Our great experiment in democracy : a history of the United States

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OUR GREAT EXPERIMENT
IN DEMOCRACY

A History of the United States

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OUR GREAT EXPERIMENT
IN DEMOCRACY

A History of the United States

By
CARL BECKER

John Stambaugh Professor of History
Cornell University

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Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

Our Great Experiment in Democracy

Copyright, 19x0, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

In the preparation of this work
I have been greatly aided by
my former colleague in the Uni-
versity of Minnesota, Professor
Guy Stanton Ford, whose excel-
lent judgment and cordial assist-
ance are an unfailing resource for
all who have the good fortune
to be associated with him.
Carl Becker

Ithaca, New York
March 15, IQ20

The work is clearly not a "history" of the
United States in the ordinary sense of that
much used and abused word, but rather a
series of essays on certain important problems
which have confronted the American people
from colonial days to the present.

It was written in the fall of 1918, and my
chief purpose in writing it was to inject a
small question mark after the assumption
(more common then perhaps than now, but
still often enough made) that there attaches
to American institutions in general, and to the
American form of government in particular,
some sacred and sacrosanct quality of the
changeless Absolute. I wished only to sug-
gest, very mildly (and there is perhaps still
some point in doing so), that American
"democracy" was, and is, an experiment:
originally an experiment in the sense that it
was then relatively a new thing in the world;
still an experiment in the sense that the pro-
found economic changes of the last century
are straining to the breaking point all political
institutions derived from an earlier age. But
for the matter of that, what is any human
institution, what has it ever been, what can
it ever be, but an experiment? An experi-
mental device in humanity's great adventure
in search of the good life ?

Carl Becker

Ithaca, New York,
May 30, 1927.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

Preface ix

I. America and Democracy i

II. The Origins of Democracy in America . . 5

III. The New World Experiment in Democracy 20

IV. Democracy and Government 64

V. New World Democracy and Old World In-

tervention 108

VI. Democracy and Free Land 142

VII. Democracy and Slavery 186

VIII. Democracy and Immigration 225

IX. Democracy and Education 262

X. Democracy and Equality 296

OUR GREAT EXPERIMENT
IN DEMOCRACY

A History of the United States

OUR GREAT EXPERIMENT
IN DEMOCRACY

A History of the United States

AMERICA AND DEMOCRACY

EVERY country is important in its own eyes
and for its own people; but some coun-
tries have a wider significance, a significance
for the world at large which gives them a pe-
culiar place in the history of civilization.
England, for example, has come to stand for
what is roughly called political liberty; and,
being pre-eminently the founder of colonies,
she is sometimes called the "mother of na-
tions." France has never been only France,
but always something European — the source
and the exemplar of fruitful ideas. The
United States has likewise had its meaning for
the Occidental world; in its own eyes and in
the eyes of Europe it has stood for the idea of
democracy. "Conceived in liberty and dedi-
cated to the proposition that all men are

created equal," its history has had the sig-
nificance of a great social experiment.

Americans themselves have commonly taken
democracy for granted, but for a century in-
telligent Europeans were aware that popular
government and social equality on such a
grand scale were new things in the world.
The outcome they could not regard as a fore-
gone conclusion, but they knew that the phe-
nomenon was well worth careful attention,
since it was bound, for good or for evil, to have
a profound influence upon the trend of his-
tory in Europe. In the course of a hundred
years many Europeans have come to observe
us at first hand; and from Crevecoeur to
H. G. Wells the thing that has chiefly in-
terested them has been the character and the
relative success or failure of our political and
social institutions. They have endeavored to
estimate, for the instruction of European
readers, the form and pressure of our democ-
racy, in order that it might serve as an example
or a warning to the Old World.

With the exception of Lord Bryce, the most
intelligent European who ever set himself the
task of observing America at first hand was
Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville was
no apostle of democracy, but he convinced
himself that it was bound to come, accepted
it as one accepts the inevitable, and like a wise

man wished to be prepared for it. It was in
order to be prepared for it that he came to
America, where he thought it could be ob-
served in its most perfect manifestation and
to the best advantage.

It is not [he says] merely to satisfy a legitimate
curiosity that I have examined America; my wish
has been to find instruction by which we may ourselves
profit. Whoever should imagine that I have intended
to write a panegyric would be strangely mistaken, and
in reading this book he will perceive that such has
not been my design: nor has it been my object to advo-
cate any form of government in particular, for I am of
opinion that absolute excellence is rarely to be found
in any legislation; I have not even affected to discuss
whether the social revolution, which I believe to .be
irresistible, is advantageous or prejudicial to mankind.
I have acknowledged this revolution as a fact already
accomplished or on the eve of its accomplishment,
and I have selected the nation, from those that have
undergone it, in which its development has been the
most peaceful and the most complete, in order to dis-
cern its natural consequences, and, if it be possible,
to distinguish the means by which it may be rendered
profitable. I confess that in America I saw more than
America; J sought the image of democracy itself, with
its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its pas-
sions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope
from its progress.

This statement of Dc Tocqueville might be
taken as representing the attitude of Europe
toward America during the first century of her

history as an independent nation, intelligent
Europeans have seen in America more than
America; they have seen in it the image of
democracy itself. Whether this image has
seemed to them pleasing or menacing, they
have realized that it might teach them much
of what they had to fear or to hope for in the
future. In its origin and in its history the
United States stands for democracy or it
stands for nothing. What is the character of
this democracy ? What were the conditions of
its origin ? Upon what solid or fragile founda-
tions does it rest? What is essential in order
that it may endure?

n

THE ORIGINS OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

MANY sorts of people contributed to the
settlement of the thirteen English col-
onies which declared their independence of
Great Britain on July 4, 1776. Men of all
classes, from the noble to the jailbird, were
among the first English immigrants in the
seventeenth century; but for the most part
the settlers were neither the outcasts nor
the favorites of fortune, but the moderately
well-to-do — lawyers, doctors, merchants, shop-
keepers, small landowners, and peasants. The
motives which inspired these people to try
their fortunes in America varied with the in-
dividual, as well as with the region in which
they settled. Some came in a spirit of advent-
ure, others to mend their fortunes or escape
the consequences of crime or poverty. Certain
colonies, such as Virginia, were founded
chiefly by men who sought better economic
opportunities; while others, such as Massa-
chusetts, were founded by men whose main

5

aim was to erect in the New World that ideal
commonwealth which they despaired of ever
seeing in Europe. However varied and inter-
mingled these motives may have been, they
may all be included in one motive, which was
the desire for more freedom and a better op-
portunity. Speaking generally, therefore, it
may be said that the founding of the English
colonies, which afterward became the United
States of America, was an idealistic enterprise fr*
— the work of discontented men who sought
in the New World a freedom which was denied
to them in the Old.

In the New World they found much freedom
of a certain kind. They found freedom from *
tradition, and from the legal and conventional
restraints of civilized society. In America they
found no pope and no king, no noble lords
levying toll upon the land, no Church exacting
fees from the poor as the price of salvation.
In America men found all the freedom of
Nature. Yet Nature imposes her own con-
straints. In this wilderness to which they
came the early settlers found that liberty was
the reward of those who seek out and obey
the harsh and unproclaimed laws of the phys-
ical universe. For many years the only liberty
which they had was the liberty to exist, if,
perchance, they could manage to do so. Thou-
sands perished, but the hardy survived; the

6

hardy and the adaptable, the resourceful, the
inventive, the stubbornly persistent, those
with a certain iron hardness in their nature,
those with the indomitable will to conquer —
these survived and won the freedom of the
New World.

While the New World of America was no
lotos-land to be enjoyed without effort, the
difficulties to be overcome were different in
the North and in the South. There was every
variation in physical environment from the
meager soil and bitter winters of New England
to the rich bottom-lands and almost tropical
heat and miasmic atmosphere of South Caro-
lina. Besides the difference in soil and climate
the various colonies were settled by a some-
what different class of people, and in some
cases by people who came for quite different
purposes. It is therefore in part due to phys-
ical reasons and in part due to moral reasons
that certain characteristic differences came to
distinguish the institutions and customs of the
New England, the Middle, and the Southern
colonies.

The people who came to Virginia were
mostly well content to establish there the in-
stitutions of old England, to reproduce its
v class divisions, to perpetuate its social cus-
toms. But it was_ found that the most profit-
able thing to raise in Virginia was tobacco;

7

A

and in spite of every effort to prevent it, to-
bacco became the one important staple crop
of the colony. Thus it happened, contrary to
expectation, that Virginia was settled, not in
compact towns on the English model, but in
great and widely separated farms or planta-
tions, strung along the river-banks where the
rich bottom-lands were. The plantation was
managed by the owner or "planter," and
worked at first by "servants" — men who had
sold their services for a term of years in order
to pay the cost of their transportation to
America — and afterward by negro slaves.
Towns did not grow up in Virginia, because
the plantation was a kind of economically self-
supporting community in itself, and because
the tobacco could be most easily shipped di-
rectly from the planter's own docks on the
river-front. Thus there were in Virginia only
two classes, the planters and their subject
servants and slaves. Virginia was in fact a
landowning aristocracy, without nobility or
merchant class, or any considerable small
peasant farming class ; and the other Southern
colonies, except North Carolina, were on the
whole similar to Virginia in these respects.

The New England colonies differed widely
from Virginia, both in the motives which led to
their settlement and in the economic charac-
teristics of the communities which were in fact

8

>

,

established there. Massachusetts, the princi-
pal New England colony, was settled by Eng-
lishmen who were not content to re-establish
in America the institutions that existed in
England. These Puritans — so called because
they wished to "purify" the English Church*
from "popish practices" — came to America
primarily to establish a society which should
be at once State and Church — a " due form of
government, as well civil as ecclesiastical"; an
ideal or Bible commonwealth which should be
pleasing in the sight of God and conformable
to His law. In Massachusetts, and this was
true of New England as a whole, the unit of
settlement was thus the town and the parish,
two things intimately related; and this type
of settlement was suited not only to the ideal
purposes of the settlers, but also to the eco-
nomic conditions which made Massachusetts
a small farming country given up largely to
the raising of grain and live stock. Every
New England colony, therefore, was at first
a collection of little agricultural villages or
townships, where the people built their houses
around the church, which was the center of
community life, and where they distributed
their land and managed their affairs in little
democratic assemblies of freeholders known as
the town meeting.

Between the New England and the Southern
9

colonies lay the Middle colonies of New York,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
They were in origin the least English of the
Colonies. New York was originally settled by
the Dutch, from whom it was conquered by
England in 1664. Pennsylvania, although
founded by the Englishman, William Penn,
was from the beginning a refuge for the op-
pressed of continental Europe as well as for
the English Quakers who followed Penn to
the New World. More composite in their
population, the Middle colonies united in some
measure the characteristics of the New Eng-
land and the Southern colonies; in respect to
their origin, the religious motive was more
prominent than in the South, but less so than
in New England; the small farm was the
characteristic economic feature, but the large
estate was common in New York; the unit of
local government was neither the town, as in
New England, nor the county, as in the South,
but a combination of town and county.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the
population of the Colonies had reached a mill-
ion and a half, and their increase in wealth was
even more marked. The early eighteenth cen-
tury was a golden age in agriculture and com-
merce, and in this prosperity the Colonies
shared. In nearly every colony there came to
be a small group of landowning and commer-

10

cial families of considerable wealth, closely
interrelated by marriage, and forming a little
colonial aristocracy which largely controlled
the government and legislation of the colony.
Rather sharply separated from this aristocracy
of "best families" was the class of the "hum-
ble folk" — the small farmers, the artisans and
mechanics in the towns, and the servant and
slave population — who had but little political
or social influence. In every colony there was
an assembly of representatives chosen for the
most part by the property-owners, and largely
dominated by the coterie of wealthy families.
Aside from the legislative assemblies, which
passed lawTmainly in the interest of the classes
that controlled them, there was in each colony
a governor, and in most colonies an executive
council which was also usually an upper legis-
lative chamber; but the governors in every
colony, except Massachusetts, Connecticut
and Rhode Island, and in most cases the execu-
tive council also, were appointed by the British
government and were supposed to represent
the interests of the British Empire just as the
assemblies were supposed to represent the
interests of their particular colonies.

The interests of the British Empire chiefly
centered in the trade laws, those regulations
which required the Colonies to export certain
staple products, such as sugar, tobacco, indigo,

ii

and naval supplies, to Great Britain or to a
British colony, and which likewise required
the Colonies to import most of the manufact-
ured commodities which they needed from
Great Britain. The trade laws were not, for the
most part, very serious burdens, for the British
merchant could not profit by the ruin of the
colonial trader, and in the long run regula-
tions prejudicial to either were not very rigidly
enforced. The burden of the trade laws fell
chiefly upon the poor in England and in the
Colonies, since the mercantile system was de-
signed not so much for the advantage of Eng-
land at the expense of the Colonies, but rather
for the special advantage of the upper classes
in both countries, the merchants and land-
owners in England and the Colonies alike.

Under these circumstances, the ruling classes
— landowners, merchants, and moneyed men
— in the Colonies as well as in England, were
greatly interested in the defense and the ex-
tension of the Empire., In pursuit of this ob-
ject England fought a number of wars in
Europe during the eighteenth century, mainly
against France; and, inasmuch as the English
colonies in America were in close contact with
the French settlements to the north and west,
every war between England and France in
Europe was necessarily a war between the
English and French colonies in America. What

12

is known in American history as King Will-
iam's War was but the American counterpart
of the war of the League of Augsburg (1685-
97); Queen Anne's War was the counter-
part of the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701-13); King George's War was the coun-
terpart of the War of the Austrian Suc-
cession (1740-48); and the French and Ind-
ian War was the counterpart of the Seven
Years' War (1756-63). In America all of
these wars were in fact "French and Indian"
wars; in all of them the colonists were ex-
pected to defend themselves against the
French and against their numerous Indian
allies, on land, while the British government
furnished them protection on the sea. Every
colonial war was a considerable expense to
the Colonies; but it was maintained that
the defense and extension of the Empire was
an advantage to the Colonies no less than to
Great Britain.

Of all the colonial wars of the eighteenth
century, the most important was the last
one, the French and Indian War (1754-63),
which was the American counterpart of the
Seven Years' War in Europe. In fact, the
war broke out in America before it did in
Europe, and the immediate cause of the war
was the dispute between the French and Eng-
lish in respect to their relative rights to the

13

territory west of the Alleghanies. The Eng-
lish had always claimed this territory as the
legitimate extension of the lands which they
occupied on the seacoast; the French claimed
it by the right of discovery and occupation.
The most direct entrance to the rich lands west
of the Alleghanies was by way of the upper
Ohio River, and it was the attempt of the
French and English to fortify and hold the
upper Ohio at the place where the present
city of Pittsburg stands that precipitated the
French and Indian War. After a long and
difficult struggle, the English won, both in
Europe and in America. By the Treaty of Paris
France lost her empire in America, and Eng-
land obtained all the French possessions east
of the Mississippi, except New Orleans.

The year 1763, which marks the close of
this seven years' conflict, was an important
date in the history of the world. In Europe
the war had taken the form of an attempt to
destroy the rising power of Frederick the
Great. That object was not attained, and the
chief results of the war were, therefore, two:
it assured the ultimate ascendancy of Prussia
over Austria in Germany, and it assured the
maritime and commercial ascendancy of Eng-
land over France in India and America. Yet
the Treaty of Paris, which seemed to open
the way for a great extension of the British

Empire in North America, was in fact the
prelude to the loss of its chief possessions there ;
for with 1763 we may date the beginning of
that long conflict between the Colonies and
the mother country of which the outcome was
the establishment of the United States as an
independent nation.

The war itself laid the foundation for this
conflict.x During the war the Colonies levied
and equipped about twenty-five thousand
troops, and these troops, although they could
not alone have driven the French out of Mon-
treal and Quebec, gave essential assistance in
achieving that end.'*' The Colonies had good
reason, therefore, to feel that they had done
their full part in expelling the French from
North America; and they were much in-
clined to think that for the future, especially
as the danger from France was now once for
all removed, they could easily defend them-
selves without any British aid at all. The
general effect of the French and Indian War
upon the Colonies was one of emancipation —
it gave them a sense of power and indepen-
dence such as they had never known before.

This feeling of emancipation was due not
only to the fact that the Colonies had aided
in winning the war, but also to the fact that
for the first time they had acted together for__
a common end. The Colonies had always

15

been noted for the spirit of jealousy and sus-
picion which characterized their dealings with
one another. Puritan New England had looked
askance at her neighbors because of their re-
ligious beliefs and practices, while the Vir-
ginia and South Carolina planters, and the
wealthy merchants of New York, who copied
the manners and the dress of the English
"gentleman," made sport of the grave man-
ners and precise speech of the solemn New-
Englanders. In 1760 Benjamin Franklin
wrote that no one need fear that the Colonies
would "unite against their own nation, which
protects them and encourages them, with
which they have so many ties of blood, in-
terest, and affection, and which 'tis well known
they all love much more than they love one an-
other." Intercolonial jealousy and suspicion
— the spirit of provincialism or particularism —
was indeed still very strong after the war, and
for many generations it was to play a great
part in the history of the United States ; but
although the French and Indian War did little
or nothing to bring about a formal union of
the Colonies, it led them to realize that they
could unite if they wished to do so, and that
they had, after all, much in common, which
ought to make them wish to do so. The men
from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and
Virginia, who had been brought together and

16

who had fought side by side with the British
regulars during the war, came to realize as
never before that these Englishmen were some-
how different from the colonials, and that a
Massachusetts man was, after all, much more
like a Virginian than either was like the Eng-
lishman. The French and Indian War, in
fact, greatly strengthened the sense of inter-
colonial solidarity. Men began to think of
themselves as in some sense Americans and
not simply as Virginians or Massachusetts
men; they thought of themselves as British-
Americans, and to think of themselves so was
to be aware that there was something more
fundamental than mere geographical location
which separated Americans from British. In a
vague and intangible way the conception of an
American nation was beginning to take form.
The feeling of intercolonial solidarity was
strengthened by the rapid growth of the Col-
onies in wealth and population. Some years
before, Franklin had pointed out the fact
that the population of the Colonies doubled
every twenty years, and on account of the
immense stretches of free land it would con-
tinue to do so for an indefinite future. On the
other hand, no European country had ever
attained such a rate of increase, and during
the last hundred years the population of
England had not doubled once. From these

17

facts it seemed reasonable to suppose that
within the next hundred years the center of
wealth and population of the British Empire
would be in America rather than in Europe.
Furthermore, on account of this increase in
population, the Colonies were every year be-
coming more important to England as markets
for her manufactured goods. Thus at the
moment when the Colonies were beginning to
feel strong enough to get along without the pro-
tection of Great Britain, they were also com-
ing to feel in some measure that Great Britain
could not very well get along without them.

Not only did the French and Indian War
change the attitude of the Colonies toward
Great Britain, it also changed the attitude of
Great Britain toward the Colonies. For seven
years Great Britain had been fighting not only
in America, but in Europe and in India and
on the sea — in the "four parts of the world,"
as Voltaire said. Within seven years, as a
result of these wars for the defense and ex-
tension of the Empire, the public debt had
doubled. Much of this debt had been con-
tracted for maintaining the English fleet and
army in America, and Englishmen were in-
clined to overlook the assistance rendered by
the Colonies and to take to themselves the
credit for the expulsion of the French from
Canada — without the British troops, they

were inclined to think, the colonists would
have found themselves subjugated to the
Bourbon despotism. It seemed only right,
therefore, that the Colonies should contribute
something to the defense of the Empire in
return for the protection which had been ex-
tended to them. On account of the great
expansion of the British possessions in Amer-
ica, the British government felt that it was
necessary to retain a part of the British army
in the Colonies as a check against the Indians
and in order to assure an effective control
of Canada, and it was generally thought in
England that the Colonies could not reason-
ably object to paying some tax or contribu-
tion in partial support of this army which
was to be stationed among them for their own
protection.

Thus, in 1763, the very time when the
Colonies were acquiring a new sense of
strength and independence, the British gov-
ernment was preparing to adopt measures for
the closer integration of the Empire and for
imposing upon the Colonies some part of the
burden of imperial defense. The attempt of
the government, in 1764-65, to lay taxes for
this purpose was the beginning of ten years
of controversy and strife which led finally to
the American Revolution and the indepen-
dence of the Thirteen Colonies.

19

Ill

THE NEW WORLD EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY

I

IN 1760, three years before the Peace of
Paris was signed, George III became King
of England. This was an event of great im-
portance in the history of England and of the
United States, on account of two political
objects which the new king pursued with
stubborn persistence during the first twenty
years of his reign. In the first place, George
III was always in favor of the policy of taxing
the Colonies and of subjecting them to the
authority of the British Parliament. In the
second place, he was determined to make the
Ministers carry out the policy of the king
rather than a policy imposed upon the king
by the Parliament. The twofold aim of
George III was to establish the supremacy of
the Parliament over the Colonies, and to es-
tablish the supremacy of the king over the
Parliament; and these two vital questions,

20

the question of colonial rights and the ques-
tion of parliamentary government in England,
were bound up one with the other, inasmuch
as the success of the king in achieving the one
aim was likely to result in his achieving the
other aim also.

This does not mean, as is often supposed,
that all those who opposed the king's scheme
of breaking away from the control of Parlia-
ment also opposed the taxation of the Col-
onies. In 1765 nearly every one in England
who thought about the matter thought it
only right that the Colonies should pay taxes
in their own defense, and very few regarded
it as unjust or illegal for Parliament to levy
those taxes. The famous Stamp Tax was
passed in 1765, after a year's notice, with
scarcely any opposition either in Parliament
or out of it. Indeed there was but little in-
terest in the matter, because no one supposed
that there would be any serious objection.
Edmund Burke said that he never listened to
a more languid debate; and Horace Walpole,
who afterward became a rabid supporter of
the Colonies, mentions the passage of the
Stamp Act as one might mention any unim-
portant act of legislative routine. At the time
no one realized that this act would lead to
controversy, to strife, and finally to revolu-
tion and the disruption of the Empire.

21

Such complete misunderstanding of the im-
portance of the Stamp Act was due to the
significant fact that whereas nearly every one
in England thought the law a just and reason-
able one, nearly every one in America thought
it an unjust and an unreasonable one. What
was the cause of this remarkable difference in
the point of view of the two groups of English-
speaking peoples ? The explanation has some-
times been that the colonial leaders used this
opportunity to carry out a malign and delib-
erately conceived conspiracy to precipitate a
rebellion in order to win political indepen-
dence. But there is slight evidence in support
of this idea. In 1765 practically all Americans
were proud of being British-Americans, they
gloried in the greatness of little old England,
and they looked forward with pride to the
great role which the British Empire would
play in the future history of the world. Very
few colonists at that time dreamed of inde-
pendence, or thought it possible for the Col-
onies to be happy or prosperous except as
parts of the Empire. In the desire to preserve
and to strengthen this Empire, both English-
men and Americans were agreed; but they
differed radically in their ideas of how the
Empire ought to be organized and governed,
and it is this difference which explains why
the former thought the Stamp Act just and

22

reasonable, while the latter thought it unjust
and unreasonable.

In the eighteenth century English govern-
ment, and to a large extent English opinion
in political matters, was controlled by a fairly
small and a fairly selfish landowning and com-
mercial oligarchy; and the complacence and
egoism of this oligarchy were never greater
than just after the Seven Years' War, when
all the world was fearing or admiring the tre-
mendous success of Great Britain. Naturally
enough, therefore, the average Englishman
felt that this Empire, about which the great
Pitt had talked so much, was the result of
the virtues and the sacrifices of England, and
that as it had been created so it must neces-
sarily be held together by the force of British
arms and of British laws. Apart from such
control, the average Englishman was apt to
say, India and the American Colonies would
have been subjected to the despotism of the
French kings; and what could be more rea-
sonable, therefore, than to suppose that the
defense and the development of the Empire
must be undertaken by the only supreme
power there was — namely, the British Parlia-
ment. If every part of the Empire should be
allowed to do as it liked, there wouldn't be
any Empire very long, and nothing but a self-
ish desire to escape their fair share of the
3 23

burden of defense could lead the Americans
to object to so reasonable and moderate a
tax as the Stamp Tax.

The American colonists regarded the Em-
pire in a somewhat different light. They knew
very well, what the Englishman was likely to
forget, that in the seventeenth century the
Colonies had been established without much
aid from England, in some cases by people
who had been driven out of England in order
to escape religious or political oppression;
and they were aware that if the English
government had neglected the Colonies in the
seventeenth century and had allowed them to
do very much as they liked, it was because they
were not regarded as of great importance.
The Americans felt also that the new interest
in the Colonies which the English government
was now exhibiting was due to the fact that
the trade of the Colonies was becoming su-
premely important to the commercial and
landowning aristocracy of England. As for
the conquest of Canada, they felt that they
had done even more than their share, a fact
which the British government itself recognized
by repaying to them a part of the money which
they had raised during the war. In a word, the
Americans felt that whatever importance the
American Colonies had as parts of the Em-
pire, whatever economic or military or polit-

24

ical value they possessed, was due to the labor
and the sacrifices of the colonists themselves,
who therefore deserved quite as much credit
for building up the wonderful British Empire
as the people of England.

The fundamental notion of Americans was
admirably expressed by Benjamin Franklin
in 1755:

British subjects, by removing to America, cultivating
a wilderness, extending the domain, and increasing
the wealth, commerce, and power of the mother coun-
try, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, ought not,
and in fact do not thereby lose their native rights.

By their native rights, Americans meant the
traditional right of Englishmen to govern and
tax themselves in assemblies of their own
choosing. Englishmen had such an assembly
in Parliament, but the Colonies were not, and
in the nature of the case could not well be
represented in Parliament ; but they had now,
and had always had, their own assemblies by
which they had hitherto governed and taxed
themselves. These assemblies they wished at
all hazards to keep. It was through these
assemblies that they had raised the money
to support the Empire in the last war against
France, and they were quite willing in the
future to raise their fair share of taxes for
the support of the Empire ; but they wished

25

to raise these taxes through their own as-
semblies in their own way. If the Parliament
could levy and collect a Stamp Tax, it could
levy and collect any and all taxes, and it
could regulate the powers of the colonial as-
semblies or abolish them altogether. The
right of Parliament to tax the Colonies in fact
involved the right to abolish colonial self-
government; and fundamentally, therefore,
the Colonies were contending for the right of
J self-government.

In defense of this right the colonists re-
sisted the Stamp Tax. All classes refused to
use the stamped papers; in many cases the
stamps were destroyed by mobs; and the
merchants bound themselves not to import
commodities from England until the act
should be repealed. Partly on account of
opposition in the Colonies, partly on account
of the pressure from the English merchants,
who complained that their business was being
ruined, the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.
But the next year, after a change of Ministry,
certain duties known as the Townshend duties
were laid on the importation of tea, glass,
painters' colors, and paper. The colonists
had claimed that the Stamp Tax was uncon-
stitutional because it was an "internal" tax;
but now they abandoned the distinction be-
tween internal and external taxes and objected

26

to the levying of any taxes whatever, including
import duties intended to raise a revenue.
After three years of controversy and strife,
of rioting and of restrictive non-importation
agreements, the British government again
yielded and repealed all of the duties save the
threepenny duty on tea, which was main-
tained, not for the revenue which it would
bring in, but as an assertion of the right of*
Parliament to levy taxes on the Colonies.

Although the Colonies insisted that the
duty on tea was unconstitutional, the con-
troversy largely subsided during the years from
1770 to 1773. In the latter year, however, the
old dispute was revived by a resolution of
Parliament giving to the East India Company
a practical monopoly of the importation of
tea into the Colonies. Taking advantage of
this opportunity to gain control of a very
profitable colonial business, the company sent
over four cargoes of tea billed to the four ports
of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston. The Boston shipment arrived
first, in the fall of 1773, but when it was at-
tempted to land the tea, a crowd of men dis-
guised as Indians boarded the ship and threw
the tea into the harbor. In New York and
Philadelphia the tea was sent back to England,
and at Charleston it was stored in the base-
ment of the custom-house. In reply to these

27

acts, particularly to the destruction of the
tea at Boston, the British government de-
cided to make a final test of the authority
of Parliament. By overwhelming majorities
the Parliament passed what were known as
the Coercive acts, one of which suspended the
Massachusetts government and placed the
colony practically under military rule, while
another closed the port of Boston until the
town should make compensation to the East
India Company for the loss of its property.
As the king said, "The die is now cast; the
colonists must either submit or win complete
independence." This was true, and, now that
the issue was so clearly one of legislative in-
dependence and not merely one of taxation,
the colonists gradually changed their argu-
ment once more, and from this time on were
inclined to deny not merely the right of Par-
liament to tax the Colonies, but the right of
Parliament to legislate for them at all.

It was on this theory that the war was
waged. According to this theory, as the
colonists finally elaborated it, the Empire was
regarded as a loose union of semi-independent
states; and just as England and Ireland and
Hanover each had its own government, so
the American Colonies must have their own
governments, all of these separate countries
and governments being united under the king

28

without being subject to the Parliament. The
English Parliament, according to this theory,
would be primarily the legislature for Eng-
land and Scotland; but on account of its
central and imperial position it would also
exercise a directing and supervising control
of matters of purely imperial concern, such
as international relations and general com-
mercial regulations; but it would have no
control whatever over the local legislative
concerns of the Colonies any more than over
the local concerns of Hanover. The famous
Declaration of Independence was constructed
on this theory. It does not mention Parlia-
ment ; the charges of tyranny and oppression
are all directed against the king, on the
ground that the Colonies could declare their
independence of the king only, since the king
was the only authority to which they had ever
been legally subject.

The battle of Yorktown made it clear to
all, even to the stubborn king himself, that
the attempt to subject the Colonies to par-
liamentary control must be abandoned. But
in abandoning this object the king had ako
to forgo the attempt to establish royal su-
premacy over Parliament. In a very real
sense the victory at Yorktown in 1781 not
only established the independence of the
United States, but contributed to the triumph

29

of the principle of parliamentary government
in England as well.

From his accession, in 1760, to the end of
the Revolution George III steadily labored
to undermine the principle of the responsi-
bility of Ministers to Parliament. His ideal
of government was not different from that of
Bismarck and Kaiser William II: it was the
king's duty to rule his people, to rule them
wisely and well in a paternal spirit ; it was the
duty of the people to submit dutifully to this
paternal wisdom; as for the Parliament, that
was a body of representative men whose busi-
ness it was to give advice to their master so
that he might indeed rule wisely, but never
to force its advice upon him. George III
would therefore have Ministers of his own
choice who were entirely responsible to him
and not to the Parliament; he would have
Ministers who, because they were chosen by
him from all parties, would be subject to no
party and would be able, therefore, to give
him disinterested advice. For twenty years
the king worked steadily to realize this type
of benevolent despotism in England.

It is not likely that the king could in any
case have succeeded. Nevertheless, his object
was not an impossible one. At that time the
principle of ministerial responsibility to Par-
liament was by no means firmly established

30

in English political practice, and the condi-
tions of English politics were so undemocratic
and in many respects so corrupt that there
was something to be said in favor of the king's
contention. The English Parliament in the
eighteenth century was a representative body,
but it was not a democratic body. It really
represented those great landowners and mer-
chant princes who were able, through their
wealth and social influence and by virtue of
a peculiarly inequitable system of elections,
to control in large measure the return of mem-
bers to Parliament. The political leaders who
looked out for the interests of these classes
were divided into a number of groups or " fac-
tions." They all called themselves "Whigs"
because the term "Tory" had fallen into dis-
repute since 17 14, when Lord Bolingbroke
and other Tories had opposed the accession
of the Hanoverian dynasty and had intrigued
to bring back instead the exiled Stuarts.
From 1 7 14 to 1760, therefore, the government
of England fell into the hands of the Whigs;
and at the time of the accession of George III,
in 1760, the various Whig factions — the Bed-
ford Whigs and Pelham Whigs and Grenville
Whigs — had come to think of government as
a kind of vested right to be enjoyed by them
forever. And in particular they had come to
think of the king's Ministers as men who

31

must be the responsible leaders of Parliament,
as men who must adopt policies which could
be carried through Parliament.

Now George III was not willing to submit
to ministerial, that is to say, to parliamentary,
control. George III was the first of the House
of Hanover who could speak the English
language as his native tongue, and he was the
first to be more interested in his English pos-
sessions than in his Hanoverian possessions.
"Born and bred an Englishman," he said, "I
glory in the name of Briton." He not only
gloried in the name of Briton, he gloried also
in the name of king; and from the first day
of his reign he was determined to be a real
king, to formulate his own policies, and to
destroy the controlling power of the great
Whig families. It must be confessed that
there is not much to be said for the Whig
factions, or, with exceptions, for their leaders.
Such men as the Duke of Newcastle, the Duke
of Bedford, George Grenville, or Charles
Townshend were more intent upon advancing
their own political interests, or in circumvent-
ing the intrigues of a rival faction, than they
were in advancing the interests of the nation
or defending or promoting the cause of free
government. The famous William Pitt, a
great liberal and a friend of the right of the
Colonies to tax themselves, was nevertheless

32

as hostile to the Whig factions as the king
himself, and as willing to see them destroyed.
But the king aimed to do more than to destroy
the Whig factions; he aimed to make the
king independent of Parliament — to restore
the powers and prerogatives which the kings
had enjoyed before the Revolution of 1688.
Thus it happened that in resisting the king,
and in trying to force their Ministers upon
him, the corrupt Whig factions, whatever the
motive may have been which inspired their
action, were really fighting for the principle
of representative government against the prin-
ciple of royal supremacy.

This conflict between the king and the Whig
factions went on during the first twenty years
of the new reign; and as time passed it became
clear that the question of parliamentary as
against royal control in the English govern-
ment was bound up with the question of the
success or failure of the Colonies in their strug-
gle for self-government. The number of men
who supported the Colonies was not great,
although they were often men of the greatest
ability, such as Pitt and Burke and Fox; and
when the Colonies declared their indepen-
dence many men in England who had formerly
supported them now rallied to the support
of the government's policy. Pitt himself was
one of these; and in fact it was the revolt of

33

the Colonies which temporarily rallied the
great majority of Englishmen to the support
of the king and enabled him to build up a
"King's Party" in Parliament that steadily
carried the policies of his Minister, Lord
North, who in turn took his instructions from
the king. During the American war, which
was the period of the Ministry of the sub-
servient Lord North, the king was thus able
to attain his object of subjecting the Parlia-
ment to the royal will. But it was precisely
because the revolt of the Colonies had thrown
all power into the hands of the king that the
maintenance of this power depended upon
the outcome of the Revolution. If the king
could subjugate the Colonies, his system of
government would be justified ; if the Colonies
won independence, such a disaster to the Em-
pire would entirely and forever discredit his
system of government. This, in fact, came to
pass; the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown
sealed the fate of Lord North's Ministry, and
with the fall of Lord North the subjection of
Parliament to the royal will was at an end.

n

The American Revolution was thus prima-
rily a struggle between the Colonies and Great
Britain over the question of self-government

34

— a struggle which was bound up with the
question of royal as against parliamentary
government in England, of popular govern-
ment against a possible autocracy. But there
was also another phase of the Revolution,
and that was the struggle within the Colonies
themselves between the little commercial and
landowning aristocracies that had hitherto
governed the Colonies and the "people," the
unfranchised "humble folk," who now were
coming to demand a measure of political*
equality. This struggle runs throughout the
period of the controversy with Great Britain
from 1765 to 1776; and while it was somewhat
diminished during the period of the war itself,
it broke out again with renewed force after
the war was over. In fact, the American
Revolution was not only a movement for
national independence from Great Britain;
it was also a movement for the democratiza-
tion of American society and politics — a move-
ment which has continued from that day to
this and which is the central theme of our
history.

In 1765 the right of voting in the American
Colonies for members of the colonial assem-
blies was in general restricted to those who
possessed property, or met certain educational
or religious tests. In most colonies a majority,
and in all a considerable minority, of the adult

35

male citizens were disfranchised. Besides,
the methods of naming candidates and of vot-
ing were such as to place a determining in-
fluence in the hands of a small coterie of
wealthy families — the so-called "best fami-
lies" of the province. These best families,
together with the governors, who were mostly
appointed from England and frequently from
among these very families, made a very dis-
tinctive and powerful upper class — a well-
intrenched aristocracy which was the real
governing force in each colony. In Virginia
and South Carolina this class was composed
of the great tidewater planters, whose ex-
tensive fields of tobacco, rice, and indigo were
cultivated by means of negro slaves. In the
Middle colonies there were not only the great
landowners, whose estates were cultivated
mainly by tenant labor, but also the wealthy
commercial families of the cities of New York
and Philadelphia. In New England there
were fewer great estates and the small free-
holders were more numerous; but there also
a political and social aristocracy had come
into existence — descendants of the old official
and clerical leaders closely allied with fam-
ilies that had gained prominence in law or
commerce.

Sharply distinguished from these "gentle-
folk," in dress and manners as well as in

36

social and political influence, was the great
mass of the population — artisans and labor-
ers, tenant and small freehold farmers. In
the Middle and Southern colonies this dis-
tinction had come to have a territorial as
well as a social and economic basis. In Vir-
ginia the poorer classes had moved "west"
beyond the first falls of the rivers, into the
piedmont or "up-country," where land was
plentiful and cheap; while in Pennsylvania
German and Scotch-Irish immigrants in great
numbers had settled in the interior counties
and from there had followed the valleys south-
ward into the Virginia and Maryland up-
country and even as far south as the Carolinas.
In this back-country the soil was not adapted
to tobacco or rice. Here there were no great
estates, no slaves, and few "servants," no
houses with pretensions to architectural ex-
cellence, no leisured class with opportunities
or inclinations for acquiring the manners or
the tastes of the "gentleman." Here every
man earned his bread by the sweat of his brow,
manners were rude and primitive, institutions
were simple, men lived close to the soil,
equality was a fact, and freedom was limited
only by the stubborn resistance of nature.

The conflict between the interests and ideals
of these two classes and these two regions was
already beginning when the controversy be-

37

tween the British government and the Col-
onies began; and from the first the two is-
sues became more or less identified. This
was strikingly the case in Virginia in respect
to the resolutions to be adopted in protest
against the Stamp Act. In the session of
the House of Burgesses of 1765 the old lead-
ers of the tidewater region, who had always
managed the colony, were opposed to adopt-
ing any resolutions at that time, since they had
already, in 1764, drawn up a mild protest
against the passage of the act. But there was
present at this session the famous orator and
tribune of the people, Patrick Henry, who had
recently made a name for himself by expos-
ing the shady actions of the treasurer, John
Robinson, a prominent member of the aris-
tocracy. This was equivalent to challenging
the supremacy of the little group of tidewater
planters, who had come to look upon the
management of the colony as their vested
duty. The episode had given Patrick Henry
a great name in the province, and had got
him a considerable following among the young
men and small planters throughout the prov-
ince, and especially in the back-country where
he was born and raised and which he repre-
sented. In this session of 1765 Henry took
the lead against the conservatives in intro-
ducing and passing a set of resolutions which

38

protested much more vigorously against the
Stamp Act than the old leaders desired.

The episode was afterward described by
Thomas Jefferson, at that time a young law
student, who watched with interest the doings
of the Virginia House of Burgesses.

Mr. Henry moved and Mr. Johnston seconded these
resolutions successively. They were opposed by Messrs.
Randolph, Bland, Pendleton, Wythe, and all the old
members, whose influence in the House had, till then,
been unbroken. They did it, not from any question
of our rights, but on the ground that the same senti-
ments had been, at their preceding session, expressed
in a more conciliatory form, to which the answers were
not yet received. But torrents of sublime eloquence
from Henry, backed by the solid reasoning of John-
ston, prevailed. The last, however, and strongest
resolution was carried but by a single vote. The debate
on it was most bloody. I was then but a student, and
stood at the door of communication between the House
and the lobby; . . . and I well remember that, after the
members on the division were told and declared from
the chair, Peyton Randolph came out at the door where
I was standing, and said, as he entered the lobby,
"By God! I would have given five hundred guineas for
a single vote."

This was only the beginning of a long strug-
gle between the old leaders, endeavoring to
maintain their social and political predomi-
nance in the province, and the young radicals,
backed by the people of the back-country, of
4 39

whom Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson
and Richard Henry Lee were the leaders. In
every stage of the conflict with Great Britain
the old leaders showed themselves more cau-
tious and conservative, the radicals more
vigorous and uncompromising, in asserting
the rights of the Colonies and in advocating
measures of resistance. But the difference
between the two parties went deeper. The
radicals wanted to democratize the social and
political institutions of Virginia, while the old
leaders wanted to maintain their supremacy;
and when the breach with England finally
came and a new constitution had to be formed,
Jefferson and his associates attempted to make
the new constitution strictly democratic, with
universal manhood suffrage, the abolition of
entail in land and of primogeniture, and the
disestablishment of the Anglican Church. Jef-
ferson even went so far as to talk of the aboli-
tion of slavery. The democrats in Virginia
were not able to get everything they wanted;
but they accomplished much. They not only
pushed the old aristocracy into the Revolu-
tionary War, but they established a far more
democratic government in Virginia than the
old leaders of the colony would have estab-
lished if it had been left to them. It was the
declaration of rights prefixed to this consti-
tution that was translated and circulated in

40

France, and that became in some degree a
model for the famous French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Very similar was the conflict in Pennsyl-
vania between the Scotch-Irish and Germans
of the interior and the Quaker-merchant aris-
tocracy of Philadelphia. The people in the
frontier counties complained that the ap-
portionment of representatives, the money
system, and the organization of the courts
of justice were all devised to benefit the Quak-
ers and merchants and to perpetuate their
power. "We apprehend/' so runs a petition
from the German and Scotch-Irish counties
of the interior, "that as freemen and English
subjects we have an indisputable title to the
same privileges and immunities with his Maj-
esty's other subjects who reside in the coun-
ties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks."
The Scotch-Irish and Germans of the interior
counties, together with the mechanics and
artisans of Philadelphia, made the strength
of the radical party. The frontier counties
in Pennsylvania, like the frontier counties in
Virginia, were strong partizans of the struggle
against England, partly because they had no
reason to like England, but partly because they
felt that the argument in favor of the rights of
the Colonies against England could be used
equally in support of their own rights against

41

the privileges of the merchants and Quak-
ers in Pennsylvania. In 1775-76, when the
first constitution of Pennsylvania was estab-
lished, the essential issue was between the
Scotch-Irish radicals, who wanted a strictly
democrat constitution, and the eastern men,
who wished so far as possible to preserve their
own supremacy.

