USA > Pennsylvania > Philadelphia County > Philadelphia > Municipal government history and politics, Vol. V > Part 26
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After this it is superfluous, as it would be invidious, to dwell on the defi- ciencies of some recent Presidents or Presidential candidates.
2 " The private fortunes of the President and Senators, as they must all be American citizens, cannot possibly be sources of danger." Federalist, No. LIV.
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regarding the influence of wealth in elections or in politics generally are expressed.
The contingency of a division of the States into two antago- nistic groups is not contemplated. When the possibility of State combinations is touched on, it is chiefly with reference to the action of small and of large States respectively. In particular no hint is dropped as to the likelihood of the insti- tution of slavery becoming a bond to unite the Southern States and a cause of quarrel between them and the Northern.1
Although the mischiefs of faction are dwelt on, nothing indicates that its embodiment in highly developed party sys- tems, whose organizations might overshadow the legal gov- ernment, had occurred to any one's mind. Still less, of course, is there any anticipation of the influence to be exerted on poli- tics by the distribution of offices.
Let us now see which of these views and forecasts have been verified by the event.
Of those put forth by the opponents of the Constitution not one has proved true. The States are still strong, the Presi- dent is not a despot, though for a time during the war he came near being one, nor has he ever fallen under the influ- ence of any European power. The House does not consist of the "wealthy and well born ;" the large States do not com- bine against nor press hardly on the smaller; no great country has so few wars or indeed foreign complications of any kind. Although persons are still found who call the Senate " an oli- garchy," they only state the undeniable fact that it consists of comparatively few persons, most of them wealthy, and that it has a strong corporate feeling in favor of the personal interests of each of its members. It is really as dependent on public opinion as the House, perhaps even more afraid of public opinion, and almost as directly the offspring of popular elec- tion. One is in fact surprised to find that of the many arrows
1 But as to the early emergence of the opposition of Northern and Southern men over slavery, see the first chapter of Dr. Von Holst's History.
2
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of accusation levelled at the Constitution, all should have flown wide of the mark.
The deeper insight and more exact thinking of Hamilton and Madison fastened upon most of the real and permanent weaknesses in popular government. Yet even they could not foresee the particular forms which those weaknesses would assume in the new nation. To examine in detail the eight points specified above would involve an examination of the whole of recent American history. I shall therefore simply indicate in a word or two the extent to which, in each case, the predictions of the Federalist may be deemed correct or the reverse.
1. The spirit of faction has certainly, as Madison expected, proved less intense over the large area of the Union than it did in the Greek republics of antiquity or in the several States from 1776 to 1789. On the other hand, the bonds of sympa- thy created by the Federal system have at times enabled one State to infect another with its own vehemence. But for South Carolina, there would have been no secession in 1861. To-day the " demon of faction " is less powerful in the parties than at any previous date since the so-called "Era of Good Feeling" in 1820.
2. Sudden popular impulses there have been. But finding a ready and constitutional expression in elections, they do not lead to physical violence, while the elaborate system of checks seldom allows them to result in dangerous Federal legislation. In the States the risk of bad laws is greater, but it is largely averted by the provisions of the Federal Constitution as well as by gubernatorial vetoes and the restrictions of recent State Constitutions.
3. The early history of the Union furnishes illustrations of feebleness and inconstancy in foreign policy, yet not greater than those which mark most monarchies. Royal caprice, or the influence of successive favorites, has proved more per- nicious in absolute monarchies than popular fickleness in republics. That of late years the foreign policy of the United
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States has been singularly consistent is due not so much to the Senate, nor even to the good sense of the people, as to the fact that the position and interests of the nation prescribe certain broad and simple lines.
4. On public matters, at least, Congress has not been prone to waste or excess in legislation. At present, it is more blame- able for what it neglects or postpones than for what it enacts. The censure is more true of the States, especially the newer Western States.
5. The House of Representatives has doubtless sought to extend its sway at the expense of other departments. Whether it has succeeded is a question on which good observers in America itself differ ; but the fact of their differing proves that the encroachments have not been considerable. When- ever the President is weak or unpopular, Congress seems to be gaining on the Executive Chief. When the latter is pre- sumably strong, he can keep the Legislature at bay.
6. In the struggle which never quite ceases, though it is often scarcely noticed, between the States and the Federal Government, the States have rather lost than gained ground. Nor are the larger States more practically formidable than the small ones. No State would now venture to brave the Fede- ral Judiciary as Georgia did, and did successfully, in the dis- graceful case of the Cherokee Indians.
7. As regards the so-called tyranny of the majority, a ques- tion too large to be fully examined here, I must be content to remark that it has not hitherto proved a serious evil in America. This, however, is due rather to the character and habits of the people and their institutions generally than to the mere extent and population of the Union, on which the Federalist writers relied.
