroes, while the black nurse in charge of a white child is admitted to the white car. The two races are everywhere taught in distinct schools and colleges, though in one or two places Negroes have been allowed to study in the medical or law classes. They worship in different churches. Though the Negroes read the ordinary papers, they also support their own distinct organs. They have distinct Young Men’s Christian Associations. With some exceptions in the case of unskilled trades, they are not admitted to trade unions.18 In concert halls and theatres, if the coloured are admitted at all, it is to an inferior part of the chamber. They are, however, sometimes called to serve on juries. Civil justice is mostly fairly administered as between the races, but not criminal justice. In most parts of the South a white man would run little more risk of being hanged for the murder of a Negro than a Mussulman in Turkey for the murder of a Christian.

Under so complete a system of separation, it is clear that the influence of social intercourse between whites and blacks, an influence to which the domestic slaves before the war owed much, now counts for little. But the question of the attitude of the whites has another side. It means more than the suspension of a civilizing agency. Some Southern observers say that the coloured generation which has grown up since the war, and which has been in less close touch with the white people than were the slaves and freedmen of the last generation, is less friendly to them. It has lost the instinctive sense of subservience and dependence, and its more educated members feel acutely the contrast between their legal equality and their inequality in every other respect. The lower class are also often unfriendly, prone to suspicion and violence. In this situation there lie possibilities of danger. The strained relations of the races appear most frequently in the lynchings of Negroes. It is extremely hard to ascertain the truth of the reports regarding these lawless acts. But there can be no doubt that over the South and, to a smaller extent, in the North also, Negroes accused of assassinating white men, or of outraging white women or children are frequently seized by white mobs and summarily killed; that occasionally, though probably not often, an innocent man perishes, and that the killing is sometimes accompanied by circumstances of revolting cruelty. Now and then the culprit is burned alive. Often his body, after he has been hanged, is riddled with bullets, a piece of barbarism akin to the Eastern habit of mutilating the corpses of the slain. The excuses offered for these acts are that white women, especially in sparsely inhabited regions, are in considerable danger from the lust of brutal Negroes, and that the swift apprehension and slaughter of the culprit not only strikes greater dread than the regular process of justice, but does not gratify the Negro’s enjoyment of the pomp and ceremony of a formal trial before a judge. It is also declared, and with truth, that whites also are lynched, though not so frequently and in a less atrocious way,19 that the Negroes themselves occasionally lynch a Negro, that it is hard for the executive authority, with no force except the militia at its command, to protect prisoners and repress disorder, and that the lynchings are the work of a comparatively small and rude part of the white population; the better citizens disapproving, but being unable or unwilling to interfere.

Whatever palliations may be found in these circumstances—and it is quite true that in a thinly peopled and unpoliced country white women do stand in serious risk—there can be no doubt that the practice of lynching has a pernicious effect on the whites themselves, accustoming them to cruelty, and fostering a spirit of lawlessness which tells for evil on every branch of government and public life. Were the Negroes less cowed by the superior strength and numbers of the whites, reprisals, now rare, would be more frequent. Yet even in a race with so little vindictiveness or temper, terrible mischief is done. The tendency to accept the leadership of the whites, and to seek progress rather by industrial and educational than by political efforts has been damped, and the establishment of good feeling and a sense of public security retarded. The humble Negro shuns contact with the whites, not knowing when some band of roughs may mishandle him; and sometimes a lynching is followed by a sudden rush of coloured emigration from the state or district where it has happened.20 The educated and aspiring Negro resents the savage spirit shown towards his colour, though he feels his helplessness too keenly to attempt any action which could check it.

This social repulsion and its consequences present a painful contrast to the effect of the four previous influences we have examined. As respects their intelligence, their character, their habits of industry, the coloured people are in most states making real progress. It is a progress very unequal as regards the different regions of the country, and perhaps may not extend to some districts of the so-called black belt, which stretches from the coast of South Carolina across the Gulf states. It is most evident in the matter of education, less evident as respects religion and the influence of literature. Its economic results are perceptible in the accumulation of property by city workmen, in the acquisition of small farms by rural cultivators, in the slow, but steady, increase in the number of coloured people in the professions of medicine, law, and literature. Were it accompanied by a growth of good feeling between whites and Negroes, and a more natural and friendly intercourse between them in business and in social matters, the horizon would be bright, and the political difficulties, which I shall presently describe, need not cause alarm. This intercourse is, however, conspicuously absent. The progress of the coloured people has been accompanied by the evolution of social classes within their own body. Wealthy and educated Negroes, such as one may now find in cities like Baltimore, Louisville, Richmond, Atlanta, and New Orleans, have come to form a cultured group, who are looked up to by the poorer class.21 But these cultured groups are as little in contact with their white neighbours as are the humblest coloured labourers, perhaps even less so. No prospect is open to them, whatever wealth or culture they may acquire, of finding an entrance into white society, and they are made to feel in a thousand ways that they belong to a caste condemned to perpetual inferiority. Their spokesmen in the press have latterly so fully realized the position as to declare that they do not seek social equality with the whites, that they are quite willing to build up a separate society of their own, and seek neither intermarriage nor social intercourse, but that what they do ask is equal opportunity in business, the professions, and politics, equal recognition of the worth of their manhood, and a discontinuance of the social humiliations they are now compelled to endure.

From this attempt to sketch the phenomena of the present, I proceed to consider the future. The future has two problems to solve. One is political; the other social. How is the determination of the whites to rule to be reconciled with the possession by the Negroes of equal rights of suffrage? How can the social severance or antagonism of the two races—by whichever term we are to describe it—the haughty assertion of superiority by the whites and the suppressed resentment of the more advanced among the coloured people, be prevented from ripening into a settled distrust and hostility which may affect the peace and prosperity of the South for centuries to come?

The methods whereby the Negroes have been prevented from exercising the rights of suffrage vested in them by law have been described in the last preceding chapter. These means became less violent as the Negroes more and more acquiesced in their exclusion; but whether violent or pacific, they were almost uniformly successful. In the so-called border states, the whites have been in so great a majority that they do not care to interfere with the coloured vote, except now and then by the use of money. Through the rest of the South the Negro came to realize that he would not be permitted to exercise any influence on the government; and his interest in coming to the polls declined accordingly. The main cause of this resolve of the whites to keep power entirely in their own hands is the alarm they feel at the possibility of Negro domination. A stranger, whether from the North or from Europe, thinks this alarm groundless. He perceives that the whites have not only the habit of command, but also nearly all the property, the intelligence, and the force of character which exist in the country. He reminds his Southern hosts that the balance even of numbers is inclining more and more in their favour; and that the probability of Northern intervention on behalf of the excluded Negro voter has become, since the failure of the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, extremely slight, while the other conditions of 1867 can never recur. On this point, however, the Southern man is immovable. To him it is a simple question of self-preservation. “We like the negro,” said a leader among them to me some years ago; “we know he must stay; we desire to treat him well. But if he votes, we must vote him, or outvote him.”

The results of the policy followed were unfortunate. The Negroes, naturally docile and disposed to follow the lead of their white employer or neighbour, felt themselves suspected, and lived in a terror of being stripped of the civic rights which they were not suffered to exercise, like the terror which for a time possessed them of being thrown back into slavery. So far as they voted at all they mostly clung together, and voted solid, intimidating or boycotting anyone of their number who was supposed to be a “bolter.” The whites, accustomed to justify their use of force or fraud by the plea of necessity, became callous to electoral malpractices. The level of purity and honesty in political methods, once comparatively high, declined; and the average Southern conscience grew to be no more sensitive than is that of professional politicians in Northern cities. Nor was the mischief confined to elections. The existence of this alarm has, by making the South regard the Negro as the capital question in national as well as state politics, warped the natural growth of political opinion and political parties upon all those other current questions which engage the mind of the people, and has to that extent retarded their reabsorption into the general political life of the Republic.

These evils were generally recognized. Out of the various remedies that were proposed for their cure, three deserve to be specially noted.

The first was (as proposed in the bill of 1890) to give protection to the coloured voter by the action of federal officers backed by federal troops. This could, of course, be done under the Constitution at federal elections only, and would not cover the equally important state and local elections. It would, moreover (as the discussions of 1890 showed), provoke great exasperation at the South, and might lead to breaches of the peace, from which the Negroes would be the chief sufferers. The whole South would resist it, and no small part of the Northern people would dislike it.

A second and opposite remedy was to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution, and leave each state free to exclude Negroes from the suffrage. This plan, although sometimes put forward by men of ability, was even more impracticable than the preceding one. A majority of three-fourths of the states could not possibly be secured for the repeal of a provision which the Northern people regard as sealing one of the main results of the Civil War.

The third suggested scheme was to limit the suffrage by some educational or even some pecuniary qualification—although American sentiment dislikes a property qualification, calculated to exclude many or most of the Negroes, not as Negroes, but because they were ignorant or poor. Such a scheme, though proposed by Gen. Wade Hampton in South Carolina as far back as 1867, was not tried until 1890, when Mississippi, by her constitution of that year,22 provided that a person applying to be registered as a voter “shall be able to read any section of the Constitution, or be able to understand the same when read to him, or to give a reasonable interpretation thereof.”

The advantages of such a method are obvious, and have suggested its adoption in a British colony where the presence of a large coloured population raised a problem not dissimilar to that we have been examining.23 Recognizing the need of knowledge and intelligence for the due exercise of political power, it excludes a large mass of confessedly incompetent persons, while leaving the door open for those Negroes whose instructed capacity brings them up to the level of the bulk of the whites, and who, in some places, may be now from one-fifth to one-fourth of the whole Negro population. Thus it may operate, not only as an improvement in the electoral body, but as an incentive to educational progress.

The obstacles to the adoption of the plan were, however, serious. One was that in disfranchising their Negroes for want of education, most Southern states would have also to disfranchise that part of their white population, which was below any educational standard high enough to exclude the mass of Negroes. The percentage of illiterates to the whole population over ten years of age was in 1890 in the Southeastern states 14.5 and in the Southwestern 15. To expect these voters (about 1,412,000) to disfranchise themselves for the sake of excluding Negroes was to expect too much. The other was that every limitation of the suffrage might diminish pro tanto (Amendment XIV) a state’s representation in federal elections, thereby weakening its influence in federal affairs and mortifying its self-esteem. The state of Mississippi, while facing, as it safely might, this possibility, evaded the former difficulty by the ingenious loophole under which the registering officials may admit whites who, though illiterate, are able to give a “reasonable interpretation” of any section of the state constitution. Such whites have, one is told, been able to satisfy the officials far more generally than have the Negroes. And if this particular section happens to be put to them, their common sense will find its interpretation obvious. Other states have since 1890 tried other methods, which are mentioned in the following chapter.

Even graver than the political difficulties which have been described is the social problem raised by the coexistence on the same soil, under the same free government, of two races so widely differing that they do not intermingle. Social disparity or social oppression cuts deeper than any political severance; and time, so far from curing the mischief, seems during the last thirty or forty years to have aggravated it. Politics leave untouched large parts of the field of human life, even in the United States; and the political inferiority of the coloured race, since it is the result of their retarded intellectual development, seems in accord with nature. Social inferiority, which is felt at every moment, and which reduces or destroys the sense of human brotherhood, is a more serious matter.

This problem is, moreover, a new one in history, for the relations of the ruling and subject races of Europe and Asia supply no parallel to it. Whoever examines the records of the past will find that the continued juxtaposition of two races has always been followed either by the disappearance of the weaker or by the intermixture of the two. Where race antagonisms still remain, as in parts of Eastern Europe, and on a far larger scale in Asia, one may expect a similar solution to be ultimately reached. In Transylvania, for instance, Saxons, Magyars, and Roumans stand apart from one another, all three, but especially the two latter, mutually suspicious and politically hostile. So further east one finds strong religious antagonisms (not without serious attendant evils), such as those of Sunnis, Shiahs, and Christians in Western Asia, or of Hindus and Mussulmans in India, antagonisms, however, which only partially coincide with race differences, and have thrown the latter quite into the shade. In all such cases, however, though one race or religion may be for the moment dominant, there is no necessary or permanent distinction between them; and there is, if the religious difficulty can be overcome, a possibility of intermarriage. Other cases may be suggested where a fusion is improbable, as between the British and the natives in India, or the colonists and the natives in South Africa. But the European rulers of India are a mere handful in comparison with the natives, nor do they settle in India so as to form a part of its permanent population. In New Zealand, the Maoris, hitherto a diminishing body, though now just maintaining their numbers, live apart on their own lands, but seem likely to be ultimately absorbed by the whites. In western South America the Spanish settlers have, in some regions, very largely mingled their blood with that of the native Indians, and may ultimately become as much blent with the latter as has befallen in Mexico. The peculiar feature of the race problem as it presents itself in the United States is, that the Negroes are in many districts one-third or even one-half of the population, are forced to live in the closest local contiguity with the whites, and are for the purposes of industry indispensable to the latter, yet are so sharply cut off from the whites by colour and all that colour means, that not merely a mingling of blood, but any social approximation, is regarded with horror, and perpetual severance is deemed a law of nature.

From such a position what issue? One hears little said in America of any possible issue, partly because the nation is tired of the whole subject, which has, in one form or another, vexed it ever since the early days of last century, partly because every plan that has been suggested is open to patent objections. Several, however, may deserve to be mentioned.

Even long before the war, and often since, it has been proposed that the Negroes should be retransported to Africa. The petty and stagnant Republic of Liberia owes its origin to the idea that it might furnish a home for Afro-American freedmen, and a centre whence they might be dispersed in larger and larger numbers through their ancient home. But in 1910 the more or less civilized population of Liberia of American origin was only some 18,000, the million of other inhabitants being aborigines, and the badly administered state was unable to pay its way.

There are two fatal objections to the plan of exporting the Southern Negroes to Africa. One is that they will not go; the other that the whites cannot afford to let them go. There is nothing to attract them in the prospect of being uprooted from their homes in a country where the comforts of civilization are attainable by industry, and thrown upon a new shore, already occupied by savages of whose very languages, except in the few spots where English is spoken, they are ignorant.24 The Southern whites, so far from encouraging, would resist their departure; for it would mean the loss of the labour by which more than half the crops of the South are raised, and a great part of her mining and iron-working industries carried on. Much of the country might, for a time at least, remain untilled and useless were the Negro to disappear; for of the introduction of coolie labour from India there can be no talk in a nation which has so strictly forbidden the entrance of Chinese. The Negro, in short, is essential to the material prosperity of the South, and his departure would mean ruin to it. Even now, the Atlantic states do what they can to prevent their coloured labourers from leaving them to go west.25

Apart from these obstacles, the transference of many millions of people from one continent to another is beyond the horizon of the possible. Their annual increase exceeds 200,000, quite as large a number as could be, in a single year, conveyed to and provided for in Africa. How many emigrant ships, and at what cost, would be needed even for this, not to speak of the far larger expenses needed to keep them from starving till they had begun to scatter themselves through the interior of Africa! To proceed by transporting even 200,000 a year, would be to try to empty a running stream by a ladle. The notion of such a solution has been abandoned by all sensible men in America, though here and there a belated voice repeats it.

Easier seems the alternative plan of setting apart for the coloured people certain districts of the country, such as, for instance, the southern part of the Atlantic coast region and the lowlands of the Gulf, and moving them into these districts from the rest of the country, as Oliver Cromwell drove the wild Irish into Connaught. But neither does this solution find any favour in America. No state would consent to see even a part of its territory cut off and allotted to the Negroes, to be by them administered in their own way. The rest of the country would hardly admit a purely black state to be represented in Congress and to vote in presidential elections on equal terms. And in many parts of the South, which are better suited for whites than for Negroes, and in which, therefore, the white population is now much larger, the leading industries would suffer severely from the removal of Negro labour. Northern Alabama, for instance, is in point of climate a region well fitted for whites. But the iron works there employ great numbers of Negroes who are found efficient, and whose place might not be easily filled. Virginia is, in the main, a white state. But not only the growing of tobacco, but also its preparation for the market, is a Negro industry; and it would be no simple matter to find white workpeople to do it equally well and cheaply. This scheme, therefore, may also be dismissed as outside the range of practical politics.

There remains the suggestion that the method by which race antagonisms have been so often removed in the past in the Old World, and to some extent (as, for instance, in Mexico) in the New World also, may eventually be applied in the United States; that is to say, that the two races may be blent by intermarriage into one. To some Europeans, and to a very few old survivors of the Abolitionist party in the North, this solution appears possible and even natural. To all Southern sentiment it is shocking. I have never met a Southern man, whether born there or an incomer from the North, who would even discuss the possibility of such a general commixture of whites and blacks as Brazil has begun to show or as exists in some Mussulman countries. In no Southern state can such a marriage be legally contracted; and what is more remarkable, in every Southern state such unions are excessively rare. Even at the North, where the aversion to Negro blood is now less strong, “miscegenation,” as they call it, is deemed such a disgrace to the white who contracts it that one seldom hears of its occurrence. Enlightened Southern men, who have themselves no dislike to the black race, justify this horror of intermarriage by arguing that no benefit which might thereby accrue to the Negroes could balance the evil which would befall the rest of the community. The interests of the nation and of humanity itself would, in their view, suffer by such a permanent debasement of the Anglo-American race as would follow. Our English blood is suffering enough already, they say, from the intrusion of inferior stock from continental Europe; and we should be brought down to the level of San Domingo were we to have an infusion from Africa added. This is the argument to which reason appeals. That enormous majority which does not reason is swayed by a feeling so strong and universal that there seems no chance of its abating within any assignable time. Revolutions in sentiment are, no doubt, conceivable, but they are more rare than revolutions in politics.

We arrive, therefore, at three conclusions:

I.The Negro will stay in North America.
II.He will stay locally intermixed with the white population.
III.He will stay socially distinct, as an alien element, unabsorbed and unabsorbable.

His position may, however, change from what it is now.

He may more and more draw southwards into the lower and hotter regions along the coasts of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Whether in the more northerly states, such as Maryland and Missouri, he will decrease, may be doubtful. But it is certainly in those southerly regions that his chief future increase may be expected. In other words, he will be a relatively smaller, and probably much smaller, element than at present in the whole population north of latitude 36°, and a relatively larger one south of latitude 33°, and east of longitude 94° W.

This change would have both its good and its evil side. It may involve less frequent occasions for collision between the two races, and may dispose the Negroes, where they are comparatively few, to acquiesce less reluctantly in white predominance. But it will afford scantier opportunities for the gradual elevation of the race in the districts where they are most numerous. Contact with the whites is the chief condition for the progress of the Negro. Where he is isolated, or where he greatly outnumbers the whites, his advance will be retarded, although nothing has yet occurred to justify the fear that he will, even along the Gulf coast, or in the sea islands of Carolina, sink to the level of the Haytian.

The Negro may, indeed, in time he doubtless will, though more rapidly in some regions than in others, continue to advance in education, intelligence, and wealth, as well as in habits of thrift and application. Such progress may seem an unmixed good. Yet it can hardly fail to be accompanied in that small minority who advance most quickly, by a growing discontent with the social disabilities imposed upon the race. It will give them greater capacity for organization, possibly greater tenacity and courage, than they now possess; and these very things might, by alarming the whites, tend to widen the chasm between the races. Whether the coloured people will be any better able to give effect to any resentment they may feel, is doubtful, so great is the disparity in strength. But they might be more embittered, and this embitterment, reacting upon white sentiment, might retard the working of those healing influences which the progress of civilization generally brings in its train. Already one hears the younger whites of the South talk of the growing “uppishness” and impertinence of the Negro, as things to be resented and punished.

That sense of haughty superiority which other nations note in the English has in their Indian dominions done much to destroy the happy effects of the enormous social and economic improvements which the rule of Britain has effected. A young indigo planter, or a lieutenant only just released from school at home, will treat with wanton insolence or contumely natives of the highest caste, perhaps of dignified social position and ancient lineage; and though government punishes these offences in the rare cases when they are brought to its knowledge, the sentiment of Anglo-Indian society scarcely condemns them. Thus the very classes whom rank and education might have been expected to render loyal to British authority are alienated. When similar tendencies appear in the Anglo-American of the South, the Englishman, who knows how not a few of his own countrymen behave to the ancient and cultivated races of the East whom they have conquered, feels that he is not entitled to sit in judgment.

I do not suggest that there is any present political danger to the Republic, or even to any particular Southern state, from the phenomena here described. But the evil of these things is to be measured not merely by any such menace to political stability as they may involve, but also by the diminution of happiness which they cause, by the passions hurtful to moral progress they perpetuate, by the spirit of lawlessness they evoke, by the contempt for the rights of man as man which they engender. In a world already so full of strife and sorrow it is grievous to see added to the other fountains of bitterness a scorn of the strong for the weak, and a dread by the weak of the strong, grounded on no antagonism of interests, for each needs the other, but solely on a difference in race and colour.

Be these evils what they may—and serious as they seem to an observer from without, they are in most parts of the South not keenly felt in daily life—legislation and administration can do comparatively little to remove them. It is, indeed, to be wished that lynching should be sternly repressed—some of the Southern state governors are doing what they can for that purpose—and that the state statutes or local regulations enforcing separation of blacks from whites in travelling or in places of public resort should be at least modified, for they press hardly on the educated Negroes. But the real change to which the friends of the South and of the Negro look forward is a change in the feelings of the white people, and especially of the ruder and less educated part of them. The political troubles I have described have been tending to pass away under altered political conditions. For the social difficulty, rooted deep in the characters of the two races, none but moral remedies have any promise of potency, and the working of moral remedies, sure as we believe it to be, is always slow. Neither will compulsive measures quicken that working. In the United States, above all other countries, one must place one’s hopes on what physicians call the healing power of Nature, and trust that the forces which make not only for equality, but also for peace and goodwill among men, will in due time reduce these evils, as they have reduced many others. There is no ground for despondency to anyone who remembers how hopeless the extinction of slavery seemed in 1820 or even in 1850 and who marks the progress which the Negroes have made since their sudden liberation. Still less is there reason for impatience, for questions like this have in some countries of the Old World required ages for their solution. The problem which confronts the South is one of the great secular problems of the world, presented here under a form of peculiar difficulty. And as the present differences between the African and the European are the product of thousands of years, during which one race was advancing in the temperate, and the other remaining stationary in the torrid zone, so centuries may pass before their relations as neighbours and fellow-citizens have been duly adjusted.

chapter 95

Further Reflections on the Negro Problem

The position of the Negro race in the United States is so peculiar and raises so many questions of the gravest social and economic kind that although the last preceding chapter has been revised and adapted to the changes that have occurred since it was first written, it seems proper to devote some additional pages to a consideration of those aspects of the subject which strike the observer of today.1

The changes of the last seventeen years have not affected the main features of the situation. The larger any problem is and the more deeply rooted in the past are the factors which determine it, the more slowly do those main features alter. There has, however, been not only an ampler but also a more temperate discussion of the whole matter during the last decade than there ever was before. This discussion has been turned into new channels by the material development of the South, and has revealed in new lights the spirit that now pervades the Southern people.

The recovery of the South from the abyss of ruin into which the Civil War had thrown large sections of it, and especially Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, began a little before 1880 and has proceeded with growing speed. The assessed valuation of taxable property in the former slave states was in 1900 just what it had been in 1860, so long was the time needed to repair the losses of the long struggle. That recovery is now visible in all directions, in the bringing of new lands under cultivation, in the opening of mines, in the creation of iron and steel works, in the extension of cotton and other factories, in the rising value of real estate, and the parallel increase of the revenues of states and cities, in the foundation of agricultural and technical schools, and the expenditure of larger and larger sums upon public instruction, in the building of new railroads and the consolidation of many small lines into a few great systems which give a quicker and better service. The growth of population has not been so marked as in the Northern and Western states, but that is largely because very few immigrants from the Old World have hitherto come to the South, except into Texas. For some time past the backward people who dwell in the Allegheny highlands have begun to move downwards into the manufacturing and mining regions. And latterly a movement has begun, evident, though not yet large, of native Americans migrating from those parts of the North and West in which good farming land has become scarcer and dearer. The stream which ran to the West for so many years is now no longer able to spread itself out there, and tending to flow southward. Thus the increase of population is in the South of a wholesome kind, and it promises to continue.

A result of this progress is to be seen in the cheerful and hopeful spirit now visible. Men feel that they have turned the corner, and expect an expanding prosperity. Legislatures are more willing to spend money on education; and legislation is more enlightened, though in some states it still lags behind the progress of the North. This brighter view of things has affected the Southern view of the Negro. Between 1870 and 1900 his presence was to many persons a sort of nightmare. All sorts of absurd dangers were predicted; all sorts of absurd expedients for getting rid of him propounded. A calmer and saner view now prevails. The evils of the Reconstruction period are not forgotten, but as no one thinks they will ever recur, men can discuss the situation quietly and reasonably, feeling that as the Negro cannot be eliminated, the whites must learn to live with him and turn his presence to the best account.

Whatever cause the whites may have had for alarm twenty or thirty years ago, when the Negroes were supposed to be increasing faster than the whites, has now vanished. They show in each census a smaller percentage not only of the whole population of the Union, but even of the former slave states. In 1910 the percentage of Negroes to the whole population of the United States was 10.9; in 1880 it was 13.1.

This is attributable partly to a slightly declining birth rate, but more to the still high rate of Negro mortality. Infants are carelessly or ignorantly treated, and much havoc is wrought by diseases which, like tuberculosis, are the result of bad sanitary conditions.

The old controversy as to the capacity of the Negro for progress still rages. But about the fact that he has progressed there can be no dispute. What are the figures? When emancipated in 1862–65 the ex-slaves had no property at all. In 1910 they were cultivating as owners or tenants 893,384 farms. They owned in the sixteen Southern states 218,467 farms; and their aggregate property was estimated as being in 1910 between $400,000,000 and $500,000,000 (£80,000,000 to £100,000,000). Their churches are stated to own property to the value of $56,000,000, raised almost entirely by themselves.

So late as 1900 there were only two Negro banks in the United States; in 1909 there were believed to be fifty.2

They have entered all the professions. In 1900 there were more than 22,000 Negro teachers in schools and colleges, more than 15,000 ministers of religion, more than 1,700 physicians and surgeons, more than 700 lawyers. The numbers are doubtless now much larger. About two hundred Negro newspapers are now published, besides weekly and monthly magazines. Many Negroes are filling official posts with credit, and not a few have earned the respect and confidence of their white neighbours.

Their progress in education has been no less remarkable. At the date of emancipation probably less than 10 per cent of the freedmen could read and write. In 1870 the percentage of illiterate Negro adult males was 83.5. In 1910 it had fallen to 33.3. This is naturally by no means so great a reduction as among the Southern whites of native parentage, among whom the illiterates had sunk in 1910 to 7.7 per cent. But it represents an immense advance, when the conditions of a backward country and a very poor population are considered.3 The Negroes have a remarkable desire for instruction, and their churches have since 1880 contributed $10,000,000 to give to their schools aid over and above the support from public funds. The attendance at the universities and colleges and technical schools has continued to grow steadily.4

That this progress should have been very unequal in different parts of the country, and that it should leave sections of the population still far behind, is no more than was to be expected. That natural differentiation of the stronger from the weaker, of the brighter from the duller, which goes on in every community began among the Negroes as soon as the extinction of slavery started the normal social processes by which communities develop. The kidnapped unfortunates who were brought from Africa in slave ships had belonged to different Negro tribes in different stages of civilization, and to different ranks and classes in the same tribe, for few if any of these tribes were in that lowest kind of savagery which knows no ranks at all. The hold of the slaveship jumbled them all together, and the plantation life of toil, enforced by the whip, pressed them all down to the same level, though the few who obtained freedom soon showed an aptitude to rise. As soon as that pressure was removed, natural inequalities of capacity began to have their legitimate effect in raising some faster than others. Fortunate accidents of environment, the help of friendly free Negroes, the benevolent encouragement of a white ex-master or neighbour, the accident of admission to a school, heightened the action of the advantages which those who were born more capable possessed; until now, after nearly fifty years of freedom, social classes have begun to form, and the gap between the best-educated Negroes practising a profession or conducting a large business and the ignorant field labourer has become a wide one. Inequalities have reappeared, although those which we find among the American Negroes today are different from those that existed between their African ancestors before the heavy roller of servitude had passed over the captives.

