Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.arcliive.org/details/americangovernmeOOelliricli AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND MAJORITY RULE A STUDY IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT By EDWARD ELLIOTT, Ph.D. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1916 Copyright, 1916, by Princeton University Press Published, February, 1916 / PREFACE The purpose of this volume is to point out the fact that the people of the United States have been hindered in the attainment of democracy, or the rule of the majority, by the form of govern- ment through which they have been compelled to act. The framers of the Constitution of the United States and of the states sought to prevent the immediate and direct rule of the mmierical majority upon the theory that all government was by nature evil and that the people might become as tyrannical as any king. To preserve liberty and protect the individual it was thought necessary both to limit the sphere of governmental action and to prevent hasty ac- tion under the influence of passion; accordingly the theory of the separation of the powers of gov- ernment and the system of checks and balances were elaborated in close connection with the theory of strictly limited and delegated powers. The popularity of a republican form of govern- ment long bHnded us to a realization of the true condition and in the meanwhile many attempts iii 3436S7 iv PREFACE were made to restore the government to the people on the assumption that somehow or other forces hostile to popular control had obtained possession of the government ; these reforms have not accomplished the desired end; the people do not govern. Moreover we have ceased to fear the action of government as dangerous to liberty and are eager to have it undertake a wide field of activity in be- half of the social well being; we find, however, that government is neither equipped with the necessary authority nor fashioned for efficiency in performing these new tasks. The suggestion is here made that the modification of our govern- ment must be in the direction of greater simplicity if we would secure efficiency and responsibility to the will of the people, I wish to express my appreciation of the kind- ness of my colleague Dean David P. Barrows of the University of California and of Professor Edgar Dawson of Hunter College, New York City, who have read the manuscript in whole or in part. Edward Elliott. Berkeley, California October 1915 TO MY WIFE IN AFFECTIONATE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HER STEADFAST INTEREST AND CONSTANT ASSISTANCE CONTENTS PAGE I. Colonial Conditions and the Framing of the Constitution 1 II, Early Efforts to Secure Popular Con- trol ..■..■>■>■■ I , >■ ■ '» ■■ > ■■ » ■ .^^ T 28 III. The New Democracy of the West 55 IV. Civil War and Majority Rule 78 V. Development of Parties and Party Machinery 96 VI. Some Newer Forms of Popular Gov- ernment 119 VII. The Simplification of Government. . . 144 Vll CHAPTER I COLONIAL CONDITIONS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION The roots of American democracy run back as far in history as do those of American govern- ment. In both instances colonial conditions and institutions are midway points, from which one looks back to the mother country and forward to the twentieth century. To know and understand the problems of government which confront our democracy today, we must look to the steps by which the present relation of governmental insti- tutions to democratic desires has been attained. The seyenteenth century _was the century of vrevolution in English history. In America it was Ihe century of colonial settlement and the home conditions and differences found reflection to some extent in the settlements made in Amer- ica. But despite the differences in religious be- liefs and in the relative importance in the scheme of government to be attributed to King and Par- 1 2 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT liament, there was unanimity, both in England and in the colonies, regarding the general frame- work and structure of government. The struggle for English liberty did not concern itself with the form of government but with the relative power in government to be enjoyed by King and Parliament. The period of the Commonwealth was anomcjous and was not the result of a revolu- tionary movement to do away with the monarchy. Even under the Commonwealth the old form was retained but with a new name. The essential elements of the framework of English government were a single executive, the king, and a dual legislative body, the Parhament, composed of the hereditary Lords and the elected Commoners. It was this form of government which was set up in the colonies, modified to suit the new conditions. The governor, the council and the general court or burgesses repeated the general features of English government, but the conditions and circumstances of their settlements produced important modifications. The colonial settlements in Virginia, which may be regarded as typical in large measure of the other Southern colonies, were made by men principally interested in a commercial venture. if ' ^ r AND MAJORITY RULE S They were in sympathy politically with the crown and religiously with the Church of England and yet they soon found themselves in opposition to royal policies and nowhere in the colonies was the opposition to royal governors more bitter than in Virginia, nor were the rights of the colonists to self-government anywhere more vigorously maintained. The physical conditions of life of the early settlers were^evefy where conducive to the develop- ment of a democratic spirit, but it differed very much in the different parts of the coimtry. In Virginia, the settlers found a pleasant and fertile land, watered by great rivers which served as highways of communication and transportation. One by one large tracts along the rivers were taken up and each plantation became the center of a community life of its own. Settlement ad- vanced up the rivers, plantation after plantation, each with its own wharf whence it shipped to- bacco in vessels which bore it direct to England, bringing back in exchange everything of which the plantation might be in need. The towns were few and sparsely populated and the business Ufe of the colony was carried on chiefly directly be- tween the plantations and the mother-country. 4 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT This method of settlement was favored by the natm*al conditions of a rich soil and a mild cli- mate, by the geographical features of the country and by the absence, for the most part, of hostile Indians, which permitted of scattered settle- ments. The agricultural community which was developed under these conditions modelled itself upon rural England. The county was the impor- tant unit of government and the economic condi- tions tended to produce a limited number of leading families, corresponding to the county families in England. They were the gentry, a sort of landed aristocracy, to which the institution of slavery furnished an additional economic and social foundation. A representative assembly was early developed in the colony and proved a constant foe to royal privilege. The House of Burgesses became the bulwark of popular liberty and through it the people demanded and secured a large share in the ^cmment of the colonjv/^elf -government and a right to approve of all taxes lev ied were sub- jects of frequent contests with royal governors in the light of which we forget the pseudo-aristoc- / racy of first families and remember only the M struggle for local self-government — rightly re- AND MAJORITY RULE 6 garded as one of the most important elements of y American democr acy ._,. «_. --- ^ In New England there were different motives lying back of the settlements and different con- ditions surrounding them and moulding their y institutions, yet here too a great love of hberty as identified with self-government grew up. The religious motive was primarily responsible for the ^4 migration to the New World of the Puritan _ colonists of New England. They sought a place in which they might observe their own forms and maintain their own doctrines and yet remain Englishmen. These Puritans, who very soon be- came Congregationalists, ha d a system of churc h government which contained the seeds of demo- cracy; every church was separate and distinct from every other and was composed of members, each of whom had an equal voice with every other in all matters concerning church govern- ment; every church was governed solely by its own members and without connection with, much less without subordination to, any outside body. Here then were local self-government and equality in each church and it was not long t^ be^re these principles of ecclesiastical organization were transferred to the field of politics, and local self- flr-otKe^ iriflir^ ^^^^ 6 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT r^ government by equals became an accepted axiom of the political arrangements. The form of government in which these ideas fomid realization was that of the "town," and the ' town-meeting has become the classic example of pure or direct democracy in America. In it all the freemen of the "town" or district might gather and in it the laws were passed, taxes levied and the selectmen chosen to execute the laws ; to it also they made their reports and by it they were held to accoimt. The conditions of life surrounding the New England colonists were favorable to the develop- jCment of the town system, with its democratic fea- tures, and unfavorable to the development of social distinctions and classes. The country was ill-adapted to agriculture by reason of a poor and rocky soil and the severity of the winterst As a natural result the settlers soon turned to trade and commerce and were thus drawn to- gether into compact settlements. The influence of the church organization was a strong factor in the development of the town system inasmuch ''^ as every church was an ecclesiastical unit as every town was a political imit, and in the first years of settlement only the church members were citizens AND MAJORITY RULE 7 of the town with a voice in the town meeting. Finally the warlike and hostile Indians were long a terror to the New England settlers and theU need for protection forced the colonists to holdl together. The Qounty never played a conspicuous part in the governmental arrangements of New Eng-:_ land, serving chiefly as a judicial district. The elective General Court was always active in up- holding the rights of the colonists to local self- government; in the charter colonies, where the governors were chosen by the people, the prin- ciple of self-government was carried out in the largest measure. The struggles of the people against the crown were as violent and as dramatic as in any part of the country. The conditions of life in New England more than elsewhere in the American colonies were un- favorable to the development of an aristocratic spirit; there were no great landed proprietors nor was slavery ever very prevalent, and the life in the towns was close and intimate, but above all tBe ease with which a man could become indepen- dent and the necessity under which all were of working, made the maintenance of social classes an impossibility. There was little or no attempt N*' 8 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT to do so and both the social and pohtical arrange- ments were developed along democratic lines. What took place in New England and in the South, took place in a modified form in the middle colonies. As they were the middle colonies geo- graphically, so they were in their life and their government. The soil and climate were not mif riendly to agriculture, yet the splendid rivers and harbors were productive of coromerce; neither the town nor the coimty system of local self-government predominated nor in colonial government was there the same bitter contest between the crown and the representatives of the people. The type of governmental form and of democratic feeling was less pronounced than in the other sections, yet here, too, the fundamental -\ conditions of hf e and of governmental form were essentially democratic. In all the colonies there were certain general features to be found, which were due partly to their common origin, and partly to the fact of the settlement of a new country ; there was a common language and a common law and despite the dif- ferences in local and colonial governments, there were many likenesses in governmental structure ; everywhere there was a large measure of self- AND MAJORITY RULE 9 government and an equally large measure of love of liberty; everywhere the conditions of hfe had tended to produce social equality. Upon the foundation of their common elements, a union of the colonies for the defense of their liberty was possible and a common declaration of their poli- tical principles became the first step toward a national life and a national democracy. The Declaration of Independence sought to justify the Revolution by a system, of political philosophy which was thoroughly English in its .;C origin. At the close of the revolutionary move- ments of the seventeenth century iij England there came the "Great and Glorious Revolution" of 1688 in which the power of the people as rep- resented in Parliament finally achieved recogni- tion and the kings of England were thenceforth kings by the grace of the people and not by the ^ grace of God. In the midst of the Civil Wars the royalist, Thomas Hobbes, had sought to establish the power of the king by a theory of society and of government which placed absolute and unlimited power in the hands of the sovereign, whom Hobbes was prone to identify with the absolute monarch. According to his view men originally 10 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT lived in a state of nature in which every man had a right to everything and in which might made right. This state of nature was a state of war of all against all and in it "the life of man was nasty, solitary, poor, brutish and short." In order to escape from the ills of the state of nature and under the guidance of a law of na- ture which bade men seek peace, every man entered into a contract with every other man by which each surrendered to the sovereign, in so far as every one else did the same thing, his right to govern himself. The sovereign, who himself did not enter into the contract, thus became pos- sessed of supreme and unlimited power over all the individuals in society; by the contract, they had made his will their will and consequently re- bellion was a logical absurdity. Moreover to rebel and to overthrow government, the sov- ereign power, was to break the social compact and to remit men again to a state of universal war. The conception of absolute power in the mon- archy was definitely defeated in England in the Revolution of 1688 and John Locke sought to give to the success of the popular movement, as Hobbes had given to the royalists, a theoretical AND MAJORITY RULE 11 and philosophical foundation. The elevation of William and Mary to the throne was regarded as the triumph of liberty and this liberty Locke sought to justify through the nature of society and government and ultimately through the na- ture of man himself. His starting point is the fact that^man is not responsible for his own exist- ence, and has not ^^i plete ^power over his own life sincejiejiasjioright to take his life, which came from God ; there£Qrele_.cannot give to an- other coinplete power over hisjifei^since he can- not_givejnore_than he Emself possesses. The state of nature which preceded society Locke thought was a state of peace and not a state of war and by the social contract men sought only to avoid the inconveniences arising in the state of nature; these were due to the-fact that every man was judge in his own case and society was established in order that there might be a common judge and a known law to live by. GUi^ ernments were set up for the protection of life, liberty and estate, and whenever they failed to accomplish the purpose for which they were es- tablished, they might be changed by the people; government was agent, not master, and the over- throw of government did not destroy society. 12 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT The right of revolution was a logical deduction from his theory of the purpose of government \ and it rested in the people from whose consent in the social contract governments derive their powers. Locke was seeking to justify the Revolution of 1688, by which a limited royal authority had been constituted, through a theory of government which made all pohtical authority limited by the very nature of its objects, and at the same time Vhe found a protection for the liberty of the individual against all government in the moral nature of man. .Bom free, it was not within the power of men to give to anyone despotic power over th^n; absolute political power was impossible. In this fashion Locke sought to establish the theoretical basis for human liberty, and the Whig party in England during almost a century of Xsupremacy proclaimed its adherence to these principles; their application resulted in a su- . premacy of Parliament over the King and of the / House of Commons over the Lords. The Whigs and the theories of Locke fell on evil days when George III came to the throne; he established a practical control over Parha- f AND MAJORITY RULE 13 ment and came nearer realizing the Stuart idea of absolute royal power than any king since Charles I. It was against this royal power grown to such dangerous proportions that the Declaration of Independence was largely di- rected, and the theories of Locke formed the foundation upon which the colonists grounded their claims. To the theory of Locke that gov- ernment is limited by its purposes and that when it fails to fulfill these purposes it may be over- thrown, there was added the conception of the inherent and inalienable rights of man. The ^" idea that all men were endowed by their Creator with certain rights, among which were the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had been developed in the colonies and first of all in Rhode Island when Roger Willi^lms proclaimed religious liberty as belonging to men simply be- ^ cause they were/men^ The political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence was firmly rooted in individual liberty and the end sought by it was some barrier to the action of government which could protect the liberty of the individual; the theory that it was the i nevitable tendency o f all governments to become oppressive and tyrannical found gen- 14 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT eral acceptance ; government was regarded as the natural foe of liberty and therefore some check upon its action was needed. Locke went back to i man in a state of nature^and the colonists to the /nature of man, while the Declaration of Indepen- ^ dence proclaimed rights both by the law of na- ture and by the nature of man. The Declaration of Independence was the embodiment of the political philosophy as well as of the causes of the Revolution, or rather let us say that the events which led to the Declaration were violations of a theory of government and a l statement of this theory was an essential part of the justification of the step that was being taken. The principles then proclaimed have been the great democratic platform for succeeding gener- ations and the history of om* political struggles may be interpreted as a succession of more or less successful efforts on the part of the people to secure in practice the application of these theo- ries. It is true that the belief in a doctrine of natural rights has almost disappeared and that no longer do we seek an impassable barrier to limit the action of government, but the attempt . to establish the equality of all men and to make V/ government derive its just powers from the con- 1*^ AND MAJORITY RULE 16 sent of the governed has gone steadily for- ward. The Declaration has been the platform of American democracy and the realization of its planks has been 'sought through governmental arrangements. The only bond of union among the colonies during the earlier years of the Revolution was* the Declaration of Independence ; a plan of gov- ernment to unite the colonies was proposed to the Contmental Congress Jveiy_sogiL^ adoption of the Declaration^ and jhough this_ plan was^cceptfidiythe^Congre^^ ingyear and submitted to the states for theix ap- proval, it was not until 1781 that it was accepted by them all. This plan of union, called the Arti- cles of Confederation, held the colonies together in a loose union until the adoption of the present Constitution in the year 1789. The Articles of Confederation were based upon the theory of the equality of the states; in the single governmental agency, the Congress, each state had an equal voic e; size and population were not accorded consideration and Rhode Island or.Delaware was as strong as Massachu- setts or Virginia. The Congress resembled a , body of diplomats more nearly than anything ^ T 16 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT else and com bined in itself all the func tions of government, * Even before the Declaration of Independence, the royal governors had been driven out and a temporary authority set up; in some of the col- onies, constitutions had been adopted, setting up a framework of government identical with the colonial forms except that popular sov- ereignty replaced that of the king and an elected governor and legislative bodies, the governor and council appointed by the crown. Immediately after the Declaration and up on the advice of the . Congress, all the states did like wise. The gen- ^ eral model was Parliament and the features of a single executive and a dual legislative body were generally present in the new state governments. ^ The interesting and novel feature about these new written constitutions was the fact that they rested upon the theory of popular sovereign ty; the will of the people was the supreme and ulti- mate source of all power; from them all govern- ments derived their powers, thus putting into immediate practical operation one plank from the platform in the Declaration of Independence. Moreover these constitutions, resting upon the will of the people, were regarded as limitations AND MAJORITY RULE 17 upon the powers of thepeople; they were the seJf-iinposed^Jimits~u^^ po wers of gove rn- r ment. Other evidence of this attitude toward government is seen in th e Bills of R i^ts, prefixed to most of these new state constitutions ; they were an expression in concrete for m of the inher ent and inalienable ^ghts of man which not even a lu popula r government could viola te. In the period of agitation which preceded the outbreak of the Revolution, the colonists had dis- cussed the principles of government in many well argued pamphlets and had arrived at a pretty clear view of the theory of government — a view which found expression in the Declaration of Independence. After the war began, political discussion was no longer of practical consequence \ and soon ceased altogether; it did not begin again until the failure of the Union under the Articles of Confederation brought a realization of the need for some other and better form of Union if the fruits of victory were to be attained in the fullest measure. < The weakness of the Union under the Articles •f Confederation lay in the fact that the Ctn- gress had n# pfwtfr t# p*t ita determimatirtis into effect but was compelled to depend upon the -*^ 22 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT vention devised for the Union differed from the old form mider the Articles of Confederation in many essential particulars. In the first place it was a Federal Union instead of a Confederation ; it was itself a state composed of states and not a mere league or alliance of states. The equality of the states which was fundamental under the Ar- ticles, was abandoned under the new plan except for the equal representation of the states in the Senate. This is not the place for a presentation of the struggles and compromises of the Conven- tion ; it is enough for our purposes to observe the results as seen in the structure of the govern- ment and the spirit which underlay that structure. /The outline of our system of government is quickly stated. The people are regarded as the possessors of all political power; a portion of their power they have delegated to ,the central government, a portion to the state governments, and a portion they have retained. The principle which underlay the division of powers between the state governments and the Federal govern- ment was to retain for the former those subjects of action which were local and particular and to f confer upon the latter the power to deal with those matters which were common to all the states.'