I
UNDERCURRENTS IN AMERICAN
POLITICS
UNDERCURRENTS
IN
AMERICAN POLITICS
COMPRISING THE FORD LECTURES, DELIVERED AT
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
AND THE BARBOUR-PAQE LECTURES, DELIVERED AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
IN THE SPRING OF 1914
ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY
PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXV
''
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
First printed May. 1915, 1000 copies
PREFACE
In the spring of 1914 it was my privilege to
deliver the Barbour-Page Lectures at the Univer-
sity of Virginia and the Ford Lectures at Oxford
University. As the two courses dealt with kindred
subjects, I am publishing them in a single volume.
The whole might well have been entitled ' ' Extra-
Constitutional Government in the United States."
The Oxford Lectures, on Property and Democracy,
show how a great many organized activities of the
community have been kept out of government con-
trol altogether. The Virginia Lectures, on Politi-
cal Methods, show how those matters which were
left in government hands have often been managed
by very different agencies from those which the
framers of our Constitution intended.
As the first three lectures were delivered to an
English audience, they contain some explanations
which are unnecessary for American readers; but
it seemed on the whole better to print them in their
original form.
vi PREFACE
When so wide a range of topics is treated in so
small a book, it is impossible to give any adequate
set of references to authorities. I have tried in the
several lectures to make due acknowledgment to
the men who have most nearly anticipated my lines
of thought or have furnished me with the largest
budgets of illustrative facts; but I have only been
able to name a few among the many to whom I am
thus indebted.
Yale University, New Haven
April 1915
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROPERTY AND DEMOCRACY
LECTURE I
THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN
DEMOCRACY 3
Colonial organization was essentially aris-
tocratic ...... 3
Religious exclusiveness in New England, 4.
Large land grants in middle colonies, 6. Effect
of slavery in south, 8.
Independence made no immediate change
in this respect ..... 10
Universal suffrage not adopted, 11. High prop-
erty qualifications, 11. Leaders of both parties
aristocratic, 13.
The turning point came in 1820 with the
advent of a new generation ... 14
Effect of political watchwords, 15. Effect of
Hamilton's land policy, 16. Western type of
man and commonwealth, 20. Andrew Jackson, 20.
Political democracy established before 1840, 22.
The political change was attended with a
social change, but not with an industrial
one 25
Contrast between Europe and America, 27.
Absence of labor legislation, 27. Socialistic agi-
tation not effective, 30.
viii CONTENTS
LECTURE II
THE CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF THE PROP-
ERTY OWNER 32
The American political and social system is
based on industrial property rights . 33
Traditional opposition between military and in-
dustrial classes in Europe, 33. No such tradition
in America, 35. Working and fighting power in
same hands, 36.
These rights have been protected by a con-
stitutional compact .... 37
I Character of the Constitutional Convention of
/ 1787, 38. Balance between home rule party and
federal party, 39. Immunities given to the
property owner, 40. The American doctrine of
sovereignty, 42.
No serious attempt has been made to amend
the Constitutional provisions protecting
property ...... 47
A democracy of small landowners, 48. Need
of attracting capital, 49. Freedom of incorpora-
tion, 51. Constitutional guarantees of corporate
independence, 53. The Dartmouth College case,
54. The Fourteenth Amendment and the San
Mateo case, 55.
The Civil War produced industrial unrest,
but not industrial reform ... 56
1 Emancipation of slaves, 56. Currency agitation,
57. High protective tariff, 58. The competitive
/ system in America, 59. Its effect on industrial
efficiency, 62.
CONTENTS ix
LECTURE III
RECENT TENDENCIES IN ECONOMICS AND IN
LEGISLATION 64
Competition did not protect shippers
against abuse of railway power . . 65
Sudden discovery of this fact after the civil war,
66. The Granger movement, 67. Railway com-
missions and the Interstate Commerce Act of
1887, 71.
Failure of competition was not confined to
railways ...... 72
Other public utilities put under control of com-
missions, 73. Attempt to enforce competition in
productive industry, 74. The Sherman Anti-
Trust Act of 1890 not enforced for several years
after its passage, 75.
The present century has witnessed the first
serious movement toward state socialism
in America ..... 76
Humanitarian development in Nineteenth Cen-
tury, 76. Labor agitation ineffective when it
antagonized small landowners, 78. Change in
Twentieth Century, 80. Small property owners
now ranged against the money power, 81. Char-
acter of new laws passed since 1903, 86. In-
creased activity in enforcing old laws, 86. Symp-
toms of a reaction, 88. Practical limits to state
control in America today, 90.
CONTENTS
POLITICAL METHODS OLD AND NEW
LECTURE IV
THE GROWTH OF PARTY MACHINERY . . 97
The perversion of party government . 97
Two distinct senses of the word party, 99.
Either a means of organizing public opinion in-
telligently, or an agency for controlling the
offices of the country as a source of power and
livelihood, 99. Second meaning tends to sup-
plant the first, 101.
Constitution makes no provision against
this danger 102
Prescribed mode of election and duties of public
officers, 105. Did not prescribe mode of nomi-
nation or character of pledges that might be
exacted of the candidate, 105.
Actual agencies of nomination . . . 108
Caucus established 1796, 108. Overthrown 1824,
109. Substitution of the convention system, 110.
Made power less responsible instead of more so,
110. Martin Van Buren, 111.
Rewards of irresponsible activity . . 113
Municipal and state offices, 114. Jackson and
the Federal civil service, 116. Franchises, local
and national, 118. The tariff and the currency
as party issues, 120.
CONTENTS xi
LECTURE V
THE REACTION AGAINST MACHINE CONTROL . 122
Ineffective remedies .... 123
Turning one party out brings the machinery of
another party into office, 123. Predatory pov-
erty as dangerous a thing as predatory wealth,
125.
Partially effective remedies . . . 127
Separation of local from national issues, 128.
Brought to public notice by New York election of
1871, 129. Local politics made increasingly inde-
pendent of national party affiliations, 131. Elec-
tion of United States senators by the people,
132. Civil service reform, 134. What it has
accomplished and what it fails to accomplish,
136.
Present experiments and tendencies . . 137
Distrust of the legislature, 137. Direct legis-
lation through state constitutions, 143. The
referendum and initiative, 145. The direct pri-
mary, 146. The recall, 147.
LECTURE VI
THE SEAT OF POWER TODAY .... 149
Unorganized political opinion ineffective . 149
New system transfers political chicane from
party organization to groups of individuals, 151.
Creation of public sentiment by newspapers, 152.
Xll
CONTENTS
Growth of the independent press . .153
The slavery agitation, 154. The campaign
against Tweed in New York, 155. Pulitzer's
theory of journalism, 158. Lessened power of
party leaders, 159. Government by popular
opinion, 159.
Unforeseen consequences of the change . 162
The appeal to emotion, 163. The appeal to im-
patience, 167. Theory of popular omniscience,
170. Undervaluation of the expert, 172. True
function of voters in a democracy, 174.
INDEX 181
PROPERTY AND DEMOCRACY
THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
At the time of the adoption of the federal con-
stitution in 1788 neither the United States as a
whole, nor any of the several commonwealths of
which it was composed, was a democracy in the
modern sense of the word.
Ever since their original settlement the political
and social system of the English colonies in
North America had been essentially aristocratic.
Nowhere among them do we find universal suffrage.
The right to vote was always confined to taxpayers,
and almost always to freeholders. In one colony
the minimum freehold qualification for the suffrage
was a thousand acres. Nor were the voters as a
body generally allowed the privilege of choosing
the chief magistrates. The higher administrative
officers were either appointed by the crown or
elected by councils composed of a few of the richest
and most influential citizens. The man of small
means and unconsidered ancestry had very little
direct participation in the affairs of state.
4 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Of course the conditions varied in different parts
of the country. The nearest approach to democracy
was found northeast of the Hudson river, in the
colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode
Island and Connecticut. The settlers in this dis-
trict were for the most part Puritans. The region
was so inhospitable that it did not attract men of
wealth. In three of the four colonies a religious
rather than a commercial motive had been domi-
nant in the foundation. There was no opportunity
for the growth of a leisure class, nor would public
sentiment have approved of it if there had been.
But though the New England freeholders were
poor, they were exclusive. Though they tilled their
own lands, it did not prevent them from being
politically arrogant, any more than the same cause
had prevented a Cincinnatus or a Fabius from
being politically arrogant in the early days of the
Roman republic. The freeman of a Massachusetts
commonwealth looked upon new settlers who
aspired to become freemen with much the same
suspicious eye with which the Roman patrician
regarded his plebeian neighbors.
These suspicions were most strongly manifested
when the new settlers held a different creed from
the older ones. The original emigrants to Massa-
chusetts were Congregationalists. They looked
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 5
upon members of any other sect as men of doubtful
character, not to be trusted with the administration
of a growing commonwealth. Woe to the Episco-
palian who held that his Lares and Penates were
as good politically as those of his Congregational
brother! During the earlier years of the history
of Massachusetts the charter required that the
freemen should be godly ; and the Puritan founders
of the colony doubted very gravely whether the
Thirty-nine Articles were a sufficiently acceptable
road to godliness to make it wise to trust the
Episcopalian with the franchise. Even when the
franchise itself had been more liberally bestowed
and political power had thus become diffused
through the whole body of freeholders, the spirit
of social exclusiveness remained almost unchanged.
For a great deal of the work of New England
society centered around the church rather than the
state; and the church was controlled by the
descendants of the original settlers.*
* The parallel between the aristocracy of New England
and the aristocracy of the early Koman republic has much
interest and significance.
In either case the aristocrats were at once farmers and
fighters, tilling the soil and resisting the enemy by turns.
In either case there was a body of outside or plebeian
neighbors, some of whom were just as wealthy as any of
the patrician aristocrats, who were for a time excluded
6 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
What was conspicuously true of Massachusetts
was true to a somewhat less degree in the other
New England colonies. They were societies of poor
but proud aristocrats. Connecticut was in some
respects the most independent and democratic of
all the New England commonwealths. Yet even in
Connecticut class distinctions were so strong that
down to the very eve of the Revolution the names
of the students in the catalogue of Yale College
were arranged, not in alphabetical rank, but in the
order of the respectability of their parentage.
In the group of colonies immediately southwest
from the offices and privileges of the state. The barrier
which separated the different classes from one another,
whether in Eome or in Massachusetts, was not primarily
a political but a religious one. The plebeian had not the
same gods as the patrician. The Episcopalian had not the
same gods as the Congregationalist. Long after the plebeian
had obtained equal rights to military offices like the consul-
ship or the dictatorship, he was excluded from semi-religious
positions like that of the praetor. The same thing holds
good in Massachusetts. Both in Eome and in New England
the ruling class, when compelled to grant political equality,
tried to keep a modicum of their old power by reserving a
good deal of public authority to the representatives of the
church of the founders. This authority the outsider could
not claim to share merely because he shared the franchise
or the right of holding military command, unless he had
gone through the process which the Massachusetts Christian
described in terms borrowed from the phraseology of pagan
Eome — the process of " sanctification and adoption."
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 7
of the Hudson river the social system was of a
different kind. There was much less religious
exclusiveness, there was much more commercial
inequality. Neither the Dutch in New York, the
Quakers in Pennsylvania, nor the Catholics who
followed Lord Baltimore to Maryland, showed the
same degree of bigotry and intolerance that ani-
mated the settlers of New England. These colonies
were to a greater or less extent trading ventures,
in which the heads of the enterprise reserved for
themselves the dominant influence in the direction
and control of affairs. Instead of a religious
aristocracy of small farmers, we therefore find a
commercial aristocracy of traders and planters.
The agricultural land of New York was largely
held by a few patroons or semi-feudal overlords;
a system originally established by the Dutch but
not essentially altered or disturbed when the
colony passed under British sovereignty. The
charters of the other colonies in this region — New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland —
either explicitly provided for a similar form of
organization or tacitly encouraged it. In all these
colonies, therefore, the influence of a comparatively
small number of wealthy citizens was dominant.
This dominance of wealth was even more marked
south of the Potomac, in the colonies or plantations
8 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The
agricultural conditions of this region made a
system of large holdings or plantations profitable
both to the colonists themselves and to the fiscal
agents of the mother country. Inequalities of
wealth which in the middle colonies were an
accident became in the southern colonies an indus-
trial advantage if not an economic necessity.
Moreover the southern plantations were particu-
larly suitable to the employment of slave labor —
first that of convicts or redemptioners, and after-
ward of negroes imported for the purpose. As is
generally the case where slavery prevails, the body
of freemen gradually divided itself into two
classes: those who were rich enough to own slaves
and those who were not. The former class, as is
usual in such communities, succeeded in engrossing
the political authority; partly by law, partly by
political maneuvering, and partly by the force of
social usage.
According to a report of the Surveyor General
of the Colonial Customs at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, quoted by Hildreth,* there were
* The account of colonial conditions given by Hildreth is
in many respects better than that which we have received
from later historians. Hildreth 's merits have been some-
what underrated, owing to his intense partisanship in deal-
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 9
in Virginia on each of the four great rivers men
in number from ten to thirty, who by trade and
industry had " gotten very competent estates."
These gentlemen took care to supply the poorer
sort with goods and necessaries, and were sure to
keep them always in their debt and consequently
dependent on them. Out of this number were
chosen the council, assembly, justices, and other
officers of government. The justices, besides their
judicial functions, managed the business and
finances of their respective counties. Parish affairs
were in the hands of self-perpetuating vestries,
which kept even the ministers in check by avoiding
induction and hiring them only from year to year.
The twelve counselors possessed extensive author-
ity ; their assent was necessary to all the governor's
official acts; they constituted one branch of the
ing with American political history at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century; but
his treatment of early colonial affairs is comparatively
unaffected by this partisanship, and shows the good effect
of contact, personal and social, with colonial traditions.
The men with whom Hildreth had talked in his boyhood
came of these colonial families whose methods and doings
he described. They had retained to a surprisingly large
extent the prejudices and feelings of their grandfathers.
In spite of his late date Hildreth thus speaks in the
character of an eyewitness. There is, I believe, no other
American historian of whom this fact is true in approxi-
mately equal extent.
10 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Assembly; they exercised the principal judicial
authority as judges of the General Court; they
were at the head of the militia as lieutenants of
the counties ; they acted as collectors of the export
duty on tobacco and the other provincial imposts,
and generally also of the Parliamentary duties,
while they farmed the king's quit-rents at a very
favorable bargain. A majority of these counselors,
united together by a sort of family compact,
aspired to engross the entire management of the
province.
All this is doubtless somewhat overstated. Con-
ditions were probably not as bad as this in 1705,
when the report was written; they certainly were
not as bad at the time of the Revolution. But we
are quite safe in saying that Thomas Jefferson's
doctrines of political equality were not drawn from
an observation of the practices that prevailed in
his immediate neighborhood.
The Revolution of 1776 severed the relation of
the colonies to the mother country but did not
greatly alter the constitutions under which they
were organized. These constitutions continued to
follow the lines set down in the colonial charters in
all respects except those which concerned the Eng-
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 11
lish overlord. Before the Revolution most of the
colonies had been compelled to accept the governors
appointed by the crown; after the Revolution the
leading citizens elected their own governors and
fixed the bounds of their authority; but with
that exception the machinery was arranged and
conducted in pretty much the same manner as
before. No immediate attempt was made to extend
the right of suffrage or to increase the proportion
of elective offices. The property qualifications
demanded of officeholders remained very high.
In South Carolina, to quote an extreme instance, |
no man could serve as governor unless he owned |
property to the value of ten thousand pounds;
which even in the depreciated currency was an
enormous sum for that time. The social order was"1
essentially an aristocratic one — not quite so much
so as it was in England at that time, but very much
more so than it is in England today. While the
right to stand for office was not denied to qualified
voters of proper age and substance, the actual
holding of office was chiefly enjoyed by such persons
as happened to belong to families of standing and
consideration.
Nor did the adoption of the Federal Constitution!
involve any necessary or immediate change in these
particulars. This constitution indeed provided
12 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
that each of the several federated states should
have a republican form of government. But to
the makers of the Federal Constitution the word
"republican" did not mean democratic. The
members of the convention that drafted it were
representatives of the conservative class in the
community. Their "republic" was the equivalent
of Aristotle's "politeia," or self-governing com-
monwealth. Most of them would have been horror-
stricken at the idea of universal suffrage. There
was indeed in all the states a strong minority of
real democrats, many of whom opposed the adop-
tion of the Constitution. But the necessity of
having an efficient central government was so
obvious that the views of the conservative party
prevailed decisively ; and the outspoken champions
of democracy were forced to acquiesce, as best they
might, in the adoption of a polity which some of
them regarded as a betrayal of the cause of popular
liberty.
The conservatives or Federalists remained in
control for twelve years after they had secured
the passage of the Constitution. Then it was the
turn of the Democrats, who came into power with
the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. It is,
however, significant of the state of popular feeling
at the time that the advent of the popular party
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 13
to office was signalized by no important political
or social changes.* Jefferson's administration
illustrated the old adage, "A radical plus power
equals a conservative." The leaders of the Demo-
crats, like the leaders of the Federalists, were for
the most part representatives of old families.
Madison and Monroe bore as respectable names as
Washington or Adams. Aaron Burr, arch-democrat
and corrupter of society, who taught Tammany
Hall the methods which have made New York
politics a byword, was of as good social standing
as Alexander Hamilton, friend of Washington and
founder of the republic's fiscal system.
To make America a democracy, in fact as well
as in name, it was not enough for one party to pass
out of power. It was necessary for one whole
generation to pass off the stage and give place to
* The apparent change of front by the Democratic leaders
in the years immediately following the adoption of the
United States Constitution was due to two causes.
In the first place, the formation of a centralized govern-
ment under the new constitution was actually followed by
a high degree of prosperity. The years preceding 1788 had
been a time of depression. The decade that immediately
followed was one of commercial expansion. It was natural,
and in fact inevitable, that this change from depression
to prosperity should be attributed to the Constitution and
that that instrument should become popular with everybody
who benefited by the commercial improvement.
The views of the extreme Democrats were further dis-
14 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
a new generation with other antecedents and other
ideals. Until about the year 1820 the citizens of
the United States were British subjects who had
accidentally transferred their allegiance without
correspondingly altering their political instincts.
The United States remained in many essential
features a group of English colonies, separated
from the mother country in 1776, somewhat against
their will, by the want of tact of George the Third
and his ministers, and united with one another in
1788, also somewhat against their will, by the
extraordinary tact of the leaders of the Consti-
tutional Convention. Colonial, however, they
remained in feeling, and separate also to a large
degree in feeling, for twenty or thirty years
afterward.
But with the advent of a new generation things
were altered. Farrand, who among all our histo-
credited by the history of the French Eevolution in 1792
and 1793. The excesses of the Keign of Terror gave
conservatives in America as well as in England strong
arguments against putting unrestricted power in the hands
of the masses, and made Democrats themselves doubt
whether their own theories of popular government were as
good practical guides as they had previously supposed.
Jefferson and his immediate followers never abandoned
\ their belief in the people, but they modified to some extent
their desire to trust the people with the direct exercise of
administrative authority.
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 15
rians is probably best qualified to judge of this
point, dates the real beginning of distinctively
American history, not from the declaration of
independence in 1776 nor from the adoption of
the Constitution in 1788, but from the close of
the War of 1812. The years following this war
witnessed the birth of a true national spirit, which
was at once American and democratic.
Several causes combined to produce this change.
First among them was the effect of the Declaration
of Independence itself upon boys who were taught
to read it. "We hold these truths to be self-
evident," said the writers of the Declaration,
"that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalien-
able rights, that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness." To the men of 1776
this sentence was simply a convenient phrase for
justifying acts of armed resistance to England
which had been committed by the several colonies
in the past and were likely to be continued on a
larger scale and with more organized purpose in
the immediate future. The writers believed them
in the same way that they believed other political
doctrines of Locke or Rousseau ; that is, they gave
them a sufficient measure of intellectual assent to
be able to use them as a basis of argument without
16 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
violating their consciences. But they were not
ready to accept them as part of the sentiment which
underlay their estimate of their fellow men and
the conduct of their own daily life. With the next
generation the case was different. What had been
a phrase to the fathers was an article of faith to
the sons. They had learned in their earliest and
most impressionable years that this was the prin-
ciple upon which the American nation was founded.
It was this, they were taught, which more than
anything else differentiated American society from
European society. What had been at first a mere
proposition regarding equality became under such
influences a sentiment in favor of equality. The
feeling of patriotism was enlisted to drive out the
old feeling of caste prejudice. The sentiments of
human equality and of national pride were in fact
so closely bound up with one another that whatever
strengthened the second strengthened the first.
The war against England from 1812 to 1815,
unfortunate as it was in many of its incidents, laid
the foundation for a new intensity of patriotic
feeling and new enthusiasm for human equality.
Of equal importance in promoting the spirit of
democracy was the system of land laws under
which the West was settled.
The greater part of the actual area of the United
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 17
States at the end of the eighteenth century was
the property of the national government, unen-
cumbered by claims of individuals or corporations.
The thirteen states that formed the Union occupied
only a small fringe along the Atlantic coast. Some
of them held grants of land in the interior by
virtue of their colonial charters ; but the total area
effectively covered by these grants was not large
in amount. Speaking broadly, the immense domain
in the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi was
at the disposal of the federal authorities. The
power thus held by the United States Government
was wisely used. Alexander Hamilton, Washing-
ton's secretary of the treasury, was a man who
understood the larger principles of statesmanship
better than any other American of his age. He
saw that in the disposal of this land fiscal consid-
erations should be subordinated to political ones;
that the most valuable thing which a democracy
could do with a public domain was to settle it with
as large a number as possible of actual freeholders.
In pursuance of this policy, arrangements were
made for the survey of the public lands at as early
a date as possible. Lines were run at intervals of
half a mile, both from north to south and from
east to west, dividing the country into square
sections of the area of a quarter of a mile, or one
18 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
hundred and sixty acres, each. These are the
quarter sections so constantly alluded to in the
land laws of the United States. On the lands thus
surveyed the price was first fixed at $2.00 an acre,
which was afterwards generally reduced to $1.25.