Though a large part of the coloured population is still ignorant and backward, especially in the hottest parts of the Gulf states and along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, the general advance is by no means confined to the townsfolk. On the contrary, one is often told that the least desirable Negroes are the lower class who live in the cities, while the most solid and industrious are the small farm owners and the artisans in the villages. There has certainly been a real and general progress among these better classes. It is visible in the better houses they inhabit, in the better method of cultivation some of them employ, in the figures that record the savings they place in the banks. Nor should the instances be forgotten in which the Negro has shown his capacity to do things for himself in a practical way. At Calhoun in Alabama there were lately nearly one hundred who had bought or were buying farms, having saved $80,000 for the purpose. The purely Negro town of Mound Bayou in the Mississippi delta, with a population of 2,000, is well governed, orderly, and prosperous, and there is a cooperative organization called the Farmers’ Improvement Society in Texas, whose members have helped one another forward in many ways till they came to own 71,000 acres of land and were able to erect an agricultural college to give farm training to their children. There are many associations among the Negroes, both cooperative and charitable, and by them much good has been effected. Though there are some whites, politicians and others, who, taking their notion of the coloured people from the illiterate plantation labourers and the shiftless criminal loafers of the cities, deny that the Negro has advanced, and though there are others who think that he is advancing more than is compatible with white ascendancy, still the majority of the educated white people in the South see, recognise, and gladly recognise, that the standard of industry, thrift, and education is rising and that it is for the benefit of the South as a whole hardly less than for the Negroes that it should rise. Steady and efficient labour is one of the most urgent needs of the country. The more the Negro advances, the more he acquires; the larger become his wants, so much the better is his labour; the more industrious and educated he is, the less prone is he to vagrancy and to crime. It is among the ruder and more ignorant sort of white people that nearly all of the opposition to the education of the coloured is to be found.

But all the Southern whites, however they may otherwise differ, agree in desiring to eliminate the Negro as a factor in politics. In 1890, Mississippi led the way in this direction by her new constitution. Six other states have followed in her steps, viz., South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia. In the new constitutional provisions of these states, intended to exclude the bulk of the Negroes, there is not a word regarding “race, colour, or previous condition of servitude,” as a ground of discrimination, so the Fifteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution is not directly infringed. The aim in view, an aim frankly avowed and justified, has been attained by provisions requiring the person who applies to be registered as a voter to have paid his taxes and to prove his possession of an educational or property qualification. Such tests (low as they were fixed), while excluding the bulk of the Negroes, would exclude a good many whites also, so it became necessary to open some other door through which whites with neither education nor property might enter. This was done in North Carolina and Louisiana by the so-called “grandfather clause” which admitted anyone whose father or grandfather had been a voter before 1867, while several other states granted registration to war veterans or their descendants.5 Things were so arranged that by one door or another nearly all the whites could find their way in, while the control of registration by white officials made it easy to exclude Negroes whose claim was at all doubtful, or whom it was desired to keep out. In Alabama it was estimated that only 5 per cent of the Negroes would under her new constitution keep the suffrage, and in Louisiana the number was reduced from 130,000 to 5,300. In the remaining four of the states that seceded, viz., Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, no constitutional change has been deemed needful. In them the Negroes are a smaller part of the population, and have not been in practice a voting force. Any attmpt on their part to assert themselves would be promptly checked.

The broad result of these measures has been to reduce the number of coloured electors on the register in the states aforesaid to an average roughly conjectured at not more than 10 per cent of the total number of adult males. It is larger in some states and in some districts of each state than in other states and districts, and no one seems to know exactly how large it is in any given area. Of those who might get their names on the register very many do not care to do so—where, for instance, a poll tax is required, they omit to pay it. And of those comparatively few Negroes who are on the register, many do not in fact vote, partly from heedlessness, partly because they know that in federal elections, and to a large extent in state elections also, their votes would make no difference, except in the rare case of a division in the dominant Democratic party. That party is so strong in nearly all the Southern states6 that the voting or abstention of the coloured voters, now everywhere so unimportant, could seldom affect the result of an election.

Under these conditions the Negroes have ceased to take much interest in politics. They are generally reckoned as belonging to the Republican party, but the organization of that party is kept up not so much in the hope of carrying elections as for the sake of securing representation in the national convention of the party and establishing a claim to some federal offices, objects which may be legitimate in themselves, but from the attainment of which the ordinary Negro has nothing to gain. He is accordingly supposed to have lost such interest in politics as he once evinced, and to accept without complaints that civic passivity to which his race has been reduced.

With this result the whites are doubly, nay, trebly, satisfied. They are relieved from any fear of Negro dominance. They declare that the Negro is growing to be more industrious, orderly, and generally useful now when he has dropped all thoughts of politics, and they add that friendly relations between the races have become easier, because, as the Negro is no longer challenging equality, they are less called upon to proclaim superiority.

It is easy to call these disfranchising provisions evasions of the Fifteenth Amendment which was intended by its framers to secure the vote to the Negroes on the same terms as the whites. But the state of things in the period between 1873 and the adoption of these new constitutions, a period during which, first by violence and afterwards by various tricks and devices, the Negroes were over almost the whole South practically deprived of their legal voting power, was worse than is the present legal exclusion of the great majority of them. It was demoralizing to the whites;7 it exacerbated feeling between the races; and as the Negroes were gaining nothing in those years by their nominal right to the suffrage, they have lost little by its curtailment. This is so generally understood by the people of the North that few have protested against the disfranchisement, and no attempt has been made to restore the boon which the nation was in 1870 supposed to be bestowing.

Among the leaders of the Negroes themselves there is a difference of view and policy on the matter. Some, bitterly resenting the disfranchising provisions, try to keep up an opposition to them, although they see little or no prospect of getting them repealed. Others think it better to accept facts which they are powerless to alter, consoling themselves by the reflection that provisions which make the suffrage depend on education and property tend to stimulate the Negro to raise himself to the tests prescribed for active citizenship. The bulk of the coloured people who live on the plantations take no interest in the matter. Among the more educated, the authority of Dr. Booker Washington has gone some way to commend the policy of preferring industrial progress to political agitation; not to add that it is hard to see what agitation could accomplish. It would not rouse the Republican party at the North, for since 1890 they have concluded that it is better to leave the South alone, while so far as state legislation is concerned, it might actually darken the prospects of the Negro by exciting more alarm and hostility in the breasts of the less kindly among the whites.8

Although the coloured people are not directly a factor in Southern politics, because few of them are allowed to vote, their presence has had indirect effects. The qualifications for the suffrage introduced to disfranchise them have, in some states, incidentally disfranchised a few of the poorer and more ignorant whites. For the purposes of the apportionment of representation among the states, all the Negroes, the disfranchised included, are reckoned, and thus contribute to make representation larger than it would otherwise be in the very states which have by their constitutions cut down the number of coloured voters.9 The resentment which is felt by those Negroes who live in the North at the action of the Southern Democrats has ensured their sturdy support of the Republican party in states like Indiana, Ohio, and New York, where they constitute an appreciable vote. The disquiet which the presence of the black man causes in the South holds the vast bulk of the Southern whites together in the Democratic party, and has so far frustrated the efforts frequently made to build up a solid party of Southern white Republicans. Thus someone has observed, with the exaggeration deemed needed to enforce a neglected truth, that the Negro, powerless as he is, still dominates the South, for his presence is never forgotten, and makes many things different from what they would otherwise be.

No person of colour has for a long time past sat in Congress, nor in the legislature of any Southern state, though now and then one may find his way into a Northern state legislature. A few hold small county offices in the South, and a few have been appointed by presidents to federal posts, such as collectors of ports or postmasters, in the South.10

The difficulty of correctly describing the social relations of blacks and whites in the South is due not only to the very different accounts which different observers, often prejudiced, have given, but also the great diversities between the various parts of the population and various regions of a wide country, stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But some salient facts may be stated as almost universally true.

The absolute social separation of the two races continues everywhere just as described in the last preceding chapter. Rarely does any person of colour sit down to meat in a white man’s house, or is in any other way recognized as an equal. The Southern whites conceive absolute separation to be essential in order, as many of them say, to assert and emphasize inequality, and, as all of them say, utterly to bar intermarriage. To the question whether so stringent an enforcement is necessary, the invariable reply is that nothing less would suffice to avert the fatal danger of an intermixture of blood. How much illicit intermixture goes on cannot be determined, but the number of light-coloured Negroes shows how large it must have been. It has by no means ceased.

In all states, though happily not in all parts of any state, there is friction between the races. In the North it exists chiefly between members of the labouring class. White working men and their labour unions generally refuse to work with coloured men, and the entrance to employment is so largely closed to them that one may say that the large majority of the Northern Negroes are confined to unskilled or unsettled avocations. In the Southern states the friction is perhaps less marked, and is least when one element, whether black or white, is in a large majority, less also in the rural districts than in the cities, where the Negro workpeople are supposed to be less submissive, where the proportion of bad characters among them is largest, and where the white workingmen are most rude and suspicious, the jealousy of labour competition being added to the jealousy of colour.11 It is in these cities that race quarrels and race riots such as those which unhappily occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, and in Atlanta, in 1906, are most to be feared. In 1910, a prize fight which took place in Nevada between a white man and a Negro in which the latter prevailed produced outbreaks of race enmity all over the country (including New York City). In the conflicts and riots at least one white man and nine or ten (by some accounts many more) Negroes were killed.

The extreme form of race friction is seen in lynching, a practice not confined to the South, though more common there than in the West, and more frequently attended by circumstances of horror. As some lynchings are not reported, and some are falsely reported, it is hard to determine the number that happen, but apparently they are becoming less frequent,12 and they are more and more condemned by the opinion of the best citizens.

Deplorable as the practice is, and seriously as it aggravates race friction, because every instance, even if it seems excusable under the particular circumstances, is apt to be followed by a crop of minor outrages, still one must not ascribe it solely to racial hatred, for whites also are lynched, though less frequently. It is largely the outcome of a defective administration of criminal justice. Homicide often, in some regions usually, goes unpunished, because courts are weak or partial, juries fail to convict, even in clear cases, while the extreme technicalities of procedure, coupled with the timidity of state judges, permit legal points to be taken by which trials are protracted, cases are appealed on trivial grounds, and the carrying out of sentences is in one way or another delayed until somehow or other the criminal escapes altogether. This distrust of the regular organs and regular processes of law is the most fertile parent of these constant resorts to violent and illegal methods of punishment.13

The racial antagonism which breaks out in lynching has produced in many parts of the South an atmosphere of suspicion and disquiet on the part of the whites, of suspicion and terror on the part of the Negroes. This is less noticeable in those agricultural districts which are almost entirely black, than in the towns. Yet it has borne its part in producing an inflow of Negroes from rural districts to the larger cities as well as from the South generally toward the North. In many places planters, even those who treat their workpeople kindly, complain of the difficulty of getting Negro labour, though it is almost the only labour that can be hired for field work. Wages have been tending to rise, but it is said that with the more backward Negroes the result is not always good, for they work less regularly when they can earn as much by fewer days of toil.

This has excited so restless and migratory a spirit that several Southern states have passed laws intended to keep the Negro on the soil by throwing difficulties in the way of his going out of the state, while bills have been introduced to exclude him from mechanical trades in order that he may stick to farm labour. Sometimes, like the ryot of India, he falls into the toils of the usurious money lender; and in all his disputes, legal or extra legal, with the whites, the chances are against him. It is also alleged that when he works on the system of receiving part of the produce of the farm, he is sometimes cozened out of his proper share by his landlord, or, if he works for wages, is held in a sort of servitude through the debts he is forced to incur for the articles supplied to him by the employer. This peonage (as it is called) is facilitated by law and in some places has grown to be a system which, where employers and creditors are harsh in enforcing their claims, makes the Negro more unrestful and drives him away from the plantations to the cities or even into the North. Yet he is often no better off at the North, where the white labourers may refuse to work with him, and where he has no more chance than in the South of receiving, except in very exceptional cases, any sort of social recognition from any class of whites, while in the cities everywhere he is met by the competition of the generally more diligent and more intelligent whites. So the Negro is after all better off in the South and on the land than anywhere else; and in the South, where the need for labourers is great and he is not generally discriminated against in business matters, a wider door is open to him both in town and in country.

At the bottom of all the labour question there stands the fact that, as compared with the white man, whether he be a native or an Italian or Polish immigrant, the average Negro is an inefficient worker. He cannot be depended to come regularly to his work, and he does less in a given time. He plies his shovel with less vigour than an Irishman, and he is not so steady as a Chinaman. He has a still unchecked liking for vagrancy, and the Negro vagrant is prone to crime; these after all are the faults that depress him in the struggle for life. All that can be said is that they are the natural result of the previous conditions, that he is less lazy in the United States than in the West Indies, and that he is improving steadily if slowly—improving in the way which is surest, viz., by his own exertions and by the example of a few of the best among his own race. A solid ground of hope lies in the fact that the evils described will naturally diminish as he grows more efficient, and that with the extension of agricultural and manual instruction, his labour will doubtless become more efficient.

Broadly speaking, there are two tendencies at work among the Southern whites, which correspond to the two classes of which Southern society consists.

The lower and more ignorant whites, including both the descendants of those who before the war were called “mean whites,” and those who have come down out of the mountains where the people had remained comparatively rude, dislike the Negroes, desiring to thrust them down and to keep them down, and, so far as they legally can, to deny them civil rights as well as social opportunities. With this class, the jealousy of labour competition has reinforced the repulsion of colour sentiment. From this class come not only the lynchings but the petty outrages practised on the weaker race; and it is in order to capture the votes of this class, which is unwilling to pay for Negro education and will sometimes boycott a white woman who devotes herself to teaching the Negroes, that anti-Negro harangues are delivered and anti-Negro bills are introduced by politicians of the less worthy type. The enmity is more collective than personal, for even where prejudice and jealousy are strongest, there are often friendly relations between individual white men of this class and their Negro neighbours, and although men of the kind described are not generally amenable to humanitarian appeals, yet those democratic doctrines which are engrained in the American mind have a certain power even over them, restraining impulses toward tyranny which might in other countries be irresistible. They might wish that the Negro was not a citizen at all, but as he is a citizen even when not a voter, his citizenship cannot be ignored.

The cultivated and progressive white people of the South, including most, though not quite all, of the leading businessmen and professional men, and many of the large landowners, cherish more kindly feelings. There are of course optimists and pessimists among them. Some, noting the progress which the Negro has already made, expect much from the effects of education and sympathetic help. Others, struck by the inferior quality of most Negro labour, think he will not in any assignable time be equal to the white as a skilled or reliable workman. But all agree in recognizing that as he is there and his labour is indispensable they must make the best of the position by giving him instruction, especially of an industrial kind, and by helping him to rise. Accordingly they advocate more liberal grants for Negro schools, and do their best to secure practical equality of civil rights and an administration of the law honestly impartial as between the races. They dislike lynching just as much as people in the North do. After the lamentable outbreak at Atlanta in September 1906, the best white citizens formed a committee for the protection of the Negroes, and this developed into the Atlanta Civil League, under the influence of which conditions showed a marked improvement. The same wish to secure protection for the Negro has been conspicuous among the most energetic and thoughtful white men in other cities.

As this opposition of two classes and two tendencies in the South is the key to the present position, so the best prospect for the future lies in the increase of the more enlightened class and the growing strength of the more friendly sentiment they represent. But it must be remembered that upon some things all Southern whites are agreed. They all dread intermarriage. They all deem absolute social separation as necessary to prevent mixture of blood. They all wish to keep strong drink away from the Negro,14 and most of them are willing even to forego, for that purpose, facilities for getting it themselves. They all desire to prevent the Negro vote from being a factor in politics, though some would concede the suffrage to the few who have education and property. And they would all alike resent the slightest interference by the national government in any matter which concerns their state legislation, political or social, upon questions affecting the coloured race.

When one comes to speak of the views and attitude of the Negroes themselves, it is necessary to premise that only a small percentage have any views at all. Even among those who can read and write, the number with sufficient knowledge or intelligence to comprehend the whole situation is small. The average Negro is a naturally thoughtless, lighthearted, kindly, easygoing being, whose interests in life are of the most elementary order, and whose vision is limited to the few miles around his house. When he had a vote, he used it, unless influenced by a white employer or patron, at the bidding of a local leader of his own race, probably a preacher. In those cities where it is worth buying, he is said to be ready to sell it. In some places, and especially where outrages have recently occurred, he lives in terror of violence from the ruder whites. But he has no racial enmity to the whites, and on the contrary is naturally deferential and submissive, responding quickly to any kindness shown to him, dangerous only when he is one of a mob, and trebly dangerous when the mob is drunk.

Among the small class of educated and reflective Negroes one may distinguish two tendencies. Reference has already been made to the opposite views of those who counsel acquiescence in, and of those who would agitate against, the restriction of the suffrage to a small section of their race. The divergence of views, however, goes further. There are those led by Dr. Booker Washington, who see no use in resisting patent facts, and therefore hold that all the Negro can at present do, and the most effective thing that, with a view to the future, he could in any case do, is to raise himself in intelligence, knowledge, industry, thrift, whatever else makes for self-help and self-respect. When he has gained these things, when he is felt to be a valuable part of the community, his colour will not exclude him from the opportunities of advancement which business presents, nor from the suffrage, nor from a share in public office. Complaints of injustice, well grounded as many of them may be, will profit little, and may even rouse further antagonism, but industrial capacity and the possession of property are sure to tell.

Others there are, such as Professor Du Bois,15 who find it hard to practise this patience; and some are beginning to organize themselves in a more aggressive spirit for common help and protection. The only political power they can exert is through the votes of the Negroes in some Northern states, and it has not yet been shown that these will follow any leaders of the type described. They can, however, both in North and South, act together for trade purposes, can patronize stores kept by members of their race, and in other ways render material aid and make their presence felt.

One thing is now common to both these sections of the educated men of colour—a growing sense of race solidarity and a perception that instead of seeking favours from the whites or trying to cling to their skirts, the Negro must go his own way, make his own society, try to stand on his own feet, in the confidence that the more he succeeds in doing this, the more respected will he be. This race consciousness finds expression in various organizations which have been formed among the Negroes for helping themselves, as well as in appeals, not always, however, responded to, to give their patronage by preference to members of the race in business relations and in professional work.

This feeling of race consciousness has in most places included, and now more and more includes, the people of mixed blood, about whom a word may be said. Whereas in Spanish and Portuguese countries persons who are not evidently black are reckoned as white, in the United States any trace of African blood marks a man as a Negro and subjects him to the disabilities attaching to the race. In Latin America whoever is not black is white; in Teutonic America whoever is not white is black. The number of this mixed population, though it cannot be exactly ascertained, is estimated at not quite one-third of the total coloured population, that is, about three millions. The proportion is largest in the Northern and Middle states, smallest in South Carolina, Georgia, and the Gulf states. While in some far Southern districts it does not reach one-fifth, there are parts of Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, and Maryland where it is two-fifths. All these persons, even if there be only an eighth or a sixteenth of Negro blood, and there be nothing in face or accent to indicate their origin, are held to belong to the Negro race.16 To what extent children continue to be born from parents of different races no one knows. In eleven Northern and Western states, as well as in all the Southern and in Arizona, intermarriage is illegal, and in some states a punishable offence, but illicit connections are said to be still frequent, though some state laws have tried to repress this practice also by penalties. One-eighth is in some states taken as the infusion which makes a man legally a Negro; but less than that would affect him socially. There is much controversy, and so far no scientific certainty because no adequate data, regarding the physiological effect of race mixture. The common view holds the mixed race to be superior in intelligence but rather inferior in physical stamina to the pure black. It dwells on the fact that nearly all the Negroes who have risen to distinction have been mulattoes. But there are men of large experience who think differently.17 In some cities, especially in the North, mulattoes and quadroons are said to have formerly looked down on the pure blacks, and sought to create an exclusive society of their own. But that racial consciousness to which I have already referred has been drawing all sections of the African race together, disposing the lighter coloured, since they can get no nearer to the whites, to identify themselves with the mass of those who belong to their own stock.

Among these light-coloured people, it is on those who, knowing their white relatives by sight, and forced to feel that persons by nature their cousins—perhaps even their brothers or sisters—are placed above them on a level to which they cannot climb, that the sense of social inequality presses most cruelly. But it presses on every educated Negro. He may have studied at a Northern university, may have associated there in a friendly if not intimate way with white students, may have passed his examinations with equal credit.18 In face and figure he may be scarcely distinguishable from them. But in after life an impassable barrier will stand between him and them. That under such conditions there should be bitterness can excite no surprise. The wonder rather is that not more bitterness finds expression; and this may be ascribed partly to the simple faith and religious resignation which lie deep in the Negro character, partly also to the fact that the coloured people have from childhood grown up accustomed to it, so that the contrast becomes keenly painful only to a few. It is fortunate that the African race is not naturally sullen or vindictive, and that its gaiety of temper finds many alleviations for the trials of life.

Whoever, revisiting a country after a long interval, seeks to form a sound judgment on the changes that are passing, does well to check the statistical facts by his personal impressions and his personal impressions by the statistical facts. As regards the position of the Negroes, the facts that can be expressed in figures are generally encouraging. They must be growing more industrious, because they own far more land, and their total property has increased much faster than their numbers. Their sanitary condition is still in many places deplorable, but the efforts which are being made to reduce disease, and particularly tuberculosis, offer a prospect of improvement. Educationally too there is visible progress, not merely in the reduction of illiteracy, but in the increased proportion who receive industrial training and in the number who enter occupations requiring a cultivated intelligence. The statistics of crime are still regrettably high, but it must be remembered that the poorest part of a population is always that from which by far the largest proportion of offenders comes, and offences committed by Negroes are in some parts of the country more constantly and severely dealt with than those committed by whites. Lynchings are less frequent. The prohibition of the use of intoxicating drinks, which has now been enacted in nearly every state of the South, will, if strictly carried out, do much to diminish both the volume of Negro crime and the risks of violent white revenge.

When one turns from the tangible facts to the less tangible impressions which the traveller receives, the strongest among these is the sense of a revival of life and energy among the whites over nearly all the South. The spirit of this generation is a different spirit from that of the generation which fought, and largely perished, in the Civil War; but it retains some measure of the dignity and largeness of view which adorned the old Southern aristocracy. And although sectionalism is passing away, the Southern men of today have along with their pride in the Union a special pride in their own land, and a Southern patriotism of their own, like the Scottish patriotism which Scotsmen superadd to the allegiance they owe to the United Kingdom. This love of the South is an inspiring motive. It not merely spurs men to the development of the material resources of a region whose wealth in such resources is scarcely even yet appreciated, but it makes them strive to build up a community with high standards in public and private life, and with an intellectual culture abreast of that of the older Northern states. There have been many evidences (notably in the progress of the temperance movement and of the Laymen’s Missionary Movement) of the strength of moral and religious sentiment in the South. Such an enlargement of view and sense of what befits a great people naturally disposes the best citizens to a more generous and sympathetic treatment of the Negro and a wiser handling of the Negro question as a whole than was possible in the days immediately following the Reconstruction period. Thus one finds among the most thoughtful Southern men, the men whose moral leadership is recognized, a more hopeful and cheerful spirit than formerly, a spirit which sees that justice and tenderness toward the weak and backward race will make for the good of the stronger race also.

Nor is this more friendly attitude visible only among the leaders of thought. Although the mass of the poorer and more ignorant whites remain suspicious and unfriendly, the visitor discerns all through the educated class in the South a greater disposition to be indulgent to the Negroes, to protect and to help them in their difficult, upward path. This is most visible where there is evident activity and prosperity—one is struck by it in North Carolina, for instance. Nor is the reason hard to find, for when people feel themselves advancing, their hearts expand, and when they are busy they cease to brood gloomily over a problem which has been for many years a sort of obsession in many parts of the country. They feel with Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi when he said, “In the face of this great problem it would be well that wise men think more, that good men pray more, and that all men talk less and curse less.” So lately spoke another eminent Southerner, “Not another word about the negro problem. Get to work.”

Thus if we compare 1870 with 1890 and 1890 with 1910, there are grounds for hope. But if we regard the actual state of things, and note how slowly changes for the better have been moving, we shall realize how much remains to be done. As the pessimist, fixing his eye only on existing evils, fails to allow for the forces which are tending to lessen them, so the optimist, who sees these forces at work, is always in danger of expecting them to work too quickly. In such a case as this, where the scale is enormous because in the South nearly ten millions of black men are scattered over nearly a million of square miles, and where the real improvement to be effected, that from which all the rest must spring, is an improvement in the character and habits which a race has formed during thousands of years, progress must needs be slow.

It was observed in the last preceding chapter that forecasts are unusually difficult in a case to the phenomena of which no parallel can be found. All prediction must rest on an observation of similar facts observed before elsewhere and on the historical development those facts have taken. Now, though there have been endless instances in history of the contact of advanced and backward races, none of these instances present phenomena sufficiently resembling those of the South to enable us to conjecture the future from the past.

The case most nearly resembling that of the Southern states is to be found in South Africa at the present day. There we see a large population of black people, the settled part of whom enjoy private civil rights equal to those of the whites, while in one part of the country (Cape Colony) a small number, who have attained a certain standard of education and property, enjoy political rights also. There, as in the South, we note a complete social separation between the races, with no prospect of any fusion between them, and a tendency also on the part of the ruder section of the whites to dislike the blacks and treat them scornfully. The outlook in South Africa is in so far darker than it is in the Southern states that the Kafir population immensely outnumbers the whites, and, though the bulk of it still remains in a tribal condition, far behind the American Negroes in point of education, it is naturally of a more vigorous character and more martial spirit than are most of the latter. However, the native problem in South Africa is still so far from being solved that one can only begin to conjecture the forms it is likely to take when the Kafirs become more civilized. It is in an earlier phase than the American problem, and does not help us toward a solution of the latter.

That latter was never more tersely and forcibly stated than by the late Mr. Henry W. Grady of Atlanta when he said:19

The problem of the South is to carry on within her body politic two separate races, equal in civil and political rights, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these races in peace, for discord means ruin. She must carry them separately, for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in equal justice, for to this she is pledged in honour and in gratitude. She must carry them even unto the end, for in human probability she will never be quit of either.

All that whoever wishes to forecast the future of the Southern Negroes can do is to study the forces actually at work in the South and try to form an estimate of the power they will respectively exert hereafter. Those forces are curiously intertwined, and while some promise to work for the bettering of existing conditions, others may work for their worsening. Many of the wiser minds in the South think that their combined effect will on the whole be for good. Some, however, think otherwise. The best way of stating the case is to present each view separately, and the more hopeful view may come first. I give it in the five paragraphs that follow.

The growing material prosperity of the South, a prosperity likely to increase still further, will make the labour of the Negro more and more needed, and will therefore make the Southern whites feel more and more anxious to retain him, to encourage him, to improve the quality of his work.

The Negro will share in this prosperity; and as his material condition improves, as he is better housed and clothed and acquires a taste for the comforts of life, he will be more industrious and more efficient. Thus will he become more self-respecting; and therewith also more respected. In becoming more educated, and especially better trained for industrial pursuits, the Negro will not only be able to hold his own in handicrafts, even in those which at present he seems in danger of losing, but will generally begin to awaken to the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. As he will be more eager to qualify himself for the suffrage, by reaching the prescribed standard of knowledge and property, so there will be less objection to his enjoying the suffrage when it is perceived that he has grown fitter for it.

As more and more among the coloured people rise to the level which the more advanced have now reached, and as they form higher aims in life than physical enjoyment and amusement, they will gain more self-control and steadiness of purpose. Crime will tend to diminish, and the occasions for friction between the races will be fewer.

As Negro society becomes more settled, and more of the more ambitious and capable men rise to positions of influence in the occupations of merchants and bankers, lawyers and physicians, the educated African will feel less discontented and less resentful at his social isolation from the whites, because he will have a better society of his own. To stand well in that society will be a legitimate subject for pride. His nascent race consciousness will then take the direction not of antagonism to the whites, but of showing what the African can do when he has got his chance, and the current that might have been dangerous in one channel will be harmless and fertilizing in another.

The growing agricultural and industrial progress of the whole South, accompanied by a scarcely less marked educational progress, will reduce both the enmity and the suspicion which now fill the breasts of so many of the ruder and more ignorant Southern whites. Men are more kindly when they are more comfortable. When they come to be occupied with pushing themselves forward in the world as are native Americans in the North, they will not let the presence of the Negro darken their sky and embitter their feelings as he has done for the last forty years. The memories of the Reconstruction period will in time pass away. People will see the present as it is and not in the light of a dismal past. The best part of the South has already recovered its old life and spring; and as this renovation spreads among the hitherto backward classes, they too will come to see the African and the difficulties his presence causes with a calmer and less unfriendly eye, and will recognize that harshness or scorn toward a weaker race tells harmfully on the stronger itself, as everyone now recognizes that slavery hurt the character of the slaveholder more than it did that of the slave.