^ AND MAJORITY RULE 23 So it was that foreign affairs, the army and navy, the financial system, the coinage, the postal ser- vice, and interstate and foreign commerce were delegated to the central government while rights of property and of contract and family relations were left to the states. All governmental authority was distributed among the three branches or departments, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The chief executive was a single individual, the Pres- ident in the Federal government and the gov- ernors in the states; the legislative power was everywhere lodged in two houses, an upper and a lower, and the judicial in a hierarchy of courts culminating in the Supreme Court of the United States and similar courts in each state. The models for this structure of government were the/^ colonial institutions and the British government. The s_pirit which u nderla y this fr amewo rk and system of governments is not so readily and easily stated. There was a very general acc eptan ce of the principle of popular sovereignty buj combined with this acceptance went a fear of gov ernm ent which resulted in a fundamental contradiction between theory and practice. Though the power . of the people was recognized, it was everywhere h i 24 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT subjected to limitations the purpose of which was to prevent government from becoming an instru- ment of oppression. The conception of modem democracy is based upon equaHty and majority rule, but no such ideas were in the minds of the f ramers of the con- stitutions, either those of the states or that of the nation. The principle of equality and the rule of the majority were theoretically accepted but ^ /in practice the suffrage was restricted to the ^ propertied classes and the rule of the majority within these classes was very tightly hemmed in by provisions for the protection of the minority, 'here were at least three factors which are worthy of consideration in an analysis of this spirit which underlay the inception of our gov- jemments. In the first place the impression of ^ George III as a "royal brute" and a tyrant, seek- ing to crush liberty in America, had sunk deep into the minds of the men of the Revolution, who were likewise the makers of the constitutions. Royal governors in the American colonies were the local examples of that tyranny which had become associated in history with royal power and royal power was synonymous with the power of government. The absolute monarchy was the AND MAJORITY RULE 26 all but universal type of government in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries. For this rea- son, if for no other, governments and rulers were objects of suspicion to the people, and this atti- tude was present even toward governments set up upon the revolutionary basis of popular sov- ereignty. But a second reason for the attitude of distrust of government is to be found in a theory which goes back to the Church Fathers, They regarded the institution of government as due to the fall of man in Adam and as a punish- ment for this original sin. Government, then, was by its nature evil and one phase of this evil was that of government as the oppressor of man- ^ kind. This view was a natural accompaniment of the age of absolute monarchs. Finally the fear of government took on another aspect. The rulers had been the source of the taxing power by which the individual was com- pelled to part with his property at the whim of the monarch, and too often he saw that the only use to which his property thus taken was put, was to minister to the vicious pleasures of the ruler. In England in the seventeenth century, Locke, in seeking to protect the individual in the enjoyment of his property, developed the theory «6 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT that one of the purposes of government was the protection of property and that when govern- ment failed in its purpose or violated this pur- pose, it could and should be overthrown. The protection of property came to be regarded as al- j most the chief function of government, and the \ makers of our constitutions were principally men of property who held this conception of govern- ment. It was natural, therefore, that they should fear lest government should fall under the con- trol of the people without property who might use it to injure and not to protect property. The combination of these three factors led to the many complicated checks and balances to be f oimd in the system — each of which is fundamen- tally a limitation upon the immediate and direct supremacy of the popular will. It was regarded as most unsafe to permit the will of the people, upon which the whole structure rested, to find a ready means of expression for it was very gener- ally believed that tyranny was as easily developed under popular government as under monarchical. Government was looked at askance because it ( had always been master; now though it had be- ^come servant, somewhat of the old fear of it remained. AND MAJORITY RULE 27 The progress of democracy in the United States has witnessed a gradual reaHzation by the people that government is the servant of their will and they have set it to work to perform a multitude of tasks in their behalf. At the same time the conception of "the people" has been steadily broadened through the extension of the suffrage and at the present time we are witness- ing many efforts on the part of this democracy to remove all the hindrances which have been interposed to prevent the inmiediate realiz^ion of its will through governmental institutions. CHAPTER II EARLY EFFORTS TO SECURE POPULAR CONTROL The Articles of Confederation had been adopted by the legislatures of the states, the members of the Congress had been chosen by the legislatures, and all important acts of the Con- gress required approval by the legislatures of at least nine states, while all changes in the Articles themselves necessitated acceptance by all of them. The Union under the Articles of Confederation was one of sovereign states to which the name confederation was aptly applied. The Congress resembled an assembly of diplomats who repre- sented their states and not the people. We have seen that the first real struggle in the constitutional convention took place over the question whether or not its labors should be confined to an amendment of the Articles of Confederation by which the character of the Union as a confederation should be preserved, or whether a different form of Union should be MAJORITY RULE 29 sought in which the equality of the states as a fundamental principle would disappear. Thd victory in this contest was with those who be- lieved that no sort of amendment would suffice, but that a new principle of union must be sought. In justification of this determination, made in the % face of the resolution of Congress under which! the Convention had assembled, it was decided to I submit the constitution to the people of the states for adoption or rejection through conventious specially chosen for that purpose. These con- ventions were supposed to represent the people directly, while the legislatures represented the people as organized into states. There was no thought of a vote by the people of the states di- rectly but only through conventions. Acceptance by conventions had been the procedure used by the states in the adoption of their own constitutions and it was not till a generation later that it be- came customary to adopt constitutions and con- stitutional amendments by direct vote of the/ people. Today there are very few state consti- tutions which were not submitted directly to the people for their approval. When the Constitution was before the people for acceptance or rejection, a strong opposition 30 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT / to it was developed on the ground that it did not contain a Bill of Rights. In English history- Bills of Rights were solemn compacts between the kings and the people in which the former recog- nized and guaranteed for the future certain rights of the people. In America they had found a place in several of the state constitutions as guar- antees of individual liberty against the action of the government. Jefferson was one of the most zealous advocates of such a declaration of the limits upon governmental action, and strongly objected to the adoption of the Constitution be- cause it lacked such a guarantee. Hamilton, on the contrary, maintained that a Bill of Rights in /the Federal Constitution was unnecessary, *inas- l much as there was no king whose oppression they need fear; it would be in the nature of a self- limitation which was superfluous as at every approach of tyranny in the government the peo- ple had only to elect other officials. Jefferson believed that the tendency of all government was toward the oppression of the individual and / therefore such limitations were necessary even in a republican form of government. Strong as he might be in asserting the right of the people to rule, Jefferson did not believe that a government AND MAJORITY RULE 31 by the people could do no wrong. He feared even a democracy could be tyrannical and he wished to see the individual protected against government. As a result of the widespread demand for a Bill of Rights, it was practically agreed that the new constitution when adopted should be amended, and within two years after its adoption the first ten amendments, virtually a Bill of Rights, were accepted. The new government was inaugurated in the Spring of 1789. Washington was the unanimous choice of the electors and of the country for the first President, and acting in the spirit of a President of the whole coimtry, he appointed to his cabinet men of opposing political principles. There were as yet no parties, but it was matter of general knowledge that Jefferson, as Secretary of State, and Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, would have different conceptions re- garding the nature and the functions of the new government. These differences were not slow in developing. The Confederation had failed primarily from the lack of money; it had no power to levy and collect taxes, it could only ask for requisitions. AJ 32 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT The new government had the power to levy and collect taxes, imposts and dues, and it was Ham- ilton's task to evolve its financial system. It was , a stupendous task and upon its success depended the existence of the Union. Any financial scheme that he might devise was forced to care for the past debts as well as for the future expenditures. In masterly fashion Hamilton set about winning financial strength and the respect of the people for the new Union. In the first place, it was a self-evident duty that the foreign and domestic debt of the Confederation which had been in- curred in prosecuting the Revolution, should be assumed, and measures to this effect were pro- posed by Hamilton and accepted by Congress. It was a far different matter, however, with the debts of the individual states, and their assump- tion by the Federal government was a great step toward securing for it a greater >respect than attached to any state. The assumption of these debts by the new government, combined with legislation adequate to care for them, drew to Ithe Union the support of the holders of these obligations; they found the success of the new government identified with their own personal fortunes; in the absence of any feeling of pa- I AND MAJORITY RULE 83 triotism and loyalty, the appeal was made to self-interest. To meet what seemed to many a crushing bur- den of debt, Hamilton secured the passage of a custom's tariff and an excise measure, both highly productive of revenue without making direct demands upon the taxpayer and in conse- quence sure to be popular. Both continue to the present as the chief source of the Federal revenue. Finally, to complete his system of finances, Ham- ilton advocated the establishment of a govern- ment bank. Here for the first time, a difference of opinion arose which was not concerned with the merits of the proposed bank but with the power of the Federal government to establish it. The theory was universally accepted that the Federal government was one of delegated pow- ers; that the Constitution contained the grant of all powers that rightfully belonged to it, and nowhere in the Constitution was the power to establish a national bank to be found. Yet, after the enumeration of the powers expressly granted, there followed these words : The Congress shall have power ... to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into e'xecution the foregoing powers, and all other powers t 10 34 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officers thereof. It was natural that Hamilton should have laid he emphasis on the word "proper" and Jefferson on "necessary." Hamilton believed in govern- ment, in its efficiency and efficacy. Human prog- ress seemed to him to be conditioned by the orderliness of society and this orderliness of so- ciety by strength in the ruling authority. He was not afraid of the aggressions of government upon individual rights ; on the contrary, he believed that individual rights could only be secured by the agency of a firm and well established authority. Jefferson's views were the exact opposite. He disbelieved in everything that Hamilton thought essential. Hamilton, as an officer of the govern- ment, was eager to round out his financial plans, so that both his theoretical views and his personal desires joined to make him see in the establish- ment of a national bank a perfectly proper means for carrying out the powers which had been dele- gated to the Federal government. In his advo- cacy of the bank, he developed the theory of the yimplied powers" of the Constitution, the theory of "loose construction" as opposed to the doc- trine of "strict construction" advocated by Jef- AND MAJORITY RULE 36 ferson. To the latter, no power could properly be implied as belonging to the Federal govern- ment which was not absolutely necessary to carry out the powers expressly granted, while to Ham- ilton it was sufficient if the power were a proper one. The struggle for the adoption of the Consti- tution had developed two parties, those who favored it because it gave hope of a union strong^ enough to exist, and those who opposed it be- cause of the fear that it would prove too strong |^ for the welfare of the individual states. After the adoption of the Constitution it was natural that the latter should wish to see the Federal government restrained within the narrowest pos- sible limits and that many of them should be strict constructionists. Thus the germs of party \ division were present, though unremarked, from ) the establishment of the new government. The establishment of the National Bank and the theo- ries of the construction of the Constitution which arose out of it, gave a sufficiently concrete case for division and very rapidly thereafter two par- ties formed under the leadership of Hamilton and Jefferson, entitled respectively the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. 36 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT The choice of a successor to Washington fell upon John Adams, a Federalist of very aristo- cratic temper. The violence of factional strife reached its climax in his administration and the Federalists felt driven by the bitterness of the attacks of their opponents to pass the famous Alien and Sedition Acts, aimed to protect the chief executive against abuse run riot, but which came dangerously near putting arbitrary power in the hands of the government. These meas- ures were the culmination of the FederaUst legis- lation, each step in which had come to be regarded as an aggression upon the liberties of the people. They were too extreme and brought overwhelming defeat to their authors in the next election. Likewise they called forth the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, adopted by the legis- latures of these two states as protests. These protests set forth the theory that the states have j the right to declare unconstitutional those acts of Congress in excess of its powers. The original draft of the Kentucky Resolutions which had been made by Jefferson and sent to his friend Breckinridge to introduce, contained the asser- tion of the right of an individual state to nullify within its boundaries any act in violation of the AND MAJORITY RULE 37 Constitution, a doctrine made famous by Calhoun at a later period. ..^^ The campaign of 1800, which resultedTrPffie overthrow of the Federalists and the triumph of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, ^as a reforjn campaign^ the first of many, and13ie ^''^^ -——^- — -~'"^ reformation sought was the restoration of the government to tlie control of the people and to its J original limits^ The Federalists were accused of having grossly perverted the original plan of the government and of having greatly exceeded the rightful limits of Federal authority, to the great detriment of the popular welfare and with danger to individual liberty. Jefferson was the champion of the rights of the people against those ; : who would control government for their own in- terests, and this political cry proved as effective then as in more recent times, for the Federalists were swept from power in all branches of the government except the judiciary. The conserva- tive element of society was shocked at the success of the masses and feared that the institutions which had been set up with such laborious efforts \ would be overturned. The victory of the radicals was viewed as a menace to all sound principles and policies, and there was great rejoicing that I — 4«XJ 38 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT the judiciary at least was saved. The victors soon found that it was a vastly different thing to be confronted with the task of actually running a government from merely indulging in criticism of others. Power and responsibility are gen- erally sobering influences upon the radical who cries for change. Once in office there comes a new viewpoint which has converted many a theo- retical radical besides Jefferson into a practical conservative. So far as the powers of the Federal govern- ment were concerned, the new party did not curtail a single one of those of which the Feder- alists had made use; in no particular did they decrease the strength of the government. It seemed to change the whole character of these powers to have them exercised by Democrats (as they soon came to be called) instead of by Fed- eralists. The freedom of construction by which power had been gained was left unmolested. In fine, the reformers did not reform, at least so far as the structure of the government was con- cerned. They did bring in an entirely new spirit, however, and this spirit was that of the democ- y which was just beginning to feel its strength. As time has gone on, it has more and more AND MAJORITY RULE 39 realized its power and has sought to give it ex- pression in the greater control of the people over government, but never in a lessening of the pow- ers of the government. In this as in so many- other particulars, the Jeffersonian democracy- was a forerunner of the Jacksonian democracy and of the American democracy by whatsoever name it may be called. Hand in hand with the more direct control of government by the will o f ^\ the majorit y there has gone a great increase ij3L ^/ \ the funct ions of government. With the growing consciousness of power, the people have lost the fear of government which animated the framers of the Constitution, and they no longer follow Jefferson in the belief that the tendency of gov- ernment is inherently toward the oppression of the individual. They have both accepted and re- jected the teaching of Jefferson, and while seek- ing to make the popular will supreme, they have not sought to curtail its expression. In the political philosophy of Jefferson there was a profound trust in the good sense of the great body of the people and a large part of his success was due to this attitude. Yet Jefferson had a profoimd distrust of government and sought to restrain it within the narrowest possible 40 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT limits, and as a restrictive principle he desired to introduce local self-government as widely as possible in order that the people might the more closely watch their officials. Hmnan nature was all right when applied to the task of choosing representatives and deciding upon policie^ but all wrong when set to carry out these pohcies from an official position. Jefferson accepted the traditional view of government as an instru- ment of oppression. Such it undoubtedly had been imder the absolute monarchy which had succeeded the feudal system. Jefferson was not pohtical philosopher enough to search history for an explanation of the phenomena of govern- mental institutions. Indeed, the study of history for such a purpose was not popular with the advocates of the rights of man; it was not in keeping with their philosophy to go beyond the a priori principles which reason had set up. Had he looked into history for an explanation, he would have seen that the absolute monarchy was a necessary phase in the development of the modem nation. A single strong power was needed to bring order out of the chaos which ensued upon the breakdown of the feudal system. Likewise, from such an historical view. i AND MAJORITY RULE 41 he might have been saved from the error of identi- fying the nature of all governments with that of the absolute monarchy and concluding therefrom that all governments were destructive of liberty. Hamilton was far better versed in history, had read its lessons more truly, and saw more clearly than did Jefferson upon what the real character of government depended, and he declared that a strong central government would not be danger- ous to liberty because of the control which the people exercised over it. Wherefore Jeiferson accused him of being a monarchist, and of desir- ing to set up a king. The triimiph of Jefferson in 1800 seemed to presage the complete overthrow of Hamilton's theories. The Federalist party survived for a few years thereafter but it had lost its vigor, and died a none too honorable death after the Hart- ford Convention of 1814. It has often been said that the Democratic-Republican party swallowed up the Federahst, and the acceptance of the re- sults of the Federalist policy has been assigned as the cause. But the j'eal caus e of the disappe jir- an ce of the Federalists lay^ eepgrjhan this sur- face acceptance of their policy. It l ay in the f^ pt that the triumphant democracy rejected that part / 4« AMERICAN GOVERNMENT of Jefferson's theory which taught that govern- ment was an evil and dangerous to Hberty, and accepted the view of Hamilton that government was good or evil according to the forces that con- trolled it ; accepting Jefferson's teaching that the will of the people was good and should be su- preme, the people rejected the inconsistent part of his theory which declared their will bad as soon as it became active as the government. The Jeffersonian Democracy, then, won its way t o power _ pn a p latform _wJiich said that the JFedgraUsts-iia d exalte d the JFederaLgovernment j iid that it mus t hp hr^in^jrHnw. Yet the victory was not made use of to fulfil the purpose pro- claimed. It is true that government expendi- tures were reduced and a "chaste reformation of the army and navy" — to use Jefferson's own phrase — ^was inaugurated, but close upon the heels of victory came the daring act which gave us half a continent at the expense of theories. Viewed from the standpoint of the Democratic- Republicans, the Purchase of Louisiana was the [greatest stretch of Federal power that had yet taken place, for nowhere in the Constitution was there a delegation of authority to acquire terri- tory, and such 'an acquisition could with ill grace AND MAJORITY RULE 43 be regarded as necessary to carry out other pow- ers which had been granted. Jefferson beheved that his act was unconstitutional and proposed the adoption of an amendment to the Constitu- tion to reheve the situation. Congress and the country accepted the Pui^chase and did not cavil about the Constitution so the amendment was not pressed. The attitude of the Jeff ersonian following to- ward the Judiciary is very enlightening. It was the only branch of the government which could not be captured by election and the thought of Chief Justice Marshall and his associates, the majority of whom were Federalists, continuing in that branch of the government the theories which had been rejected at the polls, was ex- tremely bitter. Attacks of the most violent char- acter were made upon. its personnel and upon the method of its selection. It was declared to be an aristocratic institution and out- of harmony with a democratic form of government. Moreover the Federal judiciary came into conflict with some of the state judiciaries through holding that the Federal laws' and Constitution were supreme and that acts of the states must give way before them. There has been much discussion in the^^i 44 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT course of our history concerning the right of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional and this discussion has been very active in re- cent years. Whatever may have been the inten- tion of the makers of the Constitution in this matter, it was assumed by the authors of the FederaUst that this power would belong to the Court. The revival of interest in the subject may be referred to the growth of the democratic f eel- sj^ ing in the country, insisting that the will of the ^ people should be supreme. It is an unconscious "" reflection of the growing popular tendency to sweep away all barriers and to change a repre- U sentative republic mto a jirect democracy and may reasonab ly, be connected with the demand for the recall of judges. Whatever may have been intended, Chief Jus- tice Marshall, speaking for the court in the case of Marbury vs. Madison, in the year 1803, settled the matter so far as the practice has been concerned. Arguing from the very nature of a Federal Union, with a written constitution de- clared to be the supreme law of the land, he showed that the power to declare null and void all laws in contravention of that instrument, was essential to its maintenance. The Nullifiers and AND MAJORITY RULE 46 Secessionists declared that no such power be- longed to the Supreme Court. Calhoun believej L^^ tha t to put i t in the hands of the^ourt was to make the Federal government, through the judi- cial branch, the judge of its own powers, thus j making the Government and not the Constitution/ the measure of the rights that had been delegated. But Calhoun and all those who followed him re- jected the conception that the new union was a Federal State. To them it was still a Confeder- ation. For more than a quarter of a century, the Supreme Court under the leadership of Marshall, maintained the supremacy of the Constitution, which was interpreted in harmony with the grow- ing feeling of national unity and as the instru- ment by which a nation had been created. This was the spirit that lay back of Hamilton's finan- cial measures and theories regarding the Union, and the hostility of the Democrats to the perpet- uation of his theories through judicial interpreta- tion is easily underst6od. The discordant elements in the national life had not yet become sufficiently antagonistic to bring matters to a crisis. The struggle was confined for the present within the Constitution and not until a later gen- 46 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT eration did it reach the point of demanding a dissolution of the Union. The supremacy of the people under Jefferson's guidance was a protest against the extremes to which the Federalists had gone ; it was the procla- mation that the government should be returned to its original conception. Confessedly the gov- ernment that had been established was a republic and it was moreover a representative republic. No principle was more fundamental than that it rested upon the consent of the governed, given through their representatives. But already the /difficulty of securing a perfect harmony between / the acts of the representatives and the will of I their constituents was felt although it was not N^ormulated in modem terms. When the govern- ment was set up, it seems to have been taken for granted that the mere fact of election at specific intervals, would be a sufficient guarantee of the responsibility of the representatives and we must remember that the Convention was not over eager for the immediate supremacy of the popular will. The passions of the people were far more fre- quently a topic of discussion than their virtues, and it was thought wise so to frame the govern- ment that ample time should be allowed for these AND MAJORITY RULE 47 passions to cool before they could be realized in action. Yet within a dozen years the cry was raised that the will of the people must be supreme and that the responsibility to electors must be recognized. Jefferson, in one of his radical aphorisms^^ decl ared that where annua l elections ) end^tyr anny begins, and it was accep t ed as a matter of cour se that the correct jnethod of secu r- ing responsibility in^epres enta tives^was that of election , and that the more frequent the election the m ore direc t would be the responsibiliiy. It scarcely seemed open to question that in this way the people would retain complete control of the government and be able to realize their will most effectually. The principle was accepted as car- dinal by the rising democratic spirit and its appli- cation was immediate and widespread. Offices which hitherto had been appointive were made electiv e. The change from an appointive to an elective judiciary in almost all the states was due to this idea that the will of the people must be made effective and that election was the means through which it could be accomplished. The difficulty of amending the Federal Constitution proved sufficient to prevent a similar change in the Federal judiciary. 