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Title: An old master, and other political essays

Author: Woodrow Wilson

Release date: October 2, 2023 [eBook #71776]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OLD MASTER, AND OTHER POLITICAL ESSAYS ***





Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.




AN OLD MASTER

AND

OTHER POLITICAL ESSAYS




                             AN OLD MASTER

                                  AND

                         OTHER POLITICAL ESSAYS

                                   BY
                             WOODROW WILSON

           PROFESSOR OF JURISPRUDENCE IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

          AUTHOR OF “CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT,” “DIVISION AND
                          REUNION,” ETC., ETC.


                                NEW YORK
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                  1893




                          COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS


                             TROW DIRECTORY
                    PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
                                NEW YORK




                                   TO

                             ROBERT BRIDGES

                       WITH HEARTY ACKNOWLEDGMENT

                           OF LONG AND TRIED

                               FRIENDSHIP




CONTENTS


                                                       PAGE

    I. AN OLD MASTER,                                     3

   II. THE STUDY OF POLITICS,                            31

  III. POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY,                            61

   IV. CHARACTER OF DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES,      99

    V. GOVERNMENT UNDER THE CONSTITUTION,               141


  ⁂ I. and II. republished from the _New Princeton Review_,
       IV. and V. from the _Atlantic Monthly_, with the
       kind permission of the publishers.




I

AN OLD MASTER


Why has no one ever written on the art of academic lecturing and its
many notable triumphs? In some quarters new educational canons have
spoken an emphatic condemnation of the college lecture, and it would
seem to be high time to consider its value, as illustrative of an art
about to be lost, if not as exemplary of forces to be retained, even
if modified. Are not our college class-rooms, in being robbed of the
old-time lecture, and getting instead a science-brief of _data_ and
bibliography, being deprived also of that literary atmosphere which
once pervaded them? We are unquestionably gaining in thoroughness;
but are we gaining in thoughtfulness? We are giving to many youths an
insight, it may be profound, into specialties; but are we giving any of
them a broad outlook?

There was too often a paralysis of dulness in the old lecture, or,
rather, in the old lecturer; and written lectures, like history and
fashion in dress, have an inveterate tendency to repeat themselves;
but, on the contrary, there was often a wealth of power also in the
studied discourse of strong men. Masters bent upon instructing and
inspiring--and there were many such--had to penetrate that central
secret of literature and spoken utterance--the secret of style. Their
only instrument of conquest was the sword of penetrating speech.
Some of the subtlest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory
have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet
groups of students; and it would seem to be good policy to endure
much indifferent lecturing--watchful trustees might reduce it to a
minimum--for the sake of leaving places open for the men who have in
them the inestimable force of chastened eloquence. For one man who
can impart an undying impulse there are several score, presupposing
the requisite training, who can impart a method; and here is the well
understood ground for the cumulating disfavor of college lecturing and
the rapid substitution of ‘laboratory drill.’ But will not higher
education be cut off from communion with the highest of all forces, the
force of personal inspiration in the field of great themes of thought,
if you interdict the literary method in the class-room?

I am not inclined to consume very many words in insisting on this
point, for I believe that educators are now dealing more frankly with
themselves than ever before, and that so obvious a point will by no
means escape full recognition before reformed methods of college and
university instruction take their final shape. But it is very well to
be thinking explicitly about the matter meanwhile, in order that the
lecture may be got ready to come fully militant into the final battle
for territory. The best way to compass this end would seem to be, to
study the art of the old masters of learned discourse. With Lanfranc
one could get the infinite charm of the old monastic school life;
with Abelard, the undying excitement of philosophical and religious
controversy; with Colet, the fire of reforming zeal; with Blackstone,
the satisfactions of clarified learning. But Bee and Paris and Oxford
have by no means monopolized the masters of this art, and I should
prefer, for the nonce at least, to choose an exemplar from Scotland,
and speak of Adam Smith. It will, no doubt, be possible to speak of him
without going over again the well worn ground of the topics usually
associated with his great fame.

There is much, besides the contents of his published works, to draw
to Adam Smith the attention of those who are attracted by individual
power. Scotchmen have long been reputed strong in philosophic doctrine,
and he was a Scot of the Scots. But, though Scotland is now renowned
for her philosophy, that renown is not of immemorial origin; it was not
till the last century was well advanced that she began to add great
speculative thinkers to her great preachers. Adam Smith, consequently,
stands nearly at the opening of the greatest of the intellectual eras
of Scotland. Yet by none of the great Scotch names which men have
learned since his day has his name been eclipsed. The charm about the
man consists, for those who do not regard him with the special interest
of the political economist, in his literary method, which exhibits
his personality so attractively and makes his works so thoroughly his
own, rather than in any facts about his eminency among Scotchmen. You
bring away from your reading of Adam Smith a distinct and attractive
impression of the man himself, such as you can get from the writings of
no other author in the same field, and such as makes you wish to know
still more of him. What was he like? What was his daily life?

Unhappily, we know very little that is detailed of Adam Smith as a
man; and it may be deplored, without injustice to a respected name,
that we owe that little to Dugald Stewart, who was too self-conscious
and too stately to serve another efficiently as biographer. There
was no suitable place amid the formal spaces of his palatial style
for small illuminating details. Even from Dugald Stewart, however,
we get a picture of Adam Smith which must please every one who loves
simplicity and genuineness. He was not, perhaps, a companionable man;
he was much too absent-minded to be companionable; but he was, in
the highest sense, interesting. His absent-mindedness was of that
sort which indicates fulness of mind, which marks a mind content,
much of the time, to live within itself, indulging in those delights
of quiet contemplation which the riches of a full store of thought
can always command. Often he would open to his companions his mind’s
fullest confidences, and, with a rare versatility, lavish a wealth of
information and illustration upon topics the most varied and diverse,
always to the wondering delight of those who heard him.

All who met Adam Smith in intimate intercourse are said to have been
struck chiefly by the gentleness and benignity of his manner--traits
which would naturally strike one in a Scotchman; for men of that
unbending race are not often distinguished by easiness of temper or
suavity of manner, but are generally both _fortiter in re et fortiter
in modo_. His gentleness was, possibly, only one phase of that timidity
which is natural to absent-minded men, and which was always conspicuous
in him. That timidity made it rare with him to talk much. When he
did talk, as I have said, his hearers marvelled at the ingenuity of
his reasoning, at the constructive power of his imagination, at the
comprehensiveness of his memory, at the fertility of all his resources;
but his inclination was always to remain silent. He was not, however,
disinclined to public discourse, and it is chiefly to his unusual
gifts as a lecturer that he seems to have owed his advancement in the
literary, or, rather, in the university, world.

Acting upon the advice of Lord Kames, an eminent barrister and a man of
some standing in the history of philosophy, he volunteered a course of
lectures in Edinburgh almost immediately upon his return from Oxford;
and the success of this course was hardly assured before he was elected
to the chair of Logic in the University of Glasgow. In the following
year he had the honor of succeeding to the chair of Moral Philosophy,
once occupied by the learned and ingenious Hutcheson. He seems to have
been at once successful in raising his new chair to a position of the
very highest consideration. His immediate predecessor had been one
Thomas Craigie, who has left behind him so shadowy a reputation that it
is doubtless safe to conclude that his department was, at his death,
much in need of a fresh infusion of life. This it received from Adam
Smith. The breadth and variety of the topics upon which he chose to
lecture, and the felicity, strength, and vitality of the exposition
he gave them (we are told by one who had sat under him), soon drew
to Glasgow “a multitude of students from a great distance” to hear
him. His mastery of the art of academic lecturing was presently an
established fact. It appears clear that his success was due to two
things: the broad outlook of his treatment and the fine art of his
style. His chair was Moral Philosophy; and ‘moral philosophy’ seems
to have been the most inclusive of general terms in the university
usage of Scotland at that day, and, indeed, for many years afterward.
Apparently it embraced all philosophy that did not directly concern the
phenomena of the physical world, and, accordingly, allowed its doctors
to give very free play to their tastes in the choice of subjects.
Adam Smith, in Glasgow, could draw within the big family of this
large-hearted philosophy not only the science of mental phenomena,
but also the whole of the history and organization of society; just
as, years afterwards, John Wilson, in Edinburgh, could insist upon the
adoption of something very like _belles-lettres_ into the same generous
and unconventional family circle.

Adam Smith sought to cover the field he had chosen with a fourfold
course of lectures. First, he unfolded the principles of natural
theology; second, he illustrated the principles of ethics, in a series
of lectures which were afterwards embodied in his published work on
the “Theory of Moral Sentiments;” third, he discoursed on that branch
of morality which relates to the administration of justice; and, last,
coming out upon the field with which his name is now identified, he
examined those political regulations which are founded, not upon
principles of justice, but upon considerations of expediency, and which
are calculated to increase the riches, the power, and the prosperity
of the State. His notes of his lectures he himself destroyed when he
felt death approaching, and we are left to conjecture what the main
features of his treatment were, from the recorded recollections of
his pupils and from those published works which remain as fragments
of the great plan. These fragments consist of the “Theory of Moral
Sentiments,” the “Wealth of Nations,” and “Considerations Concerning
the First Formation of Languages;” besides which there are, to quote
another’s enumeration, “a very curious history of astronomy, left
imperfect, and another fragment on the history of ancient physics,
which is a kind of sequel to that part of the history of astronomy
which relates to ancient astronomy; then a similar essay on the ancient
logic and metaphysics; then another on the nature and development of
the fine, or, as he calls them, the imitative, arts, painting, poetry,
and music, in which was meant to have been included a history of the
theatre--all forming part, his executors tell us, ‘of a plan he had
once formed for giving a connected history of the liberal and elegant
arts;’” part, that is (to continue the quotation from Mr. Bagehot),
of the “immense design of showing the origin and development of
cultivation and law, or ... of saying how, from being a savage, man
rose to be a Scotchman.”

The wideness of view and amazing variety of illustration that
characterized his treatment, in developing the several parts of this
vast plan, can easily be inferred from an examination of the “Wealth of
Nations.”

“The ‘Wealth of Nations,’” declares Mr. Buckle, from whom, for
obvious reasons, I prefer to quote, “displays a breadth of treatment
which those who cannot sympathize with, are very likely to ridicule.
The phenomena, not only of wealth, but also of society in general,
classified and arranged under their various forms; the origin of
the division of labor, and the consequences which that division has
produced; the circumstances which gave rise to the invention of money,
and to the subsequent changes in its value; the history of those
changes traced in different ages, and the history of the relations
which the precious metals bear to each other; an examination of the
connection between wages and profits, and of the laws which govern
the rise and fall of both; another examination of the way in which
these are concerned, on the one hand with the rent of land, and, on
the other hand, with the price of commodities; an inquiry into the
reason why profits vary in different trades, and at different times;
a succinct but comprehensive view of the progress of towns in Europe
since the fall of the Roman Empire; the fluctuations, during several
centuries, in the prices of the food of the people, and a statement
of how it is, that, in different stages of society, the relative cost
of meat and of land varies; the history of corporation laws and of
municipal enactments, and their bearing on the four great classes of
apprentices, manufacturers, merchants, and landlords; an account of
the immense power and riches formerly enjoyed by the clergy, and of
the manner in which, as society advances, they gradually lose their
exclusive privileges; the nature of religious dissent, and the reason
why the clergy of the Established Church can never contend with it on
terms of equality, and, therefore, call on the State to help them, and
wish to persecute when they cannot persuade; why some sects profess
more ascetic principles, and others more luxurious ones; how it was,
that, during the feudal times, the nobles acquired their power, and how
that power has, ever since, been gradually diminishing; how the rights
of territorial jurisdiction originated, and how they died away; how the
sovereigns of Europe obtained their revenue, what the sources of it
are, and what classes are most heavily taxed in order to supply it; the
cause of certain virtues, such as hospitality, flourishing in barbarous
ages, and decaying in civilized ones; the influence of inventions and
discoveries in altering the distribution of power among the various
classes of society; a bold and masterly sketch of the peculiar sort
of advantages which Europe derived from the discovery of America and
of the passage round the Cape; the origin of universities, their
degeneracy from the original plan, the corruption which has gradually
crept over them, and the reason why they are so unwilling to adopt
improvements, and to keep pace with the wants of the age; a comparison
between public and private education, and an estimate of their relative
advantages; these, and a vast number of other subjects, respecting
the structure and development of society, such as the feudal system,
slavery, emancipation of serfs, origin of standing armies and of
mercenary troops, effects produced by tithes, laws of primogeniture,
sumptuary laws, international treaties concerning trade, rise of
European banks, national debts, influence of dramatic representations
over opinions, colonies, poor-laws--all topics of a miscellaneous
character, and many of them diverging from each other--all are fused
into one great system, and irradiated by the splendor of one great
genius. Into that dense and disorderly mass, did Adam Smith introduce
symmetry, method, and law.”

In fact, it is a book of digressions--digressions characterized by more
order and method, but by little more compunction, than the wondrous
digressions of Tristram Shandy.

It is interesting to note that even this vast miscellany of thought,
the “Wealth of Nations,” systematized though it be, was not meant to
stand alone as the exposition of a complete system; it was only a
supplement to the “Theory of Moral Sentiments;” and the two together
constituted only chapters in that vast book of thought which their
author would have written. Adam Smith would have grouped all things
that concern either the individual or the social life of man under the
several greater principles of motive and action observable in human
conduct. His method throughout is, therefore, necessarily abstract
and deductive. In the “Wealth of Nations,” he ignores the operation
of love, of benevolence, of sympathy, and of charity in filling life
with kindly influences, and concentrates his attention exclusively upon
the operation of self-interest and expediency; because he had reckoned
with the altruistic motives in the “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” and
he would not confuse his view of the economic life of man by again
forcing these in where selfishness was unquestionably the predominant
force. “The philosopher,” he held, “is the man of speculation, whose
trade is not to do anything, but to observe everything;” and certainly
he satisfied his own definition. He does observe everything; and he
stores his volumes full with the sagest practical maxims, fit to have
fallen from the lips of the shrewdest of those Glasgow merchants
in whose society he learned so much that might test the uses of his
theories. But it is noticeable that none of the carefully noted facts
of experience which play so prominent a part on the stage of his
argument speaks of any other principle than the simple and single one
which is the pivot of that part of his philosophy with which he is at
the moment dealing. In the “Wealth of Nations” every apparent induction
leads to self-interest, and to self-interest alone. In Mr. Buckle’s
phrase, his facts are subsequent to his argument; they are not used for
demonstration, but for illustration. His historical cases, his fine
generalizations, everywhere broadening and strengthening his matter,
are only instances of the operation of the single abstract principle
meant to be set forth.