But this cheap rate was not the only inducement
offered to settlers. By a series of "preemption
acts" from 1801 to 1841 a man who had actually
settled upon public land without paying for it was
given prior claim to its ultimate ownership. It
was, as it were, reserved for a time when he might
be ready to purchase. Nobody could buy it over
his head. The result of these Preemption Acts was
that a man who did not have the money to buy the
land could enter and take possession of it, with the
assurance that if he made proper improvements he
would be given a chance not only to get the benefit
of his improvements, but ultimately to buy the
land itself out of the proceeds of his successful
farming.
Hamilton built even better than he knew. The
political consideration that he felt most strongly
was the danger of foreign invasion. The United
States held the central and western parts of the
continent by rather a precarious tenure. The
colonies that had revolted from England were
stretched along the Atlantic seaboard. A range
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 19
of mountains, not very high but rugged and almost
unbroken, separated them from the interior valleys.
The first settlement in these interior valleys had
been made, not across the mountains but by the
Mississippi on the south or the St. Lawrence on
the north. Spain held the lower Mississippi;
England held the lower St. Lawrence. Most of
the permanent white residents of the Mississippi
valley were French. The names of the older towns
show the kind of population with which we had
to deal: Vincennes, Terre Haute, St. Louis. The
ideals and institutions of the newly founded
United States had no particular attraction for the
inhabitants of towns with names like these. A war
with either England or Spain — or, for that matter,
a war with France — might easily have deprived
the states of the Atlantic seaboard of the slender
hold they had on the interior. As a result
of Hamilton's land policy the interior valleys of
the West were rapidly settled by a population
distinctively American in its ideals and senti-
ments. This settlement, taken in conjunction with
Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana and the upper
Mississippi valley from the French and Spanish
claimants, secured the country against the danger
of war on the western frontier.
This was the immediate and obvious effect of
20 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Hamilton's policy. But it had also an effect on
our internal constitution, less obvious but much
more fundamentally important. It created a type
of commonwealth and type of man which was
distinctively American. Our lands were occupied
by a body of men of great ability and enterprise
but small capital; men who were ready to work
and respected others in proportion to their readi-
ness to work. In the region beyond the Alleghany
mountains the sort of equality contemplated by
the Declaration of Independence was in large
measure realized. In the valleys on either side of
the Ohio river America witnessed for the first time
the growth of commonwealths that had never been
colonies but grew up to statehood independently;
communities that had never known crown governors
and crown grants, but had developed under the
American flag and the preemption law. Owing
to the conditions under which they were founded,
these western communities were intensely patriotic
and intensely convinced of the essential equality
of all mankind.
Under the operation of these causes there arose
a new democracy, different from anything which
was readily conceivable by an earlier generation.
Of this new American democracy Andrew Jackson,
elected to the presidency in 1828, was the chosen
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 21
representative. Of all the presidents of the United
States he was the one who sprang most directly
from the people; and the years of his triumph
were marked by the development of the distinctive
features which we have been accustomed to regard
as characteristic of American political life — the
adoption of universal suffrage, the multiplication
of elective offices, and the complex system of party
organization which has lasted with but slight
change until the present time.*
* It is somewhat singular that the democratic America
of a later generation should have so occupied the minds of
historians as to crowd out the memory of the aristocratic
America of earlier times. There are several reasons which
may serve to account for this.
In the first place, the foreign observers of America whose
accounts were most widely read saw the country after the
change instead of before it. The earliest of these accounts
was that by Chevalier, who investigated the American trans-
portation system and published his results in a masterly
work,, ' ' Les Voies de Communication en Amerique. ' ' The
political change was not complete at the date of Chevalier's
visit, but the parts of the country which he saw were those
where development was most active and the new spirit of
democracy most manifest.
Another Frenchman whose books were more widely read
and whose views had much larger influence than Chevalier's
was Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville studied America
carefully and was a man of eminent ability both as an
observer and as a critic; but he was a thorough Frenchman,
and he had a Frenchman's fondness for brilliant generali-
zation. Taking the America of the fourth decade of the
22 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
These developments were not consciously intro-
duced as party measures by the national govern-
ment. Under the American Constitution they
could not be. The several states have to decide
for themselves what qualifications shall be required
of their voters and how their officers shall be
elected or appointed. It is all the more significant,
therefore, that such a fundamental change in public
opinion should have taken place in so many
commonwealths at the same time, and that a nation,
till then predominantly aristocratic in its social
constitution, should have become so thoroughly
democratic in so short a period.
In the two decades from 182Q4o-l£40 new states
were organized which gave full rights of sover-
nineteenth century as he saw it, he reasoned that the prin-
ciples of political action which then prevailed were an
inherent result of the American character, foreordained and
predestined from the beginning. His observations concern-
ing the times of which he wrote were so just that people
attached undue weight to his statements of antecedent con-
ditions, which were not based upon his own observation and
were in some instances not correct. If De Tocqueville's
judgments had been unflattering to the American public,
some of his historical generalizations would have been more
readily challenged. But De Tocqueville, though not a ful-
some critic, was a friendly one. His explanations furnished
American readers with plausible excuses for many of the
faults of their social system. When Mrs. Trollope criticised
American manners malignantly, or when Charles Dickens did
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 23
eignty to all men who were personally free; and
older states like New York and Massachusetts
abolished property qualifications for the franchise
that had previously existed. The number of officers
directly chosen by the people was multiplied.
The pecuniary qualification required for the various
offices was lessened or abolished. The whole sys-
tem of nomination and election_was so modified
as to give more immediate influence to the will of
the people and less to that of the leading families.
Even for those offices whose incumbents were
appointed by the executive instead of being elected,
the old principle of fixity of tenure during good
behavior was quite generally abolished, and the
office itself made a reward of party service.
the same thing more goodnaturedly and humorously, it was
a pleasure to fall back on De Tocqueville and to say that
these evils were but the incidental defects of an inherent
spirit of democracy which had always prevailed in the
United States and which made people disregard the niceties
of custom and convention in order to appraise men at their
true value.
This is not intended as a criticism of De Tocqueville, who
next to Bryce and possibly Ostrogorski, is the ablest foreign
writer on American affairs; but to show why some of the
less essential parts of his work gained undue influence over
the public mind and contributed to a misunderstanding of
earlier American history from which hardly any of our
modern writers except Farrand and McMaster have been
able to keep themselves wholly free.
24 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
These changes were more rapid and complete in
the northern and central states than in the
southern ones; but every section felt the effect of
this movement in greater or less degree. With
surprising speed and thoroughness the country as
a whole passed from a political system which was
in its essentials aristocratic and English to one
which was democratic and American.
Even more remarkable than the rapidity of the
change itself was the absence of any reaction of
feeling or retrogression of practice such as usually
follows in the wake of rapid reform movements
of this sort. "When the Democrats went out of
office and their opponents, now called Whigs
instead of Federalists, came into power, there was
no attempt to bring government back to its old
basis. Parties divided on other lines. The
Democrats stood for free trade, the Whigs for
protection. The Democrats stood for home rule,
the Whigs for national authority. A few years
later, as a result of the struggle between home rule
and nationalism, the Democrats stood for slavery
and the Republicans (who had succeeded the old
Whig party) for emancipation. But in none of
these American political conflicts of the middle of
the nineteenth century could one party claim the
title of conservative and the other that of liberal,
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 25
as these titles were understood and used in the
politics of contemporary European states. The
political triumph of democracy was complete.
This transformation of the political order was
attended by a similar change in the social order;
though the social change was for various reasons
less rapid and complete than the political one.
The society of the West had been from the first
quite as democratic as its politics. There was but
one important class distinction — that between
workers and idlers. If a settler was willing to
work he could get large returns with very little
capital ; if he was not willing to work there was no
place for him. Under such circumstances a man
could achieve social position in three ways only:
by hospitality, by professional efficiency, or by
securing public office. Wealth without hospitality,
education without efficiency, honorable descent
without public service, were not regarded as social
qualifications. They were despised rather than
admired.
These social standards — or, if you please, this
absence of social standards — of the West had a
marked effect on the Atlantic coast. Almost every
Eastern family numbered among its members one
or two who had "gone West"; who had proved
their fitness as men under the new conditions, and
26 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
were inclined to despise the social order of older
communities as artificial. These men were apt to
be of a type strong enough to modify the views,
not only of their own family circles, but of the
whole community from which they came.
In the northern Atlantic states this modification
was very rapid. In the southern states it was
slower. The North had been an aristocracy of
small farmers who cultivated their own ground.
The South had been an aristocracy of large
planters who lived on the produce of the slaves.
When members of slave-holding families moved
westward they often carried their slaves with them,
and by this means succeeded to some extent in
perpetuating in the new country the class dis-
tinction which had subsisted in the old. While the
general structure of Northern social life began to
change in 1820, that of the South remained un-
changed for a generation more; until the civil
war of 1861, with the resulting enfranchisement
of the negro and impoverishment of the large land-
holders, had taken away the physical basis on which
it had rested for more than a century so securely.
But these changes in the political and social
order were not accompanied by any corresponding
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 27
change in the industrial order. It has been a
perpetual surprise to observers of American insti-
tutions that complete political enfranchisement has
not resulted in attempts to restrict the power of
capital. For at least sixty years after the adoption
of universal suffrage the tendency was all in the
other direction — to legislate for the property owner
rather than against him; to strengthen the powers
of capital rather than to diminish them. Demo-
crats, Whigs, and Republicans differed as to their
aims and methods, but they vied with one another
in protecting the rights of property. Even on the
remote and comparatively lawless western frontier,
where a man might kill a dozen of his fellow men
with impunity and enjoy the continued respect
of those about him, the stealing of a horse was
punished by immediate hanging and by the for-
feiture of all claim to social standing in this world
or the next.
The small protection given to the rights of man,
as compared with that which was accorded to the
rights of property, is a salient feature in the early
history of every American state — and sometimes
in its later history also. While England was
developing a large and on the whole highly
beneficent body of factory Acts, the United States
was doing nothing. It is only forty years since the
28 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
first effective law regarding hours of labor was
passed by the state of Massachusetts, limiting
the hours of women and children to about ten a
day; and even this was regarded at the time of its
passage as a piece of somewhat dangerous humani-
tarianism. As late as 1885 the attempt to keep
children out of factories until they were twelve
years old was considered by many people a radical
measure of interference with economic freedom.
While England had been developing a system of
employers' liability adequate to protect the work-
men under modern conditions, the United States
stood for many years idle. The old common law
doctrine that the employee assumed the risks of
his employment, and that the employer was not
liable for damages for an injury to one workman
resulting from the carelessness of another, remained
in full force in America for many years after it
had been done away with in England. The
employer was encouraged by his immunity from
responsibility to maintain antiquated methods and
practices dangerous to life and limb, which he alone
could change and for whose ill effects he was
morally though not legally responsible. Systems
of industrial insurance were devised in monarchies
like Prussia ; they were unknown in the democratic
commonwealths of America. Progressive taxation
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 29
has been used by nearly every country of Europe
as a means of correcting the inequalities of
wealth. Not until the most recent times has the
American democracy attempted to employ it for
this purpose.*
These are but a few among the many instances
of democratic concern for the interests of the
property owner and democratic unconcern for the
interests of humanity. Even in those exceptional
cases where the Americans of the nineteenth cen-
tury passed laws to restrict the power of capital,
we generally find that they were intended to pro-
tect one class of capitalists against the encroach-
ments of another. Forty years ago there was a
successful agitation to abolish the practice indulged
in by many manufacturers of maintaining " com-
pany stores" at which their workmen were com-
pelled to trade ; but the reform was carried through
not so much because of the injury to the workmen
who had to trade at the stores, as because of the
injury to other stores that did not belong to the
company. There was during the same period an
active and widespread attempt to reduce the rates
* There was a certain amount of progression in the income
taxes of the Civil War. But these taxes were introduced as
revenue measures under stress of fiscal necessity, and were
abolished amid general rejoicing from all parties as soon
as possible after the close of the war.
30 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
charged by railroads in the upper Mississippi
valley; but this was avowedly based on the fact
that the higher rates prevented the farmers whom
the railroads served from paying interest on their
mortgages.
From time to time we find traces of discontent
with the industrial system as a whole. From time
to time socialist leaders would arise who attempted
to organize the laboring classes of the community
for a war against capital. Agitators of this kind
made their most forcible appeal to immigrants
who had recently arrived in the country and were
not familiar with American laws and customs.
There was a widespread socialistic movement of
this kind in 1833; there have been sporadic ones
ever since. Some of this agitation aroused a good
deal of public interest and a little fear among the
more timid capitalists. But as long as there was
plenty of free land in the United States the socialist
agitators were at a disadvantage. The immigrant
felt that he had more to gain by settling down and
trying to become a capitalist than by going to war
and trying to fight the capitalist. He was inclined
to say to the agitators what the boy said to the
lady who offered him sponge cake at a party, "I
can get as good as that at home." He might be
ready to applaud the men who declaimed against
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 31
the injustice of this or that particular arrange-
ment of industrial society; he was not ready to
declare war against an industrial society which
offered him so many inducements to become one
of its members. It was the rule all through the
nineteenth century that as long as the socialist
orators stuck to words the multitude applauded
them, but whenever their words were followed by
deeds the multitude shrank from them. At bye-
elections the socialists won occasional victories; at
elections of national importance their vote was
habitually a disappointment to the leaders of the
party.
I propose in the next lecture to examine the
reasons why democracy did not lead to socialism;
why universal suffrage was not used to impair the
dominance of the property owner; why the legal
and constitutional position of property in America
remained for a series of years stronger than it was
in England in the same period. In the third lecture
I propose to examine the effect of certain changes
in the United States during recent years which
have brought America, for the first time in its
history, face to face with what Europe knows as
the social question.
II
THE CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF
THE PROPERTY OWNER
European observers of American politics are apt
to be surprised at a certain weakness of action in
industrial matters on the part of our public
authorities. The legislatures are often ready to
pass individual measures of regulation; they are
rarely willing to pursue a consistent and carefully
developed policy for the attainment of an economic
end. The people frequently declaim against the
extent of the powers of corporate capital ; they are
seldom disposed to put that capital under the direct
management of the government itself. The man
who talks loudest of the abuses of private railroad
administration often shrinks from the alternative
of having railroads owned and managed by the
state.
In spite of frequent acts of adverse legislation,
the constitutional position of the property owner
in the United States has been stronger than in any
country in Europe. However much public feeling
may at times move in the direction of socialistic
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 33
measures, there is no nation which is so far removed
from socialism as ours by its organic law and its
habits of political action. I propose to trace, as
far as is possible within the limits of a single
lecture, the reasons for this somewhat anomalous
condition; to show why the rights of property
were so strongly protected in the Federal Consti-
tution, as originally adopted by the several states
and as subsequently interpreted by the courts ; and
why as a matter of history the change of the social
and political order from an aristocracy to a democ-
racy has not been accompanied by anything like
a corresponding change in the industrial order.*
I shall begin with a proposition which may sound
somewhat startling, but which I believe to be
literally true. The whole American political and
social system is based on industrial property right,
far more completely than has ever been the case in
any European country. In every nation of Europe
there • has been a certain amount of traditional
opposition between the government and the indus-
trial classes. In the United States no such
tradition exists. In the public law of European
communities1 industrial freeholding is a compara-
* For a suggestive treatment of this subject from a some-
what different standpoint, see W. E. Weyl, The New
Democracy.
34 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
tively recent development. In the United States,
on the contrary, industrial freeholding is the
foundation on which the whole social order has
been established and built up.
Let us examine the reasons for this in detail.
Down to the thirteenth century the system of
land tenure in every country of Europe was a
feudal one. It was based upon military service.
A man held a larger or smaller estate on account
of his larger or smaller amount of fighting effi-
ciency. There were many rival claimants for the
land. The majority of those who wanted to
cultivate the soil were unable to protect themselves
against spoliation. In the absence of an efficient
protector or overlord no industry was productive
and no large accumulation of capital was possible.
The services of the military chieftain were indis-
pensable as a basis for the toil of the laborer or
the forethought of the capitalist. It was the
military chieftain, therefore, who enjoyed the
largest measure of respect socially, and the
strongest position politically.
As the conditions of public security grew better
these things changed. From the fourteenth cen-
tury to the nineteenth Europe witnessed a gradual
substitution of industrial tenures for military
tenures; a gradual development of a system of
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 35
property law intended to encourage the activities
of the laborers and the capitalists, rather than to
reward the services of the successful military
chieftain.* But down to the end of the eighteenth
century this capitalistic or industrial sort of pri-
vate property represented a superadded element
rather than an integral basis of society. And even
the developments of the last hundred years have
not been sufficient to obliterate a certain sense of
newness when we contrast the position of the
aristocracy of wealth with that of the aristocracy
of military rank.
In the American colonies conditions were wholly
different. There was no marked separation of
military and industrial classes. The working
power and the fighting power were in the hands
of the same or nearly the same persons. The land
owner held his property by a title which was at
once military and industrial. He was prepared
to defend it; he was also prepared to work upon
it, or at any rate to direct the labor of others who
worked upon it. There was no excuse from mili-
tary duty except physical weakness. There was no
excuse from industrial duty except public service.
* The experience of England in this matter has been well
set forth in the earlier chapters of Ashley's English
Economic History.
36 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Of course there was a certain differentiation of
employment. There were some men, like Leather-
stocking in Cooper's tales, who were specially
skilled in the ways of Indian fighting; and when
trouble with the Indians was anticipated, as it
quite frequently was, it was understood that these
men might leave their farms to be tilled by others.
But when peace returned the Indian fighter went
to work like his neighbors. Aristocratic as the
colonies were in many of their habits and feelings,
they would not tolerate the growth of a leisure
class. If a man had more land than his fellows,
or enjoyed more authority than his fellows, it was
expected that he would work harder and fight
harder. And this expectation was generally
realized. There was a well-defined aristocracy;
but there was no military aristocracy as distin-
guished from an industrial one, except in the
immediate entourage of the governors sent over
from England. And the effect of the aristocratic
circle surrounding these governors was to weaken
rather than to strengthen the claims of military
authority, because its members made themselves so
unpopular by their habitual exclusiveness and
intolerance that they united the colonists in a spirit
of resistance to all such claims and pretensions.
At the time, therefore, when the United States
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 37
separated from England, respect for industrial
property right was a fundamental principle in the
law and public opinion of the land. How far this
respect for property right would have continued
unimpaired if the several colonies had remained
separate from one another is an uncertain and
profitless question. They did not remain separate.
They adopted a federal constitution which con-
tained a number of guarantees for the permanence
of property right — some intentional, some probably
accidental — which made it difficult for legislatures
in subsequent generations to alter the legal condi-
tions of the earlier period, except when such
alterations secured the approval of the courts.
I have spoken in the previous lecture of the cir-
cumstances which led to the adoption of the Federal
Constitution. During the war of the Revolu-
tion, from 1775 to 1782 and in the years imme-
diately thereafter, the American Union had been
a league of independent states, and a very loose
one. These states had formed an organization
for mutual protection in carrying on a war against
England. But this organization was very weak
indeed. While the war lasted, the imminence of
perils which threatened to involve all, and the
personality of a few leaders, of whom George
Washington was the most conspicuous, enabled the
38 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
different colonies to act with some degree of
coherence. "We must all hang together," said
one of the signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, "or we shall all hang separately. ' ' But
when independence was conceded by England in
1782 and the restraints of common danger were
removed, the hopeless inefficiency of the central
government became obvious. From 1783 to 1789
the United States had no means of securing concert
of action at home or respect and influence abroad.
Clear-headed men saw the absolute necessity of
centralization. The members of the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 felt these considerations very
strongly. A large majority of them were men of
substance; a considerable minority were men of
wealth. They had viewed with apprehension the
readiness of their fellow countrymen to issue paper
money, to scale down debts, or to interpret the
obligation of contract in such a manner as to
render large investments of capital precarious. It
was at once a matter of personal interest and of
public interest to them to prevent this ; of personal
interest because acts of this kind would impair
their own enjoyment and success ; of public interest
because it was vitally necessary to America to have
its industry and commerce managed in the most
efficient and far-sighted way.
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 39
This fact is of itself sufficient to account for the
general tone of the Constitution on matters of
property right. But there are certain clauses in
that instrument which have been even more
effective in securing the property holders against
adverse legislation than the Convention itself in-
tended or expected. The reason for this is some-
what curious. The whole document was the result
of a series of compacts, agreements, and com-
promises, between two pretty evenly balanced
parties — a states rights party, which wished to
limit the powers of the federal government, and a
national party, which was anxious to set some
practical control on the autonomy of the states.
In meeting the wishes of these two parties and
limiting the powers of both state and federal
governments, the Convention more or less unwit-
tingly* gave the property owners as a body certain
* There has been a tendency in recent years to represent
the makers of the Constitution as engaged in a deliberate
attempt to tie the hands of legislators with regard to their
future action in matters of property right. A study of
the debates of the Constitutional Convention shows that a
good deal of what they did in this way was accidental
rather than deliberate. This is well illustrated by the
history of the clause in Article I, section 10, which prohibits
the passage, by any of the states, of laws impairing the
obligation of contract. No such prohibition was suggested
by the Convention to the Committee of Detail for its con-
sideration, nor is there any trace of it in the final report
40 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
guaranties against legislative interference of any
kind.
It was in the first place provided that there
should be no taking of private property without
due process of law. The states rights men feared
that the federal government might, under the stress
of military necessity, pursue an arbitrary policy
of confiscation. The federalists, or national party,
feared that one or more of the states might pursue
the same policy under the influence of sectional
jealousy. To avoid this double danger both parties
united on a constitutional provision which pre-
vented the legislature or executive, either of the
nation or of the individual states, from taking
property without allowing judicial inquiry into
the public necessity involved, and without making
full compensation even in case the result of such
made by that Committee. During the discussion of this
report (which constitutes the basis of the Constitution as
finally passed) the insertion of such a clause was suggested;
but it was opposed by Mr. Gouverneur Morris and others
as unwise, and was not pressed to a vote. What the
Convention ultimately adopted instead of this, was a motion
to prohibit "retrospective" laws. This at any rate was
the entry in the journal, though there is some doubt whether
it was transmitted in that shape to the committee of final
revision, known as the Committee on Style. This committee
seems to have taken the responsibility of changing the
phraseology of this section on its own account; so that
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 41
inquiry was favorable to the government; and it
was further provided, by another equally impor-
tant clause in the Constitution, that no state should
pass a law impairing the obligation of contracts.