Against these sanguine anticipations let us set a pessimist’s view of the probabilities, though Southern pessimism finds its grounds less in philosophic or historical reasonings than in an instinctive race antagonism which is quite compatible with kindliness to the individual Negro. These also must be stated, and as far as possible in the words of the men who hold them.

If the Negro shares in the prosperity of the South, if he grows richer and enters the professions more largely, he will become more “uppish,” will be quicker to claim social equality and more resentful of its denial. What the whites deem his insolence will provoke the reprisals from them. This will increase the tension between the two colours. And as the upper section of the Negroes find that all their advance in knowledge and material well-being brings them socially no nearer to the whites, their feelings will grow more bitter and the relations of the races more strained.

So too, assuming that race consciousness grows among the coloured people, may it not lead them to organize themselves in a way calculated to alarm and provoke the whites? The desire of the bulk of the whites to “keep down” the Negro and make him “know his place,” may be unchristian. But it exists, and any display of increasing strength on the part of the weaker race will aggravate it.

This tendency may show itself especially where the suffrage is concerned. If the Negroes so advance in property and in the capacity to pass the education tests now prescribed as to make them constitute, in some states, or counties, or cities, one-half or even one-third or one-fourth of the voters, the old alarms regarding their political influence will recur, possibly with increased force, because they will be more intelligent and better organized than they were before 1890, when electoral rights began to be withdrawn. If such a largely increased body of coloured voters should possess the franchise, the politics of the South will be disturbed and warped by the presence of a body likely to vote all together as a race irrespective of the ordinary political issues, and bartering their votes (not necessarily for money) to one party or the other as temporary advantage suggests. Probably an effort would under such circumstances be made to devise new methods for excluding at least the bulk of the coloured men; but such methods would seem more objectionable and would excite more resistance when applied to educated persons than they have done as applied in recent years to the ignorant multitude which has little or no property.

The difficulties attendant on competition in the labour market which have already caused trouble in a few places or trades are likely to be aggravated as a larger number of Negroes enter the more skilled employments. Though white workmen are deemed more efficient, the difference in efficiency is less than the difference in the wages paid to the Negroes, who at present accept much less than whites will. Irritation may follow similar to that which arose when Chinese content with lower wages competed with Americans in California and with Australians in Victoria and New South Wales. In those countries the Chinese were at last excluded. But the African cannot be prevented from seeking to improve his position merely because his competition will displease the white.

Already it is a thing without precedent in the world’s annals that two races enjoying equal civil and to some extent equal political rights should live side by side in close juxtaposition yet never intermingling, one of them stronger than the other and under constant temptation to abuse its strength. The more completely the weaker race absorbs the civilization of the stronger race and rises to its level, the more extraordinary will the situation become. Can anything but trouble be expected?

Though it is right to let the pessimist’s case be fully stated, and though his gloomy prognostications cannot be dismissed as visionary, for there may be an element of future conflict in the strengthening of African race consciousness, still the more hopeful of these two views of the situation will commend itself to one who compares the present with the past and who notes that the best men in the South, the men whose intimate knowledge and freedom from prejudice gives weight to their judgment, incline to the hopeful side. The matter may be summed up by these final observations.

The white population increases faster than the Negro not only over the whole Union, but in the South. The Negro therefore is not a political danger.

The Negro is needed as a labourer, and the more he advances, the more useful is his labour to a country which urgently needs labour. To treat the Negro fairly and help him to progress is therefore the interest of the whites.

The question whether the races can live peaceably together is at bottom a moral question, a question of good feeling, of humanity, of the application of the principles of the Gospel. Race antagonism is no doubt a strong sentiment. Many a time it has shown its formidable power. Yet it may decline under the influence of reason and good feeling. In 1810 slavery existed over nearly the whole of the American continent and its islands. Those whom it shocked were few, and still fewer contemplated its abolition. Even so late as 1860 it was defended on principle and defended out of the Bible. When the sentiment of a common humanity has so grown and improved within a century as to destroy slavery everywhere, may it not be that a like sentiment will soften the bitterness of race friction also? It is at any rate in that direction that the stream of change is running.

chapter 96

Foreign Policy and Territorial Extension

So far I have had to say nothing, and now I need say but little, of a subject which would have been constantly obtruding itself had we been dealing with any country in Europe. To every country in Europe foreign relations are a matter of primary importance. The six great powers of that continent all think it necessary to protect themselves against one another by armies, fleets, and alliances. Great Britain, seeking no extension of territory and comparatively safe from attack at home, has many colonies and one vast dependency to protect, and is drawn by them, far more than by her European position, into the tangled web of Old World diplomacy. To all these powers, and not less to the minor ones, the friendly or hostile attitude of the others is matter of vital consequence. Not only, therefore, must immense sums be spent on warlike preparations, but a great establishment of officials must be maintained and no small part of the attention of the administration and the legislature be given to the conduct of the international relations of the state. These relations, moreover, constantly affect the internal politics of the country; they sometimes cause the triumph or the defeat of a party; they influence financial policy; they make or mar the careers of statesmen.

In the United States, nothing of the kind. From the Mexican war of 1845, down to the Spanish war of 1898, external relations very rarely, and then only to a slight extent, affected internal political strife. As they did not occupy the public mind they did not lie within the sphere of party platforms or party action. We have hitherto found no occasion to refer to them save in describing the functions of the Senate; and I mention them now as the traveller did the snakes in Iceland, only to note their absence, and to indicate some of the results ascribable to thereto.

Though the chief and obvious cause of this striking contrast between the great western Republic and the powers of Europe is to be found in her geographical position on a continent where, since she bought out France and Spain, she has had only two neighbours, one comparatively weak on the south and one naturally friendly on the north, much must also be set down to the temper and convictions of the people. They are, and have usually been, pacific in their views, for the unjustifiable, because needless, war with Mexico was the work of the slaveholding oligarchy and opposed to the general sentiment of the people. They have no lust of conquest, possessing already as much land as they want. They have always been extremely jealous of a standing army, the necessary support of ambitious foreign policies. They have been so much absorbed by and interested in the development of their material resources as to care very little for what goes on in other countries. As there is no military class, so also there is no class which feels itself called on to be concerned with foreign affairs, and least of all is such a class to be found among the politicians. Even leading statesmen are often strangely ignorant of European diplomacy, much more the average senator or congressman. And into the mind of the whole people there has sunk deep the idea that all such matters belong to the bad order of the Old World; and that the true way for the model Republic to influence that world is to avoid its errors, and set an example of pacific industrialism.

This view of the facts may appear strange to those who remember that the area of the United States proper, which in 1783 was about one million square miles, is now something over three and a half millions.1 All this added territory, however, except the cessions made by Mexico in 1847, came peaceably by way of purchase or (in the case of Texas) voluntary union; and all (with the possible exception of Alaska) consists of regions which naturally cohere with the original Republic, and ought to be united with it. The limits of what may be called natural expansion have now (subject to what will be said presently) been reached; and the desire for annexation is no stronger than at any preceding epoch, while the interest in foreign relations generally has not increased. For a time a sort of friendship was professed for Russia, more for the sake of teasing England than from any real sympathy with a despotic monarchy very alien to the American spirit. But at present absolute neutrality and impartiality as regard the Old World is observed; and a remarkable proof of the desire to abstain from engagements affecting it was given, when the United States government declined to ratify the International Act of the Berlin Conference of 1885 regulating the Congo Free State, although its minister at Berlin had taken part in the deliberations of the conference by which that act was prepared. And it was after much delay and some hesitation that they ratified (in 1892) even the Brussels International Slave Trade Act.2

Such abstinence from Old World affairs is the complement to that declaration of a purpose to prevent any European power from attempting to obtain a controlling influence in New World affairs which was made by President Monroe in his message of 1823. The assertion is less needed now than it was in Monroe’s day, because the United States have grown so immensely in strength that no European power can constitute a danger to them. It would no doubt lead the government to consider international questions arising even in South America as much more within the scope of their influence than any, not directly affecting their own citizens, which might arise in the Old World, but the occasions for applying such a principle are comparatively few, and are not likely to involve serious difficulties with any European power.

The notion that the United States ought to include at least all the English- and French-speaking communities of North America is an old one. Repeated efforts were made before and during the War of Independence to induce Canada, Nova Scotia, and even the Bermuda Islands to join the revolted colonies. For many years afterwards the view continued to be expressed that no durable peace with Great Britain could exist so long as she retained possessions on the North American continent. When by degrees that belief died away, the eyes of ambitious statesmen turned to the South. The slaveholding party sought to acquire Cuba and Puerto Rico, hoping to turn them into slave states; and President Polk even tried to buy Cuba from Spain. After the abolition of slavery, attempts were made under President Johnson in 1867 to acquire St. Thomas and St. John’s from Denmark, and by President Grant (1869–73) to acquire San Domingo—an independent republic—but the Senate frustrated both. Apart from these incidents, the United States showed no desire to extend its territories, save by the purchase of Alaska, from the Mexican war down to 1898.

The results of the general indifference to foreign politics are in so far unfortunate that they have often induced carelessness in the choice of persons to represent the United States at European courts, the ambassador to Great Britain being usually the only one who has really important negotiations to conduct, and cause very inadequate appropriations to be voted for the support of such envoys. In other respects her detachment has been for the United States an unspeakable blessing. A very small army sufficed, and it was employed chiefly in the Far West for the repression of Indian troubles, troubles which have now come to an end. In 1890 the army consisted of about 25,000 privates and a little over 2,000 officers. The officers, admirably trained at West Point, the famous military academy which has maintained its high character and its absolute freedom from political affiliations since its first foundation, have been largely occupied in scientific or engineering work. Only a small navy seemed to be required—a fortunate circumstance, because the navy yards have sometimes given rise to administrative scandals. The cry sometimes raised for a large increase in the United States fleet surprised and still surprises European observers; for the power of the United States to protect her citizens abroad is not to be measured by the number of vessels or guns she possesses, but by the fact that there is no power in the world which will not lose far more than it can possibly gain by quarrelling with a nation which could, in case of war, so vast are its resources, not only create an armoured fleet but speedily equip swift vessels to attack the commerce of its antagonist. The possession of powerful armaments is apt to inspire a wish to use them. For many years no cloud rose on the external horizon, and one may indeed say that the likelihood of a war between the United States and any of the great naval powers has appeared too slight to be worth considering.

The freedom of the country from militarism of spirit and policy here described conduced not only to the slightness of a branch of expenditure which European states find almost insupportable, but also to the exemption of this Republic from a source of danger which other republics have found so serious—the ambition of successful generals, and the interference of the army in political strifes. Strong and deep-rooted as are the constitutional traditions of the United States, there have been moments, even in her history, when the existence of a great standing army might have menaced or led to civil war. Patriotism has not suffered, as Europeans sometimes fancy it must suffer, by long-continued peace. Manliness of spirit has not suffered because so few embrace the profession of arms; and the internal politics of the country, already complicated enough, are relieved from those further complications which the intrusion of issues of foreign policy bring with them. It need hardly be added that those issues are the very issues which a democracy, even so intelligent a democracy as that of the United States, is least fitted to comprehend, and which its organs of government are least fitted to handle with promptitude and success. Fortunately, the one principle to which the people have learnt to cling in foreign policy is, that the less they have of it the better; and though aspiring politicians sometimes try to play upon national pride by using arrogant language to other powers, or by suggesting schemes of annexation, such language is generally reprobated, and such schemes are usually rejected.

To state this tendency of national opinion does not, however, dispose of the question of territorial expansion; for nations are sometimes forced to increase their dominions by causes outside their own desires or volitions. The possibilities that lie before America of such expansion deserve a brief discussion.

Occupying the whole width of their continent from ocean to ocean, the Americans have neighbours only on the north and on the south. It is only in these directions that they could extend themselves by land; and extension on land is, if not easier, yet more tempting than by sea. On the north they touch the great Canadian confederation with its nine provinces, also extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and bound together by transcontinental railways. Its population is rapidly increasing, especially in the Northwest, and although legally subject to the British Crown and legislature, it is admittedly mistress of its own destinies. It was at one time deemed a matter of course that the United States would seek to annex Canada, peaceably if possible, but if not, then by force of arms. Even so late as 1864, Englishmen were constantly told that the first result of the triumph of the Federal armies in the War of Secession would be to launch a host flushed with victory against the Canadian Dominion, because when the passion for war has been once roused in a nation, it clamours for fresh conquests. Many were the arguments from history by which it was sought to convince Britain that for her own safety she ought to accede to the wily suggestions which Louis Napoleon addressed to her, deliver the slave states from defeat and herself from a formidable rival. Since those days Canada has become a far more tempting prize, for part of her northwestern territories between Lake Superior and the Rocky Mountains, then believed to be condemned to sterility by their climate, has proved to be one of the richest wheat-growing districts on the continent. The power of the United States is now far greater than in 1865, nor would it be easy for Britain and Canada effectively to defend a frontier so long and so naturally weak as is that which separates the dominion from its neighbours on the south. Yet today the possibility of absorbing Canada is seldom mentioned in the United States. Were it ever to come about, it would come about at the wish and by the act of the Canadians themselves, not as the result of any external force.

There are several reasons for this. One is the growing friendliness of the Americans to Britain. Considering how much commoner than love is hatred, or at least jealousy, between nations, considering the proverbial bitterness of family quarrels, and considering how intense was the hatred felt in the United States towards England in the earlier part of last century,3 rekindled by the unhappy war of 1812, kept alive by the sensitiveness of the one people and the arrogance of the other, imprinted afresh on new generations in America by silly schoolbooks and Fourth of July harangues, inflamed anew by the language of a section of English society during the Civil War, it is one of the remarkable events of our time that a cordial feeling should now exist between the two chief branches of the English race. The settlement of the Alabama claims has contributed to it. The democratization of Britain and the growth of literature and science in America have contributed to it. The greater respect which Europeans have come to show to America has contributed to it. The occasional appearance of illustrious men who, like Dr. Phillips Brooks and Mr. J. R. Lowell, become dear to both countries, has counted for something. But the ocean steamers have done perhaps most of all, because they have enabled the two peoples to know one another. Such unfriendly language towards Britain as still appears in the American press has been chiefly due to the wish to gratify a (now small) section of the Irish population and will vanish when the last traces of enmity in Ireland to England have passed away. Thus the old motives for an attack upon Canada are gone. But there is reason to think that even if Canada were separated from the British Empire, the Americans would not be eager to bring her into the Union. They would not try to do so by force, because that would be contrary to their doctrines and habits. They have a well-grounded aversion, strengthened by their experience of the difficulties of ruling the South after 1865, to the incorporation or control of any community not anxious to be one with them and thoroughly in harmony with their own body. Although they might rejoice over so great an extension of territory and resources, they are well satisfied with the present size and progress of their own country, which, as some remark, is at least big enough for one Congress.

As respects Canada herself, her material growth might possibly be quickened by union, and had the plan of a commercial league or customs union formerly discussed been carried out, it might have tended towards a political union; but, the temper and feelings of her people, and the growth of a vigorous national sentiment among them, have not been making for their union with the far larger mass of the United States, which they regarded with a jealousy that has declined only as they felt themselves to be rising to the stature of a nation holding an assured and respected place in the eyes of the world. Their life, and that not as respects politics only, may seem less intense than the life of their neighbours to the South. But it is free from some of the blemishes which affect the latter. Municipal governments are more pure. Party organizations have not fallen under the control of bosses. Public order has been less disturbed; and criminal justice is more effectively administered.

This is not the place for considering what are the interests in the matter of Great Britain and her other colonies, nor the prospects of the schemes suggested for a closer practical union between the mother country and her swiftly advancing progeny. As regards the ultimate interests of the two peoples most directly concerned, it may be suggested that it is more to the advantage, both of the United States and of the Canadians, that they should continue to develop independent types of political life and intellectual progress. Each may, in working out its own institutions, have something to teach the other. There is already too little variety on the American continent.

Fifteen hundred miles south of British Columbia the United States abuts upon Mexico. The position of Mexico offers a striking contrast to that of Canada. The people are utterly unlike those of the United States; they are Roman Catholics, more than half Indian in blood and preserving many Indian superstitions, easygoing, uncultured, making little advance in self-government, whether local or national, increasing but slowly in numbers,4 making very slender contributions to literature or science. They have done little to develop either the mineral or agricultural wealth of their superb territory, much of which, in fact all the interior plateau, enjoys a climate more favourable to physical exertion than that of the southernmost states of the Union. The export and import trade of the ports on the Gulf and the Pacific is in the hands of German and English houses; the mines of the north are worked by Americans, who come across from Texas and Arizona in greater and greater numbers. Two railways cross Northern Mexico from United States to the Pacific and others traverse the great plateau from the Rio Grande as far as the city of Mexico. In the northernmost states of the Mexican federation the American interests are already large, for much of the capital is theirs, their language spreads, their pervasive energy is everywhere felt. As the mines of Colorado and Arizona become less and less attractive, the stream of immigration may more and more set out of the United States across the border. It has long been feared that if American citizens should be killed, or their property attacked, the United States government would be invoked, and should the government of Mexico relapse into that weakness out of which Presidents Juarez and Diaz raised it, a difficult position would arise. American settlers, if their numbers grow, might in such a case be tempted to establish order for themselves, and perhaps at last some sort of government. In fact, the process by which Texas was severed from Mexico and brought into the Union might conceivably be repeated in a more peaceful way by the steady infiltration of an American population. Traveller after traveller used to repeat that it was all but impossible for a comparatively weak state, full of natural wealth which her people do not use, not to crumble under the impact of a stronger and more enterprising race. It was argued that all experience pointed to the detachment of province after province from Mexico and its absorption into the American Union; and that when the process had once begun it would not stop till, in a time to be measured rather by decades than by centuries, the petty republics of Central America had been also swallowed up and the predominant influence, if not the territorial frontier, of the United States advanced to the Isthmus of Panama.

If the United States were a monarchy like Russia, this might well happen, happen not so much from any deliberate purpose of aggression as by the irresistible tendency of facts, a tendency similar to that which led Rome to conquer the East, England to conquer India, Russia to conquer northwestern Asia. But the Americans are most unwilling that it should happen, and will do all they can to prevent it. They have none of that earth hunger which burns in the great nations of Europe, having already dominions which are still far from fully peopled. They are proud of the capacity of their present population for self-government. Their administrative system is singularly unfitted for the rule of dependencies, because it has no proper machinery for controlling provincial governors; so that when it found regions which were hardly fit to be established as states, it gave them a practically all but complete self-government as Territories. Administrative posts set up in a dependent country might be jobbed, and the dependent country itself maladministered. Hence the only form annexation can with advantage take is the admission of the annexed district as a self-governing state or Territory, the difference between the two being that in the latter the inhabitants, though they are usually permitted to administer their domestic affairs, have no vote in federal elections. If Chihuahua and Sonora were like Dakota, the temptation to annex these provinces and turn them into states or Territories would be strong. But the Indo-Spaniards of Mexico have not as yet shown much fitness for the exercise of political power. They would be not only an inferior and diverse element in the Union, but an element likely, if admitted to federal suffrage, to injure federal politics, to demoralize the officials who might be sent among them, and to supply a fertile soil for all kinds of roguery and rascality, which, so far as they lay within the sphere of state action, the federal government could not interfere with, and which in federal affairs would damage Congress and bring another swarm of jobs and jobbers to Washington.

One still finds in the United States, and of course especially in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, some people who declare that Mexico will be swallowed, first the northern provinces, and the whole in time. It is “manifest destiny,” and the land and mining-claim speculators of these border lands would be glad to help destiny. But the feeling of the nation disapproves a forward policy, nor has either party any such interest in promoting it as the Southern slaveholders had long ago in bringing in Texas. The question, which had seemed remote, came suddenly to the front when the fall of President Diaz was succeeded by confusion, civil war, and brigandage in Mexico. Disorder was rampant when these pages were passing through the press, nor could the issue be foreseen. It was however clear that all the best opinion in the United States desired to avoid armed intervention, fearing to be thereby drawn into an occupation of the country which would throw upon the United States grave responsibilities and involve its government in many difficulties.

I have already observed that the United States government formerly desired and seemed likely to acquire some of the West India islands. The South had a strong motive for adding to the Union regions in which slavery prevailed, and which would have been admitted as slave states. That motive has long since vanished. The objections which apply to the incorporation of Northern Mexico apply with greater force to the incorporation of islands far less fit for colonization by the Anglo-American race than are the Mexican tablelands. Till the acquisition of Puerto Rico in 1898–99 one islet only, Navassa, between Jamaica and San Domingo, belonged to the United States.5

One spot there had long been shewn a disposition to in which the Americans had, ever since 1843 (when there was for a time a risk of its being occupied by England), declared that they felt directly interested. This is the island group of Hawaii, which lies 2,000 miles to the southwest of San Francisco. They conceived that the position of these isles over against their own Western coast would be so threatening to their commerce in a war between the United States and any naval power, that they could not suffer the islands to be occupied by, or even to fall under the influence of, any European nation, and though no nation had of late years such an influence, the United States government was considering the purchase of land for a naval station at Pearl River in Oahu when the events of 1898 led to their annexing the whole of it.6

The fate of western South America belongs to a still more distant future. When capital, which is accumulating in the United States with extraordinary rapidity, is no longer able to find highly profitable employment in the development of western North America, it will seek other fields. When population has filled up the present territory of the United States, enterprising spirits will overflow into undeveloped regions. The nearest of these is western South America, the elevated plateaux of which are habitable by Northern races. The vast territories in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia,7 for which the Spaniards have done so little, and which can hardly remain forever neglected, offer a tempting field for the extension of the commercial and political influence of the United States, but the growth of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile into powerful states, and their jealousy of any action looking to such extension, have created a new factor in the situation. They already resent the too frequent references made by politicians and the press in the United States to the Monroe Doctrine as applicable to the southern continent; and the wisest among North American statesmen have now recognized that the less they dwell upon that doctrine, the better will be the relations of their own country with the great republics of the south, and the greater her influence for peace and progress in the Western Hemisphere.

chapter 97

The New Transmarine Dominions

The last preceding chapter, written in 1894, has been allowed to stand because it describes what was then the character of the foreign policy of the United States and the attitude of the nation towards other powers.

Much has happened since then—much which nobody expected—and in order to present a view of the facts as they stand in 1910, some important events that have befallen in and since 1898 must be briefly set forth but without the comments which might be proper if the events were more remote.1

For many years before 1898 the disturbed condition of the island of Cuba, where risings against the Spanish government occurred from time to time, had engaged the attention of the American public. Suggestions were often made, but always rejected, that the United States should, as the nearest neighbour, interfere to set things right. At last an insurrection which, sometimes smouldering and sometimes blazing out, had continued for many months, the Spanish troops being apparently unable to stamp it out, aroused public sentiment and led the United States government into a correspondence with Spain which ended in a war between the two nations. Hostilities began on April 21, 1898, and were virtually over in the July following.

During the campaign the United States forces had occupied the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, while the fleet had destroyed that of Spain in an engagement in the bay of Manila, and had occupied that town. Though neither the government nor the people of the United States had in April, 1898, the slightest idea of acquiring any of the dominions of Spain, a sentiment sprang up against abandoning a conquest that had been almost accidentally achieved, and in particular against losing a port which would be serviceable as a naval station, so the administration, obeying this sentiment, stipulated in the treaty of peace (signed in April, 1899), for the cession of the Philippine Islands. For this a sum of $20,000,000 was paid by the United States to Spain, which at the same time ceded the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean and also the island of Puerto Rico, with a population of about a million. Moreover, at the very outbreak of the war the United States, by a joint resolution of both houses of Congress, annexed the Hawaiian Islands, in which a sort of republic had been set up by the American residents, who had five years before overthrown the native monarchy, then in the incompetent hands of Queen Liliuokalani. The self-constituted authorities of this republic had forthwith asked the United States government for annexation; and this, though it had been previously refused by President Cleveland, was in 1898 accorded with general approval, partly because the war with Spain had evoked a wish to have a naval station in the central part of the Pacific, partly because there had been a large influx of Japanese labourers into the isles, and the Americans feared that if they did not take the islands, Japan would.

Thus in 1899 the United States found itself suddenly and unexpectedly in the possession of three considerable pieces of transmarine tropical territory, inhabited by races diverse in blood, speech, and customs from its own people and from one another. A fourth bit of territory, extremely small, but serviceable from the excellent harbour it contains, is the island of Tutuila in the Samoan group. As far back as 1872 the United States had acquired a sort of interest in it; and this, by a treaty with Britain and Germany, was turned into sovereignty in 1899. Still later a fifth acquisition, small in extent but great in value, was made by the cession to the United States of a strip of land five miles wide on each side of the line to be followed by the interoceanic ship canal from the Atlantic at Colon to the Pacific at Panama. This grant, which under a right of administration practically amounts to sovereignty, was obtained from the little republic of Panama immediately after it had revolted and severed itself from the much larger republic of Colombia.

Each of these five acquisitions has been dealt with in a separate and distinct way. Hawaii has been erected into a Territory with a governor and legislature of two houses, much as if it were on the continent of North America. As its population of American and British stock is very small, the bulk of the inhabitants being Japanese and Chinese, with nearly 30,000 Hawaiian aborigines and almost as many Portuguese, there is no present likelihood of its being turned into a state of the Union. The Constitution of the United States is, however, in full force in Hawaii, as in other Territories, and it is for tariff purposes a part of the United States.

The island of Puerto Rico has received a sort of colonial organization, with a legislature, the lower branch of which is elected on a limited suffrage, while the upper is composed of a few officials and other persons appointed by the federal government. The inhabitants, though they did not object to annexation, and have gained by it in material prosperity, are far from satisfied with these arrangements, desiring a fuller autonomy, or even to be admitted as a state of the Union. Considering, however, that they speak Spanish only, and contain a Negro element amounting to nearly one-third of the whole population, in which only 17 per cent can read and write, these wishes may have to wait some time for fulfilment. The people are orderly, and education has begun to make rapid progress.

Guam and Tutuila are nothing more than naval coaling stations. But the Philippine group, with their area of 128,000 square miles and their population of nearly eight millions, much of it uncivilized or semi-civilized, while the rest consists of Malays who have received with a slight admixture of Spanish blood a Spanish Roman Catholic type of civilization, presents administrative problems of no small difficulty. Although there was in the islands much disaffection with Spanish rule, and an insurrection had broken out shortly before the American fleet appeared on the scene, there was no sort of wish to be transferred to the United States, and when the islanders found themselves ceded by their late masters, the insurgents quickly turned their arms against those whom they had at first regarded as deliverers. Resistance was stamped out after a guerrilla warfare of three years, and in the large island of Mindanao, as well as in Luzon, a regular administration has been created, but local troubles have from time to time occurred, and the risk of their recurrence may not be past. In Luzon great improvements have been effected in the way both of constructing roads and other public works, and of introducing sanitary reforms. Municipal councils have been set up, elected by the people; natives are being appointed to administrative posts, and the friars, who were large landowners and enjoyed great power, have been settled with on liberal terms.

Chinese immigration has been forbidden, and the taking up of land by incorporated companies restricted. It may fairly be said that the American authorities have exerted themselves in a worthy spirit for the benefit of all sections of the population irrespective of race or religion. Nevertheless the natives have so far shown themselves less grateful for benefits received than desirous of an autonomy for which neither their rulers nor impartial foreign observers deem them qualified. They are not the only people which apparently prefers governing itself badly to being well governed by strangers.

A sharp controversy arose in the United States over both the constitutionality and the wisdom of the annexation of the Philippines, most of the Democrats and a section of the Republican party arguing that the fundamental principles of the Constitution were being forsaken, and that these remote tropical territories, inhabited by a population diverse in blood and speech from their rulers, would be rather an encumbrance than a source of strength to the Republic. The subject was a prominent issue at the presidential election of 1900. This controversy has since then gradually subsided, and it played little part in subsequent elections. There has, however, continued to exist much difference of opinion as to the benefits derivable by the United States from the acquisition of the islands, and as to the action proper to be taken regarding them in the future. The absorption of men’s minds in domestic questions and the fact that few have proposed to withdraw forthwith from the islands, leaving them “to sink or swim,” has latterly reduced public interest in the matter, the discussion of which began to seem rather academical than practical when it appeared that feeling had so far cooled and opinions so far approximated that the one party no longer claimed any credit for the conquest and the other could not suggest how to get rid of it.