Nowhere was this conflict between the popu-
lar and the aristocratic classes more marked
than in Massachusetts. The most influential
man in Massachusetts at that time was
Thomas Hutchinson, whose family had been
prominent in Boston since the founding of
the colony. He was a man of excellent edu-
cation and of great ability, and in 1771, at
the age of sixty, had held nearly every elective
and appointive office in the province. He was
also a man of wealth and related to most of
the influential families of wealth in Massa-
chusetts— the most prominent member of the
Boston " aristocracy " which had long gov-
erned the Old Bay Colony.

In sharp contrast to Mr. Hutchinson were
two men who became famous leaders in the
Revolution — Samuel and John Adams. In
1765 Samuel Adams was a middle-aged man
who had lost a fair patrimony, and who was
barely able to support his family. John Adams
was a young lawyer, just coming into promi-

42

nence; but he felt very keenly, as his inter-
esting Diary enables us to see, that he had
not a fair and equal opportunity in life be-
cause social opportunity and political power
had come to be so largely monopolized by the
small group of wealthy and closely interre-
lated families of which that of Thomas Hutch-
inson was the chief. And throughout the
struggle with Great Britain, in which John
Adams took a leading part, it is clear that in
his mind the people of Massachusetts were
endeavoring to emancipate themselves, not
only from the autocratic control of the Eng-
lish government, but also from the domina-
tion of a Boston aristocracy; his animosity
toward Thomas Hutchinson was much greater
than toward King George or Lord North.

The way in which these two issues were
often united is well illustrated in connection
with the famous Stamp Act controversy.
The Stamp Act required, among other things,
that practically all legal documents should
be executed on stamped paper. Almost every
one in the colony, including Mr. Hutchinson,
was opposed to the Stamp Act; but the Stamp
Act could be resisted in one of two ways —
one legal and the other illegal. The legal way
to resist it was not to execute any document
which required the use of the stamped papers ;
the illegal way was to go on executing docu-

43

mcnts just as if no Stamp Act existed. Thomas
Hutchinson, and most men of wealth and posi-
tion in the colony, preferred to resist the
Stamp Act in the legal way, and they there-
fore adjourned the courts of law from time to
time. This method appealed to conservative
men, whose incomes were assured, who were
not much affected by a temporary cessation
of business, and who wished not to compromise
their position by any action that could be
called illegal. But rising young lawyers like
John Adams found that if the courts closed
their fees were cut off and their position at
once became precarious. The closing of the
courts, John Adams wrote in his Diary, "will
make a great chasm in my affairs, if it does
not reduce me to distress." And in another
place he says that he was just at the point of
winning a competence and a reputation "when
this execrable Stamp Act came for my ruin
and that of my country."

This naive statement reveals one of the
reasons — not the only reason, but one of the
reasons — why John Adams, and all those who
depended on fees and wages for a living, those
whose interest it was to have business in a
flourishing condition, were in favor of the
more radical method, the illegal method, of
resisting the Stamp Act, while men of wealth
who lived on their incomes could afford to

44

adopt the more cautious and conservative
method. And thus it happened that John
Adams came to think Thomas Hutchinson as
much an enemy of colonial rights as Mr.
Grenville. He convinced himself that Mr.
Hutchinson and his wealthy friends, while
professing to oppose the Stamp Act, were
really tools of the British government and
were trying in this indirect way to force the
people to submit to the Stamp Act. He rea-
soned that the Boston aristocracy was able
to maintain its privileged position in Massa-
chusetts only because it was backed by the
British government; and thus the struggle
against parliamentary taxation came to be
identified with the struggle against a privileged
class in the colony.

It is this aspect of the Revolution that gives
it its chief significance for modern democracy.
The privileged classes in the Colonies, gener-
ally speaking, never really desired separation
from Great Britain. They took old England
as their ideal. Outside of New England most
educated men were educated in England, and
wished for nothing better than to fashion
their clothes, their houses, their minds, and
their manners on the best English models.
They opposed parliamentary taxation be-
cause they wanted to manage their own
affairs in miniature parliaments, where they

45

t could carry on miniature contests with the
governors for the control of the purse, after
the manner of the English Parliament in the
seventeenth century. In no sense were they
democrats; and they were as much afraid of
radical movements in the Colonies as they
were of British oppression. They wanted to
preserve their liberties against Parliament,
without sharing their privileges with the peo-
ple in the Colonies. They wanted home rule,
but they wanted to rule at home. Left to*'
themselves, the governing classes in America
would never have carried the contest to the
point of rebellion, would never have created
an independent state.

The opposition to this ideal gradually trans-
formed the Revolution into a social as well
as a political movement. Men of true demo-
cratic feeling came to see that the mere main-
tenance of what were called English liberties
would leave things much as they were, even
if the Colonies should separate from Great
Britain. They wanted not simply an in-
dependent state, but a new kind of state.
They were aiming at something more than
could be justified by an appeal to the cus-
tomary rights of Englishmen. Whether the
customary rights of Englishmen supported
the contention of the Colonies or the conten-
tions of the king depended upon fine points

46

in law and history. But it was a question
that could be ably argued on both sides. In
any case, there was nothing in the customary
rights of Englishmen that could be used in
support of equal rights for all, poor and rich
alike. And so, step by step, the radical leaders
broadened out their political theory, and came
finally to rest their cause not merely on the
positive and prescriptive rights of English-
men, but upon the natural and universal rights
of man as well.

As the Revolution ceased to be a mere con-
test for the rights of Englishmen and took
on the character of a contest for the rights
of man, it acquired an idealistic and semi-
mystical quality and gathered to itself, as all
such movements do, the emotional force of a
religious conviction. Mr. Lecky says that the
American Revolution was essentially sordid,
being concerned fundamentally with a mere
money dispute. There was much that was
sordid in the motives and the actions of many
men who took part in the Revolutionary War,
but nothing could be more profoundly wrong
than to regard the principal leaders as in-
spired by no higher motive than that of safe-
guarding their property. The conflict with
Great Britain began as a money dispute; but
in the end it came to be transfigured, in the
minds of the American patriots, into one of the

47

great epic conflicts of the world. We have
ourselves lived through such a transfiguration.
The Great War began as a conflict for land
and trade, but it speedily took on, in the
minds of the people concerned, the aspect of
a titanic struggle between the powers of light
and of darkness, a struggle which men fondly,
if vainly, hoped would bring in a new interna-
tional order based upon the principles of jus-
tice and humanity. So it was with the
American Revolution. American patriots came
to think of themselves as hazarding their lives
and their fortunes for the sake of a new social
order, the ideal society founded upon the en-
during principles of liberty, equality, and
fraternity.

There is a striking similarity between the
ideals and the language of the American pa-
triots and the radical leaders of the French
Revolution. They speak with the same lyrical
enthusiasm, like men who are defending and
propagating a new religion. "It is impossible,"
writes Richard Henry Lee, "that vice can so
triumph over virtue as that the slaves of
Tyranny should succeed against the brave
and generous asserters of Liberty and the just
rights of humanity." Consider the dry com-
mon sense with which Doctor Johnson disposed
of the alleged tyranny of Great Britain : " But
I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, op-

48

pression has agreed with them, or there has
been no oppression"; and contrast this with
the reverent solemnity with which John Adams
speaks of his associates as belonging to " that
mighty line of heroes and confessors and
martyrs who since the beginning of history
have done battle for the dignity of and happi-
ness of human nature against the leagued as-
sailants of both."

John Adams was one of the most hard-
headed of the radical leaders, no unbalanced
visionary dreaming fantastic dreams, and yet
John Adams, in 1775, clearly thought of
himself as engaged in a great epoch-making
event, far transcending any mere rupture of
the British Empire or the establishment of an
independent state. This is how he thinks of
the meaning of the Revolution :

The form of government which you admire when
its principles are pure is admirable; indeed, it is pro-
ductive of everything which is great and excellent
among men. But its principles are as easily destroyed
as human nature is corrupted. Such a government is
only to be supported by pure religion or austere morals.
Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private,
and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.
There must be a positive passion for the public good,
the public interest, honor, power, and glory established
in the minds of the people, or there can be no repub-
lican government, or any real liberty, and this public
passion must be superior to all private passions. . . .

49

... Is there in the world a nation which deserves
this character? There have been several, but they are
no more. Our dear Americans perhaps have as much
of it as any nation now existing, and New England
perhaps has more than the rest of America. But I
have seen all along my life such selfishness and little-
ness even in New England that I sometimes tremble to
think that, although we are engaged in the best cause
that ever employed the human heart, yet the prospect
of success is doubtful not for want of power or of
wisdom, but of virtue.

In no unreal sense John Adams and his as-
sociates thought of themselves as undertaking
something new in the history of the world;
they were undertaking the novel experiment
of founding that ideal community, a republic
founded upon virtue and devoted to the re-
generation of the human race.

in

It is thus clear that the American Revolu-
tion was a twofold movement : it was a move-
ment for the separation from Great Britain;
it was also a movement for the abolition of
class privilege, for the democratization of
American politics and society, in some measure
for the inauguration of an ideal state. The
Declaration of Independence reflects and ex-
presses this twofold character of the Revolu-
tion. On the one hand it is a declaration of

So

the reasons which justified the separation
from Great Britain; on the other hand it is a
charter of democracy, a charter which ex-
presses in classic form the universal rights of
mankind.

The Declaration of Independence is a short
document, which may be printed in four small
pages ; and the larger part of it is devoted to
the specific grievances against the King of
Great Britain. The Parliament is not men-
tioned because the revolutionists had ac-
cepted, at that time, a novel theory of the
Empire — the theory that the Colonies had
never been subject to the Parliament, but
only to the king. And so the Declaration,
affirming that "the history of the present
King of Great Britain is a history of repeated
injuries and usurpations, all having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute Tyr-
anny over these States," proceeds to enumer-
ate a long list of such injuries and usurpa-
tions, all of which have to do with specific
acts : laying taxes on the Colonies or designed
to limit or destroy the legislative indepen-
dence of the colonial governments. This part
of the Declaration is now rarely read and never
remembered ; and rightly so, for these specific
acts charged against George III, and once so
vital, are now dead issues.

But there is another part of the Declara-
51

tion — a short ten lines of print — which every-
one thinks of when the Declaration is men-
tioned, and which is the only part of that
famous document which most people have
ever kept in mind. This part of the Declara-
tion, the most significant and the most fa-
mous part, is as follows :

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, and that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness. That to secure these rights Governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, that whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish
it, and to institute new Government, laying its founda-
tions on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their Safety and Happiness.

On first thought it may appear strange that
the part of the Declaration of Independence
which is most famous and best remembered
is precisely the part which fs least directly
concerned with the grievances which led the
Colonies to declare independence. But the
reason for this is simple. It is that the specific
grievances of the Colonies concern the world
but little, while the principles upon which
just government rests are of universal in-

52

terest. The few phrases which make the
Declaration famous deal not with the rights
of Americans or Englishmen only, but with
the rights of man ; and in so far as the prin-
ciples which they proclaim are valid, they
are valid for Frenchmen, or Russians, or
Chinese no less than for Americans and
Englishmen. This is why these phrases still
live, and this is why the American Revolu-
tion has a universal and permanent as well
as a local and temporary importance. This
universal significance is that for the first time
in the modern world a new and potentially
powerful nation was "dedicated to the prop-
osition that all men are created equal," and
founded upon the principle that the legitimacy
of any government rests upon the will of the
people instead of the will of God or of the
State. And for a hundred years the example
of the United States has been one of the strong-
est supports of this new faith which, however
often forgotten or betrayed, is now accepted
by the better part of the world.

When the Revolutionary War began few
people in Europe supposed that the Colonies
could win their independence. If they had
been entirely united their chances would have
been better. But the fact is that at least
one-third of the people (this is the estimate
of John Adams) were indifferent or actively

53

opposed to the American cause. These were
the Loyalists — Americans who remained loyal
to Great Britain. They were not only nu-
merous, but they included many of the ablest
and most influential men in the Colonies,
being largely recruited from the upper classes
— landowners, merchants, clergymen, and offi-
cials, who had hitherto constituted the govern-
ing class, and who opposed the Revolution
quite as much because of their fear of democ-
racy as on account of any strong attachment
to Great Britain. This division within their
own ranks greatly weakened the colonists
and gave to the struggle something of the
character of a civil war.

But besides this class division, which ap-
peared in every colony, the chances of suc-
cess were immensely lessened by the per-
sistence and even the accentuation of the
old rivalries between the different colonies.
"There ought to be no New England man,
no New-Yorker, known on the continent, but
all of us Americans." So Christopher Gadsden
wrote at the time of the Stamp Act Congress
in 1765. It was a noble ideal of which most
men no doubt vaguely felt the force; but
neither New England men nor New-Yorkers
nor South-Carolinians could be wholly trans-
formed overnight. It took a hundred years
to effect this transformation; and the student

54

of the Revolution is sometimes amused, but
more often amazed and disheartened, by the
petty jealousies, the personal animosities, the
hopeless provincialism, and the sordid cor-
ruption which everywhere prevailed and which
but gave an added luster to the fame of those
outstanding Americans, such as Washington
and John Adams and Franklin, without whose
services the Revolution must have completely
failed.

Of these three illustrious leaders the name
of Washington stands out as a symbol of all
that is heroic and admirable in the annals of
his country. He was a Virginia planter, ac-
counted the wealthiest man in the Colonies,
whose life had been chiefly given to managing,
with the most scrupulous care and with the
highest efficiency, the estate which lay on
the south bank of the Potomac at Mount
Vernon. Scarcely a politician, he was yet a
man of broad vision, who foresaw a great
future for his country and was actively in-
terested in the development of the great west
that lay beyond the Alleghanies. Such mili-
tary experience as he possessed had been
gained in the French and Indian War; and
particularly in the famous Braddock Expedi-
tion he had revealed a knowledge of frontier
Indian fighting which the British general did
not possess and declined to take advantage of,

5 55

and in this disastrous retreat he had exhibited
a courage and a resourcefulness which had
won him the respect of the British and the
confidence of his countrymen.

It was on June 17, 1775, that this Virginia
colonel was appointed to be "General and
Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the
United Colonies. " It was a high-sounding
title for the leader of the nondescript collection
of soldiers who fought the Revolutionary War;
but no man who ever undertook a great task
was better fitted for its manifold duties. For
the exhibition of brilliant military geni»>*
there were during the eight years of war but
few opportunities; but for patience and reso-
lution, for sound, practical judgment, re-
sourcefulness, for ability to make the most of
an untoward situation or a hopeless defeat,
for the spirit that could inspire soldiers and
civilians with loyalty to a cause which always
seemed irretrievably lost — for all these quali-
ties the American War of Independence fur-
nished a test which only a great soul could
have met with success.

It was the merit of Washington that he
possessed these qualities, each in perfection,
and all in the happiest combination. He was
the man of staid mind and impregnable char-
acter who gathered all the scattered and dis-
cordant forces of the Revolution and directed

56

them to the achievement of the great en
so modest that he thought himself incomp
tent to the task, yet of such heroic resolutic
that neither difficulties nor reverses nor bt
trayals could bring him to despair; a man ot
rectitude, whose will was steeled to finer
temper by every defeat, and who was not to
be turned, by any failure or success, by cal-
umny, by gold, or by the dream of empire,
from the straight path of his purpose. At the
end of eight years of unremitting labor, which
depleted his fortune and for which he asked
no more than the payment of his personal
expenses, that purpose was at last achieved.

No man was ever more rightly called the
father of his country; but even the indomi-
table resolution of Washington, supported by
the dogged persistence and garrulous common
sense of John Adams and the suppleness and
resource of Franklin's intelligence — even these
would not have sufficed to win independence.
It was America's good fortune that in this
decisive hour of her history France came to
stand by her side. Without the aid of France,
the men who signed the Declaration of In-
dependence would have pledged their lives,
their fortunes, and their sacred honor in vain,
and would have been known to history as
rebels against rightful authority instead of
defenders of human liberty.

57

The influences that brought France to
stand with America bear a curiously apt rela-
tion to these two characteristic phases of the
Revolution that have been mentioned. No
one could have had less sympathy with re-
bellious subjects proclaiming the doctrine of
popular sovereignty than Louis XVI, the chief
exemplar of autocracy in Europe ; but no one
could regard with greater satisfaction the dis-
ruption of the British Empire. For a hundred
years England and France had struggled in
peace and in war, on land and on the sea, for
the possession of the New World as the basis
of maritime and commercial supremacy. And
England had won. In every stage England
had won; and never so completely as in the
last war. The Peace of Paris of 1763, by which
France had been expelled from America and
India, was the profoundest humiliation which
France had suffered, and the memory of it
still rankled.

Inevitably, therefore, as a matter of prac-
tical politics, the French government sought
to redress the balance of power in Europe
and the world by diminishing the power of
Great Britain. The persistent promoter of
this policy was the Foreign Minister, Ver-
gennes, who watched with delight the grow-
ing dispute between the mother country and
the American provinces, and who labored

58 '

from the outbreak of hostilities to bring France
into alliance with the revolting Colonies.
Early in the war, through a fictitious business
firm organized by the playwright, Beaumar-
chais, the government furnished two hundred
thousand dollars' worth of supplies and mili-
tary stores; after the Declaration of Inde-
pendence Vergennes arranged with Franklin
for a regular subsidy of two hundred thousand
dollars a year; and finally, after the great
victory of the colonial troops at Saratoga,
an open military and commercial treaty was
signed between the United States of America,
recently founded upon the revolutionary prin-
ciple of popular sovereignty, and his Most
Christian Majesty, Louis XVI, by Grace of
God King of France and Navarre.

So far as the French government was con-
cerned the alliance between the two coun-
tries was inspired by the desire to disrupt
the British Empire and thereby increase the
power of France. But the Franco-American
alliance was something more than a diplomatic
entente. The alliance was welcomed in France
with immense popular enthusiasm; and this
enthusiasm was inspired, not by hatred of
England (never were the English more ad-
mired in France than at this time), but by a
profound sympathy with the ideals of liberty
and human welfare upon which the Revolu-

59

tion was based and which found classic ex-
pression in the famous Declaration of In-
dependence. Within half a century a new
spirit had arisen in France. A generation of
brilliant writers, of whom Voltaire, Montes-
quieu, and Rousseau were the leaders, had
transformed the thinking and the aspirations
of the French people. By trenchant criticism
and corrosive satire and passionate denunci-
ation of corruption, hypocrisy, and injus-
tice, they destroyed the moral foundations of
the monarchy and the Church and prepared
the way for that great Revolution which
was destined to transform the old European
world.

Thus it happened that in 1776 the French,
like the Americans, were dreaming of a new
era. They had caught the vision of a regener-
ated society — a society in which enlightenment
would banish ignorance and vice, in which
selfishness and brutality would give way to a
kindly fraternity, in which the generous and
humane instincts of the natural man would
find expression in law and customs designed
to establish and perpetuate the general wel-
fare. And so it was that in this soft spring-
time of the modern world forward-looking
men observed with profound interest the birth
of a new nation on the western continent.
Repelled by the corrupt and artificial life of

60

Europe, everywhere encumbered with the de-
bris of worn-out institutions, they turned to
America as a kind of concrete example of their
imagined state of nature. Their very igno-
rance of America enabled them to confer upon
it more virtues than it in fact possessed. In
contrast with Europe, so oppressed with de-
fenseless tyrannies and useless inequalities,
how superior seemed this new land of promise
where every citizen was a free man, where
the necessities of life were the sure reward
of industry, where manners were simple, where
vice and crime had almost disappeared, and
where native incapacity was the only effective
barrier to ambition!

When Benjamin Franklin arrived in France
in 1776 he was therefore something more than
the official representive of the Congress of the
United States. To the French mind he was
the incarnation of the qualities which a state
founded on reason and nature would tend to
develop in all men. This man who had begun
life as a printer's boy and was now the chosen
representative of his country on a difficult
mission, this self-educated philosopher whose
discoveries were known to every savant in
Europe, this Friend of the Human Race who
had "wrested lightning from Heaven and the
scepter from the Tyrant's hand" — this man
was, after all, no more than one of nature's

61

noblemen, such as free institutions might be
expected to produce.

And in some ways Franklin was better than
his reputation. The suppleness of his plastic
mind enabled him to take on without effort
the external qualities of the French tempera-
ment, while retaining the homely wit and wis-
dom and the serene and imperturbable geni-
ality which was his native character. The
result was that never before nor since has any
man in a foreign country received such con-
tinued applause or been the object of such uni-
versal affection as fell to Franklin in France.
John Adams, who liked the French none too
well and who might have felt the jealousy of
a less successful rival, said of Franklin :

His reputation was more universal than that of
Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire; and his
character more beloved and esteemed than any or
all of them. . . . His name was familiar to government
and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and
philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that
there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de
chambre, a coachman or footman, a lady's chamber-
maid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar
with it, and who did not consider him as a friend of
humankind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to
think he was to restore the Golden Age.

The Golden Age! This phrase gives us
indeed the secret of Franklin's popularity.

62

He was in French eyes the beau-ideal of the
natural philosopher, the incarnation of all
those amiable and excellent qualities which
were potential in the nature of men, and which
would be developed in all men when institu-
tions were made to conform to reason and
justice. The enthusiasm of the French people
for America and for Franklin was but the
measure of their passionate desire for the re-
generation of France, a symbol of the com-
munity of hopes and ideals which bound the
two countries together.

IV

DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT

WHEN the United States of America as-
sumed her place among the independent
nations of the earth, the regeneration of the
human race was far from an accomplished
fact. Europeans were prepared to regard the
event as a forecast of a new era in human
history; but it would have been an optimist
indeed who could have seen in even the most
favored of the thirteen little states that com-
posed the new nation that ideal republic,
founded upon virtue and assuring the reign
of felicity, which John Adams in his generous
moments had professed to believe in. On the
contrary, the country was exhausted and de-
moralized. The poverty and destitution which
everywhere prevailed among the mass of the
people was only thrown into stronger relief
by the prosperity of those who had somehow
managed to preserve their estates, or of those
newly rich whose swollen fortunes were the

64

reward of shameless profiteering. The sense
of public probity had been immensely weak-
ened by the unrestrained lawlessness of many
years as well as by the unlimited issue of
government obligations that were scarcely
worth the paper they were printed on. Re-
spect for law had been half destroyed by the
feebleness of governments which, under the
stress of civil war, had fallen to the level of
imbecility. For many years after the treaty of
1 783 there was no question of an ideal state or of
the regeneration of the human race ; the ques-
tion was of any tolerable state, of any stable
government. The ideal republic might come, it
might conceivably come in America; but the
immediate task which confronted the United
States was to demonstrate to the world's satis-
faction that any republic could endure for a
generation.

11

Probably no people indeed has ever been
more constantly preoccupied with the ques-
tion of the proper form of government than
the people of the United States. The question
of government was one of the questions that
drove men out of Europe into America in the
seventeenth century. The colonial assemblies
were perpetually quarreling with the governor
over their respective powers. The Revolution

65

turned upon a question of government; and
throughout the Revolutionary War and for
some years after, one chief occupation of the
people was the manufacture of constitutions.
Having finally adopted a federal constitution
in 1787, the people and their leaders began to
discuss the question of how it ought to be in-
terpreted. They adopted the constitution
first and then tried to find out what it meant,
but never could agree, and at last had to fight
a desperate civil war to determine the matter.
Nevertheless, these constant wrangles about
the form of the government, at least since the
Revolution, have not, for the most part, had
to do with fundamental questions. The French
people have in the nineteenth century dis-
cussed the question of government as much
as Americans have; but in France the dispute
has involved fundamental issues, such as the
question of whether a divine-right monarchy
or a democratic republic is better. Such a dis-
pute never has nor ever could exist in America ;
and this is a fact of fundamental importance
for an understanding of American history and
institutions- —namely, that in all of our his-
tory few people have ever seriously pro-
posed that a divine-right monarchy or any
other kind of monarchy should be established.
The only king which Americans were ever
willing to recognize, even in colonial days, was

66

a king who was too far away to have any
power over them. The most deep-rooted
political instinct which Americans have, an
instinct which determines all their thinking,
is the feeling that they can and will, as a mat-
ter of course, govern themselves. This idea is
so fixed and so universally held that if any one
should suggest any kind of government other
than self-government as proper for Ameri-
cans the proposal would be taken as a species
of joke. The traditions of monarchy and
Church and nobility, which are such powerful
influences in Europe because they are so inter-
woven in all European history — these tradi-
tions simply do not exist in the United States.
Not only have Americans always been vio-
lently opposed to monarchical government,
they have always been opposed to a highly
centralized government, exercising its au-
thority from a great distance and through
officials unknown in the community where
they act. In America the burden of proof
commonly rests on the government. The
American, therefore, likes to have a govern-
ment that is limited as much as possible,
that is nicely checked and balanced; and for
this reason he likes to have a government that
is close at hand, where it can be carefully
watched and kept in its proper place. From
the beginning of American history the people

67

have accordingly been disposed to retain as
much local government as possible, and have
surrendered only gradually and under pres-
sure any powers to the central government,
whether state or national.

Such an attitude toward government is
likely to be developed in any new country
where people have to depend upon themselves
and where individual initiative is at a pre-
mium; but the trait was already ingrained
in the first settlers. America was settled, in
large part, by people who left Europe in order
to free themselves from the oppression of
monarchy and Church. Separatists, Puri-
tans, Nonconformists, Quakers, Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, Mennonites, Dunkers — these
names are associated with those Europeans
who were so eccentric in their views that they
could not live comfortably at home. They
were opposed to monarchy, opposed to heredi-
tary nobility, opposed to bishops, opposed to
May-poles, opposed to lawn sleeves, opposed to
almost all the prevailing ideas and customs.
Being temperamentally cantankerous, people
with whom it went against the grain to submit
to outward constraint, they were disposed to
look within for some "inner light" or "scru-
ple of conscience" which might serve as a
guide to action. And so, in order to be free

from the outward constraint of king or priest

68

or social custom, they came to America where
there was room for all and no one to care what
they thought or how they worshiped or
whether they had much or little government.
Inevitably such eccentric people founded
small and dispersed communities. The Pil-
grims, asserting that it belongeth not to the
magistrate "to compel religion, to plant
churches by power, and to force submission
to Ecclesiastical Government by laws and
penalties," first went to Holland ; but when
they could not be sufficiently "separated"
there, they lifted up "their eyes to the
heavens, their dearest country, and quieted
their spirits." They also quieted their spirits
by coming to the bleak New England coast and
settling at Plymouth, a tiny little community
that maintained its separate government for
seventy-one years. They preferred not to
unite with the Puritans who settled Massa-
chusetts Bay, although the difference between
the Puritans and the Separatists seems to the
modern mind very slight. The Puritans them-
selves were no sooner established at Boston
than they began to quarrel over the precise
nature of that "due form of government both
civil and ecclesiastical" which they came to
America to establish ; and some of them, being
expelled, went off with Roger Williams to found
another tiny commonwealth at Providence

69

(Rhode Island), while others followed Thomas
Hooker into a new wilderness and founded
the colony of Connecticut. Still another group
of Puritans, coming from London to Boston,
but not finding the due form of government
precisely right in every detail, went on to New
Haven and founded there a Bible common-
wealth that suited them. In origin and in
their ideas of religion and government, all
of these people were very much alike. Had
they chosen to live together under one state,
that state, seventy years after the first settle-
ment, would have had a population of less
than eighty thousand. But in spite of the
extreme hardships of the wilderness, in spite
of the danger from the Indians, these eighty
thousand eccentrics could not possibly sub-
ordinate themselves to a single government.
They preferred to live separated, according
to the "strong bent of their spirits," in five
distinct and independent states, each one an
ideal commonwealth.

During a century and a half of colonial
history the jealousy of local liberties and the
practice of local government became firmly
established, and each colony as a matter of
course managed its own affairs in complete
independence of every other colony. The
only bond of union between the colonies was
the British government, and the people of

70

the various colonies had usually but little
intercourse with one another. When John
Adams went to Philadelphia in 1774 to attend
the first Continental Congress, he had never
before been outside of New England. He
entered New York with the same interested
curiosity with which an American now goes
for the first time to London; and he noted
in his Diary, as the European tourist might
do, his impressions of the people, of their
dress and manners, of how their political in-
stitutions differed from those of New England,
and commented upon the several kinds of
food which he had for breakfast at the country
seat of Mr. John Morin Scott.

This provincial point of view was not radi-
cally changed by the Revolution; and when
independence was declared each colony re-
garded itself as an independent and sovereign
state. It is true that independence was de-
clared by the Continental Congress, but it
was an associated declaration of the thirteen
states. No colony was bound by the act of
Congress until it gave its adherence to that
act; and, in fact, the colony of New York
did not vote for independence until July 9th,
seven days after the resolution was voted in
Congress.

The resolution by which Congress voted in

favor of independence included a recom-
6 71

mendation to the effect that each state should
proceed forthwith to form a new state govern-
ment; and in fact each state, assuming full
sovereign rights, established a government to
suit itself. The Revolution thus created thir-
teen independent states, each with its own
constitution and its own government; and
this system of state governments became and
has remained to this day the foundation of
the United States and of its political system.
The original state governments were modeled
upon the old colonial governments (the col-
onies of Connecticut and Rhode Island in-
deed retained for many years their old colonial
charters as constitutions), and the structure
of these governments, in its essential features,
was much the same in all the states. There
were the county or town officials for purely
local affairs ; there were the elected assemblies,
in most cases of two houses, for the making
of state laws; and there were the governors,
elected directly by the people (except in New
York), to whom were intrusted the adminis-
trative and executive functions. There are
now forty-eight states in the Union. Each
one has a written constitution, in accordance
with which its government is organized; and
although in the course of time the trend
toward a greater degree of democracy has
brought about many modifications in detail,

72

the structural features of municipal, county,
and state governments remain what they were
at the close of the eighteenth century.

It was upon this foundation that the United
States government was erected. While the
sovereignty of the states was the accepted
idea at the close of the Revolution, every
one felt that the people of the Colonies were
in some measure a common people with a
common destiny, and that, as they had united
for defending their rights and the winning of
independence, so they must continue to act to-
gether in their dealings with the outside world.
In other words, it was agreed that the thir-
teen independent states ought to unite in a
federation. This union had been achieved
during the war by means of the Continental
Congress; but the Continental Congress was
only a temporary body with no specifically
determined powers — an assembly of deputies
acting only upon instruction from their own
governments, its authority limited to recom-
mendations, and its influence such as the
prestige of its members or the exigencies of
war might give to it. To take the place of
the Continental Congress, the states finally
adopted, after much wrangling, the Articles
of Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation created a
federal government without any effective

73

power. The states were as Jealous of their
sovereign rights then as states are now; and
the creation of a strong federal government
was contemplated with the same hesitancy
with which the states of Europe now contem-
plate the creation of a strong League of Na-
tions. It was somehow imagined that an
effective United States could be formed with-
out depriving the individual states of any
sovereign rights. The Articles of Confedera-
tion made no provision for a federal executive,
and upon the federal Congress which was
created they conferred nothing more than the
right of recommending laws which the separate
states were expected to enforce, but which
in fact they enforced or not, as they saw fit.
Such a federal union proved a complete failure.
A government which could negotiate treaties,
but could not execute them ; which could levy
taxes, but could not collect them, merited
and received the contempt of every one both
at home and abroad. Within a few years it
was found that in order to avert the dissolu-
tion of the confederation, as well as to protect
the common interests of the states against
foreign aggression, a more perfect union would
have to be formed. This more perfect union
was achieved by the adoption of the Constitu-
tion of 1787, which went into effect in 1789 and
has remained in force until the present time.

74

Ill

The Constitution of 1787 was declared by
Mr. Gladstone to be the "grandest work ever
struck off by the hand of man at a given 11016."
The men who made it would not have claimed
so much for their handiwork. The Constitu-
tion was a compromise between many diver-
gent interests, and the result was that almost
no one was very well satisfied with it. Some
thought it created a government which was
too weak to be effective, and some thought
it created a government so strong as to be
dangerous. James Madison defended the
Constitution by saying that under all the cir-
cumstances "Ji was the best we could do." At
the time, this was thought to reveal an opti-
mistic attitude of mind; but most people
could at least take refuge in the thought
that things might turn out better than was
expected.

If it could have been foreseen how much
power the federal government would be able
to assume, the Constitution would have been
rejected by a great majority of the people;
for the states were still unwilling to surrender
the principle of sovereignty. In the new
Constitution, therefore, no more power was
conferred upon the federal government than
was thought to be absolutely necessary; and

75

hence the fundamental legal principle which
governs the distribution of the power between
the federal and the state governments, re-
spectively, is this: The states were intended
to have all powers not conferred by the Con-
stitution upon the federal government, or not
denied by the Constitution to the states. That
there might be no doubt about the matter, this
principle was formulated and adopted as the
Tenth Amendment to the Constitution in the
following terms: "The powers not delegated
to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to
the States respectively, or to the people!" If
this principle is once thoroughly understood
the distribution of powers in the American
political system, which sometimes seem so
complex to foreigners, will present no great
difficulty. There are the state governments,
each having jurisdiction within its own terri-
tory, and there is the federal government at
Washington having jurisdiction over the whole
territory of the United States. The federal
government exercises such powers only as are
conferred upon it by the Constitution; while
the state governments exercise all powers not
denied to them or conferred upon the federal
government.

The federal government, upon which the
Constitution conferred certain powers, is in

76

its structure similar to the state governments.
It is a government of three branches — execu-
tive, legislative, and judicial — intended to be
so nicely checked and balanced, in respect
to the powers conferred upon each branch,
that no one branch could usurp the powers
conferred upon either of the others. The
executive branch is intrusted to the President,
originally elected by an electoral college, but
now in fact elected directly by the people,
for a term of four years. Aside from a limited
right of vetoing laws passed by Congress,
the chief function of the President is to " take
care that the laws be faithfully executed." In
order that he may do this, he is made the
commander-in-chief of the army and navy,
and is given the power to appoint ambassa-
dors, judges of the Supreme Court, and all
federal officers whose appointment is not
otherwise provided for. In addition, the
President negotiates all treaties with for-
eign powers; but both the treaties negotiated
and the appointments made by the Presi-
dent become valid only when approved by
the Senate.

The legislative branch of the federal govern-
ment consists of the Congress, composed of
an upper house called the Senate, and a lower
house called the House of Representatives.
The Senate is composed of two members from

77

each state, whether large or small, chosen
originally by the state legislatures, but now
in all states by the people, for a term of six
years. The Senate was a concession to the
small states, which wished to preserve their
equality with the large states, so that even
to-day a state like Rhode Island, with a popu-
lation of about six hundred and fifty thousand,
has equal weight in the Senate with a state
like New York, with a population of over ten
millions. But the Senate was also a conces-
sion to those who feared the unchecked power
of the people. Chosen by the state legislatures,
for a long term of service, and made up pre-
sumably of older men, the Senate was de-
signed to prevent over-hasty action by the
House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives is composed
of men chosen directly by the people for a
term of two years. The number from each
state is determined according to the popu-
lation of the state, and in each state every
one has a right to vote for members of the
House of Representatives who has a right to
vote for the members of the lower house of
the legislature of that state. The House of
Representatives was thus a concession to the
large states; but it was also a concession to the
principle of democracy. It was and is as
democratic a body as the states respectively

78

wish to make it. In two respects, indeed,
the states have been deprived by the Consti-
tution of their power to restrict the suffrage.
The fifteenth amendment prohibits the states
from denying the ballot to any person on
account of race, color, or previous condition
of servitude; the nineteenth amendment for-
bids a similar restriction on account of sex.

The third branch of the federal government
is the judicial branch, "which is vested in one
Supreme Court and in such inferior courts as
Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish." The Congress has in fact estab-
lished a number of such inferior courts. At
present (1927) the chief of these inferior
courts are the District Courts and the Cir-
cuit Courts of Appeal. There is at least
one District Court in each state; but the
large and the thickly populated states ordina-
rily have more than one. Thus, for example,
New York is divided into four districts and
Texas into four. Altogether there are in the
United States some eighty Federal judicial
districts, there being in each district at least
one district judge. The states are also
grouped into nine divisions, called circuits;
in each of these regional divisions there is
a Circuit Court of Appeals, and there arc
three or four circuit court of appeals judges
for each of these appellate courts. The

79

jurisdiction of the federal courts extends to "all
cases . . . arising under the Constitution, the
laws of the United States, and treaties made,
or which shall be made, under their authority."
Such is the form of the federal government
upon which the Constitution expressly con-
fers certain powers. Aside from the power
of the President to negotiate treaties, the
f powers which the Constitution confers upon
the federal government are essentially all con-
tained in Section VIII, which defines the legis-
lative authority of the federal Congress. This
section is of sufficient importance to quote
at length:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect
taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts
and provide for the common defense and general wel-
fare of the United States; but all duties, imposts, and
excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

To borrow money on the credit of the United States.

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, among
the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.

To establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and
uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcy through-
out the States.

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of
foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and
measures

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the
securities and current coin of the United States.

To establish post offices and post roads.

To promote the progress of science and the useful
80

arts, by securing for limited times to authors and in-
ventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
and discoveries.

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme
Court.

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed
on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations.

To declare war, grant letters of Marque and Reprisal,
to make rules concerning captures on land and water.

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation
of money to that use shall be for a longer term than
two years.

To provide and maintain a navy.

To make rules and regulations for the government
and regulation of the land and naval forces.

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute
the laws of the Union, suppress insurrection and repel
invasion, . . . and

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper
for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all
the other powers vested by this Constitution in the
Government of the United States, or any department
or officer thereof.

Such are the powers expressly conferred
upon the United States government by the
Constitution. The powers expressly denied
to the states are to make treaties with one
another or with foreign states, to coin money
or issue bills of credit, pass bills of attainder,
ex post facto laws, or laws impairing the ob-
ligation of a contract, to levy import or export
duties, to keep ships of war in time of peace,
or to grant titles of nobility.

81

It was of course very easy to say that the
Congress of the United States should pass
only such and such laws. But suppose the
Congress should not observe the limits set
in the Constitution? Who would restrain it?
It was easy to say that the states should not
pass such and such laws — for example, a law
impairing the obligation of a contract. But
suppose some state should pass a law im-
pairing the obligation of a contract? Who
would restrain it? Where virtually sovereign
powers are divided between two distinct gov-
ernments, conflict is sure to arise. The dis-
4 tribution of powers between the states and the
federal government is an essential feature of
the American federal system, and conflicts
have often arisen between the states and the
federal government in respect to their proper
sphere of activities. Some method of de-
termining these questions without resorting
to war was therefore necessary.

As a matter of fact, it fell to the Supreme
Court to decide these disputed questions. If
the Congress passes a law, or if any state legis-
lature passes a law, in either case any one may
refuse to obey the law; and if he is arrested
in consequence and brought to trial, he may
plead that the law in question is unconstitu-
tional— that is, that the Congress or the state
legislature is forbidden by the Constitution

82

of the United States to pass such a law. Such
a plea, if it is allowed, brings the case before
a federal court, and may ultimately bring it
before the Supreme Court, because the juris-
diction of the federal court extends to "all
cases arising under the Constitution of the
United States"; and it then becomes the
duty of the court, if the case cannot be de-
cided on some other ground, to raise and to
decide the question of the constitutionality of
the law in question. Acting in this way, the
Supreme Court has often declared laws of
Congress null and void on the ground that
the Congress has exceeded the powers given
to it by the Constitution; and it has still
more frequently declared state laws null and
void on the ground that the state is exercising
powers denied to it by the Constitution. Thus
the Supreme Court is not only a strictly judi-
cial body; it is also a kind of umpire or arbi-
trator which sett4es disputes in respect to the
respective powers of the federal and state
governments. In settling such disputes, it
often has to declare what is or is not law, and
so it becomes in fact a lawmaking body as
well as a law-interpreting body.