When he was considering that topic in his course which has not come
down to us in any of the remaining fragments of his lectures--the
principles of justice, namely--although still always mindful of its
relative position in the general scheme of his abstract philosophy
of society, his subject led him, we are told, to speak very much
in the modern historical spirit. He followed upon this subject,
says the pupil already quoted, “the plan which seems to have been
suggested by Montesquieu; endeavoring to trace the gradual progress
of jurisprudence, both public and private, from the rudest to the
most refined ages, and to point out the effects of those arts which
contribute to subsistence, and to the accumulation of property,
in producing corresponding improvements or alterations in law and
government.” In following Montesquieu, he was, of course, following
one of the forerunners of that great school of philosophical students
of history which has done so much in our own time to clear away the
fogs that surround the earliest ages of mankind, and to establish
something like the rudiments of a true philosophy of history. And this
same spirit was hardly less discernible in those later lectures on the
“political institutions relating to commerce, to finances, and to the
ecclesiastical and military establishments,” which formed the basis of
the “Wealth of Nations.” Everywhere throughout his writings there is a
pervasive sense of the realities of fact and circumstance; a luminous,
bracing, work-a-day atmosphere. But the conclusions are, first of all,
philosophical; only secondarily practical.

It has been necessary to go over this somewhat familiar ground with
reference to the philosophical method of Adam Smith, in order to come
at the proper point of view from which to consider his place among the
old masters of academic lecturing. It has revealed the extent of his
outlook. There yet remains something to be said of his literary method,
so that we may discern the qualities of that style which, after proving
so effectual in imparting power to his spoken discourses, has since,
transferred to the printed page, preserved his fame so far beyond the
lifetime of those who heard him.

Adam Smith took strong hold upon his hearers, as he still takes strong
hold upon his readers, by force, partly, of his native sagacity, but
by virtue, principally, of his consummate style. The success of his
lectures was not altogether a triumph of natural gifts; it was, in
great part, a triumph of sedulously cultivated art. With the true
instinct of the orator and teacher, Adam Smith saw--what every one
must see who speaks not for the patient ear of the closeted student
only, but also to the often shallow ear of the pupil in the class-room,
and to the always callous ear of the great world outside, which must
be tickled in order to be made attentive--that clearness, force, and
beauty of style are absolutely necessary to one who would draw men to
his way of thinking; nay, to any one who would induce the great mass
of mankind to give so much as passing heed to what he has to say. He
knew that wit was of no avail, without wit’s proper words; sagacity
mean, without sagacity’s mellow measures of phrase. He bestowed the
most painstaking care, therefore, not only upon what he was to say,
but also upon the way in which he was to say it. Dugald Stewart speaks
of “that flowing and apparently artless style, which he had studiously
cultivated, but which, after all his experience in composition, he
adjusted, with extreme difficulty, to his own taste.” The results
were such as to offset entirely his rugged utterance and his awkward,
angular action, and to enable the timid talker to exercise the spells
of an orator. The charm of his discourses consisted in the power of
statement which gave them life, in the clear and facile processes
of proof which gave them speed, and in the vigorous, but chastened,
imagination which lent them illumination. He constantly refreshed and
rewarded his hearers, as he still constantly refreshes and rewards his
readers, by bringing them to those clear streams of practical wisdom
and happy illustration which everywhere irrigate his expositions. His
counsel, even on the highest themes, was always undarkened. There
were no clouds about his thoughts; the least of these could be seen
without glasses through the transparent atmosphere of expression which
surrounded them. He was a great thinker,--and that was much; but he
also made men recognize him as a great thinker, because he was a great
master of style--which was more. He did not put his candle under a
bushel, but on a candlestick.

In Doctor Barnard’s verses, addressed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and his
literary friends, Adam Smith is introduced as a peer amidst that
brilliant company:

    “If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
    Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
        In words select and terse;
    Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
    _Smith how to think_, Burke how to speak,
        And Beauclerc to converse.”

It is this power of teaching other men how to think that has given
to the works of Adam Smith an immortality of influence. In his first
university chair, the chair of Logic, he had given scant time to the
investigation of the formal laws of reasoning, and had insisted,
by preference, upon the practical uses of discourse, as the living
application of logic, treating of style and of the arts of persuasion
and exposition; and here in his other chair, of Moral Philosophy,
he was practically illustrating the vivifying power of the art he
had formerly sought to expound to his pupils. “When the subject of
his work,” says Dugald Stewart, speaking of the “Theory of Moral
Sentiments,” “when the subject of his work leads him to address
the imagination and the heart, the variety and felicity of his
illustrations, the richness and fluency of his eloquence, and the skill
with which he wins the attention and commands the passions of his
hearers, leave him, among our English moralists, without a rival.”

Such, then, were the matters which this great lecturer handled, and
such was the form he gave them. Two personal characteristics stand out
in apparent contrast with what he accomplished: he is said to have been
extremely unpractical in the management of his own affairs, and yet he
fathered that science which tells how other people’s affairs, how the
world’s affairs, are managed; he is known to have been shy and silent,
and yet he was the most acceptable lecturer of his university. But it
is not uncommon for the man who is both profound and accurate in his
observation of the universal and permanent forces operative in the life
about him, to be almost altogether wanting in that sagacity concerning
the local and temporary practical details upon which the hourly
facilitation and comfort of his own life depend; nor need it surprise
any one to find the man who sits shy and taciturn in private, stand out
dominant and eloquent in public. “Commonly, indeed,” as Mr. Bagehot has
said, “the silent man, whoso brain is loaded with unexpressed ideas,
is more likely to be a successful public speaker than the brilliant
talker who daily exhausts himself in sharp sayings.” There are two
distinct kinds of observation: that which makes a man alert and shrewd,
cognizant of every trifle and quick with every trick of speech; and
that which makes a man a philosopher, conscious of the steady set of
affairs and ready in the use of all the substantial resources of wise
thought. Commend me to the former for a chat; commend me to the latter
for a book. The first will sparkle; the other burns a steady flame.

Here, then, is the picture of this Old Master: a quiet, awkward,
forceful Scotchman, whose philosophy has entered everywhere into the
life of politics and become a world force in thought; an impracticable
Commissioner of Customs, who has left for the instruction of statesmen
a theory of taxation; an unbusiness-like professor, who established
the science of business; a man of books, who is universally honored by
men of action; plain, eccentric, learned, inspired. The things that
strike us most about him are, his boldness of conception and wideness
of outlook, his breadth and comprehensiveness of treatment, and his
carefully clarified and beautified style. He was no specialist, except
_in the relations of things_.

Of course, spreading his topics far and wide in the domain of history
and philosophy, he was at many points superficial. He took most of his
materials at second hand; and it has been said that he borrowed many of
his ideas from the French. But no matter who mined the gold, he coined
it; the image and superscription are his. Certain separate, isolated
truths which served under him may have been doing individual, guerilla
warfare elsewhere for the advancement of science; but it was he who
marshalled them into drilled hosts for the conquering of the nations.
Adam Smith was doubtless indebted to the Physiocrats, but all the world
is indebted to Adam Smith. Education and the world of thought need men
who, like this man, will dare to know a multitude of things. Without
them and their bold synthetic methods, all knowledge and all thought
would fall apart into a weak analysis. Their minds do not lack in
thoroughness; their thoroughness simply lacks in minuteness. It is only
in their utterances that the mind finds the exhilaration and exaltation
that come with the free air that blows over broad uplands. They excite
you with views of the large aspects of thought; conduct you through
the noblest scenery of the mind’s domain; delight you with majesty of
outline and sweep of prospect. In this day of narrow specialties, our
thinking needs such men to fuse its parts, correlate its forces, and
centre its results; and our thinking needs them in its college stage,
in order that we may command horizons from our study windows in after
days.

The breadth and comprehensiveness of treatment characteristic of
the utterances of such a teacher are inseparable attributes of his
manner of thought. He has the artist’s eye. For him things stand in
picturesque relations; their great outlines fit into each other; the
touch of his treatment is necessarily broad and strong. The same
informing influence of artistic conception and combination gives to
his style its luminous and yet transparent qualities. His sentences
cannot retain the stiff joints of logic; it would be death to them
to wear the chains of formal statement; they must take leave to deck
themselves with eloquence. In a word, such men must write _literature_,
or nothing. Their minds quiver with those broad sympathies which
constitute the life of written speech. Their native catholicity makes
all minds receive them as kinsmen. By reason of the very strength of
their humanity, they are enabled to say things long waiting to be said,
in such a way that all men may receive them. They hold commissions
from the King of Speech. Such men will not, I am persuaded, always
seek in vain invitations to those academic platforms which are their
best coignes of vantage. But this is not just the time when they are
most appreciated, or most freely encouraged to discover themselves;
and it cannot be amiss to turn back to another order of things, and
remind ourselves how a master of academic inspiration, possessing, in
a great power to impart intellectual impulse, something higher than a
trained capacity to communicate method, may sometimes be found even in
a philosophical Scotchman.




II

THE STUDY OF POLITICS


It has long been an open secret that there is war among the political
economists. John Stuart Mill no longer receives universal homage,
but has to bear much irreverent criticism; even Adam Smith might be
seriously cavilled at were not the habit of praise grown too old in his
case. He is still ‘the father of political economy;’ but, like other
fathers of his day, he seems to us decidedly old fashioned. The fact
is, that these older writers, who professed to point out the laws of
human business, are accused of leaving out of view a full half of human
nature; in insisting that men love gain, they are said to have quite
forgotten that men sometimes love each other, that they are not only
prehensile, but also a great many other things less aggressive and less
selfish.

Those who make these charges want to leave nothing human out of their
reckonings; they want to know ‘all the facts,’ and are ready, if
necessary, to reduce every generalization of the older writers to the
state--the wholly _exceptional_ state--of a rule in German grammar.
Their protest is significant, their purpose heroic, beyond a doubt; and
what interesting questions are not raised by their programme! How is
the world to contain the writings, statistical, historical, critical,
which must be accumulated ere this enormous diagnosis of trade and
manufacture shall be completed in its details? And after it shall have
been completed in detail who is to be born great enough in genius and
patience to reduce the mass to a system comprehensible by ordinary
mortals? Moreover, who is going surety that these new economists will
not be dreadful defaulters before they get through handling these
immense assets of human nature, which Mill confessed himself unable
to handle without wrecking his bookkeeping? Are they assured of the
eventual collaboration of some Shakespeare who will set before the
world all the standard types of economic character? Let the world hope
so. Even those who cannot answer the questions I have broached ought to
bid such sturdy workers ‘God speed!’

The most interesting reflection suggested by the situation is, that
political economists are being harassed by the same discipline of
experience that, one day or another, sobers all constructors of
systems. They cannot build in the air and then escape chagrin because
men only gaze at their structures, and will not live in them. Closet
students of politics are constantly undergoing new drill in the same
lesson: the world is an inexorable schoolmaster; it will have none
of any thought which does not recognize it. Sometimes theorists like
Rousseau, being near enough the truth to deceive even those who know
something of it, are so unfortunate as to induce men to rear fabrics of
government after their aerial patterns out of earth’s stuffs, with the
result of bringing every affair of weight crashing about their ears, to
the shaking of the world. But there are not many such coincidences as
Rousseau and his times, happily; and other closet politicians, more
commonly cast and more ordinarily placed than he, have had no such
perilous successes.

There is every reason to believe that in countries where men vote as
well as write books, political writers at any rate give an honest
recognition of act to these facts. They do not vote their opinions,
they vote their party tickets; and they are the better citizens by far
for doing so. Inside their libraries they go with their masters in
thought--mayhap go great lengths with Adolph Wagner, or hold stiffly
back, “man _versus_ the state,” with Spencer; outside their libraries
they ‘go with their party.’ In a word, like sensible men, they frankly
recognize the difference between what is possible in thought and what
is practicable in action.

But the trouble is, that when they turn from voting to writing they
call many of their abstract reflections on government studies of
_politics_, and thereby lose the benefit of some very wholesome aids
to just thought. Even when they draw near the actual life of living
governments, as they frequently do, and read and compare statutes
and constitutions, they stop short of asking and ascertaining what
the men of the street think and say of institutions and laws; what
little, as well as what big, influences brought particular laws into
existence; how much of each law actually lives in the regulation of
public function or private activity, how much of it has degenerated
into ‘dead letter;’ in brief, just what things it is--what methods,
what habits, what human characteristics and social conditions--that
make the appearance of politics outside the library so different from
its appearance inside that quiet retreat; what it is that constitutes
‘practical politics’ a peculiar province. And yet these are the
questions most necessary to be answered in order to reach the heart of
their study.

Every one who has read great treatises on government which were not
merely speculative in their method must have been struck by their
exhaustive knowledge of statutes, of judicial precedents, and of legal
and constitutional history; and equally by their tacit ignorance of
anything more than this gaunt skeleton of institutions. Their best
pages are often those on which a modest asterisk, an unobtrusive
numeral, or a tiny dagger sticking high in the stately text, carries
the eye down to a foot-note, packed close in small print, in which some
hint is let drop of the fact that institutions have a _daily_ as well
as an epochal life, from which the student might ‘learn something to
his advantage.’

The inherent weakness of such a method is shown by the readiness with
which it is discredited when once a better one is put beside it. What
modern writer on political institutions has not felt, either directly
or indirectly, the influence of de Tocqueville and Bagehot? Both these
inimitable writers were men of extraordinary genius, and, whatever they
might have written about, their writings would have been admiringly
preserved, if only for the wonder of their luminous qualities. But
their political works live, not only as models of effective style,
but also as standards of stimulating wisdom; because Bagehot and de
Tocqueville were not merely students, but also _men of the world_, for
whom the only acceptable philosophy of politics was a generalization
from actual daily observation of men and things. They could see
institutions writ small in the most trivial turns of politics, and read
constitutions more clearly in a biography than in a statute-book. They
were men who, had they written history, would have written the history
of peoples, and not of courts or parliaments merely. Their methods
have, therefore, because of their essential sanity, gone far toward
discrediting all others; they have leavened the whole mass of political
literature. Was it not Bagehot, for instance, who made it necessary for
Professor Dicey to entitle his recent admirable work “The Law of the
Constitution,” that no one might think he mistook it for the _Life_ of
the Constitution?