48 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT Theag£lication of thfi_£rincrgle of responsibil- ity through election, combined with the notion thaTgoveniniiaital autho rity should, bje divided up in order to be safe, led to a decentralization of power in the states which has rendered them very poor agents for performing the tasks which have recently been laid upon them. The execiitiye authority was first an object of suspicion ; the danger to liberty was thought to lie in it, with the result that the local units of gov- ernment, as the counties, were made practically independent of state authority and the execution of state laws was in most instances put in the hands of the local officials who, being elected by the people of the local district, drew their author- ity from the ultimate source of all power. In the absence of any statutes placing them under the control or direction of the state officials, there was -an entire absence of administrative co-ordina- tion and control. The legal responsibility of the local official was to a general law regulating his duties and his political responsibility was to his constituents. \ This decentralization of governmental author- / ity was carried out, also, in the relation of state officials to each other. The governor, at the head AND MAJORITY RULE 49 of the state administration, was deprived of all control over the state officials who would natur- ally be regarded as properly subject to his direc- tion. Instead of having a cabinet, composed of heads of departments appointed and removed by him, the governor has a number of colleagues, each elected for a definite term by the same con- stituency which elects the governor. He has no authority over them and their responsibility is only to the laws which prescribe their duties and to the people of the state by whom they are elected. The result of this policy of decentralization and election to secure responsibility has been to| rob the people of all effective control over most officials and to make the officials responsible to a party organization or political boss. The people as a whole could not know all the candidates for all the offices and so they have centered their attention upon the most important offices, leaving the choice of candidates for subordinate offices to the party boss. Responsibility is thus shifted froni the people who 6lect to the boss who nomi- nates, when nomination by the successful party is the equivalent of election. At the outset the successful operation of our 60 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT highly complex system of government was largely due to the simplicity of life. Simplicity either in life or in government is essential for the suc- cess of a democracy. Simplicity of life, social, political, and economic, was decreasing even at the time the Constitution was framed, and it has continued to decrease ever since, with every new invention that has contributed to the com- fort and convenience of modem life. With the development of a capitalist class, of a society based largely on the possession of wealth, of great manufacturing interests involving an entirely new system of production and new systems of transportation and communication; with the in- crease of population and its concentration in large cities, the complexity of life has grown to almost terrifying proportions. While the life of the community was thus becoming more and more elaborate, government remained complex. That is to say, our forefathers framed a system of government and committed that framework to writing, and that the definite and rigid form thus determined might not be lightly changed, they provided a cumberous dnd difficult method of V amendment. There was no place left for a grad- ual and natural chauge in the form thus rigidly set. AND MAJORITY RULE 61 / It was comparatively easy to amend state con- stitutions so that the state governments would be empowered to grapple with the growing com- plexity of affairs so far as function was con- cerned. In the case of the Federal governmentV we have been compelled to rely almost entirely] upon the interpretation by the courts. In the mail/ this has proved reasonably satisfactory, thanks to the general terms used in the wording of the in- strument to be interpreted. It is true, the courts have recently been strenuously attacked for their failure to keep pace with the times; we are told that these august personages are ossified, that they are out of sympathy with the needs of the new social conditions, and that this situation must be remedied. On the whole, however, we are to be congratulated that the courts have been so ready to enlarge the functions of the govern- ment by the process of interpretation. While it has been relatively easy to provide government with the powers necessary for the increasing duties forced upon it by the develop- ment of the country, thereJias_jaQt^been_an equal facility Jnjnodifyi ng t he form. It has remained fixed in all essentials and fixed in complexity, so that we now have an elaborateness both of life 52 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT and of government. The result has been a poor and inefficient government, inadequate control by the people, and the general discouragement of many good persons who, after repeated vain efforts to secure an accurate reflection of public opinion in the policies of government, reached the conclusion that democracy itself was at fault, when the real trouble was with the particular form through which the democracy sought to act. So well balanced were the various branches of government in our system that no one part of the mechanism could give the controlling impetus to the rest. The logical result was a friction of the disagreeing elements upon each other, save in the rare instances when all felt impelled in the same direction. This difficulty in securing action was in entire accord with the theory of a very restricted sphere of government influence, but was out of harmony with the actual conditions.. Disaster was averted by the development of political parties which served as a unifying force throughout all depart- ments of government. Parties were national in their extent and so exerted their influence all the way up from city to nation. Thus outside of the constitutional arrangements, there was de- AND MAJORITY RULE 53 veloped an agency to make these arrangements workable, and, in the main, parties have per- formed this function satisfactorily. In recent years we have found much fault with parties and party organization and have at- tempted numerous changes, not only to give the people control of them, but also to lessen their power and influence. The people have not realized that the form of government of which they have been so proud, and the principle of election which has been re-\ ; garded as fimdamental in democracy, are largely V responsible for the failure to achieve the suprem- acy of their will in affairs of government; they have not realized that it is the complex nature of our government which has made it so difficult . for the people to govern and so easy for smaller I groups to govern in their own selfish interests. Failing to appreciate the necessity of making gov- ernment as simple as possible, almost all reforms seem to have been conceived in the spirit of mak- ing government more complex. The theory that the separation of the powers of government was necessary to preserve liberty has influenced the whole conception of government and consciously or unconsciously, complexity has been added to 54 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT complexity that no one might control govern- ment and crush out liberty. Yet this very com- plexity has put government into the hands of the few and it will never be reclaimed by the people until it has been made simple. Si mplicity i s ll €ssentialjo responsibility and efficiency. CHAPTER III THE NEW DEMOCRACY OF THE WEST From the standpoint of our present exper- ience of parties it seems that the framers of the Constitution were singularly blind to one phase of political life that has been of tremendous con- sequence in the development of our institutions. No conception of a system of parties such as we know had developed up to that time even in Eng- land nor was any intimation of it foreshadowed in the discussions of the Constitutional Conven- tion. Much was said at the time about factions and the evils which they brought upon republics, but not a word about parties in the modem sense. Perhaps it would be expecting too much of the "Fathers" to demand that they should have fore- seen and made provision for this new phenome- non yet there were already present the elements out of which parties were to be constructed. Dur- ing the War of the Revolution there had been Whigs and Tories, and after the war was ended 55 56 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT there were those who wanted a strong central government and those who did not; those who advocated the adoption of the Constitution and those who opposed it. When the Constitution had been adopted and discussion arose over the nature and extent of its powers ; when the diver- gence of views between Hamilton and Jefferson found expression upon the question of the consti- tutionality of the National Bank, and when the doctrines of "loose" and "strict" construction of the Constitution were formulated, the basis of two national parties was laid. It was natural that many of those who had opposed a stron central government and many who had opposed the adoption of the Constitution should find themselves united in opposing the doctrine of "loose construction" by which the powers of the Federal government would be enlarged. The leaders of the respective parties wen Hamilton and Jefferson; the latter had a true perception of the political truth that where th decision was made by ballots, the victory wouli rest with the greatest number and that to secur that number organization was necessary. Ac cordingly he set to work patiently and with grea shrewdness to gather together for concerted ac AND MAJORITY RULE 57 tion all those who either from principle or from personal consideration, were opposed to the plans and policies of the government. The platform upon which the fight was made was that of re- storing the Federal government to its original limits and of giving the control of it into the hands of the people. Jefferson was successful in creating the impression that those who were in control of the government were administering it without regard to the will of the people. As early as Jefferson's first election, the people were sharply divided into the two parties, the Federalist under the leadership of Hamilton and the Democratic-Republicans under that of Jefferson. The election of Adams four years previously made it evident that the method of choosing a president could not be successfully carried out under the plan provided by the Con- stitution. The theory of indirect election by the electors was that by this method the best man would be chosen. It seemed reasonable that a choice by picked men would be better than a choice by the whole people, but by the election of 1800, the presidential elector had lost his own freedom of choice and felt bound to vote for his party's choice. 58 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT The machinery for determining the party's choice became a necessity as soon as parties were formed for without such a determination there could be no certainty of centering the party vote upon a single individual. To accomplish this end use was made of the "caucus," which has early developed as a means of focusing the votes upon certain candidates for local offices. Nomination by caucus of the members of the legislatures be- longing to the respective parties soon became an established institution. It was not long, however, before the Congres- sional Caucus began to be looked upon with dilfj favor as depriving the people of all real choice. The choice of candidates being in the hands of the caucus, the only thing left for the people to do was to choose between the candidates presented. There was no responsibility to the people on the part of the caucus which was a self -constituted body. The system was bad from the standpoint of a government by the people, and dissatisfac- tion with the legislative caucus led to its abolition and in its place was substituted the \ nominating convention which was in general use | by the close of Jackson's second administration. 1 From top to bottom of the political machinery AND MAJORITY RULE 59 the convention was introduced as a means of giv- ing expression to the will of the people in the choice of candidates. The nominating conven- tion was an adaptation ; it was the making use of an instrument designed to express the will of the people in formulating, adopting, and amending constitutions, for the new purpose of nominating candidates. The theory in each case was that of a body of representatives especially chosen for a particular purpose ; the members of the con- vention being chosen directly by the people were regarded as incorporating in themselves the whole body of the people in a way similar to the theory of the British Parliament as the embodi- ment of the people of the realm. The nominating convention has lasted for about three-quarters of a century, but long before its loss of power and position, it ceased either to be or to be regarded as a successful means for the expression of the popu- lar will, and years of agitation against it as the bulwark of boss rule is just now resulting in the introduction of the direct primary, another effort to restore the control to the people. Hand in hand with the attempt of the people to organize into parties and to construct the early party machinery, there went a steady movement 60 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT toward enlarging the democracy. It was a logical result of the principle of popular rule that there should be an irresistible demand to increase the number of those who might participate actively in the affairs of government. If all men were born ^Sp and equal and all just governments de- rived their powers from the consent of the gov- erned, what justification could there be for a property qualification either for voting or for holding office? How could the profession of one religious belief qualify and that of another ex- clude a man from a share in the making* of government? Step by step, the restrictions upon the suffrage and office holding were removed until practical manhood suffrage existed. The logic of the democratic principle of popular rule and the practical considerations of party politics worked together toward a widening of the circle of voters. In the end the demands of party were /of far greater consideration than the principle of I justice in securing the admission of wholly uihI y qualified voters. jBI From the earliest days of English colonial set- tlement in America the influence of climate and the fact of a new country to be subdued to the uses of man, were all on the side of democracy. AND MAJORITY RULE 61 Where land was to be had for the taking and where fish and game abounded, it was difficult to maintain any sort of social distinctions. The ad- venturous spirits moved on and set up new com- munities in which life might be raw and crude but in which, for that very reason, a rough equality was found. With the conclusion of peace and the recog- nition that the country as far west as the Mis- sissippi was open to settlement, a steady migra- tion set in. Economic conditions were bad at the close of the war and many felt driven to try their fortune in new places. West of the AUe- ghanies, these new communities rapidly devel- oped into such consequence that territories and then states were formed in quick succession and ^admitted to the Union. The spirit of these states [was very different from that of the original ones Jong the Atlantic seaboard. It was more na- [tional and less local. They knew no existence outside of the Union and the Union was of more [consequence to them than any individual state. iThe rough social equality and the strong spirit of self-reliance developed by frontier life, com- |bmed with their love of freedom, produced a new attitude toward government. Manhood suf- 62 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT frage existed almost from the beginning; but it was in respect to office holding, to the business of carrying on the government, that the distinctive attitude of these new communities was most evi- dent. Their government was as simple as their life and the belief soon arose that any average man was capable of carrying on the business of government. Special training as a qualification for government service was imknown. In a coun- try where there was slight opportunity for educa- tion it was not unnatural that it should have been deemed of little consequence in affairs of govern- ment. Thus in the Western states a new theory of democracy was being formulated and prac- ticed, and in course of time it passed out of the circumscribed limits of the new states of the West and made itself master of the nation. Jefferson was a philosopher who took pleasure in speculation and the formulation of ideas in telling phrases. He was a lover of the Rights of Man and of the whole revolutionary propaganda of his time. He was cultured and refined and the democratic doctrine which he advocated had some- what of the flavor of his refinement. There waafll nothing crude about it and it soon attracted to itself the best talent of the country. Though AND MAJORITY RULE GS the Federalists predicted dire disaster from the success of Jefferson in the election in 1800, their forebodings were not justified. Government and society moved on much as before and it was evi- dent that the new order of things differed but slightly from the old; the chief difference lay in the fact that a new set of men was in office and not in anj^ new or startling change in the course or conduct of government. It has become a com- monplace of our history that the Democratic- Republican party absorbed the Federalist party within a dozen years. This could not have taken place if the successful party had not been com- posed of the same kind of men, thinking in the main the same kind of ideas, and led by the familiar figures of the days of the Revolution. There was no real break with the past when Jefferson was elected. There was no new ele- ment introduced into pohtics and no untried prin- ciples. There was only a harking back to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the ideas of the "Fathers." For all that Jef- ferson had to say about the people as the source of power and authority, there was a strong feel- ing that the leaders, men of training and educa- tion and social position, should direct the masses. 64 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT It was a democracy in which theoretically the majority ruled but in which in practice the lead- ers were to direct an acquiescent majority. The representatives of the new spirit of the country began to make their appearance in the national life just before the War of 1812. In fact the declaration of that war was due to them. Clay, Calhoun, and Crawford were among the new leaders who appeared upon the scene, and the old leaders of the generation of the Revolu- tion were never again in full control. It was these new men and their new spirit that forced President Madison into the war, although it was known to be against his inclination. The war itself brought into national prominence the man who, a decade later, was to typify in himself and crystalize about himself the social and political democracy of the West. Andrew Jackson, the military hero, was eclipsed by Old Hickory, the friend and champion of the people. The new leaders were far more national in their i feeling than was the older generation. The United States meant more to them than any individual state. They had grown up under thc^l influence of that well nigh reverential respect in which the Constitution had come to be held. Thej AND MAJORITY RULE 65 effect of the war was to strengthen the feeling of national unity and solidarity. As against the enemy it was one country and national patriotism had been awakened as only a war can awaken it. Henceforward for a generation the thoughts of men turned toward the greatness of the country as a whole. Some vision of the Future began to dawn on them, of a country stretching from ocean to ocean and a power which should rival any of the old world. This spirit of national patriotism had a tremendous influence upon the great struggle of the Civil War in which the principle of democracy, that the majority shall rule, was to be determined. The War of 1812 was the first great impulse [toward the spirit of a nation. The way had been prepared by the course of development which [had preceded, but the war brought home the con- (sciousness of it. At its conclusion there set in a period of peace in domestic politics, called the Era of Good Feeling, which reached its climax under Monroe and was due to the absence of any real issues. The old lines of division had grad- ually lost their sharpness as the Democratic-Re- publicans adopted and put into operation the principles of the Federalists. The two parties ^ 66 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT slowly amalgamated mitil, after the War of 1812, only one party was left. The old issues upon which the first great party struggle had , been waged, had centered around the powers of the Federal government. The Federalists be- lieved in a "loose construction" of the Constitu- tion in order that the national government might have adequate power and authority. The Demo- cratic-Republicans had driven them out of power by advocating the opposite doctrines. Yet the principles of the Federalists were those which triumphed in the end. The force of circum- stances, the mere fact of being in power, the constant growth of the Federal government in the favor and affection of the people, the deci- sions of the Supreme Court under the leadership of Marshall establishing the national character of the Union, and finally the War of 1812, were forces of development which outweighed all party platforms and brought about a general acceptance of Federalist principles. It was a period when the worship of the Constitution and of the Republican form of government was at its height. New issues and new lines of cleavage lay just ahead but for a time harmony prevailed. This period however was brief. In the absence AND MAJORITY RULE 67 of adequate issues to separate the people into parties, there sprang up parties based upon per- sonahties, — factions rather than parties, center- ing about the leaders. There was the party of Clay, of Adams, of Calhoun and of Jackson, and the election of 1824 was fought out among these factions. Andrew Jackson received the largest number of votes in the electoral college but not a majority of all the votes cast, and when the election was thrown into the House of Represen- tatives, a combination of Clay and Adams re- sulted in the election of the latter. Thereupon the Jackson men raised the cry of "bargain and corruption," inasmuch as Clay was made Secre- tary of State. This bargain and corruption, it was claimed, had resulted in defeating the clearly expressed will of the people. Jackson had re- ceived the largest number of votes and therefore should have been chosen by the House. A fail- ure to choose him was a deliberate thwarting of the people. It was the grossest violation of the sacred principle of democracy; it was an insult to the people and what was of no less conse- quence, to the Hero of New Orleans himself. Re- venge would be doubly sweet as vindicating both the people and Jackson. Thus was the hue and 68 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT cry raised by the Jackson men. They so filled the public mind with their view of the transaction that it was not long until the election of Jackson became identified with the vindication of democ- racy and the will of the people. Popular rule, they said, was endangered by such a betrayal and only the sternest of rebukes would prove effective. Jackson was an ideal figure around which to center a fight in behalf of the people. He was identified in life and in feeling with the new de- mocracy of the West, a democracy entirely different from that of Jefferson. It was crude while that was finely finished; it was based on wide suffrage and frontier ideals, while that rested upon a restricted suffrage and the best colonial traditions. ^The one was a real reflection of the opinions ani feelings of the masses, the other of the leaders of a limited number. Jack- son was reared amidst conditions which developed the rougher