No man foresaw what would be the subsequent
effect of these provisions in preventing a majority
of voters, acting in the legislature or through the
executive, from disturbing existing arrangements
with regard to railroad building or factory opera-
tion until the railroad stockholders or factory
owners had had the opportunity to have their case
tried in the courts. Clauses which were at first
intended to prevent sectional strife, and to protect
the people of one locality against arbitrary legis-
lation in another, became a means of strengthening
vested rights as a whole against the possibility of
legislative or executive interference. Nor was the
when the whole instrument was last submitted to the Con-
vention and rather hurriedly passed, the clause was made
to read: "any ex post facto law or law impairing the
obligation of contract. ' ' A motion made by Elbridge
Gerry to extend this prohibition to the Federal Government
as well as to the states was not seconded. Indeed, the
Convention at that stage of proceedings seems to have been
not unnaturally impatient of further delay and anxious to
pass anything which the Committee on Style recommended.
The whole matter can be followed out in detail in Farrand's
Records of the Federal Convention, by the aid of his excel-
lent index to the successive sections of the Constitution.
42 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
direct effect of these clauses in preventing specific
acts on the part of the legislature the most impor-
tant result of their existence. They indirectly
became a powerful means of establishing the
American courts in the position which they now
enjoy as arbiters between the legislature and the
property owner. For whenever an act of the
legislature violated, or even seemed to violate, one
of these clauses, it came before the court for
review; and in case the court found that such
violation existed, the law was blocked — rendered
powerless by a dictum of the judges declaring it
unconstitutional.
An Act of the British Parliament is authorita-
tive. It is law, ipso facto, as soon as it is regularly
passed. It cannot be resisted except by revolution.
But an Act of the United States Congress or of
a state legislature is not law except as it lies within
the limits allowed by the Constitution. Whether
it transgresses these limits is a matter for the courts
to decide. Any restriction of property right by
legislative act is therefore null and void unless the
courts decide that due process of law has been
followed and that no obligation of contract is
impaired.
The power thus granted to the courts to render
acts of the legislature inoperative is perhaps the
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 43
most distinctive feature of the American Consti-
tution; it is certainly the one which English
publicists find it the most difficult to understand.
The jurisprudence of England is founded on the
theory that there must be in every country some
sovereign, some designated person or body of
persons whose deliberately expressed will must be
obeyed. The older writers based this sovereignty
upon a supposititious social contract. Hobbes, for
instance, said that the evils of anarchy were so
great that the people had entered into an agree-
ment to obey a common superior who could main-
tain order, and that, as long as the superior
maintained order, the people were bound by their
agreement. To philosophers of this school, the \
assumption of this compact, fictitious though it
was, was the fundamental justification of state
authority.
Bentham and his followers rejected Hobbes'
fiction of a social compact. Bentham said that the
authority of the state rested, not on a fictitious
agreement supposed to have been made by our
remote ancestors, but on an actual, present-day
fact that the people recognize a common superior
and render him habitual obedience. It is the fact
of obedience, not the fiction of a compact, that
makes him sovereign. But Bentham insisted just
44 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
as clearly as Hobbes did that there were no logical
limits to the sovereign's power. There might be
practical limits. Things might be so badly man-
aged that continued obedience was intolerable. In
that case we had a revolution, a temporary state
of anarchy, followed by the acceptance of a new
sovereign; but as long as there was any sovereign
at all it was, in Bentham's view, absurd to talk
of theoretical restraints upon the exercise of his
power.
The American view of sovereignty differs from
that of Bentham in one or two important respects.
The American constitutional lawyer holds that we
habitually obey a common superior within certain
limits. It recognizes that the authority of the state
is based on the fact of habitual obedience on the
part of its members. "A just government exists
by consent of the governed. But that obedience,
and that consent, which are accorded as long as
government keeps within what we regard as the
sphere of its authority, cease when it tries to go
outside of that sphere." When the acts of the
legislature or executive are kept within certain
constitutional lines, and follow certain rules laid
down by the public opinion, we obey the govern-
ment. Within these bounds it is de facto sover-
eign. When it transgresses those bounds, we do
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 45
not obey it. If it attempts to extend its power
beyond the limits which public opinion has fixed,
its acts are nullified ; — set at nought by the refusal
of the public to cooperate in their enforcement.
We do not attempt to change the sovereign by a
process of revolution; we leave him undisturbed
within the domain of his traditional authority.
But we refuse the active help which is necessary
to enable him to extend that authority into an
unauthorized domain.
The doctrine of passive resistance has been
treated with a good deal of unmerited ridicule.
We are told that it is only another name for
revolution; that if any body of men assumes to
tell the sovereign that he cannot pass certain limits,
they themselves are claiming sovereignty by that
very act. This is not necessarily true. If a man
prevents a policeman from doing something which
lies outside of the limits of his office, he is not
assuming sovereignty. He is not even trying to
lessen the respect for the police. He is simply
keeping the police authority within traditional
bounds. Whether such acts do result in over-
throwing the authority of the police is a matter
for the historian to determine. The experience of
the United States shows that very sharp limits
can be set to the exercise of the authority of a
46 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
governing body without in the least impairing its
power and efficiency within those limits.
It is sometimes argued that if the American
courts can limit the powers of both national and
state legislatures, the courts themselves are sover-
eign. This appears to be a misleading use of
language. The courts certainly do not claim or
exercise the kind of sovereignty which is exercised
by the English Parliament. It is a truer descrip-
tion of the situation to say that America under the
Constitution witnesses an actual exercise of divided
sovereignty; that the people live under a con-
current jurisdiction of state and nation, obeying
each in some things; and that the authoritative
position of the courts in determining the limits of
this sovereignty is not itself a transcendent exercise
of sovereign power, but a highly skilled exposition
of public opinion — in other words, that the
authority of American judges rests on the same
sort of basis as the authority of English judges —
on their power of interpretation of precedents and
customs.
The early history of the Supreme Court of the
United States furnishes strong confirmation of this
statement. While the clauses of the Constitution
left the federal courts large duties and powers,
their ability to fulfil those duties and to exercise
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 47
those powers was not shown until a chief justice
of the first rank — John Marshall — was by his
almost unrivalled power of exposition able to enlist
the opinion both of lawyers and of laymen in
support of the judicial authority. It is to the work
of judges like Marshall and Story and Kent
that the actual position of the courts under the
American Constitution is mainly due.
But constitutional restraints of this kind, while
they strengthened the position of the property
holder in American politics, could not give him
permanent security in case public opinion de-
manded a change. For the Constitution itself can
be amended, and will be amended, when there is
a consensus of voters in different parts of the
country in favor of amendment. Alteration of the
Federal Constitution is a slower and more formal
thing than alteration of the law, or than alteration
of the constitution of any single state. But it
comes when there is a demand for it. Why did
not this demand make itself felt? Why did the
intensely democratic America of the nineteenth
century rest satisfied with constitutional provisions
regarding property right which were devised by
representatives of an aristocratic society in the
eighteenth under circumstances which strengthened
the hands of the conservatives?
48 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
The first cause for this persistence of property
right is to be found in the land policy of the
United States. We saw in the previous lecture
how the method adopted in the disposal of the
public lands promoted democracy. Side by side
with this effect, and in curious contrast to it, was
an equally marked effect in promoting industrial
conservatism.
The immigrant who settled in the western states
was offered two things: the vote, and the chance
of becoming a landowner. The fact that votes
were bestowed so freely upon large bodies of
settlers, many of whom were of alien race and
traditions, caused serious apprehension in many
quarters. Where so many of the individual
settlers were personally reckless and uncontrolled
by tradition, there was good reason to fear that
they would organize their governments in a reck-
less and untraditional fashion, and thus pave the
way for the abuse of democratic power. These
fears proved to be unfounded. The opportunity
to own farms in freehold made ambitious settlers
conservative. Men with a hundred and sixty
acres of land were not likely to pass laws which
would interfere with the rights of property, and
particularly of landed property. The prospect of
becoming landowners had the same sort of steady-
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 49
ing effect upon men who framed the constitutions
of new states in 1820 or 1830 that the fact of
already being landowners had upon the men who
framed the Federal Constitution forty years
earlier.
But Hamilton's policy of giving a home at a
nominal price to every bona fide settler, though it
was the most important single element in securing
the rights of property against measures of legis-
lative interference, was by no means the only
influence of the kind.
The immigrant found it easy to get land; he
found it hard to get capital. Natural resources
were present in abundance. The accumulated
supplies of machinery, fuel, and food which enable
man to utilize those natural resources effectively
were conspicuous by their absence. Each addition
to the capital of the community, however small,
represented a large addition to its productiveness.
The savings of the settlers and the investments of
citizens who lived in other states contributed alike
to this end.
Under these circumstances there was a tendency
to grant all possible privileges to those who had
capital for investment and to free them from
arbitrary restrictions of every kind. No community
would enforce a usury law which limited the rate
50 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
of interest to six per cent, when people who
borrowed capital at eight or at ten per cent made
large and legitimate profits over and above the
interest rate. The dangers lay in the opposite
direction. All through the period from 1830 to
1860 the western states of the Union tended to
encourage every sort of scheme which would
attract capital or the semblance of capital, without
much regard to its present or prospective sound-
ness. Banking laws were so loosely and carelessly
drawn that a board of directors could issue large
amounts of notes upon small amounts of reserve.
The bank notes, so long as they circulated from
hand to hand, appeared to increase the working
capital of the community; and any man who
undertook to examine too closely the nature of
the security that lay behind the note was regarded
as an unpatriotic member of society, who in an
excess of selfish over-caution questioned the validity
of a bill which he might just as easily have passed
on to the next man without inquiry.* Not until
* I have been told on what appears to be good authority
that the bank examiners of many of the western states in
the years prior to 1857 always made their visits of inspec-
tion in a certain order; so that a very small amount of gold
reserve, by being passed from bank to bank at the opportune
moment, could do duty in protecting a large number of
separate note issues. And when I asked one of my inform-
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 51
the time of the Civil War, when the United States
government needed to use the banks as a means
in carrying out its own fiscal policies, was this
state of things effectively remedied.
Among many means employed by the states of
the Union toward rapid development of their
resources, the joint stock company or industrial
corporation was most prominent.
The incorporation acts of the colonies at the end
of the eighteenth century were based almost
entirely upon English models. The American law,
like the English law of the same period, was
reluctant to allow people to avail themselves of the
principle of limited liability until there had been
a special examination of the circumstances by some
public authority. But as time went on this state
of things changed rapidly. There were in America
almost no large capitalists who could finance
industrial enterprises on an extensive scale. To
ants what would have happened to the bank if the bank
examiner had deviated from the regular routine, I was told
that he would probably have had to quit the country. It
is at any rate quite probable that the consequences of a \V
departure from the regular routine would have been as
disastrous both to him and to the banks as those which we
find when a teacher who has for a series of exercises called
his class in alphabetical order suddenly departs from this
practice without notice.
52 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
build factories or canals it was necessary to get a
large number of small investors united; and these
investors could not safely plan to unite their for-
tunes for the promotion of speculative enterprises
unless limited liability was assured them as a
matter of course. A few states, notably Massa-
chusetts, held to the principles of the older
English law. But Massachusetts, though better
provided with capital than most other parts of
the Union, found that this policy interfered with
its development, and that states which had more
liberal laws made more rapid progress in the
introduction of the necessary improvements.
Investors sought other localities for investment;
the growth of Massachusetts business was hindered ;
its character was not greatly improved. The
ultimate result in Massachusetts, as in other states,
was the passage of general laws under which any
group of individuals could associate their capital
for industrial enterprise and obtain the privileges
of limited liability from the state.
Some men were awake to the danger that might
arise from the growth of corporations. Andrew
Jackson was one of these men ; and his contest with
the Bank of the United States is a well-known
episode in American financial history. But such
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 53
fears as Jackson's were exceptional.* Most people
were too much occupied with the necessity of
getting capital for their several communities to
trouble their minds very much about what might
be done with the capital when it was once invested.
There was far more tendency to help the corpora-
tions by subsidies and special privileges than to
limit them by laws whose immediate necessity was
not very obvious. Charters were granted with the
utmost freedom by almost every state in the Union ;
and charter powers once given could not easily be
restricted.
The control of the government over corporations
was weakened, and the rights and immunities
of the property holders were correspondingly
strengthened, by two developments of constitu-
tional law whose effect upon the modern industrial
situation may be fairly characterized as fortuitous.
One of these was the decision in the celebrated
Dartmouth College case in 1819 ; the other was the
passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States in 1868.
I call their effect fortuitous, because neither the
judges who decided the Dartmouth College case
* Even Jackson's quarrel with the Bank appears to have
been based on personal grounds quite as much as on
constitutional ones.
54 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
nor the legislators who passed the Fourteenth
Amendment had any idea how these things would
affect the modern economic situation. The Dart-
mouth College case dealt with an educational
institution, not with an industrial enterprise. The
Fourteenth Amendment was framed to protect the
negroes from oppression by the whites, not to
protect corporations from oppression by the legis-
lature. It is doubtful whether a single one
of the members of Congress who voted for it
had any idea that it would touch the question
of corporate regulation at all. Yet the two
together have had the effect of placing the Ameri-
can industrial corporation in a constitutional
position of extraordinary vantage.
In 1816 the New Hampshire legislature attempted
to abrogate the charter of Dartmouth College.
Daniel Webster was employed by the College in
its defense. His reasoning so impressed the
members of the court that they committed them-
selves to the position that a charter was a contract ;
that a state, having induced people to invest
money by certain privileges and immunities, could
not at will modify those privileges and immunities
thus granted. Whether the court would have taken
such broad ground if the matter had come before
it thirty or forty years later, when the abuses of
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 55
ill-judged industrial charters had become more
fully manifest, is not sure; but having once
adopted this view and maintained it in a series of
decisions, the courts could not well abandon it.
Inasmuch as many of the corporate charters
granted by state legislatures had an unlimited
period to run, the theory that these instruments
were contracts binding the state for all time had
a very important bearing in limiting the field
within which a legislature could regulate the
activity of such a body, or an executive interfere
with it.
Again, by the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Federal Constitution the states were forbidden to
interfere with the civil rights of any person or
to pass discriminating laws which should treat
different persons unequally. This amendment,
passed just after the close of the Civil War, was
intended simply to protect the negro; to prevent
the southern states which were in the act of being
readmitted to the Union from abridging the rights
of the blacks. A number of years elapsed before
the probable effect of this clause upon the consti-
tutional position of industrial corporations seems
to have been realized. But in 1882 the Southern
Pacific Railroad Company, having been, as it
conceived, unfairly taxed by the assessors of a
56 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
certain county in California, took the position that
a law of the state of California taxing the property
of corporations at a different rate from that of
individuals was in effect a violation of the Four-
teenth Amendment to the Constitution, because a
corporation was a person and therefore entitled to
the same kind of treatment as any other person.
This view, after careful consideration, was upheld
by the federal courts. A corporation, therefore,
under the law of the United States, is entitled to
the same immunities as an individual; and since
the charter creating it is a contract, whose terms
cannot be altered at the will of the legis-
lature which is a party thereto, its constitutional
position as a property holder is much stronger in
America than it is anywhere in Europe.
This effect of the Fourteenth Amendment was
all the more important because it came at a time
when men's political conservatism had been a good
deal unsettled by the incidental consequences of
the Civil War.
The dominant power of the large landholders of
the South had been destroyed. These landholders
had remained more essentially an aristocracy than
any other social group in the United States; and
like most aristocracies, they had been essentially
conservative in all questions affecting property
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 57
right. When a body of men like these, as con-
spicuous for their political ability as had been the
Roman landed aristocracy two thousand years
earlier, was suddenly reduced from affluence to
poverty, an important bulwark for the stability of
property rights was taken away.
The Civil War had accustomed people to the use
of depreciated paper money, dependent for its
value upon the order of the government making
it a legal tender for the payment of debts. The
over-issue of United States treasury notes, or
greenbacks, had been so great that a dollar in
paper in 1864 was worth less than half a dollar
in gold. This had had a considerable effect on
wages and prices in every line of industry. It
had encouraged speculators to contract obligations
recklessly because they hoped to pay them in a
currency that would have become still further
depreciated. In districts where such speculators
were numerous the voters frequently urged their
congressional representatives to oppose any attempt
to restore specie payments after the war had come
to an end. For twelve years after its close debtors
and creditors contended against one another to
secure action by the United States government
regarding its treasury notes which should be favor-
able to their several interests. After it became
58 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
evident that no more paper would be issued, and
that the government could and would accumulate
a sufficient gold reserve to resume payment of its
notes in 1879, the debtors joined with the silver
mine owners to renew the coinage of the old silver
dollar, which was now worth less than the gold
dollar. The fact that the government was thus
constantly importuned to legislate against one
class of property owners for the benefit of another
prepared the public for the more radical suggestion
of legislation against property owners as a body,
in the interest of those who had little or nothing.
The tariff legislation in the years following the
Civil War had a somewhat similar history. During
the war all taxes had been high. There were heavy
excise rates which the home producer had to pay.
To give him some measure of protection the import
duty on foreign products which came to the
American market was made higher still. In the
years immediately following the war the excise
duties were abolished. The import duties, through
a disagreement between the Senate and the House
as to details, remained unchanged. The result was
that many industries were given the benefit of
extraordinarily high rates of protection which
nobody had ever really intended to bestow. Some
of the concerns called into being by this unwise
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 59
policy were dependent upon its continuance for
their very existence, while others more favorably
situated, which could have maintained themselves
with moderate duties or perhaps with no duties at
all, were enabled to make extravagant profits for
their stockholders. All this accustomed people to
the idea that prosperity was dependent on Acts of
Congress, rather than on the operation of intelli-
gent self-interest, and paved the way for the
advocate of more energetic state control over
property holders as a body.
Nevertheless, the tendency to rely on competition
remained very strong. The American people had
seen so much good that came from competition that
it was inclined to trust it unduly, and to feel that
where competition failed to protect the consumer
or laborer special legislation to regulate industry
would probably make matters worse instead of
better. Where one corporation had a monopoly
and abused it, it was thought that such monopoly
and such abuse would be only temporary. It was
confidently believed that unfair and exorbitant
profits would invite a rival corporation into the
field, so that rates would go down and abuses
correct themselves. Even in matters like railway
transportation, where monopoly was requisite in
the interest both of public convenience and eco-
60 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
nomical administration, people clung, in the face
of adverse experience, to the hope that competition
must somehow be made to act.
Some of this irrational belief in competition
existed in England;* but it was never quite so
strong as in the United States. There had always
been a great many lines of business in which Eng-
land did not tolerate the imposition of competitive
rates, while America accepted them as a matter of
course. Contrast the attitude of the two countries
in the matter of rentals for agricultural land.
The English landowner who deprived an old
tenant of possession because a new tenant was
ready and able to pay a higher rental, forfeited
social consideration. In America the landowner
was subject to no such restriction. If he rented his
land he was expected to get what he could. If he
* The history of English railway legislation furnishes
marked instances of this sort of opposition. From 1830 to
1850 Parliamentary committees were constantly trying to
arrange toll systems by which independent carriers could
have their trains hauled by the railway company, and
running powers under which different companies could
compete with one another upon the same line of rails.
The Eailway and Canal Traffic Act of 1854, though it was
based on careful study and was in many respects a well-
drawn measure, shows a most obstinate adherence to the
belief that the competition of different carriers on the same
line of rails must somehow be possible if the proper way
of enforcing it could be discovered.
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 61
sold it he was expected to sell it at the highest
price obtainable. As long as he did not rent his
property to people who would use it for immoral
purposes, or sell it to notoriously undesirable
citizens, the public would not condemn him for
seeking the best market he could get.
Again, contrast the conditions affecting the rate
of wages in the two countries. In England labor
was comparatively immobile. Migration from
district to district was the exception, rapid change
from one occupation to another a still rarer excep-
tion. The consequence was that wages in most
districts and in many occupations were to a large
measure fixed by custom. Even in those industries
where competitive wages might otherwise have been
paid, the effect of the trades unions was to limit
the output of the individual laborer, and therefore
to prevent him from competing with his fellows;
to substitute the principle of collective bargaining
for that of competition. In America the case was
wholly different. The mobility of the laborer was
very great. He went where he could get the
highest wages. If he was paid by the piece, as he
generally preferred to be, he worked as hard as he
could to increase his earnings. Other members of
the community looked on with satisfaction, because
he was doing all he could to increase productivity.
62 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
They were glad to have him do as much as he could.
They wished to have him dispose of his labor in the
best market. Under these circumstances competi-
tive wages were not only paid and earned, but
approved by society as a standard.
This indicates the fundamental reason why
competition was viewed with so much favor in the
United States. It put a premium on economic
efficiency. It tended to give the direction of indus-
trial affairs to the men who could obtain the largest
product with the smallest labor. This was vitally
necessary for the United States in the first half
of its history — more necessary, I believe, than to
any European country. For the immediate prob-
lems that lay before the United States at that time
were predominantly industrial ones. We had a
new country to develop. We had to attract
capital by every possible means. We had to
employ a moderate amount of labor and a very
scanty amount of inherited wealth in industrial
competition with the nations of Europe. This was
for a long time the only line in which we could
compete with them ; it was on our efficiency in this
particular that we based our claim to national
importance. We had no army or navy comparable
with that of European states. Our public service,
except in one or two departments, was rudimen-
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 63
tary. Our work in literature and in science showed
promise rather than performance. But in the
intelligent conduct of industry and the develop-
ment of inventions connected therewith, we had no
rival but England. England had the advantage
of accumulated capital and sound business tradi-
tions ; America had the advantage of a competitive
system that brought progressive men and methods
to the front and thereby equalized the struggle.
Small wonder that the patriotic American looked
with favor on an institution that enabled him to
hold his own in the industrial race. Small wonder
that a republic predominantly composed of strong
men should overlook the abuses of a system under
which the weak members suffered, when it con-
tributed so much to the standing of the nation
as a whole.
Ill
BECENT TENDENCIES IN ECONOMICS
AND IN LEGISLATION
"We saw in the last lecture why the adoption of
universal suffrage in the United States was not
followed by a movement in the direction of
socialism. Most of the voters expected to become
property owners; this made them regard any
restriction of the rights of property as undesirable.