Large sums have been voted from the revenues of the United States to be expended in the islands, and the tariff upon their products entering United States ports was in 1909 lowered almost to the point of extinction. Were they deemed to be a part of the United States within the meaning of Article I, § 8, par. 1 of the Constitution, their products would of course be subject to no import duties at all. A legislature has been established, one house of which is elected on a property qualification, the other being composed of officials, as in some British Crown colonies. The progress made in the provision of instruction is very remarkable when the difficulties of the country are considered, for out of about 2,000,000 of children between the ages of five and eighteen, 529,660 were in 1912 enrolled, with an average attendance of 329,073. Provision has been made for the establishment of a university, and the medical school which is to form a part of it is already at work.

The Canal Zone (as it is called) at the Isthmus of Panama is important not for its area, only 474 square miles, but from its position, for it brings the United States into direct contact with Central America, while the future control of the Canal opens up a vista of closer relations with the commerce and possibly the politics of western South America. The strip of territory which has been ceded is administered by the War Department, and the legal status of its inhabitants under the federal Constitution does not seem to have been precisely determined. Great difficulty has indeed been found in adjusting to these new transmarine possessions the provisions of an instrument framed with no idea that it might ever have to be applied to remote countries inhabited by alien peoples and held by the sword. The overwhelming naval strength of the United States as towards the weak republics of Colombia and Costa Rica, and the still weaker new republic of Panama, makes the defence of the Zone an easy matter, for the great difficulty of former days—a high mortality due to frequent outbreaks of yellow fever and the constant presence of malarial fevers—has been removed by the sanitary measures carried out here, as previously in Cuba, by the American authorities with an admirable energy and skill which entitle them to the undying gratitude of mankind.

Cuba, the island whose troubles led the United States into the war which brought about these recent acquisitions, was not herself annexed, nor was even any protectorate established. But in 1901, at the time when the American forces were in occupation, though preparing to leave the island, Congress passed a statute the provisions of which were subsequently incorporated in an ordinance appended to the Cuban constitution and ultimately embodied in a treaty between the United States and the republic of Cuba in 1903. These provisions declare, inter alia, that the Cuban government shall never permit any foreign power to obtain lodgment in or control over any part of the island; that the United States may intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence and the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty; that the Cuban government shall carry out sanitary measures such as will prevent the recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases, and that it will also lease or sell to the United States lands for coaling or naval stations at points to be subsequently agreed upon. Under these provisions, commonly known as “the Platt amendment,” the harbours of Guantanamo and Bahia Honda were subsequently leased to the United States. The closeness of the tie uniting Cuba with her powerful neighbour was ultimately further recognized by the special treatment extended by each country to the other in the framing of customs duties.

The stipulations above mentioned create a very peculiar relation between the United States and Cuba, although they neither amount to an alliance nor destroy the character of the island as a sovereign state, independent in general international relations. In 1906 effect was given to the clause providing for intervention. Disorders having arisen in Cuba, a small body of American troops was despatched thither. Having reestablished tranquillity and supervised the election of a new president, it withdrew early in 1909. It is generally believed that if similar difficulties were to recur, a similar intervention would follow. But the United States government has given every evidence of its honest desire to avoid the annexation of the island or the assumption of any further responsibilities in respect of it, nor is there reason to think that this policy, deliberately adopted, will be soon or lightly forsaken. Reciprocal reductions have been made in the respective tariffs of the two governments, and a good deal of American capital has now been invested in the island.

The notion that all the republics of the New World ought, simply because they are called republics, to stand closely together apart from the rest of the world—a notion as old as the early part of last century and savouring of those simple days—was revived, but with a view rather to business than to sentiment, when in 1899 a Pan-American Congress was invited to meet in Washington chiefly for the purpose of trying to arrange something approaching a general tariff system for the independent states of the Western Hemisphere. That project came to nothing, but three subsequent congresses have been held, in Mexico, in Rio de Janeiro, and in Buenos Aires, at the two latter of which various questions of common interest have been discussed, and a certain reciprocal interest is believed to have been awakened. Under the auspices of these gatherings, moreover, there has been established in Washington an institution called the Pan-American Union, which collects and supplies to all enquirers, information relating to the industry, products, commerce, and legislation of these states which promises to be of real value, and doubtless tends to bring the American countries into closer commercial touch with one another, each republic having a right to be represented in the organization of the Union. In other ways also the relations of the United States with Latin America have become closer and more frequent. On several occasions there have been pacific interventions by the former, sometimes in order to give protection against European powers, sometimes for the purpose of averting conflicts. In the case of Central America, where the independent states are the smallest, the most turbulent, the most bellicose, and the least advanced in point of civilization, efforts were made in 1907–1908 to take action in conjunction with Mexico, as being the republic not only the nearest to the disturbed area, but also more powerful under the rule of Diaz, than its petty neighbours to the south. Later, under the joint auspices of Mexico and the United States, there was set up a Central American Court of Arbitration, by whose action, if the rather irresponsible presidential dictators can be compelled to resort to it, it is hoped that the constantly recurring strife that has retarded progress in these countries may be prevented.

The temptation to intervene and either bring to reason or dethrone and expel the military adventurers who rule most of these states is often a strong one, especially to a nation which, eager to develop its trade on its own continent, perceives that till peace and order are secured, trade cannot advance. But the wisest statesmen of America feel that the temptation ought to be resisted. The example of other countries, and especially of Great Britain in India and of Russia in Central Asia, has shown how difficult it is for a strong power, when once it has interfered to put down one government and set up another, to withdraw and leave the new government to take its chances. Most of the advances of Russia in Central and Northern and of England in Southern Asia have arisen because an interference which seemed justifiable or even necessary led on to an annexation that was never intended, and in many cases never desired. With this lesson before them such statesmen have generally sought to restrain any popular impulse, whether ambitious or philanthropic, to step out of their own sphere. They have another sound reason in the fact that any action on their part that could seem aggressive or overbearing would rekindle all over Spanish America those suspicions of the too powerful sister republic which have been more or less felt ever since the Mexican war of 1846. To allay such suspicions ought to be a main aim of United States policy.

Americans have latterly been wont to speak of themselves as having become, through the events of 1898, a world power. So far as potential strength was concerned, they were a world power even before that year, for their material resources were at least equal to those of any other state. But it is true that the acquisition of transmarine dominions and the wider horizon which the control of these opened out before them, had led to their taking a larger part in the affairs of the planet as a whole than they had ever done before. To this tendency another cause also has contributed. The immense expansion of the productive and manufacturing industries of the country has induced a desire to have a larger share in world commerce and to increase the mercantile marine.2 “New foreign markets for American goods” loom larger in the eyes of the mercantile class, and administrations have proclaimed the wish and purpose to do all that can be done to promote American enterprise abroad. This tendency, which seems likely to grow stronger in the years to come, has taken concrete shape not only in stimulating the effort to claim for the United States a sort of hegemony among the republics of its own hemisphere, but also in the adoption of a forward commercial policy in the Far East, where the doctrine of what is called “the Open Door” for trade in Manchuria and China has been repeatedly proclaimed as the watchword of the United States, and as the principle it seeks to urge upon other powers.

A question has been raised as to whether the traditional maxim that the United States should confine the assertion of its interests to the Western Hemisphere—a maxim correlative to the declaration in which Monroe and Adams stated their objection to any fresh establishment of European powers therein—applies to the eastern side of Asia as well as to the rest of the Old World.3 Is or is not the Pacific Ocean to be the boundary of American action on the one side as the Atlantic is on the other? To this question no answer has so far been returned.

As after the Spanish war the regular army of the United States was more than doubled, so with the acquisition of territories beyond the sea and the assumption of wider responsibilities in the world, there came an even greater expansion of the navy, which had in 1910 become one of the three strongest afloat. In 1889 it had cost only $25,000,000 and in 1912 was costing $123,000,000.

What have been the broad results of these changes, and what future do they portend for the United States as a world power?

If ever there was a warning administered to overconfident prophets, that warning was given by the events of 1898. It was the unforeseen that happened. There was nothing in the world which the American people less expected when they went into the war against Spain than that they should come out of it the sovereigns of the Philippine Islands, four thousand miles from their own shores. Even the victory at Manila was won with no intent to acquire the isles. That was the result of a series of accidents. The Americans drifted into dominion, and were amazed to find whither they had drifted.

But without speculating about the future, a few remarks may be made on the present state of national opinion.

The people have not been seized by any lust for further conquests. From 1903 till 1912 they appeared to be taking comparatively little interest in their new possessions, which were seldom mentioned even at election time, and regarding the administration of which no more controversy was arising in the national legislature than in the British parliament about Ceylon or Borneo. It is only tariff questions affecting these transmarine territories that have latterly given rise to debates in Congress.

Among statesmen, who must of course study the position both in its actualities and its possibilities, there is a difference of opinion as to the best mode of dealing with the possessions already acquired; for though no one proposes to give up Hawaii or Puerto Rico, the Democratic Convention of 1912 recommended the abandonment of the Philippines, while others, including the administrations in power from 1898 till 1913, have held that the islands ought to be retained, at least until their people can be pronounced fit for self-government. But as to future policy, all agree in the view that the United States ought to make no further conquests and, if possible, avoid the annexation of any more territory. Such territory, they observe, would lie within the tropics, for there is none to be had elsewhere, and therefore the population would not be of American or North European stock. It would either have to be governed as a subject colony or else admitted to the Union as a state. The objection to the former alternative is that not only the Constitution and frame of government, but the political habits of the American people, are not well fitted for ruling over distant subjects of another race. The thing may no doubt be done, and in the Philippines it is being done, and that in a worthy spirit. But it is not a welcome task. The Declaration of Independence is a plant ill fitted for transplantation to tropical lands inhabited by backward races. The latter alternative (admission to the Union) presents still greater difficulties, because a state composed of citizens speaking a different language, unused to constitutional self-government, imbued with quite other notions and traditions, would be detrimental to the political life of the American people, as a foreign substance lodged in the physical body injures or endangers its vital forces. Or, to put it shortly, democratic government requires for its success the equality and the homogeneity of the citizens.

Thoughtful Americans feel that the Republic has already a sufficiently heavy load to carry in ten millions of Negroes and four or five millions of recent immigrants, ignorant of its institutions. To add other millions of mixed Spanish-Indian or Spanish-Negro blood would be an evil not compensated by the gain of territory and possible growth of trade. The recognition of these facts and the dying down of the sudden imperialistic impulse of 1898–1900 make it probable that for some time to come American policy will aim at avoiding annexations, or interventions likely to lead to annexations. As to the more distant future—let us again remind ourselves of 1898 and beware of prophesying.

In realizing herself as a world power America has not become more arrogant or more combative. Relations with Mexico were during the prudent rule of President Diaz better than ever before, and still more noteworthy has been the growth of friendliness between the United States and Canada, evidenced by the conclusion (in 1908–11) of a group of treaties designed to remove, or provide means for the settlement of, all possible causes of controversy. Though there are in her people, as in all peoples, latent bellicose tendencies capable under excitement of bursting into a blaze, the better sentiment which desires peace and endeavours to substitute arbitration for war has gained strength; and all that recent administrations have done in concluding arbitration treaties, and in urging on other powers the desirability of establishing permanent courts of arbitration, has been heartily approved by the nation.

chapter 98

Laissez Faire

An English friend of a philosophic turn of mind bade me, when he heard that I was writing this book, dedicate at least one chapter to the American theory of the state. I answered that the Americans had no theory of the state, and felt no need for one, being content, like the English, to base their constitutional ideas upon law and history.

In England and America alike (I pursued) one misses a whole circle and system of ideas and sentiments which have been potent among the nations of the European continent. To those nations the state is a great moral power, the totality of the wisdom and conscience and force of the people, yet greater far than the sum of the individuals who compose the people, because consciously and scientifically, if also by a law of nature, organized for purposes which the people indistinctly apprehend, and because it is the inheritor of a deep-rooted reverence and an almost despotic authority. There is a touch of mysticism in this conception, which has survived the change from arbitrary to representative government, and almost recalls the sacredness that used to surround the mediæval church. In England the traditions of an ancient monarchy and the social influence of the class which till lately governed have enabled the state and its service to retain a measure of influence and respect. No one, however, attributes any special wisdom to the state, no one treats those concerned with administration or legislation as a superior class. Officials are strictly held within the limits of their legal powers, and are obeyed only so far as they can show that they are carrying out the positive directions of the law. Their conduct, and indeed the decisions of the highest state organs, are criticised, perhaps with more courtesy, but otherwise in exactly the same way as those of other persons and bodies. Yet the state is dignified, and men are proud to serve it. From the American mind, that which may be called the mystic aspect of the state, and the theory of its vast range of action, are as conspicuously absent as they are from the English. They are absent, not because America is a democracy, but because the political ideas of the two branches of the race are fundamentally the same, a fact which continental observers of the United States constantly fail to appreciate. In America, however, even the dignity of the state has vanished. It sems actually less than the individuals who live under it. The people, that is to say, the vast multitude of men who inhabit the country, inspire respect or awe, the organism is ignored. The state is nothing but a name for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the inhabitants is despatched. It has no more conscience, or moral mission, or title to awe and respect, than a commercial company for working a railroad or a mine; and those who represent it are treated in public and in private with quite a little deference.

Hereupon my friend rejoined that people in America must at least have some general views about the functions of government and its relations to the individual. “We are told,” he continued, “that the whole American polity is more coherent, more self-consistent than that of England; it must therefore have what the Germans call ‘ground ideas.’ There is a profusion of legislation. Legislation must proceed upon these ideas, and by examining the current legislation of the federal government and of the states you will be able to discover and present the beliefs and notions regarding the state which the Americans cherish.”

The term “ground-ideas” does not happily describe the doctrines that prevail in the United States, for the people are not prone to form or state their notions in a philosophic way. There are, however, certain dogmas or maxims which are in so far fundamental that they have told widely on political thought, and that one usually strikes upon them when sinking a shaft, so to speak, into an American mind. Among such dogmas are the following:

Certain rights of the individual, as, for instance, his right to the enjoyment of what he has earned, to the free expression of opinion, are primordial and sacred.
All political power springs from the people, and the most completely popular government is best.
Legislatures, officials, and all other agents of the sovereign people ought to be strictly limited by law, by each other, and by the shortness of the terms of office.
Where any function can be equally well discharged by a central or by a local body, it ought by preference to be entrusted to the local body, for a centralized administration is more likely to be tyrannical, inefficient, and impure than one which, being on a small scale, is more fully within the knowledge of the citizens and more sensitive to their opinion.
Two men are wiser than one, one hundred than ninety-nine, thirty millions than twenty-nine millions. Whether they are wiser or not, the will of the larger number must prevail against the will of the smaller. But the majority is not wiser because it is called the nation, or because it controls the government, but only because it is more numerous. The nation is nothing but so many individuals. The government is nothing but certain representatives and officials, agents who are here today and gone tomorrow.
The less of government the better; that is to say, the fewer occasions for interfering with individual citizens are allowed to officials, and the less time citizens have to spend in looking after their officials, so much the more will the citizens and the community prosper. The functions of government must be kept at their minimum.

The first five of these dogmas have been discussed and illustrated in earlier chapters. The last of them needs a little examination, because it suggests points of comparison with the Old World, and because the meaning of it lies in the application. It is all very well to say that the functions of government should be kept at a minimum; but the bureaucrats of Russia might say the same. What is this minimum? Every nation, every government, every philosopher has his own view as to the functions which it must be taken to include.

The doctrine of laissez faire, or noninterference by government with the citizen, has two foundations, which may be called the sentimental and the rational. The sentimental ground is the desire of the individual to be let alone, to do as he pleases, indulge his impulses, follow out his projects. The rational ground is the principle, gathered from an observation of the phenomena of society, that interference by government more often does harm than good—that is to say, that the desires and impulses of men when left to themselves are more likely by their natural collision and cooperation to work out a happy result for the community and the individuals that compose it than will be attained by the conscious endeavours of the state controlling and directing those desires and impulses. There are laws of nature governing mankind as well as the material world; and man will thrive better under these laws than under those which he makes for himself through the organization we call government.

Of these two views, the former or sentimental has been extremely strong in America, being rooted in the character and habits of the race, and seeming to issue from that assertion of individual liberty which is proclaimed in such revered documents as the Declaration of Independence and the older state constitutions. The latter view, incessantly canvassed in Europe, has played no great part in the United States; or rather it has appeared in the form not of a philosophic induction from experience, but of a common-sense notion that everybody knows his own business best, that individual enterprise has “made America,” and will “run America,” better than the best government could do.

The state governments of 1776 and the national government of 1789 started from habits and ideas, mental habits, and administrative practice generally similar to those of contemporary England. Now England in the eighteenth century was that one among European countries in which government had the narrowest sphere. The primitive paternal legislation of the later Middle Ages had been abandoned. The central government had not begun to stretch out its arms to interfere with quarter sessions in the counties, or municipal corporations in the towns, to care for the health, or education, or morals of the people. That strengthening and reorganization of administration which was in progress in many parts of the Continent, as in Prussia under Frederick the Great, and in Portugal under Pombal, had not spread to England, and would have been resisted there by men of conservative tendencies for one set of reasons, and men of liberal tendencies for another. Everything tended to make the United States in this respect more English than England, for the circumstances of colonial life, the process of settling the Western wilderness, the feelings evoked by the struggle against George III, all went to intensify individualism, the love of enterprise, the pride in personal freedom. And from that day to this, individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.

The hundred years which have passed since the birth of the Republic have, however, brought many changes with them. Individualism is no longer threatened by arbitrary kings, and the ramparts erected to protect it from their attacks are useless and grass-grown. If any assaults are to be feared they will come from another quarter. New causes are at work in the world tending not only to lengthen the arms of government, but to make its touch quicker and firmer. Do these causes operate in America as well as in Europe? And if so, does America, in virtue of her stronger historical attachment to individualism, oppose a more effective resistance to them?

I will mention a few among them. Modern civilization, in becoming more complex and refined, has become more exacting. It discerns more benefits which the organized power of government can secure, and grows more anxious to attain them. Men live fast, and are impatient of the slow working of natural laws. The triumphs of physical science have enlarged their desires for comfort, and shown them how many things may be accomplished by the application of collective skill and large funds which are beyond the reach of individual effort. Still greater has been the influence of a quickened moral sensitiveness and philanthropic sympathy. The sight of preventable evil is painful, and is felt as a reproach. He who preaches patience and reliance upon natural progress is thought callous. The sense of sin may, as theologians tell us, be declining; but the dislike to degrading and brutalizing vice is increasing; there is a warmer recognition of the responsibility of each man for his neighbour, and a more earnest zeal in works of moral reform. Some doctrines which, because they had satisfied philosophers, were in the last generation accepted by the bulk of educated men, have now become, if not discredited by experience, yet far from popular. They are thought to be less universally true, less completely beneficial, than was at first supposed. There are benefits which the laws of demand and supply do not procure. Unlimited competition seems to press too hardly on the weak. The power of groups of men organized by incorporation as joint-stock companies, or of small knots of rich men acting in combination, has developed with unexpected strength in unexpected ways, overshadowing individuals and even communities, and showing that the very freedom of association which men sought to secure by law when they were threatened by the violence of potentates may, under the shelter of the law, ripen into a new form of tyranny. And in some countries, of which Britain may be taken as the type, the transference of political power from the few to the many has made the many less jealous of governmental authority. The government is now their creature, their instrument—why should they fear to use it? They may strip it tomorrow of the power with which they have clothed it today. They may rest confident that its power will not be used contrary to the wishes of the majority among themselves. And as it is in this majority that authority has now been vested, they readily assume that the majority will be right.

How potent these influences and arguments have proved in the old countries of Europe, how much support they receive not only from popular sentiment, but from the writings of a vigorous school of philosophical economists all the world knows. But what of newer communities, where the evils to be combated by state action are fewer, where the spirit of liberty and the sentiment of individualism are more intense? An eminent English statesman expressed the general belief of Englishmen when he said in 1883:

How is it that while the increasing democracy at home is insisting, with such growing eagerness, on more control by the state, we see so small a corresponding development of the same principle in the United States or in Anglo-Saxon colonies? It is clearly not simply the democratic spirit which demands so much central regulation. Otherwise we should find the same conditions in the Anglo-Saxon democracies across the seas.1

This belief of Englishmen was then the general belief of Americans. Nine men out of ten told the stranger that both the federal government and the state governments interfered little, and many ascribed the prosperity of the country to this noninterference as well as to the self-reliant spirit of the people. So far as there can be said to be any theory on the subject in a land which gets on without theories, laissez aller is the orthodox and accepted doctrine in the sphere both of federal and of state legislation.

Nevertheless the belief was mistaken then and has since then become still more evidently groundless. The new democracies of America are as eager for state interference as the democracy of Britain, and try their experiments with even more light-hearted promptitude. No one need be surprised at this when he reflects that the causes which have been mentioned as telling on Europe, tell on the United States with no less force. Men are even more eager than in Europe to hasten on to the ends they desire, even more impatient of the delays which a reliance on natural forces involves, even more sensitive to the wretchedness of their fellows, and to the mischiefs which vice and ignorance breed. Unrestricted competition has shown its dark side: great corporations have been more powerful than in Britain, and more inclined to abuse their power. Having lived longer under a democratic government, the American masses have realized more perfectly than those of Europe that they are themselves the government. Their absolute command of its organization (except where constitutional checks are interposed) makes them turn more quickly to it for the accomplishment of their purposes. And in the state legislatures they possess bodies with which it is easy to try legislative experiments, since these bodies, though not of themselves disposed to innovation, are mainly composed of men unskilled in economics, inapt to foresee any but the nearest consequences of their measures, prone to gratify any whim of their constituents, and open to the pressure of any section whose self-interest or impatient philanthropy clamours for some departure from the general principles of legislation. For crotchet-mongers as well as for intriguers there is no such paradise as the lobby of a state legislature. No responsible statesman is there to oppose them, no warning voice will be raised by a scientific economist.

Thus it has come to pass that, though the Americans have no theory of the state and take a narrow view of its functions, though they conceive themselves to be devoted to laissez faire in principle, and to be in practice the most self-reliant of peoples, they have grown no less accustomed than the English to carry the action of the state into ever-widening fields. Economic theory did not stop them, for practical men are proud of getting on without theory.2 The sentiment of individualism did not stop them, because state intervention has usually taken the form of helping or protecting the greater number, while restraining the few; and personal freedom of action, the love of which is strong enough to repel the paternalism of France or Germany, was at first infringed upon only at the bidding of a strong moral sentiment, such as that which condemns intemperance. So gradual was the process of transition to this new habit that for a long time few but lawyers and economists became aware of it, and the lamentations with which old-fashioned English thinkers accompany the march of legislation were in America scarcely heard and wholly unheeded. Now however the complexity of civilization and the desire to have things done which a public authority can most quickly do, and the cost of which is less felt by each man because it comes out of the public revenue, to which he is only one of many contributors—these causes have made the field of governmental action almost as wide as it is in Europe, and men recognize the fact.

As ordinary private law and administration belong to the states, it is chiefly in state legislation that we must look for instances of governmental intervention. Recent illustrations of the tendency to do by law what men were formerly left to do for themselves, and to prohibit by law acts of omission and commission which used to pass unregarded, might be culled from the statute-books of nearly every commonwealth.3 It is in the West, which plumes itself on being preeminently the land of freedom, enterprise, and self-help, that this tendency is most active, and plays the strangest pranks, because legislators are in the West more impatient and self-confident than elsewhere.

The forms which legislative intervention takes may be roughly classified under the following heads:

Prohibitions to individuals to do acts which are not, in the ordinary sense of the word, criminal (e.g., to sell intoxicating liquors, to employ a labourer for more than so many hours in a day).
Directions to individuals to do things which it is not obviously wrong to omit (e.g., to provide seats for shopwomen, to publish the accounts of a railway company).
Interferences with the ordinary course of law in order to protect individuals from the consequences of their own acts (e.g., the annulment of contracts between employer and workmen making the former not liable for accidental injuries to the latter, the exemption of homesteads, or of a certain amount of personal property, from the claims of creditors, the prohibition of more than a certain rate of interest on money).
Directions to a public authority to undertake work which might be left to individual action and the operation of supply and demand (e.g., the providing of schools and dispensaries, the establishment of state analysts, state oil inspectors, the collection and diffusion, at the public expense, of statistics).
Retention, appropriation, or control by the state of certain natural sources of wealth or elements in its production (e.g., the declaration, made by Washington, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, that the use of all waters, whether still or flowing, within their respective bounds, is a public use, and forever subject to state control, the prohibition by Indiana of the wasteful use of natural gas).

In every one of these kinds of legislative interference the Americans, or at least the Western states, seem to have gone farther than the English Parliament. The restrictions on the liquor traffic have been more sweeping; those upon the labour of women and children, and of persons employed by the state, not less so. Moral duties are more frequently enforced by legal penalties than in England. Railroads, insurance and banking companies, and other corporations are, in most states, strictly regulated. Efforts to protect individuals coming under the third head are so frequent and indulgent that their policy is beginning to be seriously questioned.4 Gratuitous elementary and secondary education is provided all over the Union, and in the West there are also gratuitous state universities open to women as well as to men. And although the state has not gone so far in superseding individual action as to create for itself monopolies, it is apt to spend money on some objects not equally cared for by European governments. It tries to prevent adulteration by putting its stamp on agricultural fertilizers, and prohibiting the sale of oleomargarine; it establishes dairy commissions and bureaux of animal industry, and boards of livestock commissioners armed with wide powers of inspection; it distributes seed to farmers, provides a state chemist to analyze soils gratuitously and recommend the appropriate fertilizers, subsidizes agricultural fairs, sends round lecturers on agriculture, and encourages by bounties the culture of beetroot and manufacture of sugar therefrom, the making of starch from state-grown potatoes, tree planting, and the killing of noxious animals—English sparrows in Massachusetts, panthers and wolves in Wyoming.5 The farmer of Kansas or Iowa is as much the object of the paternal solicitude of his legislature as the farmer of any European country. And in the pursuit of its schemes for blessing the community the state raises a taxation which would be complained of in a less prosperous country.6

What has been the result of this legislation? Have the effects which the economists of the physiocratic or laissez aller school taught us to expect actually followed? Has the natural course of commerce and industry been disturbed, has the self-helpfulness of the citizen been weakened, has government done its work ill and a new door to jobbery been opened? It is still too soon to form conclusions on these points. Some few of the experiments have failed, others seem to be succeeding; but the policy of state interference as a whole has not yet been adequately tested. In making this new departure American legislatures are serving the world, if not their own citizens, for they are providing it with a store of valuable data for its instruction, data which deserve more attention than they have hitherto received, and whose value will increase as time goes on.

It is the privilege of these unconscious philosophers to try experiments with less risk than countries like France or England would have to run, for the bodies on which the experiments are tried are so relatively small and exceptionally vigorous that failures need not inflict permanent injury. Railroads and other large business interests complain, and sometimes not without reason, but no people is shrewder than the American in coming to recognize the results of overbold legislation and modifying it when it is found to tell against the general prosperity.

N O T E

I collect a few instances of legislation illustrating the tendency to extend state intervention and the scope of penal law:

New York provides that no guest shall be excluded from any hotel on account of race, creed (some had refused to receive Jews), or colour.

Wisconsin requires every hotel above a certain height to be furnished with fireproof staircases; and Michigan punishes the proprietors of any shop or factory in which the health of employees is endangered by improper heating, lighting, ventilation, or sanitarian arrangements.

Michigan compels railroad companies to provide automatic car couplings. Other states direct the use of certain kinds of brakes.

Georgia orders railway companies to put up a bulletin stating how much any train already half an hour late is overdue; Arkansas requires this even if the train is only a few minutes late.

Wyoming requires railroads passing within four miles of any city to provide, at the nearest point, a depot whereat all local trains shall stop; while Arkansas forbids baggage be tumbled from cars on to the platform at a depot; and Ohio permits no one to be engaged as a train conductor unless he has had two years’ previous experience as trainhand.

Massachusetts forbids the employment of colour-blind persons on railways, and provides for the examination of those so employed.

Ohio requires druggists to place on bottles containing poison a red label, naming at least two of the most readily procurable antidotes.