Who has not wished that Burke had fused the permanent thoughts of
his splendid sentences of wisdom together into a noble whole, an
incomparable treatise whereby every mind that loved liberty might be
strengthened and fertilized? He had handled affairs, and could pluck
out the heart of their mystery with a skill that seldom blundered;
he spoke hardly a word of mere hearsay or speculation. He, it would
seem, better than any other, could have shown writers on politics the
difference between knowledge and insight, between an acquaintance with
public law and a real mastery of the principles of government.

Not that all ‘practical politicians’ would be the best instructors in
the deep--though they might be in the hidden--things of politics. Far
from it. They are too thickly crowded by daily detail to see permanent
outlines, too much pushed about by a thousand little influences to
detect accurately the force or the direction of the big and lasting
influences. They ‘cannot see the forest for the trees.’ They are no
more fitted to be instructors _because_ they are practical politicians
than lawyers are fitted to fill law-school chairs because they are
active practitioners. They must be something else besides to qualify
them for the high function of teaching, and must be that something
else in so masterful a fashion that no distraction of active politics
can for a moment withdraw their vision from the great and continuous
principles of their calling.

The active statesman is often an incomparable teacher, however, when
he is himself least conscious that he is teaching at all, when he has
no thought of being didactic, but has simply a heart full of the high
purpose of leading his fellow-countrymen to do those things which he
conceives to be right. Read the purposes of men like Patrick Henry
and Abraham Lincoln, men untutored of the schools--read their words
of leadership, and say whether there be anything wiser than their
home-made wisdom.

It is such reflections as these--whether my examples be well chosen or
not--which seem to me to lead directly to the right principle of study
for every one who would go beyond the law and know the life of States.
Not every State lets statutes die by mere disuse, as Scotland once
did; and if you are going to read constitutions with only lawyers for
your guides, be they never so learned, you must risk knowing only the
anatomy of institutions, never learning anything of their biology.

“Men of letters and of thought,” says Mr. Sidney Colvin, where one
would least expect to find such a remark--in a “Life of Walter Savage
Landor”--

    “Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to
    declaiming at their ease against the delinquencies of men of
    action and affairs. The inevitable friction of practical politics
    generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker and
    critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties
    which attend his own unmolested task, the task of seeking after and
    proclaiming salutary truths, should teach him to make allowance for
    the still more urgent difficulties which beset the politician--the
    man obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temptations, to
    practise from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain
    and at the same time the most indispensable of the experimental
    arts.”

Excellent! But why stop there? Must the man of letters and of thought
observe the friction of politics only to make due allowance for the
practical politician, only to keep his own placid conclusions free
from any taint of scorn or cavil at men whose lives are thrown amidst
affairs to endure the buffetings of interest and resist the tugs of
temptation? Is not a just understanding of the conditions of practical
politics also an indispensable prerequisite to the discovery and
audible proclamation of his own “salutary truths?” No truth which
does not on all its sides touch human life can ever reach the heart
of politics; and men of ‘unmolested tasks,’ of mere library calm,
simply cannot think the thoughts which will tell amidst the noise of
affairs. An alert and sympathetic perception of the infinite shifts
of circumstance and play of motive which control the actual conduct
of government ought to permeate the thinking, as well as check the
criticisms, of writers on politics.

In a word, ought not the ‘man of the world’ and the ‘man of books’
to be merged in each other in the student of politics? Was not John
Stuart Mill the better student for having served the East India Company
and sat in the House of Commons? Are not Professor Bryce and Mr. John
Morley more to be trusted in their books because they have proved
themselves worthy to be trusted in the Cabinet?

The success of great popular preachers contains a lesson for students
of politics who would themselves convert men to a saving doctrine. The
preacher has, indeed, an incalculable advantage over the student of
politics in having as his text-book that Bible which speaks of the
human heart with a Maker’s knowledge of the thing He has made; by
knowing his book he knows the deepest things of daily life. But the
great preacher reaches the heart of his hearers not by knowledge, but
by sympathy--by showing himself a brother-man to his fellow-men. And
this is just the principle which the student of politics must heed.
He must frequent the street, the counting-house, the drawing-room,
the club-house, the administrative offices, the halls--yes, and the
lobbies--of legislatures. He must cross-examine the experience of
government officials; he must hear the din of conventions, and see
their intrigues; he must witness the scenes of election day. He must
know how men who are not students regard government and its affairs.
He will get many valuable suggestions from such men on occasion;
better than that, he will learn the available approaches to such men’s
thoughts. Government is meant for the good of ordinary people, and it
is for ordinary people that the student should elucidate its problems;
let him be anxious to keep within earshot of such.

This is not to commend the writer on politics to narrow ‘practical’
views and petty comment; it is not to ask him to find a philosophy of
government which will fit the understanding and please the taste of the
‘ward politician:’ it is only to ask him to keep his generalizations
firmly bottomed on fact and experience. His philosophy will not
overshoot the hearts of men because it is feathered with high thought,
unless it be deliberately shot in air. Thoughts do not fail of
acceptance because they are not commonplace enough, but because they
are not true enough; and, in the sort of writing about which we are
here speaking, truth is a thing which can be detected better by the man
who knows life than by the man who knows only logic. You cannot lift
truth so high that men cannot reach it; the only caution to be observed
is, that you do not ask them to climb where they cannot go without
leaving _terra firma_.

Nor is the student, who naturally and properly loves books, to leave
books and sit all his time in wiseacre observation amidst busy men. His
books are his balance--or, rather, his ballast. And of course the men
of his own day are not the only men from whom he can learn politics.
Government is as old as man; men have always been politicians; the
men of to-day are only politicians of a particular school; the past
furnishes examples of politicians of every other school, and there
is as much to be learned about government from them as from their
successors.

Carlyle had the sort of eye for which one should pray when seeking to
find men alive and things actual in the records left of them. Who has
not profited by his humorous familiarity with the foibles and personal
habits of the men who lived about the court of the Hohenzollerns?
Who has not learned more than any other man could have told him of
Prussian administration under its first great organizer by looking with
Carlyle into the sociable informalities of Frederick William’s ‘tobacco
parliament?’ Carlyle knew these men well enough to joke with and rail
at them. He twitted them with their family secrets, and, knowing what
clay they were of, was not awed by their state ceremonials. Yet he saw
them, as he himself bitterly complains, only through the medium of
crabbed documents and dry-as-dust books, with no seer like himself to
help him in his interpretations. It was hard straining of the eyes to
see so far back through the dense and murky atmosphere of formal record
and set history; but he saw, nevertheless, because he did not need to
be told all in order to know all; the dryest of historians could hardly
avoid dropping some hint which would suffice Carlyle more than would
tomes of ‘profane history.’

If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to find it
advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath the surface
of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its discovery. It
needs a good nose to do the thing, but look how excellent is the game
to which a casual scent may bring you in such a domain as the study of
politics. There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by
inference. Do not expect to find the life of constitutions painted in
the great ‘standard authorities,’ but, following with becoming patience
their legal anatomy of institutions, watch their slightest movement
toward an illustrative foot-note, and try to find under that the scent
you are in quest of. If they cite an instance, seek the recital of the
same case elsewhere, where it is told with a different purpose; if it
promise well there, hunt it further still, and make sure you catch
every glimpse it affords of men’s actual dealings with government. If
your text mention names of consequence, seek them out in biographies,
and scan there the personal relations of men with affairs, for hints
of the methods by which governments are operated from day to day. You
will not need any incentive to read all their gossip, in letters and
journals, and so see governors as men; but do more: endure official
interviews and sessions of Parliament with them; collate their private
letters and their public despatches--there’s no telling when or where
you shall strike fresh trails of the game you seek. Interview judges
off the bench, courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to
France and live next door a prefect in the provinces; go to London
and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the
smoking-room of the House of Commons.

Such excursions must, of course, lead the student far afield; he will
often get quite out of sight of his starting-point, the ‘standard
authority;’ but he will not on that account be lost. The fact is,
that all literature teems with suggestions on this topic of politics.
Just as the chance news item, the unstudied traveller’s reminiscence,
the passing social or financial scandal,[A] and every hint of any
present contact of men with law or authority, illuminates directly,
or by inference, the institutions of our own day, similar random rays
thrown across the pages of old books by the unpremeditated words of
writers quite guiltless of such instructive intent may light up, for
those who are alert to see such things, the most intimate secrets of
state. If it be beyond hoping for to find a _whole_ Greville for every
age of government, there may be found Grevillian scraps, at least, in
the literature of almost every time. From men as far back and as well
remembered as Cicero, down to men as recent and as easily forgotten
as several who might be named, politicians have loved to explain to
posterity the part they took in conspicuous affairs; and that portion
of posterity which studies politics by inference ought to be profoundly
thankful to them for yielding to the taste.

    [A] Did not the Dilke trial in London, for instance, help us to
        understand at least one influence that may sometimes make a
        lawyer Home Secretary?

Approach the life of States by such avenues, and you shall be convinced
of the organic nature of political society. View society from what
point you will, you always catch sight of some part of government; man
is so truly a ‘political animal’ that you cannot examine him at all
without seeing the points--points of his very structure--whereat he
touches and depends upon, or upholds, the State.

In 1850, while Governor-General of Canada, Lord Elgin writes to Lord
Grey:

    “Our Reciprocity measure was pressed by us in Washington last
    session, just as a railway bill, in 1845 or 1846, would have been
    passed in Parliament. There was no Government to deal with, ...
    it was all a matter of canvassing this member of Congress or the
    other.”[B]

    [B] Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 121.

What? “No Government to deal with?” Here’s a central truth to be
found in none of the ‘standard authorities,’ and yet to be seen by a
practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About the same date
M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the French Government
and be made wretched by the crude deportment of the Americans. His
chief concern was to get away to some country where people were less
unconventionally at their ease in drawing-rooms; but he turned, when
necessary, to the business of his legation; and whenever he did so
he found that “here diplomatic affairs are not treated as everywhere
else, where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and
arrange the matter with him alone.” He must ‘arrange’ the matter with
several committees of Congress. He must go to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs.
Winthrop, whose “husbands are members of the House of Representatives,
and on the committee having charge of commercial affairs, in which”
he “is interested,” for “they say that these gentlemen are very
particular about visits from foreign ministers to their wives.”[C] Just
Lord Elgin’s testimony. Again the ‘standard authorities’ are added
to, and that in a quarter where we should least expect to find them
supplemented. We need despair of no source.

    [C] Souvenirs of a Diplomat, pp. 189, 281.

These are only near and easily recognized illustrations of the errant
mode of study I am expounding and advocating. Other systems besides our
own receive similar chance illumination in the odd corners of all sorts
of books. Now and again you strike mines like the “Mémoires of Madame
de Rémusat,” the “Letters” of Walpole, or the “Diary” of a Pepys or an
Evelyn; at other periods you must be content to find only slender veins
of the ore of familiar observation and intimate knowledge of affairs
for which you are delving; but your search will seldom be altogether
futile. Some newly opened archive office may offer _cahiers_, such as
revealed to de Tocqueville, more than all other records, the _ancien
régime_. Some elder Hamerton may tell you of the significant things
to be seen ‘round his house.’ All correspondence and autobiography
will repay perusal, even when not so soaked in affairs as the letters
of Cromwell, or so reminiscent of politics as the “Memoirs of Samuel
Romilly.”

Politics is the life of the State, and nothing which illustrates that
life, nothing which reveals any habit contracted by man as a political
animal, comes amiss in the study of politics. Public law is the formal
basis of the political life of society, but it is not always an
expression of its vital principle. We are inclined, oftentimes, to take
laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in their
professions without examining their conduct. Do they affect to advance
liberty, for instance? We ought to go, in person or in imagination,
amongst the people whom they command, and see for ourselves whether
those people enjoy liberty. With reference to laws and constitutions of
our own day, we can learn such things best by supplementing books and
study by travel and observation. The best-taught class in modern public
law would be a travelling class. Other times than our own we must
perforce be content to see through other men’s eyes.

In other words, statute books and legal commentaries are all very well
in the study of politics, if only you quite thoroughly understand that
they furnish only the crude body-colors for your picture of the State’s
life, upon which all your finer luminous and atmospheric effects are
afterwards to be worked. It is high time to recognize the fact that
politics can be effectually expounded only by means of the highest
literary methods. Only master workers in language and in the grouping
and interpretation of heterogeneous materials can achieve the highest
success in making real _in words_ the complex life of States. If I
might act as the interpreter of the new-school economists of whom I
have already spoken, I trust with due reverence, I should say that this
is the thought which, despite their too frequent practical contempt
for artistic literary form, is possessing them. John Stuart Mill and
Ricardo made a sort of logic of political economy; in order to simplify
their processes, they deliberately stripped man of all motives save
self-interest alone, and the result was evidently ‘_doctrinaire_’--was
not a picture of life, but a theorem of trade. Hence “the most dismal
of all sciences;” hence Sidney Smith’s exhortation to his friend not
to touch the hard, unnatural thing. The new-school economists revolt,
and say they want “a more scientific method.” What they really want
is a higher literary method. They want to take account of how a man’s
wife affects his trade, how his children stiffen his prudence, how
his prejudices condition his enterprise, how his lack of imagination
limits his market, how strongly love of home holds him back from the
good wages that might be had by emigration, how despotically the
opinion of his neighbors forbids his insisting upon a cash business,
how his position in local society prescribes the commodities he is
_not_ to deal in; in brief, how men actually do labor, plan, and get
gain. They are, therefore, portentously busy amassing particulars about
the occupations, the habits, the earnings, the whole economic life of
all classes and conditions of men. But these things are only the raw
material of poetry and the literary art, and without the intervention
of literary art must remain raw material. To make anything of them, the
economist must become a literary artist and bring his discoveries home
to our imaginations--make these innumerable details of his pour in a
concentrated fire upon the central citadels of men’s understandings. A
single step or two would then bring him within full sight of the longed
for time when political economy is to dominate legislation.

