Steps in the Development 
 of American Democracy 
 
 By 
 ANDREW CUNNINGHAM McLAUGHLIN 
 
 ProfeMor of Hiitory, University of Chicago 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1920, by 
 ANDREW CUNNINGHAM McLAUGHLIN 
 
 MAIN 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 PREFACE 7 
 
 I. EMERGENCE OF PRINCIPLES IN THE 
 
 COLONIAL PERIOD 11 
 
 II. THE THEORIES OF THE REVOLUTION: 
 THE FORMATION OF STATE CONSTITU- 
 TIONS 28 
 
 III. THE CRITICAL YEARS AFTER THE REV- 
 
 OLUTION : THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 53 
 
 IV. JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 78 
 
 V. JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 96 
 
 VI. SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY 1 17^ 
 
 VII. DEVELOPMENTS OF RECENT YEARS: 
 
 INDIVIDUALISM vs. SOCIAL CONTROL. . 146 
 
 VIII. THE IMPLICATIONS AND RESPONSIBIL- 
 ITIES OF DEMOCRACY TO-DAY . . 168 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT, a graduate of 
 Wesley an University in the class of 1864, 
 showed his lifelong interest in the training 
 of youth for the privileges and duties of 
 citizenship by long periods of service as a 
 member of the board of education of his 
 home city, and as member of the boards 
 of trustees of Wyoming Seminary and 
 Wesleyan University. 
 
 It was fitting, therefore, that, when the 
 gifts made by himself and family to Wes- 
 leyan University were combined to form a 
 fund whose income should be used "in de- 
 fraying the expenses of providing for visit- 
 ing lecturers, preachers, and other speakers 
 supplemental to the college faculty," it 
 should have been decided that the primary 
 purpose should be to provide each year a 
 course of lectures, by a distinguished 
 speaker, "for the promotion of a better un- 
 derstanding of national problems and of a 
 more perfect realization of the responsibili- 
 ties of citizenship," and to provide for the 
 publication of such lectures so that they 
 might reach a larger public than the au- 
 dience to which they should, in the first in- 
 stance, be addressed. 
 
 5 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 To give the first course of lectures on this 
 foundation, the joint committee for its ad- 
 ministration, appointed by the board of trus- 
 tees and by the faculty, selected Professor 
 Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, Pro- 
 fessor of History in the University of Chi- 
 cago, former President of the American 
 Historical Association, who had some 
 months earlier been sent to visit the uni- 
 versities and learned societies of the United 
 Kingdom to set forth to them America's 
 interest in the war and the ideals of democ- 
 racy which America in common with Britain 
 was prepared to uphold even on the field of 
 battle. 
 
 The poignant earnestness which pervades 
 the lectures marks them as the father's me- 
 morial to his son who, like many other 
 American college lads, had recently fallen 
 on the field of battle in France that the ideals 
 of democracy might live and prevail. 
 
 WILLIAM ARNOLD SHANKLIN, 
 REUBEN NELSON BENNETT, 
 ALBERT WHEELER JOHNSTON,, 
 CALEB THOMAS WINCHESTER, 
 GEORGE MATTHEW DUTCHER, 
 
 Committee. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE purpose of these lectures is not to 
 present the history of American democracy 
 in full and symmetrical outline. If one 
 should enter upon that task, he would find 
 himself writing at length the history of the 
 United States. My purpose is simply to re- 
 count a few salient experiences which helped 
 to make America what it is for experiences 
 create character. And I wish also to describe 
 certain basic doctrines and beliefs, some of 
 which may have had their day, while others 
 have not yet reached fulfillment. Especially 
 I have not attempted to discuss fully and 
 elaborately the problems of democracy as 
 they arose in the generation after the Civil 
 War, but only to show how those problems, 
 in certain essential particulars, centered in 
 the task of regulating the use of property 
 and adjusting the old ideas of personal 
 liberty to the new needs of the social and in- 
 
 7 
 
8 PREFACE 
 
 dustrial order. The problems of democracy 
 have grown thick and fast in the last decade ; 
 and these too I have not sought to discuss in 
 any detail, contenting myself with describing 
 the implications of democracy as we now may 
 and should see democracy after a century 
 and more of development and after a war 
 waged for its maintenance and upbuilding. 
 
 The lectures were given to the students of 
 Wesleyan University in the spring of 1919. 
 I hope they were of some service and that 
 in printed form they will have some slight 
 value in making clear a few leading facts and 
 principles in American history and politics. 
 
 A. C. McL. 
 University of Chicago. 
 
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 
 
 GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT FOUNDATION 
 
 LECTURES 
 
 For the Promotion of a Better Under- 
 standing of National Problems and 
 of a More Perfect Realization of 
 the Responsibilities of Citizenship. 
 
 FIRST SERIES 1918-1919 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 EMERGENCE OF PRINCIPLES IN 
 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 
 
 IT is difficult to begin a course of lectures 
 on American democracy because one does 
 not know where to find a beginning. 
 Wherever he may start in his recital, he is 
 conscious that, before the particular period 
 chosen, forces were at work that account for 
 later conditions. American democracy is, of 
 course, intimately connected with the long 
 effort of Englishmen, even before America 
 was settled, to combat tyrannical or absolute 
 government. I will not, however, allow my- 
 self to comment on those origins, but will 
 take up the story with just a word about the 
 transference of English representative insti- 
 tutions to America in the early seventeenth 
 century. The setting up of a representative 
 body in the wilds of Virginia in 1619, that 
 first step in the recognition of the colonists 
 as human beings who were entitled to some 
 
 word in the management of themselves, is a 
 
 11 
 
12 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 salient fact in the history of the British em- 
 pire, as well as the beginning of American 
 democracy. It is of immense significance as 
 the beginning of a policy of colonial self- 
 government, and thus the beginning not only 
 of the American democratic system but of 
 that far-flung British empire, that union of 
 free commonwealths which, with all its lack 
 of symmetry and legalistic form, is the great- 
 est political structure in the world. 
 
 We should notice, however, that this rep- 
 resentative assembly was not established by 
 direction of the British government. It was 
 called by the mandate of a corporation, a 
 great mercantile company, similar to other 
 large corporations which were in those days 
 reaching out for the commerce of the world. 
 The use which England has made of the 
 corporation as an agency for colonization 
 and commerce is so extensive that one can 
 hardly overemphasize it ; but I am not speak- 
 ing here of the influence of the corporation 
 charter on the constitutional forms of the 
 colonies, but of the act of the corporation, 
 itself resident in London, in calling an as- 
 sembly of representatives in Virginia. The 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 13 
 
 Virginia Company, composed of many 
 prominent men, was divided into two parties : 
 one the progressive and the liberal, the other 
 the conservative and the rigid. The liberals 
 had more in mind than making money from 
 a commercial venture. Some of them were 
 profoundly interested in the very theory of 
 government and so taken up with the pivotal 
 problems of politics that they could not think 
 of Virginia as only a tobacco plantation 
 or a producer of dividends. Though the 
 differences of opinion in this corporation 
 are more evident a year or two after the 
 decision to give to the colonists an as- 
 sembly of representatives, we can see that 
 at least as early as 1618 the divergent 
 tendencies of the two elements were at work. 
 On the one side was Sir Thomas Smythe, a 
 leading big business man, interested in the 
 various large commercial enterprises of the 
 time. On the other side was a group of 
 young idealists, the leader Sir Edward 
 Sandys. The Smythe faction said that 
 Sandys and his followers were "men of dis- 
 course and contemplation and not of reason 
 and judgment." i_ 
 
14 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 "Of discourse and contemplation" mere 
 talkers and thinkers, not active men of busi- 
 ness with sound, hard sense. How often 
 have these words been used to describe ideal- 
 ists who were prepared to take a bold step 
 forward and a steady look onward into the 
 future! Sandys was a disciple of Richard 
 Hooker, whom I venture to call the founder 
 of that school of political theory which 
 gained tremendous vigor in seventeenth- 
 century England and was finally embodied 
 in the institutions of the United States. It 
 is a strange and dramatic fact that the man 
 intent upon planting in the wilds of Virginia 
 this first seed from which American constitu- 
 tionalism sprang, should have actually had 
 in his mind the distinct theories which, as the 
 decades went by, were gathered up in our 
 fundamental law, and that he should have 
 consciously held the very ideals for which 
 Virginians and other Americans fought a 
 century and a half later. 1 
 
 *I know, of course, that Hooker's theories were not en- 
 tirely like those that developed in the seventeenth century, 
 but the fundamental fact remains that his statement of the 
 origin of government in consent was of tremendous im- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 15 
 
 It is a source of consuming interest and 
 pleasure to hunt out expressions and pur- 
 poses of political justice and to discover 
 visions of right amid the controversies and 
 more deliberate discussions of a corporation 
 dealing with tobacco and Indians and trade 
 and land grants. Of Sandys it was said 
 that "no man in the world carried a more 
 malitious heart to the government of a 
 monarchic," and that he himself declared 
 "that if our God from heaven did constitute 
 and direct a forme of Government, it was that 
 of Geneva." He belonged, in other words, 
 to that body of believers in the fundamental 
 rights of man who were to become stronger 
 as the century waxed older, were to wage 
 war against the Stuarts, and were finally, at 
 the end of the century, to depose James II 
 because he had broken the original compact 
 between king and people. If he were a real 
 and consistent idealist, Sandys could not 
 
 portance in the years to come. I know too that Hooker 
 did not invent this theory, for it was of hoary antiquity 
 when he wrote his Ecclesiastical Polity. But it was he who 
 said, "Laws they are not, therefore, which public approbation 
 hath not made so." 
 
16 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 very well refrain from seeking to promote in 
 Virginia his own ideas of political right. 
 For even in Parliament as early as 1614 he 
 had boldly announced the principles of his 
 philosophy. I call attention to these prin- 
 ciples not as merely incidental but as an ex- 
 pression of fundamental political theory by 
 one whom we may justly call the first Ameri- 
 can statesman an American statesman, 
 though he never lived in America, because he 
 was the founder of representative govern- 
 ment in the New World and the propounder 
 of the elements of American political theory. 
 In a speech in Parliament in 1614 he used 
 these words condensed, of course in the 
 report: "No successive king, but first 
 elected. Election double, of Person, and 
 Care; but both come in by Consent of the 
 People, and with reciprocal conditions be- 
 tween King and People. That King, by 
 Conquest, may also (when Power) be ex- 
 pelled." An expansion of this speech would 
 become a treatise upon the origin of govern- 
 ment. Of that we shall have more to say 
 hereafter ; but we can see here a denial of the 
 intrinsic or inherent authority of the mon- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 17 
 
 arch, an assertion of the origin of kingly 
 power in contract, a declaration of the con- 
 sent of the governed, an announcement that 
 there were people, and that care for them 
 was the condition of continuing authority, 
 and, lastly, a denial of the principle of pas- 
 sive obedience; for the king that ruled by 
 force and not by right and that did not care 
 for his people could be expelled. 
 
 Contenting ourselves with this word of 
 reference to Sandys and the group of liberals 
 who founded representative government in 
 Virginia, let us turn to the early history of 
 the northern colonies. Here, again, we are 
 looking for principles and ideas and not 
 merely for events in the ordinary sense, and 
 I shall select only one or two of these ideas as 
 the most significant. No one can under- 
 stand the history of New England without 
 some knowledge of church history, and espe- 
 cially the history of the Separatists. In the 
 reign of Elizabeth a few obscure men, amid 
 many concerned with problems of ecclesias- 
 tical order, affirmed that a small number of 
 individuals coming together could constitute 
 a church. This belief is to us so self-evident 
 
18 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 that it does not appeal to us as more than a 
 dreary commonplace; and yet it is of great 
 moment: a few simple men could found an 
 institution which men had been wont to think 
 of as an institution of vast power and august 
 majesty; it was almost as if they had said 
 that two or three gathered together can form 
 an empire. 
 
 The church, as those men conceived it, was 
 an association of individuals; and the indi- 
 vidual, free before God and under God, hav- 
 ing his own immediate relationship with the 
 divine sovereign authority, could voluntarily 
 join with others and form the church. Those 
 two elementary thoughts I wish most 
 strongly to emphasize, for they will be found 
 running through American history, showing 
 themselves in unexpected places. There is 
 such a thing as an individual, a separate self- 
 determining being; and several individuals, 
 hitherto quite separate and independent, can 
 by covenant and agreement constitute a new 
 entity, a new thing. The creation of some- 
 thing which possessed real character, au- 
 thority and duty, by the voluntary consent of 
 hitherto detached elements, constitutes one 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 19 
 
 main pillar of early American democratic 
 theory. 
 
 If we had time to study in detail the early 
 history of Massachusetts and Connecticut, 
 we should discover many illustrations of the 
 two fundamental ideas that I have just men- 
 tioned. Men's^ minds turned to contract, 
 promise, consent, as the bases of church 
 organization; and naturally they conceived 
 governmental authority of all kinds as aris- 
 ing in this way. From time immemorial 
 men have inquired thinking men how it 
 came about that one man or one set of men 
 have the right to order others to do or not to 
 do. Naturally, the men of New England 
 believed that authority sprang from the en- 
 trance of men into the social relation and 
 from contract which they voluntarily made. 
 We find views of political relationship, of 
 ecclesiastical polity and of theology itself, 
 embodying the notion that contract was the 
 source of binding authority. Even if God 
 did not obtain His supreme authority from 
 the consent of men, He, the supreme au- 
 thority, was Himself in a contractual rela- 
 tionship with man and was bound by His 
 
20 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 own promises. Thomas Hooker, the 
 founder of Connecticut, said: "Among such 
 who by no impression of nature, no rule of 
 providence or appointment from God or 
 reason have power over each other; there 
 must of necessity be a mutual engagement 
 each of the other, by their free consent, be- 
 fore by any rule of God they have any right 
 or power, or can exercise either, each toward 
 the other. This appears in all covenants 
 betwixt Prince and People, Husband and 
 Wife, Master and Servant, and most pal- 
 pable is the expression of all this in all con- 
 federations and corporations. . . . They 
 should first freely ingage in such covenants, 
 and then be careful to fulfil such duties." 
 
 John Cotton declared: "It is evident by 
 the light of nature, that all civill Relations 
 are founded in Covenant. For to pass by 
 natural Relations between Parents and Chil- 
 dren, and violent Relations between Con- 
 querors and Captives, there is no other way 
 given whereby a people sui juris free from 
 naturall and compulsory engagements, can 
 be united or combined to-gether into one vis- 
 ible body to stand by mutuall Relation, fel- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 21 
 
 low members of the same body but only by 
 mutuall covenant; as appeareth between 
 husband and wife in the family, Magistrate 
 and subjects in the Commonwealth, fellow- 
 citizens in the same cities." 
 
 To illustrate at all adequately the expres- 
 sion of these fundamental theories in early 
 New England would carry us far beyond the 
 time at our disposal. Let us content our- 
 selves now with one other elementary belief, 
 and then we shall be able to move on to later 
 times when these theories showed themselves 
 in the struggle of a nation for self-govern- 
 ment. Thisjilementary belief was belief in 
 the existence of fundamental law. This con- 
 ception of unchanging and unchangeable 
 right, this belief that there were certain fixed 
 immutable principles, can be seen in various 
 phases of political thought in England espe- 
 cially in the seventeenth century. On its 
 purely political side, this thought was ar- 
 rayed against the claim or the pretension to 
 absolute and arbitrary authority in govern- 
 ment. In its origin it is doubtless associated 
 with the belief in the unchanging and un-iX 
 varying law of God which must be superior 
 
22 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 to any law of man. Thoroughly arbitrary 
 government, one unlimited in its power and 
 authority, was, thought the English liberals 
 of the seventeenth century, a government 
 disregarding principles of right superior to 
 all human authority. Both sides those de- 
 fending the unlimited power of monarchical 
 sovereignty and those denying the rightful 
 existence of such authority really took 
 refuge in the supremacy of divine will; for 
 one side asserted the divine right of kings 
 and held up the King as the possessor of 
 authority obtained from on high, while the 
 other side set forth the reality of divine law 
 natural law binding on all human gov- 
 ernment and limiting the authority of the 
 monarch himself. Naturally, the New Eng- 
 land settlers, the offshoots of English liberal- 
 , ism and Puritanism, believed in the unchang- 
 ing authority of divine or natural law. A 
 study of the intensely interesting years of 
 Massachusetts' history in the first fifteen 
 years after the founding of Boston discloses, 
 in the little primitive settlements, currents 
 and counter currents that are curiously in- 
 dicative of the old antagonism between 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 23 
 
 classes and of the desire of the plain people 
 to bind government in such a way that 
 certain rights and privileges should not be 
 endangered. "The deputies," said Governor 
 Winthrop, "having conceived great danger 
 to our state, in regard that our magistrates, 
 for want of positive laws, in many cases, 
 might proceed according to their discretions, 
 it was agreed that some men should be ap- 
 pointed to frame a body of grounds of laws, 
 in resemblance to a Magna Charta, which, 
 being allowed by some of the ministers 
 and the general court, should be re- 
 ceived for fundamental laws." This move- 
 ment, which arose, be it noticed, out of 
 suspicion of unchecked government, resulted 
 in the establishment of the famous Body of 
 Liberties a code of fundamental laws, 
 based itself on the Bible, on the principles of 
 English liberty, and on the reason and judg- 
 ment of its framers. 
 
 I would not assert that democracy in any 
 full sense existed in Massachusetts possibly 
 not even in Plymouth. The early history of 
 the Boston colony discloses clearly a sharp 
 contrast between principles of aristocracy 
 
24, STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 and a considerable amount of democratic 
 theory in the sense that government ought 
 not to be wholly in the hands of superior 
 beings. The movement from the Bay towns 
 to the Connecticut Valley may have been, as 
 Charles Francis Adams says, only the nat- 
 ural swarming of a people who, seeing the fer- 
 tility of the charming Connecticut valley, 
 had a "hankering mind after it." But there 
 certainly were diametric differences of opin- 
 ion between Hooker, the founder of Connec- 
 ticut, and Winthrop, the leader of the Bay 
 colony. "Matters of counsel and judica- 
 ture," said Winthrop, ought not to be re- 
 ferred to the main body of the people; "the 
 best part is always the least, and of that best 
 part, the wiser part is always the lesser." 
 Hooker, on the other hand, declared: "In 
 matters of greater consequence, which con- 
 cern the common good, a general council, 
 chosen by all, to transact businesses which 
 concern all, I conceive, under favour, most 
 suitable to rule and most safe for the relief 
 of the whole." John Cotton the ecclesias- 
 tical rival of Hooker on the other hand had 
 announced, "Democracy I do not conceive 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 25 
 
 that God did ordain as a fit government 
 either for church or commonwealth." 
 
 We have thus taken a hasty glance at a 
 few incidents in early colonial history and 
 seen the announcement or the appearance of 
 a few primal ideas, which in one way or an- 
 other underlie American democracy. I am 
 not prepared to say that they are the sup- 
 porting theories of our present-day democ- 
 racy even as a form of government or as a 
 body of political theory; but what we know 
 as democracy actually began with the 
 emergence of principles which justified the 
 right of the individual under government, 
 with the assertion that men set up govern- 
 ments and that governments should be re- 
 strained by some fixed law ; and, for our pur- 
 pose of perhaps even greater consequence, 
 was the doctrine that men by contract as- 
 sociated themselves into political society. 
 Without mentioning the thought and striv- 
 ings of the seventeenth century, one could 
 have no background and no perspective for 
 understanding the principles of later democ- 
 racy, and I have given this hasty exposition 
 to banish the impression that the theories of ' 
 
26 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the American Revolution and of the early 
 national period had no ancestry, but sprang 
 full-armed from the brains of the statesmen 
 and pamphleteers of the later eighteenth 
 century. It is well always to remember that 
 the cleavage of the British race took place in 
 the seventeenth century, and, while after the 
 end of that century we find no great out- 
 pouring of political theory and it is difficult 
 to trace from written utterance the line of 
 growth, American political principles were 
 those of the century of Pym and Milton and 
 Harrington and Locke and John Lilburne 
 and countless other liberal, revolutionary, 
 and radical leaders who strove for the recog- 
 nition of man's fundamental rights under 
 government. 
 
 Of course mere political theory unattached 
 to the practical and immediate problems of 
 life cannot be very effective. Political 
 philosophy grows out of political and social 
 needs, and is often a result rather than a 
 cause of social action ; but the writings of the 
 seventeenth century real political pam- 
 phlets portray political purpose. And no 
 one could venture to say that the cogent 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 27 
 
 expression of a theory, even if unattainable 
 in its full force, has no effect in building up 
 opinion, stimulating action and giving direc- 
 tion and coherence to a movement or a tend- 
 ency. Such beyond question was the effect 
 of the writings of the pamphleteers, poets, 
 and philosophers of the seventeenth century. 
 I must not omit, however, all mention of the 
 fact that the Americans not only illustrated 
 in actuality the organization of political and 
 ecclesiastical order, but, living as they did 
 free in considerable measure from the repres- 
 sive burdens and traditions of the Old 
 World, were able to feel more strongly than 
 the people of Europe the worth and the right 
 of the individual man. Through the first 
 half of the eighteenth century the develop- 
 ment of the American colonists in the prac- 
 tices of self-government gave them a basis 
 for the philosophy with which they ap- 
 proached the problems of the American 
 Revolution. 
 
28 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE THEORIES OF THE REVO- 
 LUTION: THE FORMATION 
 OF STATE CONSTITUTIONS 
 
 THE period of the American Revolution, 
 from the viewpoint of American political de- 
 velopment, may be said to begin with the 
 outbreak of the Old French War and with 
 the attempted organization of the colonies, 
 that they might bear their fair and propor- 
 tionate share in the defense and maintenance 
 of the empire ; it ends with the formal estab- 
 lishment of the American "empire" in the 
 Constitution of the United States a gen- 
 eration of discussion, agreement, and dis- 
 agreement, a discussion in which men were 
 thinking as well as talking and writing, and 
 in which certain definite beliefs, the products 
 of thought and talk, found lodgment in basic 
 institutions and in the announcement of cer- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 29 
 
 tain elemental principles of political ethics. 
 The period ought not to be called the Revo- 
 lutionary era, but the creative era of Ameri- 
 can history. The period is too often divided 
 into two parts, necessitating a division of 
 treatment of cardinal tendencies; the first 
 part (1760-1783) is treated as if the sole 
 object of study was to explain the war; the 
 study of the later period (1783-1789) deals 
 with the discontent and confusion of recon- 
 struction from which came the Federal Con- 
 stitution. As a matter of fact, through that 
 whole generation men were engaged in the 
 development of ideas which were finally em- 
 bodied in the State and national constitutions. 
 The discussions and the perplexities of that 
 generation were concerned with three differ- 
 ent problems, which were not always closely 
 distinguished one from the other. The first 
 problem was that of trade and commerce and 
 general economic well-being. The second 
 was that of the authority of government over 
 men: did government have unrestrained au- 
 thority, or was it limited by the necessity of 
 preserving the life, property, and liberty of 
 the people? The third was that of finding a 
 
/*" 
 
 30 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 suitable structure of empire at first, the 
 structure of the British imperial system,, later 
 the structure or what should be the structure 
 of the American political system as a whole. 
 In other words, this third problem involved 
 in its later phase the task of working out a 
 system of political organization for the 
 United States, for the combination of re- 
 publics which had been colonies and had 
 emerged into self-governing commonwealths. 
 Of these problems I shall not discuss the 
 first in any detail. I do not doubt the influ- 
 ence of economic forces in history, the con- 
 tinuing effect of imperial and state financial 
 needs, the unremitting pressure of commer- 
 cial rivalries between merchants and among 
 nations and States. I do not doubt that in 
 the American Revolution pecuniary ad- 
 vantage often underlay political demands, 
 and that dread of pecuniary loss helped to 
 fashion parties and coteries and especially to 
 create or strengthen conservative and reac- 
 tionary tendencies. I do not question that 
 wealth, or what then passed for wealth, and 
 poverty, or what then was thought to be 
 poverty, furnished grounds of difference 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 31 
 
 between political elements and accounted for 
 different political theories. No one can 
 question the unintermittent conflict of inter- 
 est between classes of society, or at least be- 
 tween grades of economic well-being. But I 
 shall not attempt for the present to discuss 
 these antagonisms or variations of interest, 
 for we may well employ our time chiefly in 
 considering the thought of the time that came 
 to be embodied in actual working institutions 
 of government. For even if we accept the 
 belief which I certainly do not that the 
 cause of all movement and all striving is 
 economic discontent or the' play of economic 
 force, we may still be permitted to direct our 
 attention to the legal formulation of de- 
 mands, to the appearance of political formu- 
 la and principles, to the embodiment of those 
 principles in institutions and actual political 
 practices. There is at the present time, in 
 my judgment, altogether too much of a 
 tendency among historians to attribute 
 motives solely to economic conditions. 
 Though the old-fashioned treatment of the 
 Revolution was misleading because of its 
 failure to assess and weigh properly all kinds 
 
32 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 of economic antitheses, the fact remains that 
 different principles of government were 
 arrayed against each other; and it is 
 quite wrong to imagine that men are not 
 willing to sacrifice material gain for liberty 
 and for the sense that they are not subject to 
 the will of others. 
 