Several states order employers to find seats for women employed in shops, warehouses, or manufactories.

Several states forbid anyone to practise dentistry as well as medicine unless licensed by a state board.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Illinois compel corporations to pay workmen weekly. (Massachusetts forbade employers to deduct fines from the sums payable by them for wages, but the supreme court of the state [by a majority] held the statute unconstitutional.)

Maryland institutes a “State Board of Commissioners of Practical Plumbing,” and confines the practice of that industry to persons licensed by the same. New York provides boards of examiners to supervise plumber’s work.

Kansas punishes as a crime the making any misrepresentation to or deceiving any person in the sale of fruit of shade trees, shrubs or bulbs; and New Jersey does the like as regards fruit trees or briars.

Mississippi punishes with fine and imprisonment any legislative, executive, judicial, or ministerial officer, who shall travel on any railroad without paying absolutely, and without any evasion whatever, the same fare as is required of passengers generally.

Many states offer bounties on the raising of various agricultural products or on manufactures, while California appropriates money for the introduction from Australia of parasites and predaceous insects, with a view to the extermination of a moth which injures orange trees.

Texas makes it a punishable misdemeanour to deal in “futures” or “keep any ‘bucket shop’ or other establishment where future contracts are bought or sold with no intention of an actual delivery of the article so bought or sold,” while Massachusetts is content with making such contracts voidable.

Michigan prescribes a system of minority voting at the election of directors of joint stock corporations; Kentucky prescribes cumulative voting in like cases.

Pennsylvania forbids the consolidation of telegraph companies.

Ohio punishes by fine and imprisonment the offering to sell “options,” or exhibiting any quotations of the prices of “margins,”“futures,” or “options.” Georgia imposes on dealers in “futures” a tax of $500 a year.

New York forbids the hiring of barmaids, and Colorado permits no woman to enter a “wine room.”

Colorado, Kansas, and North Carolina, make the seduction under promise of marriage of any chaste woman a felony.

New York punishes with fine and imprisonment any person “who shall send a letter with intent to cause annoyance to any other person.”

Virginia punishes with death the destruction by dynamite or any other explosive of any dwelling, if at night, or endangering human life.

Kentucky makes it a misdemeanour to play with dice any game for money, and a felony to keep, manage, or operate any such game.

Washington punishes anyone who permits a minor to play at cards in his house without the written permission of the minor’s parent or guardian.

Oregon prohibits secret societies in all public schools; and California also forbids the formation of “secret oath-bound fraternities” in public schools.

Maine requires every public school teacher to devote not less than ten minutes per week to instruction in the principles of kindness to birds and animals, and punishes any nurse who fails at once to report to a physician that the eye of an infant has become reddened or inflamed within five weeks after birth. Rhode Island in a similar statute fixes a fortnight from birth and allows six hours for the report.

Illinois and Arizona forbid marriages between first cousins.

Virginia punishes with a fine of $100 the sale to a minor, not only of pistols, dirks, and bowie knives, but also of cigarettes. Twenty-four other states have similar laws forbidding minors to smoke or chew tobacco in public. Arizona makes it penal to sell or give liquor to a minor without his parents’ consent, or even to admit him to a saloon.

Several states have recently made the smoking of cigarettes a punishable offence.

Kentucky prohibits the sale of any book or periodical, “the chief feature of which is to record the commission of crimes, or display by cuts or illustrations of crimes committed, or the pictures of criminals, desperadoes, or fugitives from justice, or of men or women influenced by stimulants”; and North Dakota punishes the sale or gift to, and even the exhibition within sight of, any minor of any book, magazine, or newspaper “principally made up of criminal news or pictures, stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime.”

Some states permit judges to hear in private cases the evidence in which is of an obscene nature.

Massachusetts compels insurance companies to insure the lives of coloured persons on the same terms with those of whites.

Oregon requires the doors of any building used for public purposes to be so swung as to open outwards.

Minnesota enacts that all labour performed by contract upon a building shall be a first lien thereon; and declares that the fact that the person performing the labour was not enjoined from so doing shall be conclusive evidence of the contract; while Iowa gives to all workers in coal mines a lien for their wages upon all property used in constructing and working the mine.

Alabama makes it penal for a banker to discount at a higher rate than 8 percent.

Many states have stringent usury laws.

Pennsylvania forbids a mortgagee to contract for the payment by the mortgagor of any taxes over and above the interest payable.

Kentucky and some other states have been making strenuous (but imperfectly successful) efforts to extinguish lotteries. On the other hand, Nevada appears to have authorized one.

Some of the newer states by their constitutions, and many others by statutes, endeavour to destroy the combinations of capitalists called “trusts,” treating them as conspiracies, and threatening severe penalties against those concerned in them.

Laws purporting to limit the hours of adult male labour have been passed by Congress and in many states. None, however, appear to forbid under penalty overtime work, except as respects public servants (under the federal government, and in Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Colorado), the limit being 8 or 9 hours, railway servants (Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan), 10 to 12 hours, and coal miners (Wyoming), 8 hours. These laws, in fact, amount to little more than a declaration that the number of hours mentioned shall (except as aforesaid) constitute a legal day’s work in the absence of an agreement for longer service.

Congress and the legislatures of at least fourteen states have by statute created or provided for the creation of boards of arbitration in trade disputes, but have conferred very restricted powers for that purpose.

chapter 99

Woman Suffrage

Although the question of admitting women to the right of voting has never been one of the foremost political issues in the United States, its history and present position are so illustrative of the way in which political proposals spring up, and are agitated and handled in that country, that it would deserve to be here noticed, even were it not a matter which has a present interest for at least one European country. All those who have speculated on the foundations of human society and government have long been confronted by the question how far differences of sex ought to imply and prescribe a distinction of civic rights and functions between men and women. Some of the bolder among philosophers have answered the question by simply ignoring the differences. Perceiving in women an intelligence and will, which, if never equal to that of the very strongest men, yet makes the average woman the equal for most purposes of the average man, inasmuch as she gains in quickness and delicacy of perception what she loses in force and endurance, they have found no reason why woman should not share the labours, duties, and privileges of man. This was Plato’s view, pushed by him so far as to expunge marriage and domestic life altogether; and it has found expression in more than one religious movement in ancient as well as in modern times.

Christianity approached the problem from another side. Recognizing in woman an immortal soul equally precious with the soul of man, the New Testament and the usages of the primitive church opened to her a wide range of functions, virtues, and glories, in some of which she was fitted to surpass, and has in fact surpassed man; while the imagination of the Middle Ages, more intense and fervid than that of any other epoch in history, created an ideal of feminine sweetness, purity, and moral beauty infinitely surpassing that of the ancient world, and which the modern world may count as its noblest possession, an ideal on the preservation of which, more perhaps than of any other human conception, the welfare of the race depends.

The consecration of the spiritual equality of woman would doubtless have gone still farther than it did to secure for her a tangible equality in social and possibly even in political matters but for the rudeness of the times, in which physical force counted for much, and for the growth of a sacramental and sacerdotal system, which confined priesthood and the administration of certain life-giving sacraments to men. Thus, though the relations of the sexes were placed on a more wholesome basis than in Greek and Roman antiquity, though the standard of purity was raised and the conception of marriage dignified, the recognition of equality in the sphere of law, both private and public, was less complete than might be expected. When sacramentalism and sacerdotalism were, in the peoples of northern Europe, shattered by the religious movement of the sixteenth century, the idea of a clerical order confined to men was nevertheless maintained, except in a few small sects; and though the law grew constantly more just and humane to women, scarcely a voice was raised to claim for them a share in the privileges of life.

In the early days of the American Republic it seems to have occurred to no statesman, though it did occur to a few keen-witted women, that the principles of the Declaration of Independence might find application without distinction of sex; but as they were not to be applied to men of any colour but white, this need the less by wondered at. However, the legal position of women was speedily improved. State legislation gave them fuller rights of property and a better social status than they had enjoyed under the English common law, and the respectful deference with which they were generally treated was remarked by travellers as a singular exception to the general imperfection of American male manners, and in fact tending to affect inauspiciously the grace of female manners.

When Negro slavery began to excite the horror of sensitive minds, it became necessary to reexamine the foundations of society and find a theory which would, in asserting the ultimate similarity and equality of all men, condemn the ownership of one man by another. This was done by recurring to the New Testament and the Declaration of Independence. Two questions speedily suggested themselves. If all men of whatever race are equal, what of women? If equality be an absolute and, so to speak, indefeasible truth and principle, what does it import? Does it cover merely the passive rights of citizenship, the right to freedom and protection for person and property? Or does it extend to the active right of participating in the government of the commonwealth? “We demand freedom for the Negro. Do we also demand a share in the government? If we do, are not women at least as well entitled? If we do not, it is because we see that the Negro is so ignorant and altogether backward as to be unfit to exercise political power. But can this be said of women? The considerations which might apply to the case of the liberated Negro do not apply to her, for she is educated and capable. How, then, can she be excluded?”

This was an abstract way of looking at the matter, because there had not as yet been any substantial demand by women for political rights. But it was on the basis of abstract right that they were proceeding. Theory is potent with those who are themselves appealing from an actual state of things to theory and general principles. And in this instance a practical turn was given to the question by the fact that many of the most zealous and helpful workers in the Abolitionist movement were women. They showed as much courage in facing obloquy and even danger in what they deemed a sacred cause as Garrison or Lovejoy. They filled the Abolition societies and flocked to the Abolitionist conventions. They were soon admitted to vote and hold office in these organizations. The more timid or conservative members protested, and some seceded. But in an aggressive movement, as in a revolution, those who go farthest are apt to fare best. The advocates of women’s claims were the bolder spirits who retained the direction of the anti-slavery movement. The women established their right to share the perils of the combat and the glories of the victory.

The claim of women to be admitted to the franchise and to public office would no doubt have been made sooner or later in America (as it had been made in England) had there been no anti-slavery agitation. But the circumstances of its origin in that agitation have tinged its subsequent course. They invested it in the eyes of one set of persons with a species of consecration, while providing it with a body of trained workers and a precedent inspiring hope and teaching patience. To minds of an opposite cast they gave it a flavour of sentimentalism, crotchetiness, and of what used to be called in America “radicalism.”1 While the struggle against slavery continued, the question was content to stand back, but since the end of the Civil War and the admission of the Negroes to the franchise, it has come to the front, and continues to be actively pressed. There are now woman suffrage societies in most parts of the North and West. An annual convention of delegates from these societies is held, which stimulates the local workers and resolves on a plan of operations.2 Proposals for the admission of women to this or that species of suffrage are sedulously urged on state legislatures. In many Congresses amendments to the federal Constitution recognizing women as voters have been submitted, but have always failed to secure a majority of either house. The chance three-fourths of the states would accept one is at present very small. Once or twice women have been nominated as candidates for the presidency, though none has ever put out a list of presidential electors pledged to support her candidature.

These effort have borne some fruit, though less than the party counted on when the agitation began. So far as I have been able to ascertain the present state of the law in the different states and Territories of the Union, the political rights of women stand as follows:

In 1869 the legislature of the Territory of Wyoming conferred the suffrage on women for all purposes and when the Territory received statehood in 1890, this provision was retained.3 Since then a like privilege has been given to women in Colorado and Idaho by amendments to their constitutions, and in Utah by the first constitution, adopted in 1895.4 In Colorado the proposal was (in 1893) carried by the “Populist” party, then for a brief space dominant. In several states including South Dakota and Oregon it has been subjected to popular vote, but rejected by large majorities, nor does it appear in the constitutions of the three newest states. In Washington Territory the law which conferred it in 1883 was declared invalid by the courts in 1887, because its nature had not been properly described in the title, was reenacted immediately afterwards, and was in 1888 again declared invalid by the U.S. Territorial Court, on the ground that the act of Congress organizing the Territorial legislature did not empower it to extend the suffrage to women. In enacting their state constitution (1889) the people of Washington pronounced against female suffrage by a majority of two to one; and a good authority declared to me that “few women took advantage of the privilege and most of them were greatly relieved that the responsibility was removed.” But in 1910 it was carried on an initiative vote with little discussion, the people (it is stated) hardly understanding what they were doing, because a large number of questions were submitted to popular vote at the same time and this question was described on the ballot paper in a way which did not indicate the real issue.

In many states besides the ten which give full suffrage5 women are allowed to vote at elections of school officers, or on some question connected with schools; and in several other states (nine at least), as well as in all of these already referred to, they may be chosen to fill school offices, such as that of school visitor, or superintendent, or member of a school committee. They also enjoy “school suffrage” sporadically in a few cities.

In several states they have the right of voting upon questions submitted to the vote of the taxpayers as such. This includes the question of granting licenses for the sale of intoxicants. A bill to confer the same right was lost in the Massachusetts legislature by a majority of one vote only.

In Kansas in 1886 and in Michigan in 1893 women received the suffrage in all municipal elections. In Michigan, however, the law was subsequently held unconstitutional.6

In those states where women possess the school suffrage it is reported that few vote; and this is ascribed partly to indifference, partly to the difficulty which women of the humbler class experience in leaving their homes to go to the poll. In Massachusetts the number of women going to the poll declined rapidly after the first few years. But there have been cases there, and also in Kansas at municipal elections, in which a heavy vote was cast by the female voters.

In Wyoming (while still a Territory) women served as jurors for some months till the judges discovered that they were not entitled by law to do so, and in Washington (while a Territory) they served from 1884 to 1887, when the legislature, in regranting the right of voting, omitted to grant the duty or privilege of jury service. Those whose opinions I have enquired inform me that the presence of women on juries was deemed a grave evil, and that in prosecutions for gambling or the sale of intoxicants a defendant had no chance before them. It is also stated that comparatively few went to the poll. In Wyoming, moreover, the women on juries are stated to have been more severe than men.

As respects the suffrage in Wyoming, the evidence I have collected privately is conflicting. One of the most trusty authorities wrote to me as follows:

“After the first excitement is over, it is impossible to get respectable women out to vote except every two or three years on some purely emotional question like Prohibition or other temperance legislation. The effect on family life seems to be nil; certainly not bad.” Another highly competent witness wrote: “There are no large towns. In the larger places most of the women, who are chiefly married, vote; in the smaller and more rural places the women take little interest in it, as indeed the men do. As a rule, women are in favor of temperance and good schools, and so far as they have been able to cast their influence, it has been on the right side in those questions. Woman suffrage so far seems to work well, but the field of its operations is one presenting singular immunity from the evils which elsewhere might attach to it, the population being sparse and women in the minority.”

Beside these and similar statements may be set the fact that no opposition was offered in the convention of 1889, which drafted the present constitution, to the enactment of woman suffrage for all purposes. The opinion of the people at large was not duly ascertained, because the question was not separately submitted to them at the polls, but there can be little doubt that it would have been favourable. The declarations of Wyoming officials may deserve no weight, for they do not wish to offend any section of the voters, and every Western American feels bound to say the best he can and something more for the arrangements of his own state. But the whole proceedings of the convention of 1889 leave the impression that the equal suffrage in force since 1869 had worked fairly, and the summing up of the case by a thoughtful and dispassionate British observer (Sir H. Plunkett7 ) is to the same effect. Moreover, had the results been obviously bad in Wyoming, they would have been quoted against the adoption of the proposal by Colorado in 1893. In these new Western states, however, women have been in a minority. Comparatively few of them seem to have shown any eagerness to obtain the suffrage, and the laws affecting women are much the same there and in other parts of the West.

No evidence has been produced to show that politics are in the woman suffrage states substantially purer than in the adjoining states, though it is said that the polls are quieter. The most that seems to be alleged is that they are no worse; or, as the Americans express it, “Things are very much what they were before, only more so.” The conditions of the small and scattered populations of most of these states—Utah and in a less degree Idaho, being moreover exceptional as still largely Mormon—render their experience of slight value for such communities as the Eastern and Middle states.

Colorado,with a population of nearly 800,000, and with one great city, Denver, offers a better field for observations, and a book by Miss Helen L. Sumner, published in 1909 under the title of Equal Suffrage, presents the results of a minute and careful study of the working of woman suffrage there in a spirit which strikes the reader as impartial and scientific.8 The conclusions reached are, on the whole, favourable to the experiment, though there is admittedly much difference of opinion in Colorado itself upon the subject, among women as well as among men. Such changes as there have been for good or for evil, are less marked than either advocates or opponents expected. Enquiries made in many quarters do not shew that woman suffrage has done any positive harm to politics in Colorado, and some say that it occasionally prevents men of bad character from being nominated for office. Whether, however, the state, or the women in it, have as a whole gained, the discrepant evidence makes it hard to determine.

Wherever the suffrage or any public right has been given, it is given equally to married and to unmarried women.9 No one dreams of drawing any distinction between the claims of the single and the married, or of making marriage entail disfranchisement. To do so would be alien to the whole spirit of American legislation, and would indeed involve a much grosser anomaly or injustice than the exclusion of all women alike from political functions. This point, therefore, on which much controversy has arisen in England, has given no trouble in the United States; and, similarly, the Americans always assume that wherever women receive the right of voting at the election of any office, they become as a matter of course eligible for the office itself. In some cases eligibility for the office has preceded the gift of the suffrage. There are states in which women have no school suffrage, but are chosen to school offices; and states (Massachusetts, for instance) in which they have no vote at municipal or state elections, but where they are placed on the state board of education or the board of prison commissioners. It would be deemed in the last degree illogical to give municipal suffrage, and not allow a woman to be chosen mayoress, to give state (and therewith congressional) suffrage and not allow a woman to be capable of holding any state or any federal office. In Wyoming five votes out of every thirty-five were once given for a woman candidate for the post of United States senator.10

“What,” it will be asked, “are the forces by which the women’s rights movement is now pressed forward? What are the arguments used to support it? Are they of a theoretical or of a practical nature? Is it on the ground of abstract justice and democratic principle that the battle is being fought, or is it alleged that women suffer from positive disabilities and hardships which nothing but an equal share in political power will remove?”

Both sets of arguments are employed; but those of a theoretical order seem to hold the chief place. In all or nearly all states married women have complete rights to their property; and mothers have rights considerable, if not quite equal to those of fathers, in the guardianship of their children. Women enjoy the equal protection of the law and are admissible to professions and the training needed for professions, while the laws of divorce, whatever may be said of them in other respects, are not more indulgent to husbands than to wives. Although therefore the advocates of woman suffrage claim that some tangible legislative benefits will accrue to woman from her admission to the franchise, especially in the way of obtaining better protection for her and for children, the case on this side seems weak, and excites little feeling. No one who observes America can doubt that whatever is deemed to be for the real benefit of women in the social and industrial sphere will be obtained for them from the goodwill and sympathy of men, without the agency of the political vote. It is on grounds of abstract right, it is because the exclusion from political power is deemed in itself unjust and degrading, and is thought to place women on a lower level, that this exclusion is resented. It seems to be supposed that a nobler and more vigorous type of womanhood would be developed by the complete recognition of her equality, a wider and grander sphere of action opened to her efforts. Perhaps the commonest argument is contained in the question, “Why not? What reason can you give, you whose forefathers revolted from England because representation was not suffered to go with taxation, you who annually repeat the Declaration of Independence as if it were the Nicene Creed, you who after the war enfranchised ignorant Negroes, for excluding from the suffrage women who pay taxes, who are within the reason and meaning of the Declaration of 1776, who are far more intellectually and morally competent than the coloured millions of the South?” This appeal, which becomes all the stronger as an argumentum ad hominem because the American man is exceptionally deferential to women, and the American statesman exceptionally disposed to comply with every request which is urgently pressed upon him, is the kernel of the suffragist case. However, it derived for a time no small practical aid from a practical consideration. The one question of current politics which usually interests women is the question of restricting or prohibiting the sale of intoxicants. This is also the question which excites not perhaps the widest yet certainly the keenest interest in the minds of a great host of male voters. The enemies of the liquor traffic have therefore a strong motive for desiring to see their voting power reinforced by those whose aid would secure victory; and in fact Prohibitionist conventions almost always declare in favour of women’s suffrage. For a different reason, the Socialist and Labour parties are, as were the Populists also, disposed to support it, as indeed the Socialists do in Europe.

Yet it must not be supposed that the sentimental arguments are all on one side. There is a widespread apprehension that to bring women into politics might lower their social position, diminish men’s deference for them, harden and roughen them, and, as it is expressed, “brush the bloom off the flowers.” This feeling is at least as strong among women as among men, and some judicious observers deem it stronger now than it was formerly. The proportion of women who desire the suffrage seems to be smaller in America than in England. Of the many American ladies whose opinion I have from time to time during forty years inquired, the enormous majority expressed themselves hostile; and in most of the states where the question had come near to being a practical issue there have been formed women’s anti-suffrage associations which conduct an active agitation, and present to the committees of state legislatures their arguments against the proposal. They support journals also, which press upon women the desirability of their continuing in the sphere they have hitherto occupied, and dwell upon the greater and better influence which, so it is thought, they may exert on legislation and administration if they remain “outside politics.” It is remarkable that the movement has hitherto found comparatively little support among what may be called the “upper classes.” Woman suffragism has been, though less so now than formerly, thought “bad form,” and supposed to betoken a want of culture and refinement. The same reproach attached before the Civil War to Abolitionism. It was at one time an injury to the cause that some few of its prominent advocates, disavowed no doubt by the great bulk of the suffrage party, also advocated a general unsettlement of the relations between the sexes, and that a few others were too masculine in their manners and discourse. The sentimental aversion to seeing women immersed in politics is all the greater because “politics” have a technical meaning which is repellent to refined Americans; and it is felt that “politics” are more likely to soil women than women to purify “politics.”

But one of the objections deemed gravest is this, that in this land where the suffrage is, as respects men, universal, the constituencies, which are already enormous—a member of Congress represents more than six times as many voters as an English member of Parliament—would be doubled in size, and all the difficulties which already attach to elections be immensely aggravated. Even those who desire to see the sale of intoxicants restricted doubt the expediency of attaining their object by the votes of women, because the difficulty of enforcing prohibitory legislation, already serious where the drinking minority is strong, would be much greater if a majority of men in favour of keeping bars and saloons open were overborne by a minority of men turned into a majority by the votes of women.

The extension, in recent years, of woman suffrage over some Western states does not seem to have been due to any marked increase in the number of women asking for the vote, for the great bulk of the sex in those states are reported to have remained indifferent, but to the following four causes.

One is the influence of the English propaganda of the scheme. Its advance in Europe stimulated the hopes and efforts of those who advocate it in America.

A second is the growth of the Socialist and Labour parties, the leaders of which believe that woman suffrage will promote their aims. The example of Australia, where the Labour party has been greatly strengthened by the woman vote, has encouraged this belief.

A third is the tendency to exalt direct popular sovereignty and disparage representative government. The advocacy of initiative, referendum and recall disposes men to favour extensions of the suffrage, and to be moved by abstract principles and a belief in the so-called “natural right” to vote rather than by considerations of practical expediency, i.e., of what are likely to be the tangible results of any measure on the good government of the community.

A fourth is the idea that the votes of women will further social reforms. In point of fact, such reforms have moved as fast in states that have not adopted woman suffrage as in states that have, and the influence of women in promoting useful legislation seems to have been no slighter. Nevertheless the idea subsists, and seems to have led to the support extended to woman suffrage by the new Progressive party at the election of 1912.

To these one might add the influence of what is called the “woman movement” as a whole, a movement too large to be entered on here, and one felt in Britain as well as in America.

To a European observer the suffrage question seems one rather of social than of political moment. If he sees no reason to expect an improvement of politics from the participation of women in elections and their admission to Congress and to high political office, neither does he find much cause for fear. The results of universal suffrage may not, so far as legislation is concerned, greatly differ from those of manhood suffrage. Such misgivings as he entertains are of a different nature. They are serious misgivings, and they are rendered not less serious by a study of the social changes which are passing upon the world in Europe as well as in America.

chapter 100

The Supposed Faults of Democracy

The question which in one form or another every European politician has during the last half-century been asking about the United States, is the broad question, how does democracy answer? No other country has tried the experiment of a democratic government on so large a scale, with so many minor variations, for the state governments are forty-six autonomous democracies, or with such advantages of geographical position and material resources. And those who think that all civilized countries are moving towards democracy, even though they may not be destined to rest there, find the question an important one for themselves. The reader who has followed thus far the account I have tried to give of the federal Constitution and its working, of the state constitutions, of local government, of the party machinery, on the influence of public opinion as a controlling power over all the institutions of the country, will be content with a comparatively brief summary of the results to which the inquiries made under these heads point.

That summary naturally falls into three parts. We have to ask first, how far the faults usually charged on democracy are present in America; next, what are the special faults which characterize it here; last, what are the strong points which it has developed.

The chief faults which philosophers, from Plato downwards, and popular writers repeating and caricaturing the dicta of philosophers, have attributed to democratic governments, are the following:

Weakness in emergencies, incapacity to act with promptitude and decision;
Fickleness and instability, frequent changes of opinion, consequent changes in the conduct of affairs and in executive officials;
Insubordination, internal dissensions, disregard of authority, a frequent resort to violence, bringing on an anarchy which ends in military tyranny;
A desire to level down, and an intolerance of greatness;
Tyranny of the majority over the minority;
A love of novelty: a passion for changing customs and destroying old institutions;
Ignorance and folly, producing a liability to be deceived and misled; consequent growth of demagogues playing on the passions and selfishness of the masses.

I do not say that this list exhausts the reproaches directed against democracy, but it includes those which are most often heard and are best worth examining. Most of them are drawn from the history of the Greek republics of antiquity and the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, small communities where the conditions of social and political life were so different from those of a great modern country that we ought not to expect similar results to follow from political arrangements called by the same name. However, as this consideration has not prevented writers and statesmen, even in our own day, from repeating the old censures, and indeed from mixing together in one repulsive potion all the faults that belonged to small aristocratic republics with all that can belong to large democratic republics, it is worth while to examine these current notions, and try them by the light of the facts which America furnishes.

Weakness and Want of Promptitude.

The American democracy is long-suffering and slow in rousing itself; it is often perplexed by problems, and seems to grope blindly for their solution. In the dealings with England and France which preceded the war of 1812, and in the conduct of that war, its government showed some irresolution and sluggishness. The habit of blustering in its intercourse with foreign powers, and the internal strife over slavery, led Europeans to think it lacked firmness and vigour. They were undeceived in 1861. While it seemed possible to avert a breach with the Southern slaveholders, the North was willing to accept, and did accept, a series of compromises whose inadequacy was soon revealed. The North was ill led in Congress, and the South was boldly if not wisely led. Yet when the crisis arrived, the North put forth its power with a suddenness and resolution which surprised the world. There was no faltering in the conduct of a struggle which for two long years French and English statesmen deemed hopeless. The best blood of the North freely offered itself to be shed on the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania for the sake of the Union; while an enormous debt was incurred in equipping army after army. As everyone knows, the Southern people displayed no less vigour even when the tide had evidently began to turn against them, and the hope of European intervention died away. If want of force, dash, and courage in moments of danger is a defect generally chargeable on popular governments, it was not then chargeable on the United States. But the doctrine is one which finds little to support it either in ancient or modern history, while there are many instances to the contrary: witness the war of the Swiss against Charles the Bold, and the defence of Florence against Charles V.

Fickleness and Instability.

The indictment fails on this count also. The people are open to sudden impulses, and in particular states there have been ill-considered innovations and a readiness to try wild experiments, such as those I have described in California. But taking the nation as a whole, its character is marked by tenacity of beliefs and adherence to leaders once chosen. The opposite charge of stubbornness in refusing to be convinced by argument and to admit the failings of men who have established some title to gratitude, might more plausibly be preferred. Western farmers have been accustomed to suffer from the high price of the clothes they wear and the implements they use, but once they have imbibed the belief that a protective tariff makes for the general good of the country they remained Protectionists down till 1890; and of those who then wavered many have since reverted to that view. The blunders of President Grant’s first administration, and the misdeeds of the knot of men who surrounded him, playing upon the political inexperience of a blunt soldier, scarcely affected the loyalty of the masses to the man whose sword had saved the Union. Congressmen and state officials are no doubt often changed, but they are changed in pursuance of a doctrine and a habit in which the interests of a class are involved, not from any fickleness in the people.1

Insubordination and Contempt for Authority.