It has fallen out that, by turning its thoughts toward becoming a
science, politics, like political economy, has joined its literature
to those books of _natural_ science which boast a brief authority, and
then make way for what is ‘latest.’ Unless it be of the constitution
of those rare books which mark an epoch in scientific thought, a
‘scientific work’ may not expect to outlive the prevailing fashion in
ladies’ wraps. But books on politics are in the wrong company when
they associate with works among which so high a rate of mortality
obtains. The ‘science’ proper to them, as distinguished from that
which is proper to the company they now affect, is a science whose
very expositions are as deathless as itself. It is the science of the
life of man in society. Nothing which elucidates that life ought
to be reckoned foreign to its art; and no true picture of that life
can ever perish out of literature. Ripe scholarship in history and
jurisprudence is not more indispensable to the student of politics
than are a constructive imagination and a poet’s eye for the detail of
human incident. The heart of his task is insight and interpretation; no
literary power that he can bring to bear upon it will be greater than
he needs. Arthur Young’s way of observing, Bagehot’s way of writing,
and Burke’s way of philosophizing would make an ideal combination for
the work he has to do. His materials are often of the most illusive
sort, the problems which he has to solve are always of the most
confounding magnitude and variety.

It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political
institutions of one country will not suit another country; but how
infinitely difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why? To
reply to the Why he must make out all the contrasts in the histories
of the two countries. But it depends entirely upon what sort of eye he
has whether those contrasts will contain for him vital causes of the
effect he is seeking to expound. He may let some anecdote escape him
which gleams with the very spark needed to kindle his exposition. In
looking only for grave political facts he may overlook some apparently
trivial outlying detail which contains the very secret he would guess.
He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people;
whose photographs are most frequently to be seen on the walls of
peasant cottages; what books are oftenest on their shelves. Intent
upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some
piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion
that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire
self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely
thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about
it. The man who thinks the polls disagreeable and uninteresting places
has no business taking up a pen to write about government. The man who
despises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies
the sheriff’s functions only from the drawing-room or the library,
will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the
vanity of ‘good form.’

If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct,
not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the
world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the
imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality which
is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the power of
all books which have aught of force in them would then rescue books on
politics from the dismal category of ‘treatises,’ and exalt them to
the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction against the still
‘orthodox’ methods of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like
that already set afoot against the ‘orthodox’ political economists,
should be a ‘literary movement’--a movement from formalism to life.
In order really to know anything about government, you must _see it
alive_; and the object of the writer on politics should be nothing less
than this, to paint government to the life, to make it live again upon
his page.




III

POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY


The conception of political sovereignty is one of those interesting
portions of doctrine which belong in common to several distinct
branches of study. No systematic discussion of any part of the science
of politics can advance very far without it; and it is even more
indispensable to the student of legal systems than to the student of
politics. It is a question central to the life of states and to the
validity of law.

And it is rendered the more interesting by the fact that it is a
critical question, used by all schools alike as a capital test of
orthodoxy. No man who cares a whit about his standing among students of
law or of politics can afford to approach it lightly. Whatever he says
about it he must needs say with a profound sense of responsibility. He
must undertake the discussion of it with the same sort of gravity,
with the same deep sense of personal risk, that the political economist
evinces when he ventures an opinion about Value or hazards a theory
of Distribution. When once he has committed himself to an opinion
concerning it, he may be sure that with a large and influential number
of his fellow-students he can never thereafter pass for a man of
undoubted scholarship or unclouded sense.

If it is awkward, under such circumstances, that the conception should
be so indispensable, it doubtless has the advantage of forcing boldness
upon us. If for nothing else than for the sake of a _modus vivendi_, we
must out with whatever notion it is that we have accepted or invented
with reference to the nature and lodgement of sovereignty. It is, on
the whole, safer to be explicit than to hedge.

And yet it is not easy to be explicit; for there are no suitable terms
to be explicit with. One no sooner begins to examine the field and
the matter of controversy than he begins to suspect that it is all a
question of terminology. After being hurried in bewilderment through
one of Browning’s short poems without being permitted to be quite sure
at any point of the full meaning, we are led in our disappointment
to wonder, with Mr. Birrell, if it can be the punctuation. In what
we read of sovereignty we are led to wonder if it can be the _words_
that confuse us. It must be evident to every one who has not been
sophisticated by the terms themselves, or committed beyond retrieval by
the controversial use of them, that when, for example, the people of
the United States and the Czar of Russia are put together in the same
class as sovereigns, language has been forced to a very artificial use,
and one term made to cover radically different things. There is clearly
a striking contrast between these two sovereigns, in character, in
method, and in power. Doubtless an excellent way by which to enter our
subject would be through an examination of this difference. But another
way is more direct.

Let us begin with an accepted definition of sovereignty. It is
both decent and convenient to take that of Austin, that celebrated
definition which he received through Bentham from Hobbes. Austin
conceived a sovereign very concretely, as a person or body of persons
existing in an independent political society and accorded the habitual
obedience of the bulk of the members of that society, while itself
subordinate to no political superior. Law he defined to be the explicit
or implicit command of such a person or body of persons, addressed to
the members of the community, its inferiors or subjects. He took it for
granted that in every independent community supreme political authority
did actually vest in some such determinate sovereign person or body of
persons.

By the very term used to describe it, moreover, this sovereignty
is supremacy--is subject to no limitation. Every law is a command,
not only, but the command of a supreme authority; and it would be a
singular contradiction in terms to speak of this supreme power as
limited by law. How can the supreme author of law within a state
himself be subject to law: how can the creature bind the creator?
How can one refrain from smiling at the logical incapacity of those
who speak of limitations to sovereignty, or, more absurdly still, of
divisions of sovereignty? Is there a hierarchy of supremacies: can
there be a co-ordination of creators?

Austin had studied in Bonn while it was the residence of such men as
Niebuhr, Schlegel, Arndt, Welcher, Mackeldey, and Heffter, and at a
period when controversy touching some of the fundamental questions
concerning the province and method of jurisprudence was in its keen
youth. His thought was mature, indeed, before he went abroad, and
nature had very imperatively commanded of what sort that thought
should be by giving him a mind framed for abstract conception and
sharp logical processes; but contact with German thinking contributed
many important elements to his mental equipment. Thibaut became
scarcely less his master than Bentham. It was inevitable that it
should be Thibaut rather than Savigny. Savigny believed that all
law was rooted in old habit, and that legislation could modify law
successfully and beneficially only by consenting to the secondary
_rôle_ of supplementing, formulating, or at most guiding custom. He
was at weapons drawn with the school of Thibaut, which proposed to
lay legislative hands on the entire body of German law, make a code
which should be common to all the German States, and so help to make
Germany a national unit. To attempt thus to systematize law, where by
natural development it was unsystematic, seemed to Savigny a deliberate
effort to render it artificial. Law, he maintained, did not often
grow into a logical system, but was the product of daily accretions
of habit and sluggish formations of thought, which followed no system
of philosophy. It was not the business of legal science to force it
into logical categories; it was its function, rather, to give a clear
explanation of the principles and order of its life and a satisfactory
working analysis of its several parts and conceptions. Thibaut, on the
other hand, believed it to be the legitimate function of the jurist to
make piecemeal law up into organic wholes, rendering it clear where it
had been obscure, correcting its inconsistencies, trimming away its
irregularities, reducing the number of its exceptional provisions,
discovering and filling in its gaps, running it through with threads
of system, giving it elegance of style and completeness of method.
He thought it possible to change law from a system of habits into a
system of commands. These were, of course, the ideas which were most
attractive, most congenial, to the mind of Austin.

But, however natural such conceptions may have been to Austin, it
must certainly be regarded as singular that, although rejected on
the Continent, where sovereignty had throughout the most important
formative periods of European history been quite unequivocally lodged
in unmistakable sovereigns, these notions should have been accepted in
England, the land where law had been least subject to doctrine, most
observant of times and circumstances, most piecemeal in its manner of
construction, least like a set of commands, and most like a set of
habits and conventions. Doubtless we are to remember, however, that
the feudal theory of law had long been held with perfect confidence by
English lawyers in calm despite of fact. Probably it is true that the
English mind (our own), with its practical habit, likes nice systems
well enough because of their appearance of completeness, has a sense of
order which enjoys logic, without having any curiosity or capacity for
the examination of premises. The Englishman has always been found ready
to accept, from those who had the leisure to amuse themselves in that
way, interesting explanations of his institutions which did not at all
fit the actual facts. It has caused him no inconvenience, for he has
not perceived the lack of adjustment between his actual transactions
and the theory he has accepted concerning them. He has, of course, not
troubled himself to alter his institutions to suit his philosophy. That
philosophy satisfied his thought and inconvenienced neither Parliament
nor the law courts. And so he had no doubt Austin was right.

Austin’s logic is unrelenting, and the loyalty of his followers
unflinching. Sir Henry Maine having shown that throughout the greater
part of history the world has been full of independent political
societies possessing no law-making sovereign at all, and it having
become notorious that legislation has everywhere played a late and
comparatively subordinate part in the production of law, the latest
writers of the Austinian school have reduced jurisprudence to a merely
formal science, professing to care nothing for the actual manner in
which law may originate, nothing even for most of the motives which
induce men to obey law, provided you will but concede that there is,
among a great many other imperative motives, one which is universally
operative, namely, the fear of the compulsion of physical force, and
that there is at least one sovereign function, namely, the application
of that physical force in the carrying out of the law. They ask to be
allowed to confine themselves to such a definition of positive law as
will limit it to “rules which are _enforced_ by a political superior in
his capacity as such.” They take for their province only a systematic
description of the forms and method “of the influence of government
upon human conduct” through the operation of law. They thus virtually
abandon the attempt to find any universal doctrines respecting the
_rôle_ of government as a _maker_ of laws. For them government is not
a creative agent, but only an instrumentality for the effectuation of
legal rules already in existence. So hard is the principle of life
to get at that they give over all attempts to find it, and, turning
away from the larger topics of the biology, restrict themselves to the
morphology, of law.

When it came to pointing out the body of persons with which sovereignty
was lodged in particular states of complex constitutional structure,
Austin was sometimes very unsatisfactory. Sovereignty is lodged in
England, he says, in the king, the peers, and--_not_ the House of
Commons, but--the electorate. For he holds the House of Commons to be
merely a trustee of the electors, notwithstanding the fact that the
electors exercise their right of franchise under laws which Parliament
itself enacted and may change. In the United States he “believes” it to
be lodged “in the States’ governments, as forming an aggregate body;”
and he explains that by the government of a State he does not mean its
“ordinary legislature, but the body of its citizens which appoints
its ordinary legislature, and which, the Union apart, is properly
sovereign therein.” Apparently he is led thus to go back of the House
of Commons and the legislatures of our States to the electorates by
which they are chosen, because of his conception of sovereignty as
_unlimited_. If he stopped short of the electors, some part of his
sovereign body would be subject to political superiors. If he were to
go beyond the electors, to the larger body of the people--to the women
and the children and the men who cannot vote--he would come upon, not a
“determinate,” but an indeterminate body of persons.

Our own writers, however, having made bold to embrace the dogma of
popular sovereignty with a certain fervor of patriotism, have no
hesitation about taking the additional step. They maintain, with
Lieber, that “according to the views of free men,” sovereignty “can
dwell with society, the nation, only.” Writers like the late Judge
Jameson, of Chicago, declare that they have very definite ideas of what
this means. They think that Mr. Bryce expounded the doctrine when he
wrote his chapter on “Government by Public Opinion.” “When the true
sovereign has spoken,” says Judge Jameson, “at public meetings, by the
press, or by personal argument or solicitation, the electorate, when
it acts, either registers the behests of the people or ceases betimes
further to represent them.” “The pressure of public opinion consciously
brought to bear upon the electorate,” he declares to be, even when
“inarticulate” (whatever inarticulate pressure may be), “a clear and
legitimate exercise of sovereign power;” and he thinks that Mr. Herbert
Spencer meant the same thing when he declared that “that which, from
hour to hour, in every country, governed despotically or otherwise,
produces the obedience making political action possible, is the
accumulated and organized sentiment felt towards inherited institutions
made sacred by tradition,” inasmuch as Mr. Spencer proceeds to say
with all plainness, “Hence it is undeniable that, taken in its widest
acceptation, the feeling of the community is the sole source of
political power; in those communities, at least, which are not under
foreign domination. It is so at the outset of social life, and it still
continues substantially so.” And yet, if Mr. Spencer means the same
thing that Judge Jameson means, what are we to think of the present
fraternization of France and Russia? If the people be sovereign
in France and the Czar sovereign in Russia, it is doubtless quite
conceivable that one sovereign should love another; but if it be true,
as Judge Jameson makes Mr. Spencer say, that it is the people, even
in Russia, who are after all sovereign, what are we to think of the
fondness of the French sovereign for a government which is holding the
Russian sovereign in subjection? If this be correct thinking, it puts
us into awkward quandaries, troubling our logic as well as condemning
our lives.

Apply this doctrine of our masters in American law to our actual
political conditions, and see how far it simplifies the matter.
In the United States (so runs the orthodox creed) the People is
sovereign.--the verb is singular because the people, under this
doctrine, constitute a unit. And yet it is notorious that they never
have acted as a unit, nor ever can act as a unit under our existing
constitution. They have always acted, and must always act, in state
groups. And in state groups what action do they take? They assent to
constitutional provisions, or refuse to assent to them; and they
select certain persons to act as law-makers, as judges, or as executive
officers of government. Do they choose policies? No. Do they frame
constitutional provisions? Certainly not; they only accept or reject
them. In the only case in which they speak directly concerning specific
provisions of law, they neither command nor originate. They receive
or decline what is offered them. They must wait until they are asked.
They have neither initiative nor opportunity to construct. They must be
consulted concerning government, but they do not conduct it.