Such in brief outline is the framework or
structure of the American political system.
It must be confessed that it is not simple.
The principle for determining the distribution

83

of power between the various governments
may be clear enough, but the machinery itself
is complicated, and there is a great deal of it.
The number of elections to be held, of offices
to be filled, of legislative bodies to be kept
going, is something wonderful. Consider the
lawmaking bodies alone! To say nothing of
county and municipal governments through-
out the Union, there is the Congress of the
United States assembling every year, and
forty-eight state legislatures assembling at
least once in two years, to make more laws.
A more extensive plant than we have in
America for the manufacture of statutes does
not exist on the earth. Every year thousands
of new laws, state and national, are made —
very soon forgotten, most of them, it is true,
and most of them useless. But then most of
them are harmless also, because most statutes
become obsolete unless the people are inter-
ested in their enforcement, since no one in
America imagines that laws can have any
force if they are not an expression of the
public will.

IV

In America the enforcement of law as well
as the making of law rests with the people;
but the will of the people is not quite the same
thing in both cases. Laws that are made are

84

the expression of the popular will in the sense
that all statutes are formulated and passed,
and all executive decrees are issued, by assem-
blies elected by the people, or by officials ap-
pointed by some one who is himself elected
by the people. But who are the people?
And do the legislative bodies and executive
officials always represent -the wishes of the
people ?

The people, so far as the making of laws is
concerned, have never been in America, or
in any other country, composed of all the
citizens. The right of voting for legislative
bodies and officials has always been limited*
to certain persons. Nor has this limited class
of persons, this "electorate/' ever been able
to express its will perfectly, or to get it per-
fectly represented in government. No form
of government works perfectly. Democratic
government does not work perfectly; and
democratic government in the United States
is no exception to this rule. But the validity
of the principle upon which the political system
of the United States rests has in this country
never been seriously questioned. When the
American sees that his system of government
works badly, he does not deny his faith and
fall into despair. He says, cheerfully, "We
must set this right ; we must have more laws ;
we must amend the Constitution." The aver-

85

age American never doubts that the remedy
for democracy is more democracy.

The whole history of the United States has
been a process of trying to get more democ-
racy. In 1789 every state restricted the right
of voting more or less narrowly. At that time
it was generally thought that to place the
control of government unreservedly in the
hands of even a minority of the people was
to have a great deal of democracy. It was
thought that only those who had property to
protect would have a sufficiently intelligent
interest in government to be intrusted with
political power; only those who had a "stake
in the country" ought to have a share in
saying what was to be done with the country.
As John Jay was fond of saying, "Those who
own the country ought to govern it."

But even at that time there were those
who had more interest in men than they had
in money, and more faith in the virtue of the
people than they had in the virtue of wealth.
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declara-
tion of Independence, was one of those who
never lost faith in the principles of that docu-
ment ; and he became the leader of the Demo-
cratic - Republican party, which forthwith
raised the cry of "aristocracy" and "oli-
garchy" against the Federalist party, which

was supported mainly by the wealthy and edu-

86

cated classes. But although Jefferson and his
party came into power in 1801, it was not until
the period of 1820-30, when the more demo-
cratic frontier states of the Middle West began
to exercise a determining influence upon the
political history of the United States, that the
old restrictions on the suffrage began to be
abolished. This great democratic movement
culminated in the election of Andrew Jackson
(1828-37) as President. A frontier Indian-
fighter, "Old Hickory" was a man of the
people with a profound faith in the worth, the
integrity, and the sound sense of the average
man. From this period universal manhood
suffrage became the general practice in the
United States, and political control passed in
considerable measure from the cultured and
educated classes to the mass of the people.

But universal manhood suffrage brought
its evils and its problems. As the electorate
became larger, the nomination of candidates
for office was taken out of the hands of
prominent officials and placed in the hands of
mass-meetings, which in turn developed into
"nominating conventions" made of delegates
elected by the members of the party con-
cerned. The nomination convention offered
an excellent opportunity for the professional
politician to construct a closely integrated*
"political machine," which manipulated the

7 87

nomination of candidates and controlled the
party through the spoils of office and through
the relations it might establish with business
or other "interests" seeking protection or ad-
vantage. It thus came about that the hon-
est voter had usually only a choice between
two candidates, which was often a choice be-
tween two evils. Each candidate was nomi-
nated in a more or less secret and devious way,
so that whichever candidate was elected to
office was likely to have "obligations" to
those who had procured his nomination and
his election. These "obligations" were not
so much to the people as to individuals or
groups of individuals who had axes of their
own to grind.

This system of corrupt "machine politics"
at last became so perfect in its kind that
even the easy-going Americans could not
tolerate it, and in recent years the nominating
convention has been rapidly modified or abol-
ished altogether. Many states now have what
are called "primary elections" — that is, elec-
tions within each party, or without regard to
party, for the purpose of nominating candi-
dates to stand for the final election. By this
system all voters, or at least all voters who
are registered as members of a recognized
party, may take part in nominating the candi-
dates who are to be finally voted for. To some

88

extent this has diminished the influence of the
professional politician by enabling the rank and
file to choose men for office who will be more
free to carry out their wishes.

But it is of course still possible that the
elected representatives may not carry out the
wishes of the people. Municipal councilors,
state assemblymen, members of the House of
Representatives, even United States Sena-
tors, are not demigods, but more or less *
ordinary human beings. They have their
political careers to consider, often place loyalty
to party above loyalty to ideas even if they
have any, or to the welfare of the people even
if by chance they know what it is. Conscious-
ly or not, they are often the instruments of
malign influences — selfish or corrupt or vicious
organizations that prey upon society and ex-
ploit the people. Thus it happens that the
laws passed by the representatives of the
people, even when these representatives are
men whom the people choose willingly, are
often not such as the people desire.

To correct this evil by bringing the action *
of elected representatives more directly underv
popular control even during their terms of
office, there has been under way for many
years a movement which is symbolized by
the letters I. R. R. — the Initiative, the Refer-
endum, and the Recall. The Initiative (which

89

it at least as old as the French Revolution) is
a scheme which permits a certain proportion
of the voters to initiate legislation — that is,
to formulate and propose bills which the
legislature must consider and vote upon. The
Referendum is a scheme which requires cer-
tain bills or laws passed by the legislature to
be referred to the voters for approval or re-
jection. The Recall is a method of permitting
the voters to "recall" — that is, to remove
from office — an elected official before the term
of his office expires, in case he acts contrary
to their wishes. These methods, which have
been adopted to a greater or less extent in a
few of the states, are all designed to give
to the people a more direct and a more effec-
tive control of legislation, and of the con-
duct of elected representatives. Their effect
is in some measure to transform elected
officials from representatives to agents of the
people.

Meantime, the trend toward a greater de-
gree of democracy has taken the form of an
extension of the suffrage. Many people have
always regarded women as reasonably honest
and intelligent — at least, as much so as men;
and for a long time these people have been
asking a very embarrassing question. If it is
true, they say, that "all just government rests
upon the consent of the governed," why should

90

women, who have as well as men to submit to
government, not be allowed to consent to it
also. No convincing reason for not allowing
women to vote has ever been advanced which
would not apply equally well to men. But it
takes a great deal of reason to overcome the
force of a little inertia ; and it is only in recent
years, when the economic and intellectual
emancipation of women has somewhat broken
down the solidarity of the family, that the
political emancipation of women has made
much headway. At the present time women
have full or partial rights of voting in about
thirty states.1 Above all, the Great War, with
the stimulation of democratic ideals which has
come out of it, has. given a great impetus to
the woman's suffrage movement in this coun-
try. There is now a joint resolution before
the Congress of the United States proposing
an amendment to the Constitution which, if
adopted, will give to women throughout the
United States the same rights of voting as
men. The resolution has been passed by the
House of Representatives, and, although re-
cently rejected by the Senate, there seems
little doubt that it will ultimately be carried
into effect. If this should come to pass,2 the
political system of the United States, so far
as the right of the people to share in the

1 April, 1925. * Since adopted as the XIX amendment.

91

election of those who exercise governmental
power is concerned, will be as democratic as
it could well be.

Americans do not as a rule follow closely
the work of their various legislatures, or take
much interest in the great majority of the
laws they make. In a single session of almost
any state legislature a thousand or more bills
are introduced. Most of these are happily
never enacted into law; but very few people
indeed ever hear of the majority of those that
are enacted into law. Only in those laws
which are the result of wide-spread interest
and of much discussion in the newspapers do
the people take any interest ; and on the other
hand, aside from a few very special laws, those
laws in which the people are not interested
cannot long be enforced. In other words, the
right to vote for representatives is only one
method of expressing the popular will; a less
tangible but a much more effective way is
through the force of public opinion. Public
opinion, when it is once definitely crystallized,
can easily force legislatures to make the laws
that are desired, and it can with equal ease
compel officials to enforce or to ignore any
law after it has once been made. In the

92

United States there is no power that can long
resist a consolidated public opinion.

But what is public opinion? There are of
course many public opinions. Wherever you
have a group of people who think alike in
respect to any matter, there you have, for
that group and in respect to that matter, a
public opinion. In respect to many things,
there is a public opinion of the village which
is different from the public opinion of the city,
a public opinion of the city which is different
from the public opinion of the state, a public
opinion of the state which is different from
the public opinion of the nation. Again, in
any territorial area, public opinion may differ
from class to class and from group to group.
There is what may be called the public opinion
of the Democrats as opposed (it must be op-
posed) to that of the Republicans, the public
opinion of the laboring class as opposed to the
public opinion of the capitalists, the public
opinion of the Brewers' Association as op-
posed to the public opinion of the Women's
Christian Temperance Union.

Over large areas these various group opin-
ions often neutralize one another so effectively
that the practical result is nil; and it is ob-
vious that the larger the area and the more
diverse the groups concerned the more difficult
it is ever to get a thoroughly consolidated

93

public opinion in essential questions of politics
and society. This difficulty depends not only
upon the size of the territory concerned, but
also upon the extent to which there is present
vital differences in respect to race, cultural
habit, or economic conditions. Kansas is
almost entirely an agricultural state in which
there are not many very poor or very rich
people, no large cities, and few foreign-born
citizens. It is therefore much easier for the
people of Kansas to agree in respect to most
questions of politics than it is for the people
of New York State to agree in respect to simi-
lar questions. For example, there is a con-
solidated public opinion in Kansas, and has
been for a long time, on the subject of pro-
hibition; there is no such consolidated public
opinion on this subject in the state of New
York, where there is so little uniformity in re-
spect to the racial origins of the people and in
the economic conditions under which they live.
It is obvious, therefore, that the larger a
country is, and the more deep-seated the dif-
ferences are between section and section, or
between the different groups and classes, the
more difficult it will be to have a consolidated
public opinion on most questions of im-
portance. Now the United States is a very
large country, with well-marked geographical
areas differing in climate, soil, economic con-

94

editions, and in the characteristics of the people.
The Alleghany and the Rocky Mountain
ranges divide the country into the East and
the Middle West and the Far West ; climate
and historical memories combine to differenti-
ate the North from the South. The people of
the United States are of cosmopolitan origin.
For a century a constant stream of foreign
immigrants has been pouring into the country,
and to-day about one-third of the people are,
at least on one side, of foreign-born parentage.
To-day it is very difficult to say what is a
"typical" American name or a "typical"
American face. One is reminded of the story
of the corporal who at first had difficulty in
calling the roll of his company, on account of
the great number of strange Polish and Italian
names; but at last he came to the name of
O'Shaughnessey, and was heard to mutter
under his breath, "Thank God for one of those
good old American names." Almost any name
is now a good American name. But besides its
geographical and racial diversity, America is
rapidly becoming an industrialized country,
wealth is being rapidly concentrated in the
hands of the few, and as a result there is de-
veloping, in certain sections especially, a
marked divergence of interests and ideas be-
tween the capitalist and the laboring classes.
In America, therefore, the problem of recon-

95

ciling sectional differences, of Americanizing
the mass of foreign immigrants, of composing
the different interests of labor and capital —
in a word, the problem of creating a consoli-
dated public opinion is a difficult one.

If, under these conditions, the American
system of democratic government works fairly-
well, it is partly due to the fact that the fed-
eral system, with its elaborate scheme of
checks and balances, is well suited to a large
country with a great diversity of conditions.
The federal system is complicated, and it
works slowly, but it has this supreme merit,
that it does not confer too much authority in
any one government, that it allows a great deal
of leeway for political experimentation in re-
stricted areas in conformity with the crystal-
lization of public opinion in those areas. The
federal system does not require the people of
the whole United States to form a consolidated
public opinion on every important social or
political question, but only upon those ques-
tions in respect to which it is essential that the
nation should act as a unit. This is only a way
of saying that the federal system allows a great
deal of liberty in local government — it allows
the people of a state, or the people of a city or
county, a good deal of liberty todoas they please.

It is said that on one occasion the French
Minister of Public Instruction, taking out his

96

watch, told his English visitor that at that
moment all the children of France of a cer-
tain age would normally be studying the same
subject out of the same text-book. This could
happen only in a country in which a great
majority of the people were pretty well agreed
as to what children of a certain age ought to
be doing at a given hour of the day. No such
agreement exists in the United States. Every
one is agreed that education is a good thing,
that there ought to be more of it, and that it
ought to be better than it is. But there is the
greatest diversity of opinion, which seems to
fluctuate from day to day, as to what kind of
education is best; and it would therefore be
thought intolerable that the United States
government should regulate these matters in
a uniform way for the whole country. This
is a matter for the state of the locality to
determine. If the people of Iowa feel very
strongly that a knowledge of Greek is useless
in a farming community, the state of Iowa
may abolish the teaching of Greek from the
public schools of Iowa. If the people of Gary,
which is a highly industrialized city, wish to
try a radical experiment in industrial edu-
cation, why should they not do so? It may
turn out well, in which case other cities can
adopt it; or it may turn out ill, in which case
other cities may profit by the example, while

97

Gary itself can at any time return to normal
ways. And so it is in respect to a hundred
questions of government and politics; in re-
spect to woman's suffrage, prohibition,1 the re-
gulation of corporations, divorce, city govern-
ment, municipal ownership of street railways,
water-works, and other public utilities — in re-
spect to all such matters particular states and
local communities are constantly engaged in
political and social experimentation, are con-
stantly solving their own problems according to
the pressure of local or regional public opinion.
Where there is so much leeway for the states
and localities to manage their own affairs,
it is only in matters in respect to which the
whole nation has to act as a unit that the
people have to form a national opinion; and
this is a good thing, for it takes the nation a
long time to make up its mind. It took the
nation a long time to make up its mind in
respect to the Great War. Many people got
impatient with the government because it did
not declare war sooner. But the government,
in a country where public opinion is the ruling
power, could not possibly take such a mo-
mentous step until the people were ready for
it, until a fairly consolidated public opinion
had been formed; and under all the circum-
stances, the wonder is, not that the nation

1This is no longer true of Prohibition or Woman'i Suffrage.

98

took so long to make up its mind, but that it
made it up as quickly and, on the whole, as
decisively as it did.

The federal system, with its checks and
balances, although it often seems rather slow
and clumsy, is nevertheless pretty well adapted
to this large and diverse country in which the
formation of a national opinion is a slow and
often a clumsy process. It is often said that
the government of Great Britain responds
much more quickly to the pressure of public
opinion than the government of the United
States does. This is perhaps true, but it is
not so true as it seems to be. What seems to
be a more ready response to public opinion
is often only a more rapid formation of public
opinion itself. England is a small country —
about the size of the state of Kansas. The
political and industrial and intellectual life
of the nation centers in London, where the
government sits. The whole country reads
the same papers — the London papers — on the
same day they are printed ; discusses the same
events, the same men, the same measures, the
same speeches, the same scandals. Nothing
like this happens, or can happen, in the United
States. Strictly speaking, the United States
has no capital, no dominating center of in-
dustrial, political, or intellectual life. Par-
ticularly, there is no center of intellectual life.

99

The last place to go to find out what the people
are thinking about is Washington, as President
Wilson found out for himself; and it is easier
to predict the result of a general election in
Kansas City than in New York. East of the
Alleghany Mountains the people read the
New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or the Wash-
ington papers, and they never see any other.
In the Middle West the people read the Chi-
cago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, or Kansas City
papers. They can't get the New York papers
until the day after they are printed, and no
one likes to read old news. If you go still
farther west — to Seattle, Portland, San Fran-
cisco— you are again in a new country, where
a New York paper, if one is ever seen, is four
days behind the times.

Of course the newspapers all carry much
the same press matter; and events of world
importance, or of great national significance,
are similarly presented, and read on the same
day, the country over. But what the people
think about these events in any particular
section, and how their particular interests are
involved — this is differently reflected in the
different sections; so that to a considerable
extent the people of the different sections read
and think about different men and different
events and different issues. Under these cir-
cumstances it is no wonder that it takes a

ioo

long time to form a thoroughly consolidated
opinion on any vital matter.

It not infrequently happens that the people
elect in one year a Republican President and
a Republican majority in Congress, but two
years later, in the congressional elections,
elect enough Democrats to place the Repub-
licans in a minority in Congress. The result
seems an absurd one, for then there are two
parties, with different ideas and policies, in
power, one in control of the executive and
another in control of the legislative branch
of the government. In that case it would
seem that the government could not reflect
the will of the people. But it is possible that
it reflects it perfectly. It is possible that the
country is slowly changing its mind, that it
does not yet know certainly what it wants.
This is not always the case, but it is often
the case; and when it is the case the dead-
lock in the government is a good reflection of
the popular will, or lack of it. At least, until
it is certain that the country has thoroughly
made up its mind one way or another, it is
perhaps not a bad thing for the government to
go a bit slow.

VI

As we look back over American history, it is
clear that there has been an ever-increasing

IOI

number of questions about which the people,
as a whole, have come to think alike, about
which a consolidated national public opinion
has been formed; and in proportion as this
has come about the powers of the federal
government have increased and the powers
of the state governments have diminished.
Whenever the people come to think nationally
about any question they usually transfer the
control of that question to the national govern-
ment. The result, after a century and a quar-
ter, is that the power and the prestige of the
federal government are enormously increased.
If the framers of the Constitution could come
back to earth and see what the federal govern-
ment is doing to-day, they would all agree
that this monstrous thing was no child of
theirs; for to-day the federal government
exercises as a matter of course powers which
they never dreamed of giving to it. This
result has been the consequence of changing
conditions and ideas; it is the result of an
ever-increasing nationalism, a constant exten-
sion of the sphere of social and political ques-
tions in respect to which there is a consolidated
national public opinion.

But since we have a written constitution,
and the powers of the federal and state gov-
ernments are defined in the Constitution, how
does the federal government acquire new

I02

power ? The obvious way is, of course, by
changing the Constitution, by adopting
amendments to it. The Constitution can,
however, be amended only when the House of
Representatives and the Senate, each by a
two-thirds vote, proposes such an amendment,
and when this proposed amendment is ap-
proved by the legislatures of three-fourths of
the states. This would seem to make the
amendment of the Constitution extremely
difficult, and, in fact, until recently it was gen-
erally supposed it would require something
like a revolution, something like the Civil War,
to get the Constitution amended.

There is, however, another way in which
the power of the federal government has been
increased, and that is by what is called a
"liberal interpretation" of the Constitution.
As has been seen, it falls to the Supreme Court
to determine whether a statute of the federal
government is or is not constitutional; and it
is obvious that the power of the federal govern-
ment can be restricted or extended by the
simple process of interpreting the terms of the
Constitution as strictly or as liberally as possi-
ble. Some of the terms of the Constitution are
very elastic in this respect. It will be remem-
bered that after defining the specific powers of
Congress, the Constitution says, "And to make
all laws which may be necessary and proper for

8 103

carrying into execution the foregoing powers."
By a liberal interpretation of this clause the
powers of the federal government have been
very greatly extended. Through legislative
regulation, for example, the federal govern-
ment exercises control over the railroads and
other corporations, a control which may at any
time easily pass into public ownership of these
corporations ; and it has this power because it
is a "necessary and proper" power for carry-
ing into execution the harmless-looking power
"to regulate commerce between the several
states." The Constitution is so elastic that
there is almost no limit to the extension of
the powers of the federal government by
means of judicial interpretation; the only
thing necessary is to have a national public
opinion which favors the extension. As we
say in the United States, "the decisions of the
Supreme Court follow the election returns."

But there are some powers which cannot
be read into the Constitution, which can be
put there only by a formal amendment of the
Constitution. And in recent years it has be-
come clear that the formal amendment is a
less difficult matter than was formerly sup-
posed. This also is only a matter of getting
a sufficiently consolidated national public
opinion. Such an opinion in America is likely
to come gradually, without a great deal of dis-

104

cussion and without any upheaval; and it
is brought about by the constant social ex-
perimentation which is going on in the states
and local communities far more than by argu-
ment and discussion. Americans are but little
inclined to take up with ideas or theories
simply because they have a logical consistency;
but on the other hand they are not inclined
to hold to any custom merely because it is
old. Their aims are practical and their meth-
ods direct; and when any new thing is pro-
posed to them their first question is, "How
will it work?" You may say that it is only
just that women should have the right to
vote, or you may say that to refuse women
the vote is inconsistent with the principles
of the Declaration of Independence; but what
nine men out of ten will ask is: "Why do
women need to vote? How will it work out
in practice?" Now, it is a great advantage
of our federal system that it admits of trying
out this new idea on a small scale. For a long
time we have been experimenting with wom-
an's suffrage, first in municipal elections, then
in one state after another. The average
American has accordingly not argued much
about woman's suffrage; he has watched it
work in one state after another; and as it
seems to work well enough, and nothing seri-
ous happens where it is tried, the average

10;

American finds himself in favor of woman's
suffrage without really knowing how. The
truth is that he has simply become accustomed
to the idea of it, and he finds himself saying,.
"Well, I suppose women ought to have a right
to vote." What he really thinks is : "Woman's
suffrage seems to work well enough where it
is tried; there seems to be no harm in it.
I expect it is bound to come."

When Americans get the idea that a thing
is "bound to come," the battle is won.
Women will soon have the right to vote
throughout the United States because the
opinion that "it is bound to come" is taking
hold of the country. The same is true of the
prohibition movement. This has been an
issue in the United States for fifty years;
and in some states the manufacture and sale
of alcoholic liquors have been prohibited for
a generation. The movement has spread
rapidly in recent years, until now over half
the states are what we call "dry" states.
The war has in the mean time given such an
impetus to the movement that prohibition,
like woman's suffrage, is coming to be re-
garded as one of the things that "are bound
to come." National opinion is already so
far crystallized on this question that Con-
gress has voted a constitutional amendment,

which is now before the state legislatures for

106

ratification. It is extremely probable that it
will receive the approval of the necessary
three-fourths of the states, in which case the
power of the states to regulate the manufac-
ture and sale of liquors will once for all
cease.1

It all comes back to the question of a thor-
oughly established national public opinion.
If the people really want to change the Con-
stitution it is a simple matter to do so. The
system of written constitutional guaranties
prevents hasty action, and it preserves a
great deal of local liberty as long as there is
a marked divergence of interests and ideas
throughout the country in respect to any
question; but there is nothing in the system
of written constitutions or in the system of
federal government to prevent the popular
will, when it is once certain what the popular
will is, from having its way. If its way leads
to an ever greater degree of equality in the
distribution of wealth, if the popular will is
bent upon establishing a genuine social de-
mocracy, there is no power either in men
or in institutions to prevent the achievement
of these ends.

1 This proposed amendment has, since the above was written, been
ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the states.

NEW WORLD DEMOCRACY AND OLD WORLD
INTERVENTION

THE first years of independence were taken
up with attempts to solve the many prob-
lems of peaceful reconstruction under a fed-
eral government which was one of the weakest
ever devised by the hand of man. By 1786
all far-sighted men realized that a stronger
bond of union would have to be created if the
United States were not to dissolve into thir-
teen completely independent republics; and
the movement for strengthening the Articles
of Confederation resulted in the Constitu-
tional Convention of 1787 which formulated
the present Constitution. Within the next two
years the Constitution was referred to the sev-
eral states for ratification, and in 1789 the new
government went into operation with the in-
auguration of George Washington as the first
President. It was essentially over the ques-

108

tions giving rise to the formation of a new
Constitution, and over the question of the
new Constitution itself and of its approval
or rejection, that the people gradually divided
into two chief political parties. Those who
were in favor of the new Constitution were
called Federalists because they wished for a
more effective federal union of the states;
those who opposed the adoption of the Con-
stitution were at first called Anti-Federalists,
but later, after the Constitution was in fact
adopted, they called themselves Democratic
Republicans. Washington, Alexander Ham-
ilton, and John Adams were the spokesmen
of the Federalists, while Thomas Jefferson
was for many years the acknowledged and
undisputed leader of the Republicans.

Both the Federalists and the Republicans
were anti-monarchical. Both accepted the '•>
idea of self-government as it had been prac- .
tised in the Colonies, and both accepted the
Revolution as having forever put an end to
hereditary kings and a hereditary nobility in
America. But they differed in their respective
attitudes toward popular government, its
sources of strength and of weakness, and the
limitations which should be placed upon it.
The Republicans were what would to-day be
called a radical party, the Federalists a con-
servative party. Hamilton had little faith

109

in the virtue or the wisdom of "the people,"
and none at all in their capacity for efficient
government. According to him only the
people with property had a sufficient interest
in good government to be intrusted with polit-
ical power. He thought that the propertied
classes, in defense of their property, would
be the surest bulwark against the double dan-
ger of autocracy and anarchy, and in general
the fact that a man possessed property was
likely to be an evidence of industry, thrift,
and intelligence. The mass of the people, if
they were given power, having nothing to lose,
would be keen for depriving others of that
which they had themselves never been suffi-
ciently industrious or intelligent to acquire.
Hamilton therefore believed in government
for the people by the most intelligent and
prosperous people.

Many Federalists were not so frank as
Hamilton in expressing their views, but they
all shared his anti-democratic philosophy.
The experience of the Revolutionary War and
the years immediately following had made
many men more conservative than they had
once been. John Adams's enthusiasm for a
republic founded on virtue had greatly cooled,
and the fear of revolution replaced in his later
years the fears of tyranny which had inspired

him in middle age. Especially after the French

no

Revolution had run its course, proclaiming the
Terror and the de-Christianization of France,
proclaiming the mission of the republic to
carry the blessings of liberty and equality to
all nations, conservative and conventional
people everywhere came to fear revolution as
a dangerous and insidious menace to estab-
lished order. In their minds the word "revo-
lution" aroused the same repulsion that the
word "bolshevism" arouses in our day — it
was synonymous with anarchy in government
and with atheism in religion.

At the opening of the nineteenth century
the "upper classes" in every European coun-
try shared these views. The Federalists were
the people in America who shared them be-
cause the Federalists were for the most part
the well-to-do. The strength of the Federal-
ists was greater in New England than in the
South, greater in the centers of trade and in-
dustry than in the farming districts, greater
among the educated than among the unedu-
cated, greater among the rich than among the
poor. The Federalists therefore voted for the
Federal Constitution and were in favor ofv
enlarging the functions of the federal govern-
ment, not only because a strong federal govern-
ment would serve the economic interests of
the industrial and moneyed classes, but also

because it would be less amenable to popular

in

control than state governments had been, and
would serve as a needed check upon such
radical political tendencies as might find ex-
pression in certain parts of the country. The
dangerous ideas of Thomas Jefferson might
gain complete ascendancy in Virginia, but as
long as the Federal Constitution held the
state of Virginia would never be able to carry
out a program that involved anything so
revolutionary or Jacobinical as "impairing
the obligation of a contract/'

The bad odor of the word "revolution" was
easily communicated to the word "republi-
can," since it was the French Republic that
inaugurated the Terror and made the name
of revolution hateful. Therefore the Federal-
ists feared Jefferson and his "Republican"
followers not only because they professed to
have entire faith in the capacity of the people
for government, but because they still re-
tained the sympathy with the revolutionary
movement in France which nearly every one
had expressed in the days before the Terror.
The fear was genuine enough in most cases,
but it was also good politics to fasten upon
their opponents the terrible names "Jaco-
bins" and "atheists," and to denounce them
as men who desired to destroy government,
confiscate property, and abolish morality.

The bitterness with which the Federalists

112

attacked Jefferson, the solemn confidence with
which they assured the public that the Re-
publicans were the desperate and determined
enemies of the human race, is almost in-
credible. July 7, 1801, after the inauguration
of Jefferson as President, Theodore Dwight,
an intelligent and educated New England
Federalist, delivered an address in which he
gave vent to the following sentiment:

The great object of Jacobinism, both in its political
and moral revolution, is to destroy every trace of civil-
ization in the world and force mankind back into a
savage state. We have now reached the consummation
of democratic blessedness. [He is referring to the
election of Jefferson.] We have a country governed by
blockheads and knaves; the ties of marriage with all
its felicities are severed and destroyed; our wives
and daughters are thrown into the stews; our children
are cast into the world from the breast and forgotten;
filial piety is extinguished, and surnames, the only
mark of distinction among families, are abolished.
Can the imagination paint anything more dreadful on
this side of hell ?

It would indeed have been difficult for the
imagination, even of an excited New England
Federalist, to paint anything more dreadful —
or anything more remote from the wishes or
the purpose of the humane and kindly leader
of the Republican party. Thomas Jefferson,
the author of the Declaration of Independence,

113

still held to the doctrine that "all men are
created equal," and never lost his faith in
those ideals of popular government and re-
publican virtue, of the innate goodness of
man, of the regenerative power of simple and
genuinely democratic institutions, which were
proclaimed by the generous minds of the
eighteenth century, and which furnished the
driving force of the American and French
revolutions. In spite of the failure of both
revolutions to realize these ideals in any per-
fect way, in spite of the disillusionment which
swept so many honest men into reaction, Jef-
ferson remained a democrat. He believed in
government of the people, for the people, and
by the people.

The Republicans were those who on the/
whole followed Jefferson. They retained their
early republican faith. They looked at the
question of government from the point of
view of the pursuit of happiness rather than
from the point of view of the maintenance of
security, and were more concerned for the
rights of men than for the protection of prop-
erty. Accordingly, they would have govern-
ment frankly responsive to the popular will,
freed from the control of any "upper class/'
either of birth or wealth or education. They
would have government as simple as possible,
limited to the protection of life and property.

114

For all of these reasons they had mostly
opposed the new Constitution, and when it
was once adopted they wished to restrict the v
functions and powers of the federal govern-
ment as much as possible, and to preserve to
the people of each state all the essential powers
of sovereignty. In those days of difficult com-
munication, the Jeffersonian Republican felt
that only a government that was close at
hand could be properly watched, and only a r:
government that was limited to a small terri-
tory could retain a primitive and arcadian
simplicity; a government in the distant city
of New York or Washington, with extensive
jurisdiction over the whole country, was likely
to develop into a complicated bureaucracy as v
open to intrigue and as difficult to control
as the most hateful monarchy of Europe.

Monarchy! This, after all, so the Repub-
licans professed to believe, was what the
Federalists secretly wanted. They were aim-^
ing at the destruction of republican liberty.
Did they not openly denounce the French
Republic and all its works? Did they not
openly sympathize with the British govern-
ment, that very power which had so long en-
deavored to enslave America? Did they not
openly profess a contempt for the "mob," the
"canaille"? What could this mean except
that these so-called Federalists were in their

115

hearts aristocrats, monarchists in disguise,
who were waiting for the day when with the
aid of British gold they could proclaim the
Kingdom of America and have themselves
made Dukes of New York and Earls of Bos-
ton? The imagination of the Republican
journalists was as active as that of Theodore
Dwight, and in their vilification of Hamilton
and Adams, and of Washington himself, they
exhausted the rich sources of the English
language. No human motive was too low or
sordid or cowardly to be imputed to these one-
time patriots and heroes.

The profound gulf which separated the two
groups of the American people in the early
years of the Republic is a point of first-rate
importance. It is true that the vile names
which Federalists and Republicans flung at
each other were often enough no more than
the engaging amenities of party politics. But
the mutual hatred of the two parties had also
its solid foundation in a genuine fear. Each
party feared that the other was un-American.
Each party feared that the other was so en-
tangled with certain European influences that
its success would destroy American institu-
tions. The Republicans feared that the Fed-
eralists were so tied to Great Britain that they
were ready to undo the work of the Revolu-
tion; the Federalists feared that the Repub-

116

licans were so infected with French Jacobin-
ism that they were ready to proclaim the Ter-
ror and plunge America into the confusion
created by Robespierre and exploited by Na-
poleon. The profound and apparently ir-
reconcilable hostility which threatened to
shipwreck the New World experiment in
democratic government was primarily due to
the connection which still existed, or was sup-
posed to exist, between American and Euro-
pean politics. Able men on both sides of the
ocean believed that the United States must
surrender either its independence or its free
government ; that its feeble government must
either give place to a strong monarchy or in
self-defense be drawn into the system of Euro-
pean alliances and so lose the better part of
independence. For a generation the history
of the United States centered in this issue.
The future of the American experiment in
democracy depended upon its being freed
from the entanglements of European politics
and the danger of European intervention.

For a hundred years before the Colonies
won their independence from Great Britain
they had been drawn into every European
war, with or without their consent, whether
or not their essential interests were involved.
In his famous pamphlet entitled Common
Sense Thomas Paine pointed out that one

117

advantage of independence from Great Britain
would be the consequent freedom from Euro-
pean quarrels and conflicts.

We have boasted the protection of Great Britain,
without considering that her motive was interest, not
attachment; and that she did not protect us from our
enemies on our own account, but from her enemies
on her own account, and from those who have no quar-
rel with us on any other account, and who will always be
our enemies on the same account. [Therefore] our duty
to mankind at large, as well as to ourselves, instructs
us to renounce the alliance: because, any submission
to, or dependence upon, Great Britain tends directly
to involve this continent in European wars and quarrels,
and sets us at variance with nations who would other-
wise seek our friendship and against whom we have
neither anger nor complaint.

This was certainly true in part, and might
conceivably have proved altogether true had
peace prevailed in Europe for another gen-
eration. But, as it turned out, the French
Revolution followed hard upon the American
War of Independence ; and the French Revo-
lution gave rise to a series of general European
wars which began in 1792 and lasted almost
without cessation until 18 15. In these wars
France, first under the Republic and after-
ward under the leadership of Napoleon, was
pitted against all the great powers of Europe.
The immediate causes of these wars were vari-

118

ous, but the underlying issue in the earlier
period was the conflict between the demo-
cratic ideals of revolutionary France and the
old-regime ideals of the monarchical states, and
in the later period between these same states
and the revolutionary and aggressive imperial-
ism of Napoleon. Throughout the period of
these wars France, in times of reverse, claimed
to be fighting for national independence, and
in times of victory for the spread of a higher
civilization among the backward nations of
Europe. The allies, on the other hand, claimed
to be fighting in defense of small nations and
for the preservation of civilization, and they
declared their intention to continue the war
until they had destroyed, not, indeed, the
French people, but the intolerable menace of
the revolutionary spirit and of the ruthless
militarism which was the instrument of its
propagation. From the beginning England
was the organizer of all the coalitions, and in
the end the great conflict was essentially one
between the continental power of Napoleon
and the sea power of the British Empire.

When the world war became general, in
J793> President Washington proclaimed the
neutrality of the United States. But neu-
trality was easier proclaimed than maintained
in respect to a war in which all Europe en-
gaged, which involved the colonial possessions
o 119

of England, France, Holland, and Spain, and'
which was fought out on every sea. The
difficulty was all the greater because the War
of Independence had left its heritage of ob-
ligations to France and of undissolved con-
tacts with England. As a price of French aid
the United States had bound itself, by the
Treaty of Alliance of 1778, to guarantee
"forever against all other powers ... to His
Most Christian Majesty the present posses-
sions of the Crown of France in America."
The treaty of amity and commerce of the
same year accorded to France special com-
mercial favors and the right to carry French
prizes into American ports. On the other
hand, Great Britain still refused to surrender
the military posts in the Northwest on the
ground that the several states had refused to
indemnify the Loyalists for their confiscated
property. Therefore, while France counted
confidently upon the United States to repay
its old debt by coming to her aid, England
used her naval power to force the United
States to renounce the French commercial
treaty and conspired with Spain to recover the
territory west of the Alleghanies.

Under these circumstances, to proclaim
neutrality and take the side of neither party
was to incur the enmity of both; and it was
not to be supposed that either belligerent

120

would respect the neutral rights of a debt-
ridden and divided country which would be a
negligible factor even if it went to war. It
is true that by going to war the United States
could at least preserve its "honor." But it
was exceedingly unlikely that it could en-
force its rights against either belligerent by
joining the other. In any case, which side
should it join ? Its neutral rights were equally
violated by England and France, and while
the Federalists were keen for war against
France, the Jeffersonian Republicans were
keen for war with Great Britain. By entering
actively into the European conflict, the United
States might preserve a semblance of honor,
but it was almost certain that it would lose
everything else. By entangling itself in the
European system of alliances and pledging
itself to stand or fall by a European treaty
the United States would have compromised
the revolutionary settlement of 1783, invited
its own people to engage in civil war, and
placed the feeble Republic in tutelage to the
great powers of Europe.

President Washington was far - sighted
enough to see that the great end to be attained —
the great end both for America and for the
world — was the preservation of the federal *
Union as the only hope for the continued exist-
ence of free institutions. He preferred to suffer

121

repeated humiliation rather than, as the price
of national "honor," to bring the promising
experiment in democracy to an untimely end.
In his famous "Farewell Address" he accord-
ingly gave classic expression to the policy
which the United States ought to pursue in
regard to European politics, as well as to the
motives which justified it.

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign
nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to
have with them as little political connection as possible.
. . . Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us
have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must
be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of
which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence,
therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate our-
selves, by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of
her politics, or the ordinary combinations and col-
lisions of her friendships or enmities. ... If we remain
one people, under an efficient government, the period
is not far off when . . . belligerent nations, under the
impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not
lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we
may choose peace or war, as our interests guided by
justice shall counsel. Why forego the advantages of
so peculiar a situation ? . . . Why, by interweaving our
destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our
peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition,
rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?

It is clear that Washington did not urge
his countrymen to adopt a policy of complete
isolation; on the contrary, he urged them to

T 1**

cultivate relations with Europe in every re-
spect save one — the political relation. He
would have the United States keep free of
political alliances. If we would understand
why Washington so strongly urged this policy
we must read the entire " Farewell Address."
Only a small part of that address is devoted
to this point, which is the only part that is
often quoted. The principal part of the ad-
dress is concerned with those evils which
threatened to dissolve the Union and to place
the stamp of failure on the newly established
federal government. To prevent this greatest
of calamities he urged his countrymen to re-
nounce those class enmities and sectional and
party rivalries that were likely to weaken the
union of the states; and it was precisely be-
cause he felt that entangling alliances abroad
would endanger the Union and undermine
free government that he wished to avoid such
alliances.

How many opportunities do they [exaggerated at-
tachments or hostilities to foreign nations] afford to
tamper with domestic factions, to practise the arts of
seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or
awe the public councils! . . . Against the insidious wiles
of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-
citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be
constantly awake, since history and experience prove
that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of
Republican Government. But that jealousy to be useful

123

must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of
the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense
against it.

The policy of Washington was followed in
its essential points throughout the Napoleonic
wars. It is true that the United States found
it necessary upon two occasions to abandon
its positions of neutrality. The first instance
was in 1798, during the Presidency of John
Adams, when the grievances against France
became intolerable. Washington's statement
that "foreign influence is one of the most
baneful foes of Republican Government" was
never more in point than at this time. French
agents in the United States were intriguing
for the success of the Republican party, and
they convinced the French government that
the Federalist President was unsupported by
the people: "The friends of liberty in the
United States, supported by the great part
of the House of Representatives, will prob-
ably not wait for the next elections, but in
the mean time will destroy the fatal influence
of the President — by a revolution. " Counting
upon this supposed pro-French sentiment, the
French government at last endeavored to
bribe the American ambassadors, whereupon
the President severed diplomatic relations
and prepared for war.

The French government wanted support
124

instead of war, and when it discovered that
the people of the United States were prepared
to back the President rather than to over-
throw him peace was quickly restored. But
the significant point in this episode is that
President Adams, although forced to renounce
neutrality, was careful to avoid committing
the United States to any European alliances.
The very spirit of Washington's "Farewell
Address" speaks in the memoir which Adams
presented to his Cabinet in January, 1798:

Will it not be the soundest policy, even in case of
a declaration of war on both sides, between France and
the United States, for us to be totally silent to England,
and wait for her overtures? Will it not be imprudent
in us to connect ourselves with Britain, in any manner
that may impede us in embracing the first favorable
moment to make a separate peace? What aids or
benefits can we expect from England by any stipu-
lations with her, which her interest will not impel her
to extend to us without any? On the brink of the
dangerous precipice on which she stands, will not shak-
ing hands with her necessitate us to fall with her, if
she falls? On the other hand, what aid could we
stipulate to afford her, which our own interest would
not oblige us to give without any other obligation?
In case of a revolution in England, a wild democracy
will probably prevail for as long a time as it did in
France; in such case, will not the danger of reviving
and extending that delirium in America be increased
in proportion to the intimacy of our connection with
that nation?

125

Although peace was restored with France,
the neutral position of the United States be-
came more and more difficult to maintain as
the great conflict between Napoleon and the
British Empire reached its height. Thomas
Jefferson, who declared in the spirit of Wash-
ington in favor of "peace with all nations,
entangling alliances with none," refused to
declare war even in the face of the most fla-
grant violation of neutral rights on the part of
both England and France. To compel a recog-
nition of those rights, he resorted to commercial
warfare, laying an embargo upon all American
commerce with both belligerents. The em-
bargo proved a vain measure, and at last the
United States once more resorted to war to
enforce its neutral rights. Our grievances
against France were not less than those
against England, but James Madison, the
Republican successor of Jefferson, chose, for
reasons that are obscure to this day, to make
war on England. Nevertheless, he followed
the precedent of John Adams in carefully
refraining from allying the United States with
Great Britain's enemy. For two years the
United States carried on the war on its own
hook, and the peace which it made in 1814
was no part of the great European settlement
which was then already in process of being

effected.

