DEMOCRACY «** LOWELL RSITY OF CATIWIRMT* DEMOCRACY DEMOCRACY An Addrefs Delivered in the Town Hall Birmingham By the Hon. James Rufsell Lowell American Minister in London The Riverside Prefs 1902 ' ' TFURNK •AitA COLLEGE LIBftAJBT Copyright 1 886 and 1 890 by James Russell Lowell Copyright 1902 by Houghton, Mifflin & Company All rights reserved M3S 8AHTA BAx«;aJ RAR fr NOTE rHE address on Democracy was given by Mr. Lowell at Birmingham, England, 6 October, 1 884, ow assuming the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Insti- tute. It will be observed that this was near the close of Mr. Lowell's term as Minister to England; indeed, at a time when all the signs pointed to the election of Mr. Cleveland, an event which would quite certainly mean a change of ministers. Four years of friendly intercourse with English- men and Englishwomen, and of a somewhat more intimate acquaint- vi NOTE ance with the springs of government than falls to the lot of the mere looker- on; not only that, but the advantage which an alienated American has of viewing his country from a new van- tage-ground, for distance in space has some of the properties of distance in time, and an American in Europe has almost the point of view of an Amer- ican of the next century — all this may well have led Lowell to reflect on the fundamentals of politics, and have served to give point to his reflections when he came to give this, address. Moreover, the place where he was to speak reminded him of that great in- dustrial factor which enters so power- fully into modern conceptions of the state. JYOTE vii // is fair, therefore, to take the ad- dress as a careful and deliberate ex- pression of his political faith . Tet it must be borne in mind that he was somewhat hampered by his official po- sition as well as inspired by it. He stood for the great Democratic coun- try, was its spokesman, but he was not speaking to his own countrymen, and might easily be misconstrued by foreigners, if he attempted to weigh Democracy in balances designed for apothecaries' stuff and not for hay wagons. As he himself said, not long after : " Four years ago I was called upon to deliver an address in Bir- mingham, and chose for my theme ' Democracy.' In that place I felt it incumbent on me to dwell on the good viii NOTE points and favorable aspects of de- mocracy as I had seen them practi- cally illustrated in my native land. I chose rather that my discourse should suffer through inadequacy than run the risk of seeming to forget what Burke calls ' that salutary prejudice called our country/ and that obliga- tion which forbids one to discuss fam- ily affairs before strangers." One need not be nicer than his au- thor, and it is clear from what Lowell wrote afterward that he was some- what surprised at the importance at- tached to this utterance at Birming- ham. In truth, it was the natural and in a measure the unstudied ex- pression of a man whose convictions were not lightly held, had been tested NOTE ix by long experience, and were the warp and woof of his political loom. Stud- ied the address was, so far as it be- came him not to disregard his official self and above all not to suffer his creed to be modified by his surround- ings ; but bating all this, the speech was the mellow judgment of a man about to retire from a post where he had been an intermediary between the two freest nations on earth, and re- presented his deliberate thought upon the foundations of that freedom. Lowell did not read the address from manuscript, but from a printed proof furnished him by some news- paper which was to print the address the next day. On the margins of the proof he had made manuscript notes x NOTE and corrections, and then bound the slips in a cloth cover. He gave the little book thus made, to Mr. Wilson King, of Highfield Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, whose visitor he was at the time of giving the address, and wrote this inscription in it : "To Wilson King I give the blunderbuss, emptied of its charge, with very sin- cere regard. J. R. Lowell, 6th Octo- ber, 1884." H. E. S. D E MO CRACT HE must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world un- furnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into con- formity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condi- tion of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding DEMOCRACY thing is the effort to distinguish real- ities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it. And in a world of daily — nay, almost hourly — journalism, where every clever man, every man who thinks him- self clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at the word of command on every conceivable subject of human DEMOCRACY thought, or, on what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every inconceivable dis- play of human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the permitted staple of public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one-stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming so long. In this desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that, if all the words of the dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous juxtaposi- tions and combinations that made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find DEMOCRACY among them some poignant sug- gestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But, alas ! it is only the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited profusion of unex- pected and incalculable phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will be apt to think that observation has on most points of general applicability said its last word, and he who has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from it will never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of specu- lation. Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one's DEMOCRACY peace, why add to the general confusion of tongues ? There is something disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty minutes with decorous ex- actitude. I recollect being once told by the late eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to de- liver his first lecture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed three quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, and glancing anxiously from 6 DEMOCRACY time to time at the watch that lay before him on the desk. " When I had spoken a half hour," he said, " I had told them everything I knew in the world, everything ! Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, " and I have done nothing else ever since." Be- neath the humorous exaggeration of the story I seemed to see the face of a very serious and improving moral. And yet if one were to say only what he had to say and then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of their honest measure. Let us take courage by the example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines increases as the area of their land in vineyards is diminished. DEMOCRACY To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the unde- layable year has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this place, where so many wiser men have spoken be- fore me. Precluded, in my quality of national guest, by motives of taste and discretion, from dealing with any question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of com- paratively abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks on a matter concerning which I had some experimental knowledge, de- rived from the use of such eyes and DEMOCRACY ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such report as I had been able to win from them. The subject which most readily suggested itself was the spirit and the working of those conceptions of life and polity which are lumped together, whether for reproach or commendation, under the name of Democracy. By temperament and education of a conservative turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change (to me a sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary pop- ulation. The testimony of Balaam should carry some conviction. I DEMOCRACY 9 have grown to manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this system of government in my native land, have watched its advances, or what some would call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an ear-witness to the forebodings of wise and good and timid men, and have lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman say in 1840 that the doing away with the property qualification for suffrage twenty years before had been the ruin of io DEMOCRACY the State of Massachusetts ; that it had put public credit and pri- vate estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and that while suffering an unparalleled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain the unity and self-respect of the nation. If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that wielded it were un- trained to its use. There the elec- tion of a majority of the trustees of DEMOCRACY 11 the public money is controlled by the most ignorant and vicious of a population which has come to us from abroad, wholly unpractised in self-government and incapable of assimilation by American habits and methods. But the finances of our towns, where the native tra- dition is still dominant and whose affairs are discussed and settled in a public assembly of the people, have been in general honestly and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a majority of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not so often the recklessness as the moderation of public expenditure that surprises an old-fashioned observer. "The 12 DEMOCRACY beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial Wisdom. " Why, in the name of all former expe- rience, doesn't he ride to the Devil ? " Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last thing we need be anxious about is property. It always has friends or the means of making them. If riches have wings to fly away from their owner, they have wings also to escape danger. I hear America sometimes play- fully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this DEMOCRACY 13 because, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which * some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them ? But bad weather is not the worst thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman, not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole people, has charged us with the responsibility of whatever he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his countrymen. If 14 DEMOCRACY M. Zola or some other competent witness would only go into the box and tell us what those morals and manners were before our example corrupted them ! But I confess that I find little to interest and less to edify me in these in- ternational bandyings of " You 're another." I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World with what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of De- mocracy. It is generally people who are in what are called easy DEMOCRACY 15 circumstances who can afford the leisure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and these experience an immediate allevia- tion when once they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it by. There is something consola- tory also, something flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace, in thinking our- selves victims of a malady by which no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they find it simpler to class under one com- prehensive heading whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their 16 DEMOCRACY tastes, their interests, or what they suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross-grained fellows lay their ill-temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is America answerable for it? Even if she were, would it account for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease, and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German bands, and the Boers, and all the other discomforts with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that go in chariots ? Yet I have seen the evil example of De- mocracy in America cited as the DEMOCRACY 17 source and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite as little connected with it by any sequence of cause and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It has been at work for centuries, and we are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where the newspapers offer a ros- trum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are more noticeable on the surface than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of silence and suppression on the cauldron. Ber- nardo Navagero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria in 1 546, tells us that " in them there 18 DEMOCRACY are five sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of these last no account is made, because they have no voice in the Diet" 1 Nor was it among the people that subversive or mistaken doc- 1 Below the Peasants, it should be re- membered, was still another even more helpless class, the servile farm-laborers. The same witness informs us that of the extraordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their estimated property as the Barons, No- bles, and Burghers together. Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no voice. (Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, Serie I., tomo i., pp. 378, 379, 389.) DEMOCRACY 19 trines had their rise. A Father of the Church said that property was theft many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national work- shops, and of the theory that the State owed every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the first organized Democracy? A few centuries ago the chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even in that, far- sighted persons like the Emperor Charles V. saw the germ of polit- ical and social revolution. Now so DEMOCRACY that the chief end of man seems to have become the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly political and social. But there had also been social upheavals before the Re- formation and contemporaneously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race. The Reformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing. Formerly the immense majority of men — our brothers — knew only their sufferings, their wants, and their desires. They are beginning now to know their opportunity and their power. All persons who see deeper than their plates are rather DEMOCRACY 21 inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the sores of Laza- rus have a poison in them against which Dives has no antidote. There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great and prosperous Democracy on the other side of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and political the- ories of men in the