qualities of his nature. His boyhood witnessed poverty, the loss of parents, the misfor- tunes of war; his early manhood, the roistering dissipations of the times. After pursuing the study of the law, he left his home in North Carolina and crossed the mountains to become prosecuting attorney for the Mero district, sub- AND MAJORITY RULE 69 sequently a part of Tennessee. Settling at Nash- ville, Jackson soon established a reputation for courage and aggressiveness which gave him high place in a community in which these were the virtues most admired. Physical strength and personal bravery were important, if not abso- lutely necessary, for distinction in life on the frontier. Jackson prosecuted the criminals, en- gaged in tests of strength, raced horses and fought game cocks, killed his man in a duel, mar- ried, prospered, was Tennessee's first Represen- tative in Congress, Senator, Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and Major-general of Militia by the time he was thirty-seven. He then retired from public life to become a farmer and a merchant and but for the War of 1812 might have remained an obscure figure in a new and rough community. When war was declared Jackson, as Major- general of Militia, achieved undying military reputation in the defeat of the British at New Orleans. This military reputation was carefully cultivated and kept alive by the war with the Creek Indians, so that with the help of a skillful political manager, Jackson was a national figure at the Presidential election of 1824. He himself 70 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT protested that he was too old to enter the race for the Presidency, but having once yielded to the persuasion of his friends and become a candi- date, all the fire and tenacity of his spirit were enlisted in the fight. Upon his defeat, as earlier narrated, the desire for vengeance wiped out all personal objections and henceforth his career was directed toward the overthrow of the men and forces that had opposed him. So much has been said about the career of Jackson because it makes intelligible the trend of the popular movement. It shows the manner of life that gave birth to the new ideas which Jackson's election introduced into the national government. There is no possibility of under- standing these ideas unless we see behind them the social and political conditions out of which they developed. Jackson was truly a man of his times ; he is not one of the great figures of history who have risen superior to their surroundings; he was great because he was the embodiment of his age. The type of character developed under these conditions has been sufficiently indicated. Self-reliance, an ability to supply oneself with the ordinary necessities of life, a great skill with tools and weapons, a readiness to turn one's hand I I AND MAJORITY RULE 71 to almost any occupation, a facility in passing from one vocation to another; all these charac- teristics had their effect upon men's attitude to- ward government. That, too, was something to which most men might turn with a reasonable degree of success, for, like the rest of the frontier life, it also was simple. This conception of gov- ernment was fundamental in the whole attitude of this generation and was the immediate product of the social and economic conditions of life which the settlement of the new country had produced. It was a Western in contrast with the Eastern democracy of which Jefferson was the representa- tive. The spirits of the two periods are as dif- ferent in character and temperament as were Jackson and Jefferson. With the defeat of Jackson in 1824, the period of the single party came to an end. This era was abnormal in the life of a democracy and it was soon followed by a sharp division among the people. At first the supporters of Jackson were known simply as "Jackson men," but in a short time they took for themselves the popular desig- nation of Democrats — ^that part of the name of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party which had fallen into disuse. This very fact was n AMERICAN GOVERNMENT significant. They claimed to be the party of the people and to represent the great mass of the plain folk. In time the party came to represent the opposition of the masses to the classes. Jack- son's fight upon the Bank was felt to be for the freedom of the great body of the people whom the Democrats professed to believe were in danger of being permanently enslaved by the moneyed classes. When Jefferson was elected in 1800 there were many predictions of dreadful calamities ahead. The Federalists proclaimed that the stability and permanency of our institutions were menaced by the success of the radicals. Yet these prophe- cies were not fulfilled. Beginning with the con- ciliatory attitude of Jefferson's inaugural, the causes for alarm were rapidly dissipated, for it was soon realized that the control of the govern- ment was in the hands of the same social class. When the Federalist party had disappeared and the Era of Good Feeling set in, the men in control of the government undoubtedly felt more secure in their tenure of office than would have been the case had there been a sharp division of parties. The result of this feeling of security led by imper- ceptible degrees to the attitude that the office in ANrrfMAJORJTY RULE 73 some way belonged to the man and, as a conse- quence, the conception of office as a public trust was weakened in the minds of office holders. Long continuance in office under such conditions pro- duced a laxity in moral standards that led to much inefficiency if not corruption. To attack this state of affairs was good politics and the Jackson men lost no time in raising the issue in behalf of the people. Had they not been de- frauded by the bargain and corruption between Adams and Clay, the imholy alliance, in the bit- ing invective of John Randolph of Roanoke, "of the Puritan and the Blackleg, of Blifil and Black George"? And were not these men the very ones who had fattened on office until they regarded it as their right and any control by the people as an im justifiable interference? However little or much the Jackson men be- lieved such a condition to exist, they gave it a prominent place in their party platforms. To rail at the opposition on the score of indijfiference to the will of the majority and for holding them- selves superior to the desires of the common people, was as popular with the masses as abus- ing the Federalists for monarchists had been in Jackson's time or as attacking Wall Street and 74 AMERICA]SM|OVEB%|^T ^ the Trusts Ujn our own day. This ide^^hat the office-holding classes had become indifferent and had assumed to themselves superior wisdom be- cause they were office holders, provoked strong ^conderonation among men who regarded the busi- ness of government as one which the average man could easily master. The leaders of the new movement were Western men and they had a certain contempt for the refinements of the East, for that in which they were themselves lacking. It was crass provincialism but there was great strength in it. Undoubtedly, too, the defeat of Jackson in 1824 was made to seem due to the fact that he was new and from the West and of the plain people. And as the champion of their rights, which had been so grossly disregarded in his defeat, he made his campaign. By 1828 the popular party was fairly well solidified and the triumph of the people's candidate was over- whelming. It is difficult for us to realize how strong was the feeling that with Jackson's election the peo- ple had again come into their own. We can gain some conception of it from the way in which they flocked to Washington and took possession of the White House; from the way in which the I 'MAJql^TY RULE 75 refinements of life were swept awdjBind the sim- ple and often crude fashion of the West intro- duced. In striking contrast to Jefferson's election, Jackson's entry into office signalized the introduction of a new order of men into the con^ trol of the national life — men from an entirely- different social class, men more distinctly of the people. The Jeffersonian democracy was one of theory, the Jacksonian of practice. The former had its origin in the philosophy of a radical ; thinker, the latter in the manner of life of a i frontier people. Again as in 1800, the better classes socially were alarmed at the hordes of democrats who poured into Washington, both those who had been elected and those who sought appointments. Again grave fear was felt over the radical changes which the new government might under- take, and this time the fears were not without foundation. The only effect of Jefferson's elec- tion had been a little less formality in intercourse, a little greater simplicity in the tone of life. Jackson brought in radical changes in the policy of conducting the government and in the social and political life of the Capitol. In the first place, it was necessary to make the people feel 76 AMERICAN GOVER]^^^^ ^ '1^ eallvii in a concrete way that they were reallyin control; that the government, the offices, the buildings, all belonged to them. We have referred to the throngs which poured into Washington and how they took possession of the White House. But this would not have been sufficient. More tangi- ble rewards were demanded and the principle that "to the victor belonged the spoils" found ready acceptance. It both furnished the necessary re- j wards and removed from office those who had « been so bitterly attacked as heedless of the popu- lar will and corrupt in their security. It became a recognized and generally accepted theory of the Democrats that "rotation in office" was essential to a democracy. By its application the feeling of ownership of office, the disregard of the people, and the ensuing corruption, could not develop be- cause of lack of time. "To the victor belonged the spoils" was a practical platform of which the principle of "rotation in office" was the theoreti- "^ cal support. Both were in accord with that deep feeling of self-reliance and general efficiency which made the average man think himself quite competent for the simple business of government. In yet another way Jackson made his election the triumph of the people, for if they had been I fl^D MAJORITY RULE 77 tricked and defrauded by his defeat, they had been gloriously vindicated by his election ; if they had been deprived of their rights then, they had come into them now. He was their direct repre- sentative and as such he proceeded to speak and act. In him the will of the people was incorpo- rated. To such an extent was this carried out that the Executive assumed proportions in the scheme of government never before attained. We are now f amihar with the view that the Presi- dent is the direct representative of the whole people and as such is more influential than Con- gress or the Supreme Court, but in Jackson's day it was a novelty which excited alarm. It was feared that such a conception of the position of the President, if applied to the scheme of gov- ernment, would upset the balance so carefully planned. Jackson boldly claimed an equal right with the Supreme Court to interpret the Consti- tution and Congress was overshadowed by his great strength as the popular representative. The democracy had at length felt the force of the power of numbers, and the rule of the major- ity became the cardinal tenet of faith. CHAPTER IV CIVIL WAR AND MAJORITY RULE From the time of the adoption of the Consti- tution there has been a line of cleavage rmming through the people, separating them into two parties, one desiring a strong central govern- ment and a liberal construction of the Constitu- tion and the other a weak central government and a strict construction of the Constitution. The latter was at first composed of those who believed in as little government as possible and of those who sought to exalt the states rather than the nation. In the Constitutional Convention the party in favor of maintaining the rights of the states as against the Union which they were seeking to establish, was so strong that it threatened ta^l disrupt the Convention and prevent the forma-^" tion of a constitution. When the new govern- ment was inaugurated, more than one state felt itself superior to the central government. De- 78 d . MAJORITY RULE 79 spite the rapid growth of the latter iirthe respect and affection of the people, there remained a strong element always ready to seize upon this feeling of state loyalty and to use it against the nation. Jefferson, ardent advocate of local self- government, found it convenient to make use of this feeling against the Alien and Sedition Acts through the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. In the draft which he prepared for introduction in the Kentucky legislature, the right of a single state to nullify a law of the Federal government was proclaimed, but the Kentucky legislature went no further than to declare that the states had H such a right. It is doubtful if Jefferson would Bthave taken such a radical position after his own ^m presidency and his intimate friend and successor ^Kin the presidential chair, James Madison, was at ^Jgreat pains to prevent Jefferson's name being ^Hlent to the support of Nullification when Calhoun ^P made the issue acute. But whether he woulcriQf not, the name and fame of Jefferson were made to do service in defense of this doctrine, so destruc-l tive of the supremacy of the Union and so hostile! to the principle of majority rule. It was the t ariff policy of the nation which first brought a clash between the nation and a 80 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT state. From its inception the tariff had been proclaimed as a measure for the protection of the industries of the country, but it was not until the War of 1812 had produced a large crop of infant industries that its protective character be- came pronounced. The factories which sprang up as a result of the war were located in the North and the benefit of the tariff accrued to that sec- tion, while the South, as an agricultural com- munity, found itself sending the produce of its fields, by this time given up almost wholly to cotton, to a foreign market and purchasing its manufactured articles at a price determined by the tariff. The situation came to be regarded as iniquitous and the tariff as a legalized means of robbing the South. John C. Calhoun stands out as the great protagonist of the South and its "peculiar insti- tutions," but he is likewise far above his con- temporaries as a constructive political thinker. In his fight in behalf of the South he developed ai theory both of the nature of the Union and of democracy, which, though rejected by the coun- try as a whole, formed the basis of Southern action until the close of the Civil War. In his early political career Calhoun was an ardent i I I I AND MAJORITY RULE 81 advocate of the War of 1812, a supporter of a protective tariff, and a defender of the policy of internal improvements, all indicative of a strong national feeling. In course of time, however, the economic policy of the government assumed a tyrannical aspect in his eyes in view of the re- sults which it was producing in South Carohna and the other cotton raising states. He himself tells us that he turned to the Constitution to find a remedy for this deplorable state of affairs. The result of his search he gave to the world in the theory of the Constitution as a compact and of the Union as a Confederation. The practical application of this theory was the NulHfication by South Carolina in 1832 of a tariff law of the United States, and Secession a generation later. Briefly stated the theory of Nullification rested upon the assumption that the Constitution was a contract or a compact, entered into by the states as sovereign political bodies; by its terms a gov- ernment had been established and certain powers had been conferred upon it in order that it might serve as the common agent of the states in the matters which had been delegated to it. From this standpoint the Federal government was not the government of a state, separate from each i. 82 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT state yet compounded of them all; it was merely the organ of the states for the performance of special tasks. If any question should arise con- cerning the duty or the right of the Federal government to perform a particular task, the decision could not properly be given by the Fed- eral government itself, through any of its de- partments, since this would make it the judge of its own powers and make its wish and not the Constitution the measure of these powers. The decision could be given only by the states through the process of amendment. If any state felt that a law passed by Congress was in violation of the Constitution, it might nullify that law within its boundaries and it would remain null and void 'if the states, by the process of amendment, did ' not expressly confer the power in question upon the Federal government. The attempt by South Carolina to apply the theory of Nullification showed that in practice a very small minority of the people would be able to control the action of a large majority. This result was both undemocratic and in direct oppo- sition to the strong national feeling which had been developing. Jackson met the issue squarely in his proclamation when he declared that he AND MAJORITY RULE 83 would use the armed force of the nation to compel the submission of South Carolina, but a com- promise was arranged in Congress by which South Carolina secured the reduction of the tariff ; which she had sought. It might have saved the country from the Civil War if the question had been settled without a resort to compromise. Though the difficulty was adjusted the ques- tion which had been raised had not been settled. Calhoun saw this and felt the need for a more thorough theoretical establishment of the view which he had elaborated regarding the nature of the Union. There was need, too, for the refuta- tion of the view which interpreted democracy as the rule of the numerical majority. Calhoun regarded a simple numerical majority as no bet- ter than brute force, capable of the greatest tyranny, and the conduct of the numerically stronger Northern states in passing legislation / conducive to their own well being at the expense of the South as an excellent example of this ty- . ranny. In place of the numerical majority, Cal- ' hoim substituted a theory of the "constitutional'^ or "concurrent" majority. But first it was neces- sary for him to show that the foundation upon which the theory of the numerical majority rested was wrong. 84 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT "It is a great and dangerous error," he says, "to suppose that all people are equally*^ entitled to liberty." To Calhoun there is no such thing as an inherent and inalienable right to liberty, but hberty is a reward to be earned — a reward reserved by an allwise Providence for the intelU- gent, the patriotic, the virtuous and the deserving. Closely connected with this error regarding liberty is another, not less great or dangerous, which makes perfect equality necessary to liberty. Both of these errors have their origin in the view "that all men are born free and equal — ^than which nothing can be more unfounded and false." The opinion that all men are born free and equal is the result of a belief in a state of nature which preceded the establishment of society. Such a state of nature Calhoun rejects as inconsistent with the preservation and perpetuation of the race; instead of being a state of nature it is the condition most repugnant to man's feelings and most incompatible with his wants; Calhoun be- lieved that man was by nature a social animal and that he was bom into society and subject to authority. ^ Having rejected the theoretical basis upon which the supremacy of the numerical majority AND MAJORITY RULE 85 had been made to rest, Calhoun proceeds to the construction of his theory of the concurrent ma- jority. Starting from the premise that the ten- dency of government is to oppression and abuse of its powers, the primary necessity is for some means to counteract or control this tendency. The suffrage alone will not do it, for it can do no more than transfer the actual control over gov- ernment from those who make and execute the laws to the body of the community. If the in- terests of each and every portion of the com- munity were the same, then any law which op- pressed one part would oppress the whole and the right of suffrage would be sufficient to counteract the tendency of government to misuse its pow- ers; but it is evident that the interests of a com- munity are not the same and that a law which is much to the advantage of one party may be greatly to the detriment of another; since the primary purpose of government is protection, some means must be devised by which the injured part may protect itself; the only method by which this can be effected is "by taking the sense of each interest or portion of the community, which may be unequally and injuriously affected by the action of government . . . and to require 86 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT the consent of each interest, either to put or to keep the government in action." Only by such an arrangement will it be impossible for any one interest or class or order or portion of the com- munity, to obtain exclusive control of the gov- ernment and to oppress the others. Such a view of democracy was rejected by the American people since it was based upon the rule of the minority and not of the majority. To Calhoun it seemed the principle necessary to maintain liberty, and it is the only attempt in our history to interpret democracy in any other terms than those of mere numbers. It was an attempt to turn back the time of popular control of government and it failed. Though the colonies were closely related by ties of blood and language and a common heri- tage of English civilization, yet their interests were divergent and the course of their develop- ment after the formation of the Union and the adoption of the Constitution forced them steadily farther apart. The effects of soil and of climate and the resulting economic differences between the North and the South contributed more than all other factors, perhaps, to the difference in at- titude toward society and government which pre- I AND MAJORITY RULE 87 vailed in the two sections. Colonial jealousies were succeeded by state rivalries and the difficul- ties of travel and communication made it impossible for the two sections to know and to understand each other. Moreover tillers of the soil view with hostile eye the worker in the shop and the factory; agriculture and manufacture are world old rivals. The soil and the climate of the Southern states were pre-eminently suited to agriculture while those of the Northern states as naturally turned the inhabitants to commerce and manufactures. Though the Declaration of Independence as- serted that all men were created equal, slavery was even then to be f oimd in all the colonies and its existence was recognized by the Constitution; but slavery did not thrive in the North and grad- ually disappeared. That such would be its fate in the South also, seems to have been the general expectation until the invention of the cotton gin made the production of cotton on a large scale possible and profitable by the means of slave labor. From that moment the institution of slavery was fastened upon the South until it was overthrown in the struggle for the preservation of the Union whose existience had been threat- ened by it. 88 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT In the early days of the Republic southern statesmen regarded slavery as an evil and con- doned, rather than justified, its presence. With the invention of the cotton gin and the produc- tion of cotton as a staple crop, a change gradually took place in their attitude and slavery in time was defended as a "positive good." This de- fense of slavery marks a change in the social and political conditions of the South, a change which gave rise to the view that the highest type of civilization was that which rested upon slave labor. The Greek conception was revived and the Greek argument that such a composition of society gave the freemen the opportunity and the leisure for culture and public life which other- wise would have been lacking, was repeated. In both cases there was a small ruling class, with equal political rights, which constituted a sort of aristocracy. The feeling in the South was strongly aristocratic; it was exclusive and supe- rior while proclaiming itself democratic. The whole political and social development in the South had been hostile to Democracy, meaning thereby the rule of the numerical majority. f | The divergence in economic development be- tween the North and the South and the presence ; AND MAJORITY RULE 89 of slaves in large numbers in the latter, could not fail to produce a different social life in each sec- tion out of which there grew different concep- tions of government and of democracy. The irre- pressible conflict had begun; out of it in the end came a nation wholly free, in which the principle of majority rule triumphed as never before in the history of the country. ^ Though the slavery question was the immediate cause of the Civil War, the real issue at stake was the sort of government which should prevail. Was there to be a Democracy of freemen united into a single Union or were there to be two coun- tries, one slave, the other free? At the outbreak of the war the question of the extension, or even of the existence of slavery, was pushed into the background and the preservation of the Union was uppermost in the public mind. Jackson's famous toast in the days of Nullification, "The Union ! It must be preserved," might have served as the battle cry of the Union arms. Calhoun's toast on the same occasion, "Liberty! Dearer than Union," animated the spirit of the South. The victory settled for all practical purposes that the Union was indissoluble, that Secession was impossible, and that by the Constitution a 90 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT great state had been created, embracing all the states, and that in it the principle of majority rule should prevail even at the cost of civil war. ' The existence of slavery in a free coimtry was an anomaly which could not endure forever. The Declaration of Independence had laid the foun- dation for its overthrow in the assertion that all men are created equal. This principle is the logi- cal foundation both for the abolition of slavery and