126

Referring to the negotiations between the
American and British ambassadors at Ghent,
Pozzi di Borgo wrote these significant words
to Nesselrode on August 9, 18 14:

The conclusion of this important matter is uncer-
tain. The dominant party in America, which desired
the war, is aiming at a complete revolution in the
relations of the New World with the Old, by the de-
struction of all European interests in the American
continent.

The War of 18 12 is sometimes called the
second war of American independence. It is
in fact no exaggeration to say that the years
1 8 14-15 ended the dependence of the United
States not only upon Great Britain, but upon
Europe as well.

11

The Treaty of Ghent, the overthrow of
Napoleon, and the European settlement of
the Congress of Vienna were welcomed by the
people of America with universal joy. For a
quarter of a century the tremendous upheaval
in the Old World had disturbed the peace and
threatened the very existence of the United
States. The war with England had not been
a brilliant success, but it had not been a
failure, and the record in the war and the terms
of the peace were such as a young nation,

127

which for twenty years had been treated with
contemptuous insolence, might regard as a
vindication of its rights and a justification for
self-respect. With Napoleon at St. Helena
and the powers desirous of peace at all haz-
ards, the people of the United States, with an
immense sigh of relief, turned their backs on
the Old World and its affairs and with buoyant
enthusiasm took up their proper task — the de-
velopment of those inexhaustible resources that
would one day make them great and powerful.
^ Buoyant enthusiasm and unlimited self-
confidence were indeed the characteristic note
in the United States during the decade after
1815. The Napoleonic wars had contributed
immensely to the industrial and commercial
prosperity of the country, and the financial
situation of the government was excellent in
spite of the expenses of the War of 1812.
But, above all, the old internal dissensions
between Federalists and Republicans had
disappeared. The country was thoroughly
wedded to its institutions, and no one any
longer feared the monarchical inclinations of a
pro-British party or the Jacobinism of a pro-
French party. There were indeed no longer
any pro-British or pro-French parties. All
parties were thoroughly American. The coun-
try had found itself; it knew well that it

was no mere appendage of Europe; and it

128

was determined at all hazards that Europe
should recognize the fact.

The consciousness that the United States
was destined to run a different course than
Europe was strengthened by contemporary
events in South America. When Napoleon
overturned the Bourbon monarchy in Spain,
the Spanish colonies took advantage of the
opportunity to throw off their allegiance to
the mother country, and, in imitation of the
British colonies a generation earlier, they or-
ganized their governments on the republican
model of the United States. By 1820 the
de facto South American republics had virt-
ually won their independence, and, like the
United States, they wished only to go their
own way freed from European tutelage. The
United States, naturally enough, was prompt
to give formal recognition to these new sister
republics; of the superiority of republican
institutions she could not doubt, and it was
for her an immense satisfaction to think of
the entire New World as the home of freedom.

The Old World was less pleased with such
a prospect. To the ruling classes in Europe,
Napoleon was (what he called himself) the
"child of the Revolution," and to the ruling
classes the " Revolution" was therefore respon-
sible for twenty-five years of political insecu-
rity and of desolating war. After 1 8 1 5 the chief

129

aim of the principal states was to prevent a
repetition of the stupendous conflicts which
had characterized the Napoleonic era. To
preserve the peace of Europe, in the opinion
of Metternich, who was the guiding spirit,
at least after 1818, of the Concert of Europe,
it was necessary to maintain the existing
political system. The chief danger to the
existing political system was manifestly those
republican theories spread abroad by the
American and French revolutions. It was,
>4 therefore, the duty of the great powers to
act in concert in the suppression of all revo-
lutions intended to propagate or establish re-
publican institutions. On these grounds revo-
lutions in Italy were suppressed by Austria,
and France was given a free hand in restoring
the Bourbons to the Spanish throne.

If republican institutions were a menace
to the peace and good order of Europe, the
rulers of the great powers manifestly could
not contemplate the spread of those institu-
tions in America without misgiving. The
King of Spain, once restored to his throne,
therefore " seriously turned his thoughts to the
fate of his American dominions." The powers
were accordingly notified that

the king has resolved upon inviting the cabinets of
his dear and intimate allies to establish a conference
at Paris, to the end that their plenipotentiaries . . .

130

may aid Spain in adjusting the affairs of the revolted
countries of America. . . . His Majesty . . . hopes that
they will assist him in accomplishing the worthy object
of upholding the principles of order and legitimacy,
the subversion of which, once commenced in America,
would presently communicate to Europe.

It was no longer, as it had been in 1795, a
question of European intervention in the af-
fairs of the United States, but a question of
whether the European powers, having as-
sumed the duty of regulating European affairs
in harmony with monarchical principles, were
to be permitted to regulate the affairs of any
part of America in harmony with these prin-
ciples. Under these circumstances, the United
States still refused to become implicated in
the European system of alliances, or to take
any part in regulating the affairs of Europe;
but in addition to this, it now proclaimed a
new principle which was but the complement
of the old. Since the political system of Eu-
rope was monarchical while that of America
was republican, the United States would take
no part in regulating the political affairs of
Europe, and it would therefore expect the
European powers to take no part in regulating
the political affairs of America.

The first part of this double policy was
clearly stated by John Quincy Adams in 1820,
in an interview with Stratford Canning, the

131

English Minister to the United States. The
English government had invited the United
States to take part in the Congress of Troppau,
and in reply to this invitation Secretary Adams
said that

the European alliances . . . had . . . regulated the affairs
of all Europe without ever calling the United States
to their consultations. It was best for both parties
that they should continue to do so; for if the United
States should become a member of the body they
would . . . bring to it some principles not congenial to
those of the other members, and those principles would
lead to discussions tending to discord rather than to
harmony.

The corollary to this principle was obvious ;
if the United States would bring to a Euro-
pean congress "some principles not congenial
to those of the other members," it was equally
true that the European powers, if they should
assume to regulate American affairs, would
bring to that business principles not congenial
to the United States. Certainly America had as
valid a right to become republican if it wished
to as Europe had to remain monarchical;
and republicanism was no more dangerous to
the peace of Europe than monarchism was to
the peace of America. In view of the threat-
ened intervention of the European powers in
South America, an intervention based avowed-

132

ly upon hostility to republican institutions,
President Monroe formulated in his message
of 1823 the policy (the policy was that of John
Quincy Adams more than that of the Presi-
dent) which has ever since been known as the
Monroe Doctrine:

In the wars of European powers [the President said],
in matters relating to themselves we have never taken
any part. . . . Our policy in regard to Europe ... is
not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its
powers; to consider the Government de facto as the
legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly re-
lations with it, and to preserve those relations by a
frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting, in all instances,
the just claims of every power; submitting to injuries
from none. [On the other hand] With the movements
in this hemisphere we are, of necessity, more immedi-
ately connected, and by causes which must be obvious
to all enlightened and impartial observers. The politi-
cal system of the allied powers is essentially different
in this respect from that of America. This difference
proceeds from that which exists in their respective
governments. And to the defense of our own, which
has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and
treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most
enlightened citizens, and under which we have en-
joyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted.
We owe it, therefore, to candor, and to the amicable
relations existing between the United States and those
powers, to declare that we should consider any at-
tempt on their part to extend their system to any por-
tion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and
safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies

133

of any European power we have not interfered and
shall not interfere. But with the governments who
have declared their independence, and maintained it,
and whose independence we have, on great consider-
ation and on just principles, acknowledged, we could
not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing
them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny,
by any European power, in any other light than as
the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward
the United States.

The essential point of the Monroe Doctrine
was that, in defense of those democratic in-
stitutions to which America was committed,
the United States would oppose the extension
of the European political system to this con-
tinent. The most notable attempt to extend
the political system of Europe to America
occurred during the Civil War, when Emperor
Napoleon III, by means of the French army,
established an Austrian prince in Mexico on
the ruins of her former republican institutions.
Against this enterprise the United States pro-
tested vigorously, and the grounds of this pro-
test were clearly stated by Secretary Seward
in 1865:

The real cause of our natural discontent is, that the
French army which is now in Mexico is invading a
domestic republican government there which was
established by her people ... for the avowed purpose
of suppressing it and establishing upon its ruins a
foreign monarchical government, whose presence there,

134

so long as it should endure, could not but be regarded
by the people of the United States as injurious and
menacing to their own chosen and endeared republican
institutions. . . . The people of every State on the
American continent have a right to secure for them-
selves a republican government if they choose, and . . .
interference by foreign states to prevent the enjoy-
ment of such institutions deliberately established is
wrongful, and in its effects antagonistical to the free
and popular form of government existing in the United
States.

The United States has thus defended the
less powerful states of America from European
intervention; but these less powerful states
might well ask, and have sometimes asked,
what guaranty they could have against in-
tervention from the United States herself.
They might well ask whether the United
States was not interested in preventing the
European powers from extending their polit-
ical system to South America in order that
her own political influence might be extended
there. The conduct of the United States has
too often justified this fear. The unjustifiable
war with Mexico in 1846 was the most notable
example of those instances in which the United
States has employed its greater power to
further its own interests at the expense of
weak neighbors. But on the whole, the United
States has not greatly abused its assumed

position of supremacy in the affairs of the
10 I35

American continents, and President Wilson
more than once took occasion to reassure the
small states of America in respect to the future
policy of the United States. Above all, his
Mexican policy was founded frankly upon
the principle that the people of Mexico may
look to the United States for protection against
European interference without fearing that
she will herself interfere in their affairs. His
attitude was clearly expressed in an address
delivered on January 8, 191 5:

I hold it as a fundamental principle, and so do you,
that every people has the right to determine its own
form of government; and until this recent revolution
in Mexico, until the end of the Diaz regime, 80 per cent,
of the people of Mexico never had a "look-in" in
determining who should be their governor or what
their government should be. Now, I am for the 80
per cent. It is none of my business, and it is none of
your business, how long they take in determining it.
It is none of my business and it is none of yours how they
go about the business. The country is theirs. The
government is theirs. The liberty, if they can get it,
and God speed them in getting it, is theirs. And so
far as my influence goes while I am President nobody
shall interfere with them. . . .

Do you suppose that the American people are ever
going to count a small amount of material benefit
and advantage to people doing business in Mexico
against the permanent happiness of the Mexican people?
Have not European nations taken as long as they
wanted and spilled as much blood as they pleased

136

in settling their own affairs, and shall we deny that to
Mexico because she is weak? No, I say! I am proud
to belong to a strong nation that says: "This country,
which we could crush, shall have just as much freedom
in her own affairs as we have. If I am strong, I am
ashamed to bully the weak. In proportion to my
strength is my pride in withholding that strength from
the oppression of another people.'*

An episode in recent years which might
well give the states of South America reason
to fear the United States occurred in con-
nection with the construction of the Panama
Canal. In order to build that long-delayed
and highly desirable highway to the Pacific,
it was necessary to obtain a concession from
the state of Colombia. The state of Colombia,
doubtless desiring to make as good a bargain
as possible, refused to ratify a treaty which
had been negotiated; whereupon the govern-
ment of the United States encouraged, if it
did not instigate, a petty revolution in that
country, and hastened overnight to recognize
the new Republic of Panama, from which the
concession for the canal was at once obtained.
The state of Colombia sought, and has at last
obtained, partial redress through a treaty pro-
viding for compensation to be paid by the
United States. After a long and unnecessary
delay, and a certain amount of prodding by
President Wilson, the Senate ratified the

137

treaty. Certainly the payment of such com-
pensation is the least so powerful a country
as the United States could rightly do to
make good an act that can only be described
as high-handed aggression against a weak
neighbor.

The Panama episode is one of many which
make it impossible to maintain that the United
States has invariably acted with chastened
purposes and worthy aims, or that it has
never invoked the Monroe Doctrine except
for the disinterested and ideal purpose of de-
fending democratic institutions. Nor can it
be denied that the policy embodied in the
Monroe Doctrine has been an expression of
our material interests. The Monroe Doctrine
is based upon material interests precisely as
much or as little as democracy itself. It
may be safely said, however, that in the crucial
instances of the formulation of the Monroe
Doctrine one essential and determining in-
fluence has been the incompatibility of Euro-
pean and American political institutions and
ideals, and fundamentally our policy has been
to protest against the extension of the Euro-
pean political system to America because, on
account of the incompatibility, such an ex-
tension would endanger our institutions as
well as our interests. In this sense, the Mon-
roe Doctrine has been the expression of that

i38

most deep-seated of American instincts, the
attachment to free government and demo-
cratic social institutions. It is as if we had
said to Europe: "We are bound that this
great experiment in democracy shall have a
fair chance. It may fail in the end. If so,
let it at least be clearly demonstrated that the
failure is due to inherent weaknesses and not
to external interference. We propose, if it
be a possible thing, to make this part of the
world, at least, safe for democracy."

It is an interesting fact that the Monroe
Doctrine has never been so much discussed
as during the last twenty-five years. Nor has
there ever been so little agreement in respect to
its meaning and purpose. The reason for this
is obvious: on the one hand, most European
countries have themselves adopted democratic
institutions, and in so far as they have done
so the great objection to the extension of the
European political system to America falls
to the ground; on the other hand, the eco-
nomic, commercial, and financial interde-
pendence of all countries throughout the
world has so immensely increased in recent
years that the United States can less easily
than formerly refrain from playing her part
in the affairs of a world in which the interests
of every nation are intimately linked with the
interests of all.

i39

The Great War has revealed this fact in all
its dramatic possibilities. And there is some-
thing to be said for President Wilson's con-
tention that in entering the war against Ger-
many we were not abandoning the Monroe
Doctrine, but only making a wider application
of it. For a hundred years we asked, and not
in vain, that Europe should leave America
free to try the great experiment in self-
government. When the better part of Europe
became engaged in a desperate and uncertain
struggle for the preservation, as it seemed, of
those very ideals of which the United States
had hitherto been the professed champion,
how could the United States abandon the
Monroe Doctrine more completely than by
refusing to take part in making the world,
and therefore America, "safe for democracy "?
There is something to be said for this idea,
but there are two qualifications of vital im-
portance to be insisted upon. In entering
the war the United States needed to be quite
sure, and in guaranteeing the peace she needs
to be quite sure, that it is democracy and not
capitalistic imperialism that the world is being
made safe for. She needs also to be quite
clear that making the world safe for democracy
is not the same thing as imposing upon the
world her own brand of democracy.

Whether we abandon or maintain the Mon-
140

roe Doctrine is less important than whether
we hold fast to or depart from our profoundest
traditions. We shall certainly depart from
them if, having for a hundred years in the
name of democracy defended the right of
American peoples to govern themselves in
their own way, we now, in behalf of " law and
order," deny that right to any European
people because they choose to govern them-
selves according to democratic forms that are
not agreeable to us.

VI

DEMOCRACY AND FREE LAND

3. This land grows weary of her inhabitants, so as
man, who is the most precious of all creatures, is here
more vile and base than the earth we tread upon, and
of less price among us than a horse or a sheep; masters
are forced by authority to entertain servants, parents
to maintain their own children. All towns complain
of the burden of their poor, though we have taken up
many unnecessary, yea unlawful trades to maintain
them. And we use the authority of the law to hinder
the increase of people as urging the execution of the
state against cottages and inmates, and thus it is come
to pass that children, servants, and neighbors (especially
if they be poor) are counted the greatest burden which
if things were right would be the chiefest earthly
blessing.

4. The whole earth is the Lord's Garden and He hath
given it to the sons of men, with a general condition
(Gen. i:28). Increase and multiply, replenish the
earth and subdue it, which was again renewed to
Noah; the end is double, moral and natural, that man
might enjoy the fruits of the earth and God might have
his due glory from the creatures. Why then should

142

we stand here striving for places of habitation (many
men spending as much labor and cost to recover or
keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would secure
them many hundred as good or better in another
country) and in the mean time suffer a whole continent,
as fruitful and convenient for the use of men to lie
waste without any improvement ?

Such were the third and fourth headings in
the brief list of reasons in favor of settling
in America which John Winthrop, the leader
of the European migration to Massachusetts,
wrote down about the year 1628. It was, in
its way, a prophetic document. America has
indeed been a kind of Garden of the Gods.
"Increase and multiply, replenish the earth
and subdue it." This might stand as a text
of which the entire history of the United
States is hardly more than a proper amplifi-
cation. In America men have never had to
"stand — striving for places of habitation."
On the contrary, the United States has always
had, until very recently, more land than it
could use and fewer people than it needed;
and this is not only the fundamental economic
difference between the United States and
European countries, but it is a condition
which has more influence than any other in
determining the course of American history
and in molding that complex force which we
call American national character.

H3

"America is opportunity," as Emerson
said. No phrase so well expresses what the
United States has stood for, both to its own
citizens and to the outcast and the dis-
possessed of the Old World; and the solid
foundation of this unrivaled opportunity has
been the existence of an extensive public
domain of great fertility which the govern-
ment of the United States has opened freely
to the men of all nations. How this public
domain was acquired and disposed of, and
how it has shaped American institutions and
ideals, is an essential part of the story of
American democracy.

II

It was mainly a series of fortunate accidents
that placed the public domain under the con-
trol of the federal government instead of the
individual states. Originally, the title to the
land in the New World was legally understood
to* be vested in the king by right of discovery,
and the original grants of territory were made,
in most cases, to individuals, such as William
Penn, or to corporations, such as the Virginia
Company, or the Company of Massachusetts
Bay, who undertook to establish colonies
within the limits of the territory granted in

each case, with the privilege of subletting the

144

land within their respective grants. The terms
of these charter grants to the corporation or
to the individual "proprietor" therefore came
to be taken as denning the "boundaries" of
the colonies which were established within
these grants. These terms were sometimes
extremely ambiguous, as in the case of Vir-
ginia, and often more generous than was in-
tended. The Connecticut charter defined the
limits of that colony as extending from "Nar-
ragansett Bay on the east to the Southern
Sea on the west part." The Carolina pro-
prietors were given the territory between 290
and 3 6° 30' "as far as the South Seas." The
territory of Virginia was defined as extending
two hundred miles on either side of Old Point
Comfort, and as including "all that space and
circuit of land lying from the seacoast of the
precincts aforesaid, up into the land through-
out from sea to sea, west and northwest."

All of these grants were made in *the belief
that the South Sea (Pacific) was not very# far
away. The common idea was that a way to
it could be readily found by following up the
coast rivers. As late as 1689, the governor
of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, still had
faith "to make an essay to do his Majesty a
memorable service, which was to go to find
out the East India Sea," by sending a small
expedition up the James River and across the

145

Blue Ridge Mountains. As time passed, the
South Sea receded into the far-distant West,
but no colony was willing to surrender any
of the territory which could be claimed on the
basis of its ancient charter; and so it happened
that when independence was proclaimed in
1776 many colonies still maintained extensive
and conflicting claims to the territory beyond
the mountains as far west as the Pacific Ocean.
Fortunately, the small colonies refused to
approve the Articles of Confederation until
these claims were abandoned, which the large
colonies finally agreed to; and thus it hap-
pened that shortly after independence was
finally recognized, the western limits of the
thirteen states were roughly defined by the
Alleghany Mountains, while the immense
stretches of rich prairie and woodland from
the Alleghanies to the Mississippi and from
the Spanish province of Florida to the Great
Lakes — an area of about four hundred thou-
sand square miles — became the public domain
of the federal government.

To most men of that age this immense
hinterland seemed adequate for an indefinite
future; the hope of adding anything to it
would have been regarded as visionary in
face of the immediate problem of defending
it against Spanish or French or English ag-
gression. But the extraordinary good fort-

146

une of the United States began early and
has lasted long. In 1803 President Jefferson
sent James Monroe to France to assist Robert
R. Livingston in inducing the French govern-
ment to cede New Orleans and West Florida,
in order that the United States might be
assured of free navigation of the Mississippi.
He had not much hope of succeeding in achiev-
ing even this modest cession, and Livingston's
surprise can be imagined when, on the nth
of April, Napoleon's Minister, Talleyrand,
suddenly offered to sell the entire province
of Louisiana. A gift of this sort could not
be refused; the sale was early concluded
and the whole province of Louisiana was
added to the territory of the United States.
The territory thus added to the public domain
comprised the whole west bank of the Missis-
sippi (including those parts of it for many
years claimed by Great Britain, but finally
conceded to the United States), its western
limits marked by a line beginning at the
mouth of the Sabine River on the Gulf of
Mexico, running irregularly north and west
to the 420 north latitude, and thence west to
the Pacific. The extent of the cession was
approximately 1,182,752 square miles — an
area of 756,961,280 acres, acquired at a cost
of a little less than four cents per acre.
Once possessed of the province of Louisiana,
H7

the desire to acquire possession of all the terri-
tory from sea to sea was bound to follow.
This ambition, later described as the "Mani-
fest Destiny" of the United States, was real-
ized within the brief space of half a century.
In 1 8 19-2 1 East and West Florida — an area
°f 37>93ijS2° acres — was purchased from
Spain at a cost of about seventeen cents per
acre. In 1 848, as the result of a war of aggres-
sion, it must be confessed, the United States
took from Mexico the territory comprised in
the present states of California, Nevada,
Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and western
Colorado — an area of 334,443,520 acres.
From Texas, which, having won its inde-
pendence from Mexico, became a state in the
Union in 1845, the federal government, in
1850, purchased 61,892,480 acres at a cost of
twenty-five cents per acre; and in 1853 it pur-
chased from Mexico, at a cost of thirty-four
cents per acre, additional territory to the ex-
tent of 29,142,400 acres. The entire public do-
main of the United States, excluding Alaska,
was thus in excess of two million square miles,
or about one and a quarter billion acres.

m

Never before had any nation so splendid
a heritage for the people. What would the

148

government do with it? Would it hold the
public domain in trust for the poor and the
needy, or, yielding to political intrigue, barter
it away to the land-jobber and allow the
common man to take care of himself? In
the course of a hundred years much politics
has been played in connection with the public
land, some men have made fortunes and some
have lost them, there has been corruption,
there has been an almost criminal waste of
material resources — forests and mines — to the
profit of great corporations. In a new coun-
try calling for hasty development, and with
resources so unlimited, it could scarcely have
been otherwise; but on the whole, the record
of the government in disposing of the public
land has not been a bad one.

It is partly to the credit of the government
that America is, as yet at least, a nation of
small freehold landowners. Even in colonial
times the attempt to transplant the feudal
system of land tenure to this country was
scarcely successful. The founders of New
England from the very first gave careful at-
tention to the distribution of the land, which
was granted first to the town corporations and
by them allotted in small farms to heads of
families. As the common ownership by the
towns disappeared, the land passed to the
settlers in freehold tenure. The town long

149

retained certain "common lands" — meadow
or woodland — of which there are survivals to
this day, such as the famous Boston Common;
but from the beginning New England avoided
all forms of subject tenures, either in the form
of perpetual rents paid to great landowners
or in the form of " quit-rents " paid to the
state.

The provinces outside of New England were
not so fortunate. Most other colonies were
originally founded by individual proprietors
or commercial corporations who expected to
exploit the land by forms of subject tenure
familiar in the Old World. In Virginia, for
example, after the dissolution of the Virginia
Company in 1624, lands were granted only
in return for perpetual "quit-rents" paid to
the colonial government. In Pennsylvania
"quit-rents'' were paid to the proprietor. The
same was true in Maryland and the Caro-
linas, whose original proprietors had splendid
schemes for transplanting in America the
feudal system of landholding, and the system
of class distinction based upon it, with which
they were familiar in England.

But all of these efforts ultimately failed.
Land was so plentiful that settlers would not
come, or would not stay, where the price was
high or the conditions of tenure unfavorable.
In the eighteenth century German iirunk

150

grants occupied land in Pennsylvania as
"squatters." Rather than pay the £10 or
£15 per 100 acres which the proprietor
charged, they moved southward into Mary-
land where land sold for from £2 to £5 per
100 acres. Immigrants avoided New York
because all the best land along the Hudson
had been appropriated by wealthy land-
owners who refused to grant it out in freehold
tenures. No system of perpetual rents could
long endure in the New World where un-
limited quantities of land were lying unused
for the want of men to develop them. The
last vestiges of the colonial system of subject
tenantry, which had been most effectively
established in New York in the great estates
along the Hudson, were swept away as a re-
sult of the famous "Rent Riots" of 1846.

The federal government of the United
States, in dealing with the public domain,
never attempted to establish a system of
subject tenures; but in the first period after
winning independence it regarded the public
lands somewhat in the light of a financial
asset. The government was desperately poor,
and it was hoped that by disposing of large
tracts of Western land to wealthy men or to
corporations it could obtain in a few years
money enough to pay its debts. With this
in view, the government of the Confederation
11 151

sold, in October, 1781, 5,000,000 acres in the
Ohio country to the Ohio Company; and in
May, 1788, 2,000,000 acres more were sold
to John Cleves Symmes, and the price to be
paid for all this land was approximately 66%
cents an acre. The land act of May 10, 1800,
raised the price to $2 per acre and permitted
the sale of land to individuals in lots as small
as 320 acres in some regions, and 640 acres in
others.

During the next twenty years about twenty
million acres of land were sold under the
terms of this act. But the whole system of
these early years was open to criti-
cism. It was based upon the mistaken
idea that the government could, or ought to,
make money out of the sale of its land, and
this idea led in turn to a method of sale which
favored the wealthy, which opened the door
to unscrupulous politicians and land-jobbers,
and which, accordingly, discriminated against
the actual settlers, who were required to buy
more land than they needed at a higher price
than they could afford to pay.

The early system was in fact gradually
modified and ultimately abandoned alto-
gether, and in the successive modifications the
guiding principle was that the interests and
the capacities of the actual settlers ought to
be considered first of all, without reference

152

to the desires of speculators or the financial
needs of the government. In 1820 the price
was reduced to $1.25 per acre, the minimum
offered for sale was reduced to 80 acres, and
in 1832 was again reduced to 40 acres. Mean-
time, in 1 80 1, a practice had been adopted
which was greatly to the advantage of the
actual settlers. It often happened that poor
men, who were not able or not willing to pay
the price asked, would take possession without
legal right of unoccupied land which had not
yet been offered for sale. When the land so
occupied was finally sold, the actual settler —
the "squatter" — could be removed. But
from about 1801 it came to be the practice to
give to the "squatter" the first right to buy
the land which he had taken possession of, in
preference to all others. This was the be-
ginning of the so-called right of "pre-emp-
tion." What the rights of "pre-emption," as
defined by various laws passed between 1801
and 1841, amounted to was this: Any citizen
might "pre-empt" the title to a certain
amount of unoccupied land (40 acres was the
minimum after 1832) by actual residence in
a dwelling upon the land, and by cultivating
a certain portion of it. If he fulfilled these
conditions he was to have a certain number
of years in which to complete the title by
paying for the land, and during that term of

153

years no one could evict him or acquire a title
that would be valid against his.

This was a fairly liberal policy, for it per-
mitted men without any ready money to get
possession of farms without any formality
whatever, and to pay for them afterward. But
as time passed many people began to ask a
very sensible question. Since the land belongs
to the government, they said, and since the
government belongs to the people, why should
the people pay itself for its own land ? And
especially since there is so much land lying
waste for the want of men to work it, and
many poor people wanting nothing better
than a chance to work it, why should a poor
man be asked to pay anything for a small
farm of 50 or 80 or 160 acres? This ques-
tion became a national political issue in
1852, when the Free Soil party included the
following statement in its declaration of
principles:

That the Public Lands of the United States belong
to the people, and should not be sold to individuals,
nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a
sacred trust for the benefit of the people, and should
be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to land-
less settlers.

After ten years of agitation this principle
was finally embodied in what is known as the

154

"Homestead Law" of May 20, 1862. The
essential terms of this law, which might well
be called the poor man's charter of indepen-
dence, deserve to be often recalled, and are
well worth recording:

That any man who is the head of a family, or who
has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a
citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed
his declaration of intentions to become such . . .
shall ... be entitled to enter one-quarter section (160
acres) or a less quantity of unappropriated public
land, upon which said person may have filed a pre-
emption claim, or which may, at the time the applica-
tion is made, be subject to pre-emption at $1.25, or
less, per acre. Provided, however, that no certificate
shall be given or patent issued therefor until the ex-
piration of five years from the date of such entry;
and if, at the expiration of such time, or at any time
within two years thereafter, the person making such
entry (or his heirs) shall prove by two credible witnesses
that he (or his heirs) has resided upon or cultivated the
same for the term of five years immediately succeeding
the time of filing the affidavit aforesaid, and shall
make affidavit that no part of the said land has been
alienated, and that he has borne true allegiance to the
government of the United States; then, in that case,
he (or his heirs) shall be entitled to a patent, as in
other cases provided by law.

Under the terms of this law, entries were made,
during the forty-two years immediately fol-
lowing its passage, for a total of 96,495,030
acres of land.

iS5

'/

It has been estimated by Donaldson that
the public domain acquired up to the year
1880 was about 1,849,072,587 acres, of which
the cost to the government, including the
expense of surveys, administration, and sale,
was about 18 cents an acre. Prior to June 30,
1880, something more than 500,000,000 acres
had been disposed of, in various ways, at an
average price of about 36 cents an acre. Ac-
cording to the report of the Public Land Com-
mission of 1905, the government had, up to
July 1, 1904, alienated by sale and gift a total
of 967,667,449 acres. Of this amount, 276,-
558,218 acres were sold for cash; 96,495,030
acres were granted under the terms of the
Homestead Act ; 1 1 7,550,292 acres were granted
to railroads; 114,502,528 acres were classed as
forest reserves; 69,058,443 acres were granted
to states and territories for school purposes;
65,739,264 acres were granted as "swamp
lands." What proportion of the alienated
lands passed to poor men it is impossible to
say, for under all the acts for the disposal
of the public lands, even those, such as the
Homestead Act, which were designed ex-
clusively for bona fide farmers, the land-jobber
has by fraud or otherwise found it possible
to play his game. But at all events through-
out the nineteenth century, especially after
about 1820 and until about 1890, it was

156

always possible for any man, however poor,
to enter the class of landed proprietors.

IV

The abundance of free land is the obvious
explanation of the rapid increase in popula-
tion in America, and hence of the swiftness
with which the whole continent has been oc-
cupied and subdued to the uses of man. No
such rapid increase in population had ever
been known in Europe. The population of
England in 1685 was about five million; in
1 801 it was about nine million; that is to say,
the population of England had not doubled
once in a hundred and sixteen years. But
long before Malthus had formulated his
famous law of population, which was based
upon the assumption that under favorable
conditions of subsistence population would
increase in a geometrical progression, Benja-
min Franklin had observed that this was pre-
cisely the case in America.

It was in 175 1 that Franklin published a
pamphlet on the Increase of Mankind and the
Peopling of Countries, in which he estimated
that the population in the Colonies doubled
every twenty years. And he predicted that
this rate of increase would continue indefinite-
ly, so that within another hundred years there

iS7

would be more English-speaking people in
North America than in old England. The
fundamental explanation for this unprece-
dented phenomenon, as Franklin clearly saw,
was the presence of unlimited quantities of
land easily obtained.

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap
as that a laboring man, that understands Husbandry,
can in a short time save money enough to purchase a
piece of new land sufficient for a plantation, whereon
he may subsist a family, such are not afraid to marry;
for, if they look far enough forward to consider how
their children, when grown up, are to be provided for,
they see that more land is to be had at rates equally
easy, all circumstances considered.

Hence marriages in America are more general and
more generally early than in Europe. And if it is
reckoned there, that there is but one marriage per
Annum among ioo persons, perhaps we may here
reckon 2; and if in Europe they have but 4 births to
a marriage (many of their marriages being late), we
may here reckon 8, of which, if one-half grow up, and
our marriages are made, reckoning one with another at
20 years of age, our people must at least be doubled
every 20 years.

But notwithstanding this increase, so vast is the
territory of North America, that it will require many
ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled, labor
will never be cheap here, where no man continues long
a laborer for others, but gets a plantation of his own;
no man continues long a journeyman to a trade, but
goes among those new settlers and sets up for him-
self, etc.

158

The conditions which Franklin described
in the middle of the eighteenth century have
continued to exist until very recently. And
these are the conditions which therefore ex-
plain the unprecedented rapidity with which
the people of the United States have trans-
formed this immense wilderness into prosper-
ous and civilized communities.

This expansive movement of the people
westward has gone steadily on from colonial
days; decade by decade, year by year, the
frontier line of settlement, where the white
man encountered the red man and savagery
receded before a crude and primitive civili-
zation, has crept like the edge of an incoming
tide toward the Pacific. In the seventeenth
century the frontier line was the Atlantic
tidewater regions, and the frontiersmen of
that age were the Puritans of New England,
the Cavaliers and Redemptioners of Virginia,
and the Dutch and Swedes and English
Quakers of the Middle colonies. According
to the census of 1790 the settled area was
limited by the Alleghanies; but beyond the
map was dotted by little communities in
Kentucky and Tennessee, and on the upper
Ohio River. By 1825 the frontier had been
pushed forward to the Mississippi River, and
the settled area included Ohio, southern
Indiana and Illinois, Kentucky and Ten-

159

ncssee. Thirty years later the frontier was
roughly the Missouri River, and settlers were
pushing into eastern Kansas and Nebraska
and northward into Wisconsin and Minne-
sota, while the discovery of gold in California
had created a far-western frontier on the
Pacific Coast. The census of 1880 revealed
an irregular frontier line running in northern
Wisconsin and Minnesota, with settlements
along the rivers in Dakota, Nebraska, and
Kansas, in Colorado and California.

The story of this steady advance across
the continent is the great epic of American
history — a New World crusade for the con-
quest of the wilderness. It is a story fasci-
nating in its variety, richly colored by the
romance of adventure and of hazardous en-
terprises, never lacking in masterly leaders,
in eccentric characters, or bizarre incident — a
story of human endeavor, of ends achieved by
ruthless strength and harsh cruelties, by hu-
mane and generous actions, by heroic deeds
and misfortunes nobly endured. But there
is more in this story than a tale of adventure ;
rightly told, it will reveal the secret of Amer-
ican history — the persistence of democratic
ideals which flourish in the simple and prim-
itive conditions of a frontier society.

The influence upon the United States of
this century of expansion westward, involving

160

in every generation a return to simple and
primitive conditions of life, can be more easily
understood if we try to imagine what would
have happened if the Pacific had in fact, as
the first settlers imagined, washed the western
slopes of the Alleghanies. In that case, the
United States, confined to the Atlantic coast
regions, would no doubt have rapidly come
to be a thickly populated country, with little
free land, with a consequent rapid develop-
ment of industrial and social conditions simi-
lar to those in European countries. Economic
dependence upon Europe would have involved
close political relations, and close political re-
lations would have implied a similar if not an
imitated culture. The United States never
could have turned its back on the Old World,
and its ideas and its ideals would have been
borrowed from London and Paris.

This has, indeed, been true in some measure
of the Atlantic coast states, and particularly
of New England. To this day Bostonians
have what Americans call an "English ac-
cent," and European travelers have always
found Boston more English than any other
part of America, just as they have always
found the entire Atlantic coast region more
European than the country west of the Alle-
ghanies. It was the expansion of population
into the Mississippi Valley that emancipated

161

the United States from Europe. As the center
of population moved westward the center of
political power moved westward. New Eng-
land and the Atlantic states lost their pre-
dominant influence, and the course of Amer-
ican history and the character of American
society were more and more determined by
the interests and the ideas of a frontier society.
For a hundred years American history has
witnessed the repetition, in each generation,
of the same process ; in each generation a re-
turn to frontier conditions in a new area,
involving, within this area, the oft-repeated
social evolution from the most primitive to
the most advanced types of industrial society.
Many years ago Prof. Frederick J. Turner,
himself a product of the Middle West, pointed
out in a brilliant pamphlet the significance
of the frontier on American history.

In the case of most nations the development has
occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has ex-
panded, it has met other growing peoples whom it
has conquered. But in the case of the United States
we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our atten-
tion to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenom-
enon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area,
such as the rise of representative government; the
differentiation of simple colonial governments into
complex organs; the progress of primitive industrial
society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing
civilization. But we have in addition to this a recur-

162

rence of the process of evolution in each Western area
reached in the process of expansion. Thus American
development has exhibited not merely advance along
a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on
a continually advancing frontier line, and a new de-
velopment for that area. American social development
has been continually beginning over again on the
frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of Amer-
ican life, this expansion westward with its new oppor-
tunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of
primitive society, furnish the forces dominating Amer-
ican character.

But let us picture a little more in detail
this "perennial rebirth," this continual re-
newal of the process of social evolution. Pro-
fessor Turner himself quotes the following ex-
tract from Peck's New Guide to the West, which
was published in 1837:

Generally, in all Western settlements, three classes,
like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after
another. First comes the pioneer, who depends for
the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural
growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the pro-
ceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are
rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed
chiefly to a crop of corn and a "truck-patch." ... A
log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and a corn-crib,
and a field of a dozen acres . . . are enough for his oc-
cupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever be-
comes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for
the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent
as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and

163

one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods
with his family, and becomes the founder of a new
county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers
around him a few other families of similar tastes and
habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat sub-
dued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more
frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around,
roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks
elbow room. The pre-emption law allows him to dis-
pose of his cabin and corn-field to the next class of
emigrants; and to employ his own figure, he "breaks
for the high timber," "clears out for the new purchase,"
or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same
process over.

The next class of emigrants purchase the land, add
field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges
over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass
windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally
plant orchards, build mills, school-houses, court-houses,
etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal,
civilized life.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and
enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and
take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther
into the interior, and become, himself, a man of capital
and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a
spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick,
extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and
churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes,
and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities,
and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is
rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther
on. . . .

The writer has traveled much among the first class,
the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connec-

164

tion with the second grade; and now the third wave is
sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and
Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in
the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not
over fifty years of age, who have settled for the fourth,
fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and
remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion
of the variety of backwoods life and manners.

This description, allowing for regional dif-
ferences in the physical character of the coun-
try, represents in a general way a process
which has been going on for a hundred years
throughout the greater part of the United
States. It is this "perennial rebirth," this
continual renewal of the process of social
evolution, this continual mobility of the popu-
lation, that has kept America from growing
prematurely old. This it is which has broken
< sectional barriers and made impossible the
establishment of rigid class distinctions, which
has developed a composite American national
character, which has enabled Americans to
retain to so great a degree the simplicity of
their original political institutions and in such
full measure their faith in democracy.

"In 1789 the states were the creators of the
federal government; in 1861 the federal gov-
ernment was the creator of a large majority
of the states." This concise statement re-
veals one very fundamental influence which

165

Western expansion had upon the history of
the United States. It did more than any-
other single thing to weaken the old sentiment

» of state sovereignty and to strengthen the
sentiment of nationalism. The men who
migrated from Virginia and Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts into the upper Ohio Valley
very rapidly lost touch with the states from
which they had come. They perhaps retained
for a time a certain kindly recollection of the
old home, but the sense of loyalty to the
state inevitably disappeared. On the other
hand, they had bought their land from the
federal government, they lived for some years
in the "Territory of Ohio," a temporary gov-
ernment controlled by the Congress of the
United States, and when the territory of Ohio
was admitted as a state in the Union it was
by act of the federal government. In a very
real sense the state of Ohio was the creature
of the federal government, and it was the
same with all of the new states admitted to
the Union after 1789.

The new Western states were not only the
creatures of the federal government, they nat-

* urally turned to the federal governmentfor
aid inman v things^ One primary need oi the
Western country was better means of trans-
portation. As soon as they had a surplus
of food products they needed to have access

166

to the Eastern markets; and, therefore, the
West demanded the construction of better
roads, and of canals, and, later, of railroads —
enterprises which could be carried through
only by the aid of the federal government
itself. Furthermore, the Western agricultural
states required manufactured commodities,
and the Eastern states, in order to meet this
demand, and also because their less fertile
lands could not compete successfully with the
West, began to develop manufactures. In
order to protect these "infant industries,,
against foreign competition, the Middle and
New England states wanted a system of tariff
duties laid on importation from abroad.
Through a system of tariffs and a system of
"Internal Improvements," the federal gov-
ernment exercised a powerful influence in
developing the economic life of the country
and thereby acquired a political power and
prestige undreamed of by the framers of the
Constitution.

The expansion of population into the West-
ern country contributed also in a less obvious
but more profound way to the development
of a feeling of nationality. In the Western
country sectional differences and jealousies
tended to disappear through the mingling of
people from different sections. The people
who made the state of Ohio came chiefly from
12 167

Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
These men and women, thrown together in
the equalizing conditions of a primitive wilder-
ness society, rapidly lost those characteristics
that made them peculiar. It was soon found
that Puritan or Quaker, German Mennonite
or Virginia Episcopalians were all very human
persons when it came to clearing the forest,
planting corn, fighting the Indians, and pre-
serving a decent amount of law and order.
In this mingling of people from the older
regions, local exclusiveness and suspicion nec-
essarily gave way to a more national, even a
more catholic attitude of mind — an effect
greatly strengthened by the large influx of
foreign immigrants after 1820. When the
mobility of population was always so great,
the strange face, the odd speech, the curious
custom of dress, and the unaccustomed re-
ligious faith ceased to be a matter of comment
or concern. The term "outlandish" lost its
significance, and the term "stranger," among
primitive peoples identical with "enemy," be-
came thoughout the West a common form of
friendly salutation.