8. There is some foolish Congressional legislation, and, of course, much more foolish State legislation. But property is secure and the sense of civic duty seems, on the whole, to be improving.
It will appear from this examination and from the fact
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(noted a few pages back) that some remarkable developments which political life has taken never crossed the minds of the authors of the Federalist, that these wisest men of their time did not foresee what strike us now as the specially character- istic virtues and faults of American democracy. Neither the spoils system nor the system of party nominations by wire- pullers crossed their minds. They did not foresee the inor- dinate multiplication of elections, nor the evils of confining eligibility for a seat in the legislature to a person resident in the electing district. No student of history will deem that this detracts from their greatness, for history teaches nothing more plainly than the vanity of predictions in the realm of what we call the moral and political sciences, in religion, in ethics, in sociology, in government and politics. Deep thinkers help us when they unfold those permanent truths of human nature which come everywhere into play. Historians help us when, by interpreting the past, they demonstrate what are the tendencies that have so prevailed in recent years as to create the present. Observers keen enough to read the mind of the present generation may help us by rendering it probable that those tendencies, or some new ones just appearing, will be ruling factors in the near future. But beyond the near future-that is to say, beyond the lifetime of the generation which already holds power-no true philo- sopher will venture. He may indulge his fancy in picturing the details of the remoter landscape ; but he knows that it is a region fit for fancy, not for science. In the works of great thinkers there are to be found some happy guesses about times to come; but these are few, indeed, compared with the prophe- cies whose worthlessness was so soon revealed that men forgot they had ever been made, or the dreams which, like those of Dante, idealized an impossible future from an irrevocable past.
As regards the views of Hamilton and Madison, who, be it remembered, do not present themselves as prophets but as the censors of present evils, it may be added that the Constitution
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which they framed and carried checked some of these very evils (e. g., the unjust lawmaking and reckless currency experi- ments of the State legislatures); and that it was obviously impossible till the Federal government began to work to say how the existing forces could adapt themselves to it. Hamil- ton remarks in one of his letters that he holds with Montes- quieu that a nation's form of government ought to be fitted to it as a suit of clothes is fitted to its wearer.1 He would doubt- less have added that it was difficult to make sure of the fit until the coat had been tried on.
The causes, moreover, which have affected the political growth of America are largely causes which were in 1788 altogether beyond human ken: the cotton gin, steam com- munications, Irish and German immigration have been su- preme factors in that history ; but even the first of these had not risen over the horizon in that year, and the last did not become a potent factor till half way through the present cen- tury.2 What the sages of the Convention shew us, are certain tendencies they discern in their contemporaries, viz. :
Recklessness and unwisdom in the masses, producing bad laws.
Unwillingness to submit to or support a strong government.
Abuse by the majority of its legal power over the minority.
Indifference to national as compared with local and sec- tional interests, and consequent preference of State loyalty to national loyalty.
That each of these tendencies then existed and might have been expected to work for evil, admits of no doubt. But if we ask American history what it has to say about their subsequent course, the answer will be that the second and third tendencies
" " I hold with Montesquieu that a government must be fitted to a nation as much as a coat to the individual; and consequently that what may be good at Philadelphia may be bad at Paris and ridiculous at Petersburgh." To Lafayette, Jan. 6th, 1799.
" The first cargo of cotton was sent from America to Europe in 1791 and the cotton gin invented in 1793.
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have declined, and do not at present menace the public wel- fare, while the first, though never absent and always liable to marked recrudescence, as the annals of the several States prove, has done little harm in the sphere of National Government. As to the fourth, which Hamilton seems to have chiefly feared, it ultimately took the form not of a general centrifugal force, impelling each State to fly off from the system, but of a scheme for the separation of the Southern or slave-holding States into a separate Confederacy, and in this form it received, in 1865, a crushing and apparently final defeat.1
II. DE TOCQUEVILLE AND HIS BOOK.
Fifty-one years after the recognition of the independence of the United States, fifty-three years before the present year, Alexis de Tocqueville published his Democracy in America, one of the few treatises on the philosophy of politics which has risen to the rank of a classic. His book, therefore, stands half way between our own days and those first days of the Repub- lic which we know from the writings of the Fathers, of Wash- ington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Madison. It offers a means of measuring the changes that had passed on the country during the half century from the birth of the Union to the visit of its most famous European critic, and again from the days of that critic to our own.
It is a classic, and because it is a classic one may venture to canvas it freely, without the fear of seeming to detract from the fame of its author. The more one reads De Tocqueville, the more admiration does one feel for his acuteness, for the delicacy of his analysis, for the elegant precision of his reason- ings, for the limpid purity of his style ; above all for his love
1 When we come to De Tocqueville, we shall find him touching but lightly on the two first of the above tendencies (partly, perhaps, because he attends too little to the State governments), but emphasizing the third and fearing from the fourth the dissolution of the Union.