 Of course, as far as purely political argu- 
 ment went, it was directed by the Americans 
 against the authority of Parliament in one or 
 more particulars; they argued either that 
 Parliament did not possess the right of taxa- 
 tion because that right belong*! to the 
 colonies, as constituent parts of the empire, or 
 because, on general principles of human and 
 British liberty, a body in which they were not 
 represented had no right to taxation. These 
 two lines of argument were not conflicting 
 but mutually supporting. Let us notice 
 here, however, that one of these lines of argu- 
 ment, based on the practices of the old 
 empire, led finally to the establishment of the 
 Constitution of the United States. The 
 argument that the colonies as colonies, as 
 constituent parts of the empire, had an in- 
 defeasible share of authority, the actual legal 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 33 
 
 right to govern themselves in the matter of 
 taxation and internal police, was an assertion 
 that the British empire was not a simple 
 centralized empire but one in which powers 
 of government were distributed. As men 
 by their conscious thoughts and open discus- 
 sion at least assist in creating social and 
 political order, it may properly be claimed 
 that this method of protest against central- 
 ized authority in the empire helped to bring 
 in the federal state. 1 It took a generation of 
 experience, some experimenting, and a good 
 deal of tctual discussion and contemplation, 
 before the frame and form of what I venture 
 
 1 The federal state, a system of organization now adopted 
 in many parts of the world, was first put in working order 
 when the Constitution of the United States was adopted. 
 If we view such a state as one characterized by the classi- 
 fication of powers (or authorities) and the deposit of certain 
 powers in certain places, that classification and the theory 
 underlying it grew out of the practices of the old British 
 empire. I mean by "powers" such things as the power to 
 manage the post office, the power to regulate interstate and 
 foreign commerce, the power to handle foreign affairs, all 
 of which belong to the central government, while local com- 
 merce, the maintenance of local order, and a thousand other 
 things are in the hands of the parts of the system. This 
 whole subject is dealt with in my article on the "Background 
 of American Federalism" in America and Britain. (N. Y. 
 1919.) 
 
34 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 to call imperial organization was properly 
 worked out and the Constitution of the 
 United States adopted. 
 
 This may appear to you to have nothing to 
 do with the developments of American 
 democracy. But it must be looked upon as 
 an achievement of a free people ; moreover, a 
 suitable and viable scheme, whereby things 
 essentially national could be managed by 
 a national government while things es- 
 sentially local could be handled by the 
 State governments, was an absolute requisite 
 for the stability of democratic institutions, as 
 democracy was then developed ; it was neces- 
 sary for the upbuilding of the spirit and es- 
 sence of a wider democracy of continent-wide 
 sympathies and loyalties. Furthermore, we 
 are strangely likely to forget in these modern 
 days that local self-government has always 
 been considered a necessary part of demo- 
 cratic government. If in these days of con- 
 tinent-wide nationalism we lose sight of that 
 fact, it should not be forgotten in con- 
 sidering the history of democracy. The 
 participation of people in their own imme- 
 diate government may still, possibly, be con- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 35 
 
 sidered an essential quality of the demo- 
 cratic state. 
 
 The argument of the Revolution, as we 
 have said, was directed against the authority 
 of Parliamentary government, and, while 
 much was said about the privileges of the 
 colonies as political entities, a considerable 
 part of the discussion concerned the rights of 
 individual men and British citizens. Democ- 
 racy as it developed in America was long 
 involved in the task of finding suitable re- 
 straints upon government and asserting the I 
 right to be free from objectionable govern- 
 mental control. Revolutionary debates be- 
 gan with protests against certain kinds of 
 governmental activity, and for decades men 
 discussed the need of having a limited and 
 checked government if they would be free. 
 James Otis's famous speech on the Writs of 
 Assistance (1761) announced the privileges ' 
 of British subjects, denied that an act of 
 Parliament distinctly contrary to principles 
 of British liberty was law, and declared that 
 an act contrary to natural equity would be 
 held void by the courts. Little as we know 
 about Otis's statements, we can find in them 
 
36 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ( 1 ) the belief that Britain had a constitution 
 sufficiently plain to limit the authority of 
 Parliament; (2) that there was such a thing 
 as natural right beyond the touch of the most 
 august legislative body in the world ; and (3) 
 that an act violating natural justice was 
 simply not a law at all. 
 
 If Otis's assertions had been quite unique 
 or a mere oratorical pronouncement, they 
 would not merit extended examination or 
 comment; but, as a matter of fact, they ex- 
 emplify various fundamentals of Revolu- 
 tionary thought which were made over into 
 American institutions of government and 
 constituted in considerable measure the 
 fundamentals of American democracy. We 
 may notice, therefore, the idea of a constitu- 
 tion, belonging of course to Britain, protect- 
 ing Englishmen everywhere, something more 
 real, tangible, and effective than the actual 
 constitution such as the people of England 
 then had or do have. The thing most nearly 
 new, though here too, as I have said, Otis 
 thought he found basis for it in British juris- 
 prudence, was that a law contrary to natural 
 law, that is, a law contrary to the funda- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 37 
 
 mental law underlying all free government, 
 was not law at all. He did not say that an 
 act violating the Constitution was unjust or 
 unwise or in violation of precedent; it was 
 not law at all. The principles of natural 
 justice were, moreover, beyond the reach 
 of government. 
 
 We need not say that there was anything 
 new in the argument by Otis ; he referred to 
 the declarations of British jurists, and he 
 thought doubtless that he was announc- 
 ing sober and unrevolutionary prin- 
 ciples. The whole Revolutionary theory as 
 far as it referred to fundamental law, 
 principles of natural equity, and the lim- 
 ited scope of government, had been put 
 forth time and again in almost, if not abso- 
 lutely, completed form by the English rebels 
 of the seventeenth century. And we have 
 already noticed the expression of this phil- 
 osophy in early colonial times. The im- 
 portance of Otis's assertions lies in their 
 reality, in the fact that they were to be used 
 in a great political crisis, and that they were 
 to be built into institutions of government, 
 into law, and into the thought of plain 
 
38 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 people. In other words, this rebellion in 
 British history was to be effective; it was to 
 place, in actual vital functioning forms, 
 principles for which Englishmen had given 
 their lives. The Americans took these 
 theories and principles of unchanging law 
 and natural justice seriously and used them 
 in carrying on and in carrying through a 
 successful revolution. 
 
 Through a good deal of American discus- 
 sion, as the days went by, ran the line of ideas 
 which we have seen in Otis's speech. It was 
 characteristic of the Americans in their argu- 
 ments to claim as already their own, as 
 already fully existing, what in reality they 
 were going to produce and make tangible, 
 actual, and active. That is why I have 
 called the period a creative period, though 
 little really new thought came to light; and 
 that is why what we call the Revolution was 
 not a revolution in the destructive sense, 
 though it broke the British empire; it was an 
 upbuilding process, a movement forward, a 
 realizing of principles, an actualizing of 
 ideas. 
 
 In what respect did the colonists claim that 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 39 
 
 they already possessed what in reality they 
 were to make? They asserted the existence 
 of a rigid constitution beyond the reach of 
 legislative power. They declared that in all 
 free states the constitution is fixed and that it 
 was the glory of Britain that it had such a 
 constitution; and this they declared with 
 solemn assurance, though there was not then 
 in the world a fixed constitution of an inde- 
 pendent state above and beyond the reach of 
 legislative authority. They denied that an 
 act beyond the constitution was good law at 
 all, but in reality there was no such principle 
 actually in operation, either in Britain or in 
 any other country. They claimed the exist- 
 ence of certain rights of person and prop- 
 erty, for the safeguarding of which govern- 
 ment was created. They conceived of 
 government, not as possessed of intrinsic and 
 inherent powers, but of delegated power 
 only. They looked upon government as 
 sprung from the free will and expressed wish 
 of the people and subject to alteration at the 
 desire of the people. The task of that gen- 
 eration was to carry forward those assertions 
 till they were taken out of the domain of 
 
40 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 mere philosophy or of political controversy 
 and were placed securely in tangible achieve- 
 ment and in actual institutions. 1 
 
 It was of immense consequence that the 
 Revolutionary leaders did not ostensibly ad- 
 vocate the overthrow of the old and the well- 
 established. They proclaimed their undying 
 fidelity to the British constitution and un- 
 swerving loyalty to the king. Indeed, in 
 early days they acknowledged all "due sub- 
 ordination" to Parliament. They reproached 
 the Englishmen with being the real violators 
 of precedent and of established legal right; 
 the Englishmen were, so to speak, the rebels. 
 The Revolution was thus protected from de- 
 generating into a riotous attack upon all 
 authority, from being merely an assault on 
 what was old, and from losing itself in mere 
 vague denunciation or in the announcement 
 of wild theories. And because it was of this 
 character, it was characteristically a British 
 
 1 The breaking up of the British empire the Revolution 
 was a momentous fact; but the ideas underlying the struggle 
 and the establishment of our public law embracing those 
 ideas must be considered of chiefest significance in the 
 history of free government. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 41 
 
 revolution and fits into the history of the o ? e- 
 velopment of British liberty. 
 
 Many times in the course of human history 
 men had discussed the authority of govern- 
 ment or the duty of the subject to obey, and 
 in doing so they inevitably turned to the 
 origin of government or the state. And so 
 did the Americans once again absolutely 
 without inventing new ideas when they 
 questioned the power of Parliament. While 
 they cited charters, referred to practices and 
 precedents, and set out the British constitu- 
 tion as the basis of their rights, they ex- 
 amined, like the philosophers of old, the 
 source of authority. For if it could be main- 
 tained that government was self-created or 
 come direct from the Ruler of the universe, 
 then naturally the government must be 
 obeyed and was beyond the control of the 
 people. The necessity of accounting for the 
 origin of government, as we have already 
 seen, explains the doctrine of the divine right 
 of kings on the one hand and the popular 
 origin of government through contract and 
 consent on the other. Thus, among the 
 foundations of American democracy was this 
 

 42 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 insistence upon the principle that men made 
 government and made it for their own needs. 
 Such a thought, like many other things I 
 have mentioned, doubtless now appears quite 
 ordinary common sense, and we need to re- 
 mind ourselves that within these later months 
 our boys have gone to Europe to aid in over- 
 throwing the remnants of monarchical pre- 
 sumption based on the assumption of divine 
 appointment. 
 
 The American philosophy supposed a 
 state of nature from which men entered into 
 a state of society or from which they emerged 
 to put themselves under government. There 
 never was a state of nature such as these men 
 supposed, and there never was a social con- 
 tract which bound men in society and in 
 obligation to authority. But the idea, how- 
 ever historically untrue, was of immense 
 consequence, and it served not alone as a 
 starting point in argument but as a founda- 
 tion for the constructive work of the period. 
 If we examine this idea critically, we find it 
 used to explain the origin of government and 
 thus to give basis for opposition and, in ad- 
 dition, to furnish a set of irrefutable prin- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 43 
 
 ciples. It is very helpful to have a set of 
 absolutes in any political controversy; and 
 they were found by supposing the existence 
 of the absolute man, a detached abstracted 
 man possessed by the law of nature and of 
 nature's God with a few primitive and un- 
 deniable rights. These rights, antedating 
 all government, were not to be taken away by 
 the government that was created to protect 
 them. If Parliament set up its unalloyed 
 sovereignty, it could be answered by an as- 
 sertion that unlimited authority was of God 
 alone, and that man obtained from God and 
 nature the absolute unqualified rights to life, 
 liberty, and property. 
 
 May I call your attention again to the fact 
 that all this thinking takes for granted the 
 existence of the individual, that is, the abso- 
 lute, unrelated man, who existed as an unre- 
 lated being before government; he did not 
 become the owner of property because his 
 right to hold it was protected by law; he had 
 a right to it before governments were known. 
 Men did not then say: "You are what you 
 are because of the existence and the operation 
 of the social order; you have what you have 
 
44 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 because of the play of social forces ; you could 
 have no property, you would only have 
 things, if by force you could maintain your 
 hold on them, unless there were government 
 and law. You are the creature of a long 
 historical process; and society and state are 
 real things with their own duties and with 
 laws of their own being." Had they thus 
 spoken, they would not have belonged to the 
 eighteenth century at all; such words are 
 modern and do not belong in the field of 
 early American democracy. 
 
 All this political theory, all this talk about 
 natural right and absolute man, may not 
 seem to be democracy at all, as you now 
 think of democracy ; but I am not describing 
 democratic thinking of to-day or the vague 
 assumptions concerning the content of 
 democracy. I am describing the thinking of 
 a hundred and forty years ago, as far as it 
 expressed itself in political principles. It 
 must be understood before there is place for 
 discussion of the achievements of democracy 
 as a working system in America. Democ- 
 racy, as we now see it, whether a pervading 
 social sentiment or a form and process of 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 45 
 
 practical politics, has nothing to do with the 
 contractual character of the social system. 
 We have no "absolute" with which to deal, 
 save that what is wrong is wrong, and we 
 know it is wrong from experience and its 
 wrongness is proved by its production of 
 human misery. Or we may say and here 
 the historical student would have to agree 
 we maintain it is wrong because it violates 
 our individual sense of right, and beyond 
 that individual sense, which has been begot- 
 ten by developing human experience, we 
 know not where to turn for judgment as to 
 what should not be done. 
 
 Whether the political philosophy of the 
 Revolution appear very real to you or not, 
 it furnished the basis for the organization of 
 democratic institutions. The Revolution 
 was the process of change from colonies to 
 independent commonwealths ; and during the 
 course of the war constitutions were formed 
 and legal governments were established. 
 The leaders of the Revolution had in this 
 task the opportunity to make real their 
 principles of government. John Adams an- 
 nounced that the theories of the "wisest 
 
46 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 writers" should be followed, and that the 
 people should raise the whole fabric of con- 
 stitutional government with their own hands. 
 He meant, of course, that the principles that 
 the government sprang from the people and 
 was the agent of the people should be lived 
 up to in the method of establishing the new 
 government of the American States. 
 
 If the theories of the "wisest writers" were 
 to be followed ; if, in other words, this phil- 
 osophy of the origin of government and the 
 responsibility of government to people was 
 to be made real, then the method pursued 
 in setting up the government must be 
 carefully adapted to the theory. Two 
 States alone succeeded in finding a system 
 which was theoretically and completely 
 sound. These were Massachusetts and New 
 Hampshire. In Massachusetts, after one 
 constitution had been presented to the 
 people and been rejected, the people were 
 asked by the Revolutionary government if 
 they desired a constitution, and if they did, 
 to elect delegates to a convention, chosen for 
 the sole and single purpose of drafting a 
 constitution. The people voted in the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 47 
 
 affirmative and chose the delegates, who met 
 in convention. The constitution drafted by 
 the convention was submitted to the people, 
 discussed in the town meetings, adopted, and 
 then put into operation. The constitution , 
 purported to be a social compact, and it may 
 justly be said that the whole operation iM 
 lustrated as nearly as anything could the / 
 philosophy of contract and the establishment 
 of government on the consent of the 
 governed. 
 
 While the establishment of constitu- 
 tional government was under discus- 
 sion in Massachusetts, the nature of the 
 whole contract arrangement was presented 
 with amusingly technical and legalistic 
 thoroughness. Theophilus Parsons, writing 
 the Essex Result, treats of the nature of the 
 contract almost in the terms he would have 
 used, had he been discussing an agreement | \^ 
 
 between several people for the building ofsf\h 
 house or the purchase and sale of a drove of ' 
 sheep. All and each are bound by their in- 
 dividual promises; but there are certain 
 inalienable rights that no one can contract 
 away. In this constitution and the process 
 
48 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 of maldng it we find the clearest and most 
 explicit exposition of the philosophy of 
 American political democracy, in the days 
 \when it reared its first institutions. 
 
 As an inevitable consequence from the 
 method followed, as well as from the theories 
 announced, we find these fundamental 
 principles: (1) the individual exists before 
 government exists, and he has rights, a por- 
 tion of which he delegates to government, 
 that he may protect the rest; (2) the govern- 
 ment possesses the authorities bestowed upon 
 it, but is limited by a fixed constitution, 
 established by an authority superior to gov- 
 ernment; (3) the government is dis- 
 tinguished from the state, and is subordinate 
 to the state. In some respects we have en- 
 tirely lost sight in modern days of the notion 
 of the individual antedating the state and 
 government ; but the distinction between the 
 state on the one hand and the government 
 on the other is the most elementary principle 
 in the American political system. In the 
 sphere of political, as distinguished from 
 mere social democracy or spiritual democ- 
 racy, it is the first, the most lasting and the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 49 
 
 most powerful contribution of democracy to 
 the world. 
 
 The Americans had found a method of 
 making a government of their own free will; 
 the constitutional convention, supposed to be \ 
 the possessor of the authority of the people or 
 the aggregated individuals, has remained our 
 basic institution. They had found a method 
 of making real the dreams of philosophers, 
 poets, pamphleteers, and rebels of past ages. 
 I speak quite soberly when I say that this 
 first signal achievement of American phil- 
 osophic democracy, this actualizing and 
 practicalizing of theory, was the greatest ad- 
 dition to politics ever made, unless it be the 
 discovery and development of the principle 
 of representation itself. 
 
 The thought which I wish to make per- 
 fectly plain is this though I weary you by 
 repetition: the constitutional convention, a 
 representative body charged with the duty / 
 of framing a government and enabling the 
 people to lay down fundamental constitu- 
 tional law, is our primary institution. Its 
 use demonstrates the origin of government in 
 the wishes of the people and makes it clear 
 
50 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 that government is possessed of authority 
 granted to it by its superiors, the people 
 themselves. It is, then, the foundation stone 
 of democracy as a political system. 
 
 It will not do to pass over the State consti- 
 tutions or the methods of their adoption and 
 leave the impression that they gave full rec- 
 ognition to the political rights of individual 
 men. The right of a man to have his voice 
 in government simply because he was a man 
 was too radical or too advanced for the 
 thought of that day. The constitutions, 
 therefore, did not provide for universal man- 
 hood suffrage; various restrictions and quali- 
 fications were imposed. It would appear at 
 first sight that the failure to provide for uni- 
 versal manhood suffrage was a complete 
 renunciation of the philosophy of the Revo- 
 lution and of the very theory on which the 
 State constitutions were raised. But the 
 contradiction is not so thorough as one might 
 think. While it is true that the constitutions 
 did not recognize the right of every person 
 to vote or to hold office, they did spring from 
 the people, they did rest on consent, they did 
 accept the primal natural rights of man, they 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 51 
 
 did provide for governments so checked and 
 balanced as to protect life, liberty, and 
 property. 
 
 These restrictions on the suffrage gradu- 
 ally gave way in the course of the decades to 
 come ; their presence in the early State con- 
 stitutions is evidence that, however com- 
 plete was the theory of the origin of govern- 
 ments in Revolutionary days, practical 
 democratic spirit needed to be developed still 
 further before universal manhood suffrage 
 was established. Later on we shall see some- 
 thing of the development of confidence in the 
 masses of the people and the consequent 
 widening of the suffrage. 
 
 We have seen the deposit of certain prin- 
 ciples in the early State constitutions. My 
 main purpose has been to make those prin- 
 ciples very clear and to show you that they 
 were not mere vague theories quite distinct 
 from practical politics; they were of more 
 than mere passing or temporary interest. 
 We still have the philosophy of the American 
 Revolution presented to us as if it were en- 
 tirely detached; but the truth is, it furnished 
 the content for a considerable portion of 
 
52 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 practical political argument against Britain ; 
 and it was finally in large measure lived up 
 to in the fashioning of American institutions. 
 You cannot intelligently approach many of 
 the constitutional problems of the present 
 day, if you do not know the philosophy of the 
 early constitutional system. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 53 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CRITICAL YEARS AFTER 
 THE REVOLUTION: THE 
 FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 THE years intervening between the sur- 
 render at Yorktown (1781) and the adop- 
 tion of the Federal Constitution (1788) are 
 now commonly called the critical period of 
 American history. To understand them 
 fully we shall need to remember that, in the 
 modern sense of the word, the Revolution 
 was not wholly democratic. But the word 
 "democratic," which I have not as yet at- 
 tempted to analyze, may contain several 
 quite distinct meanings, and before we pro- 
 ceed further some analysis is necessary. By 
 democracy we may mean individualism, the 
 purpose and desire of the individual to act 
 free from compulsion or restraint; we may 
 mean equality, possibly only equality before 
 the law, possibly social equality in every par- 
 ticular ; we may mean mass government, that 
 
54 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 form and process of political organization in 
 which the body of the people manage their 
 own affairs. It is quite apparent that no 
 two of these qualities or characteristics are 
 necessary concomitants; in fact, individual- 
 ism and mass government may prove under 
 many circumstances to be mutually antago- 
 nistic. 
 
 At the beginning of the Revolution 
 American society was simple as compared 
 with the society of Europe. There were no 
 privileged classes, no expensive and burden- 
 some armies and courts, no serfs, no large 
 body of ignorant peasants. But we should 
 mistake if we imagined that life was entirely 
 devoid of social distinction and utterly with- 
 out stratification. America had imported in 
 colonial times some of the distinctions of 
 Europe, and life in the New World, which 
 made for independence and equality, had by 
 no means disposed of the Old World notions 
 when the Revolution came. It is difficult, if 
 not impossible, to paint a true picture with a 
 few bold strokes, for one colony differed 
 from another, and one portion of a colony 
 from another portion of the same colony. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 55 
 
 The back country, the frontier region, or the 
 part that had just passed through the experi- 
 ences of backwoods life, was simple in the 
 extreme, and there could be found few, if 
 any, of the social barriers or the social as- 
 sumptions to be found in the older regions 
 among the larger towns and cities of New 
 England and in New York or Philadelphia 
 or among the tide-water regions of Virginia 
 or South Carolina. 
 
 Devereux Jarrat, writing at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century writing, it may be 
 added, with a feeling of regret for the good old 
 times presents the condition of the middle 
 eighteenth century in Virginia, and those 
 conditions prevailed in some degree from one 
 end of the country to the other, North and 
 South. Jarrat says: "We were accustomed 
 to look upon what were called gentle folks 
 as beings of a superior order. For my part, 
 I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a 
 humble distance. A periwig, in those days, 
 was a distinguishing badge of gentle folk; 
 and when I saw a man riding the road near 
 our house, with a wig on, it would so alarm 
 my fears, and give me such a disagreeable 
 
56 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 feeling, that, I dare say, I would run off, as 
 for my life. Such ideas of the difference be- 
 tween gentle and simple were, I believe, uni- 
 versal among all of my rank and age." 
 
 The American Revolution was a democra- 
 tizing process ; it was a step in the develop- 
 ment of democracy. It did not spring from 
 the desire of a thoroughly organized public, 
 confident of opinion and power. There was 
 not as yet a sense of the wholeness of the 
 people and their authority. Compared with 
 later days, the times were marked by the 
 absence of homogeneity and social equality. 
 If the governments of 1765 or 1775 or the 
 Congresses that spoke for America had been 
 subject to an alert intelligent public senti- 
 ment ; if the general attitude of the statesmen 
 and politicians had been that of acquiescence 
 in public desire; if the main body of the 
 people in some real collective capacity, even 
 though devoid of full political organs, had 
 been conscious of themselves as a whole and 
 of their compulsive authority; if the indi- 
 vidual man, feeling his essential and full 
 political equality also had felt responsibility 
 for democracy is much more than protest 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 57 
 
 by an inarticulated mass of humans then 
 the American colonies doubtless would have 
 broken away from Britain, but the move- 
 ment would not have been our Revolution. 
 What we call the Revolution was far more 
 than breaking the English empire. It 
 sprang from the experiences of the Ameri- 
 cans in self-government, and it expressed re- 
 sentment to external control; but internally, 
 within America itself, the upheaval, based 
 largely on the principles of individual liberty 
 and freedom from restraint under govern- 
 ment, was a movement for readjustment, 
 marked in some degree by conflicts between 
 classes, and it helped to usher in and to make 
 more real popular power and popular solidar- 
 ity. It made for a unification of the people, 
 awakened new social sentiments, gave co- 
 herence to popular wishes, prepared the way, 
 in other words, for the more fully developed 
 democracy that was to come. 
 
 It is so easy for us to be misled, so easy to 
 suppose that the democracy in every sense 
 of the word appeared in final and authori- 
 tative form at the time of the Revolution, 
 and that from that day to this we have little 
 
58 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 by little lost the old faith and the old condi- 
 tion, that I must stress my assertion that it 
 was the Revolution that made possible the 
 later developments of democracy. I have 
 already sufficiently emphasized the thought 
 that the protection of the rights of the indi- 
 vidual from tyrannical use of power was the 
 chief political achievement of the Revolu- 
 tion; its political product was to deposit, in 
 institutions and in authoritative maxims of 
 the law, the principles of individual security 
 for which men had been struggling spas- 
 modically or longing dimly for ages; and in 
 that respect it marks the culmination of an 
 era. Individual liberty was secure, safe at 
 least from the grosser forms of governmental 
 tyranny. But whatever definition we may 
 give to democracy, we now know that it 
 means much more than liberty, precious as 
 that word once was in American history and 
 precious as we may still consider it. And 
 the Revolution did something more than in- 
 stitutionalize doctrines of individual liberty ; 
 it released new energies, brought into opera- 
 tion new social forces, helped in breaking 
 down class partitions and old-fashioned class 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 59 
 
 prejudices, brought home dimly to the com- 
 mon man probably not only a sense of 
 security but of responsibility. 
 
