THE
AMERICAN REPUBLIC: CHAPTER 14
ITS
CONSTITUTION TENDENCIES AND DESTINY
Orestes A. Brownson LL. D
TABLE OF CONTENTS
POLITICAL TENDENCIES
The most marked political tendency of the American people has been,
since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and simple
democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely popular
basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably united to the
national territory or domain, to the people as simply population,
either as individuals or as the race. Their tendency has
unconsciously, therefore, been to change their constitution from a
republican to a despotic, or from a civilized to a barbaric
constitution.
The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the people
are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their name; that the
rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to them; but they are
the people territorially constituted and fixed to the soil,
constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety perhaps than he
thinks, calls a "territorial democracy." To this territorial
democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed two other
democracies—the one personal and the other humanitarian—each alike
hostile to civilization, and tending to destroy the state, and capable
of sustaining government only on principles common to all despotisms.
In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and
unrestrained action—a strong desire to be himself, not another—to be
his own master, to go when and where he pleases, to do what he chooses,
to take what he wants, wherever he can find it, and to keep what he
takes. It is strong in all nomadic tribes, who are at once pastoral
and predatory, and is seldom weak in our bold frontier-men, too often
real "border ruffians." It takes different forms in different stages of
social development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.
Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief of
the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its enjoyment to the
few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a nobility—for nobleman meant
originally only freeman, as it does his own consent, express or
constructive. This is the so-called Jeffersonian democracy, in which
government has no powers but such as it derives from the consent of the
governed, and is personal democracy or pure individualism
philosophically considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God." Under
this sort of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual
sovereignty, expressed by politicians when they call the electoral
people, half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there
obviously can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there
can be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or
confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as long as
they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from which they may
separate or secede whenever they find it for their interest or their
pleasure to do so. State sovereignty and secession are based on the
same democratic principle applied to the several States of the Union
instead of individuals.
The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large
sections of the American people from the first, and has been greatly
strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that government
originates in compact. The full realization of this tendency, which,
happily, is impracticable save in theory, would be to render every man
independent alike of every other man and of society, with full right
and power to make his own will prevail. This tendency was strongest in
the slaveholding States, and especially, in those States, in the
slaveholding class, the American imitation of the feudal nobility of
mediaeval Europe; and on this side the war just ended was, in its most
general expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the
sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian
democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial
democracy, represented by the Government. This personal democracy has
been signally defeated in the defeat of the late confederacy, and can
hardly again become strong enough to be dangerous.
But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical lines,
effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant itself on
humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength, and is not
without menace to our future. The solidarity of the race, which is the
condition of all human life, founds, as we have seen, society, and
creates what are called social rights, the rights alike of society in
regard to individuals, and of individuals in regard to society.
Territorial divisions or circumscriptions found particular societies,
states, or nations; yet as the race is one and all its members live by
communion with God through it and by communion one with another, these
particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of each
other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so that there
is a real solidarity of nations as well as of individuals—the truth
underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of the solidarity of peoples.
The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law, binding on
every particular nation, and which every civilized nation recognizes
and enforces on its own subjects or citizens through its own courts as
an integral part of its own municipal or national law.
The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the rights
of society, and the rights of the particular society or nation are
limited by international law, or the rights of universal society—the
truth the ex-governor of Hungary overlooked. The grand error of
Gentilism was in denying the unity and therefore the solidarity of the
race, involved in its denial or misconception of the unity of God. It
therefore was never able to assign any solid basis to international
law, and gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus
leaving the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the real
world. Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its
basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by
the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the
living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine
Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian
revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all
Christendom.
The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the social
basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on the solidarity
of the race, and to make all rights and powers personal, or individual;
and as only the white race has been able to assert and maintain its
personal freedom, only men of that race are held to have the right to
be free. Hence the people of those States felt no scruple in holding
the black or colored race as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right
only of those who have the ability to assert and maintain it. Let the
negro prove that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a gross
outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till then, let him
be my servant, which is best for him and for me. Why ask me to free
him? I shall by doing so only change the form of his servitude. Why
appeal to me! Am I my brother's keeper? Nay, is he my brother? Is
this negro, more like an ape or a baboon than a human being, of the
same race with myself? I believe it not. But in some instances, at
least, my dear slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and
sometimes even your son, born of your own daughter. The tendency of
the Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as all
obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and therefore
all true civil society.