for the supremacy of mere numbers. Few have sought to give the words a literal interpre- tation, for it is in violation of our reason to claim equaUty in all respects for all men, but their ap- plication has been hmited to the field of law. All men are born equal before the law. It is a doc- trine aimed at class distinctions supported by law and had its modern origin in the spirit of rebellion against the power of kings and nobles. It was eminently proper for the new Republic to proclaim such a principle inasmuch as all royal and hereditary powers and privileges had been rejected. But leaving out of consideration the existence of slavery, the legal equality of all men was far from assured. In the field of political activities there were religious, property and edu- cational qualifications w^ich produced great in« equalities among the citizens. AND MAJORITY RULE 91 As has already been pointed out, these legal inequaUties in the form of restrictions upon a man's ability to vote and hold office were rapidly removed in the years following the election of Jefferson. In the Western states they never gained a foothold. The removal of these in- equalities was the first work of the Democracy in seeking to realize its ideals, and when the work was done the next step witnessed the actual con- trol of the government by the newly enfranchised masses in the Jacksonian Epoch. But already the development of the national life was bring- ing other problems. Greatest of them all was that of slavery. The solving of this problem through Emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment resulted in removing the glaring conflict between our theory and our practice. The equality of man had been attained to the extent that all men were now free but the negroes were lacking in all political rights, and the radi- cal spirit of the North, in disregard of experience, resolved upon the enfranchisement of the newly hberated slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment might bring freedom and the Fourteenth civil rights, but they were deemed insufficient to guar- antee the negro against oppression. So, avowedly 92 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT to furnish him with the necessary protection, the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted by which it was provided that the right to vote should not be denied or abridged by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The enfranchisement of the negro as a means for his own protection would never have been contemplated but for the theory of democracy which had been accepted in the North and West, that all men were equal. The theory had found practical application in the spoils system and rotation in office, and now it was to be extended to the whole nation in universal manhood suf- frage. The previous development contributed much to the failure of the North to realize that to put the ballot into the hands of the liberated slave was to introduce an era of political corrup- tion unparalleled in history. A few vindictive spirits may have sought to humble and to punish the South through negro domination; but the mass of men who supported the policy were not moved by such motives. We can scarcely realize that men should have seriously advanced such an idea or have so far lost sight of the realities as to have placed in the hands of the ignorant blacks the highest privi- I AND MAJORITY RULE 93 lege of citizenship. From the outset the belief has been strong among us that education is essen- tial to the welfare of the Republic and a great public school system has been developed to train future citizens. An intelligent public opinion is fundamental in a free country and this lapse from it can be accounted for only upon the ground that the Jacksonian theory of equality had become sadly perverted. The idea that the evils of government would be abolished by the introduction of what was then called universal suffrage was widely accepted. Government as a concern of the few was being replaced by the conception of government as the business of the many. The trouble, it was said, was in a too restricted electorate and gradually all limits upon manhood suffrage were removed. This notion was the result of a natural reaction against the old conditions of government under the monarchy when the determining voice in mat- ters of government rested with the sovereign alone or in conjunction with a few nobles and a small favored class. A similar movement was in progress in Great Britain and by successive stages the suffrage was extended to ever widening circles until manhood 94 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT suffrage was practically attained. The same tendency was to be seen in other countries also, in which the struggle for popular control of the government was being waged. Upon the the- ory that all men are equal before the law, there was no logical stopping place short of manhood suffrage. This was insistently demanded for and by those who were excluded, but the removal of restrictions on the right to vote and the admission of great numbers of ignorant and imtrained men not only did not remove the evils of politics but, on the contrary, greatly increased them. It has been pointed out already how this process of ex- tending the suffrage affected political parties and was reacted upon by them. The parties sought popular favor by advocating imiversal suffrage and every addition of an untrained class of men to the voting population demanded a closer or- ganization and a stricter discipline of the party in order to win, and victory was imperative since only by it could the rewards of office be gained. By the time the process was complete and man- hood suffrage had been attained, the boss was a well recognized part of the poUtical machinery. The Civil War had a great influence upon the nature of the Union and the character of the I AND MAJORITY RULE 95 government. Without altering the outward form, it nevertheless produced a great change in the relation of the states to the nation. It settled definitively that the Union was greater than any state and by the Fourteenth Amend- ment greatly increased the power of the Federal government at the expense of the states. It like- wise produced a condition which resulted in the supremacy of a single party for a generation. Its war record alone would have made the Repub- lican party invincible at the polls but the sub- servient negro vote rendered it doubly so. The result upon the party system was bad. Men be- longed to one party or to the other because it had or had not supported the War and not because of the principles and measures which it advocated. The long continued supremacy of one party led to a sense of security and ownership of office far beyond anything which Jackson had encoimtered. CHAPTER V DEVELOPMENT OF PARTIES AND PARTY MACHINERY In the United States the fundamental principle of government has been representation. There has been no thought of a direct democracy in which the people should meet together but gov- ernment has been carried on through representa- tives chosen from districts. In the New li^gland town meeting, to be sure, the people had a direct voice in government and a vote of the people came to be necessary for the adoption of constitutions and constitutional amendments. To this referen- dum in making and amending constitutions has been added in a few of the states a referendum and an initiative both of constitutional amend- ments and of ordinary laws. These expressions of the popular opinion in matters of government are, however, exceptional and it still remains true that almost the sole act by which the individual participates in the function of government is that 96 I MAJORITY RULE 97 of the ballot; he votes for a particular individual for a legislative, executive, or judicial office and the representative chosen gives expression to the will of the state through acts of government. Some method of determining the persons to be voted for has always been necessary. In colonial days the English practice by which candidates presented themselves to the voters without any nomination was followed; this plan was practical because the districts were small and the right of suffrage very limited ; with the increase of popu- lation, the extension of the suffrage and conse- quent increase in the number of voters, and the enlargement of the number of elective offices, some method of nominating candidates for office be- came necessary. It was realized that the theoreti- cal question of popular rule resolved itself into the practical one of securing the concentration of the votes of all like thinking men upon the same individual. To accomplish this an organiza- tion of the voters into parties was the first stej and the second was to secure within the part] some machinery for determining the individual] upon whom the members should concentrate thei] votes. The earliest nominating machinery was the 98 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT Qaucus, an institution developed in Massachu- setts out of the meeting of a few individuals who were interested in securing the election of certain men to the local offices ; the meetings were at first informal and without any sort of rules or regula- tions but in them was the germ of the modern highly developed nominating system. 1 As early as the year 1790 a plan for nominat- ing state officers byj he m embers of the legisla- ture was tried in Rhode IsIand'anJits success led to its rapid adoption generally throughout the United States. In the method provided in th Constitution for the election of the President, it was the theory that the electors would exercise free choice and select that man in all the count whom they regarded as best fitted to fill the higH office. By a system of election by electors it was thought that a refining and purifying procesi had been introduced which would result in a s lection far superior to one made by the common mass of the people. Choice by the electors w easy so long as Washington was available but soon as he passed from the political stage it be came apparent that there was no one person who commanded the support of all parties. Indis4 criminate voting in the electoral college might 4 as i )n ] I AND MAJORITY RULE 99 lead to no choice and a consequent throwing of the election into the House of Representatives. To prevent this an agreement beforehand of those of Uke mind became necessary and in consequence some method of reaching an agreement. In order that there might be a candidate who should ap- pear as the choice of the party, the members of Congress of the_resp£ctiye parties gathered in an Info rmal and unaut homedlneeting and chose a candidate. Thereby the theory of a free choice on the part of the electors was abandoned and from that time till now they have regarded them- selves as bound to vote for the party nominee, however he may be nominated. The legislative caucus was a self -constituted body, having no authority from the people or the party. Its nominations were accepted at first/ because it solved a difficulty and they were ac-V quiesced in for long because there was no other method at hand that was preferable. It was th« most representative body in existence, yet it was| by the very nature of its composition rendered \ incapable of representing all parts of the coun- try. By this method of nominating candidates the members of the party in a minority in a legis- lative district had no voice in the naming of the I I 100 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT party's candidate. To remedy this defect so called "mix caucuses" were introduced, composed of the legislative representatives of a party and of men specially selected in those districts in which the party had no representative in the leg- islative body. The lack of a true representative character, combined with the growing conscious- ness of its unauthorized character, led eventually to its abandonment. In the so-called era of good feeling which suc- ceeded upon the close of the War of 1812 there^ was but a single party and the struggle for the nomination for the presidency sank into a con- test among the leaders and assumed the charac-^l ter of factional contests in which the Congres- sional caucus sank into an unenviable position as the center of intrigues and combinations among the supporters of the aspirants. Its se- lections were made with little regard to the pop- ular wish and without the slightest control b] the people, and this too, at a time when the de-j mand for a wider degree of control of government] by the people was constantly in evidence, for th( spirit of democracy had found expression in constant widening of the suffrage and an increase] of elective offices. AND MAJORITY RULE 101 The Congressional caucus continued to per- form its function until 1824; after Jackson was defeated for the presidency in that year and the party of the "Jackson men" was formed to vin- dicate the "Hero of New Orleans" and the rights of the people, t he Congression al caucus was abandoned a s an un democratic institution; its support had been diminishing and it disappeared altogether in the face of the jealousy of the people of any agency which seemed to take power away from them and which did not draw its authority from them. It was obvious that the authority of the caucus was self-assumed and this fact was sufficient to condemn it in the eyes of the masses. With the abandonment of the Congres- sional caucus, the legislative caucus in the states also disappeared and some new method of nom- inating candidates became imperative. At first a variety of unauth orized ,, and self-constituted nomin^ting^lbodiessprang up but they all lacked the virtues and suffered from the vices of the old legislative caucus; in addition there was no cer- tainty of fixing the choice of a party upon a single individual. They did well enough for the nom- ination of a popular figure such as Jackson, but some more systematic means for gathering the iror^i'-HA 102 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT opinion of the party voters was necessary. It was discovered in the nominating convention. Conventions had been in use from the begin- ning of our national hf e for the purpose of fram- ing, adopting, and amending constitutions. The ^originaljUieo^^^f^on^ was that of a body specially chosen in which was to be found the ultimate source of popular authority. In the ac- tion of the Constitutional Convention at Philadel- phia in the method it provided for the adoption of the Constitution there was a clear illustration of this idea. The Convention had been sum- moned imder a resolution of the Congress "for the sole and express purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation," yet its first important step was a determination not to attempt to amend the Articles but to frame a new kind of govern- ment. Such action was revolutionary and could be justified only by the approval of thie people. To secure this approval, and thereby remove the illegality of their proceeding, the Conventioi adopted a resolution recommending that th( Constitution should be submitted to conventions specially chosen in each state for the purpose oi accepting or rejecting it; An approval by majority vote of all the people within the Unioi AND MAJORITY RULE 103 was unthought of and even approval by a major- ity vote within each state found no advocates, so far were the "Fathers" removed from the notion of a direct democracy. It was to this conception of a convention that the people turned in seeking for a popular means of nominating candidates. A nominating con- vention composed of delegates chosen for the sole purpose of making the nomination would represent the popular will directly, and so it was heralded as an institution for restoring the con- trol of party affairs and of the government to the hands of the people. Nothing seemed simpler than that by electing the delegates the people would control the nominations, for it was still the era when election was regarded as the_principle by which the popularwill could be made effective. So from top to bottom of the party structure conventions were introduced. At the top, as the culmination of all, was the national convention for the nomination of candidates for President and Vice-President ; at the bottom, the caucus or primary remained as the smallest local unit. In ^between, county and district and state conven- tions were developed for the nomination of can- didates for local and state offices and for Congress. 104 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT Parallelingthe coi):v^entions there grew up a system of committees, local, state and national, constituting the executive machinery of the party, which in time acquired great influence. This committee system was due to the necessil of maintaining the highly complex organizatioi of the party, which had resulted from the pra< tical application of the democratic spirit in th< extension of the suffrage, the great increase the number of elective offices and the frequence of elections, and in the principles of rotation office and to the victor belongs the spoils. With the development of a complicated pa] machinery, there grew up necessarily many rule for the guidance and direction of the parties the selection of delegates to the conventions, the conduct of the conventions themselves, in th( choice of committeemen and in the determine tion of their f unctions^y Most important of thei all, however, were the rule^-deter mining whojwei eligible to :vQte for the delega tes or to par ticipal in the caucus or primary for the nomination oi candidates for the local offices and for the electioi of delegates to the first convention in the series The importance of controlling the smallest parti units was evident, since they were the starting AND MAJORITY RULE 105 point for all the conventions and committees higher up. By dominating them, the control of the higher organizations was practically assured, and there was no other way of effecting this than by controlling those who participated in them. In the first place, a vigorous effort was made to exclude all those who belonged to a different party. The next object was to exclude all those whose party allegiance was not strong and who would, therefore, readily vote for the candidate of another party if they regarded that candidate as better fitted. Suc h^ me mbers were not easily disciplined and the success of party was seen to he in the strength of its organization. What has just been said refers to the average or normal local unit in the towns and villages and in the country; in the cities, the control of the caucus was even more absolute in the hands of the bosses. Men of independent spirit, even if they passed the tests of party regularity and secured admission, were at a great disadvantage against the organization and the voters it controlled. Up to the time of the Civil War the party system in general had served the useful purpose of forming a cohesive forceoutside__of_^goTOm- ment and yet working toward harmonious action. 106 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT m the__vaLckma_ ^ranches. It had succeeded modifyj pff, in large measure, the theory of th e s eparation of the powers of gove r nment w hich had been rega r ded as so fu ndamental_b^ the makers of our constit utions. Up to that time, too, the nommating conventions for the most part reflected the popular will and party organiza tion had not become tyrannical. The introduction of the nominating conven tion was, however, an anomaly and in contradic tion to the spirit of direct rule by the majority which was making such rapid headway. The convention was never a true institution of democ- racy and it is a little curious that it should eve have been regarded as the surest and best mean for gathering the will of the people, especiall; since by the time nominating conventions wen introduced, constitutions and constitution amendments were being submitted to a dire vote of the people. It was one of those interest ing cases in history when the inventive geniui of mankind fails and an old institution is seized upon and used for a new purpose because of ^^n^i an old idea which underlay it. ^! The convention, once introduced, held its own in the face of democratic development because o AND MAJORITY RULE 107 its^effiiugncy^an d ease of management, and event- ually JaficaiiafijDQhejgQnix^ it assur ed to thejgartj_bosses. In time, the chief business of a party came to be the securing of the nomina- tion of some particular individual or individuals and the selection of the nominees was made by a single individual or by a small group of individ- uals, known as the party bosses. The rank and file of the party had no real part or share in the choice and as similar conditions prevailed in both the large parties, the individual voter could do no more than choose between the candidates thus presented. The popular will, in so far as there was one, could express itself only in making choice between two candidates. The majority might decide the election but the majority had nothing to do with choosing the candidates: The convention, which had been introduced as a demo- cratic institution for the express purpose of re- storing power to the people, had now become the least democratic of institutions, and after a suc- cessful career of nearly three-quarters of a cen- tury, it seems threatened by the direct primary, proclaimed in its turn, a true institution of de- mocracy for securing the control of nominations in the parties by a majority vote. "^ 108 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT The direct primary is only the newest of many efforts at reform in the interest of a real choice by the majority. Preceding it were nimaerous at- tempts to abohsh the evils which had grown up in political hf e and which in some strange fashion seemed to take the power out of the hands of the people and place it in the hands of the few. While these reforms were valuable, they did not get to the root of the trouble and consequently did not produce the desired change in pohtical life The real control of the government remained] in the hands of a few who did not hesitate in many instances to use corrupt methods for maintaining their control. At first the control of government was sought largely for the sake of the salaries attached to the offices but in the end the realization of the great financial profit which could be gained throug the control of government produced "the combin ation of big business which desired privilege an of bad business which desired protection," an out of the combination there resulted the strongly intrenched political machine in many cities and in some states. It very soon became evident that those wh controlled the government could realize certai: I AND MAJORITY RULE 109 indirect financial profits; there were offices to be filled by the appointment of relatives, or there were contracts to be let to other relatives or to companies in which the officials had financial in- terests; these, with many others of a like sort, constituted the sources of so-called "honest graft," or money which could be legitimately made through the control of the various depart- ments of governmental activity. It was very easy to pass over to the position that those in control of government and therefore in control of the disposition of these favors should be paid by the one to whom they were dispensed; when this happened, "dishonest graft" had made its appearance; in time the protection of vice and crime on the one hand and the granting of special privileges on the other were added as sources of financial profit to those in control of government, whether office holders or party bosses. The final stage in the development of the con- trol of government for private gain was in the alliance of the political boss, whose reward had lain in the sense of power which he enjoyed or in the graft which he could secure, with the leaders of business whose interests it was thought neces- sary to protect from hostile or to advance by 110 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT favorable legislation. The political boss con- trolled the choice of candidates and big business made the boss subservient through its campaign contributions and slush funds. Business was non-partisan and contributed to both parties as it served its interest. To meet the growing control of government for private gain and to curb the power of the boss, efforts have been made to purify elections through greater state supervision upon the theory that thereby the popular will might find a correct expression. The general course of affairs has been toward the assumption by the state of con- trol of all matters pertaining to elections. Originally all that the state undertook was the regulation of the time and place of holding the elections and the counting of the ballots. The preparation of the ballots and their distribution were formerly left to the candidates, but now the ballots are provided by the state. Ballots arei official and uniform and a number of laws have! been passed seeking to make the use of them an intellectual and not a purely mechanical exercise. Instead of receiving from a party worker a ballot already properly marked which he had only to deposit in a box, the voter must now enter the AND MAJORITY RULE 111 booth alone and mark his own ballot. But de- spite all attempts in this direction, party workers are still able to direct the casting of many votes through the preparation of sample ballots, in the marking of which the voters are trained. Another attempt in the direction of reform was in the registration laws by which it was hoped much of the illegal voting by repeaters, particu- larly in cities, would be done away with. Regis- tration has become practically universal and more recently has been made the basis of the party pri- maries. But election and registration laws of every description and variety were of small effect in making the will of the people supreme. Pop- ular sovereignty was all right in theory but when the attempt was made to put it into practical operation there were unexpected difficulties. Laws directed to that end did not have the desired result. Always in the last analysis the determining voice was seen to lie with one person or with a few individuals. But not de- spairing, the attack of the reforming forces was directed toward a new quarter. Men now de- clared that the trouble lay in the parties! Granted that parties are a necessity, they must nevertheless be organized upon a democratic 112 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT basis; hitherto they have been aristocratic