Nearly all of them believed that free competition
would protect the community against extortion or
abuse by the property owner; this made them
regard such restriction _as unnecessary. These
were the sentiments and ideals which prevailed
among the great body of the American people
until the time of the Civil War in 1861.
The war did not weaken the belief in competition,
nor lessen the desire of the average American to
become a property owner; but it made people
more ready to see the functions of government
extended, and less conservatively tenacious of legal
tradition. Under stress of military necessity the
state and national authorities had indulged in a
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 65
good deal of arbitrary interference with personal
liberty and private property. People had become
so used to this sort of conduct on the part of
government officials that a great many things
which would have been resented as usurpations at
the beginning of the war were tolerated as ordinary
incidents of life at the end of it. The class that
would have been most inclined to resent such
usurpation — the large landowners of the South —
had been reduced from affluence to poverty.
While the conservative planters had been losing
their money, and with it a good deal of their
political power, enterprising and often reckless
speculators had fallen heir to their wealth and
influence.
When matters were in this condition a large
section of the community found its faith in com-
petition somewhat rudely shaken by what is known
as the Granger movement.
No states had done as much to attract outside
capital in the years preceding the Civil War as
those of the upper Mississippi valley. Land was
fertile, labor was efficient; opportunities for pro-
ductive industry of every kind were abundant.
The only disadvantages under which the region
suffered were lack of capital and remoteness from
market; and the people strove to overcome these
66 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
disadvantages by borrowing money and building
railroads with the utmost rapidity. Grants of
public domain were offered on a large scale to any
group of capitalists that would build a new line.
"Each community wanted railroads at any price.
Each railroad offered glowing inducements to
settlers. The result was that railroads and settlers
both moved too far west, and ran heavily in debt
to do it."
In England and in some of the older parts of
the United States railroads were built to accom-
modate traffic already existing. Cities were already
there. Markets were already there. The people
had had means of trading with one another before
the railroad came. The railroad merely facilitated
the process of exchange and increased the growth
and prosperity of the community. But in the
newer parts of America the railroads were built to
create traffic. Men went west to occupy land that
the railroads had made accessible. They had
frequently borrowed money to improve that land.
Unless they shipped their grain to market by rail
they had no power to sell their products or pay
interest on their loans. If the price of wheat in
the markets of Europe or the Atlantic seaboard
was high, the railroad could charge rates that
would pay interest on its bonded indebtedness and
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 67
leave the farmer enough to meet his obligations
also ; but if for any reason the price fell, one or the
other must go to the wall. If the railroad kept its
rates high the farmers suffered. If it reduced its
rates its own security holders suffered.
This was the dilemma which the communities in
the upper Mississippi valleys faced in 1869 and
1870. Up to that time the European demand for
grain had been so large that prices were well
maintained in spite of the increased American
wheat acreage. When prices fell railroad rates
were reduced to a very low figure at competitive
points; but they were kept at a high figure at
intermediate points, where the shipper had but a
single railroad to deal with and was forced to use
that or see his grain go to waste. Free competition
helped the city but not the country.
The railroads claimed that it was necessary for
them to make their local rates high; that if they
did not they would have to go out of business.
The farmer was by no means satisfied with this
answer. He thought that if the railroads could
afford to do business cheaply for the city they
could afford to do it cheaply for the country; and
in any event he needed to pay his interest as much
as they needed to pay theirs. In the years from
1869 to 1877 the farmers' organizations, or granges,
68 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
insisted that their representatives in the legislature
should compel railroads to make cheap rates for
country districts.*
HOAV could this result best be accomplished?
This was the question on which there was no con-
sensus of opinion. The radicals favored govern-
ment ownership of railroads as the best solution
of the problem. But the civil service of the United
States in 1870 was in such bad condition that very
few men, whatever their prepossessions in favor of
government ownership as a theory, believed that
the United States was in a position to put that
theory into effect. Public office was regarded as a
reward for partisan activity. Efficient men were
turned out of their places in order to make room for
less efficient candidates who had rendered political
* This organized attempt to control railroad rates by
representatives of farmers' organizations is shown as the
Granger movement. It is noteworthy as having aroused
the attention of the American people to the fact that there
was a railroad problem which free competition would not
solve; and as having been the first considerable attempt to
use representative government as a means of limiting the
power of property owners to manage their business in their
own way. Strictly speaking, it was not an attempt to
attack the rights or interests of property owners as a class.
It was an attempt to limit the rights of one set of property
owners, the railroad security holders, in favor of another
set of property owners, the farmers of the Mississippi
valley.
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 69
services, sometimes of a very questionable charac-
ter, to help the dominant party to triumph at the
preceding election. It was proverbial that it cost
the government two or three times as much as it
cost a private individual to get any piece of
work done, and that when the work was done it
was not well cared for or efficiently managed.
To entrust an agency like the railroad, on which
the industrial life of the country depended, to
such unfit hands as those of the United States
officeholders in 1870, was to say the least a
dangerous experiment.
Reformers who were not quite so radical advo-
cated laws prescribing the rates which railroads
could charge — the tariff itself being usually ar-
ranged by a special commission appointed for the
purpose. Such laws were in fact passed and such
commissions appointed in a large number of states.
The most thoroughgoing experiments of this kind
were made in the upper Mississippi valley. The
commissions usually took the rates which railroads
charged at competitive points as a standard of
what the railroads could afford, and then reduced
the rates at intermediate points to a corresponding
figure per mile. The railroads protested that this
was confiscation ; that an equal mileage system was
wholly inapplicable to railroad business; that the
70 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
rates at competitive points did not pay a fair
share of the fixed charges ; and that the application
of this standard to other parts of the system would
reduce them to bankruptcy. The courts, however,
upheld the right of the commissions to prescribe
railroad tariffs; quoting the words of Lord Hale
De Portibus Maris to the effect that when any
business was in fact a monopoly the state had the
right and duty to fix prices, and holding that the
capitalists had invested their money subject to
this disability.
This was regarded as a heavy blow to the security
owners. It apparently deprived them of their one
safeguard against reckless legislation. But a more
powerful force than that of the courts was working
to protect the investor. As soon as the capitalists
found that certain states would not allow them
to earn interest on railroad investments they
refused to invest more money in those states. No
new roads were constructed; the equipment that
wore out was not replaced. The rates at which
wheat was carried to market remained low; but a
great deal of wheat did not get carried to market
at all, because the physical means to transport it
were lacking. The legislatures could prevent high
charges, but they could not prevent deficient ser-
vice; and deficient service was a worse evil than
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 71
high charges. Under these circumstances the
farmers found themselves compelled to allow the
railroads fair profits. The very men who had been
most active in passing rate laws from 1870 to 1874
were readiest to repeal them in 1878.
While these experiments were being tried in the
West, another and more permanent solution was
devised in the East by far-sighted railroad men
like Albert Fink and publicists like Charles
Francis Adams. These men pointed out that
while the temporary interests of investors and
shippers were often different, the permanent
interests were very nearly or quite the same.
They believed that the American law should
be more nearly modeled on that of England;
providing for publicity of accounts and rates,
forbidding preferences of every kind, and directing
the railroads, in consultation with state railway
commissioners, to prepare tariffs by which the
permanent interests of the investors and of the
shippers should both be secured. On the whole,
the states that adopted this plan, which was known
as the Massachusetts system, got better railroad
service and dealt with railroad abuses more effect-
ively than those which tried to prescribe tariffs
of charges. When the first national measure of
railroad regulation, or interstate commerce law,
72 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
was passed in 1887, it was inspired mainly by the
Massachusetts idea. Although the Act was the
result of a compromise, its general tenor was
conservative rather than radical.
But about this time people discovered that there
were other industries besides railroads in which
competition did not operate. The telegraph ser-
vices of the country were being consolidated and
monopolized as completely as the railroad service.
The same thing was true of the telephone, of
electric light and power, and of the gas and water
supply of various cities whenever these were
controlled by private corporations. Nor was this
condition confined to the so-called "public utili-
ties." The system of monopoly had extended
itself to productive enterprise of almost every
kind. The storage and refining of petroleum was
centralized in the hands of the Standard Oil
Company. Other industries were controlled and
monopolized by corporations less widely known to
the public but not less effective and often much
more arbitrary in their action. No longer could
we regard the railroad as an exception to a general
law, to be dealt with by exceptional means. The
very existence of the competitive system of industry
was threatened. The question seemed to be not
whether competition could be made to work uni-
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 73
versally, but whether it could be made to work
at all.
With regard to public services like gas or water
or telephone communication, people quickly ac-
cepted the idea that they must almost necessarily
be monopolies, and took measures accordingly.
The existence of two rival gas or water companies
obviously involved unnecessary expense on account
of the duplication of pipes. The maintenance of
two rival telephone companies caused less obvious
but more burdensome expense, because everybody
had to pay subscriptions to two different exchanges
and had the added inconvenience of looking up
addresses in two different books.
Having once squarely recognized the impossi-
bility of enforcing competition in these lines, the
problem of control was comparatively simple. The
various states frankly admitted that monopoly was
inevitable, and appointed public utilities commis-
sions with power to fix rates which should be fair
both to investor and to consumer. But it was
difficult to deal with the ordinary forms of pro-
ductive industry in this way. It would have been
impossible to select a commission sufficiently intel-
ligent in its judgment and encyclopaedic in its
knowledge to fix the prices of all sorts of market-
able commodities. Nor did the public wish to have
74 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
things managed in this fashion. Whatever might
happen with railroads or telephones, people wanted
factories and stores to be competitive.
Contracts in restraint of trade and other arrange-
ments to prevent competition have always been
treated by the common law as against public policy
and therefore unenforceable. But many of the
states of the Union went farther than this, and
made such combinations misdemeanors and pun-
ished them accordingly. In the year 1890 Congress
passed a federal law of this kind, commonly known
as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared
illegal and criminal, punishable by fine or impris-
onment or both, every contract or combination, in
the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in
restraint of trade and commerce among the several
states or with foreign nations, and any monopo-
lizing or attempt to monopolize any part of trade
or commerce among the states.
It is a little difficult to know just how the framers
of the Act of 1890 expected it to be carried out.
It was explicitly stated during the debates in
Congress which preceded its passage that it was
not intended to apply to railroads, for these were
already regulated by the Act of 1887 under the
reserved police power of the state. Probably half
of those who voted for the Sherman Act supposed
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 75
that it would remain a dead letter — like the man
who, when asked for his views on prohibition, said
that he was in favor of the law and against its
enforcement. The Republicans were in power at
the time, and the Republicans were friendly rather
than hostile to organized capital. But the Republi-
can party managers were frightened by the public
indignation against monopolies, and thought that
they could save the next presidential election by
the passage of a rather sweeping law which they
were confident that their friends could evade if
they wished to.
They did not succeed in carrying the election;
but when the Democrats came into power in 1893
the law still remained unenforced. Other issues
occupied the public mind — tariff reduction, the
currency, relation to European powers. Curiously
enough, the first important cases decided under
the Sherman Act dealt with railroads, to which
its framers had not intended it to apply. In spite
of the presence of the law upon the statute books,
the years from 1898 to 1901, which marked the
recovery of business after the long depression that
had preceded it, witnessed a development of
combinations of producers which for number,
variety, and over-capitalization far surpassed any-
thing which America had previously experienced.
76 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
For a time it seemed as though nothing would
be done to restrict the power of these combinations.
The years named constituted a time of general
prosperity and of advancing wages. No one —
manufacturer, farmer, or workman — was inclined
to quarrel very seriously with a system which
appeared to contribute to his own prosperity. But
with the advent of a period of trade depression in
1903 people at once assumed a more critical atti-
tude toward combinations of capital; and they
have continued to maintain that attitude down to
the present time. During the last decade the
United States has witnessed a movement in the
direction of state socialism which, though less
thoroughgoing than the corresponding movements
in Germany or France or even England, is never-
theless very different in character from anything
which occurred in the century preceding.
The reasons why no such movement developed
in the nineteenth century were explained in the
previous lecture. They may be summed up in a
single sentence. Where every man of energy and
enterprise expected to become a property owner,
the community was not inclined to favor legislation
that restricted the rights of property. Of course
there were exceptions, and numerous ones. All
through the later years of the century there was
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 77
a strong humanitarian movement in favor of
protection to the weak. There was a growing
sentiment, which found expression in state laws,
that children must be kept out of factories until
a reasonable age ; that hours of labor, particularly
for women and minors, must be duly regulated;
that unsanitary or unsafe modes of doing business
must be stopped; and that the crowding of popu-
lation in the tenements of our large cities must be
regulated as effectively as possible. Permanent
labor commissions, to devise and enforce such
legislation, were organized in a large number of
the states of the Union; and a national Depart-
ment of Labor with the same ends in view was
established in 1888.
Side by side with this humanitarian movement
among property holders there had been an increas-
ing amount of agitation for government control
of industry among the workmen themselves. "With
the development of immigration from eastern
Europe there was a growing proportion of laborers
in the United States who did not understand or
appreciate the individualistic traditions of an
earlier generation and had neither the expectation
nor the ambition to become property owners and
take their places in the ranks of the capitalist
class. As the public land of the United States was
78 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
used up, the opportunity of securing a freehold
grew less attractive. As manufacturing establish-
ments increased in size, the prospect of reaching
the headship of such an establishment and becom-
ing an independent employer of labor grew more
remote. Under these circumstances a kind of
antagonism of classes grew up in the latter part
of the nineteenth century which had not been
possible a generation or two earlier. Many active
and intelligent workmen preferred to take their
chances of becoming leaders of their own class in
a struggle against the capitalist, instead of trying
to pass from the ranks of the laborers to those of
the employers.
But this growth of class antagonisms, though it
increased the dangers of industrial conflict, did
not of itself produce any constructive changes in
the social order. The Knights of Labor were able
to organize strikes and boycotts on a large scale
in 1885, and again in 1893. They were able to
secure the passage of arbitration laws in various
states, culminating in the Federal Act of the year
1898. But they were not able, either alone or in
conjunction with the leaders of the humanitarian
movement, to carry the country with them in any
organized effort to overthrow the competitive
system or seriously impair its dominance. The
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 79
efforts of the laborers as a class to secure their
rights, or what they deemed to be their rights,
aroused antagonism in other equally important
classes of the community, particularly among the
small farmers. What modern sociologists call the
creation of class consciousness has done more harm
than good to the labor movement in the United
States. To accomplish their ends laboring classes
must work with other classes, not against them.
The attempt of the Knights of Labor to boycott
everybody that did not obey the dictates of their
organization resulted after two years in a virtual
boycott of the Knights of Labor by the community.
The employment of foreign socialistic literature to
excite workmen against the traditional laws and
institutions of America has on the whole done
much more harm to those who used it than to those
whom it was intended to injure. Affiliations
between the more radical wing of the American
labor leaders and the International Workers of the
World have been a source of weakness to the labor
movement rather than of strength.
The most serious mistake of the American labor
leaders of the nineteenth century, from the stand-
point of practical politics, was that they ignored
and antagonized the farmers.
In the year 1879 Henry George published his
80 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
remarkable book on Progress and Poverty, which
attracted wide attention not only in America but
throughout the whole civilized world. It was
brilliantly written; it had great loftiness of pur-
pose. It promised the country deliverance from
the worst economic evils under which it labored.
Its sales ran up into the hundreds of thousands.
While its conclusions were not accepted by the
thoroughgoing socialists, brought up in the school
of Marx, they were popular with nearly all Ameri-
can workmen who were actively engaged in labor
agitation. It was George's fundamental principle
that all necessary reforms could be secured by
taxing the unearned increment of land to its full
amount. This conclusion was for obvious reasons
exceedingly unpopular with landowners of every
kind; with the small farmer or the owner of a
little home no less than with the large proprietor.
The fact that the labor party committed itself so
generally to an endorsement of Henry George's
views made it impossible for that party to be
successful in a democracy where a great number
of the voters lived on land which they owned or
hoped to own.
A quarter of a century later all this had changed.
In 1903 the main attacks of the labor men were
no longer directed against land ownership, but
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 81
against organized capital. The alignment of
parties was therefore quite different. The smaller
landed proprietors, in the city and in the country,
had changed sides. The owners of farms and
homes did not regard the attempts to control large
combinations of capital as attacks upon themselves,
but rather as measures conducive to their interest.
Two main causes had combined to produce this
attitude of hostility on the part of the farmers
toward the organizations of capital. In the first
place, the farmers believed that combinations of
capitalists, by suppressing competition, were en-
abled to charge more for their goods than they
otherwise would have received, and that the men
who bought goods from the manufacturers or
services from the transportation agencies were by
this means unfairly taxed ; and in the second place
they felt a strong and somewhat unreasoning
jealousy of the "money power" which was behind
these organizations.
Prices of all goods and services had risen very
rapidly in the years from 1899 to 1903. The profits
of industrial monopolies during the same period
had also been very large. It was therefore natural
that the buyers should attribute the increase of
price to the existence of monopoly, and should
regard the profit as having been obtained mainly
82 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
by unfair measures of extortion from the public
which competition would have prevented. As a
matter of fact, this view was only partly correct.
The period from 1899 to 1903 was one when prices
rose in nearly all industries, whether monopolized
or competitive. This was a necessary result of the
increase in gold production in the closing years
of the nineteenth century, followed by the sudden
expansion of banking credits at the beginning of
the twentieth. Every man who was engaged in
the production of goods or services which took
time — every one, in short, who had invested capital
at the beginning of this period to get returns at
the end of it — got more than a normal rate of
profit, because currency conditions enabled him to
sell his goods at higher prices than anybody
expected. The prosperity of the large corporations
was partly due to this cause; it was partly due to
economies of method and organization which they
were able to effect as a result of their combination ;
and it was partly also due to their power to fix
prices without fear of competition on a large scale.
But it was natural enough that this last element
had exaggerated importance in the public mind.
People saw that the cost of living had greatly
increased; they saw that many articles which had
been sold at low prices under competition in 1899
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 83
were sold at high prices under combination in 1903 :
and they naturally thought that the difference was
due to the suppression of competition.
Even more potent than their dislike for high
prices was their jealousy of the money power
which was supposed to be behind these combina-
tions. The South and West have an inherent
distrust of New York. They believe that the
financial institutions in and around Wall Street
exercise a baleful influence upon the business of
the country as a whole.* I shall not try to discuss
how far there was any real antagonism of interests
between the West and the East in these matters.
There was at any rate a feeling of antagonism;
and many things happened to accentuate that
feeling in the opening years of the twentieth
century.
Chief among these was the development of inter-
locking directorates. In combining the manufac-
turing and transportation interests of the country
on a large scale, the banks of New York and other
eastern cities were extremely active. Sometimes
the bankers themselves took the initiative; some-
* " If a man finds a discrepancy between the face value
of a share of stock and the amount actually paid in by the
subscriber," said a prominent and high-minded New York
banker, "the West at once believes that the difference was
stolen, and probably in Wall Street ! ' '
84 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
times the manufacturers who wanted to make a
combination went to the bankers to secure their
help. But in either case the financiers of New
York and Boston and other eastern cities were
active agents in the work of combination and the
exchange of securities incident thereto. As a con-
sequence the banks had a large representation in
the directorates of the new concerns. The same
man might be a director of twenty, fifty, or even
a hundred large combinations; not because he was
familiar with their work from the operating side,
but because he could give them financial strength
and support. Under these circumstances the people
who were not included in such combinations — the
small farmer, the salaried official, the wage-
earner — assumed that all these great enterprises
were managed from one common center, and that
the purpose that controlled their management was
gain for the financial world at the expense of the
industrial one.
These views were reflected in the public press.
Journals of every kind — daily, weekly, and
monthly — published articles which stimulated this
suspicion by fair means and foul. Gradually the
people came to believe that there was an alliance
between the money power in Wall Street and the
conservative element in the halls of Congress.
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 85
There were plausible grounds for this belief.
There has always been a certain amount of unwise
congressional legislation in behalf of various indus-
trial enterprises, and a great deal of improper
employment of lobbyists to secure such ends. All
this was made the subject of attack; and it was a
kind of attack that was peculiarly effective. When
President Cleveland in 1888 tried to show the
farmer that the high protective tariff injured the
economic interests of the country, the farmers did
not listen to his arguments. But when it was
suggested twenty years later that the tariff had
been devised in the interest of a money power
which the farmer hated, the suggestion at once
found ready credence.
Dislike of high prices and jealousy of the money
power thus combined to put the small property
owners on the side of those who had no property,
rather than on the side of those who had large
property. It was in this respect that the indus-
trial movements of 1903 differed from those of
1883 or 1873. In the year 1873 the farmers were
agitating for state control, but the laborers were
not. In the year 1883 the laborers were agitating
for state control, but the farmers were not. The
year 1903 for the first time saw these two large
elements ranged on the same side.
86 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
The effect of this has been seen both in the law
and in the politics of the country. The decade
from 1903 to 1913 has witnessed the passage of a
number of measures which twenty years ago would
have been regarded as distinctly socialistic in tenor.
Where state control already existed it has been
made more strict. The Interstate Commerce Law
of 1887 was supplemented by the Elkins Act of
1903, the Hepburn Act of 1906, and the Mann
Act of 1910. These measures had the support of
conservatives who saw the necessity of bowing to
public opinion, as well as of progressives who had
helped to create that opinion. Nor was the atten-
tion of Congress confined to rate regulation. A
Department of Commerce and Labor was estab-
lished in 1903, with powers much wider than those
of the old Labor Bureau. A federal Employers'
Liability Act was passed in 1906. An Hours of
Service Act went into effect in 1907. And mean-
time the experiments of individual states in these
matters went far beyond what was done by
federal authority.
But of even more consequence than the passing
of new laws was the increased activity shown in
enforcing old laws. By the mere action of public
sentiment the Department of Commerce and Labor
in the Federal Government was given an impor-
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 87
tance which its sponsors hardly anticipated. By
the same force of public opinion, statutes which
at first had been little more than dead letters were
brought into active use as agencies of industrial
control. When the federal arbitration Act of 1898
was originally passed it was regarded both by its
advocates and by its opponents as a thing of slight
consequence — a piece of machinery which could be
invoked only in occasional instances. Today public
opinion virtually compels railroad corporations
doing interstate business to submit their disputes
to federal arbitration. Of still greater significance
is the history of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of
1890. In the first twelve years during which this
law was on the statute books, only two or three
decisions adverse to industrial combinations were
rendered, and these were not of great importance.