On this head the evidence is more conflicting. There are states and cities in which the laws are imperfectly enforced. Homicide is hardly a crime in some parts of the South—that is to say, a man who kills another is not always arrested, often not convicted when arrested and put on his trial, very rarely hanged when convicted.2 One might almost say that private war is recognized by opinion in these districts, as it was in Europe during the earlier Middle Ages. In the mountainous country of eastern Kentucky, and the adjoining parts of Virginia and Tennessee, quarrels are kept up from generation to generation between hostile families and their respective friends, which the state authorities cannot succeed in repressing. In 1890, I was assured when passing the borders of that region, that in one such blood feud more than fifty persons had perished within the preceding ten years, each murder provoking another in revenge. When a judge goes into these parts it has sometimes befallen that a party of men come down fully armed from the mountains, surround the court house, and either drive him away or oblige him to abandon the attempt to do justice on slayers belonging to their faction. In the West, again, particularly in such Southwestern states as Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, brigandage was for a time, and is still in some few places, regarded with a certain amusement, rising into sympathy, by a part of the peaceable population. Having arisen partly out of the border ruffianism which preceded the outbreak of the Civil War, partly among men who were constantly engaged in skirmishing with the Indian tribes, there was a flavour of romance about it, which ceased to gild the exploits of train robbers only when their activity threatened the commercial interests of a rising city. Jesse James, the notorious bandit of Missouri, and his brothers, were popular heroes in the region they infested, much like Robin Hood and Little John in the ballads of the thirteenth century in England. These phenomena are, however, explicable by other causes than democratic government. The homicidal habits of the South are a relic of the semi-barbarism which slavery kept alive long after the Northern free states had reached the level of European order. The want of a proper police is apparently the cause answerable for the train robberies which still, even in such states as Illinois and Ohio, sometimes occur, and these are detected and punished more frequently by the energy of the railroad or express (parcel delivery) companies and their skilled detectives than through the action of the state authorities. Brigandage is due to the absence of a mounted gendarmerie in the vast and thinly-peopled Farther West; and there is no gendarmerie because the federal government leaves the states to create their own, and unsettled Western communities, being well armed, prefer to take care of themselves rather than spend their scanty corporate funds on a task whose cost would, as they think, be disproportionate to the result.3 In the western wilds of Canada, however, the mounted police secures perfect safety for wayfarers, and train robberies seem to be unknown.

Lynch law is not unknown in more civilized regions, such as Indiana and Illinois. A case occurred recently not far from New York City. Now lynch law, however shocking it may seem to Europeans and New Englanders, is far removed from arbitrary violence. According to the testimony of careful observers, it is not often abused, and its proceedings are generally conducted with some regularity of form as well as fairness of spirit. What are the circumstances? Those highly technical rules of judicial procedure and still more technical rules of evidence which America owes to the English common law, and which have in some states retained antiquated minutiæ now expunged from English practice, or been rendered by new legislation too favourable to prisoners, have to be applied in districts where population is thin, where there are very few officers, either for the apprehension of offenders, or for the hunting up of evidence against them, and where, according to common belief, both judges and juries are occasionally “squared” or “got at.” Many crimes would go unpunished if some more speedy and efficient method of dealing with them were not adopted. This method is found in a volunteer jury, summoned by the leading local citizens, or in very clear cases, by a simple seizure and execution of the criminal.4 Why not create an efficient police? Because crime is uncommon in many districts—in such a district, for instance, as Michigan or rural Wisconsin—and the people have deliberately concluded that it is cheaper and simpler to take the law into their own hands on those rare occasions when a police is needed than to be at the trouble of organizing and paying a force for which there is usually no employment. If it be urged that they are thus forming habits of lawlessness in themselves, the Americans reply that experience does not seem to make this probable, because lawlessness does not increase among the farming population, and has disappeared from places where the rudeness or simplicity of society formerly rendered lynch law necessary. Cases however occur for which no such excuse can be offered, cases in which a prisoner (probably a Negro) already in the hands of justice is seized and put to death by a mob. Some years ago there was in several states, and notably in parts of southern Indiana—a rough, wooded country, with a backward and scattered population—a strange recrudescence of lynching in the rise of the so-called White Caps, people who seized by night men or women who had given offense by their immoral life or other vices, dragged them into the woods, flogged them severely, and warned them to quit the neighbourhood forthwith. Similar outrages are often reported from other states to the southwest of Indiana, as far as Mississippi. In Ohio they were promptly repressed by an energetic governor. In 1908–9 disputes connected with the alleged attempt by a powerful corporation to create a monopoly in the purchasing of tobacco for manufacture led to a series of nocturnal outrages by armed men who sought, by whipping or killing those farmers who refused to join them in their resistance to the attempts referred to, to coerce the tobacco growers into joining that organized resistance. These Night Riders gave trouble in Kentucky and parts of Tennessee, though the governor took desperate measures against them.

The so-called “Molly Maguire” conspiracy, which vexed and terrified Pennsylvania for several years, showed the want of a vigorous and highly trained police. A sort of secret society organized a succession of murders, much like the Italian Camorra, which remained undetected till a daring man succeeded in persuading the conspirators to admit him among them. He shared their schemes, and learnt to know their persons and deeds, then turned upon them and brought them to justice. This remarkable case illustrates not any neglect of law or tenderness for crime, but mainly the power of a combination which can keep its secrets. Once detected, the Molly Maguires were severely dealt with. The Pittsburgh riots of 1877, and the Cincinnati riots of 1884, and the Chicago troubles of 1894 alarmed the Americans themselves, so long accustomed to domestic tranquillity as to have forgotten those volcanic forces which lie smouldering in all ignorant masses, ready to burst forth upon sufficient excitement. The miners and ironworkers of the Pittsburgh district are rough fellows, many of them recent immigrants who have not yet acquired American habits of order; nor would there have been anything to distinguish this Pennsylvania disturbance from those which happen during strikes in England, as, for instance, at Blackburn, in Lancashire and, later, during a coal strike at one or two places in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, or in times of distress in France, as at Decazeville in 1886, had there been a prompt suppression. Unfortunately there was in 1877 no proper force on the spot. The governor was absent; the mayor and other local authorities lost their heads; the police, feebly handled, were overpowered; the militia showed weakness; so that the riot spread in a way which surprised its authors, and the mob raged for several days along the railroads in several states, and over a large area of manufacturing and mining towns.

The moral of this event was the necessity, even in a land of freedom, of keeping a force strong enough to repress tumults in their first stage. The Cincinnati riot began in an attempt to lynch two prisoners who were thought likely to escape the punishment they richly deserved; and it would probably have ended there had not the floating rabble of this city of 300,000 inhabitants seized the opportunity to do a little pillage and make a great noise on their own account. Neither sedition had any political character, nor indeed any specific object, except that the Pennsylvanian mob showed special enmity to the railroad company.

In 1892 the same moral was enforced by the strike riots on some of the railroads in New York State and in the mining region of Idaho, by the local wars between cattlemen and “rustlers” in Wyoming, by the disturbances at the Homestead works in Pennsylvania, and by the sanguinary conflict which arose at the convict-worked mines in Tennessee, where a mob of miners attacked the stockades in which were confined convicts kept at labour under contracts between the state and private mine owners, liberated many of the convicts, captured and were on the point of hanging an officer of the state militia, and were with difficulty at last repressed by a strong militia force. The riots at Chicago in 1894 and the more protracted strife between mine owners and striking miners in Colorado somewhat later are other instances. Such tumults are not specially products of democracy, but they are unhappily proofs that democracy does not secure the good behaviour of its worst and newest citizens, and that it must be prepared, no less than other governments, to maintain order by the prompt and stern application of physical force.5

It was a regrettable evidence of the extent to which public authorities have seemed to abnegate the function of maintaining order that the habit grew up among railroad directors and the owners of other large enterprises of hiring a private armed force to protect, at the time of a strike, not only the workmen they bring in to replace the strikers, but also their yards, works, and stock in trade. A firm which began business as a private detective agency was for years accustomed to supply for this purpose bodies of men well trained and drilled, who could be relied on to defend the place allotted to them against a greatly superior force of rioters. This firm used to keep not less than one thousand men permanently on a war footing, and sent them hither and thither over the country to its customers. They were usually sworn in as sheriff’s deputies, on each occasion before the proper local authority. So frequent had been the employment of “Pinkerton’s men,” as they are called (though it is not always from Messrs. Pinkerton of Chicago that they are obtained, and the name, like “Delmonico,” for a restaurant, seems to be passing from a proper into a common noun), that some new state constitutions (e.g., Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Washington, Kentucky) and statutes in other states (e.g., Massachusetts) expressly prohibit the bringing of armed men into the state, and a committee of Congress was set to investigate the subject, so far without result, for it is going a long way to forbid a man by statute to hire persons to help him to protect his property when he finds it in danger. These strike cases are of course complicated by the reluctance of a state governor or a mayor to incur unpopularity by taking strong measures against a crowd who have votes. Here we touch a difficulty specially incident to a directly elected executive—a difficulty noted already in the cases of elected judges and elected tax officers, and one which must be taken into account in striking the balance between the good and the evil of a system of direct and pervading popular control. The remedy is in extreme cases found in the displeasure of the good citizens, who, after all, form the voting majority. But it is a remedy which may follow with too tardy steps. Meantime, many large employers of labour find themselves obliged to defend their property by these condottieri, because they cannot rely on the defence which the state ought to furnish, and the condottieri themselves, who seem to be generally men of good character as well as proved courage, are so much hated by the workmen as to be sometimes in danger of being lynched when found alone or in small parties.6

In some states not a few laws are systematically ignored or evaded, sometimes by the connivance of officials who are improperly induced to abstain from prosecuting transgressors, sometimes with the general consent of the community which perceives that they cannot be enforced. Thus some years ago the laws against the sale of liquor on Sundays in the city of Chicago were not enforced. The German and Irish part of the population disliked them, and showed its dislike by turning out of the municipal offices those who had enforced them, while yet the law remained on the statute book because, according to the Constitution of Illinois it took a majority of two-thirds in the legislature to repeal an act; and the rural members, being largely Prohibitionists, stood by this law against Sunday dealing. When in Texas I heard of the same thing as happening in the city of San Antonio, and doubt not that occurs in many cities. Probably more laws are quietly suffered to be broken in America than in either England or Germany. On the other hand, it is fair to say that the credit which the New Englanders used to claim of being a law-abiding people is borne out by the general security of property and person which, apart from the cases mentioned above, and especially from strike troubles, the traveller remarks over the rural parts of the Eastern and Middle states.7 Political disturbances (other than occasional collisions between whites and Negroes) are practically unknown. Even when an election is believed to have been fraudulently won, the result is respected, because it is externally regular. Fights seldom occur at elections; neither party disturbs the meetings or processions of the other in the hottest presidential campaign. To Americans the habit of letting opponents meet and talk in peace seems essential to a well-ordered free government.

The habit of obedience to constituted authority is another test, and one which Plato would have considered specially conclusive. The difficulty of applying it in America is that there are so few officials who come into the relation of command with the people, or in other words, that the people are so little “governed,” in the French or German sense, that one has few opportunities of discovering how they comport themselves. The officers of both the federal and the state governments, in levying taxes and carrying out the judgments of the courts, have seldom any resistance to fear, except in such regions as those already referred to, where the fierce mountaineers will not brook interference with their vendetta, or suffer the federal excisemen to do their duty. These regions are , however, quite exceptional, forming a sort of enclave of semi-barbarism in a civilized country, such as the rugged Albania was in the Roman Empire. Other authorities experience no difficulty in making themselves respected. A railroad company, for instance, finds its passengers only too submissive. They endure with a patience which astonishes Englishmen frequent irregularities of the train service and other discomforts, which would in England produce a whole crop of letters to the newspapers. The discipline of the army and navy in the war was nearly as strict as in European armies. So in universities and colleges discipline is maintained with the same general ease and the same occasional troubles as arise in Oxford and Cambridge. The children in city schools are proverbially docile. Except when strikes occur, employers never complain of any trouble in keeping order among their workpeople while at work. So far, indeed, is insubordination from being a characteristic of the native Americans, that they are conspicuously the one free people of the world which, owing to its superior intelligence, has recognized the permanent value of order, and observes it on every occasion, not least when a sudden alarm arises. Anarchy is of all dangers or bugbears the one which the modern world has least cause to fear, for the tendency of ordinary human nature to obey is the same as in past times, and the aggregation of human beings into great masses weakens the force of the individual will, and makes men more than ever like sheep, so far as action is concerned. Much less, therefore, is there ground for fancying that out of anarchy there will grow any tyranny of force. Whether democracies may not end in yielding greater power to their executives is quite another question, whereof more anon; all I observe here is that in no country can a military despotism, such as that which has twice prevailed in France and once in England, be deemed less likely to arise. During the Civil War there were many persons in Europe cultivating, as Gibbon says, the name without the temper of philosophy, who predicted that some successful leader of the Northern armies would establish his throne on the ruins of the Constitution. But no sooner had General Lee surrendered at Appomatox than the disbandment of the victorious host began; and the only thing which thereafter distinguished Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan from their fellow citizens was the liability to have “receptions” forced on them when they visited a city, and find their puissant arms wearied by the handshakings of their enthusiastic admirers.

Caesarism is the last danger likely to menace America. In no nation is civil order more stable. None is more averse to the military spirit. No political system would offer a greater resistance to an attempt to create a standing army or centralize the administration.

Jealousy of Greatness, and a Desire to Level Down.

This charge derives a claim to respectful consideration from the authority of Tocqueville, who though it a necessary attribute of democracy, and professed to have discovered symptoms of it in the United States. It alarmed J. S. Mill, and has been frequently dwelt on by his disciples, and by many who have adopted no other part of his teachings, as an evil equally inevitable and fatal in democratic countries. There was probably good ground for it in 1830. Even now one discovers a tendency in the United States, particularly in the West, to dislike, possibly to resent, any outward manifestation of social superiority. A man would be ill looked upon who should build a castle in a park, surround his pleasure grounds with a high wall, and receive an exclusive society in gilded drawing rooms. One of the parts which prominent politicians, who must be assumed to know their business, most like to play is the part of Cincinnatus at the plough, or Curius Dentatus receiving the Samnite envoys over his dinner of turnips. They welcome a newspaper interviewer at their modest farm, and take pains that he should describe how simply the rooms are furnished, and how little “help” (i.e., how few servants) is kept. Although the cynics of the New York press make a mock of such artless ways, the desired impression is produced on the farmer and artisan. At a senatorial election not long ago in a Northwestern state, the opponents of the sitting candidate procured a photograph of his residence in Washington, a handsome mansion in a fashionable avenue, and circulated it among the members of the state legislature, to show in what luxury their federal representative indulged. I remember to have heard it said of a statesman proposing to become a candidate for the presidency, that he did not venture during the preceding year to occupy his house in Washington, lest he should give occasion for similar criticism. Whether or not this was his real motive, the attribution of it to him is equally illustrative. But how little the wealthy fear to display their wealth and take in public the pleasures it procures may be understood by anyone who, walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, observes the superb houses which line it, houses whose internal decorations and collected objects of art rival those of the palaces of European nobles, or who watches in Newport, one of the most fashionable summer resorts, the lavish expenditure upon servants, horses, carriages, and luxuries of every kind. No spot in Europe conveys an equal impression of the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, of boundless wealth and a boundless desire for enjoyment, as does the Ocean Drive at Newport on an afternoon in August.

Intellectual eminence excites no jealousy, though it is more admired and respected than in Europe. The men who make great fortunes—and their number as well as the scale of their fortunes increases—are regarded not so much with envy, as with admiration. “When thou doest good unto thyself, all men shall speak well of thee.” Wealth does not, as in England, give its possessors an immediate entrée to fashionable society, but it marks them as the heroes and leaders of the commercial world, and sets them on a pinnacle of fame which fires the imagination of ambitious youths in dry goods stores or traffic clerks on a railroad. The demonstrations of hostility to wealthy “monopolists,” and especially to railroad companies, and the magnates of trusts, are prompted, not by hatred to prominence or wealth, but by discontent at the immense power which capitalists exercise, especially in the business of transporting goods, and which they have frequently abused.

Tyranny of the Majority.

Of this I have spoken in a previous chapter, and need only summarize the conclusions there arrived at. So far as compulsive legislation goes, it has never been, and is now less than ever, a serious or widespread evil. The press is free to advocate unpopular doctrines, even the most brutal forms of anarchism. Religious belief and practices are untouched by law. The sale of intoxicants is no doubt in many places restricted or forbidden, but to assume that this is a tyrannical proceeding is to beg a question on which the wise are much divided. The taxation of the rich for the benefit of the poor offers the greatest temptation to a majority disposed to abuse its powers. But neither Congress not the state legislatures have, with a very few exceptions, gone any farther in this direction that the great nations of Europe. If such abstention from legislative tyranny be held due, not to the wisdom and fairness of the American democracy, but to the restraints which the federal and state constitutions impose upon it, the answer is, who impose and maintain these restraints? The people themselves, who deserve the credit of desiring to remove from their own path temptations which might occasionally prove irresistible. It is true that the conditions have been in some points exceptionally favourable. Class hatreds are absent. The two great national parties are not class parties, for, if we take the country as a whole, rich and poor are fairly represented in both of these parties. Neither proposes to overtax the rich. Both denounce monopolism in the abstract, and promise to restrain capital from abusing its power, but neither is more forward than the other to take practical steps for such a purpose, because each includes capitalists whose contributions the party needs, and each includes plenty of the respectable and wealthy classes. Party divisions do not coincide with social or religious divisions, as has often happened in Europe.

Moreover, in state politics—and it is in the state rather than in the federal sphere that attacks on a minority might be feared—the lines on which parties act are fixed by the lines which separate the national parties, and each party is therefore held back from professing doctrines which menace the interests of any class. The only exceptions occur where some burning economic question supersedes for the moment the regular party attachments. This happened in California, with the consequences already described. It came near happening in two or three of the Northwestern states, such as Illinois and Wisconsin, where the farmers, organized in their Granges or agricultural clubs, caused the legislatures to pass statutes which bore hardly on the railroads and the owners of elevators and grain warehouses. Similar attempts were more recently made by the Populists and must from time to time be expected. Yet even this legislation could scarcely be called tyrannical. It was an attempt, however clumsy and abrupt, to deal with a real economical mischief, not an undue extension of the scope of legislation to matters in which majorities ought not to control minorities at all.

Love of Novelty; Passion for Destroying Old Institutions.

It is easy to see how democracies have been credited with this tendency. They have risen out of oligarchies or aristocratic monarchies, the process of their rise coinciding, if not always with revolution, at least with a breaking down of many old usages and institutions. It is this very breaking down that gives birth to them. Probably some of the former institutions are spared, are presently found incompatible with the new order of things, and then have to be changed till the people has, so to speak, furnished its house according to its taste. But when the new order has been established, is there any ground for believing that a democracy is an exception to the general tendency of mankind to adhere to the customs they have formed, admire the institutions they have created, and even bear the ills they know rather than incur the trouble of finding some way out of them? The Americans are not an exception. They value themselves only too self-complacently on the methods of government; they abide by their customs, because they admire them. They love novelty in the sphere of amusement, literature, and social life; but in serious matters, such as the fundamental institutions of government and in religious belief, no progressive and civilized people is more conservative.

Liability to Be Misled; Influence of Demagogues.

No doubt the inexperience of the recent immigrants, the want of trained political thought among the bulk even of native citizens, the tendency to sentimentalism which marks all large masses of men, do lay the people open to the fallacious reasoning and specious persuasions of adventurers. This happens in all popularly governed countries; and a phenomenon substantially the same occurs in oligarchies, for you may have not only aristocratic demagogues, but demagogues playing to an aristocratic mob. Stripped of its externals and considered in its essential features, demagogism is no more abundant in America than in England, France, or Italy. Empty and reckless declaimers, such as were some if those who figured in the Granger and Populist movements (for sincere and earnest men have shared in both), are allowed to talk themselves hoarse, and ultimately relapse into obscurity. A demagogue of greater talent may aspire to some high executive office; if not to the presidency, then perhaps a place in the cabinet, where he may practically pull the wires of a president whom he has put into the chair. Failing either of these, he aims at the governorship of his state or the mayoralty of a great city. In no one of these positions can he do permanent mischief. The federal executive has no influence on legislation, and even in foreign policy and in the making of appointments requires the consent of the Senate. That any man should acquire so great a hold on the country as to secure the election of two houses of Congress subservient to his will, while at the same time securing the presidency or secretaryship of state for himself, is an event too improbable to enter into calculation. Nothing approaching it has been seen since the days of Jackson. The size of the country, the differences between the states, a hundred other causes, make achievements possible enough in a European country all but impossible here. That a plausible adventurer should clamber to the presidential chair, and when seated there should conspire with a corrupt congressional ring, purchasing by the gift of offices and by jobs their support for his own schemes of private cupidity or public mischief, is conceivable, but improbable. The system of counter-checks in the federal government, which impedes or delays much good legislation, may be relied on to avert many of the dangers to which the sovereign chambers of European countries are exposed.

A demagogue installed as governor of a state—and it is usually in state politics that demagogism appears—has but limited opportunities for wrongdoing. He can make a few bad appointments, and can discredit the commonwealth by undignified acts. He cannot seriously harm it. Two politicians who seem to deserve the title recently obtained that honourable post in two great Eastern states. One of them, a typical “ringster,” perpetrated some jobs and vetoed a few good bills. Venturing too far, he at last involved his party in an ignominious defeat. The other, a man of greater natural gifts and greater capacity for mischief, whose capture of the chief magistracy of the state had drawn forth lamentations from the better citizens, seems to have left things much as he found them, and the most noteworthy incident which marked his year of office—for he was turned out at the next election—was the snub administered by the leading university in the state, which refused him the compliment usually paid to a chief magistrate of an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

This inquiry has shown us that of the faults traditionally attributed to democracy one only is fairly chargeable on the United States; that is to say, is manifested there more conspicuously than in the constitutional monarchies of Europe. This is the disposition to be lax in enforcing laws disliked by any large part of the population, to tolerate breaches of public order, and to be too indulgent to offenders generally. The Americans themselves admit this to be one of their weak points. How far it is due to that deficient reverence for law which is supposed to arise in popular governments from the fact that the people have nothing higher than themselves to look up to, how far rather to the national easygoingness and goodnature, how far to the prejudice against the maintenance of an adequate force of military and police and to the optimism which refuses to recognize the changes brought by a vast increase of population, largely consisting of immigrants, these are points I need not attempt to determine. It has produced no general disposition to lawlessness, which rather tends to diminish in the older parts of the country. And it is sometimes (though not always) replaced in a serious crisis by a firmness in repressing disorders which some European governments may envy. Men who are thoroughly awakened to the need for enforcing the law, enforce it all the more resolutely because it has the whole weight of the people behind it.

chapter 101

The True Faults of American Democracy

We have seen that the defects commonly attributed to democratic government are not specially characteristic of the United States. It remains to inquire what are the peculiar blemishes which the country does show. So far as regards the constitutional machinery of the federal and of the state government this question has been answered in earlier chapters. It is now rather the tendency of the institutions generally, the disposition and habits of the governing people, that we have to consider. The word democracy is often used to mean a spirit or tendency, sometimes the spirit of revolution, sometimes the spirit of equality. For our present purpose it is better to take it as denoting simply a form of government, that in which the numerical majority rules, deciding questions of state by the votes, whether directly, as in the ancient republics, or mediately, as in modern representative government, of the body of citizens, the citizens being if not the whole, at least a very large proportion of the adult males. The enquiry may begin with the question, What are the evils to which we may expect such a form of government to be exposed? and may then proceed to ascertain whether any other defects exist in the United States government which, though traceable to democracy, are not of its essence, but due to the particular form which it has there taken.

It is an old maxim that republics live by virtue—that is, by the maintenance of a high level of public spirit and justice among the citizens. If the republic be one in which power is confined to, or practically exercised by, a small educated class, the maintenance of this high level is helped by the sense of personal dignity which their position engenders. If the republic itself be small, and bear rule over others, patriotism may be intense, and the sense of the collective dignity of the state may ennoble the minds of the citizens, make them willing to accept sacrifices for its sake, to forego private interests and suppress private resentments, in order to be strong against the outer world. But if the state be very large, and the rights of all citizens equal, we must not expect them to rise above the average level of human nature. Rousseau and Jefferson will tell us that this level is high, that the faults which governments have hitherto shown are due to the selfishness of privileged persons and classes, that the ordinary unsophisticated man will love justice, desire the good of others, need no constraint to keep him in the right path. Experience will contradict them, and whether it talks of original sin or adopts some less scholastic phrase, will recognize that the tendencies to evil in human nature are not perhaps as strong, but as various and abiding even in the most civilized societies, as its impulses to good. Hence the rule of numbers means the rule of ordinary mankind without those artificial helps which their privileged position has given to limited governing classes, though also, no doubt, without those special temptations which follow in the wake of power and privilege.

Since every question that arises in the conduct of government is either a question of ends or a questions of means, errors may be committed by the ruling power either by fixing on wrong ends or in choosing wrong means to secure those ends. It is now, after long resistance by those who maintained that they knew better what was good for the people than the people knew themselves, at last agreed that as the masses are better judges of what will conduce to their own happiness than are the classes placed above them, they must be allowed to determine the ends. This is in fact the essence of free or popular government, and the justification for vesting power in numbers. But assuming the end to be given, who is best qualified to select the means for its accomplishment? To do so needs in many cases a knowledge of the facts, a skill in interpreting them, a power of forecasting the results of measures, unattainable by the mass of mankind. Such knowledge is too high for them. It is attainable only by trained economists, legists, statesmen. If the masses attempt it they will commit mistakes not less serious than those which befall a litigant who insists on conducting a complicated case instead of leaving it to his attorney and counsel. But in popular governments this distinction between ends and means is apt to be forgotten. Often it is one which cannot be sharply drawn, because some ends are means to larger ends, and some means are desired not only for the sake of larger ends, but for their own sakes also. And the habit of trusting its own wisdom and enjoying its own power, in which the multitude is encouraged by its leaders and servants, disposes it to ignore the distinction even where the distinction is clear, and makes it refer to the direct arbitrament of the people matters which the people are unfit to decide, and which they might safely leave to their trained ministers or representatives. Thus we find that the direct government of the multitude may become dangerous not only because the multitude shares the faults and follies of ordinary human nature, but also because it is intellectually incompetent for the delicate business of conducting the daily work of government, i.e., of choosing and carrying out with vigour and promptitude the requisite executive means. The people though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men. There is a sense in which it is true that the people are wiser than the wisest man. But what is true of their ultimate judgment after the lapse of time sufficient for full discussion, is not equally true of decisions that have to be promptly taken.

What are the consequences which we may expect to follow from these characteristics of democracy and these conditions under which it is forced to work?

Firstly, a certain commonness of mind and tone, a want of dignity and elevation in and about the conduct of public affairs, and insensibility to the nobler aspects and finer responsibilities of national life.

Secondly, a certain apathy among the luxurious classes and fastidious minds, who find themselves of no more account than the ordinary voter, and are disgusted by the superficial vulgarities of public life.

Thirdly, a want of knowledge, tact, and judgment in the details of legislation, as well as in administration, with an inadequate recognition of the difficulty of these kinds of work, and of the worth of special experience and skill in dealing with them. Because it is incompetent, the multitude will not feel its incompetence, and will not seek or defer to the counsels of those who possess the requisite capacity.

Fourthly, laxity in the management of public business. The persons entrusted with such business being only average men, thinking themselves and thought of by others as average men, with a deficient sense of their high responsibilities, may succumb to the temptations which the control of legislation and the public funds present, in cases where persons of a more enlarged view and with more of a social reputation to support would remain incorruptible. To repress such derelictions of duty is every citizen’s duty, but for that reason it is in large communities apt to be neglected. Thus the very causes which implant the mischief favour its growth.

The above-mentioned tendencies are all more or less observable in the United States. As each of them has been described already in its proper place, a summary reference may here be sufficient to indicate their relation to the democratic form of government and to the immanent spirit or theory which lies behind that form.

The tone of public life is lower than one expects to find in so great a nation. Just as we assume that an individual man will at any supreme moment in his own life rise to a higher level than that on which he usually moves, so we look to find those who conduct the affairs of a great state inspired by a sense of the magnitude of the interests entrusted to them. Their horizon ought to be expanded, their feeling of duty quickened, their dignity of attitude enhanced. Human nature with all its weaknesses does show itself capable of being thus roused on its imaginative side; and in Europe, where the traditions of aristocracy survive, everybody condemns as mean or unworthy acts done or language held by a great official which would pass unnoticed in a private citizen. It is the principle of noblesse oblige with the sense of duty and trust substituted for that of mere hereditary rank.