Nor is it otherwise, upon last analysis, in Switzerland, where the
_Referendum_ exists, where, that is, the people vote upon specific
measures of ordinary legislation not only, but where they are also
provided with means of imperative initiative in legislation. By
petitions bearing a certain large number of signatures they can propose
definite legislation, compel action upon the matter of their petitions
by their legislatures, and an ultimate submission of the question to
popular vote. But see what this is, when examined. The eyes of the
community, the men of observation and progress, get up a petition;
that is, an indeterminate body and a minority demand that certain laws
be formulated and put to the vote. The thing is done, but the measure
defeated, let us suppose, at the polls. The eyes of the community have
desired certain things, have offered them to the slow digestive organs,
and they have been rejected. Are the digestive organs, then, sovereign,
and not the initiative parts, the eyes and the reason? Is it sovereign
to stomach a thing, and not sovereign to purpose a thing?

But turn the chase in another direction, if peradventure we may yet run
the sovereign people to cover. The more absolute democratic theorists
decline to restrict the sovereign body to the electorate, to those who
have formal votes. Voters are simply the agents of the community, they
say. The press and the pulpit, the private argument and the curtain
lecture, command--voters, if they are faithful, obey. Others, no less
democratic, but more precise, seek for a more determinate body, content
themselves with the qualified voters, and think with relief that all
difficulties are removed. The electorate is sovereign.

But is the electorate a more determinate body than the population?
Does registration afford us any more certain results than the census
yields? Do the electors act in determinate numbers? Is there a quorum?
Have they any choice but to act under the forms and within the limits
assigned by law? Can they command without invitation, or assent without
suggestion? Are not the agencies which Judge Jameson calls sovereign
after all more active, more self-directed, freer to criticise, to
suggest, to insist? The newspapers, the clergymen, the mass-meeting
orators, the urgent friends, the restless, ambitious wives, the pert
and forward children can at any rate keep on talking in the intervals,
when the electors are reduced to silence, patiently awaiting an
opportunity to vote. Certainly, if we can accept this miscellaneous
sovereign of men-women-and-children, the history of sovereignty is much
simplified. This determinate body of persons, the free population, is
always present, and always has been present, under all constitutions.
All that we have to inquire is, What means had they for expressing
their will? How were their dispositions and judgments made to tell upon
the consciousness of those who framed the laws? True, this sovereign
body has its points of resemblance to the god Baal. Those who call upon
it call in vain, if it be not the season appointed for voting; there is
no voice, nor any that answer, nor any that regardeth. No fire consumes
the sacrifice. Perhaps the People is talking, or is pursuing, or is in
a journey, or peradventure it sleepeth, and must be awaked.

Surely this is a singular undertaking, this mad pursuit of a sovereign
amidst the obvious phenomena of politics! If laws be indeed commands,
the commands of a determinate person or body of persons, it ought to
be possible to discover this determinate source of authority without
much curious research. And yet it would seem that it demands ingenious
analysis. Look how uneasily Mr. Sidgwick casts about in the last
chapter of his recent “Elements of Politics,” to find Supreme Political
Power--which is his name for sovereignty. He has been looking forward
to this inquiry, not without nervousness, throughout the chapters which
precede. Political power is exercised, he perceives, through some organ
of government; but he cannot conceive that the power of this organ
is its own power. He engages in a study of dynamics. What moves this
organ: whence does it derive its power? How is it influenced? Is it
itself commanded, overawed, constrained from any quarter? This is a
door to the metaphysics of government. Taking a prince as a simple and
normal organ of government, he analyzes the subjection of princes to
their ministers, to priests, to mistresses, to the violent protests
of an insubordinate people. No influence that the prince can throw
off without losing his own authority, he thinks, can be a sovereign
influence; but any influence which can threaten his power if he resists
is a sovereign influence, the true depository of supreme political
power. Sovereignty thus becomes a catalogue of influences.

Can we accept these singular processes? If a physicist were to discard
all the separate laws, all the differential analysis of his science,
and were to reduce its entire body of principles to some general
statement of the correlation of forces, he would hardly be conceived to
have done physics a service. If in our study of anatomy we should turn
away from structural adjustment and functional force to take account
of the thousand and one influences which in individual cases affect
the organs from without, we should obviously be abandoning the science
itself. It seems to me that we do a very like thing if, in studying
the structural forces and organic actions of society, its organs of
origination and command, its organs of execution, its superior and
its subordinate authorities, its habitual modes of structural life,
we abandon all attempts at differentiation, throw all analysis into
hotch-potch, and reduce everything to terms of the general forces
which mould and govern society as a whole. We confuse our thought
in our effort to simplify it. We lose, we do not gain, by putting
powers of radically different sorts together into the same categories,
and driving them abreast, as if they pulled together, in the same
propositions.

There is no unlimited power, except the sum of all powers. Our legal
theorists have sought unlimited sovereignty by a process of summation;
have made it consist in the combined forces of the community.
Sovereignty, if it be a definite and separable thing at all, is not
unlimited power; is not identical with the powers of the community.
It is not the general vitality of the organism, but the specific
originative power of certain organs. Sovereigns have always been
subject in greater or less degree to the community; have always been
organs of the State; have never been the State itself. But they have
been sovereigns none the less; they, and not the community over which
they presided.

It is necessary, if there is to be any clear thinking at all upon this
subject, to distinguish very sharply two radically different things;
namely, the powers and processes of governing, on the one hand, from
the relations of the people to those powers and processes, on the
other. Those relations are relations of assent and obedience; and the
degree of assent and obedience marks in every case the limits, that
is, the sphere, of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the daily operative
power of framing and giving efficacy to laws. It is the originative,
directive, governing power. It lives; it plans; it executes. It is
the organic origination by the State of its law and policy; and the
sovereign power is the highest originative organ of the State. It is
none the less sovereign because it must be observant of the preferences
of those whom it governs. The obedience of the subject has always
limited the power of the sovereign. “The Eastern politicians never do
anything,” says Burke, “without the opinion of the astrologers on the
fortunate moment.... Statesmen of a more judicious prescience look for
the fortunate moment too; but they seek it, not in the conjunctions
and oppositions of planets, but in the conjunctions and oppositions
of men and things.” This is the covert admission of the Austinian
definition itself: the sovereign power is that to which “the bulk of
the community _is habitually obedient_.” When we discuss, with Mr.
Sidgwick, the influences which tell upon the action of the originative
organs of the State, we are not discussing sovereignty, but the
natural and universal limitations of sovereignty, the structural checks
and balances of the organism. There is no hope for theory if we neglect
these obvious distinctions.

At all times and under all systems there have been two sets of
phenomena visible in government: the phenomena of command and the
phenomena of obedience, the phenomena of governing and the phenomena
of being governed. Obedience, moreover, is not always an automatic or
unconscious thing. It is a submission of the will--an acquiescence
which is either the product of choice, of necessity, or of habit. This
has been observed from the first; was observed by Bodin, from whom we
get our word sovereignty, and much of our conception of the thing,
sovereignty. He perceived that the supremacy of the sovereign--even of
the mediæval French sovereign before his eyes--was in fact limited, the
frontiers of sovereignty being marked by certain antecedent rights, by
divers established prerogatives of property and vested privilege--not a
scientific, but a natural frontier, lying along the old mountains of
habit, the well-known rivers of precedent.

We know that the history of politics has been the history of liberty;
a history of the enlargement of the sphere of independent individual
action at the expense of the sphere of dictatorial authority. It has
revealed a process of differentiation. Certain freedoms of opinion
and utterance, of choice of occupation and of allegiance, of fair
trial and equitable condemnation, have been blocked out as inviolable
territories, lying quite beyond the jurisdiction of political
sovereignty. Beginning with that singular and interesting order of
the classical states of the ancient world, under which the individual
was merged in the community and liberty became identical with a share
in the exercise of the public power, we witness something like a
gradual disintegration, a resolution of the State into its constituent
elements, until at length those who govern and those who are governed
are no longer one and the same, but stand face to face treating with
one another, agreeing upon terms of command and obedience, as at
Runnymede. Conditions of submission have been contested, and, as
liberty has gained upon authority, have been jealously formulated. The
procedure and the prerogatives of authority have been agreed upon;
liberty has encroached upon sovereignty and set bounds to it. The
process is old; only some of its results are new. What both political
philosophers and political revolutionists have sought for time out
of mind has been a final definition for that part of the Austinian
conception which concerns the _habitual obedience_ of the community.
These definitions, in their practical shape as institutions, we now
call constitutions. At last peoples have become conscious of their
relations to the highest powers of the State, and have sought to give
permanence and certainty to those relations by setting the conditions
of their subordination fast in stubborn practices or in the solemn
covenants of written documents. A constitution government has always
had; but not until this latest age these deliberate formulations of
principle and practice which determine the whole organization and
action of the State, the domain of authority, the neutral territory of
liberty, the postulates of obedience.

Constitutions are definitive rather than creative. They sum up
experiences. They register consents. Assuredly Mr. Spencer is right
when he declares that that which in every country, under whatever
system governed, “produces the obedience making political action
possible, is the accumulated and organized sentiment of the community
towards inherited institutions,” and that “the feeling of the community
is the sole source of political power.” But this does not mean what
Judge Jameson reads into it, that sovereignty and the feeling of
the community are one and the same thing; that the conditions of
sovereignty and the exercise of sovereignty are identical. Sovereignty
has at all times and under all systems of government been dependent
upon the temper and disposition of the people. The will of the
community, the inclinations and desires of the body politic as a whole,
are always, in the last analysis, the foundation, as they are also
in many instances the direct and immediate source, of law. But these
preferences of the general body are exercised by way of approval or
disapproval, acquiescence or resistance; they are not agencies of
initial choice. The sanctioning judgments of a people are passive,
dormant, waiting to have things put to them, unable themselves to
suggest anything, because without organs of utterance or suggestion. I
cannot predicate sovereignty of my physical parts, but must ascribe it
to my will, notwithstanding the fact that my physical parts must assent
to the purposes of my will, and that my will is dependent upon their
obedience. The organism unquestionably dominates the organs; but there
are organs, nevertheless, organs of origination, which direct and rule
with a sovereign presidency.

A written constitution adopted by popular vote affords, perhaps, some
of the nicest tests of theory. Here we have the most specific form
of popular assent. In such a document the powers of the government
are explicitly set forth and specifically lodged; and the means by
which they may be differently constituted or bestowed are definitively
determined. Now we know that these documents are the result of
experience, the outcome of a contest of forces, the fruits of struggle.
Nations have taken knowledge of despotism. They have seen authority
abused and have refused to submit; have perceived justice to be
arbitrary and hidden away in secret tribunals, and have insisted
that it be made uniform and open; have seen ministers chosen from
among favorites, and have demanded that they be taken from among
representatives of the people; have found legislation regardful of
classes, and have clamored to have laws made by men selected without
regard to class; have felt obedience irksome because government was
disordered in form and confused in respect of responsibility, and have
insisted that responsibility be fixed and forms of order and publicity
observed. Sometimes only a steady practice has accomplished all this;
sometimes documentary securities have been demanded. These documentary
securities are written constitutions.

It is easy, as it is also impressive, to believe that a written
constitution proceeds from the people, and constitutes their sovereign
behest concerning government. But of course it does not. It proceeds
always either from some ordinary or from some extraordinary organ of
the state; its provisions are the fruit of the debated determinations
of a comparatively small deliberative body, acting usually under
some form of legal commission. It is accepted as a whole and without
discrimination by the diffused, undeliberative body of voters.

What confuses our view is the fact that these formal documentary
statements of the kinds and degrees of obedience to which the people
assent, the methods of power to which they submit, the sort of
responsibility upon which they insist, have become, from the very
necessity of their nature, a distinct and superior sort of precise and
positive law. We seek the sovereign who utters them. But they are not
the utterances of a sovereign. They are the covenants of a community.
Time out of mind communities have made covenants with their sovereigns.
When despotism in France was ‘tempered by epigram,’ the sharp tongues
of the wits spoke, after a sort, the constitution of the country,--a
positive law whose sanction was ridicule. But the wits were not
sovereign; the _salons_ did not conduct government. Our written
constitutions are only very formal statements of the standards to which
the people, upon whom government depends for support, will hold those
who exercise the sovereign power.

I do not, of course, deny the power of the people. Ultimately they
condition the action of those who govern; and it is salutary that it
should be so. It is wise also, if it be not indispensable, that the
extent and manner of their control should be explicitly set forth
and definitively agreed upon in documents of unmistakable tenor. I
say simply that such control is no new thing. It is only the precise
formulation of it that is new.

If it seem to be after all a question of words, a little closer
scrutiny will disclose the fact that it is much more than that. Mr.
Ritchie, of Oxford University, in an able article on “The Conception
of Sovereignty,” contributed to the _Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science_ (January, 1891), perceiving some part
of the distinction that I have pointed out, and wishing to realize
it in his thought, proposes to distinguish three several kinds of
sovereigns: viz. a nominal sovereign--the English queen, for example;
a legal sovereign--the law-making body; and a political sovereign--the
voters, whom we might call the sovereign of appeal. But why not confine
ourselves to substantives, if we may, and avoid the quicksands of
adjectives? Sovereignty is something quite definite; so also is power;
so also is control. Sovereignty is the highest political power in
the state, lodged in active organs, for the purposes of governing.
Sovereign power is a positive thing; control a negative thing. Power
belongs to government, is lodged in organs of initiative; control
belongs to the community, is lodged with the voters. To call these two
things by the same name is simply to impoverish language by making one
word serve for a variety of meanings.

It is never easy to point out in our complex modern governments the
exact organs in which sovereignty is lodged. On the whole, however, it
is always safe to ascribe sovereignty to the highest originative or
law-making body of the state,--the body by whose determinations both
the tasks to be carried out by the Administration and the rules to be
applied by the courts are fixed and warranted. Even where the courts
utter authoritative interpretations of what we call the fundamental
law--the law that is embodied in constitutions--they are rather the
organs through which the limitations of sovereignty are determined
than organs of sovereignty itself. They declare the principles of that
higher, constituent law which is set above sovereignty, which expresses
the restrictions set about the exercise of sovereign authority.
Such restrictions exist in all states, but they are given definite
formulation only in some. As for the Executive, that is the agent, not
the organ, of sovereignty.