The Westerner was crude and uncultivated,
ignorant of books, and lacking in the niceties
and refinements of life; but his varied ex-
perience of men and places, his close contact
with the hard realities of life, emancipated

168

those whose habitual intercourse is with people
of their own class. In spite of its primitive
crudity, the flux and mobility of life in the
West developed a certain restless energy, an
inventive resourcefulness, a flexibility of mind,
a certain humane tolerance, and a kind of j
genial acceptance of ill and good fortune
which form the basis of that national char-'
acter which is called America.

Professor Turner has described the intel-
lectual qualities that were developed by the
primitive life of the West in words that are
well worth quoting:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual
traits of profound importance. The works of travelers
from colonial days onward describe certain common
traits, and these traits have, while softening down,
still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin,
even when higher social organizations succeeded. The
result is that to the frontier the American intellect
owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and
strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness;
that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find
expedients; that masterful grasp of material things,
lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great
ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant in-
dividualism, working for good and for evil; and withal
that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with free-
dom— these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out
elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

169

No trait was more essential to success in
the primitive frontier life of the West than
individual initiative. The man who went
West to grow up with the country discovered
that the process was not a passive one. He
had to pit his strength and his resourcefulness
against the stubborn resistance and inertia
of the uncleared forest or the untilled prairie.
There was no paternal government to fall
back upon, and no settled social custom to
direct or to restrain him. At every step he
must decide what to do and how to do it;
and upon these decisions his success or failure
in acquiring the bare necessities of life, and
often in preserving life itself, depended. For
a hundred years, life under frontier conditions
has developed this trait of individual initiative
until it has become ingrained in the character
of the people.

In developing the spirit of individual initi-
ative and self-confidence, the frontier gave to
♦ men a strong sense of individual liberty. Per-
sonal initiative implies freedom of action, and
uncontrolled freedom easily passes over into
unrestrained license. The frontiersman, freed
from external restraint of government or social
convention, found, nevertheless, that the harsh
facts of nature required a conformity of their
own. He decided for himself what to do, and

how to do it; but if he decided wrong, star-

170

vation or the tomahawk of the savage might
end his liberty with his life. The frontiers-
man was free to do as he pleased — but he was
held responsible for what it was that he pleased
to do. In the harsh school of frontier ex-
perience only the fit could survive; and thus
the strong sense of individual liberty which is
so ingrained in American character is checked
by an ever-present realization of the necessity
of conforming to the realities of existence.

The long period of relatively simple frontier
conditions has also preserved and strengthened
*the idea of equality. It was not that in the
frontier of the first pioneers, or in the simple
agricultural communities that were later es-
tablished, all men appeared to be alike, or
equal in power or virtue. On the contrary, in
these communities the natural inequalities be-
tween men were thrown into strong relief.
No man could avoid the merciless, if friendly,
curiosity of his neighbors, or long pass for
anything except what he was. Pretense was
useless; birth or polite learning or social ac-
complishment counted for nothing. What
counted was a man's resourcefulness, his suc-
cess in doing what had to be done, and what
every one was doing. And the able man —
as hunter or Indian-fighter, as farmer or wood-
man or mechanic, as composer of quarrels, or
as leader of men — won whatever recognition

171

his ability entitled him to. The idea of
equality which the frontier developed was not
an equality of rewards or of possessions; it
was the idea of equality of opportunity and
of reward according to merit.

The disposition to take a man for what he
is, without regard to his rank or title, a trait
which American national character owes so
largely to frontier conditions, has been noted
by James Bryce in his great book, The Amer-
ican Commonwealth. The second charm of
American life, he says —

is one which some Europeans will smile at. It is social
equality. To many Europeans the word has an odious
sound. It suggests a dirty fellow in a blouse elbowing
his betters in a crowd, or an ill-conditioned villager
shaking his fist at the parson and the squire; or, at
any rate, it suggests obtrusiveness and bad manners.
The exact contrary is the truth. Equality improves
manners, for it strengthens the basis of all good man-
ners, respect for other men and women simply as men
and women, irrespective of their station in life. Social
equality has grown so naturally out of the circumstances
of the country, has been so long established and is so
ungrudgingly admitted, that all excuse for obtrusive-
ness has disappeared. People meet on a simple and
natural footing, with more frankness and ease than is
possible in countries where every one is either looking
up or looking down. There is no servility on the part
of the humbler, no condescension on the part of the
more highly placed, nor is there even that sort of scru-
pulously polite coldness which one might think they

172

would adopt in order to preserve their dignity. They
have no cause to fear for their dignity, so long as they
do not themselves forget it. And the fact that your
shoemaker or your factory hand addresses his employer
as an equal does not prevent him from showing all
the respect to which any one may be entitled on the
score of birth or education or eminence in any walk
of life.

Together with this sense of equality be-
tween men, the frontier also developed, often
underneath a harsh exterior, a humane and
kindly fellow-feeling, which Mr. Bryce has
noted as a distinguishing American trait:

I come last to the character and ways of the Amer-
icans themselves in which there is a certain charm,
hard to convey by description, but felt almost as soon
as one sets foot on their shore, and felt constantly
thereafter. In purely business relations there is hard-
ness, as there is the world over. Inefficiency has a
very short shrift. But apart from these relations they
are a kindly people. Good nature, heartiness, a readi-
ness to render small services to one another, an assump-
tion that neighbors in the country, or persons thrown
together in travel, or even in a crowd, were meant to
be friendly rather than hostile to one another, seem
to be everywhere in the air and in those who breathe it.
Sociability is the rule, isolation and moroseness the
rare exception. It is not that people are more vivacious
or talkative than an Englishman expects to find them,
for the Western man is often taciturn and seldom
wreathes his long face into a smile. It is rather that
you feel that the man next you, whether silent or talka-

173

tive, does not mean to repel intercourse, or convey by
his manners his low opinion of his fellow-creatures.
Everybody seems disposed to think well of the world
and its inhabitants, well enough at least to wish to
be on easy terms with them and serve them in those
little things whose trouble to the doer is small in pro-
portion to the pleasure they give to the receiver. To
help others is better recognized as a duty than in
Europe. Nowhere is money so readily given for any
public purpose. . . . People seem to take their own trou-
bles more lightly than they do in Europe, and to be
more indulgent to the faults by which troubles are
caused. It is a land of hope, and a land of hope is a
land of good humor.

America is, as Mr. Bryce says, "a land of
hope"; and that it is so has been largely due
to the boundless possibilities of the great West.
The unlimited resources of the country, and
the incredible rapidity with which they have
been developed, have combined to give to
the American character a strain of buoyant
optimism. To the American sense of liberty
and of equality must be added a marked
spirit of idealism. Americans have often been
classified as crudely materialistic — "dollar-
chasers " whose one idea is to seek wealth and
pursue it. Certainly it is true that our main
occupation is "business," our great art the
art of making money. But this means only
that the primary task of America has hitherto
been the development of the physical and

i74

material resources of a virgin country. Amer-
icans have been primarily occupied with ma-
terial things ; but they have conceived of this
task in a highly idealistic spirit. The Amer-
ican makes money easily, but he spends it
carelessly, lavishly. It is not money, but the
making of money, the enterprise, the game, the
adventure of big business, that enlist his
enthusiasm. America is a big country, and
the subjection of this vast continent within
the short space of a hundred years has ac-
customed the American to think in terms of
quantity — the tallest building, the biggest
city, the longest railroad — these things strike
the imagination because they measure achieve-
ment.

There is in the state of New York a little
town of about twenty thousand inhabitants,
located in the foothills of the Alleghany
Mountains at the head of Lake Cayuga. It
is the seat of the university with a deservedly
high reputation, the library of which has
what is said to be one of the finest Dante col-
lections in the world, and an admirable col-
lection of books and pamphlets on the French
Revolution — probably the best in America.
The town of Ithaca is in many ways charming
and delightful and attractive above most
towns in the country. Now, the business men
of this town have a motto which they have

i75

doubtless designed to convey to the world the
thing which is distinctive of the town, and
most worthy of note about it. And what is
it that they found distinctive of this town,
which is so notable for the beauty of its sur-
roundings and for the quality of its intellectual
activities ? On all of the fences and sign-posts
for miles around, they have put up this sign —
"Ithaca, the Biggest Little CityV

In this motto the business men of Ithaca
have tried to convey not a reality, but an ideal.
Ithaca can never in reality be a big city —
it can never rival New York or Chicago.
But the thing that strikes the American im-
agination about a city like New York or
Chicago is the ceaseless enterprise, the far-
sighted intelligence, the adventurous daring
of the men who have made them the great
centers of economic life; and the men of
Ithaca wish you to understand that if their
town is not so great as Chicago, it is due to
the disadvantages of its location and not to
any want of vision or of enterprise on the part
of its inhabitants.

The United States is full of these "biggest
little cities." And this is particularly true in
the West, where there are many cities of
three or four hundred thousand inhabitants
that were founded within the memory of
living man. You meet these energetic business

176

men who were perhaps born in Illinois, edu-
cated at the University of Michigan, and have
"located" in Kansas or Utah (you meet them
in the smoking-room of the Pullman cars trav-
eling to New York, Heaven knows why!), and
they will tell you of the town in which
they live. It is always the "finest town in
the state," although you have never before
heard of it, and you judge by the account
that it is exactly like a hundred other dreary
Western towns. But sooner or later you learn
the secret of the man's enthusiasm when he
says, "It's going to be a great country some
day!" Such are Americans, hurrying on with
restless energy, with tense, set faces, and eyes
fixed upon that future idealized state of "some
day."

It was this type of idealism which clearly
inspired the writer of an editorial which was
published in a newspaper at New Tacoma
many years ago. The editorial was entitled,
"Why We Should Be Happy." It appeared
that the people of New Tacoma should be
happy:

Because we are practically at the head of navigation
on Puget Sound. Tacoma is the place where all the sur-
plus products of the South and the East, that are ex-
ported by way of the Sound, must be laden on board the
vessels that are to carry them to the four corners of the
world. We should be happy because, being at the head

177

of navigation on Puget Sound, we are also nearer by
many miles than any other town on Puget Sound to
that pass in the Cascade Mountains through which the
Cascade division of the Northern Pacific Railroad will
be built in the near future. . . . We should be happy . . .
because we are connected by rail with Portland . . .
with St. Paul, Chicago, and New York; because
being thus connected we are in daily communication
with the social, political, and financial centers of the
Western Hemisphere; because all the people of the
South and of the East who visit these shores must
first visit New Tacoma. . . . We should be and we are
happy because New Tacoma is the Pacific coast termi-
nus of a transcontinental line of railroad — because
this is the only place on the whole Pacific coast north
of San Francisco where through freight from New
York can be loaded on ship directly from the cars in
which it came from the Atlantic side.

Other reasons why we should be happy are that New
Tacoma is in the center of a country where fruits and
flowers, vegetables and grain, grow in almost endless
variety; that we are surrounded with everything
beautiful in nature . . . and that there are opportunities
here for the fullest development of talents of every
kind. We have youth, good health, and opportunity.
What more could be asked ?

This vision of bliss would certainly make
no great appeal to a people who were in fact
given over to material enjoyments.

Frontier conditions have thus developed in
America a high degree of individual initiative,
a strong sense of individual liberty in respect
to certain things, and a marked tendency to

178

estimate material conditions in terms of their
future possibilities. These admirable quali-
ties have, however, their defects. It is a tra-
dition with us that we are a tolerant people.
Were we not the first to establish complete
religious toleration ? And have we not always
maintained it ? Surely. But the truth is that
we are tolerant mainly in respect to matters
which we regard as indifferent. We toler-
ate religions, but look askance at irreligion.
We tolerate political opinions, but are afraid
of anti-political opinions. The average Amer-
ican, when confronted with any conduct or
expression of opinion which he regards as
"dangerous/' or as "morally wrong," in-
stinctively wishes to "do something about
it." We have been so long occupied with
practical problems of the material order, have
been so completely absorbed in action, that
ideas, as such, ideas divorced from immediate
practical ends, seem to us permissible mainly
as a diversion, and so long as they can be dis-
missed lightly as "interesting" or "amusing."
In all serious matters — matters not to be ap-
proached in the spirit of the amateur — we
prefer ideas cast in formal mold, are at a loss
in the midst of flexible play of mind, and look
with suspicion on the emancipated, the criti-
cal, the speculative spirit. All that is aca-
demic, to be confined to the schools, and to be

179

put off when we pass out of the schools into
"real life/* In real life the average American,
knowing that he is right, wishes only to go
ahead; satisfied with certain conventional
premises — obscure premises embodied in cer-
tain great resounding words such as liberty,
democracy, equality, toleration — he hastens
on to the obvious conclusion. When the news-
papers affirm, as they are fond of doing, "we
are a tolerant people," the context is likely
to show that what the writer really means is
that we are a patient, easy-going, good-natured
people; and the phrase itself is usually the
prelude to the downright assertion that in
respect to something or other — profiteering,
or bolshevism, or Sunday baseball — our pa-
tience is almost exhausted. We are toler-
ant of the thing or idea until the thing or
idea becomes intolerable. We are tolerant
— that is to say, we are good-natured and
can take a jo£e — but don't count on carry-
ing the funny business too far. That every
one should do as he likes, or think as he likes,
is part of the American creed only to a lim-
ited extent. That it is possible to know what
is "right," and that what is right should be
recognized and adhered to, is the more funda-
mental faith.

This habitual dislike of thinking, this aver-
sion for ideas, apart from the type of thinking

1 80

and the order of ideas required for dealing
with concrete practical problems, is closely
connected with that talent for "organization"
which is so characteristic of Americans. If
anything is "to be done," an "organization"
— a committee, a society, a club, a corporation,
an association — is built up overnight, mar-
velously adapted to the "doing" of anything
that can be done by routine mechanical
methods. Every one readily "falls into line"
and does his bit. But this facility implies
on the part of individuals a disposition to
do something rather than to think something;
and indeed the great service of our endless
"organizations" is that they conveniently
relieve us all of the trouble of thinking for
ourselves.

"What do you think about the tariff?"

"Oh, I am a Republican; I never scratch
the ticket."

He does not have to think about the tariff;
the party decides that, and, like Rousseau's
citizen, he has entered into a tacit contract
by which he subordinates the individual to
the general will.

"What do you think about the wisdom of
these Liberty loans?"

"Well, I don't know; but we've got our
quota, and we've got to put Tompkins County
over the top."

181

He does not have to decide whether Liberty
loans are a good thing or a bad thing; he has
to put Tompkins County over the top ; he has
to show those Syracuse fellows that Tompkins
County can do whatever is put up to it to do.
"What are your religious views?"
"Well, you know I am a Methodist."
What he means is that he doesn't have to
think about religion; the Methodist Church
attends to that, and no one can say a word
against the Methodist Church. Americans
have a passion for regulating whatever is re-
garded as important; they like to place their
opinions in the safety-deposit box of some or-
ganization. In respect to all harmless eccen-
tricities they are easy-going and good-natured
enough — "Oh well, I guess it don't make any
difference !"

These qualities — good nature, individual
initiative, idealism, aversion from speculative
thinking, an intolerance toward "wrong" con-
duct and "bad" ideas which under excitement
is likely to run to frenzy and fanaticism — all
these characteristic American qualities, as
they have been fostered by two centuries of
provincial frontier conditions, are still more
strongly manifested in the newer Western than
in the older Eastern communities. Up to the
moment when the United States entered the
war the West k was regarded as "pacifist."

182

People generally were indifferent to the war.
It was a remote, European affair, with which
they had nothing "to do." But when the
United States entered the war, then they had
something to do, and they proceeded with
characteristic energy to do it. Mr. Wilson
told them that the United States had to go
in. "Very well," they said, "since we have to
go in, we must do a good job of it; we must
put the business over." Once organized for
the war, the enthusiasm of the West rose to
the highest possible pitch, and no opposition
to the war could be tolerated — neither op-
position to the war nor criticism of the govern-
ment in the defense of which "the boys"
had put on the uniform and for the sake of
which some of them lay dead in France; so
that it was reserved for an Iowa judge to
affirm as his solemn conviction that Amer-
ican history and institutions should never, in
the schools, be brought into comparison
with European history and institutions ex-
cept in so far as the former could be shown
to be superior to the latter. The Iowa judge
would doubtless have justified his position by
saying that it is wrong to discredit American
institutions because it is wrong to under-
mine the great principle of liberty and equal-
ity upon which American institutions are

founded.
13 183

In 1890 the superintendent of the census
made the following significant statement:

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier
of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has
been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that
there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the
discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc.,
it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the
census reports.

This brief official statement, as Professor
Turner well says, " marks the closing of a great
historic movement." In our day the era of
unlimited free land suitable for cultivation
has already passed, and with the disappear-
ance of free land, the old freedom for the in-
dividual, the old equality of opportunity,
which have hitherto been the guaranties of
American democracy, are things of which one
can no longer speak with the same confidence.
The abnormal price of the best farm land,
which now, in the states of Iowa and Illinois,
sells for from $250 to $425 per acre, is slowly
but surely creating a permanent class of tenant
farmers, while the abnormal concentration of
industrial power is not only creating a per-
manent class of wage-earners, but is placing
the control of the production and the distri-

184

bution of wealth in the hands of the few.
Political democracy we have; but the old
economic democracy is rapidly becoming a
thing of the past. To achieve, under these
changed conditions and by new methods, the
economic freedom without which political
freedom is of little use is the task of the
coming years.

VII

DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY

WHEN Jefferson wrote the Declaration of
Independence, proclaiming as a uni-
versal truth that "all men are created equal,"
negro slavery was a legalized institution
throughout the thirteen states. The contrast
between the actual fact and the proclaimed
truth was flagrant and irreconcilable. Jeffer-
son and his associates were entirely aware of
the fact. It was commonly believed at the
time that slavery was a moral as well as an
economic evil, but the leading men of the
day looked forward to the early disappear-
ance of the evil. Jefferson and Washington
and many others, although themselves the
owners of slaves, were sincerely interested in
the movement for gradual emancipation; and
they hoped and expected that the institution
would not outlast the century of which the
dominant spirit was a passionate concern for
human freedom. They would have been

1 86

amazed and disheartened could they have
known that within fifty years negro slavery
would be the foundation of the economic and
social life of the Southern States, that it would
threaten the very existence of the federal
Union, compromise the future of free govern-
ment, and end at last in a desperate and
sanguinary civil war.

The rapid and unforeseen development of
slavery in the South was due to one of those
slight changes in the mechanics of industry
which so often exercise a profound influence
upon the course of history. In 1793 Eli
Whitney invented the cotton-gin, a simple *
device for separating the seed from the fiber
which, by enabling one man to do the work
of three hundred, so greatly increased the
profit of cotton culture that cotton soon be-
came one of the chief of American products.
For the raising of cotton, negro slaves were
thought to be peculiarly suited ; and wherever
cotton could be raised negro slavery became "
every year more intrenched, was every year
more complacently excused by its benefi-
ciaries as an economic necessity, and at last
defended as a social and moral blessing. But
cotton could be raised only in the South. It
was, therefore, only in the South, where
slaves were profitable, that slavery increased
and was defended, while in the North, where

187

slaves were unprofitable, slavery disappeared
and was denounced as an evil.

By 1820 far-sighted men could see that
slavery, whether right or wrong, would prove
a serious problem because it threatened to
divide the Union into two parts — North and
South — with very different economic interests
and institutions and with antagonistic moral
and social ideas. As these differences became
more pronounced, the divergence would per-
haps create two nations instead of one, and
in that case each group or nation would think
that its own interests could not be adequately
guaranteed unless it had at least an equal
power in the common federal government.
And in fact for many years it was the tacit
understanding that the equal influence of the
two sections should be preserved in that
branch of the federal government — the Senate
— in which every state had the same number
of representatives.

It happened that the division between slave
and free states was sufficiently even, so that
for some years the balance could be deliber-
ately preserved by the admission of an equal
number of free and slave states from the
Western territories. So long as slavery was
not regarded too seriously little friction arose
in carrying out this policy. But in 1820, in
connection with the admission of the state of

Missouri, it was proposed that throughout
the whole of the territory west of the Missis-
sippi (the Louisiana territory acquired in 1803
from France) slavery should forever be pro-
hibited north of the line of 3 6° 30' north lati-
tude. This would have excluded slavery from
the proposed new state of Missouri, and as
the Northern free state of Illinois had been
admitted in 18 19, and the Northern territory
of Maine was petitioning for admission, this
would make three new free states without any
new slave state, and so give to the North a
great advantage in the federal Senate. The
question aroused wide-spread discussion, and
was at last settled by the "Missouri Com-
promise," which established the dividing line
at 360 30', but provided that Missouri should
be allowed to come in as a slave state. The
"Missouri Compromise" was accepted as a
permanent settlement, and for some years the
slavery question was in abeyance. But the
aged Jefferson, noting the sudden flaring up
of angry controversy, likened the episode to
a "fire-bell in the night." It was indeed the
first clear warning of the coming danger.

11

The economic dilemma which negro slavery
created was the same as that which is created

189

by any system of slavery, including wage-
slavery — it was profitable to the individual
slave-owner, but disastrous to the community.
Hence the ruling class in the South, a rela-
tively small part of the population, held on
desperately to the institution which with every
decade became a heavier handicap upon the
Southern States in the competition with the
North for economic and political power. It
was primarily due to slavery that the South
remained an agricultural community. Slaves
were unsuited to manufactures. Cotton plan-
tations and slaves, constantly increasing in
value, absorbed Southern capital, and as
manual labor was a disgrace where slavery
existed, the poor whites preferred to vegetate
on their small farms rather than work for
wages, while the steady stream of foreign
immigration flowed almost wholly into the
North. Both in wealth and in population the
, free states, therefore, rapidly outstripped the
slave states, and such wealth as existed in
the South was largely confined to the relatively
small class of great planters and slave-owners.
These economic disadvantages were in-
creased by the steady rise in the price of slaves,
due in part to the prohibition, after 1808,
of the foreign slave trade. Since the price of
cotton did not advance in proportion, the
continued profit of cotton-raising depended

190

upon cheap land and large-scale production.
Cheap land was to be had in the Western
territories, but in this respect the South was at
a singular disadvantage also, for the division
of the Western territory by the "Missouri
Compromise" gave to the North the greater
part of the Louisiana Purchase, while the
population and wealth of the North enabled
it to settle and exploit its share much more
rapidly than the South could hope to exploit
its share. By 1850 it was clear that if slavery
were confined to the region south of 360 30',,,
the North, which already overbalanced the
South in the federal House of Representatives,
must eventually gain a great ascendancy in
the Senate also.

This prospect would not have given the
South so great concern if it could have been
assured that the North would never use its
political advantage to discriminate against
Southern interests. The South came, there-
fore, to regard the union with the North as *
tolerable on the condition that the "peculiar
institution," as it was called, should not be
molested where it already existed. From the
legal and constitutional point of view, the
position of the South was a strong one, for
the Constitution conferred upon the federal
government no power of interfering with
slavery in the states, and it was possible to

191

argue that it had exceeded its powers in pro-
hibiting it in the territories north of 3 6° 30'.
But in spite of legal protection, the South
felt that with every decade the safety of the
" peculiar institution " was becoming more pre-
carious. This was indeed true. It was true
because the slavery question was not one
which could be settled by compromise or
confined within the limits of legal categories.
Slavery was a moral question as well as an
economic and constitutional one. It was the
moral issue that came to enforce the economic
differences between the sections and ultimately
made these differences irreconcilable by any
half-way measures. As an economic institu-
tion the slavery question might have been
settled by compromise; as a moral question
it could not be settled until the Union was
destroyed or until it became all slave or all
free.

From the eighteenth century slavery had
been regarded as a moral evil by many people;
and there had always been societies, animated
by amiable humanitarian impulses, devoted
to a mild sort of emancipation propaganda.
But in 183 1, when William Lloyd Garrison
established the Liberator in Boston, the op-
position to slavery was taken up by a different
v sort of men and in a radically different spirit.
Previously, the South had had little to fear

192

from the prevailing Northern sentiment that
slavery was in itself an evil, but that in the
South, and under present conditions, it was
probably a necessary evil for which the slave-
owners were not to be held morally responsible,
and which they must be left to deal with as
time and circumstances might determine.
Garrison and the "Abolitionists" altogether
repudiated such views.

I shall strenuously contend [Garrison said] for the
immediate emancipation of our slave population. I
will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as
justice. ... I am in earnest — I will not equivocate —
I will not excuse — I will not retract a single inch — and
I will be heard. ... I take it for granted slavery is a
crime — a damning crime; therefore, my efforts shall
be directed to the exposure of those who practise it.

Two points are significant in the above
quotation. Garrison insisted upon the im-
mediate emancipation of the slaves. If any
one objected that the Constitution — the be-
loved Constitution — stood in the way of any
such program, he could only reply that if
the Constitution sanctioned slavery, then the
Constitution was "a league with death and a
covenant with hell.,, The second point is still
more important. Garrison proclaimed slavery
to be no "necessary evil,,, but a "damning*
crime," and he regarded all slave-owners as

193

guilty of that crime, and, therefore, as vile and
despicable men. This was the spirit of the
new Abolition movement which William Lloyd
Garrison began. It was an uncompromising
attack upon slavery as a crime and upon
slave-owners as criminals. The infamy must
be abolished, the Abolitionists said; it must
be abolished now; and in the way of this
righteous object no consideration of personal
feelings, of convenience, of vested rights, or
of legal technicalities must be allowed to
stand for a moment. For many years, through-
out the North, the Abolitionists were despised
as fanatics and feared as dangerous incendi-
aries. But the spirit which they aroused
would not down; their following steadily in-
creased ; and even outside of their ranks they
won, more and more, the sympathy of men
who agreed with Emerson that although "they
might be wrong-headed, they were wrong-
headed in the right direction."

If the Abolitionists were despised and
mobbed in the North, they were hated with a
desperate hatred in the South. To say that
slavery was a necessary evil was no reflection
upon Southern planters. They had commonly,
before 1830, said as much themselves. Many
things in this world are necessary evils and
are complacently accepted as such. It could

be said, and was said, that the wretched con-

194

dition of factory laborers in New England and
old England cotton-mills was a necessary
evil. But it was a different matter when
people began to denounce slavery as an un-
necessary evil, as a crime against humanity.
Slave-owners might think the charge absurd,
and as long as Abolition sentiment was con-
fined to a few fanatics they could ignore it
with contempt. But the danger was that
Abolitionists might spread throughout the
North, and if that came to pass, as it every
day was coming to pass, the slave-owners knew
well that it would be impossible to continue
to live in political union with a people who
regarded them as unworthy of a decent man's
respect.

When slavery was challenged as a crime,
the slave-owners could therefore no longer be
content to describe it as a "necessary evil."
The Abolitionist argument could be adequate-
ly met only by proving that slavery was a
positive good, an institution that harmonized
with the nature of things, a social arrangement
which was a blessing to society and a benefit
to the slave. Between 1830 and i860 serious
and humane and gifted men formulated such
a defense of slavery. They were only follow-
ing a marked trend of thought throughout the
world when they maintained that the phrases
of the Declaration of Independence were no

195

more than "glittering generalities." The truth
is, said Chancellor Harper, not that "all men
are created equal," but rather that "man is
born to subjection." A careful and unpreju-
diced study of history, he said, would reveal
the fact that —

The exclusive owners of property ever have been,
ever will, and perhaps ever ought to be the virtual
rulers of mankind. ... It is the order of nature and of
God that the being of superior faculties and knowledge,
and therefore of superior power, should control and
dispose of those who are inferior. It is as much the
order of nature that men should enslave each other as
that animals should prey upon each other.

This was written in 1837, and at that date
it was easy to point out, with much semblance
of truth, that the industrial civilization of
New England and of old England, no less
than the agricultural civilization of the South,
was based upon the subjection of the many by
the few. There was a wage-slavery as well as
a chattel slavery, and the South maintained
that the former was worse than the latter. In
1845 James H. Hammond published a series
of letters in which he drew a heartrending
picture of the condition of laborers in the great
industrial centers. Since subjection was thus
the essential basis of civilized society, that
system was best where the master was re-

196

sponsible for the slave. Instead, therefore, of
abolishing negro slavery in the South, this
system should be taken as the model for the
reform of industrial conditions in the North.
The capitalists, according to Mr. Hammond,
should become the owners of their laborers
and as such be compelled to clothe and feed
them decently; while in the West the public
lands should be parceled out in great estates
and tilled by the landless poor bound in per-
petuity to the soil.1

As this philosophy came to be the accepted
social and political faith throughout the South,
its advocates ceased to be content with the
negative policy of preserving slavery where it
already existed. For Southern extremists, no
less than for Northern extremists, the slavery
question became a moral issue, capable only
of a logical and a radical solution. If slavery
was a damnable crime, as the Abolitionists
said, then it ought to be immediately abolished
everywhere — this the defenders of slavery ad-
mitted; but if it was, on the contrary, a
positive social blessing, then it ought to be
permitted everywhere — and this the advo-
cates of slavery demanded. They demanded
the repeal of the "Missouri Compromise" and
the free access of slavery to all the territories ;

XW. E. Dodd, Social Philosophy of the Old South, American
Journal of Sociology, xxiii, p. 735.

*97

they demanded the forcible suppression of the
Abolitionists and of all Abolition literature;
they demanded the active assistance of all
Northerners in the return of fugitive slaves;
they demanded that all criticism of slavery
should cease and that it should be accepted
not only as a legally established, but as a
morally justifiable institution.

Put in this form, the challenge was accepted.
Abolitionist sentiment spread rapidly in the
North during the decade from 1850 to i860;
and nineteen years after a mob had dragged
William Lloyd Garrison through the streets
of Boston it required over a thousand armed
soldiers supplied with a cannon loaded with
grape-shot to take the fugitive slave Burns
out of that town and send him back to Vir-
ginia. The prevailing sentiment was never
Abolitionist. To the end the great majority
of the people were opposed to any interfer-
ence with slavery where it existed; but they
looked with complacence upon the systematic
violation of the fugitive-slave law, and set
themselves more and more resolutely to resist
the legal extension of the institution in the
belief that if the evil were confined to the
states where it already existed it would ulti-
mately disappear altogether.

It was with this program in view that the
Republican party was formed, and as the ex-

198

ponent of these views Abraham Lincoln be-
came the leader of that party. In 1858
Lincoln touched the heart of the matter in
the following lucid statement :

If we could first know where we are and whither we
are tending, we could better judge what to do and how
to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a
policy was instituted with the avowed object, and
confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agita-
tion. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation
has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall
have been reached and passed. "A house divided
against itself cannot stand." I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not
expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease
to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the
other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest
the further spread of ic, and place it where the public
mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of
ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it for-
ward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states,
old as well as new — North as well as South.

At that time most of Lincoln's friends told
him that this was an unwise thing to say —
"a fool utterance," one of them called it.
But it was, in truth, the profoundest wisdom.
The more the moderates in both sections
agreed that the slavery question should be
ignored the more it was discussed; and the
14 199

more it was discussed the more irreconcilable
the position of the two sections was seen to be.
The moderate Whig party, both North and
South, dwindled to a small minority, and when
Lincoln was finally elected President, in i860,
the Southern States seceded from the Union.
The meaning of the election was clear. It
meant, says James Ford Rhodes, that —
The great and powerful North declared slavery an
evil, and maintained that it should not be extended;
that while the institution would be sacredly respected
where it existed, the conduct of the national govern-
ment must revert to the policy of the fathers and
confine slavery within bounds, hoping that if it were
restricted the time might come when the Southern
people would themselves acknowledge that they were
out of tune with the enlightened world and take steps
gradually to abolish the system.

The Southern States seceded because the
election of Lincoln demonstrated that North-
ern sentiment condemned slavery, and in
condemning slavery it had placed a stigma
upon the Southern people. To admit that
slavery must not be extended was to admit
that it ought not to exist. If the Southern
people remained in the Union, they must
either abolish slavery or be content with the
position of a morally discredited minority
whose social customs were temporarily toler-
ated for the sake of peace. They refused to
do either. For the sake of slavery, and justify-

200

ing their action on the ground that any state
had a constitutional right to withdraw from
the federal Union, they fought a desperate
war for independence and the right of self-
determination.

in

In respect to the problem of secession, there
was no consolidated public sentiment in the
North. Many Democrats sympathized with
the South and admitted the constitutional
right of the states to withdraw from the Union ;
many humanitarian Abolitionists and some
Republicans felt that if the Southern States
were dissatisfied and wished to form a separate
government, it would be the part of wisdom
and humanity to allow them to depart in
peace. While the great majority of the people
were opposed to slavery, only a small minority
were ready to take up arms for the avowed
purpose of abolishing it. President Lincoln
himself took the ground that the federal gov-
ernment would do nothing to interfere with
slavery in the Southern States; but he said
that no state had a legal right to secede;
that those people in any state who attempted
to do so were in a state of rebellion ; and that
the whole power of the federal government
would be devoted to suppressing any resistance
to the federal authority. It was on this

201

ground that Northern sentiment came gradu-
ally to the support of the President. The
North fought the Civil War, not for the sup-
pression of slavery, but for the " preservation
of the Union."

The right of any government to suppress
insurrection or rebellion is generally admitted.
But this was an exceptional case. The legal
right of secession was open to discussion, but
technically the South had a more logical and
convincing argument in favor of the right
than the North had against it. A movement
which embraced ten million people, all in-
habiting a particular and economically dis-
tinct section of the country, could scarcely
be called an insurrection ; and, in view of the
radical differences in social customs and ideals,
it might well be maintained that the natural
development of the country had in fact re-
sulted in the creation of two nations instead
of one. Many people in Europe took this
view. In 1862 William E. Gladstone, at that
time a member of the British government,
declared in a public address that the "leaders
of the South have made an army; they are
making, it appears, a navy; and they have
made, what is more than either, they have
made a nation/' On the ground that the
South was a nation, that as such it had a right
to self-determination, the British government

202

was on the point of recognizing its indepen-
ence. By what right did the North use its
superior power to compel the Southern people
to submit to a government which they re-
pudiated, and ultimately to abolish an in-
stitution to which they were devoted?

The subjugation of the Southern people
must be justified, if at all, on two grounds.
It was profound political wisdom, as well as
good political tactics, in President Lincoln to
have based the issue on the preservation of
the Union. Free government as it existed in
the United States was a new thing in the world
— a kind of political experiment as yet not
thoroughly tested, upon which the Old World
looked with interest, but with doubt as to the
outcome. Free governments had existed and
still existed in the Old World ; but the experi-
ence of the Old World, confirmed by the
political philosophy of the eighteenth century,
declared that free government, in any radical
sense of the term, was suited only to small
states, such as the city-states of Greece and
Italy, or the cantons of the Swiss mountains.
It was still a debatable question whether gov-
ernment by the people was suitable to an
extensive territory; and in the experiment
now being conducted in the United States no
point was of greater interest or importance
than this: Could a first-rate political power

203

be erected and maintained on a democratic
basis ?

It is not too much to say that the disruption
of the United States would have answered
this question in the negative for a long future.
Precisely this result had often been predicted
by those who sought to discredit republican
institutions and feared by those who sup-
ported them. It was said that a great con-
tinent like the United States must inevitably
fall apart if it continued to be governed by
public opinion. Sectional differences of in-
terests and ideals must inevitably develop
to the point where political union could be
preserved only by a government wh'ch in some
measure transcended public opinion, and in
some degree rested upon military power. The
divergence between North and South had now
reached this point, and the contest between
them would be decisive. If the South had
won its independence, the result would have
been to create an irresistible precedent, an
unanswerable justification for any other sec-
tion that was so minded to withdraw and go
its own way. If the South had won, it is en-
tirely conceivable, and indeed likely, that the
United States would have rapidly dissolved
into a congeries of petty republics contending
among themselves for a New World balance
of power, exhausting their resources in mili-

204

tary rivalry, surrendering half their freedom
to some European alliance from fear of ag-
gression or in the hope of ascendancy.

Such a result would have tremendously
compromised the future of democracy. In
Europe, above all in England, the disruption
of the Union would have been taken to mean
that no great state could hope to win or to
retain pre-eminence in the world's affairs if
it surrendered itself unreservedly to govern-
ment by the people. This is precisely why the
laboring classes in England supported the
North, while the governing classes hoped for
the success of the South. In 1863 John
Bright stated, in words that the laborers of
England could understand, the significance for
them of the Civil War:

Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the Amer-
ican contest, and every morning, with blatant voice,
it comes into our streets and curses the American
Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle
for many years past. It has beheld thirty millions of
men happy and prosperous, without emperors — without
kings [cheers] — without the surroundings of a court
[renewed cheers] — without nobles, except such as are
made by eminence in intellect and virtue — without
State bishops and State priests, those vendors of the
love that works salvation [cheers] — without great armies
and great navies — without a great debt and great taxes
— and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen
to old Europe if this great experiment should succeed.

20s

That this was no exaggeration of the feeling
of the governing classes has been admirably
demonstrated by Prof. E. D. Adams in his
little pamphlet entitled, Great Britain, Amer-
ica, and Democracy. He quotes from the
Morning Post: "If the Government of the
United States should succeed, . . . Democracy
will have achieved the greatest triumph since
the world began. It will have demonstrated
to the ample satisfaction of its present and
future proselytes that it is even more puissant
in war than in peace. " And from the Edin-
burgh Review: "It is precisely because we do
not share the admiration of America for her
own institutions and political tendencies that
we do not now see in the impending change
[success of the South] an event altogether to
be deplored. In those institutions and ten-
dencies we saw what our own might be if the
most dangerous elements of our constitution
should become dominant. We saw Democ-
racy rampant, with no restrictions upon its
caprices." Professor Adams's conclusion is
that "in England the basic opinion of our
war was of 'democracy on trial,' and men
took sides as they desired or opposed an ex-
pansion of democracy in England." And this,
in general, was what the Civil War signified
to Europe : the success of the great experiment
in democracy depended upon whether the

206

union of the states could be preserved, and
so reconstructed as to retain the essential
spirit of a free and popular government.

The Civil War may thus be justified on the
ground that the preservation of the Union
was of decisive importance in the history of
free institutions. From this point of view
the significance of the war has once for all been
expressed in the imperishable words of Pres-
ident Lincoln's address in commemoration of
the soldiers who fell at Gettysburg:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in
liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil
war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are
met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come
to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-
place for those who here gave their lives that that
nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper
that we should do this. But in a larger sense we
cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it far above our
poor power to add or detract. The world will little
note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so
nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedi-
cated to the great task remaining before us — that from

207

these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full measure of de-
votion— that we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall not perish from the earth.

In this brief address of scarcely more than
two hundred words, delivered within the space
of two minutes, an address which by common
consent ranks among the classics of English
speech, Abraham Lincoln revealed the signifi-
cance of the American experiment, and of the
Civil War as part of that experiment, both
for the New World and for the Old.

But the war could scarcely have been justi-
fied on this ground, on this ground, precisely,
it could indeed have been condemned, if the
Southern claim to independence had rested
upon permanent and ineradicable differences
of race and language and of traditional cus-
tom. This was not the case. The funda-
mental and ultimately the sole cause of quar-
rel was slavery; and slavery was not only
contrary to the trend of modern economic
development and of modern thought, but
flagrantly and completely contrary to the
ideas in behalf of which the United States won
its independence from Great Britain, as well
as to the spirit of its political institutions.

208

The social philosophy by which the South
justified slavery was a denial of America's
birthright; and precisely because the war to
preserve the Union was justified as a test
whether a nation "conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that ail men are
equal," could long endure, such a war would
have been meaningless if, in preserving the
Union, it had not destroyed the one thing
which made the preservation of the Union
useless. In effect, therefore, if not in origin,
the Civil War was a war for the abolition of
slavery as a menace to popular government
and to everything which made America of
peculiar significance to the world.

Before the end the North began to realize
that if the war did not bring about the de-
struction of slavery it would have been fought
in vain. No question was on President Lin-
coln's mind more than precisely this problem
of the relation of slavery to the war. Luke-
warm conservatives were afraid that he would
use his power as commander-in-chief of the
army to declare the slaves emancipated; and
impatient Abolitionists criticized him for tim-
idly refusing to emancipate them. After
eighteen months of war, Horace Greeley, in
an editorial in the New York Tribune, de-
manded in behalf of "twenty millions" of
people that the President should abandon a

209

policy of vacillation and come out at once in
favor of emancipation. In reply to Greeley,
Lincoln wrote a brief and masterly letter in
which he annihilated his passionate critic by
a simple and lucid statement of his policy.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing," as you say,
I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would
save the Union. I would save it in the shortest way
under the Constitution. The sooner the national
authority can be restored the nearer the Union will be
"the Union as it was." If there be those who would not
save the Union unless they could at the same time save
slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those
who would not save the Union unless they could at the
same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the
Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave,
I would do it; if I could save the Union by freeing all
the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also
do that. What I do about slavery and the colored
*■««»% I do because I believe it helps to save the Union;
aeuVwhat I forbear I forbear because I do not believe
it would help to save the Union. I shall do less when-
ever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I
shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will
help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown
to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they
shall appear to be true views.