or oligarchical, and so the reform of the party or- ganization was made the goal in Democracy's name. There had grown up in a nmnber of the Southern states in which one party was in such a large majority that nomination was equivalent to election, a system of primary elections at which the rival candidates for the nomination appealed to the voters of the party. The candidates as a rule pledged themselves to abide by the result of the primary and to support the successful can- didate in the regular election. The success of this system in choosing local officers led to its adop- tion for the choice of state officers and of those Federal officers elected within a state. This sys- tem of primary elections was taken up by the advocates of party reform and its adoption urged for all parties in all the states. The growth of parties and party organization was slow; for a long time they were almost with- out rules for their own guidance, and even when they began to adopt measures for themselves, there was no thought of bringing them under the control of the state. They were extra-legal and it was not until the direct primary as a method AND MAJORITY RULE 113 of nomination began to claim adherents that proposals were made to bring the parties imder the control of law. It is true that whenever the state midertook to do what the candidates had previously done, it was in reality extending its control over the parties, as in the matter of regis- tration and furnishing ballots at pubUc expense, but it was only with the introduction of the direct primary elections that party management fell under legal control; as yet this control is limited to the individual states though a proposal for "presidential primaries" has been advanced. Under the old system of committees and con- ventions, the parties themselves determined who should be eligible, how the members should be chosen and what duties and functions they should perform. Under a system of direct primaries the law provides who shall compose the electorate of each party through the registration, and how and where and when the party election for the choice of candidates shall be held. Generally the same laws regulate the primary election as the final election; the one is in every sense a state affair as much as is the other. The evident purpose of a direct primary is to make the choice of candidates dependent upon 114 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT the will of the numerical majority. The con- vention was introduced because the caucus had deprived the people of their freedom of choice and in course of time the convention became a cunningly devised instrument for securing a choice of candidates whose nomination was dic- tated by the bosses of "the machine." The most encouraging fact disclosed by a study of American democracy is the presence of a spirit which in spite of repeated defeats renews the battle for majority rule, for the practical control of the government by the people. The most discouraging fact revealed by that same study is the successive failure of each new insti- tution or arrangement to accomplish the result. At first they seem filled with a golden promise but little by little they pass under the control of a few individuals. The minority rules in reality and after a time the majority comes to realize that it has been dispossessed and makes another attempt to assert its supremacy and gain the mastery. It sometimes seems as though Democracy in the United States had made no real progress in its efforts to control government but had only moved in a vicious circle. Starting with a rebel- I AND MAJORITY RULE 115 lion against the rule of a king, it progressed to a republican form of government and thus far there was real gain; but thereafter it has been a suc- cession of reform movements, each having an individual phase but each aiming at the overthrow of a small group which had succeded in getting control of government. Demand for popular! rule is followed by some new governmental ar- rangement intended to afford it; the new insti- tution in time is perverted and is followed by a new demand for popular rule and a new govern- mental institution which in turn is overtaken by the same fate ; and so it goes on in a never ending round. The pessimism of this view would be un- qualified were it not for the successive efforts at accomplishing the result desired. It may be that our viewpoint needs correction and instead of looking for some means for the final solution of the difficulty, we should see in the constant strug- gle the real nature of Democracy. Such a view of American Democracy as we have just expressed must be modified by the con sideration that the changes thus far made have not been in the structure and form of government so much as in the means of giving expression to the popular will through existing agencies. The 116 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT general plan and system of the American govern- ment is fundamentally the same to-day as when it was first established. The dual arrangement of states and nation has been maintained at all costs, and within each there is still the threefold separation of the departments of government, the dual legislative chambers, the single execu- tive and a more or less independent judiciary. The changes that have been made are in city gov- ernment and in the initiative, the referendum, and the direct election of senators; they are cal- culated to produce radical changes in methods of legislation and character of legislators, though leaving intact the old framework. I The changes have been outside the framework of government. Almost immediately after the adoption of the Constitution and the successful launching of the government, there began to grow up a spirit of veneration for the Consti- tution and the republican form of government that had been established. Much of the pros- perity of the country was attributed to the repub- lican institutions; there was a great pride in the fact of having established the first republic with an extensive territory and the first Federal gov- ernment the world had ever known. The insti- AND MAJORITY RULE 117 tutions which our forefathers had created came to be regarded as ahnost sacred and the Constitu- tion as a well nigh perfect thing. If anything were amiss, it was not because of the form of gov- ernment under which we lived. Jefferson gathered together a party on a plat- form of local self-government, frequent elections and the equality of men. A rapid extension of the suffrage, a steady increase in the number and frequency of elections and the organization of party were the means by which he sought to realize the popular will. In Jackson's day the principle of equaUty was pushed still further and rotation in office and the spoils system were in- troduced into the national life. At the same time there was a bitter antagonism between the new radical spirit of the West and the conserva- tive propertied classes of the settled East. The Civil War assured the supremacy of the nation over the states, the majority over the minority, and the abolition of slavery resulted in universal manhood suffrage. Following the Civil War came a period of absorption in the development of the material resources of the country in the course of which men neglected government and were content so long as those in control of both 118 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT parties and of government were not too out- rageous in their villany and they themselves were not disturbed in their money getting. In time conscience awakened. The reforms advo- cated, however, were not directed toward a change in the form of government — that was still sacred — but in the conduct of elections, the control of the party machinery and such matters, which were regarded as inimical to democracy and to the supremacy of the popular will. It did not occur to any but a few students of the science of government to look for the difficulty in the form of our government. It was only by slow degrees that the contradiction became apparent to a wider circle which realized that our government had been expressly constituted to prevent the direct and immediate expression of the will of the majority. CHAPTER VI SOME NEWER FORMS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT The realization that our form of government had been constructed to delay, if not to thwart, the popular will has come as the result of many unsuccessful attempts to make the will of the people count directly in the control of govern- ment. The principle of election had failed; uni- versal manhood suffrage had not accomplished it; ballot reforms had not done it; election laws had proved futile. Representatives were elected to the legislature but when elected they were not responsive to the popular will — ^they did not carry out the wishes of the people but the wishes of a small group of individuals who were outside of the government, often even outside of party, who yet controlled both. One of the e arliest in dic ations of po pular dis- satisfaction with the government was the distrust of the legislatures. Mr. Bryce remarked upon this fact some thirty years ago when he was seek- 119 120 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT ing an explanation of the great change in the size and content of the state constitutions. The earher constitutions were remarkably brief documents, containing only the framework of government. Each department of the government was pro- vided for and the method of its choice, the terms of office of the persons to be chosen, their quali- fications and powers were set down. This, with a statement of the general limitations imposed upon government and a provision for amend- ment completed the usual contents. When the distrust of legislatures grew acute, the old reverence for constitutions and the old faith in a republican form of government were still vigorous so jhe natural remedy s eemed to lie in the simple procedure of enlarging the coimitu- tionso'aS-t D includ e^iiritHie subjects which it was desired should be removed from the sphere of ordinary legislation. California led the way with the constitution of 1879 which greatly surpassed in length any previous constitution. This ex- ample was quickly followed by other states and a process of enlargement by revision and amend- ment set in, which has resulted in inserting in our constitutions a great mass of enactments which should properly be dealt with by statutes. I AND MAJORITY RULE 121 'he phenomenon can be accounted for in no >ther way than as due to a distrust on the part of le people of their representatives. The Democ- racy was seeking to assiu-e its supremacy and lolding to the old theories of the excellence of our institutions, it sought this method of overcoming very real failure which it had experienced. The view wh ich was at the bo ttom of the original con- ?titution niaking was to gain security for the liberty of the individual by weakening the power of government. On the ai^umption lEat govern- ment was an evil, it was sought to make it as little harmful as possible by giving it the least possible to do. So during this period the feeling with respect to the legislatures seems to have been to render them harmless by limiting the subjects upon which they could legislate. In order to limit further the power of the legislatures to do harm, many constitutions contained provisions expressly limiting the frequency and the length of legisla- tive sessions. These attempts to secure by indirection, as it were, the supremacy of the popular will were highly illogical and we re the product of two fac- tors: the old theory that liberty lay"uriiiaction and the new condition of boss rule of the legisla- 122 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT tures. They were the result of a failure to perceive where the real difficulty lay. This limi- jtation of government through restrictions placed upon the legislatures was reactionary in character and could not in the long run endure. No insti- tution which is out of harmony with the spirit of the times and of the people can remain un- changed imder a form of government which is popular in character. Beyond doubt the spirit of the American people has been steadily tending away from the theory of a government, limited rthat it may not do harm, toward that of a gov- /emment endowed with all powers necessary for [the advancement of the social well-being of the I state or nation; away from the conception of goverment as something evil in its nature and prone to oppression and toward the conception of government as an agent of the popular will for the accomplishment of social good. Government is not feared as master but is looked to as a faith- ful servitor. The sphere of government is being enlarged that it may the better serve its master, the people. J There are many who view the increase in gov- ernmental activity with alarm, seeing in this phase of our political life the most serious menace to I I AND MAJORITY RULE 123 individual liberty. These people are holding to a discarded view of life and of the development of political institutions. They are under the influence of a system of thought which was pro- ductive of much of modern liberahsm in present day government, but this system has experienced the common fate, for having achieved its goal, it has ceased to have an objective and so has be- come conservative. The theory of the law of nature and natural rights furnished a splendid vantage ground for the fight against absolute power in the monarchy; it was the source of radical and revolutionary ideas in an age of kings, but it lost its power when popular gov- ernments were introduced. Let us see a little nearer how this came about and its particular relation to our own democracy. Under the influence of the theory of natural rights a basis had been found for the theoretical! limits to autocratic power. As this theory was worked out by John Locke and accepted by the founders of our republic, there were certain rights which men enjoyed in a state of nature before civil society came into existence ; a part of these they surrendered by the terms of the social contract by which society and government were 124 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT established, but a part of the natural rights could not be surrendered and these formed the barriers over which absolute power could not vault. Carrying out this conception, our constitutions contain Bills of Rights which are regarded as the fundamental limitations upon the powers of government. But Bills of Rights are sadly out of harmony with a spirit which demands the rule of the will of the majority; they are a species of limitation whose raison d'etre is gone. They were introduced into our political institutions under the influence of the monarchical tradition when it had become a matter of course to regard govern- ment with a hostile eye and to seek to put re- straints upon it. The fact that the new govern- ment was founded upon popular sovereignty was not sufficient to modify the inherited conception and so the people, as the source of all power, set about placing limits to their own authority. / The presence of Bills of Rights in our consti- / tutions became traditional but the theory which gave rise to them has been discarded. The law of nature and natural rights are no longer seriously regarded in the world of political thought. The only laws which today receive consideration are the laws of the land and the only rights are those AND MAJORITY RULE 125 which are assured by the law of the land. The power of the state over against the individual has no longer to confront a barrier raised up by the natural and inherent rights of man. The present generation sees no theoretical limits set to the things the state may do, except such as are set by the nature and object of the state and the means which it may use to accomplish them, but not by the natural rights of the individual. The fear entertained by many that individual liberty is endangered by an increase in state activity be- comes meaningless when we adapt our concep- tion of liberty to the new view. If liberty is freedom from restraint, then every law is a re- striction of liberty, and this is generally the view that has been held by all those who have sought to restrain the action of government. But liberty is not freedom from law but the ability to live in accordance with a known law, common to all. The law is the source of rights and at the same time of liberty. It assures us of a field in which to display our activities and so long as the law in- creases this field, liberty is not being restrained but enlarged. So it is that restrictions upon the legislatures of the character we have been dis- cussing must be regarded as out of harmony with 1«6 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT the present political philosophy and therefore not destined to endure. The people in time grew tired of seeking to accomplish what they wished through the nega- tive method of putting restraints upon the i legislatures and turned to positive measures cal- / culated to insure the supremacy of their will. For the first time since the Federal government was established — with the one great exception of the Civil War — ^an attempt was made to change the form of the government. At last the rev- erence for a representative republican form of government was not strong enough to stay the attack. The remedy for the evil conditions by which the will of the people was thwarted had been sought in many a by-path — now the open road of change in the structure of government was entered upon and it is not clear where the jour- ney will end. The old has not been destroyed save in municipal government, but new agencies for the expression of the popular will have been created — some co-ordinate with, some superior to the old ones. These new institutions of democ- /racy are the commission form of government in I municipalities, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. I AND MAJORITY RULE 127 The commission form of govermnent in cities is the most radical departure from the traditional type of governmental arrangement which we have experienced, and it is something without analogy and precedent in our own history. The typical form of municipal government was long the same as that of the states and the nation: a form in which there was a single executive, a bicameral legislative body and a judiciary. In course of time the existence of two houses in the legislative body of a city was seen to have no logical foundation and under the belief that it served no useful purpose, one was abolished. The governments of om* large cities rapidly be- came the most corrupt part of the political organi- zation. In them the boss of the worst type throve and the political machinery was supported by the protection it could afford to vice and crime as well as to special business interests. Conditions were as shocking as can well be imagined and government rested no more upon the real will of the numeri- cal majority than in autocratic Russia. The gov- ernment of our cities was controlled by the "machine," or by the "ring," or by the "boss," as the case might be but not by the popular will. The supremacy of these minority interests was 128 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT due to many causes and it is a mistake to attempt to explain it by reference to a single cause; but undoubtedly the wide extension of the suffrage and the complicated machinery, both of the gov- ernment and of party organization, contributed largely to the result. We are not primarily interested in municipal government for its own sake and therefore we need not pause to investi- gate the causes for the corrupt political condi- tions which grew up nor to consider the many attempts that were made to better them, for we are looking to see the forces and counterforces at work to advance and retard the development of the rule of the majority; so we fasten our atten- tion only upon a small portion of the whole field of municipal reform. The problem of city government in time be- came so grave as to warrant the view that democ- racy had failed — and that, too, in the field of local government, the field in which it had always been thought that its success would be easiest. Though in many cities the council, or legislative body, was composed of a single chamber, yet there were so many departments and commissions and authority had been so completely parceled out among them, that it was well-nigh impossible I AND MAJORITY RULE 1^9 to fix responsibility upon any one for failure or wrong doing. Frequently the part played by the executive or the legislative could not easily be discerned and the mass of the people did not know upon whom to place the blame when things went wrong. There was no responsible authority anywhere in city government; the real authority was outside the government and officials, instead of feeling responsible to the people, felt beholden to the political boss through whom preferment had come and to whom they must look for future rewards. There was no c ^cen tration^ f pow er but, under the old theory of the separation of governmental functions, it had been widely dis- tributed so that no one person should be too strong. The inevitable consequence had been that the people could not watch all their servants all the time; had they attempted to do so they would have had little time to devote to their or- dinary pursuits. Under such conditions it was not surprising that professional politicians ap- peared to whom it was worth while from a finan- cial standpoint to devote all their time to the business of nominating candidates, conducting elections, determining appointments and to all the other things necessary for the successful manning of the government. 130 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT Under the existing form of city government there was no opportimity for any one within the government to assume a position of leadership. There was Httle honor or distinction attached to mimicipal service because there was no chance for the display of talents of a high order, so men sought office for the financial rewards alone. The natural consequence was the development of leadership outside of government and within the party. By this means the boss of the successful party was the boss of the city and the profession of boss was highly remunerative. Against such conditions as existed and in a measure still exist in our cities, there was constant rebelhon but with little success until the introduc- tion, under the pressure of a great calamity, of the commission^ system. The ne^iidea involved was that^f thejc entra jization of powerpboth executive and legislative, in a single small group of elected officials, — the commission. The plan involved the entire repudiation of the theory that liberty was possible only where authority was divided — a theory which had been part and parcel of our political thought and institutions since the establishment of the government. The new sys- tem rested upon the theoryjthat power-fawLce- I AND MAJORITY RULE 131 sponsibility are co-ordin ate in^ Qj^ermnent and thaFtEe"oniy way of securing responsibility is to locate it in definite persons by giving them the power. Jefferson thought that the way to secure responsibility was by frequent elections and that so long as they were retained, liberty would be safe. Where annual elections cease, there tyranny begins ! We know from experience that frequency of elections has not brought a sense of responsibility to the people on the part of those elected and that a separation of the powers of government is sure to produce weakness but not necessarily, nor consequently, good government. The commission form of municipal government spread rapidly and has been adopted by hundreds of cities all over the Union. As yet, however, it has not been adopted by any large city nor has it won its way to a general acceptance. Its oppo- nents still decry it as undemocratic and ansto- cratical — even oligarchical — placing, as it does, the entire management and direction of the affairs of the mimicipality in the hands of the commission. It is contended, moreover, that so soon as the first fervor is over, old_conditions will retumJbut with an ad ded opportu nity to the bosses who will 133 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT find it easier to control the nomination and election of the few commissioners than of an executive and a nmnerous council, and that a commission controlled by a boss will place the city absolutely in his hands. Such an objection raises a fundamental ques- tion which must be squarely met. The form of government will not of itself produce good or bad government for the character of government depends upon the character of the people who control it. The form of government may, how- ever, contribute to the ease with^ which the major- ity or a few shall be able to control and democracy cannot expect more of the form of government than that it shall make easy the supremacy of the will of the majority. It is undeniable that it is easier for the people to watch half a dozen men in whom is concentrated all authority and upon whom rests all responsibility than to watch many men among whom authority and responsi- bility are divided. Therefore we may regard the adoption of the commission form of government as a distinct step toward the possibility of real majority rule. 1 The initiative and the referendum have been advocated and introduced in order to render th( AND MAJORITY RULE 133 popular will more effective. They are a product of the distrust of the legislatures and the feeling that the only way of securing the will of the peo- ple was to supply a means for its immediate and direct expression. Representatives had not represented the people but the individuals and organizations and business interests which had secured their nomination and financed their cam- paign, until some direct method of legislation seemed to be imperatively demanded or else democracy was a failure. The place of the initia- tive and the referendum in the general theory of government was not the force which led to their adoption. The y_h^ve been int roduced as emer- gency measures, to meet a particular situation and with the expectation that they would not be the normal and usual processes for legislation, but would be reserved for the special occasions, should they arise, when^ the. legislatures failed to carry out the wish es ofthe^ people. The belief was general that the possibility of using them would render their use unnecessary, but the course of events wherever they have