But, even if it be comparatively easy thus to fix upon the organs of
sovereignty in a unitary state, what shall we say of a federal state?
How apply our analysis to that? One is tempted to declare, with Dr.
Merkel, of Strassburg, that federal states give direct contradiction
of fact to prevailing theories respecting the necessity for unity
of power, indivisibility of sovereignty. Here, as he says, we have
organs and authorities in possession of powers exclusively their own,
for the furtherance of functions necessary to the ends of the state
as a whole, existing side by side with organs also in full possession
of powers exclusively their own, for the furtherance of the local
and special functions of the member states. We know, moreover, that
these two sets of organs are in fact co-ordinate; that the powers of
the states were not derived from the federal authority, were even
antecedent to the powers of the federal government, and historically
quite independent of them. And yet no one who ponders either the life
or the formal structure of a federal state can fail to perceive that
there is, after all, an essential unity in it, the virtual creation of
a central sovereignty. The constituent act--the manner in which the
government was created--can, I conceive, have nothing to do with our
analysis in this matter. The way in which the federal state came into
existence is immaterial to the question of sovereignty within it after
it has been created. Originative life and action, the characteristic
attributes of sovereignty, come after that. Character and choice are
postponed to birth, sovereignty to the creation of the body politic.
The constituent act creates a thing capable of exercising sovereignty.
After the creative law has done its part, by whatever process, then the
functions of independent life begin. Thereafter, in all federal states,
even the amendment of the fundamental law becomes an organic act,
depending, practically without exception, upon the initiative of the
chief originative organ of the federal state. Confederations are here
out of the question. They are, of course, associations of sovereigns.
In the federal state self-determination with respect to their law as
a whole has been lost by the member states. They cannot extend, they
cannot even determine, their own powers conclusively without appeal to
the federal authorities. They are unquestionably subject to a political
superior. They are fused, subordinated, dominated. Though they do not
exercise their powers by virtue of delegation, though their powers are
indeed inherent and in a very important sense independent, they are
yet inferior to a body whose own powers are in reality self-determined,
however much that self-determination may be hedged about and clogged
by the forms of the fundamental federal law. They are still states,
because their powers are original and inherent, not derivative; because
their political rights are not also legal duties; and because they
can apply to their commands the full imperative sanctions of law.
But their sphere is limited by the presiding and sovereign powers
of a state superordinated to them, the extent of whose authority is
determined, under constitutional forms and guarantees, by itself. They
have dominion; but it has sovereignty. For with the federal state lie
the highest powers of originative legal determination, the ultimate
authority to warrant change and sanction jurisdiction.

Our thought is embarrassed throughout such an analysis by the very
fact which invalidates the Austinian conception and makes a fresh
analysis necessary. Very little law literally originates in command,
though its formulation and enforcement must unquestionably be effected
through the commanding authorities of the state. It is their function
to direct, to lead, rather than to command. They originate forms,
but they do not discover principles. In a very profound sense law
proceeds from the community. It is the result of its undeliberate
as well as of its deliberate developments, of its struggles, class
against class, interest against interest, and of its compromises and
adjustments of opinion. It follows, slowly, its ethical judgments, more
promptly its material necessities. But law issues thus from the body
of the community only in vague and inchoate form. It must be taken
out of the sphere of voluntary and uncertain action and made precise
and invariable. It becomes positive law by receiving definition and
being backed by an active and recognized power within the state. The
sovereign organ of a state is, therefore, very properly said to be
its law-_making_ organ. It transmutes selected tendencies into stiff
and urgent rules. It exercises a sovereign choice in so doing. It
determines which tendencies shall be accepted, which checked and denied
efficacy. It forms the purposes of the state, avoiding revolution if
it form them wisely and with a true insight. This is sovereignty:--to
sit at the helm and steer, marking out such free courses for the
stanch craft as wind and weather will permit. This is the only sort of
sovereignty that can be exercised in human affairs. But the pilot is
sovereign, and not the weather.




IV

CHARACTER OF DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES


Everything apprises us of the fact that we are not the same nation
now that we were when the government was formed. In looking back to
that time, the impression is inevitable that we started with sundry
wrong ideas about ourselves. We deemed ourselves rank democrats,
whereas we were in fact only progressive Englishmen. Turn the leaves
of that sage manual of constitutional interpretation and advocacy, the
_Federalist_, and note the perverse tendency of its writers to refer
to Greece and Rome for precedents,--that Greece and Rome which haunted
all our earlier and even some of our more mature years. Recall, too,
that familiar story of Daniel Webster which tells of his coming home
exhausted from an interview with the first President-elect Harrison,
whose Secretary of State he was to be, and explaining that he had been
obliged in the course of the conference, which concerned the inaugural
address about to be delivered, to kill nine Roman consuls whom it had
been the intention of the good conqueror of Tippecanoe publicly to take
into office with him. The truth is that we long imagined ourselves
related in some unexplained way to all ancient republicans. Strangely
enough, too, we at the same time accepted the quite incompatible theory
that we were related also to the French philosophical radicals. We
claimed kinship with democrats everywhere,--with all democrats. We can
now scarcely realize the atmosphere of such thoughts. We are no longer
wont to refer to the ancients or to the French for sanction of what we
do. We have had abundant experience of our own by which to reckon.

“Hardly any fact in history,” says Mr. Bagehot, writing about the
middle of the century, “is so incredible as that forty and a few
years ago England was ruled by Mr. Perceval. It seems almost the same
as being ruled by the _Record_ newspaper.” (Mr. Bagehot would now
probably say the _Standard_ newspaper.) “He had the same poorness
of thought, the same petty conservatism, the same dark and narrow
superstition.” “The mere fact of such a premier being endured shows
how deeply the whole national spirit and interest was absorbed in the
contest with Napoleon, how little we understood the sort of man who
should regulate its conduct,--‘in the crisis of Europe,’ as Sydney
Smith said, ‘he safely brought the Curates’ Salaries Improvement Bill
to a hearing;’ and it still more shows the horror of all innovation
which the recent events of French history had impressed on our wealthy
and comfortable classes. They were afraid of catching revolution, as
old women of catching cold. Sir Archibald Alison to this day holds that
revolution is an infectious disease, beginning no one knows how, and
going on no one knows where. There is but one rule of escape, explains
the great historian: ‘Stay still; don’t move; do what you have been
accustomed to do; and consult your grandmother on everything.’”

Almost equally incredible to us is the ardor of revolution that filled
the world in those first days of our national life,--the fact that one
of the rulers of the world’s mind in that generation was Rousseau, the
apostle of all that is fanciful, unreal, and misleading in politics.
To be ruled by him was like taking an account of life from Mr. Rider
Haggard. And yet there is still much sympathy in this timid world
for the dull people who felt safe in the hands of Mr. Perceval, and,
happily, much sympathy also, though little justification, for such as
caught a generous elevation of spirit from the speculative enthusiasm
of Rousseau.

For us who stand in the dusty matter-of-fact world of to-day, there
is a touch of pathos in recollections of the ardor for democratic
liberty that filled the air of Europe and America a century ago with
such quickening influences. We may sometimes catch ourselves regretting
that the inoculations of experience have closed our systems against the
infections of hopeful revolution.

    “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven! O times
    In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
    Of custom, law, and statute took at once
    The attraction of a country in romance!
    When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
    When most intent on making of herself
    A prime Enchantress, to assist the work
    Which then was going forward in her name!
    Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth,
    The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
    (As at some moment might not be unfelt
    Among the bowers of paradise itself)
    The budding rose above the rose full blown.”

Such was the inspiration which not Wordsworth alone, but Coleridge
also, and many another generous spirit whom we love, caught in that day
of hope.

It is common to say, in explanation of our regret that the dawn and
youth of democracy’s day are past, that our principles are cooler now
and more circumspect, with the coolness and circumspection of advanced
years. It seems to some that our enthusiasms have become tamer and
more decorous because our sinews have hardened; that as experience
has grown idealism has declined. But to speak thus is to speak with
the old self-deception as to the character of our politics. If we are
suffering disappointment, it is the disappointment of an awakening:
we were dreaming. For we never had any business hearkening to Rousseau
or consorting with Europe in revolutionary sentiment. The government
which we founded one hundred years ago was no type of an experiment in
advanced democracy, as we allowed Europe and even ourselves to suppose;
it was simply an adaptation of English constitutional government. If
we suffered Europe to study our institutions as instances in point
touching experimentation in politics, she was the more deceived. If
we began the first century of our national existence under a similar
impression ourselves, there is the greater reason why we should start
out upon a new century of national life with more accurate conceptions.

To this end it is important that the following, among other things,
should be kept prominently in mind:--

(1.) That there are certain influences astir in this century which
make for democracy the world over, and that these influences owe their
origin in part to the radical thought of the last century; but that it
was not such forces that made us democratic, nor are we responsible
for them.

(2.) That, so far from owing our governments to these general
influences, we began, not by carrying out any theory, but by simply
carrying out a history,--inventing nothing, only establishing a
specialized species of English government; that we founded, not
democracy, but constitutional government in America.

(3.) That the government which we thus set up in a perfectly normal
manner has nevertheless changed greatly under our hands, by reason both
of growth and of the operation of the general democratic forces,--the
European, or rather worldwide, democratic forces of which I have spoken.

(4.) That two things, the great size to which our governmental organism
has attained, and, still more, this recent exposure of its character
and purposes to the common democratic forces of the age of steam and
electricity, have created new problems of organization, which it
behooves us to meet in the old spirit, but with new measures.


I.

First, then, for the forces which are bringing in democratic temper
and method the world over. It is matter of familiar knowledge what
these forces are, but it will be profitable to our thought to pass them
once more in review. They are freedom of thought and the diffusion of
enlightenment among the people. Steam and electricity have co-operated
with systematic popular education to accomplish this diffusion. The
progress of popular education and the progress of democracy have been
inseparable. The publication of their great encyclopædia by Diderot and
his associates in France in the last century, was the sure sign of the
change that was setting in. Learning was turning its face away from the
studious few towards the curious many. The intellectual movement of the
modern time was emerging from the narrow courses of scholastic thought,
and beginning to spread itself abroad over the extended, if shallow,
levels of the common mind. The serious forces of democracy will be
found, upon analysis, to reside, not in the disturbing doctrines of
eloquent revolutionary writers, not in the turbulent discontent of
the pauperized and oppressed, so much as in the educational forces of
the last hundred and fifty years, which have elevated the masses in
many countries to a plane of understanding and of orderly, intelligent
purpose more nearly on a level with the average man of the classes that
have hitherto been permitted to govern. The movements towards democracy
which have mastered all the other political tendencies of our day are
not older than the middle of the last century; and that is just the age
of the now ascendant movement toward systematic popular education.

Yet organized popular education is only one of the quickening
influences that have been producing the general enlightenment which
is everywhere becoming the promise of general liberty. Rather, it is
only part of a great whole, vastly larger than itself. Schools are but
separated seed-beds, in which the staple thoughts of the steady and
stay-at-home people are prepared and nursed. Not much of the world,
moreover, goes to school in the school house. But through the mighty
influences of commerce and the press the world itself has become a
school. The air is alive with the multitudinous voices of information.
Steady trade winds of intercommunication have sprung up which carry the
seeds of education and enlightenment, wheresoever planted, to every
quarter of the globe. No scrap of new thought can escape being borne
away from its place of birth by these all-absorbing currents. No idea
can be kept exclusively at home, but is taken up by the trader, the
reporter, the traveller, the missionary, the explorer, and is given to
all the world, in the newspaper, the novel, the memoir, the poem, the
treatise, till every community may know, not only itself, but all the
world as well, for the small price of learning to read and keeping its
ears open. All the world, so far as its news and its most insistent
thoughts are concerned, is fast being made every man’s neighbor.

Carlyle unquestionably touched one of the obvious truths concerning
modern democracy when he declared it to be the result of printing. In
the newspaper press a whole population is made critic of all human
affairs; democracy is “virtually extant,” and “democracy virtually
extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.” Looked at in the
large, the newspaper press is a type of democracy, bringing all men
without distinction under comment made by any man without distinction;
every topic is reduced to a common standard of news; everything is
noted and argued about by everybody. Nothing could give surer promise
of popular power than the activity and alertness of thought which are
made through such agencies to accompany the training of the public
schools. The activity may often be misdirected or unwholesome, may
sometimes be only feverish and mischievous, a grievous product of
narrow information and hasty conclusion; but it is none the less a
stirring and potent activity. It at least marks the initial stages of
effective thought. It makes men conscious of the existence and interest
of affairs lying outside the dull round of their own daily lives. It
gives them nations, instead of neighborhoods, to look upon and think
about. They catch glimpses of the international connections of their
trades, of the universal application of law, of the endless variety
of life, of diversities of race, of a world teeming with men like
themselves, and yet full of strange customs, puzzled by dim omens,
stained by crime, ringing with voices familiar and unfamiliar.

And all this a man can nowadays get without stirring from home, by
merely spelling out the print that covers every piece of paper about
him. If men are thrown, for any reason, into the swift and easy
currents of travel, they find themselves brought daily face to face
with persons native of every clime, with practices suggestive of whole
histories, with a thousand things which challenge curiosity, inevitably
provoking inquiries such as enlarge knowledge of life and shake the
mind imperatively loose from old preconceptions.

These are the forces which have established the drift towards
democracy. When all sources of information are accessible to all men
alike, when the world’s thought and the world’s news are scattered
broadcast where the poorest may find them, the non-democratic forms
of government must find life a desperate venture. Exclusive privilege
needs privacy, but cannot have it. Kingship of the elder patterns needs
sanctity, but can find it nowhere obtainable in a world of news items
and satisfied curiosity. The many will no longer receive submissively
the thought of a ruling few, but insist upon having opinions of their
own. The reaches of public opinion have been infinitely extended; the
number of voices that must be heeded in legislation and in executive
policy has been infinitely multiplied. Modern influences have inclined
every man to clear his throat for a word in the world’s debates. They
have popularized everything they have touched.

In the newspapers, it is true, there is very little concert between the
writers; little but piecemeal opinion is created by their comment and
argument; there is no common voice amidst their counsellings. But the
aggregate voice thunders with tremendous volume; and that aggregate
voice is ‘public opinion.’ Popular education and cheap printing and
travel vastly thicken the ranks of thinkers everywhere that their
influence is felt, and by rousing the multitude to take knowledge of
the affairs of government prepare the time when the multitude will, so
far as possible, take charge of the affairs of government,--the time
when, to repeat Carlyle’s phrase, democracy will become palpably extant.