 If the thing I have just spoken of could be 
 put into a word, it would be the word of John 
 Jay that it took time to transform subjects 
 into citizens. For after giving just weight 
 to the freedom of colonial government and to 
 the wide participation of the people in 
 political affairs, we must see that matters of 
 state were nevertheless in the hands of ruling 
 classes, and the common man had not come 
 to look upon even his State government as 
 his slave and servant rather than his master. 
 Some time must pass before the common 
 man appreciated what he himself had done, 
 what was the work of his own hand, for he 
 had in reality done more than chain govern- 
 ment he had made it; it was his. If you 
 object to this, by saying that, after all, the 
 leaders had fashioned the constitutions and 
 still held the offices, I could not deny such 
 assertion in full; but at the very least the 
 government in theory was not superimposed 
 or self -created. The developments of democ- 
 racy, dependent, of course as always, on 
 
60 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 social and economic changes, were to be 
 marked by a growing sense that government, 
 man's own creation, was not to be feared by 
 its creator but utilized. These developments 
 will be noted as we go on, but it took time for 
 this most essential quality of democracy to 
 show itself. 
 
 In the days after the war individual 
 freedom rather than political responsibility 
 was most in evidence. We have seen that 
 the Revolution in its beginning was conserv- 
 ,tive and preservative; as far as argument 
 and doctrine were concerned, Revolutionary 
 leaders did not denounce the institutions that 
 the past had produced; men gloried, or said 
 they did, in the fundamental principles of the 
 British constitution and objected to innova- 
 tion. But wars, especially revolutions, lead 
 naturally to distraction and to revolt against 
 established conditions. And so after the 
 war we find the Revolution entering upon a 
 new phase, in which men questioned the 
 validity and worth of the existing order of 
 things. People were passing on to more ad- 
 vanced and more radical ideas. Those notions 
 which afterward came to their full fruitage 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 61 
 
 in the French Revolution displayed them- 
 selves after our Revolution: the world had 
 drifted away from a state of primeval 
 simplicity and bliss into a condition of bond- 
 age and unhappiness ; nature, in which men 
 were free, happy, and unhampered, had dis- 
 appeared, and in its place had arisen un- 
 natural and unnecessary burdens, trammel- 
 ing the soul, body, and spirit of man. Had 
 America actually been loaded with the 
 weight of European governments, armies, 
 privileged classes, and economic impositions, 
 this thinking might well have ushered in a 
 spasm of revolt and destruction; but even as 
 it was, there were disorders which filled the 
 sober-minded with anxiety. At the present 
 day we know something of the demoralizing 
 effects of war; or, if you do not like the word 
 "demoralizing," we know something of how 
 forgotten or half -recognized forces are re- 
 leased, and how, as the days go by, the great 
 deeps of human passion are stirred. 
 
 In 1776 Tom Paine had written a famous 
 pamphlet, Common Sense, with the purpose 
 of stimulating the Americans to assert their 
 independence of Britain. And after the war 
 
62 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 a good deal of Paine's philosophy was openly 
 proclaimed. His aphoristic and brilliant 
 style appealed strongly to the intelligence 
 and passion of the average man. "The 
 palaces of kings," he wrote, "are built on the 
 ruins of the bowers of paradise." "Govern- 
 ment at its best is a necessary evil." If this 
 is so, why not return to the primitive and 
 blissful condition when governments did not 
 trouble and the weary were at rest? At the 
 very least, if government is an evil, it ought 
 to be reduced to a minimum; if men were 
 only innocent, there would be no need of 
 government at all. Such thinking might 
 well bring on a new revolution in which men 
 would seek to overthrow government and 
 base a new system of society on speculation, 
 if there were to be any system at all. 
 
 But despite turbulence and disorder in 
 some of the States, and uneasiness in all, the 
 new revolution did not come. The disorders 
 and the vague restlessness did not result in 
 the destruction of government; on the con- 
 trary, the conservative and propertied classes 
 of society were stimulated to reject the 
 vague though influential theories that were 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 63 
 
 in the air and to work for a substantial gov- 
 ernment. "Good God!" ejaculated Wash- 
 ington, speaking of the dangers of the time. 
 "Who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, 
 or a Briton predicted them." "We find that 
 we are men," wrote Knox, "actual men, 
 possessing all the turbulent passions belong- 
 ing to that animal, and we must have a gov- 
 ernment proper and adequate for him." 
 The time had not yet come when men could 
 be relied upon quietly and placidly to obey 
 the simple laws of peaceful and unoffending 
 justice, and instinctively follow their inclina- 
 tion to be virtuous, and to seek their own 
 good and that of their neighbors. Washing- 
 ton was undoubtedly right for that age of the 
 world, if not for all, when he said, "Experi- 
 ence has taught us that men will not adopt 
 and carry into execution measures the best 
 calculated for their own good, without inter- 
 vention of a coercive power." There is no 
 doubt that the uneasiness and the vague 
 idealism products of the war which had dis- 
 located the social and the economical order 
 were endangering the institutions of the 
 newly formed States, unsettling the f ounda- 
 
64 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 tions of those very systems and forms of 
 government, which may from our point of 
 view have been far from perfect and far from 
 the last word in democracy, but certainly 
 marked a great stride forward in democratic 
 achievement and free political condition. 
 
 The danger that the new liberty would de- 
 generate into mere license prompted the con- 
 servative elements of society to work for an 
 effective national government. Why the 
 disorders in the States as separate parts of 
 the Union should cause men to turn to the 
 need of national organization may not be 
 fully apparent; but men justly believed that, 
 even for internal peace, the "firm league of 
 friendship" between the States, the old Con- 
 federation, must be strengthened and vital- 
 ized. And so, in part because of conditions 
 of unrest in the individual States, the Fed- 
 eral Convention was summoned (1787) and 
 the Federal Constitution was framed to 
 promote justice and to secure domestic tran- 
 quillity. 
 
 The social unrest and the disorder that 
 threatened the stability of State govern- 
 ments account for certain portions of the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 65 
 
 Constitution of the United States. It 
 authorizes the national government under 
 certain circumstances to suppress insur- 
 rections; it forbids States to issue bills 
 of credit paper money or to invalidate 
 contracts. These provisions in the Consti- 
 tution were not, however, the main purpose 
 of the Convention. The members of that 
 body believed, as apparently most intelligent 
 citizens did, that union was necessary, and 
 they believed that the government of the new 
 union must have actual authority and powers 
 to carry out the ends of its establishment. 
 
 We must see, then, that the great step in 
 democratic development after the adoption 
 of the State constitutions (1776-1784), was 
 the establishment of the federal system. 
 Some there will be, of course, who will say 
 this was not a step forward but a step back- 
 ward. I believe it was a step forward to- 
 ward the realization of democracy. But if 
 it was not forward, it certainly was of much 
 significance in the history of democracy. 
 Democracy simply could not go on in iso- 
 lated, uncooperative commonwealths; there 
 had to be a government of nation-wide au- 
 
66 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 thority to make treaties, control interstate 
 and foreign commerce, settle controversies 
 between States, and secure domestic peace. 
 In short, for the safety of democracy itself 
 there must be a solution of the problem of 
 "imperial order"; and a solution was found 
 which provided, not for centralization and 
 complete consolidation, but for the mainte- 
 nance of the States. The success of democ- 
 racy in America depended on the organiza- 
 tion of a widely extended union; without 
 union based on general authority we should 
 have had a number of national States, each 
 suspicious of its neighbors, and all in danger 
 of conflict and turmoil. Cooperation is the 
 very essence of democracy. 
 
 To what extent was the Constitutional 
 Convention of 1787 a reactionary body? No 
 one can answer that question with a single 
 sentence, or probably with many. It cer- 
 tainly was not filled with a lofty purpose of 
 throwing open to the masses of the people 
 fullest opportunity to do what they willed. 
 But those that now criticize the Convention 
 for not doing this are actually asking for a 
 realization of modern democracy and are 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 67 
 
 complaining because the full content of what 
 we now call democracy did not then exist. 
 Although in the years before 1787 the un- 
 fortunate and the distressed clamored for 
 relief, and although there were demands that 
 the government do something for the poor by 
 issuing paper money, it is safe to say never- 
 theless that the general idea, high and low, 
 was that governments must be restrained lest 
 they interfere with life, liberty, and prop- 
 erty. Those who exclaim against the fram- 
 ers of the Constitution because they did not 
 provide for a highly elaborate democratic 
 paternalism and establish a government 
 quickly responsive to popular wishes, a gov- 
 ernment which could and would interfere 
 with property, with freedom of contract, and 
 with many other freedoms which are named 
 in recent discussions, may be right in their 
 laments, but are certainly not speaking 
 historically. The truth is that the demand 
 of those days was for a government that 
 could not act beyond certain limits. If the 
 average man had been assured in 1788 that 
 the new Constitution and the new govern- 
 ment gave perfect assurance that he would 
 
68 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 not be interfered with, his fears would have 
 been assuaged completely. It was tyranny 
 of overhead government which he feared. 
 When the Constitution was presented to the 
 States for adoption, it was assailed because it 
 did not contain a bill of rights or because in 
 other ways it appeared to endanger indi- 
 vidual liberty; men did not complain that it 
 prevented the masses of the people from hav- 
 ing their way and prevented them from con- 
 trolling industry and regulating the use of 
 property. 
 
 Furthermore, it is only an exaggeration to 
 say that there was not a people an exagger- 
 ation which helps, I think, to bring out the 
 truth. There were, of course, many persons, 
 some four million, including black slaves ; but 
 we mean by the word "people" much more 
 than this; the emergence of a people, con- 
 scious, authoritative, self-reliant, was to come 
 later in the development of democracy. I 
 shall not attempt here the almost hopeless 
 task of saying what you and I mean by 
 "people." I can only say that one necessity 
 of full-fledged democracy is social and 
 psychological solidarity; there must be a 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 69 
 
 certain consciousness or at least the actual 
 presence of what may be called common will. 
 Those qualities of democracy did not exist, 
 or were only beginning to exist, and, in fact, 
 were helped into reality by the endeavor to 
 build up government, even if that govern- 
 ment was to be a government so checked and 
 balanced and hampered that it could not 
 readily respond to sudden desire. Whatever 
 I mean by "people," I do not mean the poor 
 or the distressed as distinct from those that 
 were not. A democracy, that distinguishes 
 into classes those that have property from 
 those that have not, is not a full democracy, 
 even if the mass of the poor have full sway 
 in politics. 
 
 The framers of the Constitution were rich 
 men. That fact has been elaborately estab- 
 lished by Professor Beard. Government 
 even in free America and free it was in 
 almost every respect as compared with 
 Europe had always been in the hands of 
 the well-to-do. The ownership of property 
 was not considered a sin or a social offense 
 in those days. From the time of Calvin, not 
 poverty and beggarly raiment, but thrift and 
 
70 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 prosperity were supposed to be evidences of 
 divine favor. The Revolution had been be- 
 gun and carried through to protect property 
 as well as liberty. "Mr. Locke says," wrote 
 Samuel Adams in 1772, "that the security of 
 property is the end for which men enter so- 
 ciety ; and I believe Chronus will not deny it ; 
 whatever laws, therefore, are made in any 
 society, tending to render property insecure 
 must be subversive to the end for which men 
 prefer society to the state of nature, and con- 
 sequently must be subversive of society it- 
 self." No one probably will accuse Sam 
 Adams of pleading for the spoils of the pred- 
 atory rich, for the story is told of his 
 friends' having to buy him a suit of clothes 
 that he might appear decently clad before the 
 Continental Congress. Such primary facts 
 as these are often forgotten by those who 
 criticize the Constitution. I am not at- 
 tempting to defend this respect for wealth, or 
 the political theory which tended to support 
 and protect property, as ideally perfect; I 
 am only giving the facts. 
 
 We must not conclude, however, that there 
 was no envy of the rich, or that the rich did 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 71 
 
 not fear the rising tide of restlessness. Some 
 persons were anxious because they saw a 
 tendency either to bring in a state of unal- 
 loyed disorder or to use the State govern- 
 ments to attack property and decent private 
 liberty. It is always easy to strike off a few 
 sweeping generalities in description of a big 
 movement, but I shall not allow myself to 
 indulge in that agreeable dissipation. An 
 examination of the debates of the Convention 
 shows so many shades or varieties of opinion 
 that a general statement is more than usually 
 perilous. Some members believed that 
 America was suffering from an excess of 
 democracy; and, if Daniel Shays and Luke 
 Day and Job Shattuck were democrats, 
 America was thus suffering. There was 
 little or no belief in the unlimited capacity of 
 the plain people to manage their own govern- 
 ment. There was a belief in certain natural 
 antagonisms between rich and poor and in 
 the continuous presence of interests which 
 were apt to be in conflict. But that the men 
 of the Convention were plotting to sustain 
 riches at the expense of poverty or to give the 
 rich a peculiar opportunity to oppress the 
 
72 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 poor is simply not a fact. Faith in the po- 
 , litical capacity of the great mass of the plain 
 people did not exist among the plain people 
 themselves. But the great problem before 
 the Convention was not to protect riches or 
 to hold the masses in check; the task that 
 occupied time and attention, the one that 
 aroused heated discussion and provoked men 
 to anger, was the task of organizing a federal 
 state, disposing of the suspicions between the 
 existing commonwealths, finding a solution 
 of that old problem of imperial order which 
 had been vexing men and disturbing political 
 equilibrium for a generation. The main 
 task, in other words, was to form the United 
 States. 
 
 There was no reaction in the Constitution 
 itself from the tone and the content of the 
 State constitutions. Indeed, when we con- 
 sider the experiences of the decade preceding 
 the Convention, it is surprising that there 
 was not a decided reaction. The Constitu- 
 tion did not lay down qualifications for vot- 
 ing, leaving that to be decided by the States ; 
 and there were no religious or property 
 qualifications for office-holding such as the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 73 
 
 State constitutions provided. A provision 
 that men should have property to vote or 
 that they should be freeholders would not 
 have been a severe restriction on the free use 
 of the ballot in America a hundred and thirty 
 years ago; but even that restriction was not 
 inserted in the Constitution. 
 
 But, it will be said, a large number of the 
 members of the Federal Convention were 
 owners of public securities. In these days 
 possibly it may be looked upon as no mark of 
 iniquity that a man owns a Liberty Bond. 
 In short, the ownership of securities might 
 be a mark of patriotism and faith in the gov- 
 ernment quite as much as evidence that a 
 person was trafficking in the public securi- 
 ties. It may be who can say? that such 
 ownership tempted men to strive for stable 
 national government and is a proof of eco- 
 nomic influences in history. But the men 
 of most real influence, the real f ramers of the 
 Constitution, appear to have held an insig- 
 nificant amount of public securities. 
 
 When the Constitution provided for the 
 peaceful judicial settlement of controversies 
 between two or more States was it a step 
 
74 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 forward in democracy or only an achieve- 
 ment which made a fuller democracy possible 
 in the days that were to come? In these 
 latter days, when courts are under fire or 
 have just emerged from the smoke and din of 
 heated public discussion, the truth may be 
 obscure or unattractive ; but the calling of the 
 judiciary to settle disputes between States 
 which had been sovereign and retained, or 
 thought they retained, a portion of their 
 sovereignty, is a notable fact. I find it hard 
 to distinguish between the development of 
 the sentiment of democracy and the creation 
 of things which made peaceful and respect- 
 able democracy possible; but if I may be 
 allowed this digression if it be a digression 
 I will content myself with saying that 
 democratic government was on the whole 
 furthered by the extensive judicial organiza- 
 tion which the new government provided for. 
 Democratic States were henceforth to sub- 
 mit their disputes to peaceful adjudication. 
 This naturally brings up for consideration 
 the much-discussed question of the power of 
 a court to declare a law unconstitutional. 
 This power sometimes has been spoken of as 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 75 
 
 a usurpation, and is to-day often denounced 
 as undemocratic because it does not allow the 
 people to obtain immediately and without 
 restriction everything they may desire. 
 "This body was intended," says a recent 
 writer, "to enable a small body of jurists, 
 nonelected, but appointed for life by an in- 
 directly elected President and an indirectly 
 elected Senate, to set aside through a nulli- 
 fying interpretation or upon the ground of 
 unconstitutionality any federal law, ap- 
 proved by a majority, as well as any State 
 law or State Constitution." Though such a 
 statement at first sight appears to be wholly 
 true, it certainly conveys a false impression. 
 First, it is an open question whether the 
 framers expected that the federal courts 
 would have the power to declare an act of 
 Congress void, though probably they did ex- 
 pect it; second, such a power exercised over 
 the States and their constitutions was not 
 primarily to safeguard property or give 
 privilege, but to preserve the Union, for the 
 courts were bound to refuse to recognize as 
 valid State acts violating national acts or the 
 national Constitution; third, as far as the 
 
76 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 courts should exercise power at all in the way 
 of refusing to recognize acts as good law, 
 such power was intended to preserve the 
 Constitution, the fundamental law, the 
 people's law, and to prevent government 
 from interfering with individual liberty; 
 fourth, the care of the Federal Constitution 
 was assigned primarily to State courts. 
 
 There is no use in trying to understand 
 the developments of democracy without see- 
 ing its beginnings in opposition to govern- 
 ment. In the State constitutions and in the 
 Constitution of the United States, the people 
 found realization of the old demand for a 
 fundamental law which was above and be- 
 yond the reach of government ; and the exer- 
 cise of this power by the courts was in ac- 
 cordance with this belief that, because of the 
 peril to human liberty, governments must be 
 limited. It is an exact perversion of fact, a 
 misinterpretation of the whole historical situ- 
 ation, to assert that a few men or a cunning 
 minority, when the federal judicial system 
 was established, were hunting about for 
 obstacles to put in the way of a hungry 
 populace. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 77 
 
 Laws were first declared void by the State 
 courts; no State constitution gave such 
 power in so many words to the courts. The 
 power was exercised by the judges because 
 they were determined to regard the State 
 constitution as law, simply as law springing 
 from a source superior to government and 
 thus superior to any act passed by govern- 
 ment contravening the constitution. If one 
 knows anything at all of the thought and 
 activity of past ages; of how men fought 
 against tyrannical arbitrary government and 
 sought to put restraint upon it in order that 
 they might be free or have a larger share of 
 liberty; if he knows how philosophers had 
 written of fundamental law and the necessity 
 of recognizing its full effect in the state ; if 
 he knows, in short, anything of the develop- 
 ment of individual liberty, he will see in this 
 power of the courts not a conspiracy against 
 democracy, but the culmination of a long 
 struggle for liberty against arbitrary govern- 
 ment. 1 
 
 1 It should be noticed that I am not asserting that courts 
 should exercise this power or denying that they have used it 
 too freely; I am saying that if you approach this subject 
 historically it should be treated historically 
 
78 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 
 
 WHEN the new Constitution had been 
 adopted and the new government established, 
 the Constitution became almost at once a 
 battle-ground of argument. There were 
 doubtless many who were localists in senti- 
 ment without much, if any, national patriot- 
 ism. These men on the whole did not, how- 
 ever, seek to overthrow the Constitution, but 
 rather to resist the extension of govern- 
 mental authority. Fundamentally the an- 
 tagonism was between those that feared 
 strong government and those desiring effec- 
 tive administration. Those opposing the 
 plans of Hamilton and the growing power 
 and capacity of the national government 
 were not primarily defenders of State rights 
 or State sovereignty for its own sake; they 
 were defenders of personal liberty. Their 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 79 
 
 leader, Jefferson, was actually solemnly in 
 earnest when he struggled against what he 
 considered the monarchical plans of the Fed- 
 eralists, and when he objected to the exten- 
 sion of executive authority. All the way 
 through that decade of opposition, he was 
 intent upon saving the people from the 
 burdens of elaborate government. He had 
 not forgotten or proved false to the senti- 
 ments that he had earlier uttered when he 
 declared he would as leave have newspapers 
 without government as a government with- 
 out newspapers only an extravagant way 
 of saying that unrestrained intelligent 
 liberty was as good as despotism and ignor- 
 ance. 
 
 In the years of Washington's and Adams's 
 administrations, that is, in the first twelve 
 years after the adoption of the Constitution, 
 political parties were forming. Recently 
 there has been discussion among scholars and 
 radical disagreement as to whether there 
 were parties in Washington's administration 
 or not. To some extent these differences of 
 opinion might be reconciled if there were 
 thorough agreement on the definition of a 
 
80 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 party. But we are safe in saying that parties 
 were forming and acquiring consistency. 
 Moreover, thoroughly safe is the assertion 
 that one of those parties was conservative 
 and the other radical; one wished order, 
 system, guardianship of property, a care for 
 the sober commercial interests of the nation; 
 the other, with a less obvious and tangible 
 program, feared the extension of authority 
 and was filled with a vague distrust of the 
 new government and some of the men that 
 held the reins. The difference, as far as it 
 was a matter of sentiment or general inclina- 
 tion and it was largely such a matter rather 
 than mere opposition to men or measures 
 is best illustrated by the attitude toward the 
 French Revolution. To one class of men 
 the new freedom of France, all the release 
 and the relief that the overthrow of the old 
 regime signified, was hailed with joy; to 
 others the Revolution bore a sinister aspect ; 
 it strengthened and deepened their instinc- 
 tive conservatism and heightened their dread 
 of the leveling ambitions of the mob. Here 
 in America as elsewhere the antithesis was 
 that between Tom Paine's Rights of Man 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 81 
 
 and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the 
 French Revolution. 
 
 The new government was put into opera- 
 tion and guided through its youthful years 
 by men of conservative instincts, constructive 
 capacity, and administrative skill. It was 
 no small task to put the new government on 
 its feet and to make it a reality. For that 
 work the Federalist party will always de- 
 serve approbation from those who continue 
 to believe that stable government and a well 
 organized Union are requisite even for de- 
 veloping democracy and who do not look for- 
 ward to a society without government, 
 though burdened by newspapers. But when 
 all is said we must acknowledge that the con- 
 servative party was based on principles of 
 political ethics that were soon cast aside and 
 that for a hundred years past no one would 
 call distinctly American. There was a real 
 effort, and for a time a successful effort, 
 to manage governmental affairs on the prin- 
 ciple of assumed superiority of a ruling class. 
 The system and underlying sentiment em- 
 bodied the belief that government was safely 
 intrusted only to the few, and that the many 
 
82 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 should be thankful for salutary and efficient 
 administration. If the common people 
 under satisfactory restrictions would exercise 
 their right to choose their rulers, they should 
 leave the matter of government to the rulers 
 so chosen and not bother their heads about in- 
 comprehensible problems of government and 
 politics. It was all rather British in tone 
 and temper than American; and by this, of 
 course, I mean it represented a condition 
 which obtained in Britain in the eighteenth 
 century and through many decades in the 
 nineteenth, and it was quite at variance with 
 the spirit of the America that by 1800 was 
 coming to realization of itself the America 
 that would resent the whole notion of the 
 need of guidance by any class of superior 
 persons. It is needless to say that the 
 system of overhead management soon broke 
 down. Never perhaps in our history has 
 there been entire absence of management of 
 the people by "superiors"; but never after 
 1800 was there much, if any, hope for a party 
 or a group who allowed this sense of supe- 
 riority to be utterly apparent. 
 
 With Jefferson's administration, which be- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 83 
 
 gan with the opening century, we enter upon 
 a new era. He always referred to the elec- 
 tion that overthrew the Federalists and 
 brought in the Republicans as the "Revolu- 
 tion of 1800." It is perfectly true that, if 
 you scan the government documents, you 
 will find no evidence that a marked change 
 had come in the republic, and that it had 
 turned its back on an old order and was fac- 
 ing a new dispensation. But Jefferson was 
 quite right. The old theory of the Federal- 
 ists, which was in practice that of high- 
 minded and benevolent toryism, was ban- 
 ished never to return in American politics. 
 Not at once were the effects seen, but Jef- 
 ferson was the prophet of the coming democ- 
 racy, the fully determined, fully armed, fully 
 self -trustful democracy of the New World. 
 If one should judge a political society by its 
 laws alone, one might at times have great dif- 
 ficulty in distinguishing between a monarchy 
 and a republic; but it is not alone by the 
 statute book, but by the countless reactions 
 of life that one judges of the reality of mon- 
 archism and democracy. 
 
 There is an old story that Thomas Jeffer- 
 
84 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 son, like a simple country gentleman of 
 Virginia, rode his horse up to the Capitol, 
 tied it to the fence, and walked up to take the 
 oath of office as President of the United 
 States. Henry Adams in his History has 
 proved this legend to be false; but it must 
 be preserved because it is an allegory 
 more useful and contributory to truth than 
 if it were a verified fact. The new era was 
 thus ushered in by one who disdained the 
 panoply and display of official authority. 
 He came as a man from men to enter as the 
 servant of the people on the tasks of high 
 office. By every criterion, it is true, he was 
 himself a gentleman, and it is true that in 
 most particulars the new administration was 
 not ostentatiously subservient to the masses 
 of the people. Some years must still elapse 
 before the full power and spirit of American 
 democracy was manifest. But Jefferson's 
 allegorical appearance at the Capitol 
 heralded the day of simple, unassuming 
 manners and of unaffected democratic faith. 
 It is often more important to know what men 
 believe than to know what actually hap- 
 pened; it makes no real difference whether 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 85 
 
 Jefferson walked or rode ; the tradition of his 
 simple and unostentatious arrival is im- 
 portant. 
 