But in the years following 1903 prosecutions and
decisions under the Sherman Act followed one
another in rapid succession. A climax, though
not an end, was reached in 1911, when the United
States Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of
two of the largest and strongest industrial
combinations in the country — the Standard OilV
Company and the American Tobacco Company^'
Nor was this movement confined to industrial
combinations. Railroad companies were made to
88 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
feel the effect of the new policy and the disposition
of the Supreme Court to extend its application to
an increasing range of cases; a disposition which
reflected the progress of public opinion in the
country as a whole.*
While all political parties in the United States
claimed credit for the principles of the Sherman
Act and professed a wish to enforce it, the Demo-
cratic party was most consistently active in this
direction; and the triumph of the Democrats at
the presidential election of 1912, whatever may
have been the other causes which contributed
thereto, represented a victory for those who
desired a rigid enforcement of the laws against
organized capital and a return to a system of
smaller industrial units.
But though the action of legislatures and courts
during recent years has been satisfactory to the
public from a political standpoint, it has not been
so from an economic one. The dissolution of large
companies has not been followed by a reduction
in charges. On the contrary, it has been attended
in many instances by an increase. This increase
is partly due to the general rise of wages through-
* The student of American constitutional history will find
this progress set forth in detail in F. N. Judson, The Law
of Interstate Commerce.
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 89
out the country ; partly to the increased cost of the
methods of doing business imposed by recent Acts
of Congress and of the several states; and partly
also to the fact that the work of separate concerns
is in many respects less economical than that of a
large combination. Manufacturers who have been
forced to dissolve their combinations have raised
their prices in order to cover this increased cost.
Whatever good enforced competition may have
done, it has not brought the expected reduction in
the expense of living. Dissolution appears to have
hurt the consumers more than the investors.
With railroads the case has been different.
When railroad expenses are increased either by
wage arbitrations or by new governmental require-
ments, the companies are not allowed to raise their
charges in order to meet the loss unless the Inter-
state Commerce Commission gives its consent; and
this at best involves prolonged delay. The financial
results to the railroads arising from their inability
to raise rates have already been very grave, and
the results to the public are beginning to be
equally bad. Not only has there been loss of
dividends and interest, but there has been decided
reduction in quality of service, diminished demand
for iron and steel products, and widespread dis-
90 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
tress among large numbers of men thrown out of
work in transportation and allied industries.
This state of things seems likely to grow worse
instead of better in the immediate future.* It has
become clear that the enforced reintroduction of
competition by authority of the government does
not do for the public in the way of service, economy,
and rapid investment of capital what the old-
fashioned automatic competition did for our
fathers. In order to get adequate service and low
rates, inducement must be afforded for added
investments of capital. This inducement does not
exist today, and the country is suffering from the
consequences. The immediate future will un-
doubtedly see a reaction. There will be a move-
ment either in the direction of greater freedom
to the capitalist or of more intelligent supervision
on the part of the government. The conservative
wing of the Republican party hopes for the former ;
the progressive wing desires the latter.
In a rather remarkable passage of the Politics
Aristotle says that the permanence of a common-
wealth or organized body of citizens requires the
reconciliation of two somewhat inconsistent aims.
The laws must correspond to the wishes and the
* I leave this sentence as it was uttered in May, 1914.
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 91
judgment of the great body of freemen; the con-
duct of the business of the nation must be in the
hands of men who are more skilled than the great
body of freemen can be, and who will probably
do things for the community as a whole which are
not understood or approved at the time.
During the first century of the American
republic the first of these results was secured, at
the sacrifice of the second. The means on which
the framers of the Constitution relied in order to
obtain expert conduct of public affairs — the system
of indirect election, for instance — proved futile for
the purpose. During the greater part of the nine-
teenth century the only way to secure skilful man-
agement of public business was to keep it out of
the hands of the government and put it into the
hands of the property holder. Many things which
European nations did through government agencies
were left undone in America. Many other things
were left to private capital.
As long as there was even a semblance of free
competition, the American nation as a whole was
well content to have most of its business done by
private capital because in that way it could be done
efficiently and progressively, while under the exist-
ing conditions of the American civil service
government management would have meant waste
92 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
and stagnation. Now that competition is found
to be impossible in many of the important lines
of business, the public is not so well content to
leave things in private hands and is willing to
experiment with state control, even at some sacrifice
of efficiency. But our experiments in this line are
proving very costly; more costly than the general
public even yet appreciates. The solution of the
problem will not be reached until the public
demand for state control of industry and for
trained civil service go hand in hand.
America must learn the overwhelming cost to
the consumer and the public of inexpert control.
We have made some progress in that direction since
1870 ; but we are far from having reached the point
which a great nation needs to attain. Outside of
the army, the navy, and the judiciary, the standard
of administrative intelligence in America is lower
than it is in Europe, and the public appreciation
of the need of administrative intelligence a great
deal lower. High positions in the public service, in
spite of many honorable exceptions, are still given
as political rewards. High positions in private or
corporate business, with some dishonorable excep-
tions, are still given as rewards for efficiency.
Until these conditions are altered and the public
appreciates expert work in the offices of state,
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 93
industrial control in the United States is likely
to remain in the hands of the property owner, on
such terms as will give adequate inducement for
the saving of capital and adequate guarantees for
its intelligent use.
POLITICAL METHODS OLD AND NEW
IV
THE GROWTH OF PARTY MACHINERY
It is the intent of every nation, whatever its
form of government, to have that government
administered in the public interest. It is the per-
petual danger of every governing body — monarchy,
aristocracy, or democracy — that its powers will be
used, not for the public interest but for the
interests of certain individuals or classes.
Each form of government is liable to its own
peculiar perversion. A true monarchy is a govern-
ment by a king for the benefit of the people. When
he governs for the benefit of himself and his friends,
he perverts monarchy into tyranny. A true
aristocracy is a government by the wealthy and
intelligent classes for the benefit of the people.
When they begin to govern for their own benefit
they pervert aristocracy into oligarchy. A true
democracy is a government by the whole body of
citizens for the benefit of the people. When for
any reason whatever they pursue some less complete
or more shortsighted end, they pervert democracy
into demagogy. These dangers are as serious today
98 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
as they were when Aristotle called attention to
them two thousand years ago.
It was for the purpose of avoiding these dangers
that many publicists recommended a sharp sepa-
ration of the executive, legislative, and judicial
departments of the government. If one group of
men controlled public business, another made the
laws, and a third supervised their administration,
it seemed unlikely that any one of the three groups
could manage the affairs of state for its own selfish
purposes. This division of the powers of govern-
ment, with the resulting system of " checks and
balances," was a favorite device of English states-
men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It was warmly commended by Montesquieu. It
found expression in American colonial charters.
It was carried out quite fully in the Constitution
of the United States. The framers of that instru-
ment hoped that these checks and balances would
prevent the use of the powers of government in
behalf of any single dominant politician or group
of politicians.
To a large extent they were successful. They
created a government, strong enough to do the
work required of it at home and abroad, which has
lasted for a century and a quarter without becom-
ing either a tyranny, an oligarchy, or a demagogy.
PARTY MACHINERY 99
They enabled us to avoid the charted rocks and
shoals on which other ships of state have been
wrecked. But there was an uncharted shoal that
they did not avoid — a form of perversion of
popular government of which they knew nothing,
and which has been a serious and increasing
menace to our institutions. This is the perversion
of party.
The word "party" has two quite distinct V
meanings. It may be an organization whose '
primary object is to promote certain measures and
policies, and which seeks to place its members in
office as a means to that end; or it may be one
whose primary purpose is to secure office for its
leaders and rewards for their followers, valuing
measures and policies according to their utility
in promoting that result. The former represents
the legitimate function and use of party ; the latter,
its terribly frequent perversion.
"Writers like Elihu Root or Abbott Lawrence
Lowell habitually think of parties in the first of
these two senses. According to Mr. Root, the
essential thing which the party system does is to
organize public opinion so that the important
issues can be squarely presented to the citizens at
successive elections. The casting of a vote is but
the last and often the least important part of the
100 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
citizen's political activity. If each man went to
the polls on election day to vote for the candidates
he regarded as best or for the measures that he
deemed most important, the votes would be so
scattered that nothing could be done. Preliminary
organization is needed to make this vote effective;
to determine what measures interest a large part
of the citizens instead of a small part, and what
men will command confidence as advocates of those
measures. It is by their influence within such
parties in helping to make up the statements of
principle, even more than by their vote at elections
in determining which party is to prevail, that
intelligent men contribute to the work of demo-
cratic government. This view of Mr. Root has
been illustrated and in some respects supple-
mented by the pregnant phrase of President
Lowell in which he compares politicians with
brokers. ''The process of forming public opinion
involves bringing men together in masses on some
middle ground where they can combine to carry
out a common policy. In short, it requires a species
of brokerage, and one of the functions of politicians
is that of brokers. Perhaps it is their most
universal function in a democracy."
But the actual party organizations as we see
them at the present day seldom conform fully
PARTY MACHINERY 101
to the descriptions of Mr. Root or Mr. Lowell, and
often depart from them very widely. It frequently
happens that the chief purpose of parties is to
utilize the offices of the country as a means of
power and influence and livelihood for the party
leaders. They seize upon principles and embody
them in the party platform, not on account of the
public importance of these principles in securing
national prosperity, but on account of their private
importance in attracting votes to the organization.
The main object of such a party is the control of
the government for its own purposes, rather th*
the use of the government for what it deems
be the needs of the people. When a party hi
taken this shape the politician is no longer a1
broker in opinions; he is a broker in offices, in
appropriations, in privileges.
Any one who looks at the history of party
politics in the United States in recent years will
see to how great an extent this second meaning
of the term "party" has supplanted the first. I
propose in this lecture to trace the development
of this perverted conception of party and to show
the evils which have resulted from it. In the next
lecture I shall discuss some of the remedies for
this evil which have recently been introduced or
advocated. In the concluding lecture I shall try to
102 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
show what changes in our political life are needed
for the successful operation of these remedies.
If the men who in September 1787 signed the
proposed constitution of the United States had
returned to the scene of their labors in September
1912, they would have been astonished to find that
only two alterations had been made in their
original work. By the Eleventh Article of Amend-
ment to the Constitution, jurisdiction over suits
brought against a state by citizens of other states
or of foreign countries had been taken out of the
federal courts. By the Twelfth Article the presi-
dential electors, in voting for two persons, were
compelled to specify on their ballots which they
named for president and which for vice-president.
This was all. The other so-called Amendments to
the Constitution were supplements rather than
amendments. They dealt with things outside of
the original scope of the instrument. Some of
them were trivial in their effects, some were of
far-reaching importance; but whether trivial or
important, they did not alter the machinery of
federal government which was provided in the
Constitution itself.
Since the date named there have been two
PARTY MACHINERY 103
further changes in our constitutional machinery
which are of somewhat greater importance than
those that I have named ; one removing restrictions
upon the levy of direct taxes by federal authority,
and the other requiring that United States senators <
be elected by the people of the several states'
instead of by their legislatures. Yet even when
these changes are taken into account, the alteration
is small in comparison with the size and importance
of the body of the instrument.
To this permanence of constitutional machinery
I doubt whether the history of any other active
and growing state can offer a parallel. Certainly
no democracy of ancient or mediaeval times can
show anything like it, nor can any contemporary
state of Europe point to a similar experience.
During a period in which the Constitution of the
United States remained virtually unaltered, Eng-
land had by successive acts changed almost beyond
recognition the manner of election of one house
of Parliament and the range of powers of the
other; France had made at least seven radical
breaks in the continuity of her government, with
corresponding changes in her constitutional provi-
sions; the Holy Roman Empire had gone to
destruction, and had gradually been reconstructed
into a new Germany and a new Austria; Russia
104 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
had made vigorous and partially successful at-
tempts to reorganize its political system. It has
been and is a matter of perpetual wonder that a
group of men with limited experience of public
affairs, chosen somewhat hurriedly and hampered
at every stage by the necessity of compromise in
order to get any constitution at all, should have
created so enduring a structure.
But while the machinery of the Constitution has
remained unaltered, the working of that machinery
has changed radically. If James Madison came
back today he would find President and Congress
and courts elected or appointed in the same ways
and clothed with substantially the same powers
that were contemplated in the debates of the
Constitutional Convention. But side by side with
the familiar names and authorities of these offices
he would find a number of unfamiliar names and
authorities of equal importance. He would hear
of platforms and primaries, of caucuses and
nominees, of conventions and bosses. He would
be confronted with a strange set of powers and
restrictions, nowhere mentioned in the Constitu-
tion, but coordinate or at times superior in prac-
tical importance to the powers and restrictions
which the Constitution itself provided. Most of
these new names would mean little or nothing to
PARTY MACHINERY 105
his mind. The few that he did understand, like
"nominee," would seem like appalling importa-
tions from the effete monarchies of Europe. He
would find himself in a country whose legal forms
of government were familiar but whose extra-legal
customs and habits of government were wholly
strange.
The anomaly itself is startling; but the reasons
for the anomaly are quite simple. The framers
of the Constitution had arranged with great care
and skill the mode of election of public officers and
the duties of those officers after they were chosen.
They had not attempted to arrange in any way
the mode in which these officers should be nomi-
nated or the pledges that might be exacted of
them before they were chosen. A remarkable
instance of this is seen in the provisions regarding
presidential electors. It was the obvious expecta-
tion of the Constitutional Convention that the
members of the electoral college would exercise
independent judgment in the selection of candi-
dates for president and vice-president, instead of
merely ratifying a nomination which had been
prepared for them in advance. It took but four,
or at most eight, years to show how futile was that
expectation. There may have been a few people
who were willing to give the electors discretionary
106 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
power to use their best judgment in voting for a
president. The great majority wished to know in
advance the names of men for whom the several
electors were going to vote. They insisted that
this matter should be settled before the electors
were chosen instead of afterward. They wished
their representatives in the electoral college to be
pledged to vote for the candidate they liked best.
This change was gradually followed by another
of the same character. The old theory of repre-
sentative government was that the citizens in each
district would send to the legislature a man in
whose judgment they had confidence, in order that
he might discuss with other members the questions
that came before that body and then vote in the
way that he thought wisest. This was what the
framers of the Constitution expected. But the
people were not satisfied with this way of doing
things. They had ideas of their own on public
questions. They wanted to know which way a
candidate for Congress was going to vote on the
subjects that were likely to come up for discussion.
They often preferred to cast their ballots for a
second-rate man who would reflect his constituents'
opinions rather than for a first-rate man who
might look at things differently. Measures, not
men, was the cry. Not content with having their
PARTY MACHINERY 107
electors instructed in advance as to their vote for
president, they insisted on having their congress-
men pledged in advance as to the legislative
measures which they would support.
This change took place more slowly than the
other, because it is relatively easy to determine
what names are coming before the presidential
elector for his choice, and relatively hard to
determine what measures are coming before the
congressman for his vote. Nor did it come with
equal rapidity in all parts of the country. The
change was slower where the old-fashioned aristo-
cratic traditions were stronger. It was slower in
the East than in the West, slower in the South
than in the North. It is only within the present
generation that it has become substantially com-
plete. In my undergraduate days it was still a
debated question whether a congressman should
vote according to his own judgment or that of his
constituents; and on a memorable occasion in 1878
Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, one of the last and best
of the political leaders of the old school, cour-
ageously defied both the caucus of his party and
the public opinion of his district by voting as he
thought best. But as a general rule of political
practice our congressmen as early as 1850 found
themselves deprived of the right of independent
108 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
judgment on main issues almost as completely as
were the presidential electors.
But who should nominate the candidates or
define the issues to which congressmen should be
pledged 1
The actual work of nominating candidates for
president was at first done by the members of
Congress at the last session preceding the election.
The Federalists did this in 1796; the Democrats
followed their example in 1800. For twenty years
thereafter the members of the electoral college,
whatever their personal preference, found them-
selves pledged in advance by an obligation, which
had no constitutional sanction but which was too
strong for them to break, to vote for the man that
had been named by the members of their own
party in the previous Congress.
This way of doing things was not liked by the
people. It was felt to be against the spirit of the
Constitution. But as long as there was active
opposition between Federalists and Democrats, the
tactical advantages of having a strong party
organization were so great that no one ventured
to break away from the custom. When, however,
the old parties began to dissolve after the close of
the War of 1812 public sentiment against nomi-
nation by congressional caucus made itself increas-
PARTY MACHINERY 109
ingly felt; and the year 1824 witnessed the death
of this extra-constitutional agency.
The downfall of the caucus was regarded as a
great triumph for constitutional principles. The
whole theory of the Constitution demanded that
the executive and legislative powers be kept
separate. The attempt of members of Congress
to name the men for whom people should vote
for president was a violation of this principle ; the
abandonment of that attempt was hailed as a
triumph of good government. The example that
was set in Congress was rapidly followed if not
actually anticipated in the legislatures of the
several states. Up to 1820 candidates for the
governorship were frequently and perhaps habitu-
ally nominated by a caucus of the representatives
of the party in the previous legislature. In the
decade that followed the caucus gave place to the
nominating convention.
All this movement was, outwardly at least, an
effort to conform to the principles of the Consti-
tution. It is, however, very doubtful whether it
contributed to good government. It had the effect
of transferring the power of presidential nomi-
nation from the congressmen to the men who
nominated the congressmen. It did not destroy
the connection between the two branches of the
110 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
government. It simply substituted a subterranean
connection for an open and public one. Previously
men had "pulled wires;" afterwards they "laid
pipe." The framers of the Constitution had tried
to prevent the executive and the legislative
departments of the government from influencing
one another unduly. They succeeded in preventing
the responsible officers of the government from
exercising that influence, but by the very act of
so doing they transferred it to less responsible
hands — to the hands that directed the machinery
of nomination.*
From the very first there had been astute
observers who saw how easy it was for a small and
unscrupulous group of men to control nominations
in either party and restrict the choice of the voters
to candidates of their own liking. In this, as in
other byways of American politics, Aaron Burr
was a pioneer. Burr worked in many states and
by many means ; but the most enduring monument
of his political sagacity was Tammany Hall.
When the Society of Saint Tammany was founded
in 1789 its purposes were chiefly social and
* This idea has been worked out with great care by H. J.
Ford in his Rise and Growth of American Politics. Much
valuable material on the subject is contained in Gustavus
Myers' History of Tammany Hall.
PARTY MACHINERY
111
patriotic. Under Burr's tutelage it became a
dominant power in party politics. The leaders
understood the theory as well as the practice of
the means they used. "The nominating power,"
said Teunis Wortman in 1809, "is an omnipotent
one. Though it approaches us in the humble
attitude of the recommendation, its influence is
irresistible. Every year's experience demonstrates
that its recommendations are commands; that
instead of presenting a choice it deprives us of
all option."
The lesson taught in New York had been learned
by politicians of other cities and states. The
dethronement of the congressional caucus in 1824
simply opened the way for the application of
Aaron Burr's methods to the affairs of the nation
as a whole.
In this widened application of the principles of
Tammany Hall, Martin Van Buren was the leader.
The effect of this change upon the character and
position of the presidential office was soon seen.
Down to the time of Andrew Jackson every
president had been a man with a policy of his
own. From the time of Van Buren until the Civil
War, every president was to a greater or less
extent a creature of the party organization. The
seven occupants of the White House who preceded
112 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Van Buren were men of distinction. The seven
who followed him were not. So far was the con-
vention system from expressing the popular will
that it prevented a man like Henry Clay, idolized
by his party and admired by his opponents, from
realizing the object of his ambition. Bitterly did
Clay exclaim at last that he was made the candidate
of his party for president whenever it was going
to be defeated and was deprived by chicanery of
the nomination whenever the election of the Whig
candidate was certain.
But how was it possible for a few politicians to
control conventions and nominations, in defiance
of the wish of the majority of their party ? I can
only reply as the pessimistic Scotchman replied to
the minister who assured him that God was
stronger than the devil. "The devil, " said the
Scotchman, "makes up for his inferior strength
by his superior activity." Men who could not
themselves have been elected to high public office
could by activity and trickery control the machin-
ery which nominated men for office. Both state
and nation regarded nominating conventions as
something extra-constitutional. The result was
that the law had for many years very little control
over the election of delegates or the proceedings
of delegates after they were elected. In cities like
PARTY MACHINERY 113
New York the professional politicians made use
of barefaced fraud and sometimes of actual force
to achieve their ends. In other places they were
content with trickery. In still others they found
a skilful use of the arts of persuasion sufficient.
But whether the contest was decided by force or
by fraud, by trickery or by persuasion, the pro-
fessional politician and his henchmen under him,
acting all the time and thoroughly organized, were
in these early days at least more than a match for
a much larger body of independent citizens who
had their own business to attend to and could
devote but moderate time to the devious ways of
politics.
What rewards were offered to the men who
engaged in this sort of subterranean political
activity ?
A few gained high office, but only a few; of the
men who have occupied the presidential chair since
the time of Van Buren, not more than two have
been active in the details of political management.
A somewhat larger number of our American poli-
ticians have been so constituted that they were
content to do the work for the mere enjoyment of
the power it gave them. It was reward enough
for them to be in control of the affairs of their
city or state, whether the public recognized their
114 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
dominance or not. But to the majority of the
leaders and to an overwhelming majority of their
followers, some more tangible compensation was
necessary. If they gave their time to politics they
must be paid for it. If they were successful in
placing their candidates in office they expected to
be rewarded for their success; — out of the public
treasury, if necessary.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century
almost the only chance for such reward was found
in municipal offices and municipal contracts. The
mayor, the board of aldermen, and even the judges,
of a city had it in their power to give valuable
favors. The fundamental principle on which
Tammany appealed for support all through the
nineteenth century was that membership in the
Society and work for its candidates was a means
to establish a claim for such favors. A municipal
official, said Tammany, owed his primary obliga-
tions and duties to the part of the community that
nominated and elected him. His duties to the rest
of the community were of little or no importance.