But, mighty as such forces are, democratic as they are, no one can fail
to perceive that they are inadequate to produce of themselves such a
government as ours. There is little in them of constructive efficacy.
They could not of themselves build any government at all. They are
critical, analytical, questioning, quizzing forces; not architectural,
not powers that devise and build. The influences of popular education,
of the press, of travel, of commerce, of the innumerable agencies which
nowadays send knowledge and thought in quick pulsations through every
part and member of society, do not necessarily mould men for effective
endeavor. They may only confuse and paralyze the mind with their myriad
stinging lashes of excitement. They may only strengthen the impression
that “the world’s a stage,” and that no one need do more than sit
and look on through his ready glass, the newspaper. They overwhelm
one with impressions, but do they give stalwartness to his manhood?
Do they make his hand any steadier on the plough, or his purpose any
clearer with reference to the duties of the moment? They stream light
about him, it may be, but do they clear his vision? Is he better able
to see because they give him countless things to look at? Is he better
able to judge because they fill him with a delusive sense of knowing
everything? Activity of mind is not necessarily strength of mind. It
may manifest itself in mere dumb show; it may run into jigs as well as
into strenuous work at noble tasks. A man’s farm does not yield its
fruits the more abundantly in their season because he reads the world’s
news in the papers. A merchant’s shipments do not multiply because he
studies history. Banking is none the less hazardous to the banker’s
capital and taxing to his powers because the best writing of the best
essayists is to be bought cheap.


II.

Very different were the forces behind us. Nothing establishes the
republican state save trained capacity for self-government, practical
aptitude for public affairs, habitual soberness and temperateness
of united action. When we look back to the moderate sagacity and
steadfast, self-contained habit in self-government of the men to whom
we owe the establishment of our institutions in the United States,
we are at once made aware that there is no communion between their
democracy and the radical thought and restless spirit called by that
name in Europe. There is almost nothing in common between popular
outbreaks such as took place in France at her great Revolution and
the establishment of a government like our own. Our memories of the
year 1789 are as far as possible removed from the memories which
Europe retains of that pregnant year. We manifested one hundred
years ago what Europe lost, namely, self-command, self-possession.
Democracy in Europe, outside of closeted Switzerland, has acted always
in rebellion, as a destructive force: it can scarcely be said to
have had, even yet, any period of organic development. It has built
such temporary governments as it has had opportunity to erect on the
old foundations and out of the discredited materials of centralized
rule, elevating the people’s representatives for a season to the
throne, but securing almost as little as ever of that every-day local
self-government which lies so near to the heart of liberty. Democracy
in America, on the other hand, and in the English colonies has had,
almost from the first, a truly organic growth. There was nothing
revolutionary in its movements; it had not to overthrow other polities;
it had only to organize itself. It had not to create, but only to
expand, self-government. It did not need to spread propaganda: it
needed nothing but to methodize its ways of living.

In brief, we were doing nothing essentially new a century ago. Our
strength and our facility alike inhered in our traditions; those
traditions made our character and shaped our institutions. Liberty
is not something that can be created by a document; neither is it
something which, when created, can be laid away in a document, a
completed work. It is an organic principle,--a principle of life,
renewing and being renewed. Democratic institutions are never done;
they are like living tissue, always a-making. It is a strenuous thing,
this of living the life of a free people; and our success in it depends
upon training, not upon clever invention.

Our democracy, plainly, was not a body of doctrine; it was a stage of
development. Our democratic state was not a piece of developed theory,
but a piece of developed habit. It was not created by mere aspirations
or by new faith; it was built up by slow custom. Its process was
experience, its basis old wont, its meaning national organic oneness
and effective life. It came, like manhood, as the fruit of youth. An
immature people could not have had it, and the maturity to which it
was vouchsafed was the maturity of freedom and self-control. Such
government as ours is a form of conduct, and its only stable foundation
is character. A particular form of government may no more be adopted
than a particular type of character maybe adopted: both institutions
and character must be developed by conscious effort and through
transmitted aptitudes.

Governments such as ours are founded upon discussion, and government
by discussion comes as late in political as scientific thought in
intellectual development. It is a habit of state life created by
long-established circumstance, and is possible for a nation only in the
adult age of its political life. The people who successfully maintain
such a government must have gone through a period of political training
which shall have prepared them by gradual steps of acquired privilege
for assuming the entire control of their affairs. Long and slowly
widening experience in local self-direction must have prepared them for
national self-direction. They must have acquired adult self-reliance,
self-knowledge, and self-control, adult soberness and deliberateness of
judgment, adult sagacity in self-government, adult vigilance of thought
and quickness of insight. When practised, not by small communities, but
by wide nations, democracy, far from being a crude form of government,
is possible only amongst peoples of the highest and steadiest political
habit. It is the heritage of races purged alike of hasty barbaric
passions and of patient servility to rulers, and schooled in temperate
common counsel. It is an institution of political noonday, not of the
half-light of political dawn. It can never be made to sit easily or
safely on first generations, but strengthens through long heredity. It
is poison to the infant, but tonic to the man. Monarchies may be made,
but democracies must grow.

It is a deeply significant fact, therefore, again and again to be
called to mind, that only in the United States, in a few other
governments begotten of the English race, and in Switzerland, where
old Teutonic habit has had the same persistency as in England, have
examples yet been furnished of successful democracy of the modern type.
England herself is close upon democracy. Her backwardness in entering
upon its full practice is no less instructive as to the conditions
prerequisite to democracy than is the forwardness of her offspring.
She sent out to all her colonies which escaped the luckless beginning
of being made penal settlements, comparatively small, homogeneous
populations of pioneers, with strong instincts of self-government, and
with no social materials out of which to build government otherwise
than democratically. She herself, meanwhile, retained masses of
population never habituated to participation in government, untaught in
political principle either by the teachers of the hustings or of the
school house. She has had to approach democracy, therefore, by slow
and cautious extensions of the franchise to those prepared for it;
while her better colonies, born into democracy, have had to receive all
comers within their pale. She has been paring down exclusive privileges
and levelling classes; the colonies have from the first been asylums of
civil equality. They have assimilated new while she has prepared old
populations.

Erroneous as it is to represent government as only a commonplace
sort of business, little elevated in method above merchandising, and
to be regulated by counting-house principles, the favor easily won
for such views among our own people is very significant. It means
self-reliance in government. It gives voice to the eminently modern
democratic feeling that government is no hidden cult, to be left to a
few specially prepared individuals, but a common, every-day concern of
life, even if the biggest such concern. It is this self-confidence, in
many cases mistaken, no doubt, which is gradually spreading among other
peoples, less justified in it than are our own.

One cannot help marvelling that facts so obvious as these should have
escaped the perception of some of the sagest thinkers and most thorough
historical scholars of our day. Yet so it is. Sir Henry Maine, even,
the great interpreter to Englishmen of the historical forces operative
in law and social institutions, has utterly failed, in his plausible
work on _Popular Government_, to distinguish the democracy, or rather
the popular government, of the English race, which is bred by slow
circumstance and founded upon habit, from the democracy of other
peoples, which is bred by discontent and founded upon revolution.
He has missed that most obvious teaching of events, that successful
democracy differs from unsuccessful in being a product of history,--a
product of forces not suddenly become operative, but slowly working
upon whole peoples for generations together. The level of democracy is
the level of every-day habit, the level of common national experiences,
and lies far below the elevations of ecstasy to which the revolutionist
climbs.


III.

While there can be no doubt about the derivation of our government from
habit rather than from doctrine, from English experience rather than
from European thought; while it is evident that our institutions were
originally but products of a long, unbroken, unperverted constitutional
history; and certain that we shall preserve our institutions in their
integrity and efficiency only so long as we keep true in our practice
to the traditions from which our first strength was derived, there
is, nevertheless, little doubt that the forces peculiar to the new
civilization of our day, and not only these, but also the restless
forces of European democratic thought and anarchic turbulence brought
to us in such alarming volume by immigration, have deeply affected and
may deeply modify the forms and habits of our politics.

All vital governments--and by vital governments I mean those which have
life in their outlying members as well as life in their heads--all
systems in which self-government lives and retains its self-possession,
must be governments by neighbors, by peoples not only homogeneous, but
characterized within by the existence among their members of a quick
sympathy and an easy neighborly knowledge of each other. Not foreseeing
steam and electricity or the diffusion of news and knowledge which
we have witnessed, our fathers were right in thinking it impossible
for the government which they had founded to spread without strain or
break over the whole of the continent. Were not California now as near
neighbor to the Atlantic States as Massachusetts then was to New York,
national self-government on our present scale would assuredly hardly
be possible, or conceivable even. Modern science, scarcely less than
our pliancy and steadiness in political habit, may be said to have
created the United States of to-day.

Upon some aspects of this growth it is very pleasant to dwell, and very
profitable. It is significant of a strength which it is inspiring to
contemplate. The advantages of bigness accompanied by abounding life
are many and invaluable. It is impossible among us to hatch in a corner
any plot which will affect more than a corner. With life everywhere
throughout the continent, it is impossible to seize illicit power over
the whole people by seizing any central offices. To hold Washington
would be as useless to a usurper as to hold Duluth. Self-government
cannot be usurped.

A French writer has said that the autocratic ascendency of Andrew
Jackson illustrated anew the long-credited tendency of democracies to
give themselves over to one hero. The country is older now than it was
when Andrew Jackson delighted in his power, and few can believe that
it would again approve or applaud childish arrogance and ignorant
arbitrariness like his; but even in his case, striking and ominous as
it was, it must not be overlooked that he was suffered only to strain
the Constitution, not to break it. He held his office by orderly
election; he exercised its functions within the letter of the law;
he could silence not one word of hostile criticism; and, his second
term expired, he passed into private life as harmlessly as did James
Monroe. A nation that can quietly reabsorb a vast victorious army is
no more safely free and healthy than is a nation that could reabsorb
such a President as Andrew Jackson, sending him into seclusion at the
Hermitage to live without power, and die almost forgotten.

A huge, stalwart body politic like ours, with quick life in every
individual town and county, is apt, too, to have the strength of
variety of judgment. Thoughts which in one quarter kindle enthusiasm
may in another meet coolness or arouse antagonism. Events which are
fuel to the passions of one section may be but as a passing wind to
another section. No single moment of indiscretion, surely, can easily
betray the whole country at once. There will be entire populations
still cool, self-possessed, unaffected. Generous emotions sometimes
sweep whole peoples, but, happily, evil passions, sinister views,
base purposes, do not and cannot. Sedition cannot surge through the
hearts of a wakeful nation as patriotism can. In such organisms poisons
diffuse themselves slowly; only healthful life has unbroken course. The
sweep of agitations set afoot for purposes unfamiliar or uncongenial
to the customary popular thought is broken by a thousand obstacles.
It may be easy to reawaken old enthusiasms, but it must be infinitely
hard to create new ones, and impossible to surprise a whole people into
unpremeditated action.

It is well to give full weight to these great advantages of our big
and strenuous and yet familiar way of conducting affairs; but it is
imperative at the same time to make very plain the influences which are
pointing toward changes in our politics--changes which threaten loss of
organic wholeness and soundness. The union of strength with bigness
depends upon the maintenance of character, and it is just the character
of the nation which is being most deeply affected and modified by the
enormous immigration which, year after year, pours into the country
from Europe. Our own temperate blood, schooled to self-possession and
to the measured conduct of self-government, is receiving a constant
infusion and yearly experiencing a partial corruption of foreign blood.
Our own equable habits have been crossed with the feverish humors of
the restless Old World. We are unquestionably facing an ever-increasing
difficulty of self-command with ever-deteriorating materials, possibly
with degenerating fibre. We have so far succeeded in retaining

    “Some sense of duty, something of a faith,
    Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
    Some patient force to change them when we will,
    Some civic manhood firm against the crowd;”

But we must reckon our power to continue to do so with a people made up
of “minds cast in every mould of race,--minds inheriting every bias of
environment, warped by the diverse histories of a score of different
nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded, by almost every climate
on the globe.”

What was true of our early circumstances is not true of our present. We
are not now simply carrying out under normal conditions the principles
and habits of English constitutional history. Our tasks of construction
are not done. We have not simply to conduct, but also to preserve and
freshly adjust our government. Europe has sent her habits to us, and
she has sent also her political philosophy, a philosophy which has
never been purged by the cold bath of practical politics. The communion
which we did not have at first with her heated and mistaken ambitions,
with her radical, speculative habit in politics, with her readiness
to experiment in forms of government, we may possibly have to enter
into now that we are receiving her populations. Not only printing and
steam and electricity have gotten hold of us to expand our English
civilization, but also those general, and yet to us alien, forces of
democracy of which mention has already been made; and these are apt to
tell disastrously upon our Saxon habits in government.


IV.

It is thus that we are brought to our fourth and last point. We have
noted (1) the general forces of democracy which have been sapping
old forms of government in all parts of the world; (2) the error of
supposing ourselves indebted to those forces for the creation of our
government, or in any way connected with them in our origins; and (3)
the effect they have nevertheless had upon us as parts of the general
influences of the age, as well as by reason of our vast immigration
from Europe. What, now, are the new problems which have been prepared
for our solution by reason of our growth and of the effects of
immigration? They may require as much political capacity for their
proper solution as any that confronted the architects of our government.

These problems are chiefly problems of organization and leadership.
Were the nation homogeneous, were it composed simply of later
generations of the same stock by which our institutions were planted,
few adjustments of the old machinery of our politics would, perhaps,
be necessary to meet the exigencies of growth. But every added element
of variety, particularly every added element of foreign variety,
complicates even the simpler questions of politics. The dangers
attending that variety which is heterogeneity in so vast an organism
as ours are, of course, the dangers of disintegration--nothing less;
and it is unwise to think these dangers remote and merely contingent
because they are not as yet very menacing. We are conscious of oneness
as a nation, of vitality, of strength, of progress; but are we often
conscious of common thought in the concrete things of national policy?
Does not our legislation wear the features of a vast conglomerate? Are
we conscious of any national leadership? Are we not, rather, dimly
aware of being pulled in a score of directions by a score of crossing
influences, a multitude of contending forces?