been adopted seems to show a tende ncy^jo^ep^rtJ[ro m the j^axly conception of an exceptional agency and to re- gard them_as^ normal and usual methods pf 134 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT government. The people feel, or are induced to believe, that the way to secure the necessary and proper legislation is to make it themselves through these instrumentalities. The legislatures have not been abolished, to be sure, but have been left undisturbed in the possession of all their powers and functions, only with the initiative and the ref erendimi as concurrent and competing legisla- tive organs. The introduction of the initiative and referen- dum is almost as great a departure from our previous theory of government as is the commis- sion form of government for cities. The separa- tion of the powers of government carried with it the theory of a system of checks and balances, by which the executive would serve as a check upon the legislative, the legislative upon the exec- utive, and the judiciary upon both; moreover the two branches of the legislature should serve checks upon each other and for this purpose they were given terms of different lengths and were chosen from different territorial areas. In th last analysis the people could use the power resid- ing in them to check the whole government should it be necessary by an amendment to the Constitu tion. But the process of amendment was made I I AND MAJORITY RULE 135 quite difficult in order that changes should not be frequent. In fact, in some of the state con- stitutions amendment could take place only at stated intervals. The real reliance for^he supre macy of the will of the p eople was placed in^thesy^tem^fc^ el ectiv e _princip le. Experience under the con- ditions ofj requent electio ns of numerous officials has shown the difficulty, jf ^not th e impossibility, of^jpopular control^f_tfiejigminajion_or election. These fall into the hands of the professional poli- tician and officials are consequently responsible to them. In addition the carefully elaborated system of checks and balances has, by its com- plexity, rendered easier the control of govern- ment by private interests for it has increased the difficulty of locating responsibility. The referendum is to be regarded as an addi- tional check upon the action of government, since it puts into the hands of the people a quick and easy method of checking a legislature that seeks to disregard the will of the people, while the initiative goes a step beyond this in that through it the people may take the lead and entirely dis- pense with any action on the part of the legisla- ture. It is in reality the removal of a check upon 136 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT the action of the majority. The whole system of American governments was cleverly devised to protect the minority by making it extremely difficult for the majority to control all the branches of government at the same time. The fact that power was allotted among the dif- ferent departments; that there were different methods of selecting the officials and that they served different terms will sufficiently illustrate the opportunities for the minority to block the majority. The initiative has swept away most of the defenses which had been erected in behalf of the minority and has exposed it to the direct attack of the majority. Time after time the people sought to make their will effective by some reform and each time the result was disappoint- ing, but none of these reforms touched the frame- work of government. In the initiative and the referendum violent hands are laid upon the old theory and a new principle is introduced — ^the principle that the rule of the majority should be made easy, not difficult. To this extent the fun- damentally illogical theory of a government by the people in which it was extremely difficult for the people to govern, has been removed. It has, however, by no means been conclusively I I AND MAJORITY RULE 137 demonstrated that the introduction of the new method and principle will accomplish the results desired. It may suffer the same fate which has overtaken previous efforts to translate the will of the people into effective action and become the instrument of the forces which seek to con- trol government in the interest of their private fortunes. Already there are those who think they see the change taking place; they point to the fact that with the double system of elections necessitated by the direct primary and with the added elections entailed by the frequent use of the recall, the average citizen has grown or will grow weary of so much voting and that it is becoming more difficult "to get out the vote" ; in short popular enthusiasm is slackening and when this happens, then comes the opportunity for the man whose personal fortunes and selfish interests make it worth while for him to maintain his in- terest. Aristotle, speaking in criticism of Plato's view that if there were community of wives and of goods all men would have an equal love for all children and the public good, declared that that which was common to all was least regarded by each, and this view is correct now as then. What is a matter of the public good never holds 138 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT the same compelling interest as that which is matter of private profit — and so it is that the man whose selfish interests can be served through a control of the government will ever be ready to take advantage of any lack of watchfulness on the part of the people. In addition to the effect which has just been considered, the initiative and the referendum are putting upon the electorate an impossible task in that the number of measures to be considered at each election is so great and their character so complex that it is impossible for the voter to have an intelhgent opinion regarding them. The number of measures to be voted for is having a history which parallels that of the elective offi- cials. Originally few in number, they have in- creased to such an extent, due to the increase in population and the extension of the elective prin- ciple, that it is now a practical impossibility for the voter to have personal knowledge of the can- didates. For this knowledge, he has been com- pelled to substitute party loyalty and vote for the mass of candidates nominated by his party. At the primary, his condition is little better. So it is rapidly becoming with respect to the meas- ures on the ballot. The remedy which has been AND MAJORITY RULE 139 proposed for the former is the short ballot but as to the latter there is as yet no suggestion of an adequate remedy. The last of the newer institutions for the bet- ter expression of the will of the people is the recall. Until a comparatively recent time the American system of government might very properly have been said to rim by the clock. PubHc officials were chosen at stated intervals and only death or resignation brought an earlier termination of their careers than the end of the term for which they were chosen. Impeachment existed but it could no longer be considered a political measure ; its sole purpose was to remove those from office who were legally unfit. With the disappearance of impeachment as a method of removing public officials because of the political policy which they pursued, we were left without any means of getting rid of an elected official who did not carry out the wishes of his constituents. There was nothing to do but wait till the next election period came round and even then it was very difficult to make re- sponsibility effective. The recall is intended to make it possible to exercise control over an elec- tive official at any time during his term of office. 140 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT The theory back_of_ it is the suprem acj^ of the will of the people at ea^hjiidLjej^ery^ ^noment. instead of a~repfesentative looking forward to the termination of the period for which he was elected as the day of reckoning, he must feel that it is in the power of the majority to hold him responsible at any time for any of his acts. It is another departure from the old theory of a representative government in which the represen- tatives should enjoy a fixity of tenure which should make them independent of the passing fancies of the people. We must remember that the Federal Con- stitution was framed by men who felt a lively distrust of too much democracy. They wanted a representative government in which the representatives should not be merely reflectors of the prevalent feelings of their constituents but should be sufficiently removed from the popular passions toi^nable them to have independent opin- ions of their own_ iiropposition to those of the people. This distrust of democracy has disap- peared naturally enough with the triumph of the popular will and its consciousness of its own power. The difference in attitude may be ex- pressed perhaps by saying that the "Fathers" AND MAJORITY RULE 141 were legislating for the people while now the people are legislating for themselves. They do not distrust themselves and therefore they do not wish their representatives to be so far removed from a sense of responsibility that they cannot be reached till next election. They have wished to make it possible to have the next election come whenever it seems that a representative is not representing his constituents. Undoubtedly the immediate cause for the introduction of the recall was the fact that representatives had lost the sense of responsibility to the people and were obedient to the political bosses. The recall has been very widely introduced in connection with the conmiission form of govern- ment for cities, and in a few instances it has been made state-wide and appUcable to all elected offi- cials, except to the Federal representatives. The theory of the recall, in so far as it applies to legislative representatives, intensifies the theory that a representative is peculiarly such of the particular district by which he is selected and not of the whole of which the district is a part. It has always been the theory of the British Parliament that it incorporated in itself the British people and a member of Parliament, though chosen by a 142 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT district, represents the whole people. In the United States the theory has been reversed and a member of the Senate represents the state, a member of the House of Representatives and the members of the state legislature represent the particular districts by which they are elected. Only the President represents the people of the United States, and, to a somewhat less degree, the governors represent the people of the states. There remains still to mention the popular election of United States Senators as the most recent_chaii ge in the structure of our govern- m^taljy^ten^ookm^ toward the supremacy of thejeople. This change is no less strikingTh significance than the introduction of the initia- tive, the referendum and the recall and scarcely less important in its results. Its consequence for the movement we have been following is to be found in the fact that it touches the structure of the Federal government while the others have been limited to some of the states and some cities. Not even the Federal Constitution is too sacred for change at the hands of a majority bent on making its will easily felt in the control of government. Convinced that the privileged few have sought to control government for their own I AND MAJORITY RULE 148 selfish purposes, the many are seeking to make easy the election of officials and the control of government in the interest of the masses. It is too early to foresee the effect of this change upon the character of the Senate but it is safe to predict that henceforth Senators will be more responsive to popular sentiment. CHAPTER VII THE SIMPLIFICATION OF GOVERNMENT Democracy in the United States has come to [mean the supremacy of the will of the numerical majority. From the beginning our govern- mental institutions have rested upon the founda- tion of popular sovereignty and the will of the people has been in the last analysis the ultimate power. Yet the history of our political struggles shows two particulars in which we have departed from 'the conceptions of the "Fathers" and the ideas underlying the structure of our government as set forth in the Constitution. In the framing of the early constitutions and notably in the Fed- eral Constitution, there was present as a guiding principle, a fear and distrust jif-.alLgovernments, whatever their character might be, and a particu- ^i lar distrust of the jnass_of^tiie people conse-"" quentty constitutions were framed for the purpose of restricting the action of government so that it could not do harm and likewise to prevent the 144 I MAJORITY RULE 145 popular will from finding immediate realization through the action of government. Fear of gov- ernment was combined with the view that the less/ government there was, the greater was the free- dom of the individual. The result was a system of governments of strictly limited and delegated powers and so care- fully balanced, part against part, and power against power, that years might be required for even an overwhelming numerical majority to make its will effective. The governments estab- lished were representative republics in which the minority found the amplest protection and prop- erty a very large representation. Today, the rule of the numerical majority is accepted in theory and in practice the circle of voters is an ever widening one. There is no fear of government nor is the de- mocracy desirous of limiting the sphere of governmental action. On the contrary, the people are constantly demanding that govern- ment shall perform ever greater services in behalf of the popular well-being. The growth in the complexity of civilization and the problems of society have forced upon government a greater field of action. Into this field the people are not 146 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT afraid to have government enter if it truly rep- resents the popular will. The quarrel with gov- ernment has been that it did not represent and the majority of reform movements from Jeffer- son's election in 1800 until today have had for their object a truer and more direct representa- tion of the will of the people. The movement, then, has been twofold; toward a larger sphere of action on the part of government and a truer representation of the popular will. More re- cently the effort to secure the supremacy of the will of the people has been away from truer representation and toward a more direct expres- sion of the will of the people. New agencies of government have been introduced whose purpose has been to enable the numerical majority to give direct expression to its will and have that expres- sion thereby realized in some concrete act of government. The attempts which have been made to secure a truer representation of the popular will and to give a more immediate expression to the will of the majority have not always been successful. In fact a fatal lack of success seems to have pursued each one, so that they have succeeded each other in rapid succession. Some new devise AND MAJORITY RULE 147 for restoring the government to the hands of the people is advocated and adopted; for a brief period it seems to aceomphsh its purpose, but eventually popular control of government is seen to be no nearer than before. The new devise has passed into the hands of a few or has produced a condition which makes more difficult the control of government by the many. Such was the case with the principle of elec- tion advocated by Jefferson. Frequency of elections and an increase in the number of elected officials made the control of parties and of elec- tions by the bosses an easy matter. Rotation in office and to the victor belongs the spoils, strengthened the hold of those who made a busi- ness of politics and lessened the possibility of control by the democratic majority whom Jack- son sought to put in power. The nominating convention has become the tool of the interests and universal manhood suffrage only enlarged the scope of the bosses' activities and created the demand for closer organization with consequent loss of control to the masses and gain to the few who controlled the organization. The secret ballot, state control of elections and the direct primary have not eliminated corruption nor 148 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT destroyed the power of the organization. The initiative, the referendum and the recall are los- ing ground in the states where they have been adopted. The commission form of city govern- ment, combined with the recall and the short ballot, has done much to purify political condi- tions in several hundred towns and cities through- out the countrj^ though its application to the very large cities has not yet been made. With the exception of the commission form of government for cities, the reforms which have been undertaken have proceeded upon the as- sumption that the form of our government, its mechanical construction so to speak, was admir- able and not in need of change. This has been due in part at least to the veneration of the con- stitution and the principles of government upon which it rested that began to grow up shortly after its adoption and that culminated in the Civil War. The trouble was thought to lie in some alien condition that prevented the people from expressing their will through our excellent gov- ernmental arrangements. The problem which we as a people have been seeking to solve is to discover some method by which the will of the people can easily find ex- AND MAJORITY RULE 149 pression in concrete acts of government; the de- mand for an increased activity on the part of the state compels us to seek at the same time for an efficient form of government. Gradually the conviction is gaining ground that the structure of our government is not conducive to the ac- complishment of either of these ends. The American system of government is above all a complex system. In the first place gov- ernmental powers have been divided between the state governments and the Federal government and within the states the principle of local self- government has led to the establishment of num- erous subordinate political corporations for the performance of governmental functions. The principle of the separation of the three branches of government, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary has been fundamental in state and Federal governments and until very recently in large measure in municipal governments also. Each branch is so elected and given such powers as will enable it to check every other and in the legislature each house acts as a check upon the other. The powers of government are delegated and limited and the courts by declaring laws unconstitutional can check any tendency in the 150 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT other two departments of government to go be- yond the bounds set by the constitution. This complexity was partly due to the exigencies of the case but more largely to the views held regarding the inherent character of government. The need for a government of all the states and a govern- ment for each state made a division of powers and a delineation of those powers essential, but the conception of government as having an in- herent tendency toward tyranny and oppression led to the adoption of the principle of the separ- ation of the powers of government and the theory of checks and balances in order that no one de- partment might become supreme and ^pervert government. Naturally it was the executive branch which was most feared, both from the prevalence of the absolute monarchy in the eighteenth century and from the conduct of George III toward the colonies. This idea of limiting and checking the powers of government harmonizes very well with the desire that the popular will should not too readily find expres- sion, lest it should prove as tyrannical as the monarch. This complexity of structure in our system of government has always been regarded as part of AND MAJORITY RULE 151 its merit and is still cherished by many as the most necessary as well as the most excellent prin- ciple of our government, yet the question is daily being more insistently pressed whether or not this complexity may not be responsible for the most of the trouble hitherto experienced in securing efficiency and majority rule. When the Union was formed and the complex system of govern- ment put into operation, the population of the whole country was not equal to that of New York state at the present time. Moreover life in all its phases was simple ; transportation and com- munication were carried on as they had been for centuries previous ; there were few manufactures and no large cities with their multitude of prob- lems; socially, politically and economically the life of the individual and of the community was carried on in the simplest terms ; consequently the business of governing was equally simple. There were no pohtical parties, little foreign politics, and few domestic problems of moment beyond that of securing adequate revenue for the Fed- eral government. Under such conditions the sim- plicity of life rendered the complexity of the governmental system less marked, and the early success of these republican forms of government 162 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT created the tradition that they were the best form of government. So soon, however, as the life of the eomitry and the business of govern- ment began to grow complex, the new agency of party was developed outside of but alongside of government as a unifying force to overcome the lack of co-ordination in the various parts of gov- ernment. Parties have served the useful purpose of imifying government but in time they have become so complex in their organization that the demand has arisen for their control by government. If we were to approach the problem of govern- ment from the purely theoretical standpoint, we should be inclined to say that the simplest form of government was the most efficient, for the more complicated the arrangements, the greater the loss of energy, the lack of economy and the ab- sence of responsibility. The simplicity of the monarchy has always been regarded as one of the principal causes of its success; concentration of power in a single individual makes decision easy and action quick. If this is true of mon- archy, it would seem self evident that a democ- racy should seek to have the simplest possible form of government, for the greater the number AND MAJORITY RULE 153 of persons and the more numerous the govern- mental agencies whose co-operation is necessary, the more difficult it is to secure action. It may also be maintained that the more com- plex is the governmental machinery, the more difficult will it be for the people to enforce re- sponsibility for the acts of government. In our early history Jefferson thought that frequent elections were sufficient to secure responsibiUty on the part of the representative to his constituents ; it still remains true, of course, that the majority at an election can defeat a candidate whose ac- tion as their representative had displeased them, but it is very difficult to know, under our com- plex arrangements, how far a particular person is responsible for acts of government. It is eas- ier in the case of an executive or administrative official than in that of a legislator, yet even in the former it is often difficult to fix the responsibility, especially if it be in regard to carrying out a pro- gram in which the legislature participates. If democracy means the rule of the majority and if it be admitted that the present problem is to find a form of government which shall be effi- cient for the increased burden constantly placed upon it and easily and quickly responsive to the 154 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT popular will and truly responsible to the people for its acts, then a simplification either of life or of government is necessary. It is beyond the reach of possibility that life will grow more sim- ple; on the contrary we may anticipate a con- stantly increasing complexity which will steadily enlarge the field of government action. It would appear, then, the part of wisdom to see if in any particular we may be able to simplify our gov- ernmental arrangements. If we examine some of the more recent at- te mpts to secu re the supremacj^ alihe will of the people in affairs of government, it will be evi- dent that the initiative and the ref erendimi have the tendency to complicate the machinery of gov- ernment still further, while the commission form of government and the short ballot have the opposite effect. The former are losing ground because of the additional burden they have placed upon the already overloaded shoulders of the voters and the enthusiasm for the latter rests upon the desire for a simple method of giving expression to the popular will, to the promise of efficiency contained in it and to the prospect of responsibility which it offers. A direct democracy in the government of the AND MAJORITY RULE 155 United States or of the states cannot be regarded as possible of attainment; the people can never meet together to discuss or formulate measures, or to choose officials, and the initiative and the referendum should, at best, be held as reserve measures to meet emergency occasions. If this be true, the problem of finding an efficient and at the same time a popular government resolves itself into the problem of so arranging the struc- ture of government that the chosen representative shall be able to carry out the wishes of the people and be held responsible for any failure to do so. Once again we are forced to the consideration of what changes will result in that simplicity of government which is necessary to secure these ends. In undertaking such a task one has not a free field in which to operate for every proposal must be conditioned by the actual facts of our political experience. To attempt to formulate a plan for the accomplishment of these objects without giv- ing heed to the tastes and inclinations of the American people would be futile. Yet much can be accomplished with but little alteration of the plan and scheme of the present arrangements. Of the proposed changes looking to a greater 166 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT simplicity in our governmental structure, all that have received serious consideration affect the state and municipal governments alone. The view is