The same theory was applied to a greater or less
extent in almost every city. The possibility of
using state offices as political rewards developed
more slowly; but with the establishment and
development of public works on a large scale, the
PARTY MACHINERY 115
patronage and contracts and franchises which were
at the disposal of New York or Pennsylvania
became pecuniary prizes; prizes of great value to
a politician who could nominate a governor or a
legislator that was weak enough to be dependent
upon him. By the year 1825 the prostitution of
state as well as municipal offices to party purposes
had become a familiar spectacle.
National politics were kept clean for a longer
period. Until the beginning of Andrew Jackson's
administration federal offices had not been regarded
as a field for the emolument of the professional
politician. There had been instances where corrupt
men had misused national offices, but they were
exceptions and were regarded as exceptions. Un-
fortunately, just at the very moment when the
overthrow of the caucus system left the field free
for the intervention of the professional politician
in national politics, two events occurred, one
chargeable to the Whigs and the other to the
Democrats, which distinctly lowered the character
of both legislative and executive branches of the
national government. In 1828, Congress passed a
tariff law — the tariff of abominations, as it was
popularly called — which was in many of its pro-
visions so clearly a sacrifice of the general interests
of the country to the special interests of individual
116 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
districts that Congress seemed for the time being
to have made politics rather than statesmanship its
ideal. In the years immediately following, the
President removed a large number of federal office-
holders, although they had done their duty prop-
erly, in order to be able to give their offices to his
political supporters. In the forty years before
Jackson's election there had been but seventy-four
removals from office. In the first year after his
election there were two thousand. Jackson himself
was perfectly frank as to the character of this
transaction. He was ready to accept and act on
Marcy's phrase, "To the victor belong the spoils."
Patriotic and public spirited though he was, he
failed to see the evils which would result from
the adoption of the principle that public office was
a reward for partisan service.
The control of the federal offices as a prize of
successful activity gave the party leaders a sub-
stantial addition to the rewards that they were
able to offer their followers. It was not merely
the immediate money value of the positions that
counted. The incumbent of a post office or a
collectorship, no matter how it was obtained, had
a certain social standing which was more valuable
than the salary of the office. It was a visible result
of successful endeavor, and one of which he was
PARTY MACHINERY 117
proud. Moreover, the control of offices was a
prize whose value was enhanced as the country
expanded. Each decade has seen a growth in the
number and importance of our public functionaries.
The aggregate of salaries paid by the government
has increased much faster than the population.
The aggregate influence of the officeholders has
increased even faster than their salaries. For over
half a century the administrative offices of the
United States, outside of the army, the navy, and
the judiciary, continued to be treated as rewards
for party services; and even within these three
departments political influence made itself felt to
the advantage of the politicians and their friends
and to the detriment of the public.
Thus was established, in spite of the Constitution,
that connection between legislature and executive
which the framers of the Constitution had sought
to prevent. The administrative officers of the
government had received their places as rewards
for their services to the party organization. The
members of the legislative branch owed their
nomination and election to office to the same
consideration. The executive could not dictate to
the legislature, nor could the legislature dictate to
the executive; but each was bound to the nomi-
nating power which was behind them by ties of
118 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
gratitude for the past and of apprehension for
the future.
And the list of men who were thus bound to the
party organization did not end with the office-
holders and legislators. Every one who had
benefited by a partisan measure was interested
to keep the men that had passed it in power.
Each valuable franchise or lucrative subsidy which
was granted enlisted the recipient in the service
of the party which gave it to him. The less the
grant could be justified on grounds of public
policy, the more abject was his dependence on the
politicians for its continuance. The gravity of
this danger in national politics did not become
fully apparent until after the Civil War. Prior
to that time there had been a good deal of unwise
special legislation by the states and some by
Congress; but it had seldom taken such a shape
that it could become a party issue. The years from
1850 to 1857 saw a great many wasteful grants
of public land in aid of railroads; but this was an
abuse which Democrats and Republicans had vied
with one another in promoting, and for which
North and South were equally responsible. Neither
organization and neither section could point the
finger of scorn at the other.
But the course of tariff legislation after the
PARTY MACHINERY 119
Civil War was such that large financial interests
became concerned to keep the Republican party in
power. During the war the North had imposed
heavy internal revenue taxes on all manufacturing
industries ; and it had at the same time laid duties
on imports considerably higher than the internal
revenue taxes. The amount of protection actually
given was not represented by the whole duty, but
by the difference between the duty on things
produced abroad and the internal revenue tax on
the same things produced at home. After the close
of the war nearly all the internal revenue taxes
were abolished. It was expected that duties on
imports would be correspondingly reduced at the
same time. Measures to this effect were introduced
in 1867. They failed of passage, not because there
was any difference of opinion on the general policy,
but because the Senate and House could not agree
on details.
With the internal revenue tax abolished and the
duty on imports maintained, many industries
enjoyed an amount of protection which had never
been intended. The immediate result was a great
apparent prosperity in those particular lines of
industry. The secondary result was in many
instances overproduction and disaster. Which-
ever way the law worked, the representatives of
120 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
the business in question found themselves in pos-
session of plausible arguments against a change.
"Will you destroy an industry which employs so
many men at high wages?" said the prosperous
ones. ' ' Will you add to the burdens of an industry
which is already in trouble?" said the unpros-
perous ones. The fact was that the abnormal
degree of protection had created an artificial set
of industrial conditions, and that when those
conditions were removed some one was bound to
suffer.
The alignment on the question of tariff reduction
was not at first a strictly partisan one. The
Pennsylvania Democrats were for the most part
protectionists. The Western Republicans were in
many instances free traders. But as time went
on the Republican party became more and more
committed to the maintenance of the tariff in
substantially its existing shape; or, more accu-
rately, to the principle that duties should not be
reduced unless the representatives of the protected
industries themselves approved. Under such cir-
cumstances the Republican party organization
could count on the support, not merely of the
officeholders it had rewarded or the congressmen
it had nominated, but of the industries to which
PARTY MACHINERY 121
it had given protective duties that were or appeared
to be exorbitant.
In a somewhat similar way the silver mining
interests became affiliated with those who controlled
the councils of the Democratic party, and more
than once brought the monetary system of the
country into grave financial peril as a means of
promoting their own particular industry. I do
not mean that all or a majority of those who
advocated free silver coinage were consciously
intending to sacrifice the interest of the whole to
that of the part. Most of the Democratic leaders
had persuaded themselves that free silver would
be good for the country as completely as the
Republican leaders had persuaded themselves that
a high protective tariff was good for the country.
It is extraordinarily easy for a man to become
convinced that a thing that will put him and his
friends in public office is good for every one else.
This was what constituted the most dangerous
feature of the whole situation. For under in-
fluences like these, good men as well as bad lent
themselves to that perversion of the party system
which made them brokers in privileges rather than
brokers in opinions and led them to govern in the
interest of special classes rather than in the
interest of the whole body politic.
THE EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE
CONTROL
In the previous lecture I explained in some
detail the causes which led to an abnormal develop-
ment of party government in the United States.
All will admit that this development has been
attended with grave evils. Our cities have been
made the prey of political organizations with
rather notorious frequency. Our states have at
times fared no better. In the administration of
our national government there have been fewer
open scandals, but there has been much dangerous
partisanship.
Though people have recognized the evils, they
have not recognized how deeply they were rooted
in our system of government ; and when they have
tried to correct them they have usually been con-
tent with superficial or partial remedies which did
not go to the heart of the matter. There have been
frequent movements for reform in individual cities
and states. There has been a wave of agitation
against machine control of politics which has
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 123
spread over the country within the last few years.
But the great majority of the proposed reforms
deal with symptoms and manifestations of the evil
under which we suffer, rather than with the under-
lying causes that produce that evil. They offer
palliatives rather than remedies.
The first and simplest palliative for the misuse
of party government is to put the other party into
office. ' ' Turn the rascals out ! ' ' is the popular cry
whenever any extraordinary breach of public trust
is discovered in city or state. This is undoubtedly
a good policy as far as it goes. If politicians think
that they are going to be turned out of office when
they are found to have abused public confidence,
it will make them more careful to avoid flagrant
or notorious misuse of their power. This penalty
therefore has great use as a deterrent. As a
remedy its value is less clear. When the repre-
sentatives of one party are turned out the repre-
sentatives of another party come in — sometimes
immediately, sometimes after a brief spasm of
nonpartisan government. The old political ma-
chinery is at hand for the use of the other party.
The old temptations are there, and the old oppor-
tunities are there. The public has simply sub-
stituted one political machine for another. It is
better off, in so far as the new incumbents are
124 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
frightened by the fate of their predecessors; it is
worse off, in so far as the new incumbents are
hungrier than their predecessors. Whether the net
result will be good or bad depends upon the cir-
cumstances of each individual case. As a general
rule, however, the policy of turning the rascals out
while leaving the organization of the body politic
unchanged has an outcome which has been aptly
described in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of
St. Luke:
"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man,
he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and
finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house
whence I came out.
"And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and
garnished.
"Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other
spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter
in, and dwell there : and the last state of that man
is worse than the first. ' '
Some who see the futility of substituting one
party machine for another try to go one step
further back, and strike at the sources of the
corruption by penalizing the men who have bene-
fited by bad government. "Punish predatory
wealth!" is the cry of these reformers. It was
this that gave force to the Granger movement in
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 125
1870, when the farmers of the upper Mississippi
valley were aroused by the misuse of the powers
of the railroads to take the matter of legislation
into their own hands and pass drastic laws con-
cerning rates. It is this same cry which makes
itself heard in both Democratic and Progressive
parties today.
But the punishment of predatory wealth is an
easier thing to promise than to perform. The
wealthy depredators almost always manage to turn
their profits into hard cash months or perhaps years
before the public is aroused to any serious action.
By this time the only persons that can be reached
are the small investors, who have had no part in
the ill-gotten profits and whose only sin is that
they have been too easily deceived. Alas for these
small investors! "Better a wrong victim than
none at all," says the public; "we do not know
who is to blame, but we know that somebody ought
to suffer;" and the politician takes his choice
between sacrificing the interests of the investor as
a means of securing his own popularity, or levying
blackmail upon the investor as a price for not
sacrificing him.
For predatory poverty is just as dangerous a
thing as predatory wealth — a little better, perhaps,
in that it has the interest of a larger section of the
126 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
community in view; a good deal worse, in that its
acts are habitually blinder and the amount of aim-
less destruction larger. Over and over again it has
happened that the politicians, by destroying the
profits of capital in obedience to a wave of popular
feeling, have interfered with the development of
the whole community for many years to come.
This was the case in the upper Mississippi valley
at the time of the Granger movement. Laws passed
in 1873 and 1874 hurt the railroad investors by
depriving them of their profits; but they hurt the
shippers and the general business interests of the
states far more, by preventing for five years that
investment of capital in railroads which was needed
to furnish adequate transportation for farm
products. This experience seems likely to be
repeated at the present day, when arbitration
boards are constantly compelling railroads to raise
their wages and the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission is constantly refusing to allow them to raise
their rates. The effects on transportation indus-
tries in discharge of men and curtailment of
service are already deplorable, and seem likely to
grow worse in the immediate future.*
* The last two sentences are left as they were written in
the spring of 1914. Since that time the Interstate Commerce
Commission has taken action allowing the railroads certain
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 127
The policy of turning the rascals out means a
change of hands that hold the reins of party
government. The policy of punishing predatory
wealth means a change in the direction in which
those hands drive us. Neither of these changes
goes far enough to free us from the political evils
under which we suffer. Neither of them solves our
problem as a whole. They are emotional remedies
rather than practical ones. They serve to punish
an individual offender — sometimes the right one,
sometimes the wrong one; they do not serve to
reform the evil inherent in our political system.
There are, however, several measures which have
been tried in the past that modify the system itself
in certain essential particulars and are offered by
their advocates as practical remedies for the dis-
eases of the body politic. These measures may
be grouped under five heads: 1. The separation
of national from local issues. 2. A nonpartisan
civil service. 3. The substitution of direct for
indirect methods of legislation. 4. Direct nomi-
nation by the people. 5. Assurance of direct
responsibility to the people by a system which
allows the voters to recall an official who for any
needed increases of rates; and the whole industrial outlook
has been thereby improved.
128 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
reason ceases to carry out the views of those who
elected him. The first two of these have been fully
tried; the third, measurably so. The fourth is
still in the experimental stage ; the fifth has hardly
passed beyond the status of a project. I propose
to give a brief analysis of each of these remedies,
to show what it has accomplished or is likely to
accomplish, and what indirect evils and dangers,
if any, it brings in its train.
First in order of historical development is the
separation of national from local issues. This has
been so generally accepted as a principle by think-
ing men of the present generation that it is hard
for some of us to realize how recently it originated,
or how radical a proposition it seemed fifty years
ago.
In my own boyhood it was assumed that every
practical man belonged either to one party or to
the other, and that under all ordinary circum-
stances he voted the whole party ticket, national,
state, and local. In aggravated cases he might
" scratch" an objectionable candidate without
losing the right to consider himself a reputable
member of the party and to ask such favors of
the party manager as reputable members might
expect. But to vote for the candidate of the other
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 129
party was an extreme of independence which
relatively few ventured to practice.
When this feeling prevailed it was almost
impossible to prevent party managers from nomi-
nating bad men for local offices at any time when
national issues were important. The more funda-
mental the national questions involved, the surer
did the political managers feel of being able to cast
the full party vote for local candidates, whether
good or bad. " Matters of national policy," they
would say to the voters, "are of so much greater
moment than anything which a state official can
accomplish within his own limited sphere of good
or harm that you are bound by the strongest
considerations not to weaken the party as a whole
by the threat to bolt a part of the ticket." The
Constitution had attempted to separate as far as
possible the activity of the national government
from that of the separate states and cities. The
effect of the party organization was to bind them
together.
Loudest in their cry for the obligations of party
regularity were the politicians of New York City.
But it was in New York City first of all that the
reaction in favor of independent voting on munici-
pal issues developed. In the years from 1867 to
1871 the Tweed Ring had plundered the public
130 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
on so gigantic a scale that all good citizens felt
compelled to unite to overthrow it. In spite of
this union of good citizens, the Ring felt so secure
in its position as a representative of democratic
regularity that it openly defied public opinion
inside its own party as well as outside. In 1871
the issue between party regularity and good
municipal government was clearly drawn; and the
side which stood for good government won
decisively. The defeat of the Ring was followed
by the indictment and imprisonment of its leaders.
It was an object lesson of the first importance in
the possibility and the necessity of independent
municipal voting.
The lesson was taken to heart in other cities
besides New York. The election of 1871 was the
beginning of a radical change of sentiment regard-
ing the obligations of party regularity in connec-
tion with municipal affairs. Slowly but surely
people came to the conclusion that the mayor of
a city was first and above all things else a man
engaged in conducting a number of important
lines of business for the public benefit; that the
primary question was whether he was likely to be
honest and efficient in doing the business in hand;
and that his attitude on the tariff or the currency,
however important in determining whether you
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 131
wished to send him to Congress, had little or no
importance in determining his fitness to be mayor.
Forty years ago these were novel arguments. The
man who advanced them was considered an idealist.
People admitted their force as theories, but only
acted upon these theories on rare occasions, when
the party leaders had been detected in some
peculiarly atrocious attempt to sacrifice the public
interest to that of their friends and associates.
Today they are accepted in most parts of the
country as practical foundations of good local
government. While it is still true that the voters
in a large number of towns prefer to vote the
straight party ticket, local as well as national, the
manager who presumes too much on this preference
learns to his cost how slight is the hold of party
regularity in local issues. Many cities, by adopting
the commission form of government, have tried to
make municipal politics permanently independent
of party organization; and the advantage of
accomplishing this result has been so great as to
outweigh the serious disadvantages, both in theory
and in practice, which attend the operation of the
commission system.
This change in sentiment has been rendered
much more effective by two recent changes in
political practice.
132 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
The first of these is the separation of the dates
of local and national elections. In the old times
it was customary in most parts of the country to
vote for national, state, and local candidates on the
same day, if not on the same ticket. This of itself
made the sentiment of party regularity stronger
than it is at an election where people vote for local
officers only. The importance of the national issue
made the local issues look relatively unimportant.
The politicians took full advantage of this; and
they also developed complex systems of trading
votes in which members of both organizations
worked hand in hand to sacrifice the independent
nominees of each party and elect those who were
subservient to their respective machines. Separa-
tion of the dates has made it practicable to
separate the issues and has limited the opportuni-
ties for trading votes. The old argument about
regularity is far less effective when local and
national elections come on different days.
Another change which is bound to work in the
same direction is the election of United States
senators by the people.
In the old days it was never possible to elect a
legislature on the basis of state issues in a year
when a United States senator was going to be
chosen. You might approve the position of the
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 133
Republican party in your state on canals or on
prohibition, or on economical management of the
state treasury, or any one of a dozen local issues.
But if you wanted to see a Democrat elected to the
United States senate you had to vote for a Demo-
cratic candidate for the state legislature, even if
he was bibulous, extravagant, unprogressive, and
averse to building the canals you wanted. His
chief business, after all, was to elect a United
States senator. A legislature has to elect a senator
twice in six years. In those states, therefore, which
elected their legislatures for two years at a time,
two out of every three legislatures were chosen on
national issues and only one of the three on local
ones. This gave the leaders in party politics a
stronger hold over nominations and elections to
the state legislature than they would otherwise
have possessed, and had an effect on the conduct
of state politics and state business far more serious
than has generally been recognized. Prior to the
last amendment to the Constitution, complete
separation of state and national issues in politics
was impossible. Today it rests with the voters
themselves whether they will make it possible or
not.
It may be said of the separation of local and
national politics that it is unqualifiedly good in
134 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
principle. It, however, stops far short of being
a complete solution of our problem; because the
prizes of either national or local politics, taken
separately, are sufficiently large to furnish remu-
neration to those who can control the nominating
machinery in either field. The separation deprives
the politicians of one effective weapon in forcing
machine candidates on an unwilling electorate.
But they have other equally effective ones left at
their command.
The second means of preventing the perversion
of party government has been the series of meas-
ures known as civil service reform, imposing
certain rudimentary tests of fitness upon candi-
dates for office and preventing the removal of
officeholders for political reasons.
When Marcy and Jackson advanced the theory
that federal offices ought to be given as a reward
for political activity, they had no idea of the
damage that they were doing. The force of
federal officeholders in 1830 was small in number;
the problems with which they had to deal were
simpler than is the case today. There was some
plausibility in the arguments used by Jackson
and his followers as to the danger of allowing
these officeholders to form an official class of
permanent appointees, removed from the mutations
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 135
of politics. But the practical working of the spoils
system was far worse than any one could have
anticipated. If people received and held offices
as a reward for political activity, it meant that
they were encouraged to serve their party at the
expense of the government. This not only led to
the appointment of men to positions for which they
had no special training or fitness — an increasing
evil as the service became more complex — but it
encouraged many of them to neglect their duties
and to connive at the plunder of the public
treasury by men who were influential in the party.
The $75,000,000 of revenue frauds discovered in
the second administration of President Grant were
but the logical consequence of the Jacksonian
principle that the spoils belong to the victor.
Organized agitation for reform of the federal
civil service began in 1867. This movement was
at first made the object of ridicule. But it
gathered strength when people saw what glaring
frauds were being perpetrated under the old
system. The danger of regarding appointment to
office as a matter of party favor was strikingly
brought home to the people in 1881, when Guiteau
assassinated President Garfield as a matter of
private revenge for his failure to get the position
he wanted. Even then it is doubtful whether the
136 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Republican politicians who were in control of
Congress would have allowed any serious change
in a system which contributed to their power and
to their friends' profit, except for the strong
indications that the Democrats were going to be
successful in the presidential election of 1884.
Fearing that they would lose control of the federal
offices in any event, the Republicans in 1883 made
a virtue of necessity and passed a bill establishing
a classified civil service with preliminary exami-
nations and permanence of tenure. At first only
fourteen thousand offices were included in this
classified service; but successive presidents have
made use of the authority given them to extend
the scope of the provisions of the Act of 1883, so
that about three fifths of the four hundred thou-
sand federal employees are now subject to its
provisions. In local administration the reform
has not made corresponding progress; but a few
states and a considerable number of municipalities
are now following the example of the federal
government.
Civil service reform, like independent municipal
voting, is thoroughly good as far as it goes. Its
direct effect in promoting good government is,
however, limited. It applies almost entirely to the
lower ranks of the service. It does not apply to
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 137
the positions that give a man power to dominate
the policy of the country. The really important
federal offices are included for the most part in
the forty per cent of unclassified places, not in the
sixty per cent of classified ones. Those who have
observed the working of the system most carefully
believe that the chief good that we have accom-
plished is an indirect one. We have broken down
the theory that offices are to be regarded as spoils.
The people who continue to view public office in
that light no longer venture to avow their heresies
openly.
The two measures thus far described restrict the
power of the politicians by limiting the patronage
at their disposal. The three others go more to the
heart of the matter, and strive directly to curb
the power of party organizations in the making of
laws, the nomination of candidates, or the action
of officials after they have been nominated and
elected.
The first of these means is the system of direct
legislation by the people; either through the
medium of state constitutions or by the agency
of the referendum and the initiative.
The popular distrust of legislation by representa-
tive assembly dates from about the middle of the
nineteenth century. Down to that time it had been
138 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
supposed that this was the natural method, and
in fact the only good method, for making laws in
a large commonwealth. In a small city all the
citizens can attend an assembly or town meeting,
can hear measures discussed, and can vote upon
them after full deliberation. The vote will repre-
sent more or less adequately the public opinion of
the community. But in a large city this is
difficult; and in a state or nation it is obviously
impossible. The system of representative govern-
ment was devised to meet this difficulty. It allows
people in each district to select the man whom
they regard as best fitted to act as their proxy.
These representatives can meet with one another,
to discuss the proposed measures of common con-
cern and decide what is best for the community;
and their votes, taken after such discussion, ought
to represent the general sense of the state or nation
in the same way that the vote of the town meeting
represents the general sense of the borough or
village. Such was the theory of representative
government as it was held with little question until
about 1850.