On first reading, this letter seems to displav
a marked indifference to slavery, and one

210

wonders why the President placed the preser-
vation of the Union above everything else.
Probably few men ever hated African slavery
with a more intense hatred than Abraham
Lincoln. Yet he put the safety of the Union
first. The reason for this was that he believed
everything else depended upon it. If the
Union were dissolved, so he thought, not
only would the bright promise of free govern-
ment be lost, but the best chance of freeing the
slaves would be lost, too. Freedom in every
sense, in the personal and in the political
sense, depended upon preserving the Union.
To have proclaimed the freedom of the slaves
would have been a mere aimless gesture in
the air if the South could not be brought
back into the Union. The question which
the President had to consider was, therefore,
this: What effect would an emancipation
proclamation have upon the outcome of the
war? Would it strengthen or weaken North-
ern support of the war? Would it strengthen
or weaken Southern resistance ?

In the early months of the war, when the
South was victorious in a military way, the
President judged, and rightly, that a procla-
mation of emancipation would strengthen the
Southern States in their determination never
to re-enter the Union with the North, at the
same time that it would alienate a great body

211

of Northern people who were unwilling to fight
for the freedom of the negroes. Above all,
the President was endeavoring to win over
certain "border" slave states — states like
Kentucky, where pro-slave sentiment was not
so strong and where a good proportion of the
people were opposed to secession. To inter-
fere with slavery would tend to drive these
border states into the arms of the Southern
Confederacy. The President was, therefore,
waiting for the day when moderate Northern
sentiment should be ready for the policy of
emancipation, and when the attitude of the
border slave states would no longer be seriously
affected by such a policy.

But aside from all this, Lincoln was looking
beyond the war to the conditions that would
make for a just and lasting peace. He hoped
for a peace which, without conceding the
Southern claims, would effect, if possible, a
genuine reconciliation between the two sec-
tions. If the Union were to be preserved, the
people of the North and the people of the
South would have to live together; it would
be better if they could live together in har-
mony, without bitterness and rancor, "with
malice toward none, with charity for all."
The President would therefore have been
glad if the preservation of the Union could
have been secured and slavery abolished by

212

a diplomatic instead of by a military victory.
His policy in respect to slavery was closely
connected with this idea. In the first years
of the war he hoped that a policy of emanci-
pating the slaves with compensation to the
owners might win over a sufficient number of
the slave states to make it hopeless for the
rest to continue the struggle. If this could
be accomplished the great objects of the war
would be attained ; slavery would be abolished
and the Union preserved — preserved in the
most effective way, without the aftermath of
sectional bitterness which was likely to follow
a war waged to the bitter end and a peace
founded upon military conquest and enforced
at the point of the sword.

Unhappily, this outcome was impossible.
Neither the North nor the South was pre-
pared to accept such a program; the South
would not accept emancipation on any terms ;
the North would not concede compensation.
As soon as the President was convinced of
this, he was ready to proclaim emancipation
as a military measure, and it is a significant
fact that when he wrote his famous reply to
Horace Greeley there was already lying in
his desk the draft of an emancipation proc-
lamation. He was waiting only for a favor-
able turn in the military situation. Accord-
ingly, on the 23d of September, 1862, six days

213

after General Lee's invasion of Maryland was
checked at the battle of Antietam, President
Lincoln proclaimed the unconditional freedom
of all the slaves within those states which
should still be in arms against the federal
government on the ist of January, 1863.
But the South was confident of victory. At
the opening of the new year none of the
confederated states had made its peace with
the federal gcvr- rnment. The war was, there-
fore, fought to the bitter end ; and the South-
ern States, without their slaves and without
compensation for them, were compelled to re-
enter the Union as the result of a complete
military conquest.

The Civil War settled two questions: it
abolished chattel slavery, and it preserved
the Union in the sense that it established
the doctrine that this is "an indestructible
union of indestructible states." These ques-
tions the war settled permanently. Two other
questions, which grew out of the war, were
left for the future: the reconciliation of the
Southern people, and the status of the liber-
ated colored race.

It was to be expected that four years of
civil war, carried on to the bitter end, would
leave their heritage of sectional rancor and
animosity. Under the circumstances, the task
of reconstructing the political union on just

214

principles, and in a manner likely to reconcile
the Southern people to their defeat as quickly
as possible and to enable them to resume their
political functions without undue humiliation,
was an exceedingly difficult one. It might
have been accomplished had President Lin-
coln been spared to shape the policy of recon-
struction in the humane and enlightened spirit
of the second Inaugural Address — "With
malice toward none, with charity for all."
But such a spirit was not to prevail. At the
moment of victory the President was shot
down in cold blood by John Wilkes Booth, a
self-constituted avenger of the South. It was
the most senseless crime recorded in political
history, for it deprived the South of its best
friend and the North of its wisest leader — the
one indispensable reconciler of a disunited and
embittered nation.

President Lincoln's just and humane policy
of reconstruction was adopted by his suc-
cessor; but Andrew Johnson, although an able
and well-meaning man, was in origin and by
temperament wholly unfitted for the high re-
sponsibility which was thus thrust upon him.
He assumed all the authority of his office,
although it was a mere accident and no popu-
lar mandate that placed him in it. No man
ever needed a reasonable and conciliatory
temper so much who possessed so little of
15 215

either. An irreconcilable misunderstanding
at once developed between the President and
the Congress, in which the latter gained the
upper hand, and a disastrous policy of re-
construction was finally carried out in a futile
spirit of punishment and revenge under the
leadership of embittered fanatics such as
Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens. The
Southern people accepted their defeat, but
they were unwilling to confer immediately
upon all the freedmen those civil and political
rights which would have given to a densely
ignorant and hopelessly incompetent race an
ascendancy in many Southern states. The
North in turn refused to admit the Southern
States into the Union on any other terms.
To attain these ends, the South was accord-
ingly subjected for some years to military
occupation; the Southern whites were prac-
tically excluded from all political functions;
and under the protection of the Northern
army, the negroes, unscrupulously led and
exploited by Northern political adventurers
called "Carpet-baggers," organized the new
state governments which accepted the North-
ern terms, in the form of the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, and were
then admitted to the Union.

The Carpet-bag regime, in which the whites
took practically no part, was a travesty upon

216

the principle of self-government and a dis-
grace from every point of view. It precipi-
tated a condition of confusion, of political
corruption, and of social anarchy such as the
war itself never produced; and although it
forced the South to accept the Northern terms,
it failed to accomplish the object which those
terms were designed to accomplish — it failed
to confer permanently upon the colored race
an equality of civil and political rights. As
soon as the Northern army was removed the
Southern whites resumed control, and the
negroes were immediately, and have since re-
mained, practically disfranchised. In form
the Union was restored, but in spirit it re-
mained divided; and the aftermath of bitter-
ness and rancor which divided the sections for
a generation was due not so much to the war
itself as it was to the experience of the recon-
struction era. The Southern people accepted
defeat, they accepted the abolition of slavery,
and they were in the way of recognizing that
they fought not only a losing cause, but a bad
one; but the ruthless, undemocratic, and hu-
miliating domination forced upon them dur-
ing the Carpet-bag regime, and the economic
exploitation which accompanied it, they could
not forget and did not forgive. The result
was a "Solid South," which remained un-
reconciled for forty years, and which to this

217

day votes as a unit against the Republican
party, which sought in vain to confer political
privileges and to reconstitute national unity
at the point of the bayonet. The good results
of "unconditional surrender" in the military
sense — of General Lee at Appomattox — were
half lost by the "unconditional surrender"
in the political and moral sense which the
North imposed upon the South after it had
admitted defeat and laid down its arms.

It has been well said that slavery was only
the worst solution of the negro problem, and
that while the war abolished slavery as a bad
solution of the problem, it did nothing to
abolish the problem itself. This is profoundly
true; and it was in large part because the
Northern leaders failed to recognize this truth
that the reconstruction policy proved a fiasco.
The negro could be freed by force of arms;
by force of arms civil and political rights
could be conferred upon him in a formal and
legal sense; but force of arms was helpless
to make these rights a reality because neither
force of arms nor legal decrees could bring
about an assimilation of the two races or
compel the ancient masters to recognize their
former slaves as equals. Thus it is that
although the war abolished slavery, and the
Fourteenth Amendment conferred civil and
political rights upon the freedmen, the prob-

218

lem of the colored race, and the problem of
making our democracy work in respect to the
colored race, remains still unsolved.

There are to-day about ten million people of
African or of mixed African and Caucasian
descent in the United States — mainly in the
South; and they remain to-day, as they were
before the war, an inferior class. It could not,
of course, be otherwise than that a people so
long enslaved and so recently emancipated
should still be, on the whole, poorer, more
ignorant, and more debased than the white
descendants of people who for centuries have
been among the most civilized in the world.
This in itself would not make the problem
of the colored race a special and particularly
difficult one. There are perhaps as many
poor, ignorant, and debased people among the
white inhabitants of the United States. What
makes the problem of the colored race a serious
one is the fact that they are a class apart.
The inferiority of the colored man is not an
individual, but a racial matter ; however pros-
perous, intelligent, or cultivated a black man
becomes, he is still, in virtue of being a black
man, in a position of inferiority as compared
with white men of similar attainments and
capacities.

The amalgamation of the two races would
in any case be slow because of the radical

219

differences, mental and physical, which keep
them apart. But that this would not be an
insuperable barrier is proved by the large
number of people of mixed blood among the
colored population. What the whites object
to is intermarriage with negroes, and to asso-
ciating on equal terms with them; and the
chief reason for this is the indelible stigma
which the tradition of slavery has placed upon
them. The Southern people very frankly
maintain the pre-war attitude of mind in re-
spect to their relations with the colored race.
They like the negro well enough in a con-
descending way; they have for him less in-
stinctive physical repulsion than the North-
erner has, and they are even more disposed
to treat him kindly — as long as he "keeps his
place." But his "place" is still one of in-
feriority; in every respect, except in legal
status, the colored race is still regarded in
the South as a servile and an outcast class.
The attitude of the Northerner toward the
negro is much the same, although the North-
erner is less frank in admitting it. On the
whole, the Northerner dislikes the negro more
than the Southerner does, understands him
less well, has less patience with his habits
and idiosyncrasies; and however much he
may say that this repulsion is a mere preju-
dice, that the colored man is "as good as

220

any one else" and ought to be treated as an
equal, he does not commonly treat him as
an equal; in spite of theories and good in-
tentions, some subtle repulsion keeps the two
races apart, in the North no less than in the
South.

The negro is not only in a position of social
inferiority; in the economic field he labors
at a great disadvantage. Carefully prepared
statistics show that the per capita wealth of
the negroes throughout the country is #34,
while that of the whites is $885 in the South
and #1,320 in the North. That a people so
recently emancipated should be poor is nat-
ural enough, but the natural economic back-
wardness of the negroes is accentuated by the
social prejudice which virtually closes many
occupations to them, or restricts their ad-
vancement in such occupations as they may
enter. Apart from all natural or racial handi-
caps, it is still true that the negro in the
United States does not enjoy an equal eco-
nomic opportunity with the white man of
similar intelligence and industry.

To the social and economic disadvantages
must finally be added a marked political dis-
crimination. The federal Constitution con-
fers upon the negro the same right of voting
which white men possess; but the social preju-
dice and economic inequality under which he

221

lives and labors, in the Southern States es-
pecially, give such an ascendancy to the
whites that it is possible for them practically
to exclude the negro from any effective ex-
ercise of his political rights. In spite of the
Constitution, the colored people are in fact a
disfranchised people in all the Southern states.
Thus it happens that, so far as the ten million
colored people are concerned, American de-
mocracy does not work, or at least it works
badly. The negro is an American, but he is
an American who remains apart, unassimilated
with the white population, economically still
a servile class, socially inferior, and politically
unfranchised.

If slavery was a menace to free institutions,
the existence of this unassimilated class, which
is regarded as inferior and practically treated
as such, is also a menace, in however less a
degree, to free institutions. It may be true
that the United States was "conceived in
liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal"; but it must be
admitted that there is an ugly contrast be-
tween the actual fact and the ideal profession
so long as one-tenth of the population is de-
prived of its liberty and treated as inferior
on account of its "race, color, and previous
condition of servitude. " Perhaps the problem
is unsolvable; if so, it must be noted as one

222

of those situations to which our democratic
formula does not apply.

No doubt the practical application of any
ideal of government and society can never
be perfect; and it is obvious enough that
democracy works best in communities where
there is a great degree of homogeneity in the
population. There are exceptions to the rule,
as, for example, Switzerland (even in Switzer-
land it is a question whether the lack of
homogeneity is not more apparent than real) ;
but generally speaking, where racial or cult-
ural or economic interests tend to divide the
population into distinct groups, and where the
difference between the groups tends to be-
come deep-seated and permanent, there the
practical application of democratic principles
becomes difficult or impossible. Such group
differences are common and chronic in many
European communities; but in the United
States the unassimilated negro group is the
more striking phenomenon precisely because
of the astonishing rapidity with which the
great number of foreign immigrants has been
assimilated. The people of the United States
have been recruited from every country of
Europe; but hitherto the characteristics of
nationality, of language and culture, which
distinguish the immigrant when he arrives
have disappeared within a generation; his

223

children have become Americans, indistin-
guishable from the general type. Hitherto the
negro, and perhaps certain Oriental peoples
like the Chinese, have seemed to be the only
people whom the American nation has not
been able to assimilate readily.

But in recent years the process of Amer-
icanizing even the European immigrants has
come to be less rapid and less complete.
There are now more numerous and larger
groups of people speaking a foreign language
in the United States than ever before; and
these groups, under certain conditions, tend
more and more to persist as groups apart,
like the negro unassimilated to the general
type, and like the negro regarded in some
measure as economically servile and socially
inferior. The negro problem is thus no iso-
lated problem; it is a part, although no doubt
the most difficult part, of a larger problem
which confronts democracy in this country.
This problem is the problem of Americaniza-
tion— of assimilating diverse racial and eco-
nomic groups to a common type, with com-
mon interests and ideals.

VIII

DEMOCRACY AND IMMIGRATION

IT is sometimes said that the Monroe Doc-
trine is the expression of a policy of selfish
isolation. By insisting upon this policy, so
it is claimed, the United States virtually says
to Europe, "Since we have got, by our own
efforts and the favor of Providence, a very
fine country, we prefer to enjoy it ourselves;
you will therefore kindly mind your own
business and we will mind ours." This is
indeed the substance, put in very undiplo-
matic language, of what the United States
has said to the governments of Europe, but
it is the very opposite of what it has said to
the people of Europe. To the people of Eu-
rope the United States has said: "We do not
want your political system over here,1 but we
do want you — the more the better."
^ To this generous invitation the people of
Europe have responded. From colonial days
they have come in ever-increasing numbers,

This policy has recently been reversed.

22s

and in an ever greater diversity of language,
of religion, and of nationality. In the year
19 10 more than a million foreigners, excluding
those from Canada and Mexico, came to this
country. If they had all landed at the port of
New York, as in fact most of them did, and
if their arrival had been uniformly distributed
throughout the year, one might picture them
coming down an imaginary gang-plank at
Ellis Island about 3,000 every day, 120 every
hour, day and night, 2 every minute, a con-
tinuous stream of people of both sexes, of
every race and language and religion of Eu-
rope, abandoning their native land to come
to America. Why do they come? What do
they seek?

The motives of the immigrants are of course
many, varying with the country, the class, the
race from which they come; but in a general
way it may be said that the people of Europe
have come to the United States in such large
numbers because it has been, or they have
imagined it to be, a land of liberty, of oppor-
tunity, above all, of economic opportunity.
What America was to the European peasant
in the eighteenth century is indicated by St.
John de Crevecceur's description in his Letters
of an American Farmer, printed before the
Revolution. In America, he says, the rewards

of a man's industry

226

follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; this
labor is founded on the basis of self-interest. Can it
want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who
before in vain demanded a morsel of bread, now fat
and frolicksome, gladly help their father to clear those
fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed them
all; without any part being claimed either by a despotic
prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord.

More than a century later the United States
was still regarded as the land of economic
opportunity. Mr. Warne, in his book en-
titled, The Immigrant Invasion, quotes the
following statement from the United States
consular reports:

It would be difficult to state any one particular
reason why these plain, poor, hard-working people
from the plains of Russia and the hills and valleys ot
Austria, should leave their Fatherlands, their humble
homes, their friends and the traditions of their fore-
fathers, and scramble for passage on a steamer bound
for a far-off, strange country. It cannot be that their
home country is overcrowded, for the majority of them
crowd into our cities. Undoubtedly, in some cases they
leave because they love peace and resent forced military
service. Again, others forsake their old homes, impelled
by the love of freedom. But of such idealists there are
probably very few indeed. The vast majority go be-
cause our country is known to them as the land of
promise, the land of opportunities greater than their
country can offer. The great discontent among the
laboring classes of Europe, stimulated by rumors of
great prosperity in the United States, is the prime
cause of this wonderful exodus.

227

For a hundred years the peasants of Europe
have echoed the sentiment of Goethe —
"America, du hast es besser!" They have come
to America because, in contrast with Europe,
America has the best of it. What have they
found in America? Have they found the
freedom, the economic opportunity which
they sought ? What have they contributed to
America ? How have they modified the national
character? Have they furthered or retarded
the great experiment in democracy? These
are questions of importance in any considera-
tion of American ideals and institutions.

II

The average American is scarcely aware of
the continuous influx of foreigners. He does
not see them landing every day at Ellis Island.
He rarely comes into any direct contact with
them, either in the great industrial plants or
in the slums of the great cities where they live
together in comparative isolation. He does
not even see many of them on the streets,
because his streets are not their streets. If
his attention is called to the question of im-
migration he is likely to take it as a matter of
course, as something that has always been
going on, and he will very likely dismiss the
whole problem by saying, "Well, we absorb

228

these people very easily; our institutions
Americanize them, make new men of them,
in the second generation." This, of course, is
precisely the important question. Do we
Americanize them? Do they, by any chance,
or to any extent, de- Americanize us?

If we wish to get the average American
really interested in this question, it will be
well to lay before him a good many statistics.
Americans think in numbers more easily than
in any other way. They have a saying that
" Figures don't lie," and if you can make them
see the immigrant question in terms of "fig-
ures" it will at once take on a vividness that
it could not otherwise have. First of all,
therefore, let us startle our average American
by telling him that in 19 10 there were in the
United States 13,000,000 inhabitants who
were born in some foreign country. This was
roughly one-seventh of the total population;
and this means that if these 13,000,000 people
were uniformly distributed throughout the
country, the average American, when he went
about his business or pleasure, would find
that one out of every seven persons he met
was, in respect to birth, nationality, and in-
herited traditions, to all intents and purposes
a foreigner. Only a very small per cent, of
these foreign-born were under fifteen years
of age when they arrived in the country; and

229

the average American may therefore rightly
be told that he, assisted by six other average
Americans, is in duty bound to "absorb" and
"Americanize " one full-grown foreigner; and
furthermore, at the present rate of immigra-
tion we can give him only about sixteen years
to do it in, for at the end of that period we
shall have another foreigner to turn over to
him and his six associates.

If the business were managed in this way,
the average American would doubtless think
it a bigger job than he had supposed. But
another thing which the American does not
sufficiently realize is that the number of im-
migrants is constantly increasing. This in-
crease may be made vivid by the following
figures. Between 1820 and 19 10 the total
immigration from foreign countries, excluding
Canada and Mexico, was about 28,000,000;
between 1850 and 1910 it was about 25,000,-
000; between 1880 and 19 10 it was about
19,000,000; between 1900 and 1910 it was
about 9,000,000; and between 1905 and 1910
it was about 5,000,000. If the number of
immigrants had been as great every year from
1820 to 1910 as it was in the year 1910, the
total immigration for the period 1820-19 10
would have been about 90,000,000 instead of
28,000,000. Therefore we must tell our aver-
age American that if the number of immi-

230

grants goes on increasing in the future as it
has done in the past, he and his six asso-
ciates will be required, as time goes on, to
complete the process of Americanizing one
foreigner within considerably less than sixteen
years.

As a matter of fact, the immigrants are not
uniformly distributed throughout the coun-
try; and while it is this fact that enables the
average American to dismiss the problem as
one that easily solves itself, it is in reality
this fact that makes the problem more difficult
than it would otherwise be. In some parts
of the country there are almost no immigrants
at all ; in other parts they are more numerous
than the native-born. In the state of Kansas,
for example, the people are almost entirely
relieved of the task of Americanization. But
in New York City only about one person in
five is a native-born of native parents ; the rest
are either native-born of foreign parents or are
foreign-born; about 1,500,000, that is to say,
about one-third of the total population are
foreign-born. This situation concentrates the
problem of Americanization in certain areas;
New York has much more and Kansas much
less than its proper share of the common task.
And in recent years there has been a much
greater concentration of immigrants in certain
areas than formerly; so that the problem of

16 231

Americanization is becoming a more difficult
one, not only because the number of immi-
grants is increasing, but also because they are
being distributed less uniformly among the
people as a whole.

The difficulty of Americanizing any given
number of foreigners, whether they are more
or less uniformly distributed, will depend also
upon what kind of foreigners they are. It
will obviously be easier to make an American
out of a foreigner who already speaks the
English language than out of one who does
not; and easier to make an American out of
an intelligent than out of an illiterate foreigner,
whatever his nationality. If we look at im-
migration from this point of view, we find
that in the decade ending 1850 about two-
thirds of the total number of immigrants came
from Great Britain, Ireland, and Canada, and
were accordingly English-speaking people;
whereas in the decade ending 19 10 consider-
ably less than one-third came from these
countries. The proportion of foreigners speak-
ing an alien tongue has therefore constantly
increased. Besides, the quality of the immi-
grant has apparently deteriorated. Of the
immigrants who came prior to the decade
ending in 1880, only about 3 per cent, were
illiterate — that is, could neither read nor
write their own language, whatever it was;

232

CO"'

but of those who have come since 1880, about
35 per cent, were illiterate.

There is still another factor which enters
into the problem of Americanization. A for-
eigner who comes to live in America will think
of himself as an American much more readily,
and will take on American habits and customs
much more rapidly, if he finds that he is able
to engage in the same occupations that native
Americans engage in, to live in the same kind
of houses, eat the same kind of food, wear
the same kind of clothes, and enjoy the same
kind of recreation and amusements. He will
then feel that he is an American because he
is getting out of life the same things that
the average American gets. But if he finds
himself doing only the more disagreeable
kinds of work, receiving the lowest wages,
and consequently living a life which no na-
tive American will consent to live, then he
is likely to feel that America is not the prom-
ised land of opportunity which he supposed
it to be. Since he gets less than Americans
get, he will not feel himself an American,
which is much the same thing as not being
one.

Now, in fact, this is coming to be more
and more the case. The immigrant finds him-
self working in certain industries at wages
which Americans will not accept, and living

233

in certain sections of our great cities under
conditions that are often worse, and rarely
better, than those in which he lived in the
Old World. He finds himself associating
mainly or altogether with other foreigners like
himself. Since they do not commonly meet
or deal with native-born Americans, there is
slight incentive and no necessity for learning
the language, or for adopting American cus-
toms. They often remain foreigners, foreign-
ers in appearance and foreigners at heart.
Since America exploits them, they will, so
far as they can, exploit America. Their aim
too often is, not to become Americans, but
to return to Europe when they have acquired
a little money, which many of them do acquire
by good luck, or by dint of living the barest
and most squalid lives. Since 1880, about
40 per cent, of the total number of immigrants
have gone back to Europe, and of this 40
per cent, about two-thirds have remained
there. These returning immigrants do not
commonly tell their friends that America is
the promised land, the land of freedom and
of equal opportunity. They describe America
as they have found it — a country dominated
by capitalists, a sordid bourgeois society with-
out ideals, a land of " dollar-chasers " where
wealth controls the government and exploits
the people.

234

Ill

The average American would be somewhat
surprised to learn all this; he would perhaps
be a little skeptical, because he has always
understood that the ease with which foreign-
ers have been absorbed and Americanized is
one of the seven wonders of the world. Amer-
ica has been called the " melting-pot " — a con-
tinuously bubbling sociological kettle into
which we have grown accustomed to thinking
you could throw no matter what number or
variety of foreign elements, without materially
modifying the resulting product; the end of
the melting was supposed always to be the
pure gold of Americanism. This, according
to the average American, is what comes of
having true democratic institutions.

It is true that for the most part the melting-
pot has worked very well. Until recent years
the successful transformation of the foreign-
born population into "typical" Americans
within a single generation has been one of the
notable achievements of the United States.
It is true also that this happy result has been
due in some measure to the character of our
institutions; but it has been due far more to
the absence of those conditions which make
Americanization difficult — it has been due to
the dispersion of the immigrants among the

235

mass of the people, to the relative excellence
of the immigrant population, and to the oppor-
tunity of the immigrant to live the life and
enjoy the rewards of the ordinary American.
Generally speaking, these favorable conditions
prevailed up to a period which may be roughly
placed in the decade from 1880 to 1890. It
will be noted that this is also the date which
marks the end of the era of an abundance ot
free land, the end of strictly frontier condi-
tions. The coincidence is not accidental; on
the contrary, the problem of immigration and
of the Americanization of the foreign-born
is intimately connected with the disappear-
ance of free land, and with the industrial
transformation which has followed the dis-
appearance of free land.

In the earlier period — using this term to
designate roughly the period before 1880 —
the immigrant was most likely to be Irish or
German, or if he was neither of these he was
almost sure to be Scotch, Welsh, Canadian, or
English. Not until the decade ending in 1870
did the Scandinavians begin to come; not
until the next decade did the immigration from
southeastern Europe begin. The great Irish
migration of the period 1840-80 was largely
due to intolerable conditions at home — to bad
harvests and to bad laws; and it was, on the

whole, the most intelligent and energetic of

236

the Irish peasantry that came to America.
The German migration to the United States
has been pretty constant, but it reached its
greatest extent between 1850 and 1890. In
this period, powerful influences in driving
Germans to America were the failure of , the
liberal political movements of 1848, the harsh
military service imposed upon the people, the
relative lack of industrial opportunity. Aside
from the Germans, practically all of our im-
migrants spoke English as their native tongue ;
and among them, as among the Germans also,
the percentage of illiterates was very low. In
addition to this, the number of immigrants in
this early period who returned to Europe was
small; and while the fact that an immigrant
remained permanently in the United States
does not necessarily mean that he came with
that intention, the presumption is that he
did so; and therefore we may say probably
that a great proportion of the early immigrants
came to this country with minds favorably
disposed to becoming American citizens. In
all of these respects our early immigrants were
generally, by virtue of their English speech,
of their intelligence and character, and of the
state of mind with which they contemplated
their new home, a class of people whom it
would not be difficult to Americanize.

The process of Americanization was greatly
237

facilitated by the situation in which the im-
migrant was likely to find himself after he
arrived. The Irishman was more disposed
than any others to settle in the cities, but even
in the cities opportunity was not lacking.
Wages were high, and the industrious men
soon enjoyed a way of life which would have
been thought luxurious in old Ireland, while
the clever ones found in local politics an open-
ing which no one has ever excelled the sons
of Erin in making the most of. Nevertheless,
a great many Irish, and the great proportion
of other immigrants, avoided the cities. They
either came with the intention of becoming
farmers or the liberal pre-emption and home-
stead laws made them such after they ar-
rived. Indeed, the striking aspect of immi-
gration before 1890 is the steady flow of the
new-comers into the great agricultural North-
west. In the decade between 1840 and 1850
the total foreign-born population of the North
Central states was only 641,000, while that
of the North Atlantic states was 1,304,000;
whereas in the decade from 1870 to 1880 the
number in the North Atlantic states was
2,815,000, while the number in the North
Central states had risen to 2,917,000. Be-
sides, in this early period the concentration
in the cities was much less than it has since
become; so that, generally speaking, a very

238

large percentage of the early immigrants were
dispersed in the rural agricultural communi-
ties, or in the small towns which are essentially
parts of these communities ; and this was par-
ticularly true of the Germans — that is to say,
almost the only group that spoke a foreign
language.

Under these circumstances it was difficult
for the foreigner to resist the process of Amer-
icanization, even if he wanted to. I have
myself seen this process of Americanization
going on in a way that is fairly typical of the
earlier period. My own parents were de-
scended on the one side from Dutch and
German ancestors who came to New York
probably in the eighteenth century, and on
the other side from English and Irish an-
cestors who came there — I have no idea when.
My paternal great-grandfather could not
speak anything but German ; my father could
not speak anything but English, nor could
any one have guessed, either from his ap-
pearance or from any tone or quality in his
speech, that he was of other than English
descent. In 1867, having served three years
in the Civil War, he decided, like thousands
of others, to abandon the state of his birth
in order to acquire much better land at a
much lower price in the new West. He ac-
cordingly went, first to Illinois, and afterward

239

to Iowa, where he bought eighty acres of as
good farm land as there is anywhere to be
found, for which he paid, I think, about eight
dollars an acre, and to this he afterward added
two other "eighties." It was on this Iowa farm
that I was born.

One of my earliest recollections was the ap-
pearance in our neighborhood, it must have
been about 1878, of a strange family that came
to live in the house across the road. To me, a
"typical" American boy, they seemed out-
landish folk whom one would naturally avoid
as suspicious and yet wish to see from some
safe point of vantage as a curiosity. The
reason for this primitive attitude of mind
toward the new-comers was that they were
Germans who could barely speak a word or
two of English; and a "typical" little Amer-
ican boy, who was himself descended from
English, Irish, Dutch, and German ancestors,
and whose great-grandfather could not speak
English, had never in his life seen nor heard of
a German, and now learned for the first time
this marvelous thing — namely, that there were
people in the world who could not talk as he
did, but spoke a kind of gibberish which it
was alleged they understood, although no one
else did. The typical little American boy
doubted, like Doctor Johnson, whether they
could really understand themselves; and he

240

wondered why they had not been taught to
speak like other people.

Naturally enough, the little American boy
had no desire to learn this strange gibberish,
nor would he ever make the slightest effort to
learn it. Afterward, when he became the daily
companion of the children of this German
family, and sometimes found himself inveigled
by them into their house in order to get some-
thing to eat "between meals," the grown-up
Kate, of whom he was much afraid, would per-
haps make it a condition of his getting any-
thing that he should say, " Bitte, ein Stuck
Brot." But the little American boy would
never even try to make these strange sounds;
not even the great desire for bread and mo-
lasses (which he always got, anyway, in the
end) would bring him to it. Never, on any
occasion, would he say even a single word,
such as Brot, or Messer, or Tisch; for the truth
is that the little American boy could see no
sense in these words, or any good reason for
learning to pronounce them.

And indeed, in his own way, the little
American boy was quite right. He never
needed to speak German; and no one in that
Iowa farming community ever needed to
speak German. To speak nothing but Ger-
man was as great a handicap as any one could
well have; and the German family knew this

241

better than anybody. They had to learn
English, and all of them did, except the moth-
er: The father soon learned to say all that
he needed to say, in a strange, throaty fashion
that never lost its interest for the little Amer-
ican boy, and the children learned more easily
still to speak English as well as German, and
no doubt much better in the course of time.
They went with the little American boys and
girls to the "district school,'* where they
studied the same books and played the same
games and acquired the same manners as
other boys and girls. Between this German
family and other families there was no differ-
ence, except the difference in origin. The man
paid for his farm, just as my father paid for
his. He ultimately "retired" — that is, he
rented his farm and went to live in town on
the rental of his farm — just as my father did.
His children married, either the children of
other German-Americans or else native Amer-
icans (one of them married my cousin), and
they now have children of their own who go
to the schools, join the Methodist or the Bap-
tist or the Congregational Church, will become
Democrats or Republicans, as the case may
be, and probably cannot in any case speak
any language but English. Such was the proc-
ess of Americanization throughout the farm-
ing communities of the great Middle West.

242

The process has been much the same in the
small towns. Many years afterward, the little
American boy who would not learn German
(much to his subsequent regret) came to live
in another Middle- Western state, in a town or
small city of some fifteen thousand inhabi-
tants. This town, which we may call X ,

was a typical Western community in the center
of a rich farming country. It was a prosperous
"business" town in a small way, and, as
usually happens, the home of some more pre-
tentious enterprises. Most of the inhabi-
tants of this town were "typical" Americans,
and most of the shops and banks and industrial
undertakings were owned and controlled by
them. In the town of X there were, how-
ever, the usual small number of German-
Americans — men of German birth who had
become naturalized American citizens, and
among these were two or three families, inter-
related by marriage, who had built up a very
successful wholesale business. They were, if
not wealthy in the metropolitan sense, at
least wealthy in the small-town sense. In a
business way, the men were intimately asso-
ciated with the "prominent" and "solid"
citizens of the place, while in a social way they
ranked without question among the "best
people."

One of these men, whom we may call Mr.
243

B , I happened to know better than the

others. He was born in Hanover, as I recall,
of upper-middle-class parents, was educated
at a German university, and came to America
as a young man, where he married the daugh-
ter of German-born American citizens. As a
matter of course, both of them spoke English,

Mrs. B without any trace of a German

accent, Mr. B with a delightful Teutonic

tang. Necessarily, in fact, in this American
community, English was the language which
they customarily spoke, but they both spoke
German well, they had twice visited Mr.

B 's parents in Germany, and they wished,

naturally enough, that their three children
might speak German as well as English. This
they thought would be easily achieved ; the chil-
dren would learn German from their parents
and English from their playmates. Mr. and

Mrs. B did their best, but they failed.

They spoke German to the children from an
early age — at least, when they remembered
that this was what they had decided to do.
But the children only listened in German;
they would reply in English. The children
all went to the high-school, and there they
studied German, which they disliked as much
as most American children dislike it, and with
about the same result. Later they went to

the university, and there also they studied

244

German, and learned about as much of it as
other American boys and girls learn. And
the end of it all is that, in spite of the best of
opportunities and the best of intentions, the

children of Mr. and Mrs. B cannot readily

speak ten connected sentences of good Ger-
man. If they should visit Hanover they
probably could not hold intelligible converse
with their grandparents and cousins. They
are as much Americans as if their ancestors
had come over on the Mayflower!

Mr. B is also an American, and must

remain so. I do not know what he thinks of
the Great War, and it does not greatly mattei
— except to himself. He very certainly has
relatives who have fought with the German
armies, very likely has some who have died
in battle. His sympathies may or may not
be with the Fatherland. The result is the
same in either case. His fortunes are inex-
tricably bound up with this American com-
munity in which he lives. The efforts and
the associations of thirty years, his business
career and that of his son, the welfare and
the happiness of his wife and daughters, tie
him for good and for ill to this place and
to these people. Whatever he may think
in his heart, unless he is an extraordinary
person indeed he must and he will act so that
when he goes down the street a dozen friends

245

and cronies will give him the kindly smile and
the intimate "Hello, Fred!" which makes the
day comfortable and life worth living.

IV

In the last quarter of a century the immi-
grant problem, the problem of Americaniza-
tion, has become a much more difficult one.
The immigrant is himself of a different type ;
he comes, or is brought over, for somewhat
different purposes, and he finds himself, when
he gets here, in a quite different situation from
that which has just been described.

The immigration from Great Britain and
Ireland has greatly diminished in recent years.
Ireland has now scarcely more than one-half
the population it had toward the middle of
the nineteenth century; and on the other hand,
thanks to the Irish legislation, it is, or was
just before the war, a far more desirable place
to live in. German migration has also fallen
off. The rapid development of industrial life
in Germany, together with the extensive social
legislation favorable to the working-class, re-
moved many of the conditions which formerly
drove Germans to leave the Fatherland, while
a good many of those who do go to South
America rather than to the United States.
The place of the Germans has been largely

246

taken by the Scandinavians, especially the
Swedes; but the Swedes, although they have
in considerable numbers become farmers in
the Northwest, have more often taken entire
possession of certain districts, as in Minne-
sota, where they are not assimilated by the
native population, but form alien communities
preserving their language and customs.

The striking fact, however, is that relatively
few of the present-day immigrants become
farmers. For the most part the best lands
have been taken. Iowa land which in 1867
was purchased for #8 per acre is now sold,
some of it, for $425 per acre. The immigrant
finds, therefore, that he must either become
a renter on this good land, paying nearly as
much per acre in yearly rent as the land cost
fifty years ago, or else he must go where land
is cheaper because it is more remote or of
poorer quality. In either case, and in spite
of the high prices paid for farm products, when
rent or interest is paid there is often little left
for the necessities of life, and nothing for the
luxuries. In addition to this, the farmers of
the Northwest find that the price which they
can get for their wheat is somehow determined
by the great milling corporations of Minne-
apolis, while the meat-packers of Chicago, St.
Louis, and Kansas City manipulate in their
own interests the price of hogs and cattle.
17 247

Inevitably, therefore, the agricultural com-
munities no longer attract immigrants as they
once did. The situation is vividly revealed
in the simple fact that whereas in 1850 the
average price of farm land in the United States
was only #11.33 Per acre, and in 1900 was still
only #19.30, in 1910 it had risen to #39.50,
having more than doubled in ten years. These
facts find their complement in the statistics
of immigration distribution since 1880. It
will be remembered that the total foreign-
born population in the North Central states
(the distinctively agricultural states) steadily
increased before that date until it numbered
2,917,000 as against 2,815,000 for the North
Atlantic states (the distinctively industrial
states). Since 1880 the great increase has
been chiefly in the latter rather than in the
former region. In 19 10 the figures for the
North Central states were 4,690,000, while
those for the North Atlantic states were
6,676,000. But this does not tell the whole
story. After the year 1890 the increase in
the North Central states was very slight —
amounting to less than a million in the twenty
years from 1890 to 19 10. And this slight in-
crease was evidently largely in the cities. Dur-
ing the decade from 1890 to 1900 there was
actually a decrease of foreign-born population
in every one of the North Central states except

248

North Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois. Dur-
ing the same decade, out of a total increase ot
1,092,000 in the foreign-born population, all
but 152,000 of this increase was in the six
states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massa-
chusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illi-
nois— that is to say, the most highly indus-
trialized states, with the exception of Illinois,
in the Union. The meaning of this is clear;
it means that in the twenty years before 19 10
the great mass of the immigrant population,
instead of being widely distributed over large
areas and among the agricultural communities,
was concentrated in the great industrial cen-
ters— New York, Pittsburg, the coal-mining
regions of Pennsylvania, and the manufact-
uring towns of New Jersey, Connecticut, and
Massachusetts.

A second characteristic of recent immigra-
tion is that the immigrants who come in such
large numbers to work in the Bethlehem steel-
plant or the New England cotton-mills are
less likely to be English-speaking people, less
likely to be German. In the decade ending
1880 the immigration from Italy, Austria-
Hungary, Russia, and the Balkans was not
more than 3 per cent, of the total; in the
decade ending 1910 it was about 36 per cent,
of the total. In 1870 the number of Slavs

and Italian laborers in the anthracite coaJ

249

region of Pennsylvania was 306, while the
number of English-speaking laborers was 105,-
000; in 1910 the number of Slavs and Italians
was 177,803, while the number of English-
speaking laborers was only 82,000. In the dec-
ade ending 1910 only about 28 per cent, of
the total immigration was of English-speaking
stocks, and in the same period the number of
illiterates had risen to nearly 40 per cent.

The ignorant peasant or laborer or vaga-
bond of any country, particularly of south-
eastern Europe, may well imagine America
to be the land where life is bright and wealth
easily obtained. The ignorant are certainly
those who can be most easily made to think
so by those who are interested in getting them
to come. Undoubtedly the hopeless lot of
many people in such countries as Russia and
Italy, in parts of Austria-Hungary, in Greece
and Bulgaria and Rumania, predispose them,
at all hazards, to try their fortunes in the New
World. But it is also true that much of the
present-day immigration is "induced" or
"stimulated" by those who have their own
interests to serve. This has always been true
to some extent. In the earlier period land
companies desiring to sell their land, state
governments wishing to populate their empty
stretches of territory, and European govern-
ments willing to rid their countries of useless

250

or vicious classes, have all contributed to swell
the tide of immigration.

Yet this sort of activity was probably never
so notable, or so bad in its results, as now.
On this point the United States Commissioner-
General of Immigration, referring to the enor-
mous increase of immigration from southern
and southeastern Europe, has this to say in
his report for 19 10:

It is, to a very large extent, induced, stimulated,
artificial immigration; and hand in hand with it (as
a part, indeed, of the machinations of the promoters,
steerers, runners, sub-agents, and usurers, more or less
directly connected with steamship lines, the great
beneficiaries of immigration) run plans for the ex-
ploitation of the ignorant classes which often place
upon our shores large numbers of aliens, who, if the
facts were only known at the time, are worse than
destitute, are burdened with obligations in which they
and all their relatives are parties, debts secured with
mortgages on such small holdings as they and their
relatives possess, and on which usurious interest must
be paid. Pitiable indeed is their condition, and pitiable
it roust remain unless good fortune accompanies the
alien while he is struggling to exist and is denying
himself the necessaries of decent living in order to clear
himself of the incubus of accumulated debt.