 We are reminded by the learned historian 
 of the period, Henry Adams, that perhaps 
 dress should never be considered a trifle. 
 We cannot, for example, picture Alexander 
 Hamilton save as trim, neat, primly and 
 almost exquisitely attired; for we think of 
 him as the foe of all untidiness and disorder ; 
 and George Washington's careful directions, 
 which he sent at one time to his London 
 agent for the purchase of clothes, assures us 
 of what we should otherwise be confident of 
 that this man, vigorous, strong, and inher- 
 ently virile as he was, was arrayed with care- 
 ful consideration for the dignity of his posi- 
 tion and the dignity of himself. Taine tells 
 us that about the time of Elizabeth's reign 
 the courtiers gave up the shield and two- 
 handled sword for the rapier. "A little, 
 almost imperceptible fact," he says, "y 6 ^ 
 vast, for it is like the change which, sixty 
 years ago, made us give up the sword at 
 court to leave our arms swinging about in our 
 black coats." 
 
86 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The picture, then, of Jefferson, as it has 
 been left for us, is of considerable conse- 
 quence; and I allow myself the privilege of 
 extended comment because the personality 
 of this man has been of tremendous conse- 
 quence in the development of American 
 democracy, while around his name have 
 gathered legends, principles, and sentiments 
 for which he in his own proper person was 
 probably only slightly responsible. "Jeffer- 
 son is a slender man," wrote Senator Maclay, 
 of Pennsylvania ; "has rather the air of stiff- 
 ness in his manner. His clothes seem too 
 small for him. He sits in a lounging man- 
 ner, on one hip commonly, and with one of 
 his shoulders elevated much above the other. 
 His face has a sunny aspect. His whole 
 figure has a loose, shackling air. He had a 
 rambling, vacant look, and nothing of that 
 firm, collected deportment which I expected 
 would dignify the presence of a secretary or 
 minister. I looked for gravity, but a laxity 
 of manner seemed shed about him. He 
 spoke almost without ceasing, but even 
 his discourse partook of his personal de- 
 meanor. It was loose and rambling; and 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 87 
 
 yet he scattered information wherever he 
 went, and some even brilliant sentiments 
 sparkled from him." The secretary of the 
 British legation described Jefferson as he ap- 
 peared a few years later. "He was a tall 
 man, with a very red, freckled face and gray, 
 neglected hair; his manners good-natured, 
 and rather friendly, though he had a some- 
 what cynical expression of countenance. He 
 wore a blue coat, a thick, gray-colored hairy 
 waistcoat, with a red underwaistcoat lapped 
 over it, green velveteen breeches with 
 pearl buttons, yarn stockings, and slip- 
 pers down at the heels his appearance being 
 very much like that of a tall, large-boned 
 farmer." 
 
 We can picture this man, who for eight 
 years occupied the Presidency, moving about 
 the White House in this negligent attire, 
 sitting or lounging in an awkward fashion, 
 and, despite a certain rustic shyness, talking 
 with brilliance and suggestiveness on all 
 matters of human interest. In some way, 
 we know not just how, he made a deep im- 
 pression on the men about him ; he was their 
 leader, they his intellectual disciples. That 
 
88 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 he had talent for shrewd political leadership 
 and even for a sort of political management 
 is true ; but the assertion does not materially 
 serve us in understanding the influence of his 
 personality. The wealth of his intellectual 
 interests, some unexplained charm in his un- 
 austere presence, some contagious quality 
 that is found in all men who have more than 
 mere direct driving power, won men and 
 gave them strength. The chiefest reason 
 for his influence, and the chiefest reason for 
 our still speaking of Jeffersonian Democ- 
 racy, was doubtless the fact that he was in 
 the original sense of the word a prophet one 
 who speaks for another one who instinc- 
 tively represented the spirit, the developing 
 spirit, of the masses of the people who were 
 as yet but half conscious of themselves and 
 but half conscious of their own visions. 
 
 His face wore a sunny aspect; querulous 
 at times and over sensitive, he nevertheless 
 preached and practiced the doctrine of faith. 
 It is thus that in the person of Thomas Jef- 
 ferson we see the embodiment of certain 
 radical and essential elements of any democ- 
 racy which deserves the name; for, first and 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 89 
 
 last, his philosophy was the philosophy of 
 hope built upon confidence in men and upon 
 assurance that if given opportunity ^they V 
 would rise to as yet unattained heights. ~As- j\ 
 surance that men were capable of self-gov- 
 ernment, or mere reliance, in theory at least, > 
 on the belief that the main body of the people 
 were the safest custodians of power, was not 
 the sum and substance of his philosophy; 
 he looked forward with a clear and hope- 
 ful eye to a developed capacity and a 
 recreated strength. If we have grown cold, 
 calculating, distrustful, in these modern 
 days, questioning the validity of our own 
 selves, such was not the mood of the orthodox 
 democracy of which Jefferson was the seer. 
 The American democracy of the nineteenth 
 century may have been assertive, intellectu- 
 ally untidy, heedless, and devoid of neat ad- 
 ministrative capacity; but it was not be- 
 draggled in spirit, sullen, or hopeless. Call 
 it what you will, it cannot be denied the 
 quality of cheerful confidence. It may have 
 speculated and even gambled light-heartedly 
 with fate; it may, as Kipling says, have 
 matched with destiny for beers; but the 
 
90 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 democracy that was beginning under Jeffer- 
 son's eyes did not lack faith in a benevolent 
 future. The face of American democracy 
 wore a sunny aspect. 
 
 It is not enough, therefore, to think of 
 Jefferson or of Jeffersonism as the spirit of 
 individualism.^ He believed, it is true, in the 
 natural force of native vigor which had been 
 so long restrained by the complexities of 
 elaborate superimposed systems? he resented 
 the heavy hand of government and believed 
 men should be free to manage their own 
 affairs. The elaborate restraints which ap- 
 peared in the social and political order of 
 Europe he considered artificial burdens on 
 the native desires and instinctive capacities 
 of men. But his philosophy was much more 
 than negative; it included faith in progress. 
 And so, even the word "opportunity," often 
 used as the central token of American 
 democracy, is not quite sufficient if it signify 
 only that men should not be restrained or 
 that every one should be given the chance to 
 find his own level ;" Jeff ersonism included be- 
 lief in man's moving on to a higher level. It 
 was not only the thought that men had the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 91 
 
 right to free action, but faith that the result 
 would be progress. 
 
 I do not know anything in Jefferson's 
 thought that implies the necessity of 
 equality. He believed in the equality of ^ 
 such opportunity as men might have if all 
 were free and unoppressed; he did not be- 
 lieve in a mere unvarying level of attain- 
 ment or of social recognition. It may be 
 that we apply to him a faith stronger than his 
 own words justify; and this is not wholly 
 wrong, for any man acquiring leadership has 
 always in him more than his exact words 
 logically imply. But, rightly air. wrongly, 1 ' 
 Jefferson suggests to me an appreciation of 
 the creative energy of freedom. It is a 
 quaint faith, this faith that freedom is more 
 than the negation of restraint, and that in its 
 very self it is productive; but if quaint and 
 without substantial verification, it is a whole- 
 some faith and not altogether without 
 foundation. 
 
 It will thus be seen that, by the time Jef- 
 ferson came to the Presidency, the people 
 had passed or were beginning to pass from 
 one condition of democracy to another. It 
 
92 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 might almost be said that the old condition 
 was not democracy but liberty; it was in the 
 main content with ending or nearly ending 
 that old struggle of man against govern- 
 ment, the contest between liberty and power. 
 And if we are thinking at all in the terms 
 of modern triumphant though dissatisfied 
 democracy, we find that it is by no means an 
 intimate associate with mere freedom from 
 restraint. Jefferson, it is true, was solicitous 
 for liberty, for freedom of thought and ac- 
 tion; much of his thinking was directed to 
 the task ' of opposing the development in 
 America of an active, expensive and oppres- 
 sive government; but with 1800 we certainly 
 see signs of the democracy of affirmation, not 
 merely negation, the democracy of a growing 
 masculine faith, though it was not yet ready 
 to express itself in demands for govern- 
 mental activity. For the first time we feel 
 confident that we are coming into contact 
 with more than any theory of governmental 
 organization; we find ourselves thinking in 
 terms of the spirit of a people. We discover 
 those traits of character or the beginning of 
 those inherent qualities which were to be 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 93 
 
 more fully manifested in the decades ahead. 
 Knowing as we do that in Jefferson's time 
 the Constitution was not strictly construed, 
 that he purchased Louisiana, that he 
 fathered the embargo, that in other ways the 
 government actually grew stronger, we may 
 think that the democratic revolution of 1800 
 had no real significance. To correct this im- 
 pression let us turn to the laments of the dis- 
 consolate New Englanders, who believed in 
 the Federalist syllogism of "democracy, 
 anarchy, despotism." They believed that 
 the end of a decent and self-respecting world 
 was at hand. "The great object of Jacobin- 
 ism," said Theodore Dwight, "both in its 
 political and moral revolution, is to destroy 
 every trace of civilization in the world, and 
 to force mankind back into a savage state. 
 . . . That is, in plain English, the greatest 
 villain in the community is the fittest person 
 to make and execute the laws. Graduated 
 by this scale, there can be no doubt that 
 Jacobins have the highest quaifications for 
 rulers. . . . We have now reached the con- 
 summation of democratic blessedness. We 
 have a country governed by blockheads and 
 
94 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 knaves; the ties of marriage with all its 
 felicities are severed and destroyed; our 
 wives and daughters are thrown into the 
 stews; our children are cast into the 
 world from the breast and are forgotten ; filial 
 piety is extinguished, and our surnames, the 
 only mark of distinction among families, are 
 abolished. Can imagination paint anything 
 more dreadful on this side of hell?" 1 Such 
 was the wail of the conservatives who 
 loathed the prospect of democracy, and who 
 believed that to them and men of their ilk 
 should be left the task of maintaining order 
 and deciding what was good for the people. 
 Some writers of recent days have spoken as if 
 intolerance were the inevitable mental atti- 
 tude of democracy, which must be ignorant, 
 narrow-minded, and bigoted. A study of 
 autocracy or toryism, the cult of assumed su- 
 periority, will show that bigoted intolerance 
 is its logical progeny. And this is so because 
 an intolerant exclusive democracy is false 
 democracy ; whereas true toryism is based on 
 the assumption of superiority, on a supposed 
 
 1 Quoted by Henry Adams, History of the United States, 
 vol. I, p. 225. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 95 
 
 monopoly of wisdom, and on a spirit of ex- 
 clusiveness shutting out the incursion of 
 ideas from without. 
 
 "The obstinacy of the race," says Henry 
 Adams, in commenting on the New England 
 intellectuals, "was never better shown than 
 when, with the sunlight of the nineteenth 
 century bursting upon them, these resolute 
 sons of granite and ice turned their faces 
 from the sight, and smiled in their sardonic 
 way at the folly or wickedness of men who 
 could pretend to believe the world improved 
 because henceforth the ignorant and vicious 
 were to rule the United States and govern 
 the churches and schools of New England." 
 Years had to pass before the more stalwart 
 New Englanders looking resolutely and 
 hopefully forward, were ready to warm 
 themselves in the sunlight of the new 
 century. 
 
96 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 
 
 So far I have from necessity discussed the 
 developments of American democracy with 
 not more than slight reference to certain ele- 
 mentary things; I have scarcely mentioned 
 the natural conditions or the physical en- 
 vironment in which the American people 
 were living. We must now for a moment 
 turn our attention to these fundamental con- 
 ditions which were creating and shaping, in 
 very marked degree, the character, institu- 
 tions, and capacity of the people. They 
 owed much to the principles of English 
 liberty ; they owed much to their practical ex- 
 perience with free or half-free colonial gov- 
 ernment; they were influenced by many 
 other circumstances of their upbringing in 
 America ; but chiefly they were influenced by 
 the opportunities of an open continent, by 
 the abundance of cheap land, by life in a new 
 country where social rigidity could not by 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 97 
 
 the nature of things be scrupulously main- 
 tained. While they were changing the wil- 
 derness into farms and villages and were ever 
 pushing on into the back-country, they were 
 creating within themselves qualities that we 
 call the essential or characteristic qualities of 
 American democracy. This democracy de- 
 veloped and asserted itself in a country not 
 geographically narrow and restricted, but 
 one offering opportunities for expansion and 
 tempting men to new enterprises in the 
 wilderness, "The agency," says Godkin, 1 
 "which in our opinion gave democracy its 
 first great impulse in the United States, 
 which has promoted its spread ever since, and 
 has contributed to the production of those 
 phenomena in American society which 
 hostile critics set down as peculiarly demo- 
 cratic, was neither the origin of the colonists, 
 nor the circumstances under which they came 
 
 Bodkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, pp. 30, 31. 
 The general subject of the influence of the frontier and the " 
 West has been amply and wisely treated by Professor F. J. 
 Turner in his Influence of the Frontier in American 
 History, (Annual Report of the American Historical Asso- 
 ciation, 1893) ; Rise of the New West, and various other 
 articles. 
 
98 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 to the country, nor their religious belief, but 
 the great change in the distribution of popu- 
 lation, which began soon after the Revolu- 
 tion and which continues its operation even 
 to the present time." 
 
 Under frontier experiences the American 
 democracy developed. Doubtless the very 
 extent of the country and the industrial op- 
 portunities it offered served in some respects 
 to delay the growth of social problems such 
 as came to the peoples of Europe before 1860 
 and also helped to delay social legislation and 
 organization which modern democracy 
 craves. Not until after our Civil War did 
 we begin to be conscious of the problems 
 growing out of complex social structure 
 begotten by machinery and the factory 
 system; and not, indeed, till toward the end 
 of the nineteenth century did those problems 
 begin to loom so large and press for solution 
 so persistently that the political leaders and 
 the main body of the people were thoroughly 
 aware of their existence. Almost till the 
 beginning of the twentieth century, as we 
 shall see later, the sum of social wisdom ap- 
 peared to consist of reliance on the freedom, 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 99 
 
 opportunity, and open competition char- 
 acteristic of the earlier simple system of 
 society. 
 
 What were the natural influences of the 
 frontier and how did it shape or create char- 
 acter or capacity? A man living on a clear- 
 ing in the forest or on an isolated prairie 
 farm, intent upon winning a living for his 
 family by his own hard work, wresting a live- 
 lihood from nature in her untouched primi- 
 tive conditions, unaided or unhindered by 
 social conventions, naturally develops certain 
 qualities and aptitudes, and an attitude to- 
 ward life. If in addition we consider the 
 very fact of the untamed wilderness and the 
 vast opportunities of a continent which 
 appeared to offer boundless resources, we 
 find those fundamental influences which 
 have shaped American society most deeply 
 and given it color. We are safe in as- 
 suming, especially those of us conver- 
 sant with Western life of only a few 
 decades ago, the intimate connection between 
 national character and the American wilder- 
 ness ; we are convinced that the frontier had 
 a large share in creating the temper of our 
 
100 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 people and the character of our social and 
 political life. 
 
 The frontiersman is and must be self- 
 reliant, because there is no one else upon 
 whom he can rely. He is an individualist 
 in a way, because he depends upon himself 
 and naturally resents interference with his 
 own particular job, though there is no need 
 of a highly developed philosophy of in- 
 dividualism because he has no ground in his 
 experience for fearing the tyranny of a 
 superimposed government or social order. 
 He must have deftness and skill in meeting 
 emergencies, such emergencies of a practical 
 character as arise from his environment ; and 
 he must overcome with his own inventions 
 and his own vigor the obstacles which nature 
 presents to him. He has no conception of 
 the problems presented by an intricate and 
 complex social order and is prepared to have 
 little patience with such perplexities if they 
 arise. Technical knowledge in fields of 
 human endeavor beyond his own experience 
 does not arouse his enthusiasm, especially if 
 such knowledge comes from books. What 
 he calls "theorizing" is the most useless of 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY -101 
 
 occupations. He respects originality, espe- 
 cially an originality that enables a man 
 to get on with his job, and he pays 
 marked deference, thoroughly self-reliant 
 and steadily poised though he be, to the self- 
 made man, one who has succeeded by dint of 
 personal effort, by shrewdness, even by 
 "smartness," in doing what he himself and all 
 his neighbors are trying to do. He can see 
 no fault in his neighbor's becoming rich or 
 reasonably well-to-do if the neighbor has 
 played the hard rough game fairly. He 
 even admires a rude and dominating vigor, a 
 rugged strength not altogether gentle in its 
 applications, for softness is the one thing he 
 instinctively abominates. No particular re- 
 spect for traditional habits or conventions 
 holds him, because he has left the land of 
 tradition behind him; as tradition cannot 
 help him, it is promptly forgotten. The 
 past means little or nothing to him; the 
 future, and the future only, is his. Taine, 
 speaking of the men who centuries ago built 
 up and defended the old kingdom of Europe, 
 points out that such men as had qualities of 
 real leadership and possessed physical and 
 
102 STEPS. IN.DEVELOPMENT 
 
 mental vigor were the founders of noble 
 families. "They had no need of ancestors," 
 he says; "they were ancestors themselves." 
 So it was with the frontiersmen of America, 
 the founders of the American States. Not 
 respecting tradition, as social questions 
 arose, they were ready for the new and un- 
 tried ; recognizing themselves as self -created, 
 the creatures of no past to which they were 
 beholden, they did not realize that they were 
 founding traditions and practices of great 
 moment for their posterity. Though the 
 man of the West, wherever the West might 
 be, was thrown on his own resources and 
 lived largely apart from men, he was not 
 sullen, morose, selfish, or unsociable. 
 
 I have said that the frontiersmen, or those 
 just emerged from the most primitive condi- 
 tions of the back-country, did not build 
 methodically for a future because they recog- 
 nized no debt to the past. Everyone, save 
 the inevitable shirkers and slackers, was toil- 
 ing not simply to live but to get on in the 
 world and to better his condition. Inspired 
 by what he saw even in the rude beginnings, 
 stimulated by the opportunities that lay at 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 103 
 
 his hand, watching the rapid transformation 
 of the wilderness into farms and villages, 
 glorying in his own power and his own 
 freedom, conscious of his own strength, he 
 saw visions and dreamed dreams. The 
 frontiersman was instinctively an idealist. 
 He pictured a coming time, not far remote, 
 when the glorious future of his country, his 
 town, and his neighborhood, would awaken 
 the amazement of an admiring world. The 
 lure of the West, which took men away from 
 the settled regions and carried them step by 
 step across the continent, is one of the strik- 
 ing things in American history. Men such 
 as these hopeful, self-reliant, idealistic 
 also were naturally self-confident, believing 
 in the guidance, not of superior beings, but 
 the plain, common sense of plain people who 
 lived with realities. The step from self-con- 
 fidence and belief in a benign future to boast- 
 fulness, based largely on what was to be ac- 
 complished, was not a long step. 
 
 Of course the frontier embodied substan- 
 tial social equality, as it had left behind all 
 the old-fashioned barriers of social freedom 
 which the older East inherited in part from 
 
104 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Europe. There was in the West a strange 
 but not inexplicable mixture of equality with 
 an appreciation of the fact that one might and 
 must take advantage of his opportunities and 
 show his own superior skill. His society, in 
 other words, had discarded artificial, time- 
 worn standards or classifications, but it did 
 admit differences of attainment, for the race 
 was to the swift and the battle to the strong. 
 Even political leadership, provided the 
 leader made no assumption of superior intel- 
 ligence or erudition, but appeared to embody 
 in himself the homely traits of the soil, was 
 accepted loyally. There was more than 
 willingness to swear undying allegiance to 
 "Old Hickory," to "Harry of the West, the 
 Millboy of the Slashes," to the "Rail Split- 
 ter" to anyone, indeed, portraying in his 
 own success the noble opportunities for any 
 manly soul who was willing to fight his own 
 fight and raise himself by his own efforts. 
 Men saw in such success a justification of 
 themselves and their own toil; they found in 
 Western orators and politicians proof of the 
 superiority of American life. 
 
 Every portion of the land was at one 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 105 
 
 time or another a frontier; and at no time 
 was the influence of frontier life without 
 effect on the character and activities of the ^ 
 people; but not until after the war of 1812 
 do we see these frontier characteristics in full 
 force. After the war, the emigration from 
 the Eastern States into the West was so 
 rapid that before 1830 a large portion of the 
 people of the nation lived beyond the Ap- 
 palachians. If to these persons you add 
 those living in the newer sections of the At- 
 lantic Coast, you will find that almost half of 
 the national population were frontiersmen, 
 or had emerged but a short time before from 
 the condition of simple life of the frontier. 
 To this number should be added those in- 
 habitants of the older sections whose condi- 
 tion and experience gave them very direct 
 and immediate sympathy with the qualities 
 produced by backwoods life. 
 
 With the accession of Andrew Jackson to 
 the Presidency (1829) we find that American 
 democracy had reached self-consciousness. 
 What had gone before was only half-hearted, 
 or, to be more cautious, not thoroughgoing 
 and complete. Now, for a time at least, the 
 
106 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 doctrines and the spirit of frontier democ- 
 racy were dominant in national politics and 
 in national character. Jackson was a man 
 of the people a common man of uncommon 
 astuteness, a plain man trusting in himself 
 but not disassociating himself from others, 
 an unsophisticated person indulging in blunt 
 simplicity, an unlearned statesman owing 
 nothing to colleges, to books, to ancestry, to 
 tradition, believing in the capacity of the 
 ordinary person to handle the affairs of state 
 which ought to be as free from intricacy as 
 frontier society itself. 
 
 The scenes at Washington when Jackson 
 was inaugurated might as well be described 
 by a humble word; they were not ceremonies, 
 they were "goings on." "The President," 
 we are told, "was literally pursued by a mot- 
 ley concourse of people riding, running 
 helter-skelter, striving who would first gain 
 admittance into the Executive Mansion, 
 where it was understood that refreshments 
 were to be distributed. The halls were 
 filled with a disorderly rabble scrambling for 
 the refreshments designed for the drawing 
 rooms, the people forcing their way into the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 107 
 
 saloons, mingling with foreign ministers and 
 citizens surrounding the President. China 
 and glass to the amount of several thousands 
 of dollars were broken in the struggle to get 
 at the ices and cakes, though punch and other 
 drinkables had been carried out in tubs and 
 buckets to the people." 
 
 These unpretentious festivities marked the 
 entrance of the demos into full possession of 
 its kingdom. The "goings on" were not al- 
 together seemly by the standards of so-called 
 good society; but no one has ever asserted 
 that democracy prided itself on seemliness or 
 obedience to other standards than its own 
 least of all a democracy that had just waked 
 up, or a frontier democracy that had just 
 come into its own. These struggles for the 
 ices and cakes meant that there was no spe- 
 cial food for ministers of state from which 
 the sovereign himself should be barred; and 
 there was to be no peculiar place or property 
 in which the sovereign people had no share. 
 Obediently to this spirit of ownership of 
 proprietorship if not propriety demand 
 was made for the offices the "plums," they 
 are called, not ices and cakes which had too 
 
108 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 long been in the possession of officeholders 
 who thought themselves better than other 
 people or were charged with such offenses. 
 So the "spoils system" was established, 
 partly a protest against supposed exclusive- 
 ness of an official class, partly a natural ex- 
 pression of the belief that what one has won 
 by his own effort rightly belongs to him, 
 partly the practical manifestation of political 
 equality and the invalidity of the assumption 
 that any special knowledge or experience is 
 needed for public service. 
 
 The spoils system, we must notice in pass- 
 ing, was more than a demonstration that the 
 people had come to their own so contra- 
 dictory are the forces of human life ; it was a 
 method of financing political parties. And 
 so we have this awkward fact: at the moment 
 when the plain people were rejoicing over 
 the fall of the Bastile and their entrance into 
 authority, they were really turning over the 
 offices to the magnates of the party to be used 
 to reward activity of the party men-at-arms ; 
 they were making the office not a place of 
 public service but payment for efficient 
 partisan warfare. Acclaiming that the gov- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 109 
 
 ernment was now their own, they provided 
 resources for the government of the party 
 the party machine that was often in reality 
 dictatorial, masterful, crafty, and only 
 ostensibly popular. If we had full time to 
 trace the vicissitudes of American democ- 
 racy, we should have to trace the develop- 
 ment of party and of party machinery; we 
 should have to see various efforts to control 
 or democratize the party government; and 
 we should have to study the influence of that 
 sturdy loyalty to party group, that faithful 
 allegiance to one's adopted or inherited 
 party, which is one of the most effective and 
 perplexing realities in democratic life. How 
 can a people be actually self-determining 
 when they are swayed by party prejudice, 
 party tradition, party machinery? Or, on 
 the other hand, can democracies manage to 
 exist and grow without these things? Un- 
 fortunately, I have not now the time to dis- 
 cuss this fascinating problem. 
 