Such also had been the practical working of the
system in England in the days when Parliament
was establishing its supremacy. Down to the
seventeenth century the English Parliament was
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 139
essentially a place where representatives of dif-
ferent districts and different interests met in order
to shape their opinion intelligently on the affairs
of the kingdom. It created a national public
opinion in the same way that a town meeting
creates a local public opinion. There was no other
adequate agency for this purpose. There were few
newspapers. There was little opportunity for
public information of any kind regarding the
conduct of national and international affairs. Had
it not been for the necessity of calling Parliaments
in order to levy taxes, the king might have taken
advantage of this public ignorance to undermine
the liberties of different parts of the kingdom
separately. The country gentlemen who went to
Parliament found out what was going on. They
deliberated with representatives from other parts
of the kingdom and made plans for common action.
When they went home they told the people who
had sent them what new measures were being
proposed or enforced and what they ought to think
about them.
The system of public law which was framed by
the English Parliaments was an expression of the
public opinion thus formed, and derived its essen-
tial force from the fact that the sentiment of the
nation was behind it, rather than from the fact
140 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
that it had been discussed by two houses, one of
which was a representative body. But it was
natural enough that people who compared the
public law of England with that of France or
Austria and saw how much better it was should
overvalue the machinery that produced it, and
seek the cause of the excellence of English law not
in the intelligence of English public opinion but
in the details of its method of legislation. Montes-
quieu himself fell into precisely this error.
The men who framed our state and federal
constitutions made the same mistake as Montes-
quieu, and were much concerned to follow in detail
all the forms of English Parliamentary organiza-
tion. We tried to establish two legislative chambers
in every important political unit. It is because
Parliament had a House of Lords as well as a
House of Commons that so many of our munici-
palities, scattered all over the nation, have a board
of aldermen as well as a court of common council.
But it gradually appeared that these assemblies
did not fulfil the function which the theory of
representative government assigned them. They
were not places where the best men from each
community went to make up their minds about
public questions. The representatives were sent
with more or less specific instructions. They were
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 141
chosen for the purpose of putting into effect cer-
tain ideas and principles already expressed in the
party platform. The telegraph and the printing
press have deprived parliaments and congresses of
their function as agencies for the making of public
opinion. It was almost always formed before they
assembled.
But while the deliberative power of such assem-
blies has been diminished, their law-making power
has very greatly increased. The authority of
Parliament in the sixteenth century was preca-
rious; even in the seventeenth it was by no means
unquestioned. A parliamentary statute or ordi-
nance which did not have the will of the people
behind it was a plaything for the king to toy with
as he liked. Today an Act of Parliament in Eng-
land or of Congress in America, even when
distasteful to the majority of the people, is a
thing which cannot easily be disobeyed or ignored.
This change of conditions, by which parliamen-
tary assemblies ceased to make public opinion and
began to make laws which were independent of
public opinion, has rendered modern representative
government, in its practical working, a very dif-
ferent thing from what the theorists have contem-
plated. It has made it worth while for the
professional politician who is pursuing selfish ends
142 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
of his own to see that the men elected to positions
in such a body are those that he can influence, and
that the statement of principles which the public
has exacted of them is such as he can approve.
Both of these opportunities have been given him
by his control of the nominating convention. If
it is completely under his hands he can dictate
both the candidates and the platform. If it is
partially under his hands he can at least prevent
the nomination of candidates of outspoken inde-
pendence and the adoption of platforms with
inconveniently frank declaration of principles. In
fact, it matters very little what the platform says,
so long as the candidate is Mr. Pliable and not
Mr. Obstinate. There are numerous precedents in
American politics for ignoring the pledges of party
platforms. In fact, the whole situation reminds
one of the experience of an Ohio politician who
tried to view the scenery of the Alleghany moun-
tains from the platform of a Pennsylvania railroad
train, instead of staying inside the car, as the rules
required. When the conductor called his attention
to the Company's rules, he asked sharply what a
platform was made for if not to stand on. The
conductor closed the discussion by saying, "You
are a practical politician, Mr. Blank. You should
know that a platform is not made to stand on; a
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 143
platform is made to get in on ! " Of course it may
happen that the political leaders, in their anxiety
to make the candidate suit the organization, may
fail to suit the people and therefore be defeated
at the polls; but inasmuch as there is usually
another party organization on the opposite side
working for subservient candidates and machine-
made platforms, this danger is not always so great
as it appears.
That part of the work of legislative bodies which
first caused popular dissatisfaction was their
liberality — to use no harsher word — in granting
valuable franchises to the politicians and their
friends without adequate regard for the protection
of the public. Even in the decades preceding the
Civil War this practice aroused much adverse
criticism; and in the years immediately following
the war the power was so abused that constitutional
provisions were adopted by many of the states
which were directed specifically against this evil.
It became customary to require corporations to be
organized under general laws and to restrict or
prohibit the grant of special charters and the
special privileges which usually attach thereto.
This was the first step in limiting legislative
powers. A second followed almost immediately
thereafter. A new form of state constitution
144 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
became fashionable, much longer and more explicit
than the old, which included a great deal of matter
that was not in a strict sense constitutional law
at all. A constitution, in the old and accredited
meaning of the word, prescribes the powers and
functions of the different departments of the
government. These new-fashioned constitutions
included a great many general laws regarding the
conduct of corporations and individuals. When-
ever a law of this kind was incorporated in a state
constitution it had the effect of limiting the power
of the legislature. If a great body of public and
private law was thus made part of the constitution,
this meant that the legislature had no authority
to make any fundamental changes in the law
except by the slow process of constitutional amend-
ment, which required a submission of the proposed
changes to a vote of the people.
These long American constitutions were severely
criticised by European publicists, who said that
we did not know what the word "constitution"
really meant. This criticism was in some respects
wide of the mark. The reason why our constitu-
tions were made so encyclopaedic was not that the
people of the United States had wrong ideas as to
what should be put in a constitution, but that they
were unwilling to leave the legislatures free to vote
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 145
on certain important subjects, and therefore incor-
porated their views on these subjects in the
constitution as the easiest way of tying the
legislature's hands.
Within recent years they have found a more
direct means of accomplishing the desired result
by the introduction of the referendum. Under this
system a legislature submits proposed changes in
law to popular vote to determine whether they
shall become effective or not. This mode of legis-
lation originated in Switzerland. After many
experiments in the different cantons it was incor-
porated into the Swiss federal constitution in 1874.
Two decades later Switzerland supplemented the
referendum by the adoption of the initiative, or
right of proposal of laws by popular petition.
Some of our states have for many years applied
the principle of the referendum in a limited way.
Certain classes of legislative acts, such as the
contraction of state debts, or the selection of sites
for public buildings, have in such states required
confirmation by popular vote before they went
into effect. In 1897 Iowa made this requirement
general in regard to all grants of franchises of
any kind whatever. But it was not until 1898 that
the referendum was first adopted in its complete
form by South Dakota. Since that time about
146 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
one third of the states have introduced it to a
greater or less extent into their organic law.
With the adoption of the principle of the refer-
endum, and the initiative which is apt to go with it,
the abandonment of the old theory of representa-
tive government is complete. The legislature is
now no longer an agency for framing public
opinion and making the laws which public opinion
demands, but a conference committee on the affairs
of the state, one of whose duties is to submit drafts
of proposed legislation to the people in order to
see whether the majority of voters likes them.
The power of the leaders of nominating conventions
to secure the passage of such laws as they wish
and the profits and emoluments incident thereto
is by this means seriously impaired if not wholly
destroyed.
But there are two other changes which are
intended by their advocates to complete the over-
throw of old-fashioned political machinery more
fully than can be accomplished by the referendum
or initiative. The first of these is the direct
primary. Observing the evils which arise from
nominating conventions, many of our reformers
would give the people the opportunity to nominate
candidates themselves. They would do away with
representative assemblies for nomination as well
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 147
as representative assemblies for legislation, and
would have the name of the party candidate
decided by a majority of the popular vote within
the party.
The direct primary is no new thing. It was
tentatively introduced in Pennsylvania about
1870. Abandoned in the East except by a few
municipalities, it was for two decades occasionally
tried in the West and frequently in the South.
But during these early years it was applied only
to town or county nominations. The movement for
state-wide primaries is a much more recent one.
It has gained rapid headway in the past three or
four years. In 1912 fifteen states held primaries
to determine preferences for presidential candi-
dates; and a considerable number of others used
this agency to nominate candidates for governor,
senator, or congressman at large.
Still more novel, and in some respects more
radical, is the fifth and last proposal of the advo-
cates of direct popular government. They would
make it possible for a certain proportion of the
voters to petition for the recall of an obnoxious
or unpopular official, and compel the holding of
a new election to see whether he is to be permitted
to serve out his term of office. Many localities are
experimenting with the system of the recall; but
148 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
it is too soon to say how far those that have tried
it are satisfied with it, or how widely their example
is likely to be followed. The plan is still in the
experimental stage.
Regarding the success of all these more thorough-
going plans for curbing the power of professional
politicians, we may say what Ostrogorski, that
acute and careful Russian student of American
politics, says concerning the direct primary:
"Neither the sanguine hopes of the reformers nor
the fears of the bosses have been entirely justi-
fied. . . . Frauds are not prevented by the new
system. Many bad candidates are defeated who
would be nominated in convention, but the hap-
hazard vote of the multitude rejects good men
against whom a convention would not dare to come
out." And after an enumeration of minor evils,
all the more significant because of Ostrogorski 's
sympathy with progressive views and methods, he
adds: "These unsatisfactory results of the direct
primary cannot be considered as accidental."
Why these means have failed to realize the hopes
of their advocates, and what more fundamental
reforms in practice and in thought are necessary
to make government by the people effective, are
questions which I shall discuss in the concluding
lecture.
VI
THE SEAT OF POWEE TODAY
When party government was at its height the
leaders of the organization had a decisive influence
on the nomination of candidates and the passage
of laws. Public opinion counted for comparatively
little, except as an indirect deterrent of mistakes
that might lose elections. The measures which I
have described in the last lecture — the initiative,
the referendum, the direct primary — were efforts
to make organization count for less and public
opinion for more. Why have they disappointed
the hopes of their advocates?
Chiefly because it is impossible, except in grave
emergencies, to make unorganized public opinion
effective in practical politics. If, as Mr. Root well
says in his book on The Citizen's Part in Govern-
ment, all the voters went to the polls without
previous discussion and cast their several votes for
the candidates that each man liked best, the great
majority of votes would be thrown away. ' ' Human
nature is such that long before an election could
be reached some men who wished for the offices
150 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
would have taken steps to secure in advance the
support of voters; some men who had business or
property interests which they desired to have
protected or promoted through the operation of
government would have taken steps to secure
support for candidates in their interest ; and some
men who were anxious to advance principles or
policies that they considered to be for the good
of the commonwealth would have taken steps to
secure support for candidates representing those
principles and policies. All of these would have
got their friends and supporters to help them, and
in each group a temporary organization would
have grown up for effective work in securing
support. Under these circumstances, when the
votes came to be cast, the candidates of some of
these extempore organizations would inevitably
have a plurality of votes, and the great mass of
voters who did not follow any organized leadership
would find that their ballots were practically
thrown away by reason of being scattered about
among a great number of candidates instead of
being concentrated so as to be effective."
We see this fact elucidated in the workings of
the direct primary. Occasionally it happens that
a man is so prominent or so conspicuously well
fitted for the duties of the office that he can secure
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 151
votes enough to nominate him by the spontaneous
impulse of his fellow citizens. But such cases are
rare. A preliminary campaign is usually neces-
sary. The man of ability who will not take the
trouble to make such a campaign gets fewer votes
than his less able opponent who has the time and
money to spend in organizing his followers and
creating a public sentiment in his behalf. It has
become a proverb in certain states that any man
who wishes to be chosen for office must incur the
trouble of making two campaigns, one for nomi-
nation and the other for election. Political chicane
has not been eliminated. It has simply been trans-
ferred from the hands of a party organization to
the hands of individuals or groups of individuals.
The managers of the old party machines tried
to find out what their followers wanted by personal
conversation between man and man. The ward
leader talked with the men whose votes he con-
trolled, and knew what they thought and felt.
The district leader talked with the ward leaders,
and on the basis of that conversation made up his
mind what he wished to do. The members of the
county committee talked with the leaders in the
several districts and obtained full knowledge of
the demands of party men in different sections.
The successful politician was the man who under-
152 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS
stood the art of mixing with men, of getting at
what they wanted and coming to an understanding
with them as to the degree in which their several
wants could be gratified. It was thus that the
sentiment was organized which could carry con-
ventions and determine nominations. It was on
these means, supplemented by the influence of
great orators and debaters who argued in defense
of the plans thus framed, that the older politicians
relied for securing acceptance of their projects.
The modern politician must go to work in a
different way. He must appeal to a wider public
sentiment — a sentiment which has been created,
not by a vast number of separate conversations but
by the influence of a few newspapers and maga-
zines upon their readers. It is through the press —
daily, weekly, or monthly — that the American
people forms its opinion as to men and measures.
The success or failure of a candidate in securing
the nomination depends largely upon the support
which he receives from this quarter. The man who
accomplishes most in modern politics is he who
recognizes this fact most fully. It is not by the
personal influence which was characteristic of the
old party system that nominations are now secured
and the way made clear for the passage of laws.
It is by the influence of the printed page, which
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 153
enables the man who controls it to determine
thousands of votes for good or for evil.
In 1824 we overthrew the legislative caucus as
a dominant power in politics, and left the field
open for the party machine. Today we are over-
throwing the party machine and are leaving the
field open to the press. In neither case have we
provided for the expression of a spontaneous or
unorganized public opinion. We have simply sub-
stituted one method of organization for another.
Under the old system the goodness or badness of
a party machine determined whether Congress
would make good laws or the administration good
appointments. Under the new system the good-
ness or badness of newspapers is likely to determine
whether the initiative and the referendum will be
used to promote intelligent legislation; whether
the direct primary will give us good candidates or
bad candidates; whether we shall be able to sur-
mount the perils with which the experiment of the
recall is attended.
Among the many changed conditions of Ameri-
can politics, the growth of an independent press is
perhaps the most important. Prior to 1850 it was
regarded as almost indispensable for a newspaper
to belong to a party. Before the nominating
convention met the different sections of the party
154 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
would have different newspapers supporting their
own particular candidates or measures. After the
nominating convention was over the newspapers
were expected to fall into line just as the different
sections of the party fell into line ; and they quite
generally did so. The papers that were really
independent were few in number, and might be
divided into two classes: the very good and the
very bad. Journals of each of these classes found
their advice neglected by astute politicians; the
very good, because their readers were supposed
to be cranks, and too frequently gave ground for
that supposition; the very bad, because they were
known to be for sale to the highest bidder, so that
their support carried no weight.
The growth of the free soil party in the North
and the consequent agitation in favor of secession
in the South gave the press a somewhat greater
importance and influence in party councils. The
slavery question was one which could not be dealt
with by the old political methods of discussion and
compromise. A kind of popular feeling was grow-
ing up in both North and South which the politi-
cians who framed the compromises of 1848 were
powerless to control. Under such circumstances
journals like the Springfield Republican, the New
York Tribune, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press in
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 155
the North, or like the Charleston Mercury and — to
take an instance of a different kind — De Bow's
Review in the South, were making the opinion
which the politicians had to be content to follow.
The press in 1860 was thus a far more potent factor
in politics than it had been ten years earlier. But
it was not as yet a dominant factor. People still
liked better to listen to debates than to read
editorials; they still preferred to form their
opinion from the spoken word rather than from
the printed page. Nor were the newspapers and
reviews in any true sense independent of party.
They did more to make the party than they did
before, but when it was made they stood closely
by it as an organization. For the sake of mould-
ing the opinions of their fellow Republicans or
Democrats on some points, they were content to
forego the privilege of expressing their own
personal views upon others.
The real power of the press in politics — the
power possessed by a paper that tells people the
things they want to know, in the face of the
hostility of one party machine and the indiffer-
ence of another — was accidentally discovered by
the New York Times in the summer of 1871.
Tweed was at that time in complete control of the
city government. The efforts of political rivals
156 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
to shake his dominance, within his own party or
outside of it, had proved futile. The attempts to
overthrow him by conventional methods were
abortive. The Democratic machine throughout the
state was his to direct. Even the Republican
leaders were unwilling to engage in active oppo-
sition to a system of plunder which, though
organized on a larger scale than their own, was
yet a natural development of political methods
with which they were familiar and by which many
of them profited.
"While matters were in this shape, a bookkeeper
in one of the departments of the city government
had gradually collected evidence that the public
was being robbed on a large scale. He offered this
evidence to one New York paper after another.
Incredible as it may now seem, one paper after
another refused it. The newspapers of that day
were afraid to publish facts which the party
machine preferred to keep quiet. Finally the New
York Times undertook the campaign of publicity.
I am told that it did so with much reluctance and
grave apprehension of the possible consequences
to itself. But the Times was not being very
actively supported or highly valued by the Repub-
lican machine at the time; and it decided to take
the chance that the people might be interested to
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 157
read the detailed evidence as to the way in which
millions of dollars were being extracted from their
pockets every month.
The result astounded the proprietors of the
Times as much as it did anybody else. Men who
had listened apathetically when orators like
Beecher or Evarts described the way in which the
city was being plundered seized eagerly upon the
facts when they were put before them in cold type.
The printed page had come into its own heritage.
It could do things which the spoken word could
not do. People called for copies of the Times
faster than the press could furnish them. These
were days when the sale of other papers on trains
and on the streets had practically ceased, because
people wanted the Times and nothing else. I can
myself remember the distressed lament of some
of the Republican leaders that people would insist
on getting the Times, whose party regularity was
not above suspicion, merely because it gave them
the information they desired, when they could
have got the same information reprinted in other
papers one day later without sacrifice of their
party consciences. But it was in vain that they
protested. The Staats-Zeitung joined with the
Times by publishing the facts in the German
tongue. Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly drove
158 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
the lesson home by his inimitable cartoons. In two
short months public opinion, formed under the
influence of these three newspapers, became over-
whelming in its force. The Cooper Union meeting
of April 6th, before the newspaper disclosures, had
accomplished nothing. The Cooper Union meeting
of September 4th, after the newspaper disclosures,
was a political upheaval. The indictment of
corrupt officials followed in October, a crushing
defeat for Tammany as an organization in the
elections of November; and before the close of the
calendar year the power of Tweed was at an end.
The experience of the New York Times in 1871
taught at least two distinct lessons : first, that facts
presented by a newspaper were more effective than
the same facts presented by orators of eminence;
second, that if a newspaper had such facts in its
possession it could commercially afford to print
them even if the party leaders did not wish them
printed. But the press of the country was rather
slow to learn these lessons. A few newspapers in
our larger cities assumed an attitude of political
independence in municipal affairs. A somewhat
larger number adopted the policy of giving an
unvarnished tale of facts in their news columns
as distinct from their editorial pages. It was not
until about ten years later that Joseph Pulitzer
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 159
familiarized the public with the theory that a
newspaper's first duty was to give its readers
information. It was Pulitzer's principle to decide
whether a thing should be published and in what
shape a thing should be published, solely on the
basis of its value as news; with relatively little
reference to political or moral considerations,
except so far as these considerations might affect
the readability of the article and the consequent
sale of the paper.
Of the good and the evil that was brought into
journalism by this new method, as introduced by
Pulitzer and carried out still further by some of
his followers, I shall not undertake to speak in
detail. We are concerned only with its great and
almost revolutionary consequences upon the rela-
tion between newspapers and parties. No longer
could the party leader hope that a view of the
facts which was accepted as profitable by him and
his associates in a convention would be presented
to the public by a devoted band of newspaper
followers and received as gospel truth by nine
tenths of the men who read those newspapers.
The statement had to be what the newspaper men
themselves regarded as profitable for them to
publish. The power of moulding public opinion
had passed out of the hands of the party leader
160 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
and into those of the editor. And as if the poli-
tician's troubles with the daily press were not
enough, weekly and monthly papers rose in great
numbers which undertook with more or less success
to tell the people the facts which the editors
thought that they wanted; publications which did
for the members of the rural community what the
daily papers did for the people of our larger cities
in giving them data, sometimes right and some-
times wrong, for judging public questions inde-
pendently of party utterances.
Is this change in the method of organizing
public opinion a good one or a bad one ? The old-
fashioned man of affairs, whether in politics or
out of it, is inclined to think it almost wholly bad.
The editor of the new school and the reader who
takes his opinion from the editor are apt to think
it wholly good. The truth, as usual, lies between
the two extremes. It is a change which is pre-
dominantly for the better, but one which has
possibilities of evil as well as of good. And
according as the press uses its new power for evil
or for good will the results of the referendum and
the direct primary, and other similar agencies of
modern democracy, be also evil or good.
The organization of public opinion by the news-
papers instead of by the party managers has
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 161
certain distinct and obvious advantages. In the
first place, it involves a more direct appeal to
reason. A newspaper owes its power to the fact
that its readers think as its editor wishes them to
think. Their opinion may be right or wrong. The
evidence presented to them may be complete or
incomplete. But the opinion is in any case a real
opinion, based on an examination of important
statements.
In the next place, this opinion is formed in the
open instead of being shaped by secret conferences,
as was so often the case under old-fashioned party
leadership. The newspaper makes its appeal in
broad daylight. If the appeal is an unfair one,
those who are arguing on the other side have at
least a chance to see what is being said and done
by their opponents and to try to prove that it is
unfair. Government by newspapers is government
by discussion. It is perhaps the only form of
government by discussion which is practicable in
a large community.
In the third place, the appeal which the news-
paper makes to its readers almost necessarily takes
the form of an appeal to their judgment rather
than to their selfishness. A party manager work-
ing under the old system is constantly occupied in
pointing out to his followers how their personal
162 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
interests would be advanced by some measure or
some candidate. A newspaper or magazine that
should adopt this policy would soon find its
influence confined within a limited circle. The
general public would suspect, and rightly suspect,
that a measure which one group of voters was
urged to support on purely selfish grounds would
be of doubtful benefit to the community as a whole.
A journalist may himself often be led to support
certain measures or certain candidates for reasons
of self-interest. But his appeal to his readers for
support must be placed on broader grounds than
this in order to be effective.
Such are the patent and obvious advantages of
having the organization of popular opinion left in
the hands of the public press. They are so funda-
mental in character that we are sometimes tempted
to overlook the disadvantages and dangers with
which this process is attended. The very fact that
makes the appeal of the press an almost ideal agency
in democratic government when rightly used, corre-
spondingly increases the perils when it is used
wrongly. The power of an editor is a power to
influence public thinking. If he confines himself
to legitimate methods of influence he realizes
Bagehot's ideal of government by discussion. If
he uses it wrongly and leads his readers to act on
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 163
imperfect information, lie not only turns the
action of the government into wrong channels, but
he effects the more permanent and disastrous harm
of poisoning public opinion at its source.