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of truth and the elevation of his views. He is not only urbane, but judicial ; not only noble, but edifying. There is perhaps no book of the generation to which he belonged which contains more solid wisdom in a more attractive dress.
We have here, however, to regard the treatise not merely as a model of art and a storehouse of ethical maxims, but as a picture and criticism of the government and people of the United States. And before using it as evidence of their con- dition fifty years ago, some observations must be made as to the reliance we may place upon it.
The first observation is that not only are its descriptions of democracy as displayed in America no longer true in many points, but that in certain points they were never true. That is to say, some were true of America, but not of democracy in general, while others were true of democracy in general but not true of America. It is worth while to attempt to indicate the causes of such errors as may be discovered in his picture, because they are errors which every one who approaches a similar task has to guard against. De Tocqueville is not much read in the United States, where the scientific, histori- cal and philosophical study of the institutions of the country, apart from the legal study of the Constitution, is of quite recent growth. He is less read than formerly in England and even in France. But his views of the American government and people have so passed into the texture of our thoughts that we cannot shake off his influence, and in order to profit by it are bound to submit his conclusions and predictions to a searching though respectful examination.
The defects of the book are due to three causes. He had a strong and penetrating intellect, but it moved by preference in the a priori or deductive path, and his power of observation, quick and active as it was, did not lead but followed the march of his reasonings. It will be found, when his method is closely observed, that the facts he cites are rather the illustra- tions than the sources of his conclusions. He had studied America carefully and thoroughly. But he wanted the neces-
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sary preparation for that study. His knowledge of England, while remarkable in a foreigner, was not sufficient to show him how much in American institutions is really English, and explainable only from English sources.
He wrote about America, and meant to describe it fully and faithfully. But his heart was in France, and the thought of France, never absent from him, unconsciously colored every picture he drew. It made him think things abnormal which are merely un-French ; it made him attach undue importance to phenomena which seemed to explain French events or sup- ply a warning against French dangers.
He reveals his method in the introduction to his book. He draws a fancy sketch of a Democratic people, based on a few general principles, passes to the condition of France, and then proceeds to tell us that in America he went to seek the Type of Democracy-Democracy pure and simple-in its normal shape. "J'avoue que dans l' Amérique, j'ai vu plus que l' Amér- ique: j'y ai cherché une image de la démocratie elle-même, de ses penchants, de son caractère, de ses préjugés, de ses passions."
Like Plato in the Republic, he begins by imagining that there exists somewhere a Type or Pattern of Democracy, and as the American Republic comes nearest to this pattern, he selects it for examination. He is aware, of course, that there must be in every country and people many features peculiar to the country which reappear in its government, and repeatedly observes that this or that is peculiar to America, and must not be taken as necessarily or generally true of other Democracies. But in practice he underrates the purely local and special features of America, and often, forgetting his own scientific cautions, treats it as a norm for Democracy in general. Nor does he, after finding his norm, proceed simply to examine its facts and draw inferences from them. In many chapters he begins by laying down one or two large principles, he devel- ops conclusions from them, and then he points out that the phenomena of America conform to these conclusions. Instead of drawing the character of Democracy from the aspects it
A
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presents in America, he arrives at its character a priori, and uses those aspects only to point and enforce propositions he has already reached. It is not Democracy in America he describes, but Democracy illustrated from America. He is admirably honest, never conceding or consciously evading a fact which he perceives might tell against his theories. But being already prepossessed by certain abstract principles, facts do not fall on his mind like seeds on virgin soil. He is struck by those which accord with, he is apt to ignore those which diverge from his preconceptions. Like all a priori reasoners, he is peculiarly exposed to the danger of pressing a principle too far, of seeking to explain a phenomenon by one principle only when it is perhaps the result of an accidental concurrence of several minor causes. The scholasticism we observe in him is due partly to this deductive habit, partly to his want of familiarity with the actualities of politics. An instance of it appears in his tendency to over-estimate the value of constitu- tional powers and devices, and to forget how often they are modified, almost reversed in practice by the habits of those who use them. Though no one has more judiciously warned us to look to the actual working of institutions and the ideas of the men who work them rather than to their letter, he has himself failed to observe that the American Constitution tends to vary in working from its legal theory, and the name Legis- lature has prevented him, like so many other foreign observers, from seeing in the English Parliament an executive as well as a law-making body.