Old World who do not find things to their mind ; but, whether for good or evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak. Every successive swarm that has gone out from this officina gentium has, when left to its own instincts — may I not call them hereditary 22 DEMOCRACY instincts ? — assumed a more or less thoroughly democratic form. This would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that the Brit- ish Constitution, under whatever disguises of prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with democratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with conservative instincts. People are continually saying that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this means only that a clearer conception of human claims and human duties is begin- ning to be prevalent. The dis- content with the existing order of things, however, pervaded the DEMOCRACY 23 atmosphere wherever the condi- tions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America. I say wherever the conditions were favorable, for it is certain that the germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous field for their development and noxious activity unless where the simplest sanitary precautions have been neglected. " For this effect defective comes by cause," as Polonius said long ago. It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then only that they syllogize un- 24 DEMOCRACY welcome truths. It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence : — " The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion." Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much heed to their proper busi- ness as to their pleasures or man- ners, the guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of or- derly and secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when the reasonable and practi- DEMOCRACY 25 cable are denied that men demand the unreasonable and impractica- ble ; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor. No; the sentiment which lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am speaking al- ways of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a form of government ; for this was but the outgrowth of the other and not its cause. This sen- timent is merely an expression of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the management of their own affairs. What is new is that they are more and more gaining 26 DEMOCRACY that control, and learning more and more how to be worthy of it. What we used to call the tend- ency or drift — what we are being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things — has for some time been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your over- coat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are con- scious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a DEMOCRACY 27 metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet comes of what nurses and other experi- enced persons call growing-pains, and need not seriously alarm us. They are what every generation before us — certainly every gen- eration since the invention of print- ing — has gone through with more or less good fortune. To the door of every generation there comes a knocking, and unless the house- hold, like the Thane of Cawdor and his wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder. It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who 28 DEMOCRACY wishes to come in out of the cold. The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. " Who 's there, in the name of Beelzebub?" he mutters. Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it, — have not prophesied with the alderman that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had happened. Suppres- sion of the slave trade, abolition of slavery, trade unions, — at all of these excellent people shook DEMOCRACY 29 their heads despondingly, and mur- mured " Ichabod." But the trade unions are now debating instead of conspiring, and we all read their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are learning the business of citizenship and the dif- ficulties of practical legislation. One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the govern- ment of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it — the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all lit- SO DEMOCRACY erature — a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quick- ened them with its own indomitable impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but they had their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have it sooner or later. They made their corner the counter and bank- ing-house of the world, and thence they rule it and us with the igno- bler sceptre of finance. Your grand- fathers mobbed Priestley only that you might set up his statue and make Birmingham the headquar- ters of English Unitarianism. We hear it said sometimes that this is an DEMOCR AC Y 31 age of transition, as if that made matters clearer; but can any one point us to an age that was not ? If he could, he would show us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before us, is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so that the train may not come to grief. For we should remember that nothing is more natural for people whose education has been neglected than to spell evolution with an initial "r." A great man struggling with the storms of fate has been called a sublime specta- cle ; but surely a great man wres- tling with these new forces that have come into the world, master- 32 DEMOCRACY ing them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were it would be only a better school of manhood, a no- bler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing it- self than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and conse- quences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of me- diocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct — to en- danger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the charges lies DEMOCRACY 33 in the habit it has of making itself generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most in- convenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condi- tion to give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited by it. Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and un- certain thoughts, it is the indefinite- ness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physi- cal, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more 34 DEMOCRACY likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in me- chanics. President Lincoln defined democracy to be " the government of the people by the people for the people." This is a sufficiently com- pact statement of it as a political ar- rangement. Theodore Parker said that " Democracy meant not « I 'm as good as you are,' but 'You 're as good as I am.' " And this is the ethical conception of it, necessary as a complement of the other; a con- ception which, could it be made act- ual and practical, would easily solve DEMOCRACY 35 all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been pro- posing to mankind from the be- ginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dra- matist Dekker said he was the first true gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that " One knocked at the Be- loved's door, and a voice asked from within « Who is there ? ' and he an- swered 'It is I.' Then the voice 36 DEMOCRACY said, * This house will not