I do not mean that this last in its extreme form
is a very common thing. While unscrupulous men
occasionally acquire power as journalists, they are
no more numerous in that profession than in any
other. But there is a good deal of danger of
unintentional poisoning of public opinion; danger
that the journalist, in his honest desire to promote
a particular measure, will encourage the public in
habits and methods of thought which are antago-
nistic to the success of democratic government.
The first and most frequent source of harm is
that while he is pretending to appeal to the
judgment of his readers he really appeals to their
emotion.
A man who desires to make his newspaper
popular is under a constant temptation to pander
to the prejudices of his public. Without actually
making grave misstatements, he can print the facts
which they like in large type and suppress or
relegate to obscure columns the facts which they
do not like. Under these circumstances their
judgment is distorted and their preconceived
impressions confirmed, until they become incapable
164 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
of weighing the real evidence on which their
political action ought to be based. If another
paper tries to furnish them the true facts, they
disbelieve it. They are accessible only to the kind
of evidence that their own particular journal
prefers to furnish.
The editor, under such circumstances, often
makes the excuse that he gave his readers what
they wanted. Even if he were an ordinary private
citizen, this excuse would hardly pass current.
The man who puts aniline dyes into children's
candy is not excused by the fact that the children
like to have their candy bright colored. And the
newspaper man is not an ordinary private citizen.
He is by the course of recent events put into a
place of public responsibility. He has it in his
power more than any other man to see that the
country is governed well or ill. If he enables his
readers to base their votes on organized informa-
tion he does service. If he leads them to base those
votes on organized emotion he does irreparable
wrong.
I do not know whether it was President Lowell
or some one else who coined the phrase ' ' organized
emotion." Whoever may have been the inventor,
it is an accurate description of something which
gravely threatens the stability of American govern-
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 165
merit. Every student of history knows what
fearful mistakes democracies have made under the
influence of emotion evoked by popular orators;
how thousands of men, listening to an appeal to
prejudice veiled in the form of exposition of fact,
have taken leave of their judgment and brought
their commonwealths to the brink of ruin or even
beyond it. Our own people have not been wholly
exempt from this danger. "The curse of the
country," said Daniel Webster in a moment of
bitterness, ' ' has been its orators. ' ' This dangerous
gift of the orator, of making emotion take the place
of information, is one to which the newspaper
has today fallen heir.
The danger which will result to the common-
wealth if our political action is based on organized
emotion rather than organized information is
peculiarly great in connection with the direct
primary.
Under the old-fashioned system of nomination
by party conventions, two questions were always
asked concerning a candidate: first, did the party
want him? and second, could he be elected? It
was not enough for the leaders to know whether
the candidate was popular with the majority of
their followers. It was an equally important
question — in fact, in a great many instances a much
166 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
more important question — whether he could attract
a sufficient number of votes from the opposite
party, or hold a sufficient number of doubtful votes
within his own party, to make his election reason-
ably certain. The managers wanted to get the
strongest candidate they could; and the strongest
candidate was not always the man for whom his
party associates were most enthusiastic. He was
commonly a man of more moderate views than
they. Take a salient instance, which has now
become historical. In the presidential campaign
of 1860, if the Republican convention had consulted
the wishes of the majority of voters within the
party it would have nominated Seward. He had
taken strong ground against slavery; and northern
Republicans who were excited by the heat of our
slavery contest saw in him their natural champion.
But sagacious men knew that Seward could not
be elected, and convinced the convention of the
soundness of that view. It nominated Lincoln — a
man who spoke less of abstract principles than
Seward and more of constitutional law; less of the
abolition of slavery — however much he may have
had this at heart — and more of the preservation
of the Union. The nomination of Lincoln was a
distinct disappointment to extremists throughout
the North; but it appealed to moderate men in
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 167
states adjoining the Potomac and the Ohio, whose
votes were necessary and sufficient to elect him.
This instance is a typical one. The convention
system has been distinctly favorable to the nomi-
nation of businesslike candidates for the principal
offices — of candidates who were unsatisfactory to
some of the extreme elements in their own party
and satisfactory to the moderate men in the
opposite party. It has tended to give us men who
appealed to the country instead of appealing to a
group. With the substitution of the direct primary
we are bound to lose something of this advantage.
We are almost certain to see a larger number of
candidates who represent extreme views on either
side. To prevent this danger from becoming fatal
the press of the country will have to recognize the
responsibility that is placed in its hands by the
new conditions, and strive to moderate rather than
to accelerate the tides of unreasoning emotion.
Closely akin to the appeal to prejudice is the
appeal to impatience; and there is great danger
that the modern editor will be tempted to make
use of this appeal to the detriment of good
government.
The work of governing a commonwealth —
nation, state, or city — is a complicated and difficult
piece of business. It never goes wholly right. The
168 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
statesman must sacrifice some things which he
regards as highly desirable in order to secure other
things which he deems fundamentally essential.
He alone knows how necessary the sacrifice is and
how much he himself regrets it. The man who
looks on from outside thinks that the statesman is
doing it lightly. Such a man sees the loss to the
shipper from allowing an increased railroad rate.
He does not see that he must let the railroad charge
that rate in order to secure the necessary develop-
ment of the transportation system of the commu-
nity. He sees the loss from having American
vessels pay tolls in the Panama Canal. He does
not see the gain in foreign relations due to the
adoption of an honorable policy. A journalist is
tempted to make himself popular by voicing the
complaints of his readers. By advocating a short-
sighted policy which works for today only, he can
make a profit for himself; and few of those who
buy his paper foresee the loss that comes to the
country if his advice is followed, or put the blame
on his shoulders after it has come.
This sort of captious criticism is one of the
incidental evils which has attended government
by discussion in all ages and in every state.
"Armies," says Macaulay, "have won victories
under bad generals, but no army ever won a
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 169
victory under a debating society." Once let the
officials of a democracy be placed at the mercy of
a purely critical press, and the efficiency of
American democracy — not to say American democ-
racy itself — is at an end. It is this that makes
the proposed institution of the recall so perilous.
The recall is based on the theory that people should
be encouraged to judge of a man's work when it
is half done. On terms like these efficient and far-
sighted administration is impossible. The recall
may seem to be justified in a few cases where an
official has palpably betrayed his trust without
quite rendering himself liable to impeachment;
but for one case of that kind where it does good,
there are likely to be a dozen cases where it will
prevent an official from assuming the sacrifices
and incurring the odium which any farsighted
plan of government is apt to involve before its
results are understood.
Most of the public discussion of the recall has
centered about the recall of judges. We are told
that the judicial office is something apart by itself,
and that there are special dangers which make the
recall inapplicable in this particular instance. I
believe that this distinction between the recall of
judges and the recall of other officials is an essen-
tially false one; that every official should be
170 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
allowed to serve out his term, except in case of
misconduct or incapacity; and that the nation
which claims the right to change its mind as to
the fitness of an official during the middle of his
term is proving its incapacity for democratic
government. It is either unwilling to take the
proper care in the selection of officials or unable
to have patience until the allotted work is done
before passing judgment on its merits.
A third danger to which the press is subject is
the assumption of omniscience. In this respect,
as in the other two that I have just named, the
newspaper or magazine is simply falling in with
the prepossessions of its readers. We all rather
like to feel that we know everything that is worth
knowing. The present tendencies in our education,
which lead us to scatter our study over a large
range of subjects, tend to strengthen this feeling.
Small wonder, then, that the newspaper, bringing
a vast range of information within reach of the
people, should claim to inform them on many
details of business and politics, of science and art,
which must necessarily be left to the judgment of
the expert if they are to be effectually dealt with
in practice. The editor is constantly tempted to
natter his readers into believing that they know
everything about government which is worth know-
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 171
ing, and that anybody who claims to know more
than the general public is either an aristocrat or
an impostor.
There is a theory that if you only find out what
the people want you will know what the govern-
ment ought to do. Like most political aphorisms,
this is a mixture of truth and falsehood, of prac-
tical good sense and unpractical idealism. If we
mean by this statement that the ideals of the people
and the policy of the government must be in
harmony, and that one cannot be a great deal
better or a great deal worse than the other without
strain and damage and threat of revolution, it is
right. But if we interpret it to mean that the
people as a whole are competent to decide how the
business of government should be managed in each
particular instance, it is wrong. This distinction
is as old as Aristotle's Politics itself. Aristotle
showed how the state which deserves the title of
"republic" is one where the laws conform to the
general wishes of the people, but where at the same
time people are content to elect, for the actual
conduct of a nation's affairs, men better trained
than themselves in the details of public business.
Among the qualities needed to make a democracy
successful I should agree with Aristotle in laying
great emphasis upon the readiness to value experts
172 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
as they deserve to be valued. The larger and more
complex the affairs of the state, the less is it pos-
sible for each member of the people to inform
himself on all the details of public business. In a
small country town each intelligent citizen is
competent to fill almost any office at short notice.
In a city it requires training to be a successful head
of one of the departments. In a nation the need of
specialization for the proper command of the army
and navy and for the proper administration of
justice is even more conspicuously necessary.
Amid the keen competition that now exists between
different peoples, the permanent influence of the
United States depends on having its public service
carried on with a high degree of technical efficiency.
The more complex our development is, the more
urgent is the need of self-restraint and modesty
in our public opinion; such self -restraint and
modesty as will lead us to be content with judging
the expert by the results which he achieves instead
of trying to prescribe the methods that he shall
follow.
If we really value experts properly we must
show our faith by our works and be prepared to
pay them more in the future than we have been
willing to pay them in the past. The parsimony
of the American people in this respect has become
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 173
a byword. The salaries of our officers in the army
and the navy are notoriously low as compared with
what men of equal ability could obtain in private
business. We refuse to give our judges more than
a fraction of the income which they could obtain
by the practice of their profession. We take the
ground that the honor of serving the country is so
great that a man should be content to do it at
great pecuniary sacrifice. Fortunately there are
many able men among us who are content to accept
public service on these niggardly terms. Some
have private fortunes of their own. Some are
willing to remain poor for the sake of doing their
duty to an ungrateful commonwealth. But the
general effect of our unwillingness to grant first-
rate salaries to first-rate men is deplorable. The
waste due to inefficient work and unnecessary red
tape is vastly in excess of the economy realized.
To save a few hundred thousand dollars in our
diplomatic service, we lose millions in our dealings
with other states. We are undertaking to hold our
place among the nations of the world in a competi-
tion which grows every year more keen. But the
United States is the one country which begrudges
the money necessary and the expert ability neces-
sary to give its citizens a high-grade public service
at home and abroad.
174 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
Besides placing the proper value upon the ser-
vices of officials, we must also be prepared to give
them a proper degree of independence. We must
not keep nagging at them.
In a well-managed private business the man at
the head keeps careful control of the general policy
and takes great pains to select good men to attend
to the several parts. But he does not spend his
time interfering with their management of details.
If he did, it would interfere both with his efficiency
in his work and with their efficiency in theirs.
What is true of the individual head of a private
business is even more true of the directors of a
well-managed corporation. They determine the
policy, and choose the men to carry it out. In
order to have time and strength to do these things
wisely, they leave the details of engineering and
of accounting to the officials whom they have
selected for the purpose.
The position of a voter in a democracy is essen-
tially that of a director rather than that of an
official. It is his function to place the right men
at the head of certain departments of the govern-
ment and prescribe the ends which they should
try to attain. The means by which they are to
reach these ends should generally be left to the
judgment of the officials themselves. But this
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 175
principle, which is understood in every well-
conducted private business, is not understood in
public business. We lay more stress on the need
of watching our officers than we should, and less
stress on the need of choosing them carefully and
leaving them to themselves. Instead of rejoicing
when we can put a department of the government
in the hands of a man who knows more than we
do about the methods of conducting it, we are
jealous of superior knowledge and watch its
manifestations with suspicion.
There are certain points on which it is possible
for the citizens of the community as a body to
form an intelligent public opinion. There are cer-
tain other points on which opinion is valueless
without technical training behind it ; and the deci-
sion of these points must be left to the different
groups of men who have the expert knowledge
which is necessary. The whole town can decide
where a bridge ought to be built and how much
should be spent in building it. It requires knowl-
edge of mathematics to know how to design the
bridge, and knowledge of physics and chemistry
to know what sort of materials to use in its con-
struction. The whole community can know whether
it wants to have railroads owned by the govern-
ment or by private corporations. It requires
176 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS
knowledge of engineering to know how to locate
such railroads properly, and knowledge of political
economy to know what system of rates can be
adopted. Any attempt to settle scientific matters
by public opinion means rotten bridges and bank-
rupt railroads.
The American people has made some progress
toward learning this lesson. "We no longer entrust
politicians with the command of armies, as was so
frequently done in Athens or Rome. A proposal
to take the conduct of the army in the field out
of the hands of army officers and put it into the
hands of members of Congress, which was seriously
urged in 1848, would seem quite laughable today.
But we need to carry the lesson further in the
next century than we have in the last. We are
in more immediate competition with Europe now
than we were fifty years ago. To keep our place
in this competitive struggle, we must prove that
a democracy can manage business as well as a
monarchy; that it can show the same care in the
selection of officials and the same self-restraint in
judging of their work before it is done. The people
as a whole must assume the double duty of voting
intelligently on matters which public opinion can
decide and leaving to the specialist matters which
can only be decided by the specialist; of holding
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 177
the expert responsible for results and promoting
the man who has done business well rather
than the one who flatters the people that he is
going to do business in a way they will like and
understand. Thus, and thus only, can we com-
bine two things which are equally essential to
American democracy if it is to hold its place among
the nations: popular sovereignty and efficient
government.
INDEX
INDEX
Acts of Parliament, 141;
contrasted with Acts of
Congress, 42
Adams, Charles Francis, 71
Anti-Trust Act of 1890, 74,
75, 87-89
Arbitration Acts, 78, 87
Aristocracy, in American
colonies, 3-11, 36; perma-
nence of, in South, 56, 57
Aristotle, on democracy, 90,
91, 97, 98; ideal of repub-
lic, 171
Ashley, W. J., 35
Bagehot, Walter, 162
Banking laws, 50, 51
Bentham, Jeremy, 43, 44
Brokerage in politics, 100,
101, 121
Bryce, James, 23
Burr, Aaron, 13, 110, 111
Capital, legal position of,
27, 29; scarcity of, 49-51
Caucus system, 108, 109
Charleston Mercury, 155
Charters, as contracts, 55;
abuses connected with
grant, 143
Checks and balances, 98
Chevalier, Michel, 21
Church and state in New
England, 4, 5
Civil service, federal, 116,
117; present condition of,
91-93; reform of, 127,
134-137
Civil War, industrial effects
of, 56-59, 64, 65, 118-120
Class consciousness, 79
Classified civil service, 137
Clay, Henry, 112
Colonial charters and state
constitutions, 10, 11
Colonies, aristocracy in, 3-11
Commerce and Labor, De-
partment of, 86
Company stores, 29
Competition in England and
in the United States, 59-
63
Congress and nominating
power, 108, 109
Congressional caucus, 108,
109
Constitution, Federal, and
democracy, 11, 12; condi-
tions affecting adoption
of, 37-42; permanence of,
102-104
Constitutional Convention of
1787, 38-40
Constitutions in Western
states, 143-145
Contract, obligation of, 39,
40
182
INDEX
Convention, nomination by,
109-111, 142, 143, 165-
168
Corporations, growth of, 51-
53; legal position of, 53-
56
Cost of living, increase of,
81-83
Courts, authority of, 42-47
Dartmouth College case, 53-
55
De Bow's Eeview, 155
Declaration of Independ-
ence, indirect effects of,
15, 16
Democracy in America,
actual beginnings of, 20
Democratic party, 24, 27,
108; relation to Sherman
Act, 88; to silver inter-
ests, 121
Department of Labor, 77
Direct primary, 146-151
Due process of law, 40
Educational tendencies, 170
Election of president, 105-
107
Employers ' liability, 28 ;
federal Act, 86
England, labor legislation
in, 28; limits to competi-
tion in, 59-63
Equality, sentiment of, 16
Experts, position of, in
America, 171-174
Extra-constitutional powers,
104
Factory Acts, 28, 77
Farrand, Max, 14, 23, 41
Federal Constitution, condi-
tions affecting adoption
of, 37-42; permanence of,
102-104
Federal offices as rewards
of party service, 116, 117
Federalist party, 12, 108
Feudal and industrial ten-
ures, 33-36
Fink, Albert, 71
Ford, H. J., 110
Fourteenth Amendment, 53-
56
Franchises, grant of, 118,
143
Freehold ownership, 48
Freehold suffrage, 3
George, Henry, 79, 80
Government, functions of,
62, 63, 68
Granger movement, 65-70,
124-126
Hamilton, Alexander, 13,
49; land policy of, 17-20
Harper's Weekly, 157
Hildreth on colonial history,
8, 9
Hobbes, Thomas, 43, 44
Hours of labor, regulation
of, 28, 86
INDEX
183
Immigrants, opportunities
for, 48, 49; change in
character of, 77, 78
Impatience, newspaper ap-
peal to, 167
Incorporation Acts of colo-
nies, 51
Interlocking directorates, 83,
84
International Workers of
the World, 79
Interstate Commerce Com-
mission, 89, 126
Interstate commerce law, 71,
72; supplemented by ad-
ditional Acts, 86
Iowa, referendum in, 145
Jackson, Andrew, 20, 21,
115, 116, 134, 135; atti-
tude toward corporations,
52, 53
Jefferson, Thomas, 12-14, 19
Joint stock companies, 51-
53
Judges, recall of, 169
Judson, F. N., 88
Knights of Labor, 78
Labor, Department of, 77
Lamar, L. Q. C., 107
Land laws, 16-20
Legislation by representa-
tive assembly, 137-144
Limited liability in the
United States, 51, 52
Lincoln, Abraham, nomina-
tion of, 166, 167
Louisiana purchase, 19
Lowell, A. L., 164; on
party government, 99-101
Macaulay, T. B., 168
McMaster, J. B., 23
Marshall, John, 47
Massachusetts, early social
system, 4-6; labor legis-
lation, 28 ; corporation
laws, 52; railroad regula-
tion, 71, 72
Middle colonies, social sys-
tem of, 7
Military tenures, 34-36
Mississippi valley, develop-
ment of, 19, 65-69
Money power, jealousy of,
81, 83-85
Monopoly, 59, 60 ; legal posi-
tion of, 70; extension of,
72-75
Montesquieu, 98, 140
Myers, Gustavus, 110
National spirit, beginnings
of, 15
New England, early social
system of, 4-6
New York, land holding in,
7; state politics in, 115
New York Staats-Zeitung,
157
New York Times, 155-158
New York Tribune, 154
184
INDEX
Newspapers, influence on
politics, 152-159
Nomination, by conventions,
165-168; of president,
105, 106, 108-110
Nullification, 45, 46
Organized emotion, 164
Ostrogorski, M. L., 23, 148
Paper money, effects of, 57,
58
Parliament, authority of, 42,
43; early history of, 138-
140
Party, perversion of, 99;
two meanings of, 99-102
Party regularity, 128-131
Passive resistance, 45-46
Patroon system, 7
Pennsylvania, state politics
in, 115
Plantation system, 8
Politicians, professional,
112-114, 122-124
Popular election of senators,
132-134
Predatory wealth, 124-126
Preemption Acts, 18
Presidential election, 105-
107
Prices, rise of, 81-83
Primary, direct, 146-151
Professional politicians, 151-
153
Progress and Poverty, 79, 80
Progressive taxation, 28, 29
Property owner, legal posi-
tion of, 27, 29, 32-42
Property qualifications of
office holders, 11
Protection, 58, 59
Public land, 16-20
Public opinion, agencies for
forming, 141 ; unorgan-
ized, 149; sphere of, 175
Public utilities, 72-74
Publicity of railroad ac-
counts, 71
Pulitzer, Joseph, 158-160
Railroad regulation, 30, 65-
72; in England, 60
Railroads, present economic
condition of, 89
Recall, 147, 148; theory of,
169
Referendum, 145, 146
Regularity, party, 128-131
Representative government,
theory of, 106-108, 137-
139
Republican form of govern-
ment, interpretation of,
12
Republican party, attitude
on tariff, 120, 121; on
civil service reform, 135,
136
Restraint of trade, 74
Roman parallels to New
England history, 5, 6
Root, Elihu, 149, 150; on
party government, 99-101
INDEX
185
Saint Paul Pioneer Press,
154
Salaries of American offi-
cials, 173
Senators, popular election
of, 132-134
Separation of national and
local issues, 127, 128, 132-
134
Seward, W. H., 166
Sherman Act, 74, 75, 87-89
Silver coinage, 58, 121
Slavery, political effect of,
8, 24; extension of, 26;
influence on political
methods, 154, 155
Social contract, 43, 44
Socialistic movements in
America, 30, 31, 76-79
South Carolina, property
qualifications in, 11
South Dakota, referendum
in, 145
Southern colonies, social sys-
tem of, 7-10
Sovereignty, doctrine of, 43-
46
Spoils system, 134, 135
Springfield Eepublican, 154
State constitutions, and colo-
nial charters, 10, 11;
modern form of, 143-145
State socialism, recent move-
ments toward, 76-79
Subsidies, 53, 65, 66, 118
Suffrage, colonial restric-
tions on, 3; universal, 21
Supreme Court of the
United States, 46, 47
Switzerland, referendum in,
145
Tammany Hall, 13, 110-114,
158
Tariff legislation, 115, 118-
121
Taxation, progressive, 28,
29
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 21-
23
Tweed Ring, 129, 130, 155-
158
Unconstitutionality, 42-47
Unearned increment, 80
Van Buren, Martin, 111-113
Virginia, colonial organiza-
tion in, 8-10
Wages in England and
America, 61, 62
War of 1812, effects of, 16
Webster, Daniel, 54, 165
West, settlement of, 16-20;
social system of, 25, 26 j
financial legislation in,
50
Weyl, W. E., 33
Whig party, 24, 27
Wortman, Teunis, 111
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