These helpless people, encumbered with
debt, ignorant of English, many of them un-
able to read or write any language, ready tc
be herded into the first job that offers, are

251

precisely the human material which many of
the great manufacturing establishments are
looking for. The competitive system of in-
dustry forces employers to look at labor as a
commodity to be purchased as cheaply as pos-
sible and to be thrown aside when it is ho
longer worth the cost. Outside of business
hours the average American employer is a
humane and generous man; but he cannot
afford, or thinks that he cannot afford, to
bring sentiment, not even perhaps the senti-
ment of humanity, into his business ; and he
has not even the interest or the pride of own-
ership which would induce the master of a
slave gang to see that his chattels were well fed
and comfortable. His responsibility to the
laborers ends when he has paid them the stipu-
lated wage, and he somehow persuades him-
self that while the plant and the product be-
long to him, and must accordingly be the
objects of his constant solicitude, the laborer
does not belong to him and is therefore no
concern of his ; it is with the labor only, and
with its price, that he has anything to do.
Noblesse oblige, that sentiment which so often
induces the wealthy American to bestow his
wealth upon public institutions devoted to the
welfare of humanity, is singularly absent in his
dealings with the actual men and women who
contribute to the production of that wealth.

252

The intelligent English-speaking American
laborer understands this; and since the em-
ployer considers that his business is to buy
labor as cheaply as possible, the laborer con-
siders that he must sell his labor as dearly as
possible. The long history of the labor-unions
in the United States is the story of how in-
telligent labor has tried to organize so that
the individual laborer may deal with the in-
dividual capitalist on equal terms and force
him to pay a decent living wage. For many
kinds of skilled labor the labor-union has been
an effective means of keeping wages at a rea-
sonably high level. But the more successful
the unions are the more interested (falsely,
no doubt) the employers are in obtaining a
supply of labor that is not controlled by the
unions. Nothing is therefore so well suited
to the purposes of those great industries which
require a great deal of unskilled labor as a
continuous influx of ignorant, destitute, and
helpless foreigners. It is this class of immi-
grants, coming largely from southeastern Eu-
rope, that they welcome; and these new-
comers are steadily driving native American
labor, as well as English-speaking immigrant
labor, out of one industry after another. Slavs
and Italians are replacing Irish, Scotch, Welsh,
German, and English workers in the anthracite
coal-mining industry; Poles and Armenians

253

are replacing the Irish in the making of collars
and cuffs; Poles and Italians are replacing
the Irish and the English in the woolen,
worsted, and cotton industries; Russians and
Italians are replacing Germans in the manu-
facture of men's and children's clothing. And
so it is in many other industries.

The new-comers drive out the native la-
borers not only because they are not con-
trolled by the labor-unions, but because they
are willing to live, or cannot in their ig-
norance and dire need refuse to live, in a
way which the native will not endure. Mr.
Warne, in his book entitled, The Immigrant
Invasion, contrasts the standard of life of
the English-speaking laborer in the anthra-
cite coal-mining region with that of the
Slav and Italian laborer. The English-speak-
ing laborers of the period before 1880, he
says —

wanted a home, with a wife and children and some
degree of comfort. In that home he wanted none but
his own immediate family or near relatives. For the
rent of a neat, two-story frame house with a porch
and yard he usually paid about four dollars a month.
He wanted a carpet in the best room, pictures on the
wall, and the home to be otherwise attractive and com-
fortable. . . . His wife he liked to see comfortably and
fairly well dressed. For his children he had ambitions
which required their attendance at the little red school-
house on the hill. ... In brief, the standard of living

254

of the English-speaking races was a comparatively
high one, which needed for its maintenance a compara-
tively high wage.

In striking contrast with all this is the mode of
life which the Slav and Italian brought with them
into the region. . . . They came in batches, shipped
by the car-load to the coal-fields. When they arrived
they seemed perfectly aimless. It was hard for them
to make themselves understood. They would land
at the depot, and . . . spend the first night on the plat-
form, or in a stable on the hay. . . . Many were so poor
that they came in old army suits, their belongings all
in one big bundle. . . . These Slavs and Italians do not
object to living in a one-room hut built by their own
hands on the hillside, of driftwood gathered at spare
moments from along the highway, and roofed with tin
from discarded powder-cans. In not a few of their
living-places the most conspicuous articles of furniture
are bunks arranged in rows along the side of the wall.
They are not particular with whom or how many they
live, except that usually they want them to be of their
own nationality. . . . Out of a wage averaging the year
round about thirty dollars a month many of the Slavs
and Italians easily save from fifteen to twenty dollars
a month. The Slav with a family cannot save so much,
but in not a few cases even with a wife and children
his slightly higher cost of living is met by the wife
taking in "boarders." The family income is also in-
creased through the work of the wife. . . . She usually
goes about barefooted and bareheaded even in the
streets. . . . Besides all this, to these workers children
are an asset instead of a liability.

Under such conditions as these, in which
the immigrants are concentrated in little com-

255

pact communities around great industrial
plants like the anthracite coal-mines and the
Bethlehem steel-works, or in the slums of our
great cities, the Americanization of the for-
eigner becomes increasingly difficult. He does
not learn the English language, because he
does not need to; he does not associate with
Americans, because they do not live in his
community; he feels no high regard for Amer-
ica because he soon learns that it gives him
neither the opportunities nor the rewards
which Americans have. A great number of
these people come to America not to become
Americans, but to save a little of their des-
perately earned money in order to return to
the Old World. The children of those who
do remain very likely learn English — after a
fashion; but they too often learn English as
an American in Germany learns German, not
as a language which he intends to make his
own, but as an instrument which may prove
temporarily useful. In organizing the army
under the selective draft it was found that in
many of these foreign communities from 60
to 80 per cent, of the draftees could not speak
English, and in many companies it was nec-
essary to teach the men the simple words and
phrases of the drill-book before undertaking
to train them in the elementary movements of
military tactics. They went to war to fight

256

for American ideals, often enough vaguely-
wondering what they were, or sullenly in-
quiring what benefits they promised to the
exploited poor.

Mr. H. G. Wells, who is at all events a keen
observer, has this to say in his book on The
Future of America:

At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny
the alleged necessity of gross flattery whenever one
writes of America for Americans, and state the bare
facts of the case, they amount to this: That America,
in the urgent process of individualistic industrial de-
velopment, in the feverish haste to get through with
the material possibilities, is importing a large portion
of the peasantry of central and eastern Europe, and
converting it into a practically illiterate industrial pro-
letariat. In doing this it is doing something that,
however different in spirit, differs from the slave trade
in its earlier history only in the narrower gap between
employer and laborer. In the "colored" population
America has already ten million descendants of un-
assimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immi-
grants. . . . And I have a foreboding that in the mixed
flood of workers that pours into America by the million
to-day, in the torrent of ignorance, against which that
heroic being, the schoolmarm, battles at present all
unaided by men, there is to be found the possibility of
another dreadful separation of class and kind, a sepa-
ration perhaps not so profound, but far more universal.
One sees the possibility of a rich industrial and mercan-
tile aristocracy of western European origin dominating
a dark-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated proletariat
from central and eastern Europe.

257

This is the danger as Mr. Wells sees it. There
is, no doubt, much exaggeration in the picture,
if it is to be taken as a picture of America as
a whole. Mr. Wells, besides being given to
over-emphasis, sees that part of America which
travelers mostly see — the Eastern part more
than the Western, the cities and industrial
centers more than the rural and agricultural
communities. But this is just what the im-
migrant sees also, and the America which the
immigrant sees is the whole of America for
him. Whatever we may think, for the great
mass of the foreign-born population America
no longer stands, as it once stood, for the
ideal of liberty and equality. When the im-
migrant thinks of America he thinks of New
York with its palaces on Fifth Avenue and
the massed squalor of its East Side slums;
or else he thinks of the untold millions which
our public-spirited billionaires have accumu-
lated by the aid of men working twelve hours
a day for wages that would barely keep a
slave in sleek condition. When they think
of America they think of the bloated bourgeois
Republic; and so their minds, seeking for the
everlasting ideal of democracy, seeking for
the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness," turn to bolshevism and the class
war.

What Mr. Wells sees, and what the immi-
258

grant sees, is not the whole of America. The
great heart of America, its humanity and ideal-
ism, its sanity and common sense, its attach-
ment to the old conceptions of liberty and
equal opportunity — these are to be found still
(or will be, let us hope, when the unreason of
the war frenzy shall have subsided) in the
great mass of the people outside the large
cities, in the quiet towns and villages and farm-
ing communities. What Mr. Wells and the
immigrant see is not the whole of America.
We must have faith to believe that it is not
America at all. But at least it is a tendency
in American life, and it is a tendency which
must be recognized, and, being recognized,
must be combated. If this is not so, then
America, in any ideal or spiritual sense, and
all she has meant for the world, will cease
to be.

The problem of immigration is but part of
a larger problem: it is part of the problem
created by the disappearance of free land, by
the rapid industrialization of America, and
by the concentration of wealth and industrial
power; it is part of the problem of industrial
democracy — a problem which we, in company
with the rest of the world, have yet to solve.
That the United States — even the fortunate
United States — must meet this problem has
not escaped the penetrating eye of America's

259

most competent as well as ner most friendly
critic. In the latest edition of The American
Commonwealth Lord Bryce has this to say:

There is a part of the Atlantic where the westward-
speeding steam-vessel always expects to encounter fogs.
On the fourth or fifth day of the voyage while still in
bright sunlight, one sees at a distance a long, low,
dark-gray line across the bows, and is told that this is
the first of the fog-banks which have to be traversed.
Presently the vessel is upon the cloud, and rushes into
its chilling embrace, not knowing what perils of ice-
bergs may be shrouded within its encompassing gloom.

So America, in her swift onward progress, sees,
looming on the horizon and now no longer distant, a
time of mists and shadows, wherein dangers may be
concealed whose form and magnitude she can scarcely
yet conjecture. As she fills up her Western regions with
inhabitants, she sees the time approach when all the
best land . . . will have been occupied, and when the
land now under cultivation will have been so far ex-
hausted as to yield scantier crops even to more ex-
pensive culture. Although transportation may also
have become cheaper, the price of food will rise; farms
will be less easily obtained and will need more capital
to work them with profit; the struggle for existence
will become more severe. And while the outlet which
the West now provides for the overflow of the great
cities will have become less available, the cities will
have grown immensely more populous; pauperism . . .
may be more widely spread; and even if wages do not
sink work may be less abundant. In fact, the chronic
evils and problems of old societies and crowded coun-
tries, such as we see them to-day in Europe, will have
reappeared in this new soil, while the demand of the

260

multitude to have a larger share in the nation's collec-
tive wealth may well have grown more insistent.

High economic authorities pronounce that the be-
ginnings of this time of pressure lie not more than
twenty years ahead. ... It may be the time of trial for
democratic institutions.

One may well contrast or compare this
picture of the future of America, drawn by
one of the most intelligent and one of the
sanest minds of our age, as well as one of the
best informed in all matters respecting Amer-
ica, with the picture drawn by Mr. Wells.
The words are different, but the picture, al-
though less highly colored, is much the same.
Into this time of pressure described by Mr.
Bryce, the pressure created in every country
which undergoes the industrial revolution, the
United States is already passing. What dan-
gers shall we encounter? With what prepara-
tion, in intelligence and knowledge, in high
courage and in civic virtue, will we meet
them ?

IX

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

WHEN we say, with easy confidence, that
the rapidity with which the immigrants
are Americanized is due to our "institutions,"
we have in mind, among other things, the
public schools. If it is pointed out that in
many places the process of Americanization is
slow and incomplete, or that it does not go on
at all, we are likely to say, "The remedy for
this is education." In America, while we have
not too much respect for the educated, we
have unlimited faith in education. What-
ever ills democracy may be suffering from, the
reply is always forthcoming, "The remedy for
that is more and better education."

This attitude of mind is at bottom a sound
one, in so far as it leads to a serious and in-
telligent interest in the schools — and it is not
by any means confined to America. \ Wher-
ever democracy exists, or wherever intelligent

262

people desire to have it exist, there the de-
sirability of free education for the masses is
likely to be insisted upon. The ruling class
must be educated in some fashion; it^maybe
badly educated, but at least it? must have the
sort of education that is suited to the kind of
government that is in its keeping. If the ideal
of government is an absolute monarchy, or a
landowning aristocracy, or an ecclesiastical
priesthood, or a combination of all three, then
no doubt education should be confined to
these classes. But if the idea that the people
are to rule is frankly accepted, then it is ob- ]
vious that the people should be as intelligent
and well informed as possible; from which it
follows that the state should provide free edu-
cation for all its citizens.!

This, at all events, is the theory which has
accompanied the spread of democracy in Eu-
rope. Whereas in the Middle Ages and early
modern period education was largely confined
to the clergy, in the later modern period, and
in proportion as the ideal of democracy has
made headway, the State has replaced the
Church in the control of education, and free
public schools for the people have been widely
established. Which was cause and which was
effect in this process cannot be inquired into
here; but, generally speaking, it is true that
the ideal of popular education under the con-
is 263

trol of the state is as commonly accepted now
as the ideal of education controlled by and
limited to the clergy was in the Middle Ages.
In this respect, as in respect to the idea of
free government itself, the United States was
in some measure a pioneer, and it has been
in some measure an example to European
countries. The quality and the smooth work-
ing of democracy in America have been com-
monly associated with the low percentage of
illiteracy and the general diffusion of an ele-
mentary education among the people; and this
happy situation, it has been assumed, is due
to the existence everywhere, even in remote
country districts, of the free public school.
The United States has in fact been held up
as a shining example of what a true democracy
does in the way of educating its citizens, and
of what an educated citizenship can do in
the way of making democracy a success.

II

Serious concern for education was one of
the chief characteristics of the Puritans who
settled New England in the seventeenth cen-
tury. The type of education which they
wished to promote was indeed of a limited
and very carefully guarded sort. Like all
men who have a conscious and reasoned theory

264

of the ideal commonwealth, they wanted for
their people an education which, by confirming
the theory, would constitute a bulwark for the
support and the preservation of the common-
wealth; and as the Puritan Commonwealth
was founded upon a definite theological creed
and very precise notions of conduct, the
schools which they established were devoted
mainly to inculcating the accepted ideas of t
religion, politics, and morality. But at all
events the Puritan desired that all children
should learn to read and write, if only that they
might read the Bible and copy its verses;
and the novel and important aspect of his
interest in education was that in order to
accomplish these ends he adopted the practice
of establishing schools in every community*
at the public expense.

In a community where the Church was a
part of the State, the training of the clergy
was obviously a matter of primary importance.
Hence the Puritans had scarcely landed in
Massachusetts Bay before they took steps
to found a college for that purpose, and six
years later Harvard College was in fact estab-
lished. The existence of a college called for
secondary schools. One of the earliest of
these, and the first school in America to be
supported by public taxation, was founded
at Dorchester in 1639. It was ordered by the

265

town that twenty pounds be raised and " paid
to such schoolmaster as shall undertake to
teach English, Latin, and other tongues, also
writing. The said schoolmaster to be chosen
from time to time by the freemen." Within
the first twenty years of Massachusetts his-
tory six grammar-schools had been founded
in that colony.

But the founders of Massachusetts were
not indifferent to primary-schools. Their
ideal in this respect (it was not found possible
to realize it fully) is clearly stated in the
famous order of the General Court, issued in
1647, which laid the foundation of the com-
mon school system in the province, and has
been called the "mother of all our school laws."

It being one of the chief projects of that old deluder
Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the Script-
ures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown
tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the
use of tongues, . . .

It is therefore resolved. That every Township in this
jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the
number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith ap-
point one within their Town to teach such children as
shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall
be paid either by the parents or masters of such chil-
dren, or by the inhabitants in general ... as the major
part . . . shall appoint. . . .

It is further ordered, That when any Town shall in-
crease to the number of one hundred householders,

266

they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof
being able to instruct youth, so far as they may be
fitted, for the university: Provided, that if any Town
neglect the performance hereof above one year, that
every such Town shall pay five pounds to the next
school until they shall perform this order.

The Massachusetts school system, as actu-
ally established and as projected in this law,
is in all essential respects the model upon
which the school system of the United States
has been fashioned. These essential points
are, first, a free primary-school in every local *
community to teach the rudiments of knowl-
edge to all children who may attend ; second,
a grammar-school (that is to say, a secondary,
or, as we say, a "high" school) in every com-
munity to teach the elements of general cult-
ure and to fit youths for the university; and
finally a college or university to train men for
the professions or to give them a "liberal
education/* The Massachusetts law did not
require either the primary or the secondary
schools to be supported by public taxation,
nor did it require the secondary schools to
be "free" schools. But in practice, both in
New England and later throughout the United
States, both primary and secondary schools
have come to be free and publicly supported.
Harvard University has remained a privately
endowed institution, and it still requires of

267

its pupils the payment of high fees. In the
East most universities, among them some of
the best in the country, have followed Harvard
in this respect ; but in the region west of the
Alleghanies the universities are commonly
"state universities,, — that is, they are inte-
gral parts of the system of free public schools,
being supported by taxation and controlled
by public authority.

The establishment of free schools was made
an easy thing in America, as many things
have been made easy, by the existence of an
abundance of public land. From an early
date the New England colonies took advan-
tage of this fact by reserving, in the town
grants, a certain part of the land as an endow-
ment for schools. The example of New Eng-
land became at a later date the settled prac-
tice in all the newer parts of the United
States. In the Northwest Ordinance, passed
by Congress in 1787 for the government of the
territory north of the Ohio River, there was
included the following clause : " Religion, mo-
rality, and knowledge being necessary to good
government and the happiness of mankind,
schools and the means of education shall for-
ever be encouraged." The clause was not
mandatory, but it has proved something more
than a mere pious hope. In all the states
formed out of the public domain the common

268

practice has been to make extensive reserva-
tions of lands as an endowment for public
education. Such lands have indeed too often
been badly administered, and in some cases
largely diverted from their original purpose by
political jobbery; but the existence of free
schools in all the newer states, from the
little "district" schools in every township, up
through the graded grammar and high-schools
in every county or urban community, to the
state university, is due in no small measure
to this practice of reserving public lands as
an educational endowment.

That such reservations were so generally
and so generously made for this purpose
meant, of course, that the people who settled
the West were themselves seriously interested
in education. Few pioneer settlements, even
the most primitive, were long without schools.
The little log school-house was often the first
public building erected, frequently serving the
double purpose of religious worship and secu-
lar instruction; and, as the community grew,
additional school-houses were built. The es-
tablishment of schools, in fact, kept pace with
the progress of settlement, and by the middle
of the nineteenth century free elementary
education, supported by public taxation, had
been established in practically every part of
the country.

269

When the pioneer used the word "educa-
tion," he did not, of course, mean quite what
the college professor means by it. The pioneer
wanted his children to be "educated" in the
sense that he wanted them not to be illiterate
— he wanted them to be able to read, write,
and "do arithmetic." He wanted them to be
able to do these things even if he could not
do them himself; in fact, if he could not read
and write himself, he was likely to want par-
ticularly that his children should be able to
read and write. The underlying motive which
has given the people of the United States so
keen an interest in "education" is indeed an
essential part of their democratic habit of
mind. No man takes it as a matter of course
that his status is fixed, or that his children
must necessarily be what he has been. It is
rather a matter of course that a man's children
may do something more and achieve some-
thing better than he has found possible. All
that they need is a "better chance" than he
has had; and it is, above all, "education" that
will give them this better chance.

Nowhere has this feeling been more common
or more intense than in the newer Western
parts of the country, where the development
of the community has been so rapid, where
class divisions have been relatively non-exist-
ent, and where lack of training has been the

270

chief bar to individual advancement. In the
frontier communities, therefore, the devotion
to education was wide-spread, intense, and
extremely practical in its object. Every one
wanted the boys and girls to have a "better
chance." All boys and girls must, as a matter
of course, learn to read, to write, and to do
sums. But in any community, as soon as that
came to be a common achievement, so that
to be illiterate was almost a disgrace, to be
able to read and write and "do arithmetic"
was not enough. If a boy was to have his
"better chance" he must go to a "higher"
school where he could learn to do arithmetic
better than his father, and study algebra and
grammar, which his father perhaps never
studied, or perhaps learn a language, or read
books which his father never heard of. To the
father who never went to a "high-school" this
was very wonderful — this was to "have a
chance." But to the boy himself the high-
school became in turn a matter of course ; and
for his boy, who must also have his better
chance, nothing would serve but a college —
the boy must go to a university and become a
"real scholar," so that he would have every
opportunity that any man could have.

To the people of the United States, and par-
ticularly to the people of the newer regions of
the Middle and Far West, where indeed the

271

American system of public schools has re-
ceived its most characteristic form, education
has essentially always meant just this: That
the boy, and the girl, too, must, if possible,
learn something which their parents never
knew in order that they might have a better
chance to rise in the world than their parents
had. It is this attitude of mind that largely
explains the otherwise astonishing fact that
the people of these Western states, the great
majority of them relatively poor and unedu-
cated, have been willing to pay taxes for the
support of high-schools and universities. The
number of boys and girls who ever go to the
university, or even to the high-school, is very
small in comparison with the total population.
One might suppose that the average man
would regard these higher schools as "aristo-
cratic" institutions and be inclined to think
that they should be supported by the people
whose children took advantage of them. But
the fact is that no one could be sure who was
an "average man"; no one could be sure that
his children would not be among the favored
few; every man could at least have a reason-
able hope that his children would graduate
from the high-school at least, and perhaps
(who could tell ?) even from the university.

It is this reasonable hope that made people
willing to support free higher as well as free

272

primary education. It is this reasonable hope
that finds succinct expression in the constitu-
tion of the state of Indiana, which was drafted
in 1 8 19, and which may be taken as represent-
ing the common practice:

It shall be the duty of the General Assembly, as
soon as circumstances will permit, to provide by law
for a general system of education ascending in regular
graduation from township schools to state university,
wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all.

In this spirit the Western States established
their public schools. And to-day it is a rare
country district which has not its little school-
house at the crossroads within easy walking-
distance of every home; a rare town which
has not its graded grammar- and high-school ;
a rare state which has not within its borders
at least one university and one or more col-
leges and academies; and almost all of the
lower schools, as well as a great number of the
universities, are free schools, are maintained
by public taxation and controlled by the
public authority.

The public-school system of the United
States is rightly regarded as one of the most
characteristic, as one of the essential parts of
American democratic institutions. What kind
of education do these schools furnish? How
do they serve the purposes of democracy ?

273

Ill

The purpose of the public-school system is,
after all, social rather than strictly intellectual.
It is only in the college or the university, and
sometimes not even in them, that a pupil
can become "educated" in the academic sense.
Only an insignificant part of the people ever
see the inside of a college. In after-life it is
difficult to distinguish the high-school gradu-
ate from one who never got beyond the gram-
mar grade, or a university graduate from one
who never got beyond the high-school. The
public schools are in fact a socialistic enter-
prise on a grand scale; and the employment of
some six hundred thousand teachers, and the
expenditure of over half a billion dollars of
public money annually in such an enterprise,
can be justified only if the result is an ad-
vantage to the community as a whole rather
than primarily to the individual concerned.
In theory there is perhaps no necessary op-
position between the advantage of the in-
dividual and that of the community. But
there may be in practice; and since the ad-
vantage of the schools to the community
can come only through the individuals who
pass through them, it is and must remain a
fundamental assumption that the chief pur-
pose of free education in a democratic soci-

274

ety is to make good citizens rather than good *
scholars.

This primary purpose was long ago expressed,
in the seventeenth century, by the Puritans
of New Haven, who founded schools "for the
better training up of youth in this town, that
through God's blessing they may be fitted for
public service hereafter, either in church or
commonwealth." When, at a later time, the
Church was no longer thought to be a neces-
sary part of the State, the term "Church" was
left out of this formula ; but with that slight
change the Puritan formula fitted nicely
enough into the democratic political philoso-
phy to which America has always held. That
philosophy was formulated in the eighteenth
century, and the idea of free schools, sup-
ported and controlled by the state, was an
essential part of it.

Eighteenth-century political philosophy was
fashioned mainly in France at a time when the
progressive minds of the age found the welfare
of men hampered by arbitrary government and
by the outworn and senseless privileges en-
joyed by nobles and clergy and monopolistic
industrial corporations. They reasoned, there-
fore, that the wretched state of the great mass
of the people was due, not to native viciousncss,
but to bad laws and customs. If you would
make men better, more prosperous, and more

275

happy, they said, you must first of all give
them freedom; you must abolish arbitrary
government and class privilege and, by con-
ferring political and personal and industrial
liberty, give every man a chance to make the
most of himself. But this was not all. There
would still remain certain inequalities. One
man would be born intelligent, another stupid ;
one would have an excellent home-training,
another would lack this training. These in-
equalities, arising from difference in capacity
and from advantages of birth, it was the
business of the state to remove as far as
possible. According to eighteenth-century
political philosophy, it was, therefore, the
duty of the state to establish a system of
free elementary schools, through which all
citizens would pass, and which would mold
them all to some degree of equality. A uni-
form education, it was hoped, would in time
give to all citizens that common capacity
and that similarity in civic virtue which
would be the sure foundation of genuine de-
mocracy and of steady progress toward human
perfectibility.

The generous expectations of eighteenth-
century philosophers have not been fully real-
ized. Neither free government nor free public
schools which have come with free govern-
ment have brought about the reign of felicity

276

or the regeneration of the human race. But
the modern faith in public education, so far
as that faith still persists, rests upon the same
general philosophy; and it is in the United
States, where the philosophy was never so
consciously elaborated as in France, that it
has been most effectively confirmed in prac-
tice. Not in any ideal way, but in a prac-
tically effective way, the public schools in the
United States do make for equality; they do
in some measure enable men to enter upon the
economic struggle for existence on more equal
terms ; they do in some measure tend to shape
the mind and manners of men to a common
social type; they do, most of all, bridge the
gap between rich and poor, the well dressed
and the shabby, the soft mannered and the
brutal, by throwing them together at an im-
pressionable age and forcing them to compete
or co-operate in common tasks and common
activities.

The most characteristic and the most im-
portant part of the public-school system is
that which is comprised in the primary and
grammar grades. These are the people's
schools in the strict sense; for throughout the
country these are almost the only elementary
schools, and to these schools practically all the
children go. In any typical community there
is every reason for parents sending their chil-

277

dren to the public schools, and, except perhaps
in the case of strict Catholics, none for refusing
or neglecting to do so. It costs them nothing
— in some places even the text-books, paper,
pencils, pens, and ink are furnished gratis.
The hard-worked mother of a family often
finds other than educational advantages in
turning over her children to the safe guardian-
ship of the schoolmistress from nine to four
o'clock five days in the week. Besides, it is
taken as a matter of course that a child shall
"go to school" from the age of five, at least,
until the age of twelve or fourteen. In any
small community a family that does not send
Jane and Tom to school is a marked family —
the neighbors wish to know the reason, and
if none is forthcoming they pity the children
as unfortunates and condemn the parents as
culpable.

To these schools, then, all the children of a
community come, and there they learn — in a
routine way, indeed — the essentials. They
learn to add and subtract and divide, and to
do fractions and compute interest. There
they learn a little about the geography of the
world, they learn to name the states of the
Union, their capitals, chief towns and rivers,
and their leading industries. They learn a little
English grammar, are corrected when they

say "I seen" or "he has went" (although very

278

rarely when they say "he don't "), and make
some progress in writing, and in the mastery
of the intricacies of English spelling. There
they learn the elements of American history,
and of the form and working of local and
national government. They learn all this,
and this is much for all the people to learn.
It means that in any average town or country
community it is a rare thing to meet any
person who cannot sign his name to a sub-
scription, or write a letter to a friend, read a
newspaper, or a book out of the circulating
library. It means that the great majority
of the people know something about the coun-
tries of the world, and more about their own
country, about its history, about its govern-
ment, about its public men and political par-
ties and the issues that divide them. For all
the people to learn this means that all have
that rudimentary knowledge which makes the
effort to earn a living much easier than it
would otherwise be, and that intelligent in-
terest in general affairs without which demo-
cratic government would be impossible except
in name.

It is important that all the people learn
these things; it is quite as important that they
learn them together and in the same way;
for in learning them together and in the same
way they learn a good many other things
19 279

besides. The children of the poor and the
rich, the cultured and the ignorant, the good
and the bad, assemble in the same room and
study the same books and recite the same
lessons. Johnny, the banker's son, sits in the
seat next to Jake, the butcher's boy, or Gertie,
the washerwoman's daughter. In the free-
masonry of youth they give each other the
wink, or whisper out of hours, or exchange
needed crayons or paper pads. There is, gen-
erally speaking, one rule for all, and Johnny
is reprimanded for whispering, or Jake is com-
mended for good behavior, without discrimi-
nation; or if by chance there seems any dis-
crimination, "teacher" falls under the severe
censure of all her pupils. The school-room is
a juvenile democracy with a marked public
opinion of its own which insists above all
things upon impartial justice, silently with-
draws its "mandate" from the instructor who
has favorites, and ostracizes any pupil so lost ,
to a sense of the social welfare as to become
"teacher's pet."

The playground is even more democratic
than the class-room. There is, in connection
with the American public school, an important
institution known as "recess" — an intermis-
sion of fifteen minutes in the middle of the
morning and another in the middle of the
afternoon session. During recess the children,

280

in pleasant weather, march out of the building,
and when the ranks are broken pandemonium
is let loose. For a moment the struggling mass
of humanity is a howling mob ; but it is a mob
which, in true American fashion, quickly ar-
ranges itself in groups according to the in-
terests or likings of the individuals composing
it. Games of all sorts are immediately in
course; and ordinarily, so far as boys are con-
cerned, the worth of any boy and his standing
among his fellows is largely determined by
his ability to organize attractive games and
his skill in playing them. Baseball is the
American national game, and it is the public-
school playground that chiefly makes it so.
It is the principal school sport. School-boys
all know, and nearly all play, baseball; they
take it with intense seriousness, and it fur-
nishes an admirable test of strength and en-
durance, or accuracy, or sure judgment, and
of self-restraint. But it does more than this.
On the baseball-field of the public schools all
the boys of a community, of high or low de-
gree, good, bad, or indifferent, submit them-
selves voluntarily to a single test — the test
of merit in playing the game. And when a
"team" is organized to compete with a neigh-
boring school, by common consent the best
players are chosen. Nothing else counts. It
might be a choice between the son of the

281

President of the United States and a boot-
black; only one question would be asked —
which can play the better? And the better
player would be chosen. The chances are that
it would be the bootblack.

This is, on the whole, the spirit which ani-
mates the boys in respect to their life in the
public schools. They form an essentially
democratic community in which all have to
submit to the same standards of judgment.
The judgment is essentially direct and fair-
minded, except perhaps in respect to the odd
or unusual boy who happens also to be an
incorrigibly unsocial boy. It is something of
an ordeal for a new boy — a country boy, for
example, entering a city school — to be sub-
jected to the severe scrutiny and the rough-
and-ready tests which he cannot escape. For
the attitude of the school-boy is not cosmo-
politan; the outsider is a foreigner and an
enemy, and until he is initiated and proves
himself one of them his life is made a burden.
School-boys are democratic only within the
tested group. Toward outsiders they are,
although very human, scarcely humane or
engaging. The new boy is at once the ob-
served of all observers ; the center of frank and
impertinent and brutal curiosity and criticism;
the object of friendly insult and intolerable
familiarity. He is simply being tested, as any

282

social group tests a new-comer; the only dif-
ference is that school-boys have no reticences,
and they accomplish in three days what with
their elders would take three months or three
years. They want to see straight off how the
new boy will take them and their manners.
They want to get used to him in the shortest
order. Above all, the new boy must not cry
or sulk. Let him grin and stand up to it;
let him return insult for insult, blow for blow,
taunt for taunt, and it is soon over; he is ac-
cepted at once as a brother, and has henceforth
an equal chance with every member of the
community.

It is in the lower grades of the public schools
that the work of Americanizing the foreign-
born and the children of the foreign-born goes
on, often with a thoroughness that leaves
nothing to be desired. Mary Antin has writ-
ten a fascinating account of her own Amer-
icanization, and of the notable part which the
public schools played in it. She was indeed
an exceptional child — too exceptional to be
the basis of any generalization; but she speaks
also for thousands of others upon whom the
schools have had a similar transforming effect,
but who were doubtless less conscious of the
process, or who at least less consciously super-
vised and promoted it. It is not worth while,
she says —

283

to refer to voluminous school statistics to see just how
many "green" pupils entered school last September,
not knowing the days of the week in English, who next
February will be declaiming patriotic verses in honor
of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, with a
foreign accent, indeed, but with plenty of enthusiasm.
It is enough to know that this hundredfold miracle
is common to the schools in every part of the United
States where immigrants are received.

The miracle is perhaps not often complete
between September and February. Perhaps
it is not even a miracle at all, but a very
natural process of transformation, more or
less independent of the "enthusiasm" of the
pupil; but at least the transformation goes on,
and it goes on much more rapidly in the schools
than it does anywhere else.

Miracle or not, the transformation goes on
in most cases, especially in the case of boys,
more rapidly and more effectively on the play-
ground than in the school-room. The little
German or Italian boy is precisely in the posi-
tion of a new-comer, except that an extraor-
dinary curiosity attaches to him on account
of the odd clothes, or manner, or habit of
speech that is likely to make him a shining
mark. All these peculiarities are noted, imi-
tated in derision, and advertised as fit subjects
for ridicule. The boy's name is of no im-
portance; he belongs to a well-known species

284

— "Dutch" or "Dago," as the case may be —
and this little boy, whose parents are so fondly
endeavoring to keep him in the way of speak-
ing German or Italian, finds that his constant
companions regard any "lingo" as reprehen-
sible. The little boy does not like to be called
"Dutch" or "Dago," and his one consuming
ambition is to divest himself of every badge
or trait, every shred of costume, every man-
nerism or tone of voice, which might dis-
tinguish him as "different" from the others.
Hence he becomes an American with a swift-
ness that amazes his parents. The process
which brings about this transformation is a
bit brutal, but it is effective and enduring.

The high-schools and universities are es-
sentially parts of the public-school system in
fact, even if not always so in law. Instruction
covers a different field of study and is more ad-
vanced and mature, but it is not essentially
different in kind. The high-school pupil stud-
ies English language and literature, perhaps
Latin or German, history and government and
economics, a bit of botany, or physics, or
possibly chemistry. In the university the same
subjects, multiplied and specialized, are stud-
ied, under more competent masters and with
added facilities and in greater freedom; but
in method of instruction and in the tests ap-
plied, the transition from grammar grade to

285

high-school, from high-school to university,
is in no sense revolutionary. Above all, in the
association of the pupils with one another,
and in the various activities and " interests "
which they pursue outside the class-room, the
same spirit prevails and the same social in-
fluences are at work as in the grammar grades.
The high-school and the university pupils
play the same games, more systematically or-
ganized, more professionally, and, in the uni-
versity, at least, in somewhat less of the spirit
of the "career open to talent.'' To these ac-
tivities the high-school and university pupils
add other, more mature and more sophisti-
cated, social activities — debating and literary
clubs; literary periodicals and newspapers;
class organizations with their elected officers,
and the "politics" that inevitably accompany
elections; "society" in the narrow sense, with
its receptions, dances, informal "affairs," and
the jealousies and aspirations and triumphs
which attend these things.

The high-schools and universities, taken as
a whole, are true reflections of American life.
Learning has in them as much and as little
prestige as it has outside. They do not make,
and do not aim to make, "scholars" of their
pupils, although the university opens the door
to the scholarly life for those who seek it.
Nor does the university make of its pupils a

286

distinct class in after-life. There is in both
high-school and university a good deal of
youthful snobbery, but in general the experi-
ence is wholesome, and it tends to liberalize
the mind and broaden the sympathy of its
beneficiaries. The members of the higher
schools are subjected to much the same tests,
although in more subtle and urbane ways,
as the members of the lower schools; in a
wider field, they learn to co-operate or com-
pete at common tasks with all sorts of people ;
they learn to detect the substance beneath
the form, and to accord merit, in them-
selves and in others, to talent rather than to
position.

It is a reflection, as well as a confirmation,
of the democratic character of our society
that poverty is no bar to a university career.
In practically every college and university
there is always a considerable number of stu-
dents who pay their expenses by working
during odd hours in term time or throughout
the summer vacations. There are many col-
leges in which from 50 to 75 per cent, of the
students pay their own way in whole or in
part, a circumstance which is sure to strike
the European observer of American institu-
tions as singular, very likely as admirable,
but at all events as "so American." M. Paul
Bourget, in his book on America entitled,

287

Outre-Mer, gives some specific instances that
may be taken as typical.

I remember [he says] when I was in Newport being
entirely nonplussed by the question of a negro who
waited upon me in the hotel, a sort of black giant whom
up to that time I had admired solely for his dexterity
in carrying on the flat of his hand a tray loaded with
six or seven entire dinners.

"Is it true, sir," he asked me, "that you are going
to write a book about America?"

"Perhaps," I replied. "But why do you ask?"

"Because I should much like to have a copy to read
this winter in college."

"The negroes are so vain," said a New Yorker,
to whom I laughingly related this dialogue. "He
wanted to make you think he knew how to read." . . .
My witty interlocutor was mistaken. It was not in
braggadocio that the waiter in the Newport hotel had
spoken of his college. I had proof of this when . . .
I received a letter which I cannot refrain from setting
down here in all its artlessness, so significant does it
appear to me.

"I write you a few lines to let you know that I have
succeeded in entering college as I hoped to do. I
entered January I, and am getting along very nicely
with my studies. My wish was to take the full, regular
course, but I am not able to do so as I must support
myself while in school. I must therefore content my-
self with the normal and scientific course. I do not
precisely know what I shall do next summer. I have
thought of going back to the hotel in Newport, but
nothing is decided. I am looking for a copy of your
book when it is finished."

288

What can be the spirit of a college on wnose benches
a servant, twenty years old and more, may take his
place for six months in the year, between two terms of
service, and the fact not appear in the least exceptional ?

M. Bourget relates the history of another
student, in Harvard University, of whom he
learned from Mr. Frank Bolles, the treasurer
of the university. The statement is worth
repeating, not because it is exceptional, but
because it is so common that it would scarcely
excite comment in any college or university
in the United States.

The poor student fixed his freshman expenses at
$381, his sophomore expenses at $361, those of his
junior year at $395, and those of his senior year at
$462. He had $25 of debts when he entered Harvard.
He was, therefore, obliged to earn money, and a large
sum of money, during these four years, while at the
same time pursuing his studies.

The details of the methods he pursued are very sig-
nificant. As freshman, he "made" $346, thus divided:
a prize of £250, a loan of $15 on his watch, $71 earned
by typewriting for his fellow-students, #8 by selling
books, $2 by tutoring.

As sophomore he used the same methods, except that
in view of the smallness of the prize gained that year,
he decided to wait at table. His work as waiter brought
him $38. It may be remarked that this is not an
isolated case. Many Harvard students gain by this
means, especially during vacations, the small overplus
of resources they require. This student, in his second
vear, added to this business that of preparing the brains

289

of sheep for the lectures of Prof. William James, the
great psychologist.

The third year — the junior — appears to have been
easier. Tutoring brought him in more — $120. He
got work in the library that helped to set him on his
feet. A large prize which he took in the fourth year
put an end to his difficulties, and he left college at the
completion of his studies, having met all his expenses
during the four years and put aside a small sum of
money.

This is a perfect specimen of the American student,
and Mr. Bolles is right in concluding at the close of
his letter, "A young man who has gone through this
is certain to succeed in any calling." He cites among
possible careers railway service, journalism, book-
publishing, political life, and teaching. The elasticity
of this program is simply in conformity with the genius
of a country where a man finds it perfectly natural to
change his profession at forty, fifty, or sixty years.
One consequence of this facility of guiding his life in
the most opposite directions is that the "poor scholar"
is unknown in the United States. The students who
wait upon their classmates, napkin on arm and dish
in hand, and who will presently be sitting on the same
benches with them, attending the same lectures and
passing the same examinations, have, if one may so
speak, taken and given a lesson of destiny. They
know and they demonstrate that the man of energy
accepts all and conquers all, if only he will. Neither
he nor his fellow-students will forget the lesson.

This is all very true and very admirable.
The young man whose career M. Bourget
describes was an excellent young man, and

the training which he received was an excel-

290

lent training for almost any kind of endeavor
in after-life; but it is obvious that a young
man with so much seriousness and energy
would have been able to achieve a great deal
more in a purely intellectual way if he had not
been so heavily handicapped by the necessity
of earning his own living. And the result, in
colleges where there are so many serious and
able young men who are handicapped in this
way, is that the standards of scholarship main-
tained for obtaining the degree are somewhat
lowered in order that the impossible may not
be required of such students. It is a rare
college or university in the United States in
which an intelligent student who does not
have to earn his living may not pass the
examinations successfully without any very
concentrated or continued mental effort.
The presence of a large number of self-
supporting students is not the only rea-
son for this, but it is one of the reasons,
and one of the most difficult to deal with
practically.

The standards for the degree are, of course,
only a minimum requirement, and they are
no measure of the quality of the universities.
Particularly in the better universities, any
student who has the time, the desire, and the
ability may obtain intellectual training of a
high order. Twenty-five years ago so com-

291

petent a judge as Mr. Bryce gave his deliber-
ate nnininn nn this nnint*

ate opinion on this point

The higher learning [in the United States] is in no
danger. The great universities of the East, as well as
one or two in the West, are already beginning to rival
the ancient universities of Europe. . . . An Englishman
who visits America can never feel sure how far his
judgment has been affected by the warmth of the wel-
come he receives. But if I may venture to state the
impression which the American universities have made
on me, I will say that while of all the institutions of
the country they are those of which Americans speak
most modestly, and indeed deprecatingly, they are
those which seem to be at this moment making the
swiftest progress and to have the brightest promise
for the future. They are supplying exactly those
things which European critics have hitherto found
lacking to America: and they are contributing to her
political as well as to her contemplative life elements
of inestimable worth.