In saying that he did not know England, I fully admit that his knowledge of that great free government was far beyond the knowledge of most cultivated foreigners. He had studied its history, had lived among and learnt the sentiments of its aristocracy. But he had little experience of the ideas and habits of the middle class, whom the Americans then more resembled, and he was not familiar-as how could a stranger. be ?- with the details of English politics and the working of the English Courts. Hence he has failed to grasp the sub-
1
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stantial identity of the American people with the English. He perceives that there are many and close resemblances, and traces much that is American to an English source. He has seen and described with perfect justness and clearness the men- tal habits of the English and American lawyer as contrasted with those of the French lawyer. But he has not grasped, as perhaps no one but an Englishman or an American can grasp, the truth that the American people is the English people, modi- fied in some directions by the circumstances of its colonial life and its more popular government, but in essentials the same. Hence much which is merely English appears to De Tocque- ville to be American or Democratic. The functions of the judges, for instance, in expounding the Constitution (whether of the Federation or of a State) and disregarding a statute which conflicts therewith, the responsibility of an official to the ordinary courts of the land, the co-existence of laws of a higher and lower degree of authority, seem to him to be novel and brilliant inventions instead of mere instances of general doctrines of English law, adapted to the circumstances of a colony, dependent on a Home Government or a State partially subordinated to a Federal Government. The absence of what the French call " Administration" and the disposition to leave people to themselves which strike him, would not surprise an Englishman accustomed to the like freedom. Much that he remarks in the mental habits of the ordinary American, his latent conservatism for instance, his indifference to amusement as compared with material comfort, his commercial eagerness and tendency to take a commercial view of all things, might have been just as well remarked of the ordinary middle-class Englishman, and has nothing to do with a Democratic Govern- ment. Other features which he ascribes to this last named cause, such as habits of easy social intercourse, the disposition to prize certain particular virtues, the readiness to give mutual help, are equally attributable to the conditions of life that existed among settlers in a wild country where few persons were raised by birth or wealth above their fellows, and every-
1
English
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one had need of the aid of others-conditions whose results remain in the temper of the people even when the community has passed into another phase, a phase in which inequalities of wealth have already begun to be marked, and temptations have appeared which did not beset the Puritans of the seven- teenth century.
It is no reproach to De Tocqueville that France formed to him the background of every picture whose foreground was the New World. He tells us frankly in the Introduction that the phenomena of social equality, as they existed in France, and the political consequences to be expected from them, filled his mind when he examined the institutions of America ; he hoped to find there lessons by which France might profit : "J'ai voulu y trouver des enseignements dont nous puissions profiter." But with this purpose before him, he could hardly avoid laying too much stress on points which seemed to have instruction for his own countrymen, and from fancying those things to be peculiar and abnormal which stood contrasted with the circumstances of France. De Tocqueville is, perhaps of all eminent French writers, the least prone to assume the ways and ideas of his own country to be the rule, and those of another country the exception; yet even in him the tendency lurks. There is more than a trace of it in his surprise at the American habit of using without abusing political associations, and at the disposition of Legislatures to try experiments in legislation, a disposition which struck him chiefly by its contrast with the immutability which the Code of the First Empire seemed to have stamped upon the private law of France.
But this constant great reference to France goes deeper than the political philosophy of the book. It determines its scope and aim. The Democracy in America is not so much a politi- cal study as a work of edification. It is a warning to France of the need to adjust her political institutions to her social condition, and above all to improve the tone of her politics, to create a moral and religious basis for her national life, to
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erect a new fabric of social doctrine, in the place of that which, already crumbling, the Revolution had overthrown. We must not, therefore, expect to find in him a ·complete description and criticism such as a German would have given of the gov- ernment of America in all its details and aspects. To observe this is not to complain of the book. What he has produced is more artistic, and possibly more impressive than such a description would have been, as a landscape gives a juster notion of scenery than a map. His book is permanently valuable, because its reflections and exhortations are appli- cable, not merely to the Frenchmen of fifty years ago, but to mankind generally, since they touch upon failings and dangers permanently inherent to political society. Let it only be re- membered that in spite of its scientific form, it is really a work of art rather than a work of science, and a work suf- fused with strong, though carefully repressed emotion.
The best illustration I can give of these tendencies of De Tocqueville will be found in a comparison of the first part of his work, published in 1834, and now included in the first and second volumes of recent editions with the second part published in 1840, and now forming the third volume. In the first part the author keeps close to his facts. Even when he has set out on the a priori road, he speedily brings his theory to the test of American phenomena: they give sub- stance to, and (so to speak) steady the theory, while the theory connects and illumines them. But in the second part (third volume) he soars far from the ground and is often lost in the clouds of his own sombre meditation. When this part was written, the direct impressions of his transatlantic visit had begun to fade from his mind. With all his finesse and fertility, he had neither sufficient profundity of thought nor a sufficient ample store of facts gathered from history at large to enable him to give body and substance to his reflec- tions on the obscure problems wherewith he attempts to deal.1
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