At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite tendency—a
tendency to exaggerate the social element, to overlook the territorial
basis of the state, and to disregard the rights of individuals. This
tendency has been and is strong in the people called abolitionists.
The American abolitionist is so engrossed with the unity that he loses
the solidarity of the race, which supposes unity of race and
multiplicity of individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and
authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial
circumscriptions. Back of these, back of individuals, he sees
humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, governments, and
laws, and holds that he may trample on them all or give them to the
winds at the call of humanity or "the higher law." The principle on
which he acts is as indefensible as the personal or egoistical
democracy of the slaveholders and their sympathizers. Were his
socialistic tendency to become exclusive and realized, it would found
in the name of humanity a complete social despotism, which, proving
impracticable from its very generality, would break up in anarchy, in
which might makes right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its
generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can
recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much out
of the order of civilization, and as much in that of barbarism, as is
the slaveholder himself. Wendell Phillips is as far removed from true
Christian civilization as was John C. Calhoun, and William Lloyd
Garrison is as much of a barbarian and despot in principle and tendency
as Jefferson Davis. Hence the great body of the people in the
non-slaveholding States, wedded to American democracy as they were and
are could never, as much as they detested slavery, be induced to make
common cause with the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the
late civil war was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the
time the social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same
enemy. The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt that pure
socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as pure
individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that slavery has
been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic reasons but really
for reasons of state, in order to save the territorial democracy. The
territorial democracy would not unite to eliminate even so barbaric an
element as slavery, till the rebellion gave them the constitutional
right to abolish it; and even then so scrupulous were they, that they
demanded a constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean
work of it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in demanding
its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds. Slavery is really
a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism to American
civilization. The whole force of the national life opposes it, and
must finally eliminate it, or become itself extinct and it is no mean
proof of their utter want of sympathy with all the living forces of
modern civilization, that the leading men of the South and their
prominent friends at the North really persuaded themselves that with
cotton, rice, and tobacco, they could effectually resist the
anti-slavery movement, and perpetuate their barbaric democracy. They
studied the classics, they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that
those nations became great by slavery, instead of being great even in
spite of slavery. They failed to take into the account the fact that
when Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if they
were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their times,
they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly civilized
nations of all times. They failed also to perceive that, if the
Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole territorial people in
the political people, it yet recognized both the social and the
territorial foundation of the state, and never attempted to rest it on
pure individualism; they forgot, too, that Greece and Rome both fell,
and fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism
within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.
The world has changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves
were sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
master. The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and every
species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen saw not.
It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or national, the
real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise question in debate
is clearly and distinctly understood by either party. Slavery was only
incidentally involved in the late war. The war was occasioned by the
collision of two extreme parties; but it was itself a war between
civilization and barbarism, primarily between the territorial democracy
and the personal democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation,
as much a war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the
individualism of the slaveholder. Yet the victory, though complete
over the former, is only half won over the latter, for it has left the
humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for the moment stronger
than ever. The socialistic democracy was enlisted by the territorial,
not to strengthen the government at home, as it imagines, for that it
did not do, and could not do, since the national instinct was even more
opposed to it than to the personal democracy; but under its antislavery
aspect, to soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign
intervention, which was seriously threatened. The populations of
Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly anti-slavery,
and if the war here appeared to them a war, not solely for the unity of
the nation and the integrity of its domain, as it really was, in which
they took and could take no interest, but a war for the abolition of
slavery, their governments would not venture to intervene. This was
the only consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself
assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation
Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the rebellion
only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors the late
President only as their supposed liberator, not as the preserver of the
unity and integrity of the nation. This is natural enough abroad, and
proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery policy of the government, which
had become absolutely necessary to save the Republic long before it was
adopted; yet it is not as the emancipator of some two or three millions
of slaves that the American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham
Lincoln, but, aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and
troops of unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the
American state, and the protector of modern civilization. His
anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but he
adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or negro
freedom. That was only an incidental issue, as the really great men of
the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were willing themselves
at last to free and arm their own negroes, and perhaps were willing to
do it even at first. This fact alone proves that they had, or believed
they had, a far more important cause than the preservation of negro