This is no doubt true, and it is no doubt as
true now as it was twenty-five years ago,
although university faculties themselves com-
plain of the decline of scholarship both among
the students and among the instructors. It is
no doubt a part of the business of faculties to
complain of the decline of scholarship, and
there is at least little evidence that productive
scholarship is at a lower level now than for-
merly. But of course when one speaks of the
"higher learning" and productive scholarship

292

in our universities, or in any universities, one
has in mind a relatively small part of universi-
ties as a whole. At least, this is true in respect
to American universities. Apart from our
best graduate schools, the greater part of our
universities, what we call our undergraduate
colleges, have little to do with productive
scholarship or the "higher learning." They are
essentially schools devoted to furnishing stu-
dents the elements of "general culture "; they
are in fact scarcely more than extensions of
the high-schools, and as such they are signif-
icant in a social rather than in an intellectual
way; they are significant in reflecting and con-
firming American life rather than in adding
to it. Both in high-school and university the
pupils receive instruction from their teachers,
and good instruction it often is ; but essentially
the pupils educate themselves by playing on a
miniature stage the drama of American life.
In playing this drama they acquire a keener
sense of its meaning, a more conscious feeling
for its spirit and its possibilities. An Amer-
ican boy may easily go through the public
schools from the primary grade to the end of
the college course without acquiring much
knowledge of books, or any taste for the things
of the mind, or any capacity for handling
ideas; but he cannot do so easily without
meeting all sorts of people, without finding

293

his level among these people, without being
subjected to tests which ignore his pet egoisms
and his carefully nourished illusions, without
learning that poverty is not a disgrace nor
good manners a sign of weakness, without be-
coming in some measure aware of that es-
sentially democratic truth that the merit of a
man is independent of the externals which
distinguish him, and of the accidents which
place him high or low in the social scale.

This has been well enough in the past, but
it is doubtful whether it will continue to be
so in the future; and it is a significant fact that
our school system, from top to bottom, is just
now under rather general and drastic criticism.
So long as American life is essentially demo-
cratic, as it has been in the past, the public
schools, even if they do no more than to reflect
and confirm that life, must have a powerful
democratic influence. But if, as there are
many indications, and as many people are
coming to think, American life is becoming less
democratic than it was — if class divisions are
becoming more marked and more permanent,
if political freedom is becoming ineffective
because economic freedom is disappearing, if
plutocracy is becoming the substance and de-
mocracy only the form of American society —
if this is what the future holds, then the public
schools can no longer serve democracy to any

294

purpose by merely reflecting and confirming
the conditions of life. Their task, in that case,
is to work against these conditions. This, in
a general way, is the task of the public schools
for the future; and in order to accomplish
this task they must be informed by a more
conscious and deliberate purpose than they
have been; they must devote themselves with
better talent and greater concentration to
things intellectual; they must lead and not
follow the best thought of the age, shape and
not be shaped by the pressure of economic
and social tendencies. This will be no slight
undertaking, but it will be no more difficult
than democracy itself, of which, indeed, it will
be an essential condition.
20

X

DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY

SINCE the French Revolution liberty and
equality have been words to conjure with,
perhaps because their meaning is not capable
of very precise definition. They are commonly
used together, as though they were but different
aspects of the same thing; but many people
find, upon analysis, that they mean precisely
opposite things. Men cannot be made equal,
they say, without being subject to a great deal
of restraint, for perfect equality would mean
that no man could be permitted to have what
any other man could not have, or to do what
any other man could not do. On the other
hand, it is maintained, a man cannot be per-
fectly free unless he is allowed to do as he
likes. According to these people, therefore,
the desire for liberty is contrary to the desire
for equality, so that if liberty is what men

want they ought to renounce the idea of

296

equality, and if equality is what they want
they ought to renounce the idea of liberty.

The men who inaugurated the French Revo-
lution evidently did not think that this was
true, since they desired and demanded both
liberty and equality, not to speak of fraternity
in addition. In their famous "Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen" they
proclaimed that "all men are born free and
equal in rights"; and they were so far from
thinking that liberty and equality were in-
consistent with each other that they defined
them in the same phrase. "Liberty," they
said, "consists in the freedom to do every-
thing which injures no one else; hence the
exercise of the natural rights of each man has
no limits except those which assure to the
other members of society the enjoyment of
the same rights." This is perfectly clear as a
principle, although the application of the
principle may not be very easy. By this
definition liberty does not mean the right of
a man to do as he pleases, but only the right
to do as he pleases in so far as he does not
please to interfere with the equal right of
every other man. The emphasis is chiefly on
equality, for liberty is defined in terms of
equality; and M. fimile Faguet has written
a brilliant essay to prove that to the men of
the Revolution liberty and equality meant the

297

same thing; that what they chiefly wanted
was equality, and that they believed that if
men had equality they would thereby have all
the liberty they needed or were likely to want.

ii

M. Faguet is doubtless right. But even if
the men of the Revolution had their minds
fixed primarily upon equality, they expected
to get it not so much by imposing restraints
as by removing them. They found themselves
living in a world where the most glaring in-
equalities existed; but these inequalities were
sanctioned by laws and customs which re-
strained one man from doing what another
man was permitted to do. The peasant or the
noble was forbidden to do what the member
of the industrial gild could do; the gilds-
man was forbidden to do what the noble
could do; and every man was forbidden or
required to do whatever the king might take
it into his head to command. The men of the
Revolution were, therefore, convinced that
the glaring inequalities that existed were due
to the fact that a man's liberty of action was
thwarted and restrained at every turn by
quite senseless restraints. It was for this rea-
son that they saw liberty and equality as
two parts of the same thing. They easily

298

supposed that if the existing restraints upon
liberty of action were removed, the existing
inequalities in conditions between classes and
individuals would largely disappear. Thus
they expected to get equality of conditions by
the simple process of removing the legal re-
straints upon liberty of action.

In carrying out this program there were
three kinds of liberty which they wished to
establish: personal liberty, industrial liberty,
and political liberty. By personal liberty they
meant that no man should be bound to any*
other contrary to his will, nor subject to arbi-
trary arrest and imprisonment by the govern-
ment; and in addition they meant that every
man should be free to speak and publish his
opinions. By industrial liberty they meant'
that every man should have the right to en-
gage in any legitimate occupation, the right
to sell his labor by a free contract, the right
to buy or sell commodities unhampered by
legally established restrictions or privileges.
By political liberty they meant the abolition*
of arbitrary government, the establishment of
a government controlled by the governed and
acting only on the sanction of laws which
should be the same for all.

The men of the Revolution believed that if
they established these liberties the desired
equality would thereby, automatically, as it

299

were, be attained. They reasoned that if
political liberty existed the laws would be
equitable, because the people who made the
laws would be the very people who had to
submit to them. This result would be further
guaranteed by that freedom of thought which,
by enabling every man to declare his interest
and express his opinion, would enable the
people to know what laws were just and
equitable. Above all, they reasoned that in-
dustrial liberty would result in a reasonable
degree of economic equality; for if every man
was free to engage in any occupation, to sell
his labor, or the products of his labor, where
he could get the most for them, and to buy
what he needed where he could get it at the
lowest price, why, then, generally speaking,
one man would have as good a chance as
another and each man's share in the common
wealth would be determined largely by his
own efforts. Men would no doubt differ in
ability; but it was supposed that with a sys-
tem of free elementary education any man of
reasonable intelligence and industry might
acquire the skill and practise the frugality
which would enable him to support himself and
his family in comfort and content.

The men who formulated the philosophy
of the Revolution were mainly of the middle
class; and in its earlier and later stages the

300

Revolution was mainly directed by this class
— it was what is called a bourgeois movement.
To these people the idea of achieving equality *
through the removal of restraints upon liberty
was entirely satisfactory, and to them it re-
mained so long after the lower classes found
it entirely unsatisfactory; they felt that if they
had enough freedom of action they could take
care of themselves, and they easily persuaded
themselves that the peasants and working-men
would be much better off than they had been.
The peasants, in France at least, certainly were
a good deal better off because they came into
full ownership of their land, and the taxes
which they paid to the state after the Revolu-
tion were very much less than the taxes and
feudal dues which they paid before. But on
the whole, it must be said that the liberties
which the Revolution brought with it were
chiefly advantageous to the bourgeoisie. The
political freedom which it established, al-
though based upon the doctrine of popular
sovereignty, placed the government in the
hands of the educated people and the owners
of property; the freedom of opinion and of
the press for a long time in France meant
scarcely more than the freedom to express
such opinions as respectable middle-class peo-
ple were not afraid of; the industrial freedom
which followed the abolition of the old medi-

301

eval gilds and trade corporations was an ad-
vantage to the men with capital, but proved
in the end disastrous to the laborer. The
"liberty" established by the Revolution was
indeed mainly a bourgeois affair; and so far
from working automatically to bring about an
ideal "equality," it only brought about an
equality between the middle and upper classes.
In no respect did the revolutionary theory

*of liberty and equality break down so com-
pletely as in the field of industrial activity.
The revolutionary leaders were so impressed
with the desirability of complete economic
freedom that they not only destroyed the old
legally established gilds and close corpora-
tions, but they attempted to prevent the for-
mation of private and voluntary co-operative
industrial organizations. They were so de-
termined to make every man economically
free that when the working-men of Paris
formed a kind of union in order to fix a mini-
mum wage, and organized a strike to enforce
such a wage, and attempted to prevent other
workers from working for a lower wage, a law
was passed forbidding citizens engaged in any
industry or trade to form any organization
whatever for the regulation of their common

^interests. This was done on the theory that
every man must be free to sell his labor or his
commodities to the highest bidder. Every

302

man must be free, whether he wanted to or f
not, because a man who was subjected even
to the self-imposed restraints of a labor-union
would not be in a position of equality with a
man who was not subject to such restraints.

For over half a century the revolutionary
theory that complete freedom of contract in
the industrial field would bring about the
greatest degree of economic prosperity for all
men, the theory of laissez-faire, was the pre- ->
vailing theory, at least among the ruling
classes. Everywhere it failed. Everywhere,
sooner or later, it brought about a glaring
inequality of wealth. In every country, al-
though not with the same rapidity, it brought
about the concentration of wealth and eco-
nomic power, and therefore of political power
also, in the hands of great capitalists, bankers,
manufacturers, and landowners, while the
mass of the agricultural population remained
poor, and the laborers in the industrial centers
were reduced to conditions of life which the
term " wage-slaves" graphically and accu-
rately described.

This result of the revolutionary theory was
nowhere so soon or so obviously worked out
as in England; and the reason for that was
that the industrial revolution, which was
the most important economic phenomenon of
the nineteenth century, began first and pro-

303

grcssed most rapidly in that country. The
fact is that the revolutionary theory, on its
economic side, suited only to society with a
rudimentary industrial life, has broken down,
and it is bound to break down in every
country where industrial life becomes com-
plex, and in proportion to such complexity.
In Europe it has therefore broken down in
every country in proportion to the develop-
ment of what is called the industrial revo-
lution.

The basis of the industrial revolution is
the increasing application of material forces
to the production of wealth. Technical in-
ventions, the use of steam and electrical power,
have transformed the processes of the pro-
duction and the transportation of wealth, and
have thereby vitally affected the distribution
of it. The use of machinery makes it possible
to multiply ten, a hundred, a thousandfold,
the results of one man's labor. But to get the
most out of machinery it is necessary to carry
on industrial operations on a large scale, and
this means that industry must be concentrated
at particular points, and it means, above all,
that the production and transportation of
wealth cannot be carried on profitably without
the use of a great deal of wealth to begin with,
in the form of "capital." Under the conditions
brought about by the industrial revolution

304

capital was, above all, necessary; and accord-
ingly the possession of great wealth meant
something more than that its possessor could
live in a better house and eat better food and
have better clothes and a better time generally
than a poor man; it meant that by means of
his wealth — by investing his capital in great
industrial enterprises — he could take to him-
self all that multiplied power which was
stored up in the steam and electricity and the
technical machines through which alone the
production and transportation of commodities
could be most profitably carried on.

Under these conditions, to say that every
man should be free to sell his labor, or the
products of his labor, to the highest bidder
sounds much like some huge Rabelaisian pleas-
antry. The poor man could only sell his labor
and not the product of it; whereas the rich
man could sell his labor, plus the product of
his capital in the form of machine labor, plus
the product of the labor of the men whom
his capital employed to work his machines
for him. This would not have been so in-
equitable if the laborer could have obtained
in wages the real share of the product which
his labor produced. But this he could not do
because, on account of the unlimited expan-
sion of machine power in production, there was
never, or rarely, more capital than could be

30S

profitably employed, while there were always,
or nearly always, more laborers than were
needed, since the use of machines reduced
relatively the number of laborers required and
at the same time, through the employment of
women and children, increased the number of
laborers available. The result was that the
individual laborer, who had to work or starve,
had to sell his labor for what the capital-
ist would pay for it rather than for what it
produced.

Thus the liberty which the Revolution es-
tablished in the industrial world meant that
"to him that hath shall be given, and to him
that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath." It meant, for the laborer, the
liberty to sell his labor for a bare existence,
if happily there was any one who would
buy it at any price; and it meant, for the
capitalist, the liberty to sell his own labor
(if indeed he cared to work at all), plus the
labor of as many men and as many machines
as his capital represented. The result has
been, throughout the nineteenth century, the
increasing concentration of wealth and of the
industrial power which it represents in the
hands of a small class, and the increasing
power of this small class over the production
and distribution of wealth, and therefore over
the lives, the fortunes, and the happiness of

306

all. In the economic sense, there is for the
great mass of men and women neither liberty
nor equality. Without a much greater degree
of both than now exists, the personal and
political liberties which have been so hardly
won through a century of struggle lose half
their importance, and democracy itself is
scarcely more than a pious hope.

in

In no country was the eighteenth-century
philosophy of liberty and equality so con-
fidently, or perhaps so unconsciously, ac-
cepted as in the United States ; to no country
was it so well suited; in no country had it
(until recently) worked so well or been so
long unquestioned.

There are many reasons why this should
have been so. The United States was, rela-
tively speaking, accustomed to free govern-
ment, free speech, freedom of religion, and
freedom of contract from the earliest days of
its history. No violent revolution was re-
quired, as in France, to establish these prin-
ciples in practice, and the principles them-
selves never had to win their way against
powerful and persistent traditions of a dif-
ferent regime. But above all, the eighteenth-
century philosophy of liberty was not incon-

307

sistent with the existence of essential equality.
In its origin the United States was almost
exclusively an agricultural community, and
until the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury it has never developed more than a rudi-
mentary industrial life. The reason for this
was, of course, the lack of capital at low rates
of interest, and an abundance of good land
at very low prices. No industrial laborer was
likely to work for starvation wages so long
as he could go West and become the owner of
one hundred and sixty acres of land for the
trouble of improving it. So long as any man
could readily become a landowner, a highly
complex industrial life could not easily be
developed, and it remained true that the ex-
istence of political, personal, and industrial
liberty did bring about, more or less auto-
matically, an exceptional degree of equality.

The conditions which so long existed in the
United States not only brought about a fair
degree of equality among individuals, but they
prevented the formation of any defined or
persistent class inequalities. Any individual
could consent with some cheerfulness to be
poor to-day, since there was always an even
chance that to-morrow he would be "well
fixed. " The son of a laborer could without
undue optimism look forward to becoming an
employer; the son of a farmer was never des-

308

tined to follow the plow, but might reasonably
aspire to the high dignity of a college pro-
fessorship. In a country where changes in
fortune and social status were so rapid and
so common the people inevitably acquired a
spirit of buoyant optimism which discounted
such inequalities as existed; if they had not
equality they projected it into the immediate
future, and in that future, rather than in the
present, they lived their lives. The tragedy
in the life of Mr. J. M. Barrie's Admirable
Crichton, says Mr. Herbert Croly —

was not due to any prohibition of his conversion in
England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief,
but that on English soil he did not in his own soul want
any such elevation and distinction. His very loyalty
to the forms and fabrics of English life kept him fatu-
ously content with the mean truckling and meaner
domineering of his position as butler. On the other
hand, the loyalty of the American to the American
idea would tend to make him aggressive and self-
confident. Our democratic prohibition of any but
occasional social distinctions and our democratic dis-
like to any suggestion of authentic social inferiority
have contributed as essentially to the fluid and elastic
substance of American life as have its abundant and
accessible economic opportunities.

Thus it is that for a hundred years, thanks
to an abundance of land, a settled democratic
habit of mind, and a people in whom resource-

309

fulness and self-confidence have come to be
almost acquired characteristics, the United
States preserved an equality of opportunity
and of conditions quite unknown in Europe.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the United
States still preserves a naive faith in the
political philosophy of the eighteenth century,
whereas in Europe it has long since been
abandoned by most forward-looking men. The
average American still believes that our
equality is the automatic result of our liberty;
he still believes that the high average of well-
being in the United States is the result of free
government and the superior character of its
people; he still believes that the theory of
"supply and demand" is a beautiful doctrine,
that there is a kind of .magic in the word
"competition," and that "individual initia-
tive" is one of the natural rights referred to
in the Declaration of Independence; he still
believes that the interest of each and the wel-
fare of all will continue to be realized in the
future as in the past by applying the good old
rule of "every man for himself and the devil
take the hindmost." Whoever is hindmost, he
thinks, is so by his own fault ; he has failed to
take advantage of the opportunities which
every American has.

The truth is, of course, that it is not our free

government, but our fortunate economic situ-

310

ation, that has hitherto been the solid basis of
our equality; and this fortunate situation is
unhappily rapidly passing away. The close
of the nineteenth century marks the close of
an era. It was the period, on the one hand,
when the great areas of fertile and accessible
land were occupied; on the other hand, it
was the period when the United States began
to develop with amazing rapidity a concen-
trated and complex industrial life. What
this transition means should be fairly obvi-
ous, for it is one of the many advantages of
the United States that it may, if it will, profit
by the experience of European countries.
The industrial revolution has long been an
accomplished fact in many parts of the Old
World. The transformation in economic and
social conditions which it brings in its train,
the problems which it sets for solution, the
solutions which have been attempted and
which have failed or been in part successful,
are all there revealed as in an open book.
The obvious fact of our generation is that the
United States is rapidly passing through the
earlier stages of the industrial revolution, and
that it must expect to be confronted with the
same conditions, however more slowly de-
veloped or in whatever less acute form, which
have appeared in those countries where it has
occurred.

21 311

As yet the United States is far from being
as highly industrialized as England or Bel-
gium or many other European countries; but
the significant fact is the rapidity with which
it is becoming so. Within a generation it has
acquired the unenviable reputation, which
many people fatuously take to be a mark of
virtue, of being pre-eminently the land of
gigantic trusts and combinations, the country
of millionaires, the country blessed with the
"richest man in the world.'' In fact, the
United States is now known abroad less for
being the land of liberty than for being the
land of "big business," and of financial opera-
tions of a boldness and reach never before
dreamed of; and within twenty-five years,
although still one of the greatest agricultural
countries, the growth of great cities and the
rapid industrialization of certain regions have
been so marked that books have been written
to prove that within no great time New York
will replace London as the commercial and
financial center of the world's exchanges.

Industrial development was, of course,
bound to come in the United States in pro-
portion as the best lands were taken, as the
country became relatively populated, and as
capital increased and interest declined. The
natural resources of the country, in the way
of forests, coal and iron deposits, and other

312

essential raw materials, were such that no
other result was possible or desirable. And
this inevitable trend of development was de-X
liberately fostered by the government. From
an early date the federal government adopted
the policy of aiding in the construction of
highways; and the states and cities have
granted untold wealth to corporations in the
form of land and franchises in order to induce
them to construct railroads and street-car
lines, and to supply gas, electricity, water, and
telegraph and telephone service. Above all,
the federal government, during the greater
part of our history since 1816, has adopted
the policy of high tariffs for the avowed pur-
pose of protecting American manufactures
from European competition. "Infant indus-
tries," it was argued, needed the paternal and
fostering care of the government if they were
ever to grow to maturity; and the giant
stature which many of these "infants" have
attained in recent years is due quite as much
to governmental aid as it is to the "intelli-
gence and initiative of the American business
man." This policy of extending governmental
aid in the industrial development of the coun-
try has been so extensively and persistently
followed that from an early date it came to be
known as "the American system"; and the
American system was designed to do for

313

industry much what the public land policy
did for agriculture.

Never was the American system so exten-
sively practised as after the Civil War; and
never were the conditions so favorable for the
development of "big business. " The people
turned with a sigh of relief from the high
tension of the slavery controversy and the
taut emotional enthusiasm of the war to the
prosaic business of attending to their own
affairs. American history records no era
more materially minded than the twenty-five
years from 1865 to 1890. The South was
ruined, and the one immediate task was the
reorganization of its social system and the
rehabilitation of its economic life. For' a
generation the North likewise, but with
greater energy, became absorbed in the en-
ticing game of exploiting the material re-
sources of the country. The average man
felt that, having suppressed the Rebellion and
abolished slavery, he had done a good job
and could no longer be expected to be his
brother's keeper.

Politics reflected the inevitable reaction
from the idealism of the war. The defeat of
the South, and the discredit which that de-
feat placed upon the Democratic party, left
the Presidency and the Senate, at least, if
not the House of Representatives, for the

3H

most part in the undisputed control of the
Northern Republicans. Politics still turned
on the dead issues of the Civil War; and a
passionate denunciation of the " rebellion,"
of the Southern "traitors" who had led it
and the Northern "copperheads" who had
abetted it, was a sufficient qualification to
elect any candidate to high office. In this
era of public apathy, of sordid politics, and
of mediocre statesmen, the industrial brigand
tied himself to the dominant party and was
given a free field. The unlovely history of
many a "big business," builded upon special
privilege and political corruption and the
cynical wrecking of small business enterprise,
was all too common in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century; and when the public
conscience began to stir in the 'nineties it was
confronted with the amazing fact that in this
land of democracy and equal opportunity a
large proportion of the wealth of the country
was in the hands of a relatively small part of
the population, and that an industrial and
financial mechanism had been constructed
through which the magnates of business
could exercise a dangerous influence upon the
lives and fortunes of the people.

For many years the people had watched
with complacent satisfaction the marvelous
development of big business. They con-

3i5

gratulated themselves and the country on the
admirable results of "individual initiative,"
and exhibited an attitude of indifference, or
even of hostility, toward the efforts of the
industrial workers to obtain, through unions
and by means of strikes, a fair wage and
decent conditions of living. They said that
these were "un-American" methods; at-
tempts to restrict the freedom of the indi-
vidual to work for whom he pleased, and
under such conditions as he might choose;
and they were rather pleased than otherwise
when the great corporations, no doubt in
order to preserve a free field for "individual
initiative," employed private detectives and
private military forces to break up the strikes
and destroy the effectiveness of labor-unions.
But in recent years the public has come, or
must one say only that it is coming, to take a
different attitude. From about 1890 prices
began to rise, and they have been continually
rising since; so that while every one who has
anything to sell gets more for it, the cost of
everything he has to buy is so much greater
that his position is likely to be no better than
it was. The farmer gets a price for his wheat
and corn which he never would have dreamed
of getting twenty-five years ago; but the
price of land and of machinery is so high that
the renter finds it difficult to make a living

316

and almost out of the question to buy a farm.
Small business men throughout the country
find themselves in much the same position.
For the mass of the people our boasted " pros-
perity " is largely fictitious prosperity. Mean-
while "big business" thrives as never before;
the number of millionaires increases, while
the chance of the average man's ever becom-
ing one declines. Under these conditions the
average man is more and more inclined to
think that free competition and individual
initiative are not perhaps among the inherent
rights of man ; he begins to think that some-
how those on the " inside," by mysterious
financial operations, by juggling the "mar-
ket," by control of the press, and by means of
political connections, are able to determine
the prices of essential commodities. Under
these circumstances a spirit of social unrest is
arising. Everything seems not well in God's
country; and many people besides the indus-
trial laborer are seriously inquiring whether
the beneficent principle of "individual initia-
tive" is not, after all, only another name for
"maintaining a private paternalistic regula-
tion of other men's affairs." In the United
States the trend of thought is turning at last,
as it has long since turned in Europe, from the
question of the production of wealth to the
question of its distribution. The problem of

317

an equitable distribution of wealth is indeed a
vital problem of the age. How can it be
solved satisfactorily ? Does its solution imply-
any radical modification of our political ideas,
any fundamental changes in the form and
characters of our government ?

IV

In the latter part of November, 191 8, a
successful lawyer, standing in the lobby of a
Washington club, having lighted a fragrant
Havana cigar, was heard to proclaim that it
was of vital importance that the government
should immediately restore the railroads,
telegraph lines, and express companies to
private hands, and surrender the control over
industry and labor which it had exercised
(rightly no doubt) during the emergency of
the war. "I am opposed,'* he said, "to
every interference with private initiative.
Interference with private initiative is a so-
cialistic doctrine, and it is contrary to the
spirit of this government** This was a way
the gentleman took of saying that he was op-
posed to governmental regulation of business,
and of justifying that opposition by a fine-
sounding, idealistic phrase. There are plenty
of Americans who would applaud both the
sentiment and the phrase, but one wonders

318

whether such people have ever seriously-
asked themselves what, after all, is the " spirit
of this government."

If questioned they would probably say
that the spirit of this government is one that
makes for freedom and democracy, and that
freedom and democracy have been achieved
by giving the greatest amount of liberty to
the individual and by the resolute refusal of
the government to engage in any " socialistic "
practices. No one would wish to deny that
the "spirit of this government" is essentially
favorable to liberty and democracy. What
Americans pride themselves upon, and on the
whole with good reason, is precisely that the
United States has always been a shining
example of applied democracy. But democ-
racy means nothing, and has meant nothing,
in the United States if it does not mean
equality — not indeed a mechanical and dead-
ening equality of goods and of conditions and
of ideas, but a reasonable degree of equality
of opportunity and well-being. The "spirit
of this government " must, it would seem, be
favorable to such equality, and to such
measures as will effectively realize it.

Those who are more concerned for the
rights of property than for the rights of men
are inclined to make much of the distinction
between what they call the "principle" of

319

Individualism and the "principle" of Col-
lectivism — between a political philosophy
which denies and one which commends gov-
ernmental restriction of individual liberty.
This is a lawyer's doctrinaire distinction
which corresponds to no essential reality.
All government is an interference with in-
dividual liberty; without governmental in-
tervention private property as we know it
would cease to exist. Governments have
always assumed the right to determine what a
man may and what he may not do with his
property. In some countries and in some
periods the restraints upon the use of property
have been less in extent, or inspired by a
different purpose, than in others; but what-
ever the restraints may have been, they have
always been ostensibly justified on grounds of
expediency. It is beating the air to discuss
whether government should regulate private
property; private property is the very essence
of governmental regulation — the most funda-
mental and far-reaching of all the regulations
upon which modern society is founded. The
question which a sensible man will ask himself
is, therefore, this: under the conditions of life
as we find them to-day, what objects should
we have in mind to guide us in the regulation
of the use of private property, and what sort

of regulations will prove best adapted to

320

attain that object? No questions are an-
swered and no difficulties solved by saying
that this kind of regulation accords with the
"principle of Individualism," while that kind
of regulation accords with the "principle of
Socialism."

Moreover, the government of the United
States appears never to have had much respect
for the "principle of Individualism." It has
never hesitated to restrain the "private ini-
tiative" of some men along some lines, in
order to aid the " private initiative " of other
men along other lines. Both the federal and
the state governments have constantly oc-
cupied themselves, on a grand scale, with
schemes designed to furnish citizens with op-
portunities which they would never have had
if they had been left to rely wholly upon the
blessed principle of Individualism. What was
the public-land policy of the federal gov-
ernment, by which millions of acres of the
public domain {public land, be it noted) were
virtually given away to the poor and needy —
what was this but a "socialistic" enterprise?
Is it "private initiative" that has lowered the
percentage of illiteracy and raised the general
level of intelligence in the United States?
Or is this result due in great part to govern-
mental intervention, in the form of taxes laid
upon private property in order that every in-

321

dividual, poor and rich alike, may have a
common education free of cost to himself?
Was the private initiative of our great "cap-
tains of industry " entirely responsible for
their amazing success, or did they owe some-
thing to governmental aid, in the form of
franchises, protective tariffs, and special laws
advantageous chiefly to corporations? Our
"infant industries," whose gigantic stature
now amazes the world, still clamor, do they
not, for governmental intervention. It seems,
in fact, that the only people who just now
seriously oppose governmental intervention
are the brewers. According to the philosophy
of big business in general, one is forced to the
conclusion that "private initiative" is ade-
quate only for the laborer and the consumer,
some degree of governmental intervention be-
ing still necessary for the capitalist and the
manufacturer.

The truth is indeed that the best traditions
of the United States, the real "spirit of this
government," are wholly in favor of whatever
governmental activity may be necessary to
assure that fundamental equality of oppor-
tunity which is indispensable to true liberty
and the very essence of democracy. Without
such equality of opportunity, "individual
initiative" is no more than a sanctimonious
phrase that tastes sweet in the mouths of the

322

fortunate. And if it was proper to equalize
opportunity and well-being by furnishing the
people with free land and free schools, it is
proper to equalize opportunity and well-being
by assuring an equitable distribution among
the people of that wealth which is the product
of their labor and of the resources of the
country which belongs to them.

If this can be satisfactorily done by "gov-
ernmental intervention/* the propriety of
attempting it is scarcely to be questioned.
But it is well to remember that govern-
mental intervention may be quite legitimate
without being quite adequate; and recent
events have made it abundantly clear that the
problem which confronts us is not one involv-
ing industrial liberty only, but political liberty
as well. If, therefore, industrial liberty is to
be achieved through the action of a beneficent
government, we need to be quite sure that the
government is beneficent; if the state is to
give us equality, we need to know whether it
is likely, in the process, to deprive us of liberty.
The modern problem, which seems so largely
economic, does in fact raise the political ques-
tion in its most fundamental form. For
many years it has been obvious that the
eighteenth-century philosophy has been a
complete failure on its economic side, and
hitherto we have more or less confidently

323

sought a new solution of industrial democracy
within the framework of the old revolutionary
political mechanism. To-day this confidence
is much diminished; and it seems question-
able indeed whether democracy in any form,
industrial or political, does not involve a rad-
ical modification of the modern state rather
than an extension of its already overgrown
powers.

The modern state still rests, ostensibly,
upon the revolutionary doctrine of natural
rights and the popular will, and still func-
tions, ostensibly, through the revolutionary
representative mechanism. That the govern-
ment should be responsive to the popular will
is indeed still loudly proclaimed ; but it is sig-
nificant that those aspects of the revolutionary
political philosophy which are most in evi-
dence, which are indeed in the way of be-
coming sacrosanct, are precisely those devices
for determining and expressing the will of the
people which no longer do adequately deter-
mine or express the will of the people. These
devices are the suffrage and the election, by
majority vote, of representatives apportioned
on the basis of population within definite and
more or less arbitrary territorial areas. The
will of the people is thus identified with the
wiH of the majority, irrespective of the ques-
tions to be decided by the majority or of the

3H

composition of the groups which make the
majority and the minority in any given case.
Generally speaking, majority rule is a
practicable device for determining the will of
the people only under two essential conditions.
The first of these conditions is that the matter
about which the decision is to be binding on
all should be one which it is generally agreed
should be decided in one way for all. Few
people believe in majority rule in respect to
religious practices, and no one believes in
majority rule in respect to the color of neck-
ties. Other things equal, majority rule works
well in respect to any line of conduct in pro-
portion as the people concerned are agreed
that it is a matter calling for a common de-
cision. The second condition, closely con-
nected with the first, is that the group or com-
munity within which the rule of the majority
is to be applied should possess a high degree
of solidarity. In a group in which all have
much the same possessions, standards of life,
and moral prepossessions, majority rule works
well enough precisely because the ideas and
interests of the minority are not so radically
different from those of the majority that they
cannot readily submit to the decision of the
majority. The will of the people is suffi-
ciently expressed by the will of the majority
only when the minority "wills" to let it go

325

at that. But when the minority is a more or
less fixed group, whose ideas and interests are
radically different from those of the majority,
or are thought to be so, then majority rule
ceases to be "government by the people" and
becomes the oppression of one group by
another.

Now the industrial revolution has brought
about a situation in these respects to which
the old mechanism of representation is be-
coming unsuited. The old mechanism of rep-
resentation was based upon the assumption
precisely that, given free thought, free schools,
and free contract, inequalities within the elec-
torate would tend to disappear; it was sup-
posed that the " people " would more and
more be shaped, by the operation of these
"liberties," to a common type in respect to
material conditions, spiritual aspirations, and
civic ideals. It need scarcely be pointed out
that this has not proved to be the case. In
place of nations of individuals, all more or
less alike in respect to conditions and ideas,
the industrial revolution has given us nations
differentiated into classes and corporate and
occupational groups, more or less different
and often sharply antagonistic; and the lines
of division have little or nothing to do with
the territorial areas upon which political rep-
resentation is based.

326

Inevitably, therefore, when a given eco-
nomic group finds its interests inadequately
represented within the political framework it
endeavors to get its interests " represented "
outside of it — it forms an organization based
upon its economic interests and uses its
economic power, if it has any, to exert extra-
political pressure. The most striking ex-
amples of this phenomenon are of course the
activities for many years past of the capital-
ist and labor groups. In 1917, when the
labor-unions threatened to tie up all the rail-
roads of the country, many people said that
it was an "outrage" that the representatives
of the unions should be allowed to "dictate"
to the government of the United States.
These people conveniently forgot that for a
quarter of a century the capitalist and manu-
facturing groups had been sending their
"representatives" to Washington, where they
also "dictated," more urbanely no doubt, to
the government of the United States. That
either group, laborers or capitalists, should
"dictate" the policy of the government is an
"outrage," if you like, although no more so in
the one case than in the other. But it is
useless to cry "outrage." What has to be
faced is a situation in which the government
finds it necessary to submit to dictation by
special groups; and this situation arises, in
a 327

part at least, from the fact that our political
machinery is no longer well adapted to our
economic organization. The government,
nominally composed of persons chosen to
represent the will of the people in certain
territorial areas, finds that the crucial prob-
lems of the time cannot be solved without
taking into account the will of the people
grouped in certain economic categories. This
is doubtless the real source of the diminished
state of Congressmen and Senators. What
they too often legally represent is a group of
people without any definite common will to
be expressed; what they have to deal with
are groups of people who can get their will
expressed only by using their extra-legal
economic power as a means of dictation.

Such dictation is not new; what is new is
that the labor groups have recently acquired
sufficient economic power to compete with the
capitalist groups for the control of the govern-
ment. If labor dictation seems more revolu-
tionary than capitalist dictation, the reason
is that whereas labor is dissatisfied with the
present political and economic regime, capital
has been and is desirous of maintaining the
present political and economic regime. It
is manifestly to the interest of the capitalist
groups, in whose hands the industrial revo-
lution has placed such tremendous power, to

328

maintain the capitalist regime at home, and
to promote, through imperialist methods, their
interests abroad. Professing unlimited faith
in democracy and the rule of the majority,
they are, therefore, above all others interested
in maintaining unimpaired the fiction of na-
tional solidarity, and above all others inter-
ested in magnifying the state and in divest-
ing it of responsibility both at home and
abroad. In view of the persistent rivalry of
nations with one another in a world of inter-
national anarchy, the prevailing nationalist
psychology makes it relatively easy to iden-
tify the will of the dominant group with the
will of the "people," and the interest of the
dominant group with the "honor" or the
"vital interest " of the nation. Confronted
always with the menace of war and conquest,
the disposition is always strong, and in times
of crisis becomes irresistible, to place the
"honor" and the "vital interest" of the na-
tion unreservedly in the hands of the govern-
ment and to assume that the government
speaks for an undifferentiated nation. In the
last analysis truth and virtue become indis-
tinguishable from "loyalty" — loyalty to the
government and submission to the state.

Thus on the basis of popular sovereignty
and national independence, in origin a pro-
test against the divine right of kings, there

329

has been erected in our day the doctrine of the
divine right of the state and the absolutism of
the majority. To-day this absolutism is at
the disposal of the capitalist class ; to-morrow
it may be at the disposal of the proletariat.
The danger is much the same in either case.
What the dominant class, whether labor or
capital, really fears is not a government which
either obtains or destroys liberty; what it
fears is an all-powerful government which it
does not control; what it desires is an all-
powemil government which can be used
primarily in the service of its own interests.
A genuine friend of mankind, one who esti-
mates civilization in terms of the spiritual as
well as the material life, has little to hope for
from the conception of an absolute state for
which obedience is the only virtue and force
the only test of right. Such a state, failing
to effect a genuine reconciliation of contending
interests and aspirations, seems destined to be
a mere instrument in the hands of self-seeking
groups engaged in a desolating class conflict.

"The autocracy of individuals," says Pro-
fessor Pollard, " is something of a myth, and
the real enemy of civilization, as it is the real
parent of militarism, is the autocracy of the
state, which is not confined to the Central
Empires and their allies. This is also the
truth about irresponsibility. The irrespon-

33o

sibility of monarchs to their peoples is a mat-
ter of detail compared with the irresponsibility
of the state. // the state can do what it likes,
frame its own code of international conduct, and
dictate its own conception of truth and morals,
it is immaterial to those who suffer whether that
dictation comes from a despot or a democracy ."
These are words which may well give us pause.
It is indeed questionable whether "industrial
liberty," or liberty in any sense, can be
achieved through the activities of a state
which, on the assumption that it speaks for a
majority, can frame its own code of interna-
tional conduct and dictate its own conception
of truth and morals. Democracy under these
conditions is scarcely the kind of democracy
the world needs to be made safe for.

The concentration of economic power in the
hands of a class, the more or less effective con-
trol of the state by this class, the rationaliza-
tion of the state so controlled on some founda-
tion of divine right or of papal or popular
infallibility — these are indeed old enemies of
human welfare. They have appeared in every
stage of history, and the latter-day result of
the political and industrial revolutions of the
last two centuries have been chiefly to present
them in new forms. That these old enemies
have taken on the protective coloring of de-
mocracy makes them no less real, but only

33i

more insidious. To mistake the form for the
substance of democracy, to assume with com-
placence that institutions under which liberties
were once won will always guarantee them —
this will be, for any people in the twentieth
century, to court disaster. It is perhaps the
peculiar danger of the United States. The
time for national complacency is past. The
sentimentalism which turns away from facts
to feed on platitudes, the provincialism which
fears ideas and plays at politics in the spirit
of the gambler or the amateur, will no longer
serve. The time has come when the people
of the United States must bring all their intel-
ligence and all their idealism to the considera-
tion of the subtler realities of human relations,
as they have formerly to the much simpler
realities of material existence: this at least
they must do if America is to be in the future
what it has been in the past — a fruitful ex-
periment in democracy.

THE END

332

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ADVERTISING

By Claude C. Hopkins
A romance of American advertis-
ing in its formative years and a
description of the novel methods
employed by the author to change
a nation's buying habits.

The Golden Hind Series

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

By E. F. Benson

An adventurous biography of
Drake to whom English sea-power
owes its greatest debt.

The Golden Hind Series

CAPTAIN
JOHN SMITH

By E. Keble Chatterton
A complete and fascinating picture
of that hardy explorer, adventurer,
and bar, Captain John Smith.

AS I KNEW THEM

By Henry L. Stoddard
In this entertaining book of mem-
oirs the confidant of Presidents and
of the candidates they defeated
gives his own account of what he
has seen and heard — and done — at
the political center of gravity.

Publishers

HARPER y BROTHERS

New York

T-I57

ADVENTUROUS LIVES

The Golden Hind Series

The aim of this series is to present the lives of great explorers written by
well-known men of letters which are reliable history and attractive
biography.

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE
By E. F. Benson
A glamorous and thrilling narrative of Drake to whom English sea-power
owes its greatest debt.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

By E. Keble Chatterton
A complete and fascinating, and so far as possible, definitive picture of
that hardy explorer, adventurer, and liar, Captain John Smith.

The Broadway Travelers

A series of rare and fascinating books of travel and exploration edited
by Sir Denison Ross and Miss Eileen Power.

DON JUAN OF PERSIA

Translated with an Introduction by Guy Le Strange

A sixteenth-century Persian Moslem who had become a Spanish Roman

Catholic and kept a diary of his travels through Russia, Germany, Italy

and Spain.

AKBAR AND THE JESUITS
Translated with an Introduction by C. H. Payne
An account of the Jesuit missions to the court of the great Mogul
Emperor in the early seventeenth century.

TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF PERO TAFUR

Translated with an Introduction by Malcolm Letts
A candid and humorous chronicle of the travels of a Castilian knight in
fifteenth-century Europe.

MEMOIRS OF AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FOOTMAN

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by John Beresford
The life and travels of John Macdonald in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and
what he saw of the men and manners of his period (1745-1779).

NOVA FRANCIA, By Marc Lescarbot

Edited, with an Introduction, by II. P. Biggar

An account of a voyage to Arcadia in 1606 by a witty French barrister.

THE DIARY OF HENRY TEONGE
Edited from the original MS. by G. E. Manwaring
Teonge's diary has long been recognized as giving one of the most authori-
tative and interesting records of the reign of Charles II.

HARPER y BROTHERS

Established Since 18 17 New York

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