 Jackson, we have said, was the man of the 
 people ; but this means more than a humble 
 origin or personal popularity with the popu- 
 lace. It means two things: (1) The Presi- 
 
110 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 dent was considered to have a mandate from 
 the nation. He alone was chosen from the 
 whole, and he was thought to represent the 
 whole. He could speak authoritatively for 
 the masses of the people. So striking is this, 
 so different in real spirit from what had been 
 the case before, that we only exaggerate 
 when we call Jackson the first President of 
 the American people ; in considering him we 
 do not think of intricate election devices, 
 electoral colleges, State boundaries, or an au- 
 thority limited strictly to executing the laws 
 of Congress. He was the exponent of a 
 fact the American nation and a popular 
 will. All this is but the reverse side of the 
 second thing, which is (2 ) that there was now 
 an American people realizing themselves as 
 determining authority. 
 
 Jacksonian democracy was not altogether 
 unseemly ; and, indeed, whether it was or not 
 makes little real difference. If there were 
 rude assertiveness and ungenteel scramble 
 and unpleasant cocksureness, there was also 
 in a very large measure that sense of self, 
 that consciousness of authority, that absence 
 of embarrassment, that belief in its own high 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 111 
 
 destiny, without which democracy cannot 
 really exist. Moreover, though sedate con- 
 servatives of the East stood aghast, and 
 many a good New-Englander was only less 
 shocked than when Jeffersonism won the 
 battle thirty years before, Jacksonian democ- 
 racy was national, not sectional; though it 
 was frontier democracy, it caught up within 
 itself the remnants of f rontierism in the older 
 East. Despite the rumblings of slave-hold- 
 ing reactionaries in South Carolina, the 
 United States was now essentially a united 
 nation, an entity, knowing itself, feeling its 
 solidarity. 
 
 In the fifty years and more that elapsed 
 after the forming of the first State constitu- 
 tions, new constitutions had been formed and 
 changes had been made in the old. Gradu- 
 ally the constitutions had been liberalized, 
 and modifications making for greater par- 
 ticipation of the people in their own govern- 
 ment were provided for. Qualifications for 
 the suffrage and for officeholding were 
 largely put aside. Moreover, the people not 
 only could vote, they did vote; and this fact 
 in itself is a fact of prime importance in 
 
112 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the development of American democracy. 1 
 When Jackson spoke of the people's will he 
 meant much more than could have been in 
 the minds of men who framed the Constitu- 
 tion: they were careful to safeguard personal 
 liberty, but were largely unconscious of this 
 vast moral power, this moral entity to whose 
 whims and caprices and stern demands an 
 obedient official must pay heed. 
 
 How did Jacksonian democracy differ 
 from Jeffersonian? It is difficult to say, be- 
 cause we can see in Jeffersonian democracy 
 something of a prophecy of what was to be. 
 Comparisons and contrasts are not, however, 
 entirely valueless, though we are in danger 
 of making the contrasts too sharp. Only, 
 however, by making the contrast sharp and 
 strong can I succeed, I think, in bringing be- 
 fore the reader the face and figure of the en- 
 ergetic and trustful democracy which we 
 associate with the personality of Old 
 Hickory. 
 
 1. Jefferson was intent upon restraining 
 
 *A study of the figures showing votes cast at election at 
 various times from 1789 to 1840 is very illuminating in show- 
 ing the growth of democratic interest and responsibility. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 113 
 
 government, keeping it within narrow limits ; 
 Jackson had no fear of governmental au- 
 thority. It reposed in his own bosom, and 
 the people did not fear their own. 2. Jef- 
 ferson was anxious about constitutional re- 
 strictions. Jackson perhaps thought he was 
 also, but he had no qualms. Mere constitu- 
 tionalism did not bulk very large on the 
 Jacksonian horizon. The time had not yet 
 come when expanding demands of an ever- 
 more complex life thrust upon government 
 many new obligations ; the times had not yet 
 come when people insisted on having efficient 
 government that could do things and would 
 do them; but the average Jackson just as- 
 sumed that the people meant to have their 
 way, and the government must obey its 
 master. 3. Jefferson, eager for the mainte- 
 nance of individual liberty, was solicitous for 
 State rights; Jackson did not deny the 
 State had rights, but he felt himself the head 
 of a united nation. 4. Jefferson had faith 
 in the judgment of the people, but his faith 
 was really the substance of things hoped for; 
 the people had not yet learned to have full 
 faith in themselves. Jackson spoke au- 
 
114 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 thoritatively in the name of a people, who did 
 not ask anybody to have faith in them; they 
 had faith in themselves. 5. Jefferson be- 
 lieved in progress of men under simple gov- 
 ernment toward a noble future; Jackson, a 
 true Westerner, believed also in progress, 
 but gloried in actual achievements. In both 
 Jeffersonism and Jacksonism there is the be- 
 lief in opportunity, but one cannot say that 
 Jefferson struggled for equality, save the 
 equality of chance which men might have if 
 they were unmolested; in Jackson's time, 
 though men, as I have said, recognized 
 success and were eager in the struggle for 
 advancement, they had cast aside as alto- 
 gether unworthy any of the older distinctions 
 which still existed in the days of Jefferson. 
 And, moreover, there was a large degree of 
 actual equality; during the second quarter of 
 the century there was probably, especially 
 throughout the Mississippi Valley, a nearer 
 approach to full social equality than at any 
 other time in our history. 6. Jeff erson would 
 not have thought of the unlettered and the 
 inexperienced as qualified for the duties of 
 office; he could not have imagined, with 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 115 
 
 simple frontier naivete, that affairs of state 
 required no expert guidance; but Jackson- 
 ism, true to itself and its origins, scouted the 
 need of guidance, looked askance at the ex- 
 pert, and thought all the voters should do 
 was to put one of themselves in office. Jef- 
 fersonian democracy was withal decorous, 
 though not unargumentative ; Jacksonian 
 democracy was rude, strong, vociferous, 
 noisy, boastful. The democrats of 1800 
 gloried in the hope of a better and finer 
 civilization; the men of 1830, though talking 
 of what was to be, reveled in their achieve- 
 ments, their freedom, their happiness, and 
 the superiority of their civilization. 
 
 I have said that democracy of the Jack- 
 sonian type was vociferous and boastful; but 
 life of those days was much more than merely 
 indecorous; in fact, to dwell upon the un- 
 seemly qualities of American democracy is to 
 make a blunder too often made. The very 
 years when Jackson occupied the White 
 House were days of varied intellectual ac- 
 tivity; one might say they marked the begin- 
 nings of national culture. You cannot speak 
 of that quarter century and omit Irving and 
 
116 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Emerson and Bancroft and Prescott. You 
 cannot forget the younger men, Lowell and 
 Holmes and Parkman, who were then 
 coming to manhood and to creative power. 
 You cannot neglect Webster, and Calhoun, 
 and Everett. You cannot pass over those 
 years without remembering that Lincoln was 
 living, reading his Bible and his Shake- 
 speare, and studying his dingy statute books 
 amid the scenes of the untutored West. The 
 truth is that if America was boisterous, it was 
 so partly because it was intensely alive. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 117 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY 
 
 IN -the days of Jacksonian democracy, 
 when men were discussing questions of prac- 
 tical politics the bank, the tariff, the public 
 lands and when they were boasting of their 
 freedom, the problem of Negro slavery be- 
 gan to occupy public attention. Perhaps it 
 is more nearly correct to say that opposition 
 to slavery aroused public interest; at all 
 events, though there had been some op- 
 position before this time, we can see in the 
 fourth decade of the century the beginnings 
 of that determined agitation which ended in 
 Civil War and the emancipation of the 
 blacks. Possibly this movement may appear 
 to be quite distinct from the development of 
 democracy ; but in reality the attack on slav- 
 ery and the upbuilding or the maintenance of 
 democracy were closely associated. 
 
 One of the noteworthy things about the 
 nineteenth century was the disappearance of 
 
118 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 slavery, the disappearance of the ownership 
 of one man by another; and this, of course, 
 indicated a changed attitude of mind, an 
 awakened sentiment on the subject of human 
 relationships and responsibilities. The cen- 
 tury, especially with the beginning of the 
 second quarter, was marked by the spread of 
 what was termed humanitarianism ; and the 
 attack on slavery was a natural and inevit- 
 able part of the movement, but only a part. 
 In the eighteenth century thousands of 
 Negroes were brought from Africa under re- 
 volting conditions; and few people stopped 
 to consider the inhumanity of the traffic. 
 Early in the nineteenth century the slave 
 trade was declared piracy, and soon after the 
 middle of the century, slavery, except in a 
 few half -savage places of the earth, had dis- 
 appeared. Thus in the course of a few dec- 
 ades an institution as old as the pyramids, or 
 far older, disappeared from the world. 
 
 We should first notice that the general 
 humanitarian movement was by no means 
 solely an American movement; it showed it- 
 self in Europe as well as on this side of the 
 water. Furthermore, it was closely associ- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 119 
 
 ated with, or it embodied within itself, the 
 fundamental philosophy of developing de- 
 mocracy, even political democracy ; it helped 
 toward the enlargement of the suffrage, the 
 growing appreciation of man's right to self- 
 government, and it made for an improve- 
 ment in the conditions of labor. The course 
 of English history amply illustrates this : the 
 Reform Bill of 1832, the Chartist movement, 
 the factory laws, and the other efforts to 
 rescue the toiler from the terrible burdens of 
 modern industrialism, the various move- 
 ments for a freer and better colonial system, 
 are all parts of the developing recognition of 
 human rights and the reality of human 
 duties. There was a general trend toward 
 social reform, which in succeeding years 
 swept strongly onward and has by no means 
 spent its force at the present moment. 
 
 In America, beginning about 1830, ap- 
 peared various manifestations of this awak- 
 ened sentiment; missionary societies were 
 provided, new religious organizations came 
 into existence, the public school system took 
 on new vitality, men discussed and redis- 
 cussed problems of human improvement. 
 
120 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 This general spirit of humanitarianism de- 
 serves our special attention, because the 
 slavery struggle in America often has been 
 studied as if it were not associated with other 
 humanitarian movements, as if opposition to 
 slavery were disconnected from the general 
 movement of the European world, and even 
 as if it had nothing to do with democracy in 
 its political, social, and economic aspects. 
 You cannot split a tendency of the human 
 spirit into neatly detached sections. When 
 a general impulse is set in motion, or when 
 an institution or a social practice is attacked, 
 the ethical principles and the social thinking 
 involved are sure to show themselves in 
 numerous ways. The human mind is too 
 nearly a homogeneous whole to work in de- 
 tached thought-tight chambers. The threads 
 of human motive and desire are likely to be 
 woven into a single strand ; and not only the 
 individual man but society responds, in 
 various undertakings, to the same or similar 
 impulses. 
 
 In the fourth decade of the nineteenth 
 century, both England and America were 
 peculiarly stirred, as I have indicated, by 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 121 
 
 reform movements. "It was a day of ideals 
 in every camp," says Morley in his Life of 
 Richard Cobden. "The general restless- 
 ness was as intense among reflecting con- 
 servatives as among reflecting liberals. . . . 
 A great wave of humanity, of benevolence, 
 of desire for improvement, a great wave of 
 social sentiment, in short, poured itself 
 among all who had the faculty for large and 
 disinterested thinking. . . . The political 
 spirit was abroad in the most comprehensive 
 sense, the desire of strengthening society by 
 adapting it to better ideals and reenriching 
 it from new sources of moral power." As 
 far as democracy is essentially a spirit of 
 human relationship and that is what it 
 chiefly is this sentiment was the sentiment 
 of reawakened democracy; it is perfectly 
 obvious that this whole humanitarian ideal- 
 istic movement, manifesting itself in sundry 
 ways in metaphysics, in demands for prac- 
 tical legislation, in plans for the reconstruc- 
 tion of society, in efforts of benevolence, in 
 acts of compassion was the root of much 
 modern achievement, though ideal humani- 
 tarianism still lingers in the distance. It is 
 
122 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the root of the long and maddeningly slow 
 effort to introduce a new social morality into 
 industry ; it underlies the desire to establish a 
 cleaner and better method of handling the 
 backward races and of a modified and im- 
 proved colonial system ; it furnishes the phil- 
 osophy of political liberalism as over against 
 close-fisted and stiff-necked conservatism. 
 
 In America this humanitarian movement 
 naturally showed itself most clearly in New 
 England, where in the thirties and forties 
 many people intellectuals and nonintel- 
 lectuals alike were stirred by visions of 
 social change and reconstruction. "But some 
 there were, high-flying souls filled with the 
 new wine of this idealism, to whom the 
 reality of ideas appeared to require that im- 
 mediate effect should be given to their ideas ; 
 and failing this, that they should refuse all 
 participation in an order of things which they 
 could not approve. . . . There was an im- 
 mense indefinite hope, and there was an as- 
 surance that all particular mischiefs were 
 speedily coming to an end." 1 Read only a 
 
 1 Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, vol. 1, p. 262ff. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 123 
 
 few words of Emerson's New England Re- 
 formers, and the whole thing will be fairly 
 plain: 
 
 "What a fertility of projects for the salva- 
 tion of the world! One apostle thought all 
 men should go to farming ; and another that 
 no man should buy or sell; that the use of 
 money was the cardinal evil; another, that 
 the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and 
 drink damnation. These made unleavened 
 bread, and were foes to the death to 
 fermentation. . . . Others assailed particu- 
 lar vocations, as that of the lawyer, that 
 of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the 
 clergyman, of the scholar. . . . Others de- 
 voted themselves to the worrying of churches 
 and meetings for public worship; and the 
 fertile forms of anti-nomianism among the 
 elder puritans seemed to have their match in 
 the plenty of the new harvest of reform. 
 
 "With this din of opinions and debate, 
 there was a keener scrutiny of institutions 
 and domestic life than any we had known, 
 there was sincere protesting against existing 
 evils, and there were changes of employment 
 dictated by consciences. ... A restless, 
 
124 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 prying, conscientious criticism broke out in 
 unexpected quarters. Who gave me the 
 money with which I bought my coat? Why 
 should the professional labor and that of the 
 counting-house be paid so disproportionately 
 to the labor of the porter and wood-sawyer? 
 . . . Am I not too protected a person? Is 
 there not a wide disparity between the lot of 
 me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my 
 poor sister?" 
 
 From what has been said it must be ap- 
 parent that the abolition movement, which 
 began in the earlier thirties, was but one ex- 
 pression of the humanitarian movement and 
 had its close association with the social-re- 
 form thinking of the day. Garrisonian abo- 
 litionism, because of the very extravagance 
 of its principles, powerfully presented the 
 core of the reform tendency. The followers 
 of Garrison believed that we should reach out 
 for the immediate good, scorn palliations or 
 half-way measures, accept no apology for an 
 institution on the ground that it had a long 
 history behind it, resent the notion of a 
 gradual emergence from evil, for "gradual- 
 ism in theory is perpetuity in practice," 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 125 
 
 cast out slavery as a sin. Furthermore, with 
 this zeal for immediate reform, we find in 
 abolitionism two tendencies that appear at 
 least in theory to be opposed: one was the 
 tendency toward cooperation, mutual help- 
 fulness, association; the other was freedom 
 of the individual, a freedom brought about 
 by breaking all bonds of artificial restraint. 
 Such tendencies or principles are seen in the 
 various social movements of the time revolt 
 against stockish civilization, a freeing of the 
 individual, and, on the other hand, the estab- 
 lishment of new communities and associa- 
 tions. And, after all, is not a good deal of 
 this activity, a good deal of this seeming con- 
 tradiction, only characteristic of democracy, 
 which demands freedom but equally de- 
 mands cooperation, united effort, and com- 
 panionship ? 
 
 If one reads superficially the utterances of 
 Garrison, he may think him a simon-pure in- 
 dividualist ; he appears to rely in considerable 
 measure on the old idea of natural right ; but, 
 as a matter of fact, the philosophy of aboli- 
 tionism was that of social wholeness. Garri- 
 son attacked the Constitution of the United 
 
126 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 States, deeming it "a covenant with death 
 and an agreement with hell"; the orthodox 
 abolitionist refused to vote because the Con- 
 stitution, he believed, recognized slavery. 
 Nevertheless, the slavery question arose, be- 
 cause the United States was a nation and had 
 come to a realization of its wholeness ; plainly 
 and definitely the man of Massachusetts had 
 a duty, because men in South Carolina, a 
 thousand miles away, held slaves ; opposition 
 to slavery as a fact was in part the product of 
 a developed national consciousness. And, 
 again, though Garrison and his followers ab- 
 jured the Constitution and announced there 
 should be no union with slaveholders, they 
 conceived of a union larger and more com- 
 prehensive than the union of the American 
 States: "The world is my country," de- 
 clared the Liberator. "My countrymen are 
 all mankind." This is one of those startling 
 manifestations of the strength of a firmly 
 held philosophy; for no one can, on prin- 
 ciple and by faith, recognize his duty to his 
 neighbor without being carried forward, at 
 least in his faith, to a recognition of wide, 
 perhaps a world-wide, neighborhood. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 127 
 
 The effect of Garrisonian abolitionism, 
 connected as it was in essence with the whole 
 stream of humanitarian sentiment, is hard to 
 establish. Probably by the violence of its 
 attack it aroused bitter antipathy at the 
 South and hardened the heart of Pharaoh. 
 The refusal to consider means to the desired 
 end or to have anything to do with gradual 
 abolishment of the evil of slavery may in the 
 long run have added to the difficulty of solv- 
 ing the slavery problem peacefully. We 
 cannot tell. We do know that, though Gar- 
 risonian abolitionism was violent and ex- 
 travagant, it was a manifestation of a de- 
 veloping intention to rid the land of slavery, 
 and was part of the humanitarian movement, 
 without which democracy would be a hollow 
 sham, much farther away from the tasks and 
 the imperative duties of the present moment 
 than it is. And still, so contrary, so perverse 
 are human affairs that this very effort to rid 
 the land of slavery, this very sectional strife 
 which was engendered, made extremely diffi- 
 cult the job of tackling and solving in the 
 years to come the thousand and one problems 
 of social and industrial betterment. The 
 
128 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 problems of white labor had to wait, though 
 slavery- was also a labor problem; and the 
 whole program of liberalism and of social 
 reform to-day, fifty years and more since the 
 emancipation of the Negroes, is complicated 
 by the fact that the Democratic party is 
 largely a Southern party, and it is dif- 
 ficult to form any nation-wide party on 
 a clean-cut policy of industrial and social 
 progress. 
 
 If American democracy was to de- 
 velop and maintain itself, it must banish 
 slavery: for slavery was based on force, not 
 on consent; it belied the philosophy of de- 
 mocracy. No nation that really accepted 
 the principle of ownership of man and the 
 ownership of labor could, as the years went 
 by, develop principles of democracy, inter- 
 national duty, or meet high-mindedly the 
 problems of social improvement and recon- 
 struction as they arose. And so, I say, this 
 movement for the abolition of slavery, which 
 you may have considered quite disconnected 
 with developing democracy, was intimately 
 associated with it. It is intimately associated 
 not only logically, but by historical attach- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 129 
 
 ments, with the desire of the present day to 
 attempt the establishment of a world-peace 
 on decent and self-respecting international 
 conduct, on a recognition of liberty and free- 
 dom from malicious assault by the strong 
 upon the weak. 
 
 The safety of slavery depended on silence ; 
 at least the defenders of slavery believed that 
 agitation of the subject endangered its 
 safety. It is true that the slaveholders dis- 
 cussed the subject continually, and learned 
 books and tracts were written to defend the 
 system. But they strongly objected to 
 verbal attack or criticism by others. This, 
 of course, was an inevitable product of the 
 nature of the institution. The right to hold 
 people in bondage under the hand of force is 
 consistent only with forceful opposition to 
 criticism; a philosophy which scorns consent 
 and communication as the basis of a social 
 order cannot be expected to welcome discus- 
 sion with intention of reaching conclusions as 
 the result of argument and interchange of 
 opinion. The slaveholders, therefore, ob- 
 jected to open discussion, not alone because 
 they resented attacks upon their property, 
 
130 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 but because the whole nature of slaveholding 
 philosophy necessarily condemned discussion 
 and the meeting of minds for the determina- 
 tion of a fundamental question. This ac- 
 counts for the torrents of abuse and pas- 
 sionate denunciation poured out on Garri- 
 son and the whole antislavery cause at the 
 North. 
 
 The attempts to prevent discussion in 
 Congress and to shut out abolition matter 
 from the mails amply disclosed the contradic- 
 tion between slaveholding philosophy and 
 free institutions. The "gag laws," directed 
 against the presentation of antislavery peti- 
 tions, increased rather than diminished atten- 
 tion to the whole subject in the country at 
 large, and, probably, even in Congress itself. 
 Calhoun, as usual seeing things as they were 
 with remarkable clearness, dreaded the de- 
 velopment of a public sentiment at the 
 North; he realized that, if a public sentiment 
 on a distinct moral question were created by 
 discussion, slavery was endangered and per- 
 haps doomed or the Union would be shat- 
 tered. Now, there can be no democracy 
 without freedom of public discussion; and 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 131 
 
 there can be no democracy without the free 
 opportunity of creating moral judgments by 
 interchange of opinion. Thus slavery was 
 not only contrary to democracy because by it 
 black men were held in bondage, but also be- 
 cause it demanded silence, made war on the 
 elementary life-principles of a free state 
 which can exist only when there are facilities 
 for forming common public opinion. One 
 cannot well overestimate, therefore, the sig- 
 nificance of this rising controversy; it was 
 preeminently a controversy between the very 
 life of democracy itself and the life of an 
 autocratic system, which could exist only if 
 the elements of democratic character were 
 crushed out in the nation as a whole. Long 
 before Abraham Lincoln announced that the 
 nation could not long exist half-slave and 
 half -free, that it must become either the one 
 thing or the other, the fundamental ethical 
 principles of democracy and slaveholding 
 were at war, and only one could survive if 
 the nation remained a nation. Notice that I 
 am asserting not only that slavery kept some 
 millions of blacks from democratic citizen- 
 ship, but also that the philosophy on which 
 
132 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 slaveholding rested must be acquiesced in by 
 the nation if slavery was to be safe. The 
 North must adopt silence and the whole 
 principle on which silence rested. The 
 North must surrender the principle of open 
 discussion on public affairs, the forming of a 
 political and social morality by interchange 
 of opinion, the principle of popular govern- 
 ment and democracy. 
 
 The development of slaveholding phil- 
 osophy will make all this more clear, and as 
 we see this, we shall see how the slavery con- 
 test, which ended in the Civil War, was a 
 contest between two principles of life affect- 
 ing the whole nation. I have attempted to 
 illustrate before how the philosophy of aboli- 
 tion was but a part of the philosophy of 
 human relationships which was exhibiting 
 itself in many of the activities and ambitions 
 of men. But democracy had as yet no 
 thoroughly worked out philosophy, unless we 
 accept the old philosophy of natural rights 
 and of the absolute man ; democracy has been 
 with us, as it should be, I imagine, a matter 
 of experiences and of growth as society de- 
 veloped, Furthermore, before 1830 there 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 133 
 
 was in this country no systematic and clearly 1 
 formulated philosophy of slavery. Up to 
 that time the South had regretted the exist- 
 ence of the institution which had gradually 
 been weaving its coils about the whole social 
 and industrial life of the section. The first 
 person to outline the philosophy with any 
 thoroughness was Thomas R. Dew, profes- 
 sor in William and Mary College. He con- 
 tended that slavery was the normal condition 
 of the majority of men, that prosperity and 
 civilization rested on slavery. All this talk 
 about natural equality of men was mere rub- 
 bish at the best; the common herd should moil 
 and toil that the men and women of superior 
 caste might rise to heights of elegant leisure 
 and create noble works of art and literature. 
 "Few greater blows," says Professor Dodd, v 
 "have ever been struck at democracy in the 
 United States than this argument of an able 
 and trusted teacher and scientist. The Vir- 
 ginians, at the point of beginning a policy 
 of emancipation, turned their backs upon 
 democracy and henceforth discounted their 
 great historical leader [Jefferson]. They 
 accepted a new social faith, which, as they 
 
134 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 said, was more consistent with the facts of 
 life." 1 
 
 While these theories of social order were 
 primarily or ostensibly directed toward the 
 maintenance of Negro slavery, they, of 
 course, were intended to be principles of uni- 
 versal application. The world and the full- 
 ness thereof existed for the benefit of the 
 select few; and they should banish altogether 
 as maudlin and false all this sentimental talk 
 about the rights of men as men to a higher 
 and freer participation in the affairs of state 
 and a wider and deeper participation in the 
 comforts and pleasures of a developing 
 civilization. As superintendence and direc- 
 tion were for white men in the South, and as 
 labor was for the black men and the poorer 
 whites, so at the North, if this philosophy 
 prevailed, labor should be the lot of the 
 laborer, while guidance and refined enjoy- 
 
 *A very interesting and learned presentation appears in 
 "The Social Philosophy of the Old South," American Journal 
 of Sociology, vol. xxiii, pp. 735-746, by Professor William E. 
 Dodd. Quotation above is from p. 737. Chancellor Harper 
 asserted, "The exclusive owners of property ever have been, 
 ever will, and perhaps ever ought to be the virtual rulers 
 of mankind." 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 135 
 
 ment should be the burden of the superior 
 classes. 
 