slavery. They fought for personal democracy, under the form of State
sovereignty, against social democracy; for personal freedom and
independence against social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their
cause was as good as that against which they took up arms; and if they
had or could have fought against that, without fighting at the same
time against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
democracy, they would have succeeded. It is not socialism nor
abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has conquered. The
Union itself has won no victories over the South, and it is both
historically and legally false to say that the South has been
subjugated. The Union has preserved itself and American civilization,
alike for North and South, East and West. The armies that so often met
in the shock of battle were not drawn up respectively by the North and
the South, but by two rival democracies, to decide which of the two
should rule the future. They were the armies of two mutually
antagonistic systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly
conscious of the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it but
dimly discerned. On both sides the cause was broader and deeper than
negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the abolitionists
have won. The territorial democracy alone has won, and won what will
prove to be a final victory over the purely personal democracy, which
had its chief seat in the Southern States, though by no means confined
to them. The danger to American democracy from that quarter is forever
removed, and democracy à la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of it.
But in this world victories are never complete. The socialistic
democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not patriotism,
that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the brave men led by
McClellan, Grant, and Sherman. The humanitarians are more dangerous in
principle than the egoists, for they have the appearance of building on
a broader and deeper foundation, of being more Christian, more
philosophic, more generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more
successful than under the guise of an angel of light. His favorite
guise in modern times is that of philanthropy. He is a genuine
humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism is
Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming sentiment
of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes both
individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when they believe
they are earnestly and most successfully doing the work of God. Your
leading abolitionists are as much affected by satanophany as your
leading confederates, nor are they one whit more philosophical or less
sophistical. The one loses the race, the other the individual, and
neither has learned to apply practically that fundamental truth that
there is never the general without the particular, nor the particular
without the general, the race without individuals, nor individuals
without the race. The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we
are taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race, and
Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that original sin
was in him actual or personal sin.
The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses men
in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor to secure
the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother Jansenist
sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the freedom of
grace. Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of slavery, to-day he
agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality, and announces that when he
has secured that he will agitate for female suffrage and the equality
of the sexes, forgetting or ignorant that the relation of equality
subsists only between individuals of the same sex; that God made the
man the head of the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for
the woman. Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in
social, industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and
agitate for equality of property. But since property, if recognized at
all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther
still, and agitate for the total abolition of property, as an
injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with M. Proudhon, or the
Englishman Godwin. It is unjust that one should have what another
wants, or even more than another. What right have you to ride in your
coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on
foot? Nor can our humanitarian stop there. Individuals are, and as
long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and
some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger
or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
therefore some have natural advantages which others have not. There is
inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the
abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals
to the race, or humanity, man in general. He can find no limit to his
agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a
pure nullity, for he respects no territorial or individual
circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder. This
is not fancy, for he has gone very nearly as far as it is here shown,
if logical, he must go.
The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be
interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian
democracy. It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of
the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our
bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in
prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal,
hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor
of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion. They had no
wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have
regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; but they
held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern
abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization. For
the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy,
all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even
ostentatious in theirs. The Catholics feared the war might result in
encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian
sects trusted that it would. If the victory of the Union should turn
out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world
will have no reason to applaud it.
That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be taken as
a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be idle to deny.
It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party throughout the world are
in ecstasies over it. The party claim it. The European Socialists and
Red Republicans applaud it, and the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict
on us the deep humiliation of their congratulations. A cause that can
be approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must be
strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element. It is no
compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of men who assert
not only people-king, but people-God; and those Americans who are
delighted with them are worse enemies to the American democracy than
ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, and more
contemptible, as the swindler is more contemptible than the highwayman.
But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their host.