prevalent that any experiments should be made upon the smaller governing bodies since any injury resulting would be less far-reaching in its effects and more easily corrected. Perhaps for this reason in part the remodelling has begun with municipal governments. The commission form of government for cities represents that simplicity and responsibility and its success has led to the proposal in several states to extend the principle to the state government. In the commission form, power is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals whose acts are open to the public view; responsibility for their acts may be enforced with comparative ease through the recall. This concentration of legis- lative and executive powers in the same hands is in violent conflict with the principle of the sep- aration of the powers of government hitherto regarded as fundamental, but we no longer fear to entrust power to the government so long as it can be held responsible for its proper use. ' Our state governments are confessedly ineffi- cient and unresponsive to the popular will. This I AND MAJORITY RULE 157 is due to the decentralization of governmental power as well as to the separation of the branches of government and the system of checks and bal- ances. The governor has become in large measure a legal figurehead. Though it is supposedly his duty to see that the laws are enforced, the power to enforce them has been put in the hands of the state officials and local authorities, elected by the people and in no sense subject to the control of the governor. Such a decentralization and dissi- pation of governmental power makes responsi- bility for the enforcement of the law a practical impossibihty. Even political parties are unable to secure unity of action amidst such diverse ele- ments. In the past few years the poHtical influ- ence and importance of the governorship has been enlarged through the fact that governors have more frequently been also leaders of the party and as such have been able to put through a legislative program. The same leader- ship is more apparent in the presidency than in the governorship. To concentrate the executive power of the states in the hands of the governor and a cabinet or council appointed by him and acting as the heads of departments would be to establish a 158 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT condition which has proved acceptable in the national government. Such an arrangement would contribute greatly to the efficiency of our state governments and the power would not be dangerous since responsibility for its exercise could be enforced. Under the present decentrali- zation authority is weakened by division lest it may do harm. Under a cabinet system it would be strengthened by being united in order that it might do good. If we advance a step further in the simplify- ing process and abolish one house of the state legislature, responsibility for legislation will be made easier and inasmuch as no real difference underlies the basis of representation in the two houses, there will be no loss of representation to any element of the state. As a further step toward securing responsi- bility in the government thus modified, some co-ordination of the executive and legislative branches should be devised. If the executive through the heads of the departments had the right to frame, introduce and advocate bills, and if the executive and the legislature were chosen at the same time, it would be possible for the voter to enforce responsibility upon one or both J AND MAJORITY RULE 169 of them. Such an arrangement would not leave the legislative branch helpless in the hands of the executive, but it would concentrate and cen- tralize responsibility so that it could be definitely and accurately meted out to the individuals and the party meriting reward or rebuke. Under such a plan responsibility would shift from indi- vidual to party; at present almost the only attempt to enforce responsibility is upon the individual with relatively little thought for the party. To make such a change more productive of a sense of responsibility to the people the present statutory and constitutional provisions requiring that a representative in the legislative body must reside in the district which he represents should be changed. This requirement, which is well- nigh universal in the states, and which custom has prescribed for the national legislature, forces the representative into the position of a representative of the district and not of the state or the nation. Also his first care is for the dis- trict and his best efforts are directed toward securing its good will through appropriations and appointments ; he finds himself compelled to view legislation from the standpoint of its effect upon 160 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT his constituents and his own chances for re- election. Were law and custom changed so that a man might represent any district no matter where he lived, the "pork barrel" as an institu- tion of our poUtical life would disappear; the representative would have more than a local out- look and yet his sense of responsibiUty to the people would be enhanced. The abohtion of the residence requirement would produce two effects of the utmost conse- quence to our political life; it would make of poUtics a legitimate career, and it would make the leaders of the government the leaders of the party. Under present conditions it is largely a matter of chance whether or not a man can enter politi- cal life, for his political opinions may not be those of the majority of the district in which he lives; in order to enter political life such a man must move his residence or change his views. Assum- ing that he holds views in harmony with the majority in his district and that he secures an election, the chances that he will be able to con- tinue in politics as a career are very sHght. No matter how able he may be nor how excellent a public servant, his career is liable to be termin- ^ AND MAJORITY RULE 161 ated by a change of opinion in the district or by a change even within his own party within the district. In either event he is left stranded and the state or nation may lose the services of a valu- able public servant. If election from any district were possible, men could and would look upon political life as a career upon which they could enter with the reasonable expectation of being able to continue in it if their talents and ability justified. Such men would find their satisfaction in the success which they attained; the honor of the position would be sufficient reward. Under our present system, where tenure of office is un- certain and where brevity of tenure has been re- garded as a tenet of democratic faith, poUtics as a career has been as a rule impossible. Politics as a business has been followed by those who found it financially profitable and the political boss oft- ener than not holding no office, has sought to control government for selfish purposes. If poli- tics can be made a career, then the leaders in government will be more permanent; they will likewise become the leaders of the party and poli- tics as a business for financial profit will disap- pear with the political boss. When the leaders of the government are also the leaders of the 162 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT party, then party responsibility can be enforced in the largest degree; moreover when this co- ordination between parties and the government has taken place, it will be to the interest of the party leaders to see to it that the men who give promise of a future brilliant career shall be re- turned and once established as a valuable mem- ber, successive elections are practically assured. The presence of parties in modem political life is universal but the evils to which parties have given rise have led some to demand their aboli- tion, and in California the legislature has passed an act providing for non-party ballot. The ar- gument upon which this action was made to rest is that parties are determined in the United States by national issues; that the governing of a state is not to be determined in accordance with national issues, but, like the government of cities, it is a business proposition which should not be decided by a party vote. There is some measure of truth in the statement that party lines are drawn in accordance with national issues but there is no foundation for the statement that the gov- erning of a state is purely a matter of business administration and not a matter of policies. So long as the states retain control of property and AND MAJORITY RULE 163 family rights it can scarcely be maintained that questions of policy are not involved. It is true that national issues sometimes carry a party into power in a state where it otherwise would not have been successful. The remedy lies in not holding state elections simultaneously with national elec- tions; state policies can then be judged more nearly on their own merits ; if it still be contended that national issues will sometimes turn the scale, then it may be answered that better so than to have no unifying force in government and no leaders for the formation of policies. True re- sponsibility can be achieved only through party responsibility; individuals who have displeased the constituency may be defeated but to accom- plish a constructive program or to carry out a policy there must be a party, with representatives pledged to that program or policy, which may be held responsible as a party for failure to carry it out. One more change remains to be considered without which all the others will be much impaired in value and which, without them, would never- theless do much to produce responsibility in gov- ernment. Almost the greatest difficulty which confronts the voter is the task of knowing some- 164 AMERICAN GOVERNMENT thing about the persons among whom he is called upon to make choice. The number of elective offices and the frequency of elections have made it practically impossible for the voter to cast his ballot intelligently. The principle of election so long regarded as fundamental in the democ- racy, has resulted in placing the nomination, and consequently the election, of candidates in the hands of the bosses. The voter must vote blindly and generally will vote for the candidates of the party with which he sympathizes. Direct pri- maries alone will not remedy the evil since the number will still be far beyond what the average voter will have the time and opportimity to investigate. The remedy for this condition is the short ballot or a discarding of the theory that election is sufficient to secure responsibility. Too much election has proved ruinous to popular con- trol. The principle of the short ballot if adopted would result in the election at any one time of only a few individuals and the placing in the hands of the higher executive officials the ap- point of all those subordinate administrative officers who could not properly be put upon the permanent civil service roll. Judges likewise should be appointed instead of elected. AND MAJORITY RULE 165 Whatever changes may be made in our system of governments, of one thing we may be sure, no change which does not contribute to an easier expression of the popular will or 'which does not increase the facility with which government per- forms its tasks will endure. Democracy in the United States demands an easy and efficient instrument for the expression of its will. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen: Efficient Democracy. Dodd, Mead & Co. 1907. Beard: American Government and Politics. Mac- millan. 1914. Beard: American City Government. Century Co. 1912. Beard: An Economic Interpretation of the Consti- tution of the United States. Macmillan. 1913. Beard: Economic Origin of Jeffersonian Democracy. Macmillan. 1915. Beard: Loose Leaf Digest of Short Ballot Charters; Short Ballot Organization. 1911. Barnett: The Initiative, Referendum and Recall in Oregon. Macmillan. 1915. Bradford : Commission Government in American Cities. Macmillan. 1911. Bryce : The American Commonwealth. Macmillan. 1912. Burgess: Political Science and Constitutional Law. Ginn & Co. 1893. Burgess : Civil War and the Constitution. Scribner. 1901. Childs: Short Ballot Principles. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1911. Cleveland: Organized Democracy. Longmans, Green & Co. 1913. Croly: The Promise of American Life. Macmillan. 1909. Croly: Progressive Democracy. Macmillan. 1914. 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY 167 Dallinger: Nominations for Elective Office. Long- mans, Green & Co. 1897. DeWitt: The Progressive Movement. Macmillan. 1915. Dunning: Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruc- tion. Macmillan. 1898. Dunning: Reconstruction, Political and Economic. Harper & Bros. 1907. Eaton : The Oregon System. McClurg & Co. 1912. Elliott: Biographical Story of the Constitution* Putnams. 1910. Farrand: The Framing of the Constitution of the U. S. Yale University Press. 1913. Farrand: Records of the Federal Constitution of 1787. Yale University Press. 1911. The Federalist: Ford's edition. Holt & Co. 1898. Fish: Civil Service and the Patronage. Longmans, Green & Co. 1905. Ford: Rise and Growth of American Politics. Mac- millan. 1898. Godkin: Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1898. Gordy: Political Parties in the United States. Holt &Co. 1902. Hadley: Undercurrents in American Politics. Yale University Press. 1915. Hodges: The Distrust of State Legislatures — The Remedy. Proceedings, Conference of Governors. 1913. Holt: Introduction to the Study of Government. Macmillan. 1915. James: Applied City Government. Harper & Bros. 1914. Kales: Unpopular Government in the United States. Longmans, Green & Co. 1913. 168 BIBLIOGRAPHY Lobingier: The People's Law. Macmillan. 1909. Lowell: Public Opinion and Popular Government. Longmans, Green & Co. 1913. Macy: Party Organization and Machinery. Century Co. 1904. McLaughlin: The Courts, the Constitution, and Parties. University of Chicago Press. 1912. Merriam: Primary Elections. University of Chicago Press. 1909. Meyer: Nominating Systems. Madison, Wis. 1902. Moore : Four Phases of American Development. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1912. Munro: The Government of American Cities. Mac- millan, 1912. Munro: The Initiative, Referendum and Recall. Ap- pleton. 1912. Oberholtzer: The Initiative, the Referendum and the Recall. Scribners. 1911. Ostrogorski : Democracy and the Party System in the United States. Macmillan. 1910. Ray: Introduction to Political Parties and Practical Politics. Scribners. 1913. Reed: Government for the People. Huebsch. 1915. Reins ch : American Legislatures and Legislative Meth- ods. Century Co. 1907. Revision of the State Constitution : Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science. Columbia University. New York. 1914. Sedgwick: The Democratic Mistake. Scribners. 1912. Sloane: Party Government in the United States. Har- per & Bros. 1914. Smith : The Spirit of American Government. Macmil- lan. 1912. Taft: Popular Government. Yale University Press. 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 Turner: Rise of the New West. Harper & Bros. 1906. U'Ren: State and County Government in Oregon and Proposed changes. Annals American Academy, Vol. XLVII, May 1913. ^Weyl: The New Democracy. Macmillan. 1912. Wilcox: Government by all the People. Macmillan. 1912. Wilson: Congressional Government. Houghton, Mif- flin & Co. 1907. Wilson : Constitutional Government in the U. S. Col- umbia University Press. 1908. Wilson: The New Freedom. Doubleday Co. 1913.' Wilson: The State. Heath & Co. 1911. Woodbum: American Politics. Putnams. 1903. Young : The New American Government and its Work. Macmillan. 1915. INDEX Adams, J., aristocratic Federal- ist, 36; election of, 57. Adams, J. Q., election of, 67. Allen and Sedition Acts, cul- mination of Federalist legis- lation, 36; called forth Vir- ginia and Kentucky Resolu- tions, 36; 79. Amendment, of constitutions, 50-51; difficulty of, 135. Annapolis Convention, 19. Articles of Confederation, based on equality of states, 15; weakness of, 18-19; adopted by legislatures, 28. Assumption, of state debts, 32. Bank, government, 33; and party origin, 35. "Bargain and Corruption," 67. Bills of Rights, prefixed to state constitutions, as limitations, 17; in English history, 30; in Constitution of United States, 31; in state constitutions, 124. Boss, control of party by, 107; and big business, 109; and municipal government, 127- 128. Bryce, 119. Business, non-partisan, 110. Burgesses, House of, bulwark of liberty, 4. Cabinet, in state government, 157-158. Calhoun, regarded Union as confederation, 45 ; protagonist of South, 80; theory of Un- ion, 80-82; view of democ- racy, 83; "concurrent major- ity," 83-86. California, constitution of 1879, 120; non-party law, 162. Candidates, self-proposed, 97. See caucus and convention infra. Caucus, congressional in dis- favor, 58; first development of, 98; legislative, 98-100; "mixed," 100 ; congressional abandoned, 101, control of, 105. Charles I, 13. Checks and balances, origin of, 24-26; aided control of gov- ernment by the few, 135. Church Fathers, origin of state in fall of Adam, 25. CivO War, immediate cause of, 89; influence upon nature of Union, 94-95. Clay, 64, 67. Colonial settlement, in Virginia, largely commercial venture, 2; in sympathy with Crown and Church of England, 2; in New England, due to reli- gious motive, 5. Colonies, divergence in develop- ment of, 86. Commerce, in Virginia, 3-4; fa- vored in New England by physical conditions, 6. Commission : see government infra. Committees, party, 104. Concurrent majority, 83-86. 171 172 INDEX Congress, powers of, under Ar- ticles of Confederation, 18. Constitution, written, based on popular sovereignty, 16; dif- fers from ordinary laws, 21; of United States adopted by conventions, 29; "loose" and "strict" construction of, 34; parties for and against adop- tion of, 35; worship of, 66; a compact, 81; reverence for, 116; size of, 120. Contract, social, 9. Convention, Constitutional of 1787, called, 30; abandoned instructions, 21, 28; appeal to people for justification, 21 ; attitude of, toward suprem- acy of popular will, 46; threatened disruption of, 78; original view of, 102. Nominating, as agent of popular will, 57-58; an adaptation, 59; theory of, 103; introduction of, an anomaly, 106; retained for its efficiency, 107; ceases to be democratic, 107. Conventions, for adoption of the constitution, 29. County, important in Virginia, 3; judicial district in New England, 7. Court, Supreme, 23. Crawford, 64. Decentralization, of power of government, 48; robs the peo- ple of eflPective control, 49; lessens responsibility, 157. Declaration of Independence, a system of political philoso- phy, 9, 13, 14; platform for democracy, 14; bond of union among colonies, 15; and slav- ery, 87, 90 ; and majority rule, 90. Democratic-Republicans, Jef- ferson, leader of, 35 ; triumph of, 37; alarmed conservatives, 37; did not "reform" govern- ment, 38. Democracy, roots of American, 1 ; influenced by physical con- ditions, 3; in Virginia, 3-4; in New England, 5-7 ; in the mid- dle colonies, 8-9; platform for, 14 ; modern, based on, 24 ; progress of, 27; aids in de- velopment of, 60-61; charac- ter of, in U. S., 61-65; Jack- sonian, 71-72; Calhoun's view of, 83 flp.; attitude of South toward, 88; and extension of suffrage, 91, 93-94; progress of 114; and city government, 128; distrust of in constitu- tional convention, 140, 144; direct, in U. S., impossible, 155; demands easy and effi- cient method of expression, 165. Direct primary, 107; in South, 112; controlled by law, 113; purpose of, 113-114. Election, as guarantee of re- sponsibility or representative, 46; Jefferson's attitude to- ward, 47 ; state supervision of, 110; primary, 112; direct, of Senators, 116; evils of fre- quent, 135; state at different time from national, 163. Electors, theory of, abandoned, 57, 98, 99. Emancipation, 91. Enfranchisement, of negro, 92. Equality, proclaimed, 87, 89; not secured, 90. Era of Good Feeling, 65; effect of, on office holders, 72-73. Executive, coordinated with legislative power, 158. Federal, see government infra. Federalists, Hamilton, leader of, 35; overthrown, 37; prin- INDEX 173 ciples of, generally adopted, 66. Fifteenth Amendment, 92. Fourteenth Amendment, 91, 95. George III, 12, 24, 150. Government, form of, set up in colonies, 2; common elements of, in the colonies, 8-9; natur- al foe to liberty, 14 ; first state governments, 16; outline of our system of, 22; division of power between Federal and state, 22-23; three depart- ments of, 23; distrust of, 24- 25; fear of, lost, 39; distrust of, by Jefferson, 39-40; com- plexity of American, 50; ef- fect of complex machinery of, 52-54; control of for private gain, 108-109; changes in, 116; and majority rule, 118; to de- lay popular will, 119; limited to secure liberty, 121; sphere of, 122-123; limited by nat- ural rights, 123-124; influence of form of, upon character of, 132 ; municipal, commission form of, 127, 130; concen- trates power and responsibil- ity, 131; change in attitude toward, 144, 145; no fear of, 145; increase in activity of, 145, 146; structure of, and popular control of, 149; com- plexity of, to prevent tyranny, 150; makes control by few easy, 151; simplicity of, and popular control, 152-153 ; commission form of, tends to simplicity, 154, 156; pro- posed changes in, 156; of states, inefficient, 156-157. Governor, royal, opjwsition to, 3, 7; local examples of ty- ranny, 24; piosition of, as leaders, 157; and cabinet, 157- 158. Graft, development of, 109. Hamilton, thought Bill of Rights unnecessary, 30; Sec- retary of Treasury, 31; his financial measures, 32 ff.; fa- vored "loose" construction, 34; no fear of government, 41. Hobbes, theory of government, 9. Impeachment, 139. Initiative and referendum, breaking down distinction be- tween constitutions and or- dinary laws, 21; 96; 116; 132; product of distrust of legis- la,tures, 133; as emergency measures, 133; change in theory of, 134; introduce new principle, 136; burden of, 137-138; development in use of, 138; tend to complicate government, 154. Jackson, defeat of in 1824, 68; career typical of new democ- racy, 69-70; election of, in- troduced new social class, 75; brought new principles of government, 76; as direct representative of people, 77; attitude toward nullification, 82. Jacksonian Democracy, differ- ence of, from Jeffersonian, 64-65; represented the masses against the classes, 72; plat- form of 73-74. Jefferson, advocate of Bill of Rights, 30; feared tyranny of government, 31; Secretary of State, 31; favored "strict" construction of constitution, 34-35; champion of people, 37; regarded government as oppressor, 40; attitude of, to- ward judiciary, 43; organized party, 56-57; election of, how regarded, 72; appealed to 174 INDEX state loyalty; and nullifica- tion, 79; platform of, 117. Jeffersonian Democracy, plat- form of, 42; character of, 63- 63. Judiciary, attacks upon, 43; conflict between state and Federal, 43; power to declare law unconstitutional, 44. Kentucky Resolutions, original draft, 36. See Virginia Reso- lutions, infra. Legislator, represents a district, 142. Legislature, distrust of, 120- 121; limitation of, 122; theory of representation in U. S., 142; of one house, 158; co- ordinated with executive, 158. Liberty, in relation to law, 125. Life, simplicity of, in early Re- public, 50; growing complex- ity of, 50. Locke, theory of government, 10-11; purpose of govern- ment, 26; theory of natural rights, 123. Louisiana Purchase, power of Federal Government to make, 42-43 ; believed unconstitu- tional by Jefferson, 43. Madison, forced into War of 1812, 64; 79. Majority, and choice of can- didates, 113-114; rule of, and government, 118; direct rule of, 146. Marshall, John, asserts power of courts to declare law un- constitutional, 44. Marbury v. Madison, 44. Minority, protection of, 136; endangered by initiative, 136. Monroe, 65. Nature, state of, Hobbes' view of, 9; Locke's view of, 11. Natural rights, theory of, 123. New England, democracy in. 5; town-meeting, 6; church organization in, 7. Nomination, machinery for, 58, 98, 100, 107. North, trend of development in, 87. Nullification, doctrine of, 81-82. Parliament, theory of represen- tation in, 141. Parties, for and against adop- tion of the Constitution, 35; as unifying force, 52; not foreseen, 55 ; basis of, in inter- pretation of Constitution, 55- 56; united, 65-66. Party, Federalist, absorbed, 41; cause of disappearance, 42; of "Jackson men," 101; com- mittees, 104; control of, 104- 105; unifying force of, 105- 106; organization of, slow, 113; under legal control, 113; responsibility of, 159, 161, 163, leaders of, as leaders of gov- ernment, 160; lines drawn on national issues, 162. People, attempts to secure su- premacy of, 146-147. President, method of election, 98-99. Presidential primaries, 113. Politics, a career, 160-161. "Pork barrel," disappearance of, 160. Puritans, became Congrega- tionalists in New England, 5. Recall, purpose of, 139-140; and majority rule, 140; of liegtis/lative ireprdsentativies, 141. Referendum, see initiative. Reforms, to secure supremacy of popular will, 117-118. Registration, as reform meas- ure, 111. Representative, not responsive to popular will, 119; resi- dence in district, 159. INDEX 175 Republican party, 95. Responsibility, lack of, in gov- ernment, 128-129. Revolution, of 1688, 9, 10, 12; right of, 12. Rights, natural, 9, 11; of man, 13, 14, 17. "Rotation in office," 76. Secession, impossible, 89. Se^iator, popular election of, 142. Separation, of powers of gov- ernment, 53; rejected in com- mission form, 130; theory of, 134. Short ballot, as reform measure, 139; tends to simplify gov- ernment, 154, 164. Slavery, early attitude towards, 87-88; a "positive good," 88. South, development in, 87; aris- tocratic feeling of, 88. Sovereignty, popular, of state constitutions, 16. SuflFrage, extension of, 60; man- hood, 92-94. Tariff, first, 33; brought con- flict between state and na- tion, 79-80; effect of, upon South, 80. Thirteenth Amendment, 91. Town meeting, in New Eng- land, 6, 96. Union, nature of, 81; indissolu- ble, 89. Victor, to the, belong the spoils, 76. Virginia, character of democ- racy in, 4; House of Bur- gesses, 4; agricultural life in, 4. Virginia and Kentucky Resolu- tions, 36, 79. War of 1812, gave national im- pulse, 65. Washington, first President, 31. West, new democracy of, 61- 62; effect on ideas of goT- ernment, 71. William and Mary, 11. Williams, Roger, proclaimed re- ligious liberty as inherent right, 13.