 The foundation of this doctrine was, of 
 course, that property was to rule: in the 
 South, the capitalist, fortunate in having 
 members of another race for the great body 
 of menial toilers, could own the body of the 
 laborer. It is almost refreshing to see the 
 unadorned presentation of this whole phil- 
 osophy of property as over against hu- 
 manity. The thinking is so absolutely "un- 
 humanitarian," so cold, so straightforward, 
 so devoid of shuffling or subterfuge, that one 
 can hardly complain of unfair play. There 
 is the argument; do not bandy with it, take it 
 or leave it : the thing to do is to keep the toiler 
 in his place, ignorant because he has no need 
 of education, free from temptation to climb 
 because climbing will but injure him and the 
 social caste into which he may attempt to 
 clamber; the workingman of Britain or the 
 North is in a condition worse than slavery be- 
 cause the slave being property is cared for as 
 property ; unhappy the land in which prop- 
 erty is not made secure and civilization not 
 stabilized by subjection of labor to capital. 
 
136 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 It is plain that to preserve this most desir- 
 able stratification of society, every effort 
 must be made to hold power in the hands of 
 superior beings. Naturally, the militaristic 
 doctrines found lodgment. Members of a 
 ruling caste take with perfect aptitude to a 
 militaristic regime. Of course there was not 
 developed at the South that thoroughgoing 
 militaristic plan and principle which was 
 getting its stranglehold upon Germany and 
 which in our day has brought unspeakable 
 ruin on the world; but no one can read the 
 arguments for aristocracy built on slave 
 labor and stratified society without seeing in 
 all their perfect and shapely nakedness the 
 philosophic members of the argument for 
 Machtpolitik and militaristic overlordship. 
 I do not mean that the slaveholding regime 
 was consciously and knowingly militaristic; 
 but only that slaveholding, like militarism, 
 rests on force, and that before 1860 the very 
 nature of slavery was developing the prin- 
 ciple of force. 
 
 The main argument of Calhoun was not so 
 directly and brazenly an argument for 
 slavery, per se, as it was an argument for the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 137 
 
 maintenance of black slavery because of the 
 diversity of the races. But by the logic of 
 the situation even Calhoun was forced to give 
 support to the principles which Dew and 
 Harper most fully presented: "There never 
 has yet existed," he said, "a wealthy and 
 civilized society in which one portion of the 
 community did not in point of fact live on the 
 labor of the other." Furthermore, Calhoun's 
 later political theory was all based on opposi- 
 tion to majority rule; instead of upholding 
 what Jefferson called the vital principle of // 
 republics as opposed to force, the vital 
 principle of despotism, he elaborated with 
 astonishing skill a series of abstruse theo- 
 retical principles to justify the right of the 
 minority to protect itself against intrusion; 
 mere government by weight of numbers he 
 repudiated vigorously and with astonishing 
 cleverness. While this argument was created 
 for the protection of slavery in a nation 
 where the slaveholders were greatly outnum- 
 bered, he cited with approval those devices in 
 South Carolina which had been used to pro- 
 tect the few against the many, and, of course, 
 his whole dissertation is against the propriety 
 
138 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 of a government which governs solely in ac- 
 cordance with the wishes of the masses of the 
 people. 
 
 There is no more interesting or pathetic 
 figure in American history than Calhoun. 
 A man of extraordinary mental capacity, he 
 gave the full force of his great intellect and 
 character to the defense of a doomed cause 
 slavery. Slavery could be protected only by 
 the South's shutting itself from the currents 
 of nineteenth-century life ; the forces of civil- 
 ization were arrayed against the maintenance 
 of any "peculiar institution." He was caught 
 up in a contradiction which seemed to make 
 imperative (1) the existence of slavery as a 
 local institution with which the North or 
 other parts of the world had no right to 
 meddle, and (2) the need of other people's 
 accepting the philosophy of slavery and of 
 minority rule. 
 
 That Calhoun's theories, finely spun and 
 wondrously elaborated, were really woven 
 into a clever fabric for the protection of 
 propertied interests hardly needs to be 
 pointed out. In this case the property ques- 
 tion was complicated by the fact that the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 139 
 
 owner was white and the property black ; but 
 withal behind the argument for slavery were 
 vast property interests, the holders of which 
 had a thorough understanding, and on one 
 plea or another were prepared to go any 
 length to defend their possessions. The very 
 extravagance of their positions and the very 
 extremity of their needs furnish a brilliant 
 illustration of the way in which selfish inter- 
 ests may create a philosophy and threaten 
 the state ; and as the antithesis between slave- 
 holding and humanitarianism was so patent, 
 so shocking, so obvious, it enables us to see 
 other situations and problems of like char- 
 acter, where the conflict is not so obvious. 1 
 Doubtless there is always danger and always 
 
 1 Of course I do not mean to assert that all Southerners 
 were cruel and inhumane. Calhoun was instinctively humane 
 and gentle, and I have no doubt Dew and Harper were. But 
 there stands their philosophy, and before 1860 it had many 
 followers. We often find in life gentle and refined people 
 who tolerate a system of industrial or social intolerance which 
 one would expect them to reject. I shrink, indeed, from 
 describing the philosophy of slaveholding, lest I appear to be 
 heaping objurgation on the South; of that we have had more 
 than enough. One ought to be allowed to attack evils in an 
 industrial and social system without being charged with 
 attacking the conscience and the character of all that are 
 caught up and entangled in the system. 
 
140 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 a struggle, danger that those flourishing un- 
 der a given order of society and content with 
 its rigidity will seek to entrench themselves 
 and develop political and social theory for 
 their defenses, while the discontented will 
 become more discontented and batter at the 
 barricades of their opponents. The struggle 
 may be, probably will be, more or less con- 
 tinuous ; but, despite the vicissitudes and the 
 disappointments of modern democracy, we 
 must believe, if we believe in democracy, 
 that adjustments will come through discus- 
 sion and not by force. 
 
 It is plain enough that the very founda- 
 tions of democracy were involved in the 
 whole slavery contest, not alone, let me say 
 again, simply because it hardly can be demo- 
 cratic to hold men in bondage as property, 
 but because the whole philosophy of slavery 
 was at war with the philosophy of freedom 
 and democracy. The thinking which would 
 justify the white man in owning the black 
 man, justified and exalted a system of so- 
 ciety in which the many toiled for the few, 
 in which the minority had privilege and 
 power and unchanging protection, in which 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 141 
 
 education and discussion and free exchange 
 of opinion were at the best for the elect alone, 
 in which, as the minority must protect itself, 
 military authority must be in the hands of the 
 superior beings who alone were capable of 
 managing the affairs of state. It is discon- 
 certing to discover in how many different and 
 yet similar guises the right of the superior to 
 manage and control the inferior, this right 
 based on some assumed basis for separate 
 superiority, this right of the lesser number to 
 control the destinies of the larger, comes to 
 light even in modern history. 
 
 Illuminating as is the whole philosophy of 
 slaveholding, it is especially so when one re- 
 members that it was directly opposed to the 
 philosophy of abolitionism and of humani- 
 tarianism, and when one sees that this highly 
 developed theory was worked out in the very 
 decade when humanitarianism was exhibiting 
 itself most strikingly, especially in the 
 Northern American States and Britain. 
 Here were two directly antithetical attitudes 
 toward life and duty, and the result of the 
 antithesis was a great war, in which slave- 
 holding was beaten down; it had to go if 
 
142 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 democracy, a principle of human intercourse 
 based on freedom and fellowship, was to sur- 
 vive and enter upon new duties and new en- 
 larging experiences. 
 
 All this, of course, leads us up to the Civil 
 War and its significance. The development 
 of antislavery sentiment at the North is a 
 very difficult course to trace. It is hard to 
 account for the transition in twenty years or 
 so from the time when Garrison's life was in 
 danger and when the question of slavery did 
 not trouble the even plane of orthodox re- 
 ligion in the Northern States to the time 
 when Wendell Phillips was a popular idol 
 and Charles Sumner a popular leader, and 
 when churches were divided into Northern 
 and Southern branches because of the slavery 
 issue. That transition, momentous, per- 
 plexing, meaning so much that was fateful 
 in our history, I shall not attempt to trace. 
 The developing spirit was doubtless con- 
 nected with the growth of national sentiment 
 throughout the North, doubtless strength- 
 ened by the incursion of free laborers from 
 Europe, doubtless aided by the widening and 
 deepening social life of the Northwest which 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 143 
 
 was preparing to add its vigor to the con- 
 science of the plain people of New England. 
 At all events the Civil War came on, 
 slavery was abolished, and the nation was 
 saved. Let us look for a moment into what 
 was involved in the controversy and then see 
 what was its effect. It is plain, of course, 
 from what has been said before, that the issue 
 was between principles of democracy and 
 those principles of slaveholding which were 
 directly opposed to the whole philosophy of 
 democracy. The average man at the North 
 believed the war was for the Union, to save 
 the country from dissolution, and so it was; 
 but the fate of the country was in reality of 
 especial significance because on it depended 
 the fate of democratic experiment. The 
 United States stood out before the world as 
 the one conspicuous effort at popular gov- 
 ernment. Was the country to be torn asun- 
 der because a section beaten in an election 
 after twenty years and more of discussion 
 would not accept the constitutional decision 
 of the electorate? We have only to think of 
 what would have resulted from the triumph 
 of the principle of secession to see what was 
 
144 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the significance of the war. Two differing 
 social and industrial systems would have ex- 
 isted facing each other across the Ohio and 
 a surveyor's line in the West two intrinsi- 
 cally hostile systems. Moreover, the break-up 
 of the Union would have been hailed by con- 
 servative classes the world over as a demon- 
 stration of the incompetence of democracy 
 as a basis of national organization. These 
 two systems hardly could have maintained 
 themselves peaceably ; they would have been 
 vexed continually by all the old problems 
 of industrial diversity and fugitive slaves. 
 Other wars surely would have followed and 
 in the intervals a militaristic system would 
 have been established. But all this simply 
 shows us that the conflict was really, as 
 Seward proclaimed, an irrepressible conflict, 
 and that this continent must be either one 
 thing or the other, either all free or all slave. 
 The contest, as both Seward and Lincoln 
 maintained, was the age-old contest between 
 privilege and freedom, between the claims of 
 the few to power and ease and the right of 
 the many to eat the bread earned by their 
 own labor, a contest which perhaps never will 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 145 
 
 disappear. Lincoln clearly saw the nature 
 of the conflict : it was a conflict to determine 
 whether democracy as a form of government 
 and a principle of life should survive. 
 
146 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 DEVELOPMENTS OF RECENT 
 YEARS: INDIVIDUALISM VS. 
 SOCIAL CONTROL 
 
 IT is difficult to analyze or to describe 
 briefly the fifty years and more that have 
 passed since the end of the Civil War. In 
 that half century the population of the 
 United States trebled ; immigrants came into 
 the country by the million; in 1860 all the 
 Western country between the western line 
 of Iowa and the Rockies was almost un- 
 peopled; the mountain regions were prac- 
 tically without inhabitants. In one decade, 
 1870 to 1880, a territory equal to that of 
 France was added to the farms of the nation, 
 while in the next two decades the total area 
 of farm lands taken up constituted a terri- 
 tory as large as France, England, Wales, 
 and Germany combined. Towns and vil- 
 lages became cities; industries developed to 
 enormous proportions; a few men amassed 
 vast fortunes and the wealth of the land in- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 147 
 
 creased amazingly; because of machinery 
 and the building of railroads, many lines of 
 business were concentrated in manufactur- 
 ing centers; new problems begotten by 
 wealth and poverty demanded solution; 
 workmen began to talk about classes of so- 
 ciety, while conflicts between labor and 
 capital assumed at times alarming propor- 
 tions ; the growing complexity of society ac- 
 centuated the interdependence of various 
 portions of the country and its essential in- 
 dustrial unity, and also that government in 
 the nation, the State, and the city must take 
 on a multitude of duties unthought of in the 
 simpler life of the days before the war. 
 Democracy as a form of government was 
 thus put to new tests because it was called to 
 new duties. It had succeeded in the less 
 intricate life of earlier days. Could it take 
 on the new tasks and show itself efficient, 
 economical, and just? Could our constitu- 
 tional systems, arranged and established in 
 more primitive times, be adapted to the new 
 situation? 
 
 We shall have to content ourselves with 
 only a brief discussion of the democratic de- 
 
148 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 velopments and trials during that half 
 century of growth, and we can only partly 
 answer the questions that I have stated. 
 Even the presentation of the problems is, 
 however, of some value. 
 
 The first ten or fifteen years after the war 
 were largely taken up with discussing the 
 problems and cherishing the animosities of 
 Reconstruction. We now look back on those 
 years with some sinking of the heart. The 
 South was a scene of industrial and social 
 confusion. Slavery in its more evident forms 
 had been put away forever; but you need not 
 be told that the effort made by the North to 
 force Negro suffrage on the South, despite 
 the amendments to the Constitution, was not 
 a practical success ; the effort to secure sub- 
 stantial equality for the Negro was likewise 
 largely a failure. The whole matter was full 
 of difficulties for Northerner and Southerner 
 alike; but it is especially depressing to find 
 how much of the thought and passions of 
 men here at the North was given to revenge- 
 ful or suspicious partisan politics, how little 
 to finding, on the basis of enlightenment, 
 some solutions for the pressing problems, 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 149 
 
 which men as mere politicians could not dis- 
 cern. Of course the race question itself was 
 full of perplexity, and it remains with us 
 to-day, a question to be answered if possible 
 by the mandates of democratic justice. In 
 America and in the world at large, beneath 
 the task of making and preserving democ- 
 racy, rests the fact of diversity of races, of 
 race prejudices and of race ambitions. 
 
 The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was 
 partly the product of partisanship, though 
 not altogether unworthy partisanship. The 
 Southern Democrats, the Republicans 
 thought, should not have the advantage of 
 increased State representation in Congress 
 as the result of emancipation of the blacks. 
 So the amendment provided that a reduction 
 of representation should follow any denial of 
 the suffrage to male citizens twenty-one 
 years of age. The Fifteenth Amendment 
 (1870) declared that suffrage should not be 
 denied on account of race, color, or previous 
 condition of servitude. I mention these 
 efforts here only for the purpose of indicat- 
 ing that the old belief in freedom and re- 
 sponsibility was still active. Charles Sum- 
 
150 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ner and his school believed that the f reedman 
 was fit to vote and, moreover, that liberty 
 and responsibility would add to his man- 
 hood ; they continued to cherish the idealism 
 which had been the uplifting force of the 
 antislavery movement the belief that free- 
 dom was the panacea for social ills. 
 
 Now, it is a strange and disconcerting fact 
 that this belief in freedom was prominent at 
 a time when society, as we have just noticed, 
 was passing on to a new stage. Society was 
 becoming more complex ; the old ideas of un- 
 restrained liberty, the notion that all would 
 be well if government did not govern too 
 much, were being invalidated by new needs ; 
 the time was coming when men needed to 
 have things done for them which they could 
 not do themselves, and when restraints on 
 individual action were demanded. The time 
 was close at hand when government must 
 control the use of property. The old theory 
 of laissez-faire, of everybody for himself in 
 the business world and the devil take the 
 hindmost, was being discredited and was soon 
 to appear unworkable. As one reads 
 through the Congressional debates of those 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 151 
 
 days when the Fourteenth Amendment was 
 under discussion, he is depressed by the 
 volume of sound poured out in denunciation 
 of the "Rebels" and by the slight attention 
 given to the provisions of the Amendment 
 that were to be of great significance in the 
 days that were just ahead. 
 
 The first section of the Amendment pro- 
 vides that no State shall deprive a person of 
 his life, liberty, or property without due 
 process of law, or deny to any person the 
 equal protection of the law. The State 
 constitutions commonly contained provisions 
 of like character. But it is noteworthy that 
 the Fourteenth Amendment protected in- 
 dividual liberty from infringement by the 
 States; personal liberty was placed under 
 national protection. Though the framers 
 of the Amendment had chiefly in mind the 
 protection of the Negroes, the words are gen- 
 eral in their import; they do not refer to 
 black men and freedmen alone. As the na- 
 tional Constitution now contained explicit 
 protection of individual rights, every piece of 
 State legislation that could be interpreted as 
 an encroachment on personal liberty, on the 
 
152 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 right of every man to do as he chose, might 
 be checked by national authority or brought 
 before the Federal Court for examination. 
 
 Hardly was the Amendment passed, when 
 difficult questions of interpretation arose; 
 indeed, difficult questions continued to arise, 
 because, as we have said, the times were de- 
 manding greater governmental activity ; dis- 
 content with the old notion that all would be 
 well if only men were left alone was begin- 
 ning to manifest itself. On the other hand, 
 corporations and individual owners of prop- 
 erty, busily engaged in industry, some of 
 them occupied with tasks that affected wide 
 areas and many thousands of people, wanted 
 to be left quite free to manage their own busi- 
 ness and reap their own rewards. The belief 
 that men should be left alone was all right 
 enough in simpler times, before the building 
 of great factories and before long railway 
 systems knit people in wide regions into a 
 single body, when much that people ate was 
 raised in the immediate neighborhood, when 
 much that they wore was made in the house- 
 hold or by the village tailor or shoemaker, 
 when much that was used and all that was 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 153 
 
 mended depended on the cleverness of the 
 village tinker. But the new life was begin- 
 ning to undermine local independence and 
 the power of any man to live for him- 
 self alone and supply his own wants. What 
 was meant, then, by a declaration that no 
 State should deprive a person of life, liberty, 
 or property without due process of law? 
 Was a corporation a person? What was the 
 content and the extent of liberty? Did 
 property include profits from property, or 
 could rates and charges be fixed and regu- 
 lated, and if so, under what conditions? A 
 study of the disputes arising under the first 
 section of the Fourteenth Amendment dis- 
 closes the nature of the industrial and gen- 
 eral social problems of democracy in these 
 decades of rapid change and rapid develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Fortunately, at an early date the Supreme 
 Court decided that the States were not by the 
 Amendment deprived of the police power; 
 that is to say, the broad power of controlling 
 individual action and regulating the use of 
 property to secure the life, health, and safety 
 of the people. But, of course, the question 
 
154 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 arose as to what was a due exercise of the 
 police power. How far could State legisla- 
 tion go, under guise of using the police 
 power, in the way of controlling men in their 
 use of property? We must always remem- 
 ber that we in America always had boasted 
 of the advantage of having governments that 
 did not meddle ; and we prided ourselves, not 
 unjustly, on our ability to get on without 
 annoying interferences. So legal contro- 
 versies arose, and little by little principles, 
 adapted to the new order, were laid down. 
 We must consider all this discussion and the 
 building up of new law as the product of a 
 democracy endeavoring to solve the problems 
 of a new social and industrial era. 
 
 As railways reached out over the Western 
 country tying up the whole Middle West 
 into an industrial unit, and as farms 
 stretched out over the northern Mississippi 
 basin, the farmers grew uneasy and de- 
 manded regulation of railway rates and ele- 
 vator charges. They felt that they were sub- 
 ject to the will of a few men controlling es- 
 sential industrial agencies and occupying 
 strategical positions. Answering this de- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 155 
 
 mand of the Grangers, various laws were 
 passed, and these, of course, came before the 
 courts, that their validity might be tested. 
 "What right has a State Legislature to regu- 
 late charges?" said the railway owners. 
 "What right have you," said the owners of 
 grain elevators, "to say how much we shall 
 charge for storing grain? This property is 
 ours, and no one can limit the profits we 
 reap except by taking away our property 
 without due process." But the courts up- 
 held the authority of the State to do these 
 things, and in doing so laid down, in 
 the elevator case, a very important prin- 
 ciple, namely, that when property is de- 
 voted to a public use it is affected with a pub- 
 lic interest and the public has an interest in 
 that use. This principle formed the basis for 
 the body of legislation that was to come, regu- 
 lating and controlling corporations that are 
 of quasi-public character. 1 The courts did 
 
 *Of course railroads might be regulated on a somewhat 
 different principle, because they receive certain privileges 
 from the State. But the general principle that a business 
 may, though privately owned, be so essentially public in 
 nature as to warrant regulation of rates is a very important 
 principle. 
 
156 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 not, however, acknowledge the full right of 
 the State Legislatures to fix rates, but re- 
 served to themselves the authority to deny the 
 validity of any rates that were so unreason- 
 ably low as to be practically a confiscation of 
 property. No one now questions the right 
 and the duty of the government to regulate 
 railroads. Times have changed since men in 
 control of railway systems indignantly de- 
 nied that the public had any business to inter- 
 fere with the management of their property. 
 Gradually they came to recognize that they 
 are public servants. 
 
 It is unnecessary to remind ourselves, per- 
 haps, that all this new adjustment, all this 
 growth of public control, all these new 
 burdens of democratic responsibility, had to 
 be worked out here in America under writ- 
 ten constitutions; and these constitutions 
 sought to preserve individual liberty and in 
 a measure to restrain government. It was 
 necessary in this country, as in Britain, to 
 bring about a change of mind, to determine 
 what was wise and proper, to seek solutions 
 for new problems ; but in addition all Ameri- 
 can legislation had to be squared with the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 157 
 
 prohibitions and commands of written con- 
 stitutions. To be rid of the old theory of 
 individual right and at the same time pre- 
 serve constitutional limitation, or, rather, to 
 preserve what needed to be preserved of in- 
 dividual right, to preserve the Constitution 
 and at the same time meet the new needs of 
 the day, was a difficult task. This process of 
 adjustment, this enlargement of the prin- 
 ciples of constitutional law, often sorely 
 tried the impatient reformer. But I think it 
 fair to say that the courts, though sometimes 
 unwisely technical, on the whole succeeded 
 with remarkable cleverness in maintain- 
 ing constitutional principles while they 
 recognized the validity of new social legisla- 
 tion. And this I say despite the fact that 
 the courts have been the chief mark of attack 
 from those that would hastily accomplish 
 what they deem desirable. It may be that, 
 in time to come, the people will demand that 
 written constitutions, as far as they restrain 
 governmental authority, be scrapped alto- 
 gether ; it may be that the courts will be de- 
 prived of the job of passing on the question 
 as to whether legislation is in accord with a 
 
158 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 constitution superior to ordinary laws. But 
 that time is not yet. 
 
 Possibly of even greater consequence than 
 legislation regulating railroads and other 
 corporations are the laws for the protection 
 of the workingman. This class of legislation 
 has come chiefly in the last twenty -five years. 
 Laws have been passed limiting the hours of 
 labor and also laws providing that employers 
 should give certain compensation for in- 
 juries suffered by workmen. This legisla- 
 tion, of course, had to pass through the 
 judicial gantlet; for here again an old 
 "liberty" appeared to be infringed upon. 
 What right has any Legislature to limit my 
 power of contracting with laborers in my 
 factory? Or why should a law prevent a 
 man or woman from working more than ten 
 hours a day when he is willing to toil for 
 twelve ? 
 
 This demand for legislation restricting the 
 absolute freedom of contract grew out of the 
 fact that practically there was not real 
 freedom, especially for the workman. It 
 was easy enough to say that, if he did not like 
 the hours of labor, he need not work, or to say 
 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 159 
 
 that if he did not wish to accept the risks of a 
 certain employment, he could seek some 
 other employment. As a matter of cold 
 fact, the laborer was not free, except in the 
 view of the law, to move hither and thither, 
 or to accept or reject employment. And so 
 the State stepped in to announce that em- 
 ployers must provide safe appliances, assume 
 the risks of the employment as one of the 
 burdens of business, and for the public good 
 protect the public and the working people 
 from long hours and unnecessarily exhaust- 
 ing labor. 
 
 In passing upon this legislation the courts, 
 struggling up and away from the old idea of 
 democracy, away from the belief that all 
 would be well if government kept its hands 
 off, reached a social point of view and 
 adopted the principles of the new social 
 democracy. But they did not declare that 
 individual rights of employer and laborer are 
 henceforth subject to any and every legis- 
 lative act that may be passed : laws encroach- 
 ing on the old freedom of contract must be 
 judged by a wholesome social standard; the 
 validity of such legislation must depend on 
 
160 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 some apparent social need. Granted that 
 there is to be any restraint on the free exer- 
 cise of majority power, the requirement that 
 there be some reasonable relationship be- 
 tween the welfare of the State and the legis- 
 lation interfering with private conduct cannot 
 be considered an unwholesome requirement. 
 If we have reached the point where the courts 
 freely admit the legality of such acts as ap- 
 pear to reasonable men to be of benefit to the 
 public, the courts cannot justly be charged 
 with acting as mere obstructions to the will 
 of the people. 
 
 Democratic developments of the last half 
 century are distinguished, therefore, by the 
 efforts of the people to promote public wel- 
 fare by legislation. Individual liberty and 
 corporate action are limited and restrained 
 for the general social good; a wide domain 
 of legislation and administration has been 
 entered upon, a domain undreamed of by the 
 fathers. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century Jefferson announced as the great 
 requisite to complete the circle of our happi- 
 ness a wise and frugal government which 
 would maintain order and leave to the people 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 161 
 
 freedom of looking after their own affairs. 
 No one would now call such a government 
 democratic. But we have still to discover 
 how wise and frugal and efficient a democ- 
 racy can be that has assumed the responsi- 
 bility of a new paternalism. 
 