Not they are the real victors. When the smoke of battle has cleared
away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by the Republic, and
that that alone has triumphed. The abolitionists, in so far as they
asserted the unity of the race and opposed slavery as a denial of that
unity, have also won; but in so far as they denied the reality or
authority of territorial and individual circumscriptions, followed a
purely socialistic tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a
watery sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been
crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late insurrectionary
States are fully reconstructed. The Southern or egoistical democrats,
so far as they denied the unity and solidarity of the race, the rights
of society over individuals, and the equal rights of each and every
individual in face of the state, or the obligations of society to
protect the weak and help the helpless, have been also defeated; but so
far as they asserted personal or individual rights which society
neither gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State
sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General
government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, they
share in the victory, as the future will prove.
European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly
against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State, have no
lot or part in the victory of the American people: not for them nor for
men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers
fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in
modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as
themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives,
and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the
waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to
repair. They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and
civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history. The
American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species
of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority,
and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized
governments—not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them.
The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative;
but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false
democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of
insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an
aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should
always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever
plots its destruction. They must never be delighted again to have
their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
to his own sovereign as the nation's guest. The people of the Northern
States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the
people of the Southern States. Their press had taught them to call
every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the
traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they
had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the
Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and
traitors. But their own government has found it necessary for the
public safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they
will most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead of
lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the reign
of barbarism.
The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by the
failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the disintegrating
element, either in the particular State or in the United States, is
henceforth to be apprehended. But the tendency in the opposite
direction may give the American state some trouble. The tendency now
is, as to the Union, consolidation, and as to the particular state,
humanitarianism, socialism, or centralized democracy. Yet this
tendency, though it may do much mischief, will hardly become exclusive.
The States that seceded, when restored, will always, even in abandoning
State sovereignty, resist it, and still assert State rights. When
these States are restored to their normal position, they will always be
able to protect themselves against any encroachments on their special
rights by the General government. The constitution, in the
distribution of the powers of government, provides the States severally
with ample means to protect their individuality against the
centralizing tendency of the General government, however strong it may
be.
The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General
government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look upon it
as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to regard the
several State governments as subordinate instead of co-ordinate
governments. It is not improbable that the Executive, since the
outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded throughout on that
supposition, and hence his extraordinary assumptions of power; but when
once peace is fully re-established and the States have all resumed
their normal position in the Union, every State will be found prompt
enough to resist any attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights.
Its instinct of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will
be protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United States.
The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of the
States is far less than the danger that the Executive will usurp all
the powers of Congress and the judiciary. Congress, during the
rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could, with dictatorial
powers, and these powers the Executive continues to exercise even after
the rebellion is suppressed. They were given and held under the rights
of war, and for war purposes only, and expired by natural limitation
when the war ceased; but the Executive forgets this, and, instead of
calling Congress together and submitting the work of reconstruction of
the States that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to
reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign; 372 and
the people seem to like it. He might and should, as commander-in-chief
of the army and navy, govern them as military departments, by his
lieutenants, till Congress could either create provisional civil
governments for them or recognize them as self-governing States in the
Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war
power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every
act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and
done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity.
His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are
inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them.
Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public sentiment, and a
deep wound is inflicted on the constitution, which will be long in
healing.
The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not
originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a long time
before. There is a growing disposition on the part of Congress to
throw as much of the business of government as possible into the hands
of the Executive. The patronage the Executive wields, even in times of
peace, is so large that he has indirectly an almost supreme control
over the legislative branch of the government. For this, which is,
and, if not checked will continue to be, a growing evil, there is no
obvious remedy, unless the President is chosen for a longer term of
office and made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous
doctrine of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the
true interests of the public. Here is matter for the consideration of
the American statesman. But as to the usurpations of the Executive in
these unsettled times, they will be only temporary, and will cease when
the States are all restored. They are abuses, but only temporary
abuses, and the Southern States, when restored to the Union, will
resume their rights in their own sphere, as self-governing communities,
and legalize or undo the unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.