hold me and thee ; ' and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he re- turned and knocked again at the door ; and again the voice asked « Who is there ? ' and he said « It is thyself ; ' and the door was opened to him." But that is idealism, you will say, and this is an only too prac- tical world. I grant it; but I am one of those who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought that a democracy was possible only in a small territory, and this is doubtless true of a de- mocracy strictly defined, for in such DEMOCRACY 37 all the citizens decide directly upon every question of public concern in a general assembly. An example still survives in the tiny Swiss can- ton of Appenzell. But this imme- diate intervention of the people in their own affairs is not of the es- sence of democracy ; it is not ne- cessary, nor indeed, in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. Lincoln's definition would fair- ly enough apply have existed, and now exist, in which, though the su- preme authority reside in the peo- ple, yet they can act only indirectly on the national policy. This gen- eration has seen a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in all that have ever existed the body 38 DEMOCRACY politic has never embraced all the inhabitants included within its ter- ritory, the right to share in the di- rection of affairs has been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been further restricted by various lim- itations, sometimes of property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and sex. The framers of the American* Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of gov- ernment they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sud- DEMOCRACY 39 den innovation of theory ; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditat- ing. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and sta- bility. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to 40 DEMOCRACY their race, and many of them a dis- trust of human nature derived from their creed. The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic af- firmations or fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn. This was a prac- tical question, and they addressed themselves to it as men of know- ledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular dis- cretion. They put as many obsta- cles as they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their whim. With few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of the then accepted syllogism, — DEMOCRACY 41 democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was framed upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where every pas- sion was reverberated from house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till every impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all the more dangerous be- cause sanctified with the formality of law. 1 1 The effect of the electric telegraph in re- producing this trooping of emotion and per- haps of opinion is yet to be measured. The 42 DEMOCRACY Fortunately their case was whol- ly different. They were to legislate for a widely scattered population and for States already practised in the discipline of a partial independ- ence. They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous advan- tages. The material they had to work upon was already democrat- ical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by more than a century's schooling in self-government. They had but to give permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to their new institutions, especially in supplying effect of Darwinism as a disintegrator of hu- manitarianism is also to be reckoned with. DEMOCRACY 43 them with checks and balances, they had a great help and safe- guard in their federal organization. The different, sometimes conflict- ing, interests and social systems of the several States made existence as a Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on a constant practice of moderation and com- promise. The very elements of dis- integration were the best guides in political training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the appli- cation of it to a question of funda- mental morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that compromise makes a good um- brella but a poor roof ; that it is a 44 DEMOCRACY temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship. Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the whole, successful ? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving contagious ? This trial would have been less severe could it have been made with a people homogeneous in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United States have been called on to absorb and assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say that the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. DEMOCRACY 45 The previous condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in New York and asked what his politics were, in- quired if there was a Government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, « Thin I 'm agin it ! " We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have made them over into good citizens, who have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of a country and of institutions which they know to be worth dying for. The exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes of ignorance and pov- erty have coagulated in great cities. 46 DEMOCRACY But the social system is yet to seek which has not to look the same ter- rible wolf in the eyes. On the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buying up the worn- out farms of Massachusetts, and making them productive again by the same virtues of industry and thrift that once made them profit- able to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them. To have achieved even these prosaic results ( if you choose to call them so), and that out of materials the most discordant, — I might say the most recalcitrant, — argues a cer- tain beneficent virtue in the system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere luck. Car- DEMOCRACY 47 lyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day for everybody. He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on their bellies. As for the secu- rity of property, it should be tol- erably well secured in a country where every other man hopes to be rich, even though the only pro- perty qualification be the owner- ship of two hands that add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest the largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its division ? In point of fact, far- seeing men count the increasing power of wealth and its combina- tions as one of the chief dangers 48 DEMOCRACY with which the institutions of the United States are threatened in the not distant future. The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto understood, but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the State. It bears those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. Wealth should not forget this, for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then. Let me not be misunder- stood. I see as clearly as any man possibly can, and rate as highly, DEMOCRACY 49 the value of wealth, and of heredi- tary wealth, as the security of re- finement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and beautify life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an