 State constitutions have been greatly en- 
 larged in the last half century. In place of 
 the brief direct documents of early days that 
 contained little more than a description of 
 government and a statement of fundamental 
 rights, we now have elaborate instruments 
 containing orders, prohibitions, and explicit 
 legislation on a variety of topics. The con- 
 stitutions have been used as a means of direct 
 popular legislation; for all through these 
 later years the competence of the ordinary 
 Legislature has been subject to a vague dis- 
 trust, often too well founded. This distrust 
 and the rising confidence in the judgment of 
 the people have brought forth, not only 
 elaborate constitutions filled with legislative 
 enactment, but provision for the initiative, 
 referendum, and recall. The cure for the 
 ills of democracy, reformers declared, was to 
 bring in more democracy, a democracy which 
 
162 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 would allow the people by direct pronounce- 
 ment to obtain their desires. 
 
 Many people, in recent years, have gone 
 so far as to call representative government a 
 failure, though how we can have anything 
 but a government by representatives it is 
 hard to see. All the outcry against our 
 forms of government and against our consti- 
 tutional system appears to me unjustified, 
 though the criticism in the days before the 
 war was characteristic of an uneasy and 
 changing democracy. If we can elect cap- 
 able and honest men to public office, our in- 
 stitutions will not hamper the soul of the 
 nation. The task of modern political democ- 
 racy is to elect honest and capable men to 
 office; such discouragement as we often en- 
 dure can be attributed to popular heedless- 
 ness, to the depressing readiness of the 
 masses of the people, especially those having 
 most to gain from honest administration, to 
 follow party lines thoughtlessly and to yield 
 to incompetent leadership or worse. No 
 mere modification of written documents can 
 supply the want of conscientious attention to 
 the power of the ballot. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 163 
 
 Recent democratic movement not every- 
 body would call it progress is well indicated 
 by the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amend- 
 ments, both adopted in 1913. The Seven- 
 teenth, providing for the popular election of 
 senators, was the product of intense dis- 
 satisfaction with the unseemly and some- 
 times scandalous election wrangles in State 
 Legislatures; and the people believed that 
 they were quite competent to choose senators 
 themselves. The indirect method of election 
 which the framers of the Constitution had 
 established may have been suited to the 
 timid and half-conscious democracy of the 
 eighteenth century, but the system had been 
 outgrown by the twentieth century. There 
 is no use in arguing that we shall not get 
 better senators by the new method of direct 
 choice; the people, in this, as in some other 
 respects, impatient with representative 
 systems, wanted to try the job themselves. 
 
 The Sixteenth Amendment too was the re- 
 sult of years of discussion. Its adoption 
 marks the end of a long effort, begun a gen- 
 eration or so ago, to use the income tax as a 
 method of making wealth bear what was 
 
164 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 thought to be its fair burden of taxation. 
 The amendment provides that the national 
 government can levy taxes on incomes with- 
 out apportionment among the States, as 
 originally provided by the Constitution. 1 
 The principle of graduation has now been 
 adopted, and, judging from our experiences 
 with war taxes, a way has been found to ward 
 off what used to be called "the menace of 
 great wealth." Whether you term this 
 democracy or not, the Sixteenth Amendment 
 and graduated income taxation must be 
 deemed the most considerable result of some 
 decades of political agitation and of social 
 unrest ; for a generation men had been per- 
 plexed by developing wealth and continuing 
 poverty, and some there were who believed 
 both were foreign to successful democracy. 
 
 It is a very striking fact, as Lord Bryce 
 has pointed out, that for many decades writ- 
 ten constitutions were demanded by liberals 
 
 J The Constitution provides that "direct taxes" levied by 
 the national government must be distributed among the 
 States in accordance with population. In 1895 the Supreme 
 Court decided that a tax on incomes, from most sources, was 
 a direct tax. 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 165 
 
 struggling to build up and safeguard liberty, 
 while now the written constitution is upheld 
 by the conservative elements of the com- 
 munity, though they too declare their object 
 is to protect liberty and the rights to honestly 
 acquired property. Few things better il- 
 lustrate the changes that have come in the 
 development of modern popular govern- 
 ment. But one can well doubt whether a 
 radical change in our form of government 
 would aid materially in the wise solution of 
 our social problem. Naturally, if we do not 
 desire any protection of property, any safe- 
 guards of what used to be called individual 
 liberty and constitutional law, anything, in 
 fact, but the immediate establishment of 
 what the majority wants or thinks it wants, 
 such a consummation might be gained by 
 scrapping everything we have. But those 
 who complain of courts and constitutions do 
 not, in my judgment, fully appreciate how 
 rapidly popular desires are fulfilled and how 
 amenable are the judges and officeholders to 
 the public will. While judicial precedents 
 and party intrigue often do present obstacles, 
 the impressive fact is the rapidity with which 
 
166 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 changes come. No one conversant with our 
 judicial history for the last thirty years will 
 deny it. The truth is, the obstacles to re- 
 form, as far as it can be obtained by legisla- 
 tion at all, are due, first, to the difficulty in 
 obtaining an aroused and determined public 
 opinion and until there is a decided ma- 
 jority conscious of its purpose, changes 
 ought not to come ; second, to obstacles such 
 as would arise under any system of formal 
 government, namely, incompetence, pressure 
 from well-organized minorities, occasional 
 corruption and malign influences, and heed- 
 lessness of the voter. When there is among 
 the people a well-considered desire for a 
 change it comes. Public opinion is powerful 
 and commanding. 
 
 Other countries have outstripped the 
 United States in providing certain kinds of 
 social legislation, though we have made great 
 strides even in the last ten years. This com- 
 parative backwardness is due not so much to 
 inadequacy or awkwardness of our govern- 
 mental system as to various other things: 
 
 (1) to the constant stream of immigration; 
 
 (2) to the abundance of laborers; (3) to the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 167 
 
 fact that until recently we had an open West 
 and still have opportunities not offered by 
 other countries, and that we have conse- 
 quently not felt the pressure of the economic 
 system as have the people of Europe; (4) to 
 the size of the country and the difficulty of 
 getting a consensus of opinion; (5) to the 
 diversity of occupations and to the fact that 
 there are large sections of the country in 
 which people, engaged in agriculture, are un- 
 aware of the problems and perplexities of big 
 industry and of urban communities; (6) to 
 the peculiar perversity with which men ad- 
 here to parties on traditional lines, partly 
 because of the history of the United States 
 with its sectionalism and its particular loy- 
 alties and differing memories ; (7) to the fact 
 that for various reasons we have no liberal 
 party in America; (8) to the discouraging 
 frequency with which those who have most to 
 gain from honest and forward-looking gov- 
 ernment, see fit, particularly in our muni- 
 cipalities, to select, not wise, honest, and cap- 
 able administrators, but incapable triflers 
 having no social vision. 
 
168 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE IMPLICATIONS AND RE- 
 SPONSIBILITIES OF DEMOC- 
 RACY TO-DAY 
 
 IN discussing successive experiences of 
 America as a popular state, and in trying to 
 present some of the steps in the develop- 
 ments of democracy, I have refrained from 
 any serious effort to describe democracy ex- 
 cept as certain phases or aspects of it ap- 
 peared in our actual life history. I refrained 
 too from attempting to lay down an inclusive 
 definition. Such a course appeared neces- 
 sary, if I would not attribute to American 
 democracy of the past all that we now find 
 to be theoretically involved in the action 
 and character of a thoroughly democratic 
 people. If we analyze the subject, we 
 shall see that we now find implied in it much 
 that men would not have seen or not accepted 
 in most of the decades of the past. Inasmuch 
 as a democratic society includes naturally 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 169 
 
 within itself the character, the aspirations, and 
 the qualities of the main body of the people, 
 we must expect, as the years go by, that some 
 of the characteristics of democracy, portions 
 at least of its visible significance, will vary. 
 Successive experiences and developing social 
 needs recreate, modify, and enlarge the 
 scope and content of democratic responsi- 
 bility. 
 
 Furthermore, a great war has been fought 
 with the strength of millions to make democ- 
 racy safe and to preserve for ourselves and 
 for our children's children a spirit and an in- 
 spiration. Young men by the hundred 
 thousand lie in Flanders' fields or in the 
 rugged ravines of the Argonne, martyrs for 
 the cause of democratic justice. We have 
 therefore been enabled to see, or we ought to 
 have been enabled to see, the full significance 
 of democracy as a principle of life. Much of 
 the discussion of democracy in the past ap- 
 pears to rest on the supposition that America 
 was democratic, that we always embodied all 
 of the qualities of democracy, that we were 
 a charming example of all the virtues and all 
 the capabilities of a thorough and utterly 
 
170 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 sincere democratic nation. Do not so under- 
 stand what I shall have to say about the 
 meaning of democracy and what is involved 
 in the full philosophy of democracy. 
 America has more or less consciously striven 
 to be democratic; we have more or less hon- 
 estly sought to be a really popular state, and 
 we have partly succeeded under circum- 
 stances that were on the whole favorable. 
 But to-day more than ever before we should 
 be aware of our failings, see our responsi- 
 bilities, and seek earnestly to live up to the 
 tasks of a real, a newly inspired, and a devel- 
 oping democracy. 
 
 I speak of a rejuvenated and newly in- 
 spired democracy, because, if we have seen 
 democracy at its full stature, we may ques- 
 tion its vitality. If we have faith in continu- 
 ous enlargement, we may have confidence in 
 its permanence, we may be sure that it was 
 something worth dying for, and, what is 
 more, something worth living for. And, 
 after all, that is the great human question; 
 if men died for it, will the rest of us live for 
 it? 
 
 No quality or condition of life is perma- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 171 
 
 nent ; there must come change. We now are v 
 wondering, however, whether in our effort to 
 secure what we thought most essential we 
 have been swept on by a tide of human pas- 
 sions, which has deposited us at the feet of a 
 new despotism, which disregards the old re- 
 straint of the democratic state and the 
 democratic society. It almost seems as if all 
 civilization were suffering from shell shock, 
 beset by dangers of aberration and psychical 
 derangement. Under the old name and with 
 new watchwords are men to fashion a new 
 tyranny or is there to come a refreshment of 
 the spirit and enlargement of freedom? I 
 am not going to speak of Bolshevism as a 
 creed or a practice; I wish only to impress 
 the thought that not even democracy can\ 
 stand still, and to present the possibility that 
 it faces a new peril. We have already seen 
 that what we have called democracy in this 
 country has passed through various phases. 
 If democracy after its struggle for self- 
 preservation is quite content, then it is no 
 longer quite alive; it may go down before 
 new vitalities. An embalmed democracy 
 deserves burial. 
 
172 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The fullest meaning of democracy may be 
 brought out by contrasting it with autoc- 
 racy; that is why the war should have made 
 us see all that is implied in the institutions 
 and ideals we fought for. Let us, then, ex- 
 amine the philosophy of autocracy, and, in 
 order to understand what we fought for, let 
 us first understand what we fought against. 
 To analyze democracy is no easy task be- 
 cause it is alive; to vivisect democracy is 
 harder than to hold an autopsy on autocracy. 
 
 An autocratic government is one recogniz- 
 ing no authority beyond itself; it acknowl- 
 edges no responsibility to externals. Its 
 power is spontaneous, intrinsic, or inherent. 
 Its main reliance, its main resting place, is 
 force. There may be no need of continuous 
 display of power ; but the nature of the insti- 
 tution demands the self-will of the autocrat 
 and the obedience of the subject. It is the 
 duty of an autocrat not to carry out the 
 will of others, but to bend all the rest to his 
 will; if he does not, he ceases to be autocratic. 
 Necessarily, the state and the government are 
 one; Louis XIV was quite right when he 
 said "L'etat c'est moll" ; he was the possessor 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 173 
 
 of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the pecu- 
 liar possession of the state. 
 
 Autocracy requires segregation for safety. 
 If there is a divinity which doth hedge a king, 
 the hedges must be scrupulously maintained. 
 If no man is great to his valet, everything 
 must be done to shut out the vulgar from the 
 sacred presence of the would-be great. Ac- 
 cessibility may be an amiable quality in a 
 king, but it endangers his character as an 
 autocrat; he must be kept apart from the 
 conflicting and modifying currents of life. 
 I do not maintain that all autocrats have 
 been personally inaccessible; but to the ex- 
 tent that they practice accessibility or feel the 
 pull of anything outside themselves they 
 cease to be really and primarily autocratic. 
 
 This need of segregation or aloofness rests 
 in part on the assumption of superiority. No 
 autocrat doubting his own wisdom would be 
 more than a whited sepulcher, though I ad- 
 mit he might still be a ravening wolf. Any 
 recognition by an autocratic monarch or an 
 autocratic aristocracy that help can be 
 gained from the opinion of others under- 
 mines their fortress. They are of bluer 
 
174 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 blood and of finer clay. To strengthen this 
 position of authority they call upon God as 
 the source of their peculiar superiority. Be- 
 cause of this superiority they must cut them- 
 selves off from surrounding life. This, of 
 course, begets a degree of insanity, for only 
 by human contacts can one remain psycho- 
 logically wholesome. 
 
 Autocracy leans upon deceit. The auto- 
 crat need not always be deceitful; but when 
 the lion's skin runs short he will "eke it out 
 with the fox's." He has no duty but to serve 
 himself. To deceive the multitude can be no 
 sin if he helps himself to greater security. 
 And if active deceit is not always needful, 
 secrecy is the inevitable companion of 
 superiority and aloofness. So closely allied 
 are stealth and secrecy that it requires the 
 microscope of the practiced casuist to dis- 
 tinguish one from the other, and both are 
 the parents of intrigue. 
 
 To this sum of the virtues of autocracy 
 should be added cruelty not perhaps a 
 quality necessarily indulged in. But how is 
 one to judge of cruelty? If one maintains 
 aloofness and superiority, how can one know 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 175 
 
 how his acts torture the common man? No 
 one can retain human compassion by shut- 
 ting himself off from human sympathy. 
 Sympathy is certainly denied the autocrat, 
 because it means fellow feeling, and there are 
 no fellows ; all are his underlings. 
 
 I have not been contending that any 
 person was ever a perfect autocrat ; it would 
 probably not be hard to point out almost 
 perfectly functioning autocratic aristoc- 
 racies. But that is neither here nor there. 
 My main contention is that there was a 
 nature in this thing we are dissecting, there 
 was a logic in its life. It was living up to 
 the philosophy of its own being, living up to 
 the impulses of its own life, when it lived up 
 to irresponsibility irresponsibility to ex- 
 ternal compulsion, be it legal, moral, or spir- 
 itual. No human organization has as such 
 a higher law than the law of self-preservation 
 and self-expression, and the law of autocracy 
 must be that of self -consideration, and that 
 alone. To the extent that it considers others 
 it invalidates itself. 
 
 When Mr. Wilson called America to 
 arms, bidding us fight against autocracy, we 
 
176 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 thought at first, as possibly he did, of the 
 enormities and cruel willfulness of autocratic 
 government. We were justified in so think- 
 ing; the Kaiser and the men surrounding him 
 displayed to the world various obvious perils 
 in a government whose chieftain spoke of 
 himself as the commander of an armed 
 nation and as one relying on the strong arm 
 of a Teutonic God. But we soon saw more 
 than this ; we saw Germany as an organized 
 nation in arms playing the role of the auto- 
 crat among the nations of the world. We 
 saw her practicing irresponsibility, laying in- 
 ternational law aside, using brute force to get 
 her way, trampling upon her inferiors, in- 
 dulging in intrigue, using frightfulness as a 
 weapon. She could not acknowledge the 
 binding character of moral obligation, she 
 could not accept the common opinion of the 
 world without recognizing external au- 
 thority, something above her own self-will. 
 No nation that opposed her plans merited 
 pity, for her highest duty was to herself. She 
 was typically, logically, adequately auto- 
 cratic. 
 
 No nation can adopt a form and principle 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 177 
 
 of government and placidly acquiesce in it, 
 without tolerating, probably admiring, the 
 philosophy on which such government rests. 
 The character of a people is bound to show 
 itself more or less fully in the scheme of 
 political order with which it is content. 
 But, generalization aside, no one can doubt 
 the symmetry of the Teutonic organiza- 
 tion. Germany was self-willed, Germany 
 was superior, Germany relied on force, 
 Germany would not permit the crudities 
 of outside civilization to mar her own 
 Kultur, Germany must be dominant, not 
 co-operative. When Grey asked the Ger- 
 man foreign office in 1914 to confer and 
 discuss, and not to plunge recklessly into 
 war, the request was pushed haughtily aside. 
 It is not consistent with the self-will of a 
 superior being to indulge in conversations. 
 And thus we see it was a state of mind the 
 world fought against, the autocratic state of 
 mind aloofness which begat peculiarity and 
 obliquity a dehumanizing because an un- 
 companionable state of mind. An English- 
 man said not long ago that the "primary 
 fault of Germany was ingrained determina- 
 
178 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 tion not to permit a free meeting of minds 
 between people and people." How could a 
 nation permeated by the philosophy of au- 
 tocracy permit free, open, cordial inter- 
 change of opinion, the building up of a com- 
 munity of sentiment or judgment? 
 
 If, now, we have performed this hurried 
 autopsy, we may take up the vivisection. 
 And yet, perhaps, it is quite unnecessary, for 
 democracy is just the opposite of all these 
 things; and if it be intent on self-preserva- 
 tion, on living up to the logic of its own 
 being, "it will shun the whole^ philosophy of 
 autocracy as it would the plague. 
 
 In a democracy the masses of the people 
 are supposed to participate in their own gov- 
 ernment. What is called the government is 
 the creature and agent of the state. This 
 government has no inherent power, nothing 
 intrinsically its own. The center of its char- 
 acter is responsibility to the main body of the 
 people. All authority is a trust. The justi- 
 fication of democracy as a form of govern- 
 ment is that it is natural, not artificial; gov- 
 ernmental action, is supposed to conform, 
 and in a perfect democracy will conform to 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 179 
 
 the wishes of the people. It is not necessary 
 to assume that men always choose aright, but 
 only that they strive to satisfy natural 
 desires. 
 
 Democratic government is responsive gov- 
 ernment. Whether men always choose cor- 
 rectly or know their own needs better than a 
 selected few can tell them is not now the 
 question. Democracy's justification of itself 
 is that it is natural and that there are tides of 
 human impulse sweeping through the masses 
 of men, instinctive longings and cravings, to 
 which government must respond. No ex- 
 traneous, superimposed, semidetached gov- 
 ernment, above all not one tainted with ir- 
 responsibility, can be sensitive to the devel- 
 oping needs of mankind. 
 
 I shall not, however, longer dwell upon 
 democracy merely as a form of government. 
 No one can speak for a moment of political 
 machinery without finding himself beginning 
 to wander into life beyond the borders of 
 mere mechanism. So closely associated are 
 the assumptions of political democracy with ' 
 the activities and spirit of everyday life, so 
 intimate are political forms, if they be more 
 
180 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 than form, in their reactions on daily con- 
 duct, that it is almost impossible to dis- 
 
 x- tinguish the character of the people from the 
 nature of its government. So all-permeat- 
 ing is a principle of political organization, or 
 so single are the thoughts of men, that the 
 logic of a political system affects ethical con- 
 ceptions, social relationship, ecclesiastical 
 organization, and theological tenets. Modern 
 
 / theology, for example, is the theology of 
 democratic brotherhood coupled with free- 
 dom of the individual; and we have seen that 
 the Puritans established their church on con- 
 tract, elaborated a contractual political 
 philosophy, and bound Almighty God by his 
 
 \ own constitutional covenants. 
 
 As democratic government is responsible 
 government, acknowledging that power and 
 authority rest on consent and agreement, so 
 it inculcates the sense of responsibility in 
 every member of the state. Unless the in- 
 dividual, recognizing the ethical principle 
 upon which the theory of the state rests, is 
 prepared to shoulder his burden and do his 
 part, that theory remains in part a theory. 
 Here we reach another justification of the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 181 
 
 democratic system. Jit suggests responsi- 
 bility in each individual, and not only the 
 need of doing for himself, but of living for 
 others. |lf the philosophy of the popular 
 state actually stimulates this feeling of obli- 
 gation, this duty to act and to live in social 
 order, then the state by its very nature, by 
 the logic of its being, by the necessity of self- 
 realization, awakens the most fundamental 
 of human virtues. , 
 
 Democracy rests on faith. It confides in 
 the fundamental validity of human nature. 
 It believes that men can be trusted, and, 
 while they may fall into error, they will 
 naturally on the whole seek out the good. f \ 
 Its philosophy is, therefore, the philosophy 
 of optimism ; and it is perfectly natural that 
 it should have arisen in its modern form in 
 America, where men are perhaps optimistic 
 because they are democratic, but certainly 
 are democratic because they are optimistic. 
 Once again we find ourselves in the realm of 
 ethics, and even theology. It was inevitable 
 that modern American democracy should 
 have its rise in the mind and heart of a Vir- 
 ginian who had broken away from the old- 
 
182 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 fashioned views of theology and religion, and 
 looked upon the Creator of the universe as a 
 Father who was interested in the lives of his 
 children, rather than as a Judge who was 
 intent upon condemning them to everlasting 
 fire. The one thought we always have, even 
 / when not wholly conscious of it, is that men 
 are capable of progress and that the future 
 surely contains within itself a higher and 
 better order of things than we now see about 
 us. In all that we do we are inspired by the 
 belief that, little by little, step by step, men 
 are lifting themselves to a higher stage of 
 civilization and to a higher plane of char- 
 acter. The autocratic or oligarchic state, by 
 the very logic of its being, loses the inspira- 
 tion that comes from faith. Faith and au- 
 tocracy are enemies, and the very system of 
 the state suggests content with a static condi- 
 tion, not to say despair, rather than move- 
 ment toward a better and brighter future. 
 If we speak more simply and in the terms 
 of practical politics, this faith foundation of 
 the democratic state means that on the whole 
 there is no surer criterion for what is wise in 
 political action than the judgment of the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 183 
 
 main body of the people. This does not\ 
 mean that men are perfect in the mass; for 
 they cannot well be, inasmuch as they are not 
 individually perfect. 1 It simply means that 
 the judgments of the whole are likely in the 
 long run to be the surest guides as to what is 
 best for the whole, j As faith in the quality of 
 the masses of men is an inspiration to each 
 one of us individually and affects our 
 temperament in all matters of social life, so 
 the faith which is reposed in the individual 
 man helps to make him more worthy of con- 
 fidence. If one believes that other men have 
 no faith in him, he must almost surely lose 
 faith in himself. "Was there not," says 
 Morley, "a profound and far-reaching truth 
 wrapped up in Goethe's simple yet really in- 
 exhaustible monition, that if we would im- 
 prove a man, it would be well to let him be- 
 lieve that we already think him that which we 
 would have him to be?" 1 
 
 Democracy has been called the hope of the 
 world. It is hope. As Jefferson said, men 
 have the natural right to "pursue happiness." 
 Unhopeful democracy does not amount K to 
 
 1 "Essay on Carlyle," Miscellanies, vol. i, p. 192. 
 
184, STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 anything. Henry Adams pictures Jeffer- 
 son as saying to himself: "If fifty years hence 
 the average man shall invariably argue from 
 two ascertained premises where he now 
 jumps to a conclusion from a single sup- 
 posed revelation that is progress ! I expect 
 it to be made here, under our democratic 
 stimulants, on a great scale, until every man 
 is potentially an athlete in body and an 
 Aristotle in mind." In speaking of the 
 characteristic optimism of the Americans of 
 one hundred years ago and more, Adams 
 said: "If the priests and barons who set their 
 names to Magna Charta had been told that 
 in a few centuries every swineherd and 
 cobbler's apprentice would write and read 
 with an ease such as few kings could then 
 command, and reason with a better logic than 
 any university could then practice, the 
 priests and barons would have been much 
 more incredulous than any man who was told 
 in 1800 that within another five centuries the 
 ploughboy would go a-field whistling a 
 sonata of Beethoven and figure out in 
 quaternions the relation of his furrows." 
 This recognition that faith is our soul's 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 185 
 
 salvation is the cause of our anxiety in these 
 passing days not that we fear for our prop- 
 erty, not that we are afraid of national dis- 
 comfiture, not that we stand sponsor for any 
 given international or even for any particu- 
 lar economic system but that we fear for 
 the philosophy of our daily life, fear that we 
 may be robbed of our faith, fear that we may 
 stand naked and unarmed in the presence of 
 facts appearing to demonstrate that men are 
 not sufficiently wise, generous, magnanimous, 
 and self -restrained to move steadily forward 
 toward the goal of their own greater good, 
 liempcracy. rests, upon education. Of 
 course it is conceivable that in a perfectly 
 simple state with narrow limits you might 
 have democracy without very much intel- 
 ligence, but in the compexity of modern life 
 it is utterly impossible to carry forward the 
 affairs of popular government without wide 
 and sound education. We sometimes 
 wonder, not so much whether men are mor- 
 ally capable of living up to their responsi- 
 bilities, as whether the human intellect is 
 capable of actually solving the problems of 
 modern life and managing public affairs for 
 
186 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the common good. Society has become so 
 intricate, there are so many interrelations 
 and interdependences, that we are sometimes 
 staggered at the very prospect and shrink 
 from the attempt to find intellectual solu- 
 tions for our problems. 
 