The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the
individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able to
become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not begin at
home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance. In the States
in which the humanitarian tendency is the strongest, the territorial
democracy has its most effective organization. Prior to the outbreak
of the rebellion the American people had asserted popular sovereignty,
but had never rendered an account to themselves in what sense the
people are or are not sovereign. They had never distinguished the
three sorts of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of
the three is the distinctively American democracy. For them, democracy
was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought to avoid them
either by exaggerating one or the other of the two exclusive
tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself through
restrictions on suffrage. The latter class began to distrust universal
suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to dream of modifying the
American constitution so as to make it conform more nearly to the
English model. The war has proved that the were wrong, for nothing is
more certain than that the people have saved the national unity and
integrity almost in spite of their government. The General government
either was not disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against
secession, till forced to do it by the people themselves. No wise
American can henceforth distrust American democracy. The people may be
trusted. So much is settled. But as the two extremes were equally
democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of popular
sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling to allow
separation, and would not and did not engage in the war against
secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of the national
domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it was not democracy
in the sense of either of the extremes that made the war and came out
of it victorious; and hence the real American democracy must differ
from them both, and is neither a personal nor a humanitarian, but a
territorial democracy. The true idea of American democracy thus comes
out, for the first time, freed from the two extreme democracies which
have been identified with it, and henceforth enters into the
understandings as well as the hearts of the people. The war has
enlightened patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes
reason—a well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional
conviction.
In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent the
socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive. In the States that
seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not gain it, for
it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions, and habits of the
Southern people, and the Southern people will not be exterminated nor
swamped by migrations either from the North or from Europe. They are
and always will be an agricultural people, and an agricultural people
are and always will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless
unwittingly held for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special
object in which they take a passionate interest. The worst of all
policies is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and depressed
whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of the 29th of
May, 1865. Of course that policy will not be carried out, and if the
negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote with the wealthy
landholding class, and aid them in resisting all socialistic
tendencies. The humanitarians will fail for the want of a good social
grievance against which they can declaim.
In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as a
speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance. It is
aided much by the congregational constitution of their religion; yet it
is weak at home, and is resisted practically by the territorial
division of power. New England means Massachusetts, and nowhere is the
subdivision of the powers of government carried further, or the
constitution of the territorial democracy more complete, than in that
State. Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the farther
they are from home and the less its right to interfere with them, the
more in earnest and the more effective for evil does it become. Its
nature is to mind every one's business but its own. But now that
slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in the United States a social
grievance of magnitude enough to enlist any considerable number of the
people, even of Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it. Negro
enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a question
that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not serve their
purpose of prolonged agitation. They could not and never did carry
away the nation, even on the question of slavery itself, and
abolitionism had comparatively little direct influence in abolishing
slavery; and the exclusion of negro suffrage can never be made to
appear to the American people as any thing like so great a grievance as
was slavery.
Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a
numerous and an important portion of the population. Their increasing
numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much as the majority may
dislike their religion, a constantly increasing influence, and it is
idle to leave them out in counting the future of the country. They
will, in a very few years, be the best and most thoroughly educated
class of the American people; and, aside from their religion, or,
rather, in consequence of their religion, the most learned,
enlightened, and intelligent portion of the American population; and as
much as they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army
and elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation
has won. The best things written on the controversy have been written
by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their religion to
comprehend the real character of the American constitution than any
other class of Americans, the moment they study it in the light of
their own theology. The American constitution is based on that of
natural society, on the solidarity of the race, and the difference
between natural society and the church or Christian society is, that
the one is initial and the other teleological. The law of both is the
same; Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is
exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic. If
they have been backward in their sympathy with the government, it has
been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the humanitarian
or socialistic elements they detected in the Republican party, joined
with a prejudice against political and social negro equality. But
their church everywhere opposes the socialistic movements of the age,
all movements in behalf of barbarism, and they may always be counted on
to resist the advance of the socialistic democracy. If the country has
had reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have,
in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them, indeed,
for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to their religion,
which has been and is the grand protectress of modern society and
civilization.