Such a sentiment is comparatively weak in America. A cabinet minister, or senator, or governor of a state, sometimes even a president, hardly feels himself more bound by it than the director of a railway company or the mayor of a town does in Europe. In order to avoid the assumption of being individually wiser or better than his fellow citizens, he has been apt to act and speak as though he were still simply one of them, and so far from magnifying his office and making it honourable, seems anxious to show that he is the mere creature of the popular vote, so filled by the sense that it is the people and not he who governs as to fear that he should be deemed to have forgotten his personal insignificance. There is in the United States abundance of patriotism, that is to say, of a passion for the greatness and happiness of the Republic, and a readiness to make sacrifices for it. The history of the Civil War showed that this passion is at least as strong as in England or France. There is no want of an appreciation of the collective majesty of the nation, for this is the theme of incessant speeches, nor even of the past and future glories of each particular state in the Union. But these sentiments do not bear their appropriate fruit in raising the conception of public office, of its worth and dignity. The newspapers assume public men to be selfish and cynical. Disinterested virtue is not looked for, is perhaps turned into ridicule where it exists. The hard commercial spirit which pervades the meetings of a joint-stock company is the spirit in which most politicians speak, and are not blamed for speaking, of public business. Something, especially in the case of newspapers, must be allowed for the humorous tendencies of the American mind, which likes to put forward the absurd and even vulgar side of things for the sake of getting fun out of them. But after making such allowances, the fact remains that, although no people is more emotional, and even in a sense more poetical, in no country is the ideal side of public life, what one may venture to call the heroic element in a public career, so ignored by the mass and repudiated by the leaders. This has affected not only the elevation but the independence and courage of public men; and the country has suffered from the want of what we call distinction in its conspicuous figures.1

I have discussed in a previous chapter the difficulties which surround the rule of public opinion where it allows little discretion to its agents, relying upon its own competence to supervise administration and secure the legislation which a progressive country needs. The American masses have been obliged, both by democratic theory and by the structure of their government, to proceed upon the assumption of their own competence. They have succeeded better than could have been expected. No people except the choicest children of England, long trained by the practice of local self-government at home and in the colonies before their revolt, could have succeeded half so well. Nevertheless the masses of the United States as one finds them today show what are the limitations of the average man. They can deal with broad and simple issues, especially with issues into which a moral element enters. They spoke out with a clear strong voice upon slavery, when at last it had become plain that slavery must either spread or vanish, and threw themselves with enthusiasm into the struggle for the Union. Their instinctive dislike for foreign complications as well as for acquisitions of new territory have from time to time checked unwise attempts to incur needless responsibilities. Their sense of national and commercial honour has defeated more than one mischievous scheme for tampering with the public debt. But when a question of intricacy presents itself, requiring either keen foresight, exact reasoning, or wide knowledge, they are at fault. Questions relating to currency and coinage, free trade and protection, improvements in the machinery of constitutions or of municipal governments, the control by law of corporations and still more of trusts, the method of securing purity of elections, the reform of criminal procedure in the state courts, these are problems which long baffled, and some of which seem still to baffle them, just as the Free Soil question did before the war or the reconstruction of the revolted Southern states for a long time after it. In those two instances a solution came about, but in the former it was no so much effected by the policy of the people or their statesmen as forced on them by events, in the latter it has left serious evil behind.

Is this a defect incidental to all popular governments, or is there anything in the American system specially calculated to produce it?

A state must of course take the people as it finds them, with such elements of ignorance and passion as exist in masses of men everywhere. Nevertheless, a representative or parliamentary system provides the means of mitigating the evils to be feared from ignorance and haste, for it vests the actual conduct of affairs in a body of specially chosen and presumably specially qualified men, who may themselves entrust such of their functions as need peculiar knowledge or skill to a smaller governing body or bodies selected in respect of their more eminent fitness. By this method the defects of democracy are remedied, while its strength is retained. The masses give their impulse to the representatives: the representatives, directed by the people to secure certain ends, bring their skill and experience to bear on the choice and application of the best means. The Americans, however, have not so constructed or composed their representative bodies as to secure a large measure of these benefits. The legislatures are disjoined from the administrative offices. Legislatures are not chosen for their ability or experience, but are, two-thirds of them little above the average citizen, being in many places so chosen to represent rather the local machine than the people. They are not much respected or trusted, and finding no exceptional virtue expected from them, they behave as ordinary men do when subjected to temptation. The separation of the executive from the legislature is a part of the constitutional arrangements of the country, and has no doubt some advantages. The character of the legislatures is due to a mistaken view of human equality and an exaggerated devotion to popular sovereignty. It is a result of democratic theory pushed to extremes, but is not necessarily incident to a democratic government. The government of England, for instance, has now become substantially a democracy, but there is no reason why it should imitate America in either of the points just mentioned; nor does democratic France, apt enough to make a bold use of theory, seem to have pushed theory to excess in these particular directions. I do not, however, deny that a democratic system makes the people self-confident, and that self-confidence may easily pass into a jealousy of delegated power, an undervaluing of skill and knowledge, a belief that any citizen is good enough for any political work. This is perhaps more likely to happen with a people who have really reached a high level of political competence; and so one may say that the American democracy is not better just because it is so good. Were it less educated, less shrewd, less actively interested in public affairs, less independent in spirit, it might be more disposed, like the masses in Europe, to look up to the classes which have hitherto done the work of government. So perhaps the excellence of rural local self-government has lowered the conception of national government. The ordinary American farmer or shopkeeper or artisan bears a part in the local government of his township or village, or county, or small municipality. He is quite competent to discuss the questions that arise there. He knows his fellow citizens, and can, if he takes the trouble, select the fittest of them for local office. No high standard of fitness is needed, for the work of local administration can be adequately despatched by any sensible man of business habits. Taking his ideas from this local government, he images Congress to himself as nothing more than a larger town council or board of county commissioners, the president and his cabinet as a sort of bigger mayor and city treasurer and education superintendent; he is therefore content to choose for high federal posts such persons as he would elect for these local offices. They are such as he is himself; and it would seem to him a disparagement of his own civic worth were he to deem his neighbours, honest, hardworking, keen-witted men, unfit for any place in the service of the Republic.

A European critic may remark that this way of presenting the case ignores the evils and losses which defective government involves. “If,” he will say, “the mass of mankind possesses neither the knowledge nor the leisure nor the skill to determine the legislation and policy of a great state, will not the vigour of the commonwealth decline and its resources be squandered? Will not a nation ruled by its average men in reliance on their own average wisdom be overtaken in the race of prosperity or overpowered in a warlike struggle by a nation of equal resources which is guided by its most capable minds?” The answer to this criticism is that America has hitherto been able to afford to squander her resources, and that no other state threatens her. With her wealth and in her position she can with impunity commit errors which might be fatal to the nations of Western Europe.

The comparative indifference to political life of the educated and wealthy classes which is so much preached at by American reformers and dwelt on by European critics is partly due to this attitude of the multitude. These classes find no smooth and easy path lying before them. Since the masses do not look to them for guidance, they do not come forward to give it. If they wish for office they must struggle for it, avoiding the least appearance of presuming on their social position. I think, however, that the abstention of the upper class is largely ascribable to causes, set forth in a previous chapter, that have little to do with democracy, and while believing that the United States have suffered from this abstention, do not regard it as an inseparable incident of their government. Accidental causes, such as the Spoils System, which is a comparatively recent distemper, already partially eliminated, have largely contributed to it.

The Spoils System reminds us of the machine and the whole organization of rings and bosses. This ugliest feature in the current politics of the country could not have grown up save under the rule of the multitude; and some of the arrangements which have aided its growth, such as the number and frequency of elections, have been dictated by what may be called the narrow doctrinairism of an irreflective democratic theory. It is not, however, necessarily incident to popular government, but is in America due to peculiar conditions which might be removed without rendering the government less truly popular. The city masses may improve if immigration declines; offices may cease to be the reward of party victory; the better citizens may throw themselves more actively into political work.

The many forms in which wealth displays its power to a source of evil more deep-seated than the last, and one which, though common to all governments, is especially dangerous in a democracy. For democracy, in relying on the average citizen, relies on two things, the personal interest which he has in good government and the public virtue which makes him desire it for the sake of the community. Wealth, skilfully used, can overcome the former motive, because the share of the average man in the state is a small one, less than the gain by which wealth may tempt him. As for virtue, the average man’s standard depends on the standard maintained by the public opinion of other average men. Now the sight of wealth frequently prevailing over the sense of duty, with no punishment following, lowers this standard, and leads opinion to accept as inevitable what it knows to be harmful, till only some specially audacious offender stirs the public wrath. Under arbitrary governments one expects a low level of honour in officials, because they are not responsible to the people, and in the people, because they have no power. One looks for renovation to freedom, and struggles for freedom accordingly. If similar evils appear under a government which is already free, the remedy is less obvious and the prospect darker.

Such corruption as exists in the United States will not, however, be ascribed to its democratic government by anyone who remembers that corruption was rife in the English Parliament in the days of Walpole, in English constituencies very much later, and now prevails not only in an almost absolutist state like Russia but also (less widely) in some other European monarchies. There are diseases which attack the body politic, like the natural body, at certain stages of growth, but disappear when a nation has passed into another stage, or when sedulous experimentation has discovered the appropriate remedy. The corruption of Parliament in Sir Robert Walpole’s days characterized a period of transition when power had passed to the House of Commons, but the control of the people over the House had not yet been fully established, and when, through a variety of moral causes, the tone of the nation was comparatively low. The corruption of the electorate in English boroughs appeared when a seat had become an object of desire to rich men, while yet the interest of the voters in public affairs was so feeble that they were willing to sell their votes, and their number often so small that each vote fetched a high price. The growth of intelligence and independence among the people, as well as the introduction of severe penalties for bribery, and the extinction of small constituencies, have now almost extinguished electoral corruption. Similar results may be expected in American constituencies from the better ballot and election laws now being enacted.

It is not, however, only in the way of bribery at popular elections that the influence of wealth is felt. In some places it taints the election of federal senators by state legislators. In others it induces officials who ought to guard the purity of the ballot box to tamper with returns. It is always trying to procure legislation in the interests of commercial undertakings. It supplies the funds for maintaining party organizations and defraying the enormous costs of electoral campaigns, and demands in return sometimes a high administrative post, sometimes favours for a railroad, sometimes a clause in a tariff bill, sometimes a lucrative contract. Titles and ribands it cannot, as in Europe, demand, for these the country happily knows not; yet these would be perhaps less harmful than the recompenses it now obtains. One thing alone it can scarcely ever buy—impunity for detected guilt. The two protections which the people retain are criminal justice, and the power, when an election comes, of inflicting condign chastisement not only on the men over whose virtue wealth has prevailed, but even over the party in state, or nation, which they have compromised. Thus the money power is held at bay, and though cities have suffered terribly, and national interests seriously, the general tone of public honour seems to be rather rising than falling. It would, I think rise faster but for the peculiar facilities which the last few years have revealed for the action of great corporations, wielding enormous pecuniary resources, but keeping in the background the personality of those who direct these resources for their own behoof.

Of the faults summarized in this chapter, other that the influence of wealth, those which might seem to go deepest, because they have least to do with the particular constitutional arrangements of the country, and are most directly the offspring of its temper and habits, are the want of dignity in public life, the prominence of inferior men, and the absence of distinguished figures. The people are good, but not good enough to be able to dispense with efficient service by capable representatives and officials, wise guidance by strong and enlightened leaders. There is too little of good serving and good leading.

It it were clear that these are the fruits of liberty and equality, the prospects of the world would be darker than we have been wont to think them. They are, however, the fruits not of liberty and equality, but of an optimism which has underrated the inherent difficulties of politics and failings of human nature, of a theory which has confused equality of civil rights and duties with equality of capacity, and of a thoughtlessness which has forgotten that the problems of the world and the dangers which beset society are always putting on new faces and appearing in new directions. The Americans started their Republic with a determination to prevent abuses of power such as they had suffered from the British Crown. Freedom seemed the one thing necessary; and freedom was thought to consist in cutting down the powers of legislatures and officials. Freedom was the national boast during the years that followed down till the Civil War; and in the delight of proclaiming themselves superior in this regard to the rest of the world they omitted to provide themselves with the other requisites for good government, and forgot that power may be abused in other ways than by monarchic tyranny or legislative usurpation. They continued to beat the drum along the old ramparts erected in 1776 and 1789 against George III, or those who might try to imitate him, when the enemy had moved quite away from that side of the position, and was beginning to threaten their rear. No maxim was more popular among them than that which declares eternal vigilance to be the price of freedom. Unfortunately their vigilance took account only of the old dangers, and did not note the development of new ones, as if the captain of a man-of-war were to think only of his guns and armour plating, and neglect to protect himself against torpedoes. Thus abuses were suffered to grow up, which seemed trivial in the midst of so general a prosperity; and good citizens who were occupied in other and more engrossing ways, allowed politics to fall into the hands of mean men. The efforts which these citizens are now making to recover the control of public business would have encountered fewer obstacles had they been made sooner. But the obstacles will be overcome. No one, I think, who has studied either the history of the American people, or their present mind and habits, will conclude that there is among them any jealousy of merit, any positive aversion to culture or knowledge. Neither the political arrangements not the social and economical conditions of the country tend at this moment to draw its best intellects and loftiest characters into public life. But it is not the democratic temper of the people that stands in the way.

The commonest of the old charges against democracy was that it passed into ochlocracy. I have sought to show that this has not happened, and is not likely to happen in America. The features of mob rule do not appear in her system, whose most characteristic faults are the existence of a class of persons using government as a means of private gain and the menacing power of wealth. Plutocracy, which the ancients contrasted with democracy, has shown in America an inauspicious affinity for certain professedly democratic institutions.

Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy. The fatalistic habit of mind perceptible among the Americans needs to be corrected by the spectacle of courage and independence taking their own path, and not looking to see whither the mass are moving. Those whose material prosperity tends to lap them in self-complacency and dull the edge of aspiration, need to be thrilled by the emotions which great men can excite, stimulated by the ideals they present, stirred to a loftier sense of what national life may attain. In some countries men of brilliant gifts may be dangerous to freedom; but the ambition of American statesmen has been schooled to flow in constitutional channels, and the Republic is strong enough to stand any strain to which the rise of heroes may expose her.

chapter 102

The Strength of American Democracy

Those merits of American government which belong to its federal Constitution have already been discussed;1 we have now to consider such as flow from the rule of public opinion, from the temper, habits, and ideas of the people.

I. The first is that of stability. As one test of a human body’s soundness is its capacity for reaching a great age, so it is high praise for a political system that it has stood no more changed than any institution must change in a changing world, and that it now gives every promise of durability. The people are profoundly attached to the form which their national life has taken. The federal Constitution is, to their eyes, an almost sacred thing, an Ark of the Covenant, whereon no man may lay rash hands. All over Europe one hears schemes of radical change freely discussed. There is still a monarchical party in France, a republican party in Italy and Spain, a social democratic party everywhere, not to speak of sporadic anarchist groups. Even in England, it is impossible to feel confident that any one of the existing institutions of the country will be standing fifty years hence. But in the United States the discussion of political problems busies itself with details, so far as the native Americans are concerned, and has assumed that the main lines must remain as they are.2 This conservative spirit, jealously watchful even in small matters, sometimes prevents reforms, but it assures to the people an easy mind, and a trust in their future which they feel to be not only a present satisfaction but a reservoir of strength.

The best proof of the well-braced solidity of the system is that it survived the Civil War, changed only in a few points which have not greatly affected the balance of national and state powers. Another must have struck every European traveller who questions American publicists about the institutions of their country. When I first travelled in the United States, I used to ask thoughtful men, superior to the prejudices of custom, whether they did not think the states’ system defective in such and such points, whether the legislative authority of Congress might not profitably be extended, whether the suffrage ought not to be restricted as regards Negroes or immigrants, and so forth. Whether assenting or dissenting, the persons questioned invariably treated such matters as purely speculative, saying that the present arrangements were far too deeply rooted for their alteration to come within the horizon of practical politics. So when a serious trouble arises, a trouble which in Europe would threaten revolution, the people face it quietly, and assume that a tolerable solution will be found. At the disputed election of 1876, when each of the two great parties, heated with conflict, claimed that its candidate had been chosen president, and the Constitution supplied no way out of the difficulty, public tranquillity was scarcely disturbed, and the public funds fell but little. A method was invented of settling the question which both sides acquiesced in, and although the decision was a boundless disappointment to the party which had cast the majority of the popular vote, that party quietly submitted to lose those spoils of office whereon its eyes had been feasting.

II. Feeling the law to be its own work, the people is disposed to obey the law. In a preceding chapter I have examined instances of the disregard of the law, and the supercession of its tardy methods by the action of the crowd. Such instances, serious as they are, do not disentitle the nation as a whole to the credit of law-abiding habits. It is the best result that can be ascribed to the direct participation of the people in their government that they have the love of the maker for his work, that every citizen looks upon a statute as a regulation made by himself for his own guidance no less than for that of others, every official as a person he has himself chosen, and whom it is therefore his interest, with no disparagement to his personal independence, to obey. Plato thought that those who felt their own sovereignty would be impatient of all control; nor is it to be denied that the principle of equality may result in lowering the status and dignity of a magistrate. But as regards law and order the gain much exceeds the loss, for everyone feels that there is no appeal from the law, behind which there stands the force of that nation. Such a temper can exist and bear these fruits only where minorities, however large, have learned to submit patiently to majorities, however small. But that is the one lesson which the American government through every grade and in every department daily teaches, and which it has woven into the texture of every citizen’s mind. The habit of living under a rigid constitution superior to ordinary statutes—indeed two rigid constitutions, since the state constitution is a fundamental law within its own sphere no less than is the federal—intensifies this legality of view, since it may turn all sorts of questions which have not been determined by a direct vote of the people into questions of legal construction. It even accustoms people to submit to see their direct vote given in the enactment of a state constitution nullified by the decision of a court holding that the federal Constitution has been contravened. Every page of American history illustrates the wholesome results. The events of the last few years present an instance of the constraint which the people put on themselves in order to respect every form of law. The Mormons, a community not exceeding 140,000 persons, persistently defied all the efforts of Congress to root out polygamy, a practice eminently repulsive to American notions. If they had inhabited a state, Congress could not have interfered at all, but as Utah was then only a Territory, Congress had not only a power of legislating for it which overrides Territorial ordinances passed by the local legislature, but the right to apply military force independent of local authorities. Thus the Mormons were really at the mercy of the federal government, had it chosen to employ violent methods. But by entrenching themselves behind the letter of the Constitution, they continued for many years to maintain their “peculiar institution” by evading the statutes passed against it and challenging a proof which under the common law rules of evidence it has been usually found impossible to give. Declaimers hounded on Congress to take arbitrary means for the suppression of the practice, but Congress and the executive submitted to be outwitted rather than depart from the accustomed principles of administration, and succeeded at last only by a statute whose searching but strictly constitutional provisions the recalcitrants failed to evade. The same spirit of legality shows itself in misgoverned cities. Even where it is notorious that officials have been chosen by the grossest fraud and that they are robbing the city, the body of the people, however indignant, recognize the authority and go on paying the taxes which a ring levies, because strict legal proof of the frauds and robberies is not forthcoming. Wrongdoing supplies a field for the display of virtue.

III. There is a broad simplicity about the political ideas of the people, and a courageous consistency in carrying them out in practice. When they have accepted a principle, they do not shrink from applying it “right through,” however disagreeable in particular cases some of the results may be. I am far from meaning that they are logical in the French sense of the word. They have little taste either for assuming abstract propositions or for syllogistically deducing practical conclusions therefrom. But when they have adopted a general maxim of policy or rule of action they show more faith in it than the English for instance would do; they adhere to it where the English would make exceptions; they prefer certainty and uniformity to the advantages which might occasionally be gained by deviation.3 If this tendency is partly the result of obedience to a rigid constitution, it is no less due to the democratic dislike of exceptions and complexities, which the multitude finds not only difficult of comprehension but disquieting to the individual who may not know how they will affect him. Take for instance the boundless freedom of the press. There are abuses obviously incident to such freedom, and these abuses have not failed to appear. But the Americans deliberately hold that in view of the benefits which such freedom on the whole promises, abuses must be borne with and left to the sentiment of the people and the private law of libel to deal with. When the Ku Klux Klan outrages disgraced several of the Southern states after the military occupation of those states had ceased, there was much to said for sending back the troops to protect the Negroes and Northern immigrants. But the general judgment that things ought to be allowed to take their natural course prevailed; and the result justified this policy, for the outrages after a while died out, when ordinary self-government had been restored. When recently a gigantic organization of unions of working men, purporting to unite the whole of American labour, attempted to enforce its sentences against particular firms or corporations by a boycott in which all labourers were urged to join, there was displeasure, but no panic, no call for violent remedies. The prevailing faith in liberty and in the good sense of the mass was unshaken; and the result is already justifying this tranquil faith. Such a tendency is not an unmixed blessing, for it sometimes allows evils to go too long unchecked. But in giving equability to the system of government it gives steadiness and strength. It teaches the people patience, accustoming them to expect relief only by constitutional means. It confirms their faith in their institutions, as friends value one another more when their friendship has stood the test of a journey full of hardships.

IV. American government, relying very little on officials, has the merit of arming them with little power of arbitrary interference. The reader who has followed the description of federal authorities, state authorities, county and city or township authorities, may think there is a great deal of administration; but the reason why these descriptions are necessarily so minute is because the powers of each authority are so carefully and closely restricted. It is natural to fancy that a government of the people and by the people will be led to undertake many and various functions for the people, and in the confidence of its strength will constitute itself a general philanthropic agency for their social and economic benefit. Of late years a current has begun to run in this direction.4 But the paternalism of America differs from that of Europe in acting not so much through officials as through the law. That is to say, when it prescribes to the citizen a particular course of action it relies upon the ordinary legal sanctions, instead of investing the administrative officers with inquisitorial duties or powers that might prove oppressive, and when it devolves active functions upon officials, they are functions serving to aid the individual and the community rather than to interfere with or supersede the action of private enterprise. Having dwelt on the evils which may flow from the undue application of the doctrine of direct popular sovereignty, I must remind the European reader that it is only fair to place to the credit of that doctrine and the arrangements it has dictated, the intelligence which the average native American shows in his political judgments, the strong sense he entertains of the duty of giving a vote, the spirit of alertness and enterprise, which has made him self-helpful above all other men.

V. There are no struggles between privileged and unprivileged orders, not even that perpetual strife of rich and poor which is the oldest disease of civilized states. One must not pronounce broadly that there are no classes, for in parts of the country social distinctions have begun to grow up. But for political purposes classes scarcely exist. No one of the questions which now agitate the nation is a question between rich and poor. Instead of suspicion, jealousy, and arrogance embittering the relations of class, good feeling and kindliness reign. Everything that government, as the Americans have hitherto understood the term, can give them, the poorer classes have already, political power, equal civil rights, a career open to all citizens alike, not to speak of that gratuitous higher as well as elementary education which on their own economic prines the United States might have abstained from giving, but which political reasons have led them to provide with so unstinting a hand. Hence the poorer have had little to fight for, no grounds for disliking the well-to-do, no complaints to make against them. The agitation of the last few years has been directed, not against the richer classes generally, but against incorporated companies and a few wealthy capitalists, who are deemed to have abused the powers which the privilege of incorporation conferred upon them, or employed their wealth to procure legislation unfair to the public. Where violent language has been used like that which France and Germany are familiar, it has been used, not by native Americans, but by newcomers, who bring their Old World passions with them. Property is safe, because those who hold it are far more numerous than those who do not: the usual motives for revolution vanish; universal suffrage, even when vested in ignorant newcomers, can do comparatively little harm, because the masses have obtained everything which they could hope to attain except by a general pillage. And the native Americans, though the same cannot be said of some of the recent immigrants, are shrewd enough to see that the poor would suffer from such pillage no less than the rich.

When I revised in 1894 the preceding part of this chapter, I left these words, which were written in 1888, to stand as they were. I leave them still in 1910, because they seem still to express the view which the most judicious Americans themselves then took and take now of their country. Looking at the labour troubles which have more than once occurred since 1888, including the great railroad strike riots of July 1894, that view may seem too roseate. But it must be remembered that strike riots are largely due to the passion of recent immigrants, whom American institutions have not had time to educate; and it must also be noted that the opinion of the native Americans, with little distinction of class, has usually approved the action, however bold, of the executive, federal or state, whenever it puts forth all its legal powers to repress disorder. It is not wonderful that over the immense area of the country the public should be now and then disturbed, and that the force to preserve it should sometimes be wanting. But things, so far from getting worse, seem rather to be mending.

A European censor may make two reflections on the statements of this part of the case. He will observe that, after all, it is no more than saying that when you have got to the bottom you can fall no farther. And he will ask whether, if property is safe and contentment reigns, these advantages are not due to the economical conditions of a new and resourceful country, with an abundance of unoccupied land and mineral wealth, rather than to the democratic structure of the government. The answer to the first objection is, that the descent towards equality and democracy has involved no injury to the richer or better educated classes; to the second, that although much must doubtless be ascribed to the bounty of nature, her favours have been so used by the people as to bring about a prosperity, a general diffusion of property, an abundance of freedom, of equality, and of good feeling which furnish the best security against the recurrence in America of chronic Old World evils, even when her economic state shall have become less auspicious than it now is. Wealthy and powerful such a country must have been under any form of government, but the speed with which she has advanced, and the employment of the sources of wealth to diffuse comfort among millions of families, may be placed to the credit of stimulative freedom. Wholesome habits have been established among the people whose value will be found when the times of pressure approach, and though the troubles that have arisen between labour and capital may not soon pass away, the sense of human equality, the absence of offensive privileges distinguishing class from class, will make those troubles less severe than in Europe, where they are complicated by the recollection of old wrongs, by arrogance on the one side and envy on the other.

Some American panegyrists of democracy have weakened their own case by claiming for a form of government all the triumphs which modern science has wrought in a land of unequalled natural resources. An active European race would probably have made America rich and prosperous under any government. But the volume and the character of the prosperity attained may be in large measure ascribed to the institutions of the country. As Dr. Charles W. Eliot observes in a singularly thoughtful address:

Sensible and righteous government ought ultimately to make a nation rich; and although this proposition cannot be directly reversed, yet diffused well-being, comfort, and material prosperity establish a fair presumption in favour of the government and the prevailing social conditions under which these blessings have been secured. . . .

The successful establishment and support of religious institutions—churches, seminaries, and religious charities—upon a purely voluntary system, is an unprecedented achievement of the American democracy. In only three generations American democratic society has effected the complete separation of Church and State, a reform which no other people has ever attempted. Yet religious institutions are not stinted in the United States; on the contrary, they abound and thrive, and all alike are protected and encouraged, but not supported, by the State. . . . The maintenance of churches, seminaries, and charities by voluntary contributions and by the administrative labours of volunteers, implies an enormous and incessant expenditure of mental and moral force. It is a force which must ever be renewed from generation to generation; for it is a personal force, constantly expiring, and as constantly to be replaced. Into the maintenance of the voluntary system in religion has gone a good part of the moral energy which three generations have been able to spare from the work of getting a living; but it is worth the sacrifice, and will be accounted in history one of the most remarkable feats of American public spirit and faith in freedom.

A similar exhibition of diffused mental and moral energy has accompanied the establishment and the development of a system of higher instruction in the United States, with no inheritance of monastic endowments, and no gifts from royal or ecclesiastical personages disposing of great resources derived from the State, and with but scanty help from the public purse. Whoever is familiar with the colleges and universities of the United States knows that the creation of these democratic institutions has cost the life-work of thousands of devoted men. At the sacrifice of other aspirations, and under heavy discouragements and disappointments, but with faith and hope, these teachers and trustees have built up institutions, which, however imperfect, have cherished scientific enthusiasm, fostered piety, literature, and art, maintained the standards of honour and public duty, and steadily kept in view the ethical ideals which democracy cherishes. It has been a popular work, to which large numbers of people in successive generations have contributed of their substance or of their labour. The endowment of institutions of education, including libraries and museums, by private persons in the United States is a phenomenon without precedent or parallel, and is a legitimate effect of democratic institutions. Under a tyranny—were it that of a Marcus Aurelius—or an oligarchy—were it as enlightened as that which now rules Germany—such a phenomenon would be simply impossible. Like the voluntary system in religion, the voluntary system in the higher education buttresses democracy; each demands from the community a large outlay of intellectual activity and moral vigour.