 Because of some vague appreciation of 
 these responsibilities of popular government, 
 the American people have always taken a 
 lively interest in schools and colleges. There 
 has appeared at times to be even a strange 
 contradiction between the unstinted force 
 of the whole educational system and 
 the attitude of mind, or what seemed to 
 be the attitude of mind, of the average 
 American. Certainly until a short time 
 ago the average business man and the 
 great body of persons who had not them- 
 selves received college education were in- 
 clined to depreciate the value of any form 
 of study which would not give immediate 
 practical assistance in the business of making 
 a living. The educated man was looked 
 upon as quite a superfluity in public affairs ; 
 and the theorist and even the expert were con- 
 sidered abnormalities. The early life on the 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 187 
 
 frontier, leading men to think that the great- 
 est achievement was to overcome the tangible 
 and most immediate obstacles of nature, 
 prompted them to look almost with disfavor 
 on anything that was not adapted to the win- 
 ning of the wilderness. And yet in spite of 
 this, hardly were these Western settlements 
 made, hardly, as Tyler says of the early New 
 Englanders, were the stumps brown in their 
 earliest harvest field, or had the wolves ceased 
 to howl about their nightly habitations, when 
 they determined to found schools and col- 
 leges and give their children the opportunity 
 of education. The reason for this inconsist- 
 ency, if such it were, is to be found partly in 
 this unconscious realization that democracy 
 depends upon an intelligent public, and 
 partly, no doubt, on the fact that democracy 
 is forward-looking; and if the early Ameri- 
 can had no ancestors, he had at least pos- 
 terity. If he had no past, the future be- 
 longed to himself and, above all, to his 
 children. 
 
 But when I have said that democracy rests 
 on education, and prompts wealthy men to 
 endow schools and colleges, and leads the 
 
188 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 public to pour out its money in educational 
 undertakings, I have been dwelling only on 
 education in the very formal, though more 
 ordinary sense of the word. The more im- 
 portant truth is that democracy is itself edu- 
 cating. The duties to which men are called, 
 the matters which each individual man is 
 asked to consider, in themselves demand 
 thought. Any social or political system 
 which asks the individual man to think is in 
 the highest degree educating. Progress must 
 come from human effort, and, above all, from 
 / the effort to think. "In the free state," said 
 the French philosopher, Montesquieu, "it 
 does not make so very much difference 
 whether men think things out correctly or 
 incorrectly. The important thing is that 
 they think at all." 
 
 At times in the course of heated elections, 
 when complicated questions of state are in- 
 volved, we doubt whether the untrained 
 public is capable of understanding the actual 
 issues. The truth simply is that in a free 
 state it does not make such a tremendous 
 amount of difference whether a question is 
 thought out correctly or not, if men by their 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 189 
 
 responsibilities are tempted to think about 
 things which otherwise they would have no 
 thought about. The educational and uplift- 
 ing force comes from reaching out for ideas 
 and logical principles just a little bit beyond 
 our reach; and it is this reaching, this effort 
 to do what one has not done before, this at- 
 tempt to grasp what is perhaps unattainable, 
 that is most desirable. It is better that men 
 should reach and fail to grasp than never to 
 have reached at all. 
 
 Democracy is fundamentally a matter of x 
 human relationships. I have been contend- 
 ing that possibly its chiefest value resulted 
 from its necessary reactions upon the in- 
 dividual man. But democracy as we have 
 come to conceive it is not an individual thing 
 at all. And still, democracy demands free- 
 dom; it cannot survive, it does not exist, 
 under the weight of super-imposed burdens 
 as distinguished from self-imposed. There 
 are two kinds of morality in the world, and 
 only two; and one of them is not morality. 
 Obedience in response to externally applied 
 compulsion need not be termed a virtue; 
 though compulsion is needed to restrain the 
 
190 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 criminal-minded man or the criminal-minded 
 state, obedience is necessitated by immor- 
 ality. Only internal compulsion, or obedi- 
 ence to one's own inner sense of obligation, 
 is real morality. Now, the democratic state 
 calls on men to assume burdens, to compel 
 themselves to act rightly and justly because 
 they believe in right and justice. 
 
 There is a perilous notion abroad in the 
 land that we should imitate Germany and 
 rear passive obedience to external order into 
 exalted virtue, and that by discipline, train- 
 ing, command, we should create character. 
 This is all at variance with democratic phil- 
 osophy and with the philosophy of our edu- 
 cational system. Modern education has 
 thriven and justified itself by seeking to re- 
 lease faculties, to develop self-command, to 
 awaken self-reliance, to establish responsi- 
 bility. Our educational system and phil- 
 osophy have been justified in the crisis. The 
 young men from our college halls flocking 
 unbidden to officers' training camps showed 
 intellectual keenness and eagerness; they 
 showed power in analyzing problems, and a 
 readiness to assume unwonted duties of com- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 191 
 
 mand because they had been led by freedom 
 of college life and college teaching to com- 
 mand themselves. This capacity for re- 
 sponsible leadership filled us with merited 
 pride. In the terrible battles on the Meuse 
 and in the Argonne, young fellows but a year 
 or two out of college, working over an un- 
 known terrain, leading a body of unskilled 
 men, their superior officers sick or wounded 
 or dead, carried the burdens of terrifying 
 responsibility with a calm and courageous 
 strength which is one of the soul-stirring 
 facts of the war. 
 
 This, I maintain, was the outstanding les- 
 son of the war. The German soldier doubt- 
 less had a consuming, almost a fanatical love 
 of his race and his fatherland, and I would 
 not rob the fallen soldiers of their meed of 
 praise, if it is needed, for their readiness to 
 sacrifice. But to my mind the great in- 
 spiring sight was the rise of free peoples to 
 struggle unbidden for justice, their readiness 
 to offer their lives for uncompelled duty. 
 And possibly the most wholesome and 
 uplifting sight of all was the way in 
 which the free peoples of the free Brit- 
 
192 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ish empire in Australia, New Zealand, 
 Canada, South Africa nations nourished 
 in freedom, rose almost to a man to per- 
 form prodigies of valor on the fields of 
 death. For it gave us new assurance that 
 empires could be reared on freedom and that 
 men would not cravenly steal to safety be- 
 hind the curtain of irresponsibility. The 
 boys too that went from these halls and other 
 college halls openly, frankly, welcoming 
 danger, welcoming it with a pathetic high- 
 heartedness that wrung our own souls, 
 proved to us, if proof were needed, the com- 
 pelling power of duty. You may lament 
 that we were so slow; you may complain be- 
 cause we did not go into the war sooner ; you 
 may believe that delay was in the long run 
 wasteful of life ; but as for me, I know of no 
 more inspiring fact in history than the calm, 
 though slow, deliberation of a hundred mil- 
 lion people making up their own minds to do 
 what they believed ought to be done. 
 
 Freedom begets responsibility; freedom 
 creates duties; freedom binds men together 
 in fellowship. This is only one of those 
 paradoxes of which human life is full. The 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 193 
 
 student of the philosophy of society knows 
 that society flourishes on mutually support- 
 ing contradictions. So democracy, calling 
 upon the individual to live and act, is at war 
 with irresponsible individualism. One of my 
 colleagues, with a wit suited to Sydney 
 Smith or a regenerated Voltaire, once de- 
 fined an afternoon reception as a clever social 
 device for giving the least possible pleasure 
 to the largest possible number. I may stop 
 to say that even the afternoon-reception 
 variety of democracy is at least as praise- 
 worthy as the more decorous and not less 
 formal autocracy. For if democracy at its 
 worst is but an uncomfortable and perhaps 
 uncomforting elbowing and pushing for the 
 ices and cakes, resulting in the least possible 
 gratification to the multitude, autocracy at 
 its best, that is, acting most wholeheartedly 
 in response to the law of its own being, seeks 
 to give the greatest possible pleasure to the 
 smallest possible number. 
 
 But the afternoon reception does not 
 typify real democracy, for democracy con- 
 notes cooperation and relationships. Indi- 
 vidualism is the result of disintegration; its 
 
194 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 motive is detachment. Democracy is asso- 
 ciation. You cannot take a man out into the 
 wilderness and leave him with the admonition 
 that he be a good democrat. Democracy re- 
 quires companionship. Without contacts, 
 nay without wholeness, without social 
 solidarity, it is only partly itself. If a neigh- 
 borhood, a nation, a college, is divided into 
 groups that are self-willed, self-seeking, un- 
 communicative, it is not democratic for 
 mere poverty or mere simplicity or mere un- 
 sophistication, though often called the ele- 
 ments of democracy, are not so at all. You 
 cannot have need I say it? you cannot 
 have popular government, popular deter- 
 mination ; you cannot have popular anything, 
 without a populace which feels itself a whole. 
 I have not touched on the vexed question 
 of social equality, or, indeed, on equality at 
 all. I am not sure that in the future, if 
 democracy ever reaches perfection, equality 
 will be considered an essential attribute. 
 There is no equality in nature, and an artifi- 
 cially imposed equality can scarcely be called 
 democratic. The whole subject is so full of 
 perplexing and alluring difficulties that more 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 195 
 
 time is needed for its discussion than I can 
 here properly devote to it. Some things, 
 however, are obvious. Democracy, as we 
 have known it, has meant progress and op- 
 portunity, not an unvarying dead-level 
 achievement ; it has rested on thrift and en- 
 terprise and individual judgment and 
 energy; it has given or allowed its rewards, 
 doubtless overlavishly, to shrewdness and in- 
 dividual skill. But a society which does not" 
 prompt men to move and to exert themselves 
 can scarcely survive. Equality before the 
 law we all acknowledge as a necessity; and if 
 it is not a reality, it must be made so, a real 
 equality before the bar of justice. 
 
 Almost from the beginning in America, 
 and most notably since men began to pour 
 in eager armies through the passes of the 
 Appalachians to seize upon the lands of the 
 Mississippi basin and to develop its re- 
 sources, "success" has been the outstanding 
 word in American civilization. Every school- 
 boy was urged to win success in life, and gen- 
 erally the thought was of pecuniary success. 
 It is symptomatic of recent America that 
 that word no longer holds its dominating 
 
196 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 position, and, if it is used, connotes some- 
 thing new. The winning of a great fortune 
 is not now looked upon as the only success in 
 life, if it be success at all ; and the holders of 
 vast wealth are judged by others and they 
 judge themselves by the skill and wisdom 
 and public spirit with which they give their 
 money away. We do not know how far this 
 attitude toward the amassing of fortunes will 
 develop in the days to come, or how far men 
 should be deterred or restrained in their 
 efforts to make and control money and more 
 money. And I think we do not need to 
 know. We do know that society lives and 
 is changing before our eyes and that there is 
 a deepening sense of social responsibility in 
 the minds of the fortunate and the prosper- 
 ous. After all is said, responsibility is the 
 word and the spirit which separates democ- 
 racy from its antagonist, its essential enemy, 
 autocracy. Doubtless we are entering upon 
 a stage different from that created by the 
 frontier life of the American people, and 
 service is supplanting success. It is, more- 
 over, not alone the rich that must cherish re- 
 sponsibility, but the poor as well. Or, if we 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 197 
 
 can reasonably hope for the disappearance 
 of real poverty, as we must and may hope, 
 the less fortunate and the less gifted must 
 bear their share of obligation to the state, to 
 themselves, and to their neighbors. 
 
 I have no doubt that industry must be 
 democratized and that the process is going 
 on. But unless we have passed on to a stage 
 of mere negation, such democratization does 
 not involve the destruction of expert guid- 
 ance or the denial of appropriate pecuniary 
 reward; it does not involve domination by 
 the ignorant and the incapable, or the be- 
 numbing of individual initiative. It does 
 mean probably a widening of companionship, 
 a strengthening of responsibility, a humaniz- 
 ing and liberalizing of authority, a deepening 
 of duty, a banishing of unintelligent enmity. 
 It does mean this process of democratiza- 
 tion an integrating process, a wholesomiz- 
 ing process, based on a sense of individual 
 selfrespect and social esteem. Unless the 
 past has led us quite astray, these are the 
 natural products of a developing humanity 
 under the inspiriting suggestions of a po- 
 litical system which decries willfulness. 
 
198 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The industrial revolution began only 
 about one hundred and fifty years ago ; it has 
 shown its effects clearly only through the 
 past seventy-five years. Only during the 
 past one hundred and fifty years has modern 
 inductive science been applied to mechanical 
 invention and wrought the marvelous change 
 in habit, environment, and necessities of men. 
 Taken all in all, this was probably the great- 
 est transformation suffered by the human 
 race since man first learned to make fire. 
 Indeed, the change from tools to machinery 
 and, above all, from tools to machinery 
 driven by nonhuman power, may be consid- 
 ered almost as momentous as the change 
 from the unaided human hand and claw to 
 tools. Count this gross exaggeration, if you 
 wish ; but you still will see it is nothing but 
 sheer folly to suppose that the industrial 
 organization of society is to find a quasi- 
 permanent, human, and satisfying form in a 
 few decades after the revolution has shown 
 its results. Ultimately, it may be, society 
 will be stabilized; but surely it will not be 
 to-day or to-morrow. The most we have the 
 right to demand and expect is that social re- 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 199 
 
 arrangements will be brought on by reason- 
 able adjustment, not by autocratic brute 
 force; that the philosophy and spirit of 
 democracy will enable men to work out re- 
 sults by agreements and accommodations 
 and intelligent consent. 
 
 Publicity is the weapon of democracy^^ 
 Not only is secrecy a source of danger, but it 
 is in itself incompatible with popular govern- 
 ment. How, pray, can people have opinions 
 about things they know nothing of? And if 
 there is no opinion, how can popular govern- 
 ment exist at all? The openness of demo- 
 cratic life sometimes seems to militate against 
 privacy, not to say secrecy. To the inquisi- 
 tive onlooker we appear to direct our po- 
 litical affairs by mandates issued at elections, 
 but we don't. We govern chiefly by public 
 opinion, and if congressmen at times appear 
 to insulate themselves from the vulgus and 
 not to know what people are thinking, we are 
 justly indignant. A democratic government 
 cannot be an insulated government, cut off 
 from the currents of life for two- or four- 
 year periods. As publicity is an absolute 
 essential, stealth and intrigue are impossible 
 
200 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 derivatives from democratic philosophy. I 
 do not mean they do not exist. I mean that 
 they are vices gnawing at the heart of the 
 democratic state; they are the weapons of a 
 mean autocracy. 
 
 There is now on foot a movement for 
 Americanizing the immigrant. Plans are 
 laid for inculcating certain knowledge, ex- 
 tending the use of the English language, and 
 developing a spirit of patriotism. Often, it 
 seems to me, the motive of this effort is not 
 quite clear. Is it based on some fear ? Must 
 we believe that men must be given, if only by 
 forcible inoculation, a readiness to fight for 
 the flag? Is it based on the assumption that 
 we have our own Kultur^ high above all other 
 brands, which must be accepted if civilization 
 be secure? If so, I am not confident of the 
 justice, the wisdom, or the moral effects of 
 the effort. But I am confident that social in- 
 tegration must be secured, if democracy sur- 
 vive; disintegration, intellectual separate- 
 ness, differences of moral reactions on funda- 
 mental problems of living, are unsocializing 
 and hence inconsistent with community life 
 and action. There must be understanding, 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 201 
 
 freedom of intercourse, interchange of ideas 
 between man and man, or there can be no 
 creation of a common purpose. The flag, 
 which we may all ignorantly worship, must 
 be the symbol, not of a pugnacious patriot- 
 ism, but of the common possession of a com- 
 mon ideal. Democracy without community 
 in things of the spirit is gross, material, and 
 nevertheless unreal. America is safe as a 
 democratic reality if there is a wide and deep 
 devotion to a code of daily morality ; if there 
 is no commonness, waving the flag is of little 
 value. 
 
 For this reason too we insist now on the 
 use of the English language, not because it 
 is better than others, not because we fear that 
 the civilization it may carry with it is im- 
 periled, not because of any mean nationalistic 
 pride or envy or trepidation or enmity, but 
 once again because communication and the 
 creation of a public opinion which is the basis 
 of free popular government are necessary if 
 we would maintain and build up the thing 
 our boys died for, the thing the masses of the 
 plain people are praying for. The old say- 
 ing, "Divide and rule," was the watchword 
 
202 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 of many an autocratic system; we have the 
 right to say to people of the would-be popu- 
 ; lar state, "Unite and rule"; you cannot 
 possess your own government unless you as 
 a whole people possess yourselves. 
 
 We sometimes hear that democratic gov- 
 ernment is government by the majority, or, 
 that, on the other hand, a minority has 
 certain rights and immunities beyond the 
 reach of the majority. Perhaps, it is quite 
 right to protect minorities as we have at- 
 tempted to do by constitutional restraints; 
 but neither one of these assertions expresses 
 the philosophic content of democracy. In a 
 free state the majority, by the nature of the 
 state, has no right to legislate for itself alone. 
 Fifty-one have no inherent authority to bully 
 forty-nine ; that would be only autocracy on 
 a large and unwholesome scale. Democracy 
 rests on duty, not on privilege, and that is 
 the lesson for both minorities and ma- 
 jorities. The notion that we live in the 
 presence of a persistent dualism of ma- 
 jorities and minorities, and the minor- 
 ities have a shield and buckler protecting 
 them from molestation may be partly true in 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 203 
 
 fact; but it belies the spirit of democracy if 
 not of ever-changing life ; it is in part a relic 
 of the half-democracy of the eighteenth 
 century and of the principle of an unchang- 
 ing natural law that cannot be moved one jot 
 or one tittle. By the implications of a real 
 democracy, minorities and individuals should 
 be protected by the principle of freedom, by 
 the duty of majorities to be responsible for 
 others and not self-seeking, by the duty of 
 minorities to accommodate themselves to 
 public needs. 
 
 The simple truth is that the truly popular 
 state cannot be based on dualism, on continu- 
 ous friction between fifty-one and forty-nine, 
 on authority backed by protected privilege, 
 or on unreasoning power supported by ma- 
 jority strength. Need I repeat again that 
 democratic government rests upon agree- 
 ment ; that is, upon processes through which 
 men come to common understanding? Life / 
 is not rigid; it is a series of adjustments and / 
 accommodations. A real democracy is con- * 
 stant rearrangement, adjustment, and as- 
 similation. Irrespective of legal limitations, 
 minorities must have their rights, because 
 
204 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 they are portions of the whole and because 
 majorities carry responsibility for others. 
 That is the philosophy of democracy. Jef- 
 ferson announced that acquiescence in the 
 decision of majorities was the vital principle 
 of republics, but the purpose of the majority 
 to be right must be reasonable. That is the 
 sum of the whole matter. Democracy is not 
 consistent with irreconcilable minorities; 
 they must acquiesce ; and if the power of the 
 larger number is to be guided by reason, it 
 must come from reasoning, from discussion, 
 from the upbuilding of a common purpose 
 and a common life. Acquiescence is more 
 difficult than domination: such is the lesson 
 which the young fledgling democracies of 
 eastern Europe must learn if they are to hold 
 aloft on their adventurous flight. On the 
 other hand, the tyranny of the sansculotte 
 is no better than the despotism of the over- 
 dressed. 
 
 In the Gettysburg address Lincoln ap- 
 pealed for a new birth of freedom. He 
 hoped that those who died there, those that 
 offered the last full measure of devotion, 
 would create by their death a finer spirit for 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 205 
 
 the living. He hoped that America 
 go on with a fuller life consecrated to free- 
 dom and justice. But after that war came 
 years of petty revengeful politics; and the 
 men of America, for whom the heroes of 
 Gettysburg perished, turned to the material 
 tasks of a materialistic generation, to exploit- 
 ing the natural resources of the continent, as 
 if life were no more than meat or the body 
 than raiment. In large measure they left 
 the new birth of freedom to the none too 
 tender care of wrangling and ambitious 
 party leaders. It is not so easy now to shirk 
 the responsibilities of the hour, because the 
 West is gone ; and they must not be shirked, 
 if democracy was worth dying for. The 
 burdens of social responsibility lie at our 
 very doors. If we insist on putting petty 
 politicians into office and on shunning the 
 tasks which humanity here and in the world 
 at large has thrust upon us, we shall shame 
 the cause for which we fought and court dis- 
 aster. Momentous as our victory in France 
 may be, momentous in overturning Europe, 
 in banishing autocracy, possibly even more 
 important is the effect upon ourselves. Are 
 
206 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 those conquests by that maddening reacting 
 perversity which muddies the whole stream 
 of history, to make us vain, nationalistic, and 
 domineering, or is there to be a freshening of 
 life, a clarification of character? 
 
 This war, we have asserted, is to make the 
 world safe for democracy; but democracy 
 can be safe only if it is democratic. The 
 great question before the world to-day is 
 whether America will play whole-heartedly 
 the role of a democratic nation. That is the 
 center of the whole world-problem. Democ- 
 racy as a spirit, a spirit partly begotten and 
 greatly enlarged and strengthened by a 
 theory of political organization, has shown 
 itself masterful, conquering, almost, it would 
 seem, irresistible. Thrones have been over- 
 turned, the secret chancelleries of nations 
 have been opened to the gaze of an irreverent 
 public, dynasties have disappeared, willful 
 autocratic overlords have fled into the dark- 
 ness. From the days when America, ac- 
 knowledging a decent respect for the opinion 
 of mankind, announced that governments 
 obtain their just powers from the consent of 
 the governed, the mills of the gods have been 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 207 
 
 grinding not slowly but exceeding fine. It 
 is easy enough for mole-eyed materialists to 
 talk of territories and markets and economic 
 penetrations and mailed fists and national 
 armies and tribal gods, but the world has 
 been changed under the hammering insist- 
 ence of a principle of human life. Once and 
 again, and most plainly last of all, democracy 
 has risen in its armed might and hurled itself 
 against its enemy. But its victories have on 
 the whole been silent victories, untroubled by 
 the din of physical warfare, unsullied by 
 human sacrifice. The real struggle has been 
 continuous, unintermitting, most real when 
 most unnoticed. Democracy overthrew au- 
 tocracy because it was life fighting with 
 death, or youth with age. Autocracy was 
 beaten in the war because it was beaten as a 
 principle of living as a reality, before the war 
 began. Wars only register conquests. Men 
 and women that can read and think should 
 see this thing plainly. 
 
 And now that America has won, what will 
 she do America, who, cherishing, enlarging, 
 and upbuilding the principles of British free- 
 dom for which the men of Britain had them- 
 
208 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 selves struggled and suffered; America, who, 
 more than any other nation, unless it be the 
 old and the regenerated England, is re- 
 sponsible for this spread of democracy 
 through the last century and a half what 
 will America do? Well, we are sometimes 
 told she will now live unto herself, scorn 
 companionship, flout cooperation, shield her- 
 self from duty, assume irresponsibility. 
 Such words would be funny if they were not 
 so serious ; all the more serious because they 
 come from men who honestly think they are 
 advocating actual American life and Ameri- 
 can democracy. For this all means that we 
 shall abjure democracy and refuse to act it 
 out. We gave, forsooth, we gave our boys 
 for revenge, to punish Germany, to ward off 
 fear from our coasts, not to clarify and 
 cleanse human life ; we sent those two million 
 young fellows across the sea that we might 
 be safe to lead an irresponsible existence, 
 sharking for our own booty, heedless, con- 
 tent autocratic, because uncompanionable, 
 superior, inaccessible, self-willed. 
 
 Some things even the blind should see. We 
 cannot act one thing and be another. If we 
 
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 209 
 
 would be democratic, we must act the demo- 
 crat. In the world of international affairs 
 we must maintain our faith, take courage 
 from our belief in the hearts of men, rely on 
 enlightened public opinion and strive to en- 
 lighten it and our own minds, trust to the 
 weapons of publicity as the foe of stealth and 
 intrigue and hidden malice. We must cher- 
 ish companionship, recognize life as a series 
 of readjustments and accommodations, 
 shoulder responsibilities, cast out mean fear 
 even though it be called danger to the Mon- 
 roe Doctrine, practice friendliness, and be 
 high-hearted even as our boys were high- 
 hearted and ready for service and death. 
 "Small minds," said Burke, "and great em- 
 pires go ill together." America if it would 
 be great must be big-minded, magnanimous, 
 and spiritually strong. If we deny ourselves 
 in the wide currents of the world, refuse to 
 act the democrat, decline to participate in a 
 world-arrangement based on consent and 
 agreement, pride ourselves on a puny-souled 
 invulnerability, think we can shut ourselves 
 off by a hedge of self-imposed divinity, we 
 don't deserve to live as a democracy. We 
 
210 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 shall not be a democracy. We shall have 
 already fallen a prey to the cancer of auto- 
 cratic irresponsibility, to the corroding acids 
 of self-will. We cannot be inwardly demo- 
 cratic and outwardly autocratic inwardly 
 hope-full, faith-full, friendly, frank, and 
 humane, outwardly repelling, unsocial, sul- 
 len, superior, distrustful, forceful. For the 
 revivification of its own soul, the nation must 
 act on the moral tenets of its own accepted 
 philosophy or lose it, sear its own spirit, 
 deaden its own life. As Germany at- 
 tempted to play the role of the autocrat be- 
 cause the nation was permeated with the phil- 
 osophy of autocracy, America must play the 
 democrat if she is filled with the spirit and 
 the philosophy of democracy. , 
 
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