ancestral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture which has been of example and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capa- ble of secreting. I should not think of coming be- fore you to defend or to criticise any form of government. All have their virtues, all their defects, and all have illustrated one period or another in the history of the race, with signal services to humanity 50 DEMOCRACY and culture. There is not one that could stand a cynical cross-exami- nation by an experienced criminal lawyer, except that of a perfectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the world has never seen, except in that white-haired king of Browning's, who " Lived long ago In the morning of the world, When Earth was nearer Heaven than now." The English race, if they did not invent government by discussion, have at least carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable contriv- ance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions DEMOCRACY 51 than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading journals, so thoroughly is every- thing debated before the author- ized and responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of government by a major- ity of voices ? To a person who in the last century would have called himself an Impartial Observer, a 52 DEMOCRACY numerical preponderance seems, on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as could well be devised, but experience has appar- ently shown it to be a convenient arrangement for determining what may be expedient or advisable or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bot- tom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own im- age at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the god- dess, but that she is far better-look- ing than he had imagined. DEMOCRACY 53 The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unanswera- ble. " What," we exclaim, " shall Tom, Dick, and Harry have as much weight in the scale as I?" Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And yet universal suf- frage has not been the instrument of greater unwisdom than contriv- ances of a more select description. Assemblies could be mentioned composed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity which have sometimes shown traces of human passion or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the business of Mankind so well, then, that there is no use in trying 54 DEMOCRACY a less costly method ? The demo- cratic theory is that those Consti- tutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety- valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, " Is -it wise to give every man the ballot? " but rather the practical one, " Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer ? " It may be con- jectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the bal- lot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in DEMOCRACY 55 their heads. At any rate this is the dilemma to which the drift of opin- ion has been for some time sweep- ing us, and in politics a dilemma is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of suffrage is not valued when it is in- discriminately bestowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I have observed that what men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. But is there not danger that it will be valued at more than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate way will be sought to make up for the want of it ? Men who have a voice in public affairs are at once 56 DEMOCRACY affiliated with one or other of the great parties between which society is divided, merge their individual hopes and opinions in its safer, be- cause more generalized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tac- tics, and acquire, to a certain de- gree, the orderly qualities of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to a body corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be cer- tain, that, under whatever method of helping things to go wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have the divine right to govern will be found to govern in the end, and that the highest privilege to which the majority of mankind can aspire is that of being governed by those DEMOCRACY 57 wiser than they. Universal suffrage has in the United States sometimes been made the instrument of in- considerate changes, under the no- tion of reform, and this from a misconception of the true mean- ing of popular government. One of these has been the substitution in many of the States of popular election for official selection in the choice of judges. The same sys- tem applied to military officers was the source of much evil during our civil war, and, I believe, had to be abandoned . But it has been also true that on all great questions of na- tional policy a reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought out at the critical moment to turn 58 DEMOCRACY the scale in favor of a wiser de- cision. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run. It is, per- haps, true that, by effacing the principle of passive obedience, de- mocracy, ill understood, has slack- ened the spring of that ductility to discipline which is essential to " the unity and married calm of States." But I feel assured that experience and necessity will cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure others. And under what frame of policy have evils ever been re- medied till they became intolera- ble, and shook men out of their indolent indifference through their fears ? DEMOCRACY 59 We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap the foundations of personal independ- ence, to weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect due to eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius. If these things were so, society could not hold to- gether. Perhaps the best forcing- house of robust individuality would be where public opinion is inclined to be most overbearing, as he must be of heroic temper who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the season in a soft hat. As for au- thority, it is one of the symptoms of the time that the religious reverence for it is declining everywhere, but this is due partly to the fact that 60 DEMOCRACY state-craft is no longer looked upon as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay of superstition, by which I mean the habit of re- specting what we are told to respect rather than what is respectable in it- self. There is more rough and tum- ble in the American democracy than is altogether agreeable to people of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and the people take their political duties lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatural nor un- becoming in a young giant. De- mocracies can no more jump away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no doubt sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve DEMOCRACY 61 it. But they do this because they believe them worthy of it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ of a no- bler religion. But is it democracies alone that fall into these errors ? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a statue to Hudson, the railway king, and have heard Louis Napo- leon hailed as the saviour of society by men who certainly had no de- mocratic associations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But de- mocracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have also seen the wisest statesman and most preg- nant speaker of our generation, a man of humble birth and ungainly 62 DEMOCRACY manners, of little culture beyond what his own genius supplied, be- come more absolute in power than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his coun- trymen for his honesty, his wis- dom, his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly humane simplicity of his character. And I remember another whom popular respect enveloped as with a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely genial, and the most inde- pendent of opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament and decoration. Institutions which could bear and breed such men as DEMOCRACY 63 Lincoln and Emerson had surely some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless turmoil and mis- carriage of the world, if there be one thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing to make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves. The touchstone of political and social institutions is their ability to supply them with worthy objects of this sentiment, which is the very tap- root of civilization and progress. There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it with the elements of growth and vigor than such an organization of society as will 64 DEMOCRACY enable men to respect themselves, and so to justify them in respect- ing others. Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than those of an avowedly democratical Con- stitution. For I take it that the real essence of democracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napo- leon when he said that the French Revolution meant " la carriere ou- verte aux talents " — a clear path- way for merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to paraphrase this by calling democracy that form of society, no matter what its poli- tical classification, in which every man had a chance and knew that he had it. If a man can climb, and DEMOCRACY 65 feels himself encouraged to climb, from a coalpit to the highest posi- tion for which he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what name is given to the government under which he lives. The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more fa- mous tribune of that name, wrote in 1771 : " The English are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agi- tated and more unfortunate than the very Algerines themselves, be- cause they do not know and will not know till the destruction of their overswollen power, which I believe very near, whether they are mon- archy, aristocracy, or democracy, and wish to play the part of all three." England has not been obli- 66 DEMOCRACY ging enough to fulfil the Bailli's prophecy, and perhaps it was this very carelessness about the name, and concern about the substance of popular government, this skill in getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all the motives which influence men, and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a principal factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands, whereas they are more will- ing to let time and circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance have made. All free governments, whatever their name, DEMOCRACY 67 are in reality governments by pub- lic opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their pro- sperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the ele- ment from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigrammatic terse- ness, bids you educate your future rulers. But would this alone be a 68 DEMOCRACY sufficient safeguard ? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in so far as they are legitimate. What is really ominous of danger to the existing order of things is not democracy (which, properly understood, is a conservative force), but the Socialism which may find a fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and for- tunes any more than we can equal- ize the brains of men — and a very sagacious person has said that " where two men ride of a horse DEMOCRACY 69 one must ride behind" — we can yet, perhaps, do something to cor- rect those methods and influences that lead to enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enormous. It is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George and to prove him mistaken in his political economy. I do not believe that land should be divided because the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may this not be said ? A fortiori, we might on the same principle insist on a division of hu- man wit, for I have observed that the quantity of this has been even more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an inequitably large share of it. But he is right in 70 DEMOCRACY his impelling motive ; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that hu- manity makes a part, by far the most important part, of political economy ; and in thinking man to be of more concern and more con- vincing than the longest columns of figures in the world. For unless you include human nature in your addition, your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Communism means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and community of interests, sym- pathy, the giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must combine DEMOCRACY 71 to produce — means, in short, the practical application of Christian- ity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruc- tion. State Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal charac- ter — self-help, fore thought, and frugality — which nourish and sus- tain the trunk and branches of every vigorous Commonwealth. I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun 72 DEMOCRACY should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not sur- render except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that you must " Be your own palace or the world 's your gaol." But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought, thought must find a remedy some- where. There has been no period of time in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than DEMOCRACY 73 now. It builds hospitals, it estab- lishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders possi- ble, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows of their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now constituted these are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem, and which it has always believed, to be the most in- nocent and healthful. The evil ele- 74 DEMOCRACY ments it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses. Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its con- stitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the des- tinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocra- cies, or democracies, but will be re- vealed by the still small voice that DEMOCRACY 75 speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity. OF THIS EDITION THERE HAVE BEEN PRINTED 500 NUMBERED COPIES BY H.O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY FOR HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY OF BOSTON AND NEW YORK. JVb. 2./ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara College Library Santa Barbara, California Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 3 1205 02548 4500 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 789 395 - ■ ... ■:-. :■--. ; :?--K-.^J ■:■■■=- ;:.y.--~\: : -- r "j -::': .... . : ... .• ,'. -