From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to the
extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private property
as bases of political rights or franchises. This tendency has often
been justified on the ground that the elective franchise is a natural
right; which is not true, because the elective franchise is political
power, and political power is always a civil trust, never a natural
right, and the state judges for itself to whom it will or will not
confide the trust; but there can be no doubt that it is a normal
tendency, and in strict accordance with the constitution of American
civil society, which rests on the unity of the race, and public instead
of private property. All political distinctions founded on birth,
race, or private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are
necessarily eliminated by its normal developments. To contend that
none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a particular
race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary, to the order of
civilization the New World is developing. The only qualification for
the elective franchise the American system can logically insist on is
that the elector belong to the territorial people—that is, be a
natural-born or a naturalized citizen, be a major in full possession of
his natural faculties, and unconvicted of any infamous offence. The
State is free to naturalize foreigners or not, and under such
restrictions as it judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must
treat them as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.
The naturalization question is one of great national importance. The
migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the national
population, and to the national wealth and resources, but less,
perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity of elections, or
the wisdom and integrity of the government. It is impossible that
there should be perfect harmony between the national territorial
democracy and individuals born, brought up, and formed under a
political order in many respects widely different from it; and there is
no doubt that the democracy, in its objectionable sense, has been
greatly strengthened by the large infusion of naturalized citizens.
There can be no question that, if the laboring classes, in whom the
national sentiment is usually the strongest, had been composed almost
wholly of native Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in
the cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of
persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less
difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies. But to
leave so large a portion of the actual population as the foreign born
residing in the country without the rights of citizens, would have been
a far graver evil, and would, in the late struggle, have given the
victory to secession. There are great national advantages derived from
the migration hither of foreign labor, and if the migration be
encouraged or permitted, naturalization on easy and liberal terms is
the wisest, the best, and only safe policy. The children of
foreign-born parents are real Americans.
Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent powers
of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually more active,
more energetic than the children of the older inhabitants of the
country among whom they settle. Some of our first men in civil life
have been sons of foreign-born parents, and so are not a few of our
greatest and most successful generals. The most successful of our
merchants have been foreign-born. The same thing has been noticed
elsewhere, especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to
Holland, Germany, England, and Ireland. The immigration of so many
millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American people
much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character, and made them
a superior people on the whole to what they would otherwise have been.
This has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of race or
blood, but is a natural effect of breaking men away from routine, and
throwing them back on their own individual energies and personal
resources.
Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to freedom;
but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward progress of
American democracy, which asserts equal rights for all, and not for a
race or class only. Some would confine suffrage to landholders, or, at
least, to property-holders; but that is inconsistent with the American
idea, and is a relic of the barbaric constitution which founds power on
private instead of public wealth. Nor are property-owners a whit more
likely to vote for the public good than are those who own no property
but their own labor. The men of wealth, the business men,
manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who exert
the worst influence on government in every country, for they always
strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their own private
interests. They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let government take care
of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor," instead of the
far safer maxim, "Let government take care of the weak, the strong can
take care of themselves." Universal suffrage is better than restricted
suffrage, but even universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private
property from having an undue political influence.
The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable from it,
and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an inferior class
to those elevated by restricted suffrage. The Congress of 1860, or of
1862. was a fair average of the wisdom, the talent, and the virtue of
the country, and not inferior to that of 1776, or that of 1789; and the
Executive during the rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as
it was during the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain,
and not inferior to that of France during the Crimean war. The Crimean
war developed and placed in high command, either with the English or
the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, to say
nothing of others. The more aristocratic South proved itself, in both
statesmanship and generalship, in no respect superior to the
territorial democracy of the North and West.
The great evil the country experiences is not from universal suffrage,
but from what may be called rotation in office. The number of
political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern and Western
States especially, the representatives in Congress are changed every
two or four years, and a member, as soon as he has acquired the
experience necessary to qualify him for his position, is dropped, not
through the fickleness of his constituency, but to give place to
another whose aid had been necessary to his first or second election.
Employes are "rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful,
but because there are others who want their places. This is all bad,
but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong public
opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which is mainly
formed by it. There is, no doubt, a due share of official corruption,
but not more than elsewhere, and that would be much diminished by
increasing the salaries of the public servants, especially in the
higher offices of the government, both General and State. The pay to
the lower officers and employes of the government, and to the privates
and non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in general,
too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both the civil and
military service is too low, and relatively far lower than it was when
the government was first organized.