VI. The government of the Republic, limited and languid in ordinary times, is capable of developing immense vigour. It can pull itself together at moments of danger, can put forth unexpected efforts, can venture on stretches of authority transcending not only ordinary practice but even ordinary law. This is the result of the unity of the nation. A divided people is a weak people, even if it obeys a monarch; a united people is doubly strong when it is democratic, for then the force of each individual swells the collective force of the government, encourages it, relieves it from internal embarrassments. Now the American people is united at moments of national concern from two causes. One is that absence of class divisions and jealousies which has been already described. The people are homogeneous: a feeling which stirs them stirs alike rich and poor, farmers and traders, Eastern men and Western men—one may now add, Southern men also. Their patriotism has ceased to be defiant, and is conceived as the duty of promoting the greatness and happiness of their country, a greatness which, as it does not look to war or aggression, does not redound specially, as it might in Europe, to the glory or benefit of the ruling caste or the military profession, but to that of all the citizens. The other source of unity is the tendency in democracies for the sentiment of the majority to tell upon the sentiment of a minority. That faith in the popular voice whereof I have already spoken strengthens every feeling which has once become strong, and makes it rush like a wave over the country, sweeping everything before it. I do not mean that the people become wild with excitement, for beneath their noisy demonstrations they retain their composure and shrewd view of facts. I mean only that the pervading sympathy stirs them to unwonted efforts. The steam is superheated, but the effect is seen only in the greater expansive force which it exerts. Hence a spirited executive can in critical times go forward with a courage and confidence possible only to those who know that they have a whole nation behind them. The people fall into rank at once. With that surprising gift for organization which they possess, they concentrate themselves on the immediate object; they dispense with the ordinary constitutional restrictions; they make personal sacrifices which remind one of the self-devotion of Roman citizens in the earlier and better days of Rome.

Speaking thus, I am thinking chiefly of the spirit evolved by the Civil War both in the North and South. But the sort of strength which a democratic government derives from its direct dependence on the people is seen in many smaller instances. In 1863, when on the making of a draft of men for the war, the Irish mob rose in New York City, excited by the advance of General Robert E. Lee into Pennsylvania, the state government called out the troops, and by them restored order with a stern vigour which would have done credit to Radetzsky or Cavaignac. More than a thousand rioters were shot down, and public opinion entirely approved the slaughter. Years after the war, when the Orangemen of New York purposed to have a 12th of July procession through the streets, the Irish Catholics threatened to prevent it. The feeling of the native Americans was aroused at once; young men of wealth came back from their mountain and seaside resorts to fill the militia regiments which were called out to guard the procession, and the display of force was so overwhelming that no disturbance followed. These Americans had no sympathy with the childish and mischievous partisanship which leads the Orangemen to perpetuate Old World feuds on New World soil. But processions were legal, and they were resolved that the law should be respected, and the spirit of disorder repressed. They would have been equally ready to protect a Roman Catholic procession.

Given an adequate occasion, executive authority can better venture to take strong measures, and feels more sure of support from the body of the people, than is the case in England. When there is a failure to enforce the law, the fault lies at the door, not of the people, but of timid or time-serving officials who fear to offend some interested section of the voters.

VII. Democracy has not only taught the Americans how to use liberty without abusing it, and how to secure equality; it has also taught them fraternity. The word has gone out of fashion in the Old World, and no wonder, considering what was done in its name in 1793, considering also that it still figures in the programme of assassins. Nevertheless, there is in the United States a sort of kindliness, a sense of human fellowship, a recognition of the duty of mutual help owed by man to man, stronger than anywhere in the Old World, and certainly stronger than in the upper or middle classes of England, France, or Germany. The natural impulse of every citizen in America is to respect every other citizen, and to feel that citizenship constitutes a certain ground of respect. The idea of each man’s equal rights is so fully realized that the rich or powerful man feels it no indignity to take his turn among the crowd, and does not expect any deference from the poorest. Whether or no an employer of labour has any stronger sense of his duty to those whom he employs than employers have in Europe, he has certainly a greater sense of responsibility for the use of his wealth. The number of gifts for benevolent and other public purposes, the number of educational, artistic, literary, and scientific foundations, is larger than even in Britain, the wealthiest and most liberal of European countries. Wealth is generally felt to be a trust, and exclusiveness condemned not merely as indicative of selfishness, but as a sort of offence against the public. No one, for instance, thinks of shutting up his pleasure grounds; he seldom even builds a wall round them, but puts up only a low railing, so that the sight of his trees and shrubs is enjoyed by passers-by. That anyone should be permitted either by opinion or by law to seal up many square miles of beautiful mountain country against tourists or artists is to the ordinary American almost incredible. Such things are to him the marks of a land still groaning under feudal tyranny.

It may seem strange to those who know how difficult European states have generally found it to conduct negotiations with the government of the United States, and who are accustomed to read in European newspapers the defiant utterances which American politicians address from Congress to the effete monarchies of the Old World, to be told that this spirit of fraternity has its influence on international relations also. Nevertheless if we look not at the irresponsible orators, who play to the lower feelings of a section of the people, but at the general sentiment of the whole people, we shall recognize that democracy makes both for peace and for justice as between nations. Despite the admiration for military exploits which the Americans have sometimes shown, no country is at bottom more pervaded by a hatred of war, and a sense that national honour stands rooted in national fair dealing. The nation has been often misrepresented by its statesmen, but although it has sometimes allowed them to say irritating things and advance unreasonable claims, it has seldom permitted them to abuse its enormous strength, as most European nations possessed of similar strength have in time past abused theirs.

The characteristics of the American people which I have passed in review though not all due solely to democratic government, have been strengthened by it, and contribute to its solidity and to the smoothness of its working. As one sometimes sees an individual man who fails in life because the different parts of his nature seem unfitted to each other, so that his action, swayed by contending influences, results in nothing definite or effective, so one sees nations whose political institutions are either in advance of or lag behind their social conditions, so that the unity of the body politic suffers, and the harmony of its movements is disturbed. America is not such a nation. There have, no doubt, been two diverse influences at work on the minds of men. One is the conservative English spirit, brought from home, expressed, and (if one may say so) entrenched in those fastnesses of the federal Constitution, and (to a less degree) of the state constitutions, which reveal their English origin. The other is the devotion to democratic equality and popular sovereignty, due partly to Puritanism, partly to abstract theory, partly to the circumstances of the Revolutionary struggle. But since neither of these two streams of tendency has been able to overcome the other, they have at least become so blent as to form a definite type of political habits, and a self-consistent body of political ideas. Thus it may now be said that the country is made all of a piece. Its institutions have become adapted to its economic and social conditions and are the due expression of its character. The new wine has been poured into new bottles; or to adopt a metaphor more appropriate to the country, the vehicle has been built with a lightness, strength, and elasticity which fit it for the roads it has to traverse.

Note to Edition of 1914

I have allowed this and the two last preceding chapters to stand substantially as they were written in 1888 and revised in 1894, because the picture they present seems to be still true in its general outlines, though one might qualify it in some of the details. However, in every country time brings certain changes, and of those to be noted as having come to pass since 1894, the following seem most noteworthy.

Respect for the law is less generally evident, as has appeared in the frequent disorders caused by labour disputes.

The administration of the criminal law is more conspicuously defective.

There is less faith in representative government, and less reverence for the federal Constitution.

The power of wealth, and especially the power of the great corporations, has begun to decline. It had gone as far as in 1900 to arouse fear and resentment, and has since then been curbed.

The spirit which makes for “good citizenship” is more generally diffused, and the educated class in particular are more disposed to discharge their civic duties with earnestness and perseverance. This phenomenon, full of promise for the future of democratic government, is due partly to that resentment against the undue influence of wealth already mentioned, partly to a growing interest in what are called “social reforms.”

A reader who may think that some recent events point to conclusions more or less at variance with those stated in these chapters is requested to take the latter subject with the foregoing qualifications.

chapter 103

How Far American Experience Is Available for Europe

There are two substantial services which the study of history may render to politics. The one is to correct the use, which is generally the abuse, of the deductive or a priori method of reasoning in politics. The other is to save the politician from being misled by superficial historical analogies. He who repudiates the a priori method is apt to fancy himself a practical man, when, running to the other extreme, he argues directly from the phenomena of one age or country to those of another, and finding somewhat similar causes or conditions bids us to expect similar results. His error is as grave as that of the man who relies on abstract reasonings; for he neglects that critical examination of the premises from which every process of reasoning ought to start. The better trained any historical inquirer is, so much the more cautious will he be in the employment of what are called historical arguments in politics. He knows how necessary it is in an attempting to draw any conclusion of practical worth for one country from the political experience of another, to allow for the points in which the countries differ, because among these points there are usually some which affect the soundness of the inference, making it doubtful whether that which holds true of the one will hold true of the other. The value of history for students of politics or practical statesmen lies rather in its power of quickening their insight, in its giving them a larger knowledge of the phenomena of man’s nature as a political being and of the tendencies that move groups and communities of men, and thus teaching them how to observe the facts that come under their own eyes, and what to expect from the men with whom they have to deal. A thinker duly exercised in historical research will carry his stores of the world’s political experience about with him, not as a book of prescriptions or recipes from which he can select one to apply to a given case, but rather as a physician carries a treatise on pathology which instructs him in the general principles to be followed in observing the symptoms and investigating the causes of the maladies that come before him. So, although the character of democratic government in the United States is full of instruction for Europeans, it supplies few conclusions directly bearing on the present politics of any European country, because both the strong and the weak points of the American people are not exactly repeated anywhere in the Old World, not even in such countries as France, Switzerland, and England. The picture given of the phenomena of America in preceding chapters has probably already suggested to the reader the inferences to be drawn from it, and such application as they may have to Europe. I shall therefore be here content with recapitulating in the most concise way the points in which the institutions of the United States and the methods employed in working them seem, if not quite directly, yet most nearly, to touch and throw light upon European problems. America has in some respects anticipated European nations. She is walking before them along a path which they may probably follow. She carries behind her, to adopt a famous simile of Dante’s, a lamp whose light helps those who come after her more than it always does herself, because some of the dangers she has passed through may not recur at any other point in her path; whereas they, following in her footsteps, may stumble in the same stony places, or be entangled in the quagmires into which she has slipped.

I.

Manhood Suffrage.

This has now been adopted by so many peoples of Europe that they have the less occasion to study its transatlantic aspects. The wisest Americans, while appreciating the strength which it gives to their government, and conceiving that they could hardly have stopped short of it, hold that their recent experiences does not invite imitation by European nations, unless at least Europeans adopt safeguards resembling those they have applied. With those safeguards the abolition of property qualifications has, so far as the native population is concerned, proved successful; but in the hands of the Negroes at the South, or the newly enfranchised immigrants of the larger cities, a vote is, and is now generally admitted to be, a dangerous weapon.

II.

The Civil Service.

To keep minor administrative offices out of politics, to make them tenable for life and obtainable by merit instead of by private patronage, is at present the chief aim of American reformers. They are laboriously striving to bring their civil service up to the German or British level. If there is any lesson they would seek to impress on Europeans, it is the mischief of allowing politics to get into the hands of men who seek to make a living by them, and of suffering public offices to become the reward of party work. Rather, they would say, interdict officeholders from participation in politics; appoint them by competition, however absurd competition may sometimes appear, choose them by lot, like the Athenians and Florentines; only do not let offices be tenable at the pleasure of party chiefs and lie in the uncontrolled patronage of persons who can use them to strengthen their own political position.1

III.

The Judiciary.

The same observation applies to judicial posts, and with no less force. The American state bench suffers both from the too prevalent system of popular election and from the scanty remuneration allotted. To procure men of character, learning, and intellectual power, and to keep them independent, ample remuneration must be paid, a life tenure secured, and the appointments placed in responsible hands. There is nothing in the English frame of government which thoughtful Americans so much admire as the maintenance of a high level of integrity and capacity in the judges; and they often express a hope that nothing will be done to lower the position of officials on whose excellence the well-being and commercial credit of a country largely depend.2

IV.

Character and Working of Legislatures.3

Although the rule of representative chambers has been deemed the most characteristic feature of well-ordered free governments, as contrasted with the impetuous democracies of antiquity which legislated by primary assemblies, it must be confessed that the legislative bodies of the United States have done something to discredit representative government. Whether this result is mainly due, as some think, to the disconnection of the executive from the legislature, or whether it must be traced to deeper sources of weakness, it is not without instruction for those who would in Europe vest in legislatures, and, perhaps, even in one-chambered legislatures, still wider powers of interference with administration than they now possess.

V.

Second Chambers.4

The Americans consider the division of every political legislature into two coordinate bodies to be absolutely necessary; and their opinion, in this respect, is the more valuable because several states tried for a time to work with one chamber, and because they are fully sensible of the inconveniences which the frequent collision of two chambers involves. Their view is, doubtless, tinged by the low opinion which they hold of the quality of their legislators. Distrusting these, they desire to place every possible check upon their action. In cities it does not appear that either the two-chambered or the one-chambered system shows any advantage over the other; but it is now beginning to be seen that city government has altogether been planned too much on political lines, and is conducted too little according to business methods.

VI.

Length of Legislative Terms.5

The gain and the loss in having legislatures elected for short terms are sufficiently obvious. To a European, the experience of Congress seems to indicate that the shortness of its term is rather to be avoided than imitated. It is not needed in order to secure the obedience of Congress to the popular will: it increases the cost of politics by making elections more frequent, and it keeps a considerable proportion of the legislators employed in learning a business which they are dismissed from as soon as they have learnt it.

VII.

Indirect Elections.6

American experience does not commend this device, which, until the establishment of the present mode of choosing the French Senate, was chiefly known from its employment in the Republic of Venice. The choice of the president by electors, chosen for the purpose, has wholly failed to attain the object its authors desired. The election of senators by state legislatures give no better, and possibly worse, men to the Senate than direct popular election would give.

VIII.

A Rigid Constitution.7

Although several European states have now placed themselves under constitutions not alterable by their legislatures in the same way as ordinary statutes are altered, America furnishes in her state governments, as well as in her federal government, by far the most instructive examples of the working of a system under which certain laws are made fundamental, and surrounded not only with a sort of consecration, but with provisions which make change comparatively difficult. There is nothing in their system with whose results, despite some obvious drawbacks, the multitude as well as the wise are so well satisfied; nothing which they more frequently recommend to the consideration of those Europeans who are alarmed at the progress which democracy makes in the Old World.

IX.

Direct Legislation by the People.8

In this respect also the example of the several states—for the federal government is not in point—deserves to be well studied by English and French statesmen. The plan, whose merits seem to me in America to outweigh its defects, could hardly work as well in a large country as it does in communities of the size of the American states, and in the new form of initiative it offers an alluringly easy means of effecting radical changes. The method is useful less by its own merits than by comparison with the faults of the legislatures. The people are as likely to be right in judgment as are those bodies; and they are more honest and more independent, but in countries which have capable and trustworthy legislatures direct legislation might work ill by lowering the dignity and importance of such bodies. It would be an appeal from comparative knowledge to comparative ignorance. This consideration does not apply to its use in local affairs, where it stimulates the activity of the citizen without superseding the administrative body.

X.

Local Self-Government.9

Nothing has more contributed to give strength and flexibility to the government of the United States, or to train the masses of the people to work their democratic institutions, than the existence everywhere in the Northern states of self-governing administrative units, such as townships, small enough to enlist the personal interest and be subject to the personal watchfulness and control of the ordinary citizen. Abuses have indeed sprung up in the cities, and in the case of the largest among them, have become formidable, partly because the principle of local control has not been sufficiently adhered to. Nevertheless the system of local government as a whole has been not merely beneficial, but indispensable, and well deserves the study of those who in Europe are alive to the evils of centralization, and perceive that those evils will not necessarily diminish with a further democratization of such countries as Britain, Germany, and Italy. I do not say that in any of the great European states the mass of the rural population is equally competent with the American to work such a system; still it presents a model towards which European institutions ought to tend. Very different is the lesson which the American cities teach. It is a lesson of what to avoid. Nowhere have the conjoint influences of false theory, party cohesion, and the apathy of good citizens, together with a recklessly granted suffrage, rendered municipal government so wasteful, inefficient, and impure.

XI.

The Absence of a Church Establishment.

As the discussion of ecclesiastical matters belongs to a later part of this book,10 I must be content with observing that in America everybody, to whatever religious communion he belongs, professes satisfaction with the complete separation of church and state. This separation has not tended to make religion less of a force in America as respects either political or social reform, nor does it prevent the people from considering Christianity to be the national religion, and their commonwealth an object of the Divine care.

XII.

Party Machinery.11

The tremendous power of party organization had been described. It enslaves local officials, it increases the tendency to regard members of Congress as mere delegates, it keeps men of independent character out of local and national politics, it puts bad men into place, it perverts the wishes of the people, it has in some places set up a tyranny under the forms of democracy. Yet it is hard to see how free government can go without parties, and certain that the strenuous rivalry of parties will not dispense with machinery. The moral seems to the old one that “ Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom,” that the best citizens must, as the Americans say, “take hold,” must by themselves accepting posts in the organization keep it from falling into the hands of professionals, must entrust as few lucrative places as possible to popular election or political patronage, must leave reasonable discretion to their representatives in the national councils, must endeavour to maintain in politics the same standard of honour which guides them in private life. These are moral rather than political precepts, but party organization is one of those things which is good or bad according to the spirit with which it is worked.

XIII.

The Unattractiveness of Politics.12

Partly from the influence of party machinery, partly from peculiarities of the federal Constitution, partly from social and economical causes, the American system does not succeed in bringing the best men to the top. Yet in democracy more perhaps than in other governments, seeing it is the most delicate and difficult of governments, it is essential that the best men should come to the top. There is in fact this matter for Europeans to reflect upon, for they have assumed that political success will always attract ambition, and that public life will draw at least enough of the highest ability. America disproves the assumption. Her example does not, however, throw much light on the way to keep politics attractive, for her conditions are dissimilar to those of European countries, where ambition finds less scope for distinction in the field of industrial enterprise, and rank is less disjoined from political eminence.

XIV.

The Power of Wealth.

Plutocracy used to be considered a form of oligarchy, and opposed to democracy. But there is a strong plutocratic element infused into American democracy; and the fact that constitutions ignore differences of property, treating all votes alike, makes it neither less potent nor less mischievous. Of the power of wealth democracies may say, with Dante, Here we find the great enemy.13 Though it has afflicted all forms of government, it seems specially pernicious in a popular government, because when the disease appeared under despotisms and oligarchies, freedom was deemed the only and sufficient antidote. Experience, however, shows that in democracies it is no less menacing, for the personal interest of the average man in good government—and in a large democracy he feels himself insignificant— is overborne by the inducements which wealth, skilfully employed, can offer him; and when once the average man’s standard of public virtue has been lowered by the sight of numerous defections from virtue in others, great is the difficulty of raising it. In the United States the money power acts by corrupting sometimes the voter, sometimes the juror, sometimes the legislator, sometimes a whole party; for large subscriptions and promises of political support have been known to influence a party to procure or refrain from such legislation as wealth desires or fears. The rich, and especially great corporations, have not only enterprises to promote but dangers to escape from at the hands of unscrupulous demagogues or legislators. But whether their action has this palliation or not, the belief, often well grounded, that they exercise a secret power in their own interests, exasperates other sections of the community, and has been a factor in producing not only unwise legislation directed against them, but also outbreaks of lawless violence.

To these scattered observations, which I have made abrupt in order to avoid being led into repetitions, I need hardly add the general moral which the United States teach, that the masses of the people are wiser, fairer, and more temperate in any matter to which they can be induced to bend their minds than most European philosophers have believed it possible for the masses of the people to be; because this is the moral which the preceding chapters in public opinion have been intended to make clear. But the reader is again to be reminded that while the foregoing points are those in which American experience seems most directly available for European states, he must not expect the problems America has dealt with to reappear in Europe in the same forms. Such facts—to mention two only out of many—as the abundance of land and the absence of menace from other powers show how dissimilar are the conditions under which popular government works in the Eastern and Western Hemisphere. Instructive as American experience may be if discretely used, nothing will be more misleading to one who tries to apply it without allowing for the differences of economic and social environment.

Part VI

Social Institutions

chapter 104

The Bar

Among the organized institutions of a country which, while not directly a part of the government, influence politics as well as society, the bar has in England, Scotland, and France played a part only second to that played by the church. Certainly no English institution is more curiously and distinctively English than this body, with its venerable traditions, its aristocratic sympathies, its strong, though now declining, corporate spirit, its affinity for certain forms of literature, its singular relation, half of dependence, half of condescension, to the solicitors, its friendly control over its official superiors, the judges. To see how such an institution has shaped itself and thriven in a new country is to secure an excellent means of estimating the ideas, conditions, and habits which affect and colour the social system of that country, as well as to examine one of the chief among the secondary forces of public life. It is therefore not merely for the sake of satisfying the curiosity of English lawyers that I propose to sketch some of the salient features of the legal profession as it exists in the United States, and to show how it has developed apart from the restrictions imposed on it in England by ancient custom, and under the unchecked operation of the laws of demand and supply.

When England sent out her colonies, the bar, like most of her other institutions, reappeared upon the new soil, and had gained before the revolution of 1776 a position similar to that it held at home, not owing to any deliberate purpose on the part of those who led and ruled the new communities (for the Puritan settlers at least held lawyers in slight esteem), but because the conditions of a progressive society required its existence. That disposition to simplify and popularize law, to make it less of a mystery and bring it more within the reach of an average citizen, which is strong in modern Europe, is of course still stronger in a colony, and naturally tended in America to lessen the corporate exclusiveness of the legal profession, and do away with the antiquated rules which had governed it in England. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of relations in modern society, and the development of many new arts and departments of applied science, bring into an always clearer light the importance of a division of labour, and, by attaching greater value to special knowledge and skill, tend to limit and define the activity of every profession. In spite, therefore, of the democratic aversion to exclusive organizations, the lawyers in America soon acquired professional habits and a corporate spirit similar to that of their brethren in England; and early last century they had reached a power and social consideration relatively greater than the bar has ever held on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

But the most characteristic peculiarity of the English system disappeared. In the United States, as in some parts of Europe, and most British colonies, there is no distinction between barristers and attorneys. Every lawyer, or “counsel,” is permitted to take every kind of business: he may argue a cause in the Supreme Federal Court at Washington, or write six-and-eightpenny letters from a shopkeeper to an obstinate debtor. He may himself conduct all the proceedings in a cause, confer with the client, issue the writ, draw the declaration, get together the evidence, prepare the brief, and conduct the case when it comes on in court. He is employed, not like the English barrister, by another professional man, but by the client himself, who seeks him out and makes his bargain directly with him, just as in England people call in a physician or make their bargain with an architect. In spite, however, of this union of all a lawyer’s functions in the same person, considerations of practical convenience have in many places established a division of labour similar to that existing in England. Where two or more lawyers are in partnership, it often happens that one member undertakes the court work and the duties of the advocate, while another or others transact the rest of the business, see the clients, conduct correspondence, hunt up evidence, prepare witnesses for examination, and manage the thousand little things for which a man goes to his attorney. The merits of the plan are obvious. It saves the senior member from drudgery, and from being distracted by petty details; it introduces the juniors to business, and enables them to profit by the experience and knowledge of the mature practitioner; it secures to the client the benefit of a closer attention to details than a leading counsel could be expected to give, while yet the whole of his suit is managed in the same office, and the responsibility is not divided, as in England, between two independent personages. However, the custom of forming legal partnerships is one which prevails much more extensively in some parts of the Union than in others. In Boston and New York, for instance, it is common, and I think in the Western cities; in the towns of Connecticut and in Philadelphia one is told that it is rather the exception. Even apart from the arrangement which distributes the various kinds of business among the members of a firm, there is a certain tendency for work of a different character to fall into the hands of different men. A beginner is of course glad enough to be employed in any way, and takes willingly the smaller jobs; he will conduct a defence in a police court, or manage the recovery of a tradesman’s petty debt. I remember having been told by a very eminent counsel that when an old apple-woman applied to his son to have her market licence renewed, which for some reason had been withdrawn, he had insisted on the young man’s taking up the case. As he rises, it becomes easier for him to select his business, and when he has attained real eminence he may confine himself entirely to the higher walks, arguing cases and giving opinions, but leaving most of the preparatory work and all the communications with the client to be done by the juniors who are retained along with him. He is, in fact, with the important difference that he is liable for any negligence, very much in the position of an English leader or King’s counsel, and his services are sought, not only by the client, but by another counsel, or firm of counsel, who have an important suit in hand, to which they feel themselves unequal. He may however be, and often is, retained directly by the client; and in that case he is allowed to retain a junior to aid him, or to desire the client to do so, naming the man he wishes for, a thing which the etiquette of the English bar is supposed to forbid. In every great city there are several practitioners of this kind, men who only undertake the weightiest business at the largest fees; and even in the minor towns court practice is in the hands of a comparatively small group. In one New England city, for instance, whose population is about 50,000, there are, I was told, some sixty or seventy practising lawyers, of whom not more than ten or twelve ever conduct a case in court, the remainder doing what Englishmen would call attorney’s and conveyancer’s work.

Whatever disadvantages this system of one undivided legal profession has, it has one conspicuous merit, on which anyone who is accustomed to watch the career of the swarm of young men who annually press into the Temple or Lincoln’s Inn full of bright hopes, may be pardoned for dwelling. It affords a far better prospect of speedy employment and an active professional life, than the beginner who is not “strongly backed” can look forward to in England. Private friends can do much more to help a young man, since he gets business direct from the client instead of from a solicitor; he may pick up little bits of work which his prosperous seniors do not care to have, may thereby learn those details of practice of which in England a barrister often remains ignorant, may gain experience and confidence in his own powers, may teach himself how to speak and how to deal with men, may gradually form a connection among those for whom he has managed trifling matters, may commend himself to the good opinion of older lawyers, who will be glad to retain him as their junior when they have a brief to give away. So far he is better off than the young barrister in England. He is also, in another way, more favourably placed than the young English solicitor. He is not taught to rely in cases of legal difficulty upon the opinion of another person. He does not see the path of an honourable ambition, the opportunities of forensic oratory, the access to the judicial bench, irrevocably closed against him, but has the fullest freedom to choose whatever line his talents fit him for. Every English lawyer’s experience, as it furnishes him with cases where a man was obliged to remain an attorney who would have shone as a counsel, so also suggests cases of persons who were believed, and with reason believed, by their friends to possess the highest forensic abilities, but literally never had the chance of displaying them, and languished on in obscurity, while others in every way inferior to them became, by mere dint of practice, fitter for ultmate success. Quite otherwise in A

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Supplementary Note to Editions of 1910 and 1914 - Viscount James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 [1888]

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Supplementary Note to Editions of 1910 and 1914

REMARKS ON THE GROWTH OF PARTY: ITS PERVERSIONS AND THE REMEDIES APPLIED

Part IV

Public Opinion

chapter 76

The Nature of Public Opinion

chapter 77

Government by Public Opinion

chapter 78

How Public Opinion Rules in America

chapter 79

Organs of Public Opinion

chapter 80

National Characteristics as Moulding Public Opinion

chapter 81

Classes as Influencing Opinion

chapter 82

Local Types of Opinion—East, West, and South

chapter 83

The Action of Public Opinion

chapter 84

The Tyranny of the Majority

chapter 85

The Fatalism of the Multitude

chapter 86

Wherein Public Opinion Fails

chapter 87

Wherein Public Opinion Succeeds

Part V

Illustrations & Reflections

chapter 88

The Tammany Ring in New York City

chapter 89

The Philadelphia Gas Ring

chapter 90

Kearneyism in California

I.

The Character of California

II.

The Sand Lot Party

III.

The New Constitution

IV.

Observations on the Movement

EPILOGUE TO THIS AND THE TWO LAST PRECEDING CHAPTERS

chapter 91

The Home of the Nation

chapter 92

The Latest Phase of Immigration

chapter 93

The South Since the War

chapter 94

Present and Future of the Negro1

chapter 95

Further Reflections on the Negro Problem

chapter 96

Foreign Policy and Territorial Extension

chapter 97

The New Transmarine Dominions

chapter 98

Laissez Faire

N O T E

chapter 99