The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at all
by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility to the
military spirit and a standing army. The depreciation of the military
spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental democracy, which,
like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and brings about the very
evils it seeks to avoid. The hostility to standing armies is inherited
from England, and originated in the quarrels between king and
parliament, and is a striking evidence of the folly of that bundle of
antagonistic forces called the British constitution. In feudal times
most of the land was held by military service, and the reliance of
government was on the feudal militia; but no real progress was made in
eliminating barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at
its command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies. It
is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the whole, lost
more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary for royal
supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the military
spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not held in honor
and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size is public economy.
It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who are worth more there than
anywhere else; it creates honorable places for gentlemen or the sons of
gentlemen without wealth, in which they can serve both themselves and
their country. Under a democratic government the most serious
embarrassment to the state is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or
not fitted to support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in
a democratic government than in any other. The civil service,
divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science, and
art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class, and the
army and navy would be an economy and a real service to the state were
they maintained only for the sake of the rank and position they give to
their officers, and the wholesome influence these officers would exert
on society and the politics of the country—this even in case there
were no wars or apprehension of wars. They supply an element needed in
all society, to sustain in it the chivalric and heroic spirit,
perpetually endangered by the mercantile and political spirit, which
has in it always something low and sordid.
But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding nations
to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself. When it can
have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; for the human
animal, like all animals, must work off in some way its fighting humor,
and the only sure way of maintaining peace is always to be prepared for
war. A regular standing army of forty thousand men would have
prevented the Mexican war, and an army of fifty thousand
well-disciplined and efficient troops at the command of the President
on his inauguration in March, 1861, would have prevented the rebellion,
or have instantly suppressed it. The cost of maintaining a land army
of even a hundred thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would
have been, in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion
has cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as those on
the side of the government, are equally to be counted. The actual
losses to the country have been not less than six or eight thousand
millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the assessed value of the whole
property of the United States according to the census returns of 1860,
and which has only been partially cancelled by actual increase of
property since. To meet the interest on the debt incurred will require
a heavier sum to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been necessary to
maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection of peace and the
prevention of the rebellion.
The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not blunder
much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it did in its
military operations, before 1868 things will settle down into their
normal order; but a regular army—not militia or volunteers, who are
too expensive—of at least a hundred thousand men of all arms, and a
navy nearly as large as that of England or France, will be needed as a
peace establishment. The army of a hundred thousand men must form a
cadre of an army of three times that number, which will be necessary to
place the army on a war footing. Less will answer neither for peace
nor war, for the nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain
henceforth the rank of a first-class military and maritime power, and
take a leading part in political movements of the civilized world, and,
to a great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
Canning boasted that he had raised up the New World to redress the
balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened Spain and gave
the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the Emperor of the French is
trying, by strengthening Italy and Spain, and by a French protectorate
in Mexico, to secure to France, both in the Old World and the New—a
magnificent dream, but not to be realized. His uncle judged more
wisely when he sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought
only to secure to France the hegemony of the Old. But the hegemony of
the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she will
have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even in Europe.
To maintain this position, which is imperative on her, she must always
have a large armed force, either on foot or in reserve, which she can
call out and put on a war footing at short notice. The United States
must henceforth be a great military and naval power, and the old
hostility to a standing army and the old attempt to bring the military
into disrepute must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency,
egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race and
socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the race, is the
most dangerous. The egoistical form is checked, sufficiently weakened
by the defeat of the rebels; but the social form believes that it has
triumphed, and that individuals are effaced in society, and the States
in the Union. Against this, more especially should public opinion and
American statesmanship be now directed, and territorial democracy and
the division of the powers of government be asserted and vigorously
maintained. The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy
is conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet arrived,
as the Germans say, at self consciousness—selbsbewusstseyn—and
operates only instinctively. All the dominant theories and
sentimentalities are against it, and it is only Providence that can
sustain it.
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