This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led; its giant
faculties must be schooled and directed. Leadership cannot belong
to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can
groups of communities. We speak of the sovereignty of the people, but
that sovereignty, we know very well, is of a peculiar sort; quite
unlike the sovereignty of a king or of a small, easily concerting
group of confident men. It is judicial merely, not creative. It
passes judgment or gives sanction, but it cannot direct or suggest.
It furnishes standards, not policies. Questions of government are
infinitely complex questions, and no multitude can of themselves
form clear-cut, comprehensive, consistent conclusions touching them.
Yet without such conclusions, without single and prompt purposes,
government cannot be carried on. Neither legislation nor administration
can be done at the ballot box. The people can only accept the
governing act of representatives. But the size of the modern democracy
necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the
shaping of popular judgments in a very different way from that in which
it was exercised in former times. “It is said by eminent censors of
the press,” said Mr. Bright on one occasion in the House of Commons,
“that this debate will yield about thirty hours of talk, and will end
in no result. I have observed that all great questions in this country
require thirty hours of talk many times repeated before they are
settled. There is much shower and much sunshine between the sowing of
the seed and the reaping of the harvest, but the harvest is generally
reaped after all.” So it must be in all self-governing nations of
to-day. They are not a single audience within sound of an orator’s
voice, but a thousand audiences. Their actions do not spring from a
single thrill of feeling, but from slow conclusions following upon much
talk. The talk must gradually percolate through the whole mass. It
cannot be sent straight through them so that they are electrified as
the pulse is stirred by the call of a trumpet. A score of platforms in
every neighborhood must ring with the insistent voice of controversy;
and for a few hundreds who hear what is said by the public speakers,
many thousands must read of the matter in the newspapers, discuss
it interjectionally at the breakfast-table, desultorily in the
street-cars, laconically on the streets, dogmatically at dinner; all
this with a certain advantage, of course. Through so many stages
of consideration passion cannot possibly hold out. It gets chilled
by over-exposure. It finds the modern popular state organized for
giving and hearing counsel in such a way that those who give it must
be careful that it is such counsel as will wear well. Those who
hear it handle and examine it enough to test its wearing qualities
to the utmost. All this, however, when looked at from another point
of view, but illustrates an infinite difficulty of achieving energy
and organization. There is a certain peril almost of disintegration
attending such phenomena.

Every one now knows familiarly enough how we accomplished the wide
aggregations of self-government characteristic of the modern time, how
we have articulated governments as vast and yet as whole as continents
like our own. The instrumentality has been representation, of which the
ancient world knew nothing, and lacking which it always lacked national
integration. Because of representation and the railroads to carry
representatives to distant capitals, we have been able to rear colossal
structures like the government of the United States as easily as the
ancients gave political organization to a city; and our great building
is as stout as was their little one.

But not until recently have we been able to see the full effects of
thus sending men to legislate for us at capitals distant the breadth
of a continent. It makes the leaders of our politics, many of them,
mere names to our consciousness instead of real persons whom we have
seen and heard, and whom we know. We have to accept rumors concerning
them, we have to know them through the variously colored accounts
of others; we can seldom test our impressions of their sincerity by
standing with them face to face. Here certainly the ancient pocket
republics had much the advantage of us: in them citizens and leaders
were always neighbors; they stood constantly in each other’s presence.
Every Athenian knew Themistocles’s manner, and gait, and address, and
felt directly the just influence of Aristides. No Athenian of a later
period needed to be told of the vanities and fopperies of Alcibiades,
any more than the elder generation needed to have described to them the
personality of Pericles.

Our separation from our leaders is the greater peril, because
democratic government more than any other needs organization in order
to escape disintegration; and it can have organization only by full
knowledge of its leaders and full confidence in them. Just because it
is a vast body to be persuaded, it must know its persuaders; in order
to be effective, it must always have choice of men who are impersonated
policies. Just because none but the finest mental batteries, with pure
metals and unadulterated acids, can send a current through so huge and
yet so rare a medium as democratic opinion, it is the more necessary
to look to the excellence of these instrumentalities. There is no
permanent place in democratic leadership except for him who “hath clean
hands and a pure heart.” If other men come temporarily into power among
us, it is because we cut our leadership up into so many small parts,
and do not subject any one man to the purifying influences of centred
responsibility. Never before was consistent leadership so necessary;
never before was it necessary to concert measures over areas so vast,
to adjust laws to so many interests, to make a compact and intelligible
unit out of so many fractions, to maintain a central and dominant force
where there are so many forces.

It is a noteworthy fact that the admiration for our institutions
which has during the past few years so suddenly grown to large
proportions among publicists abroad is almost all of it directed to
the restraints we have effected upon the action of government. Sir
Henry Maine thought our federal Constitution an admirable reservoir,
in which the mighty waters of democracy are held at rest, kept back
from free destructive course. Lord Rosebery has wondering praise for
the security of our Senate against usurpation of its functions by the
House of Representatives. Mr. Goldwin Smith supposes the saving act
of organization for a democracy to be the drafting and adoption of a
written constitution. Thus it is always the static, never the dynamic,
forces of our government which are praised. The greater part of our
foreign admirers find our success to consist in the achievement of
stable safeguards against hasty or retrogressive action; we are asked
to believe that we have succeeded because we have taken Sir Archibald
Alison’s advice, and have resisted the infection of revolution by
staying quite still.

But, after all, progress is motion, government is action. The waters
of democracy are useless in their reservoirs unless they may be used
to drive the wheels of policy and administration. Though we be the
most law-abiding and law-directed nation in the world, law has not
yet attained to such efficacy among us as to frame, or adjust, or
administer itself. It may restrain, but it cannot lead us; and I
believe that unless we concentrate legislative leadership--leadership,
that is, in progressive policy--unless we give leave to our nationality
and practice to it by such concentration, we shall sooner or later
suffer something like national paralysis in the face of emergencies. We
have no one in Congress who stands for the nation. Each man stands but
for his part of the nation; and so management and combination, which
may be effected in the dark, are given the place that should be held by
centred and responsible leadership, which would of necessity work in
the focus of the national gaze.

What is the valuable element in monarchy which causes men constantly
to turn to it as to an ideal form of government, could it but be kept
pure and wise? It is its cohesion, its readiness and power to act,
its abounding loyalty to certain concrete things, to certain visible
persons, its concerted organization, its perfect model of progressive
order. Democracy abounds with vitality; but how shall it combine with
its other elements of life and strength this power of the governments
that know their own minds and their own aims? We have not yet reached
the age when government may be made impersonal.

The only way in which we can preserve our nationality in its integrity
and its old-time originative force in the face of growth and imported
change is by concentrating it; by putting leaders forward, vested with
abundant authority in the conception and execution of policy. There is
plenty of the old vitality in our national character to tell, if we
will but give it leave. Give it leave, and it will the more impress and
mould those who come to us from abroad. I believe that we have not made
enough of leadership.

    “A people is but the attempt of many
    To rise to the completer life of one;
    And those who live as models for the mass
    Are singly of more value than they all.”

We shall not again have a true national life until we compact it by
such legislative leadership as other nations have. But once thus
compacted and embodied, our nationality is safe. An acute English
historical scholar has said that “the Americans of the United States
are a nation because they once obeyed a king;” we shall remain a nation
only by obeying leaders.

    “Keep but the model safe,
    New men will rise to study it.”




V

GOVERNMENT UNDER THE CONSTITUTION


It is by no means wholly to our advantage that our constitutional law
is contained in definitive written documents. The fact that it is thus
formulated and rendered fixed and definite has seriously misled us, it
is to be feared, as to the true function and efficacy of constitutional
law. That law is not made more valid by being written, but only more
explicit; it is not rendered more sacred, but only more definite and
secure. Written constitutions are simply more or less successful
generalizations of political experience. Their tone of authority does
not at all alter the historical realities and imperative practical
conditions of government. They determine forms, utter distinct
purposes, set the powers of the State in definite hierarchy; but they
do not make the forms they originate workable, or the purposes they
utter feasible. All that must depend upon the men who become governors
and upon the people over whom they are set in authority. Laws can have
no other life than that which is given them by the men who administer
and the men who obey them. Constitutional law affords no exception to
the rule. The Constitution of the United States, happily, was framed by
exceptional men thoroughly schooled in the realities of government. It
consists, accordingly, not of principles newly invented, to be put into
operation by means of devices originated for the occasion, but of sound
pieces of tested experience. It has served its purpose beneficently,
not because it was written, but because it has proved itself accordant
in every essential part with tried principles of government--principles
tested by the race for whose use it was intended, and therefore
already embedded in their lives and practices. Its strength will be
found, upon analysis, to lie in its definiteness and in its power to
restrain rather than in any unusual excellence of its energetic parts.
For the right operation of these it has had to depend, like other
constitutions, upon the virtue and discretion of the people and their
ministers. “The public powers are carefully defined; the mode in which
they are to be exercised is fixed; and the amplest securities are taken
that none of the more important constitutional arrangements shall be
altered without every guarantee of caution and every opportunity for
deliberation.... It would seem that, by a wise constitution, democracy
may be made nearly as calm as water in a great artificial reservoir.”[D]

    [D] Sir Henry Maine: Popular Government (Am. ed.), pp. 110, 111.

We possess, therefore, not a more suitable constitution than other
countries, but a constitution which is perfectly definite and which
is preserved by very formidable difficulties of amendment against
inconsiderate change. The difference between our own case and that
of Great Britain upon which we have most reason to congratulate
ourselves is that here public opinion has definite _criteria_ for its
conservatism; whereas in England it has only shifting and uncertain
precedent. In both countries there is the same respect for law. But
there is not in England the same certainty as to what the law of the
constitution is. We have a fundamental law which is written, and which
in its main points is read by all alike in a single accepted sense.
There is no more quarrel about its main intent than there is in England
about the meaning of Magna Charta. Much of the British constitution, on
the contrary, has not the support of even a common statute. It may, in
respect of many vital parts of it, be interpreted or understood in half
a dozen different ways, _and amended by the prevalent understanding_.
We are not more free than the English; we are only more secure.

The definiteness of our Constitution, nevertheless, apart from its
outline of structural arrangements and of the division of functions
among the several departments of the government, is negative rather
than affirmative. Its very enumeration of the powers of Congress is
but a means of indicating very plainly what Congress can _not_ do.
It is significant that one of the most important and most highly
esteemed of the many legal commentaries on our government should be
entitled ‘Constitutional Limitations.’ In expounding the restrictions
imposed by fundamental law upon state and federal action, Judge
Cooley is allowed to have laid bare the most essential parts of our
constitutional system. It was a prime necessity in so complex a
structure that bounds should be set to authority. The ‘may-nots’ and
the ‘shall-nots’ of our constitutions, consequently, give them their
distinctive form and character. The strength which preserves the system
is the strength of self-restraint.

And yet here again it must be understood that mere definiteness of
legal provision has no saving efficacy of its own. These distinct lines
run between power and power will not of their own virtue maintain
themselves. It is not in having such a constitution but in obeying
it that our advantage lies. The vitality of such provisions consists
wholly in the fact that they receive our acquiescence. They rest
upon the legal conscience, upon what Mr. Grote would have called the
‘constitutional morality,’ of our race. They are efficient because we
are above all things law-abiding. The prohibitions of the law do not
assert themselves as taskmasters set over us by some external power.
They are of our own devising. We are self-restrained.

This legal conscience manifestly constitutes the only guarantee, for
example, of the division of powers between the state and federal
governments, that chief arrangement of our constitutional system. The
integrity of the powers possessed by the States has from the first
depended solely upon the conservatism of the federal courts. State
functions have certainly not decayed; but they have been preserved, not
by virtue of any forces of self-defence of their own, but because the
national government has been vouchsafed the grace of self-restraint.
What curtailment their province might suffer has been illustrated
in several notable cases in which the Supreme Court of the United
States has confirmed to the general government extensive powers of
punishing state judicial and executive officers for disobedience to
state laws. Although the federal courts have generally held Congress
back from aggressions upon the States, they have nevertheless once
and again countenanced serious encroachments upon state powers; and
their occasional laxity of principle on such points is sufficiently
significant of the fact that there is no _balance_ between the state
and federal governments, but only the safeguard of a customary
‘constitutional morality’ on the part of the federal courts. The actual
encroachments upon state rights which those courts have permitted,
under the pressure of strong political interests at critical periods,
were not, however, needed to prove the potential supremacy of the
federal government. They only showed how that potential supremacy would
on occasion become actual supremacy. There is no guarantee but that of
conscience that justice will be accorded a suitor when his adversary is
both court and opposing litigant. So strong is the instinct of those
who administer our governments to keep within the sanction of the law,
that even when the last three amendments to the Constitution were being
forced upon the southern states by means which were revolutionary the
outward forms of the Constitution were observed. It was none the less
obvious, however, with what sovereign impunity the national government
might act in stripping those forms of their genuineness. As there are
times of sorrow or of peril which try men’s souls and lay bare the
inner secrets of their characters, so there are times of revolution
which act as fire in burning away all but the basic elements of
constitutions. It is then, too, that dormant powers awake which are not
afterward readily lulled to sleep again.

Such was certainly the effect of the civil war upon the Constitution of
the Union. The implying of powers, once cautious, is now become bold
and confident. In the discussions now going forward with reference to
federal regulation of great corporations, and with reference to federal
aid to education, there are scores of writers and speakers who tacitly
assume the power of the federal government to act in such matters, for
one that urges a constitutional objection. Constitutional objections,
before the war habitual, have, it would seem, permanently lost their
prominence.

The whole energy of origination under our system rests with Congress.
It stands at the front of all government among us; it is the single
affirmative voice in national policy. First or last, it determines what
is to be done. The President, indeed, appoints officers and negotiates
treaties, but he does so subject to the ‘yes’ of the Senate. Congress
organizes the executive departments, organizes the army, organizes the
navy. It audits, approves, and pays expenses. It conceives and directs
all comprehensive policy. All else is negation. The President says
‘no’ in his vetoes; the Supreme Court says ‘no’ in its restraining
decisions. And it is as much the law of public opinion as the law of
the Constitution that restrains the action of Congress.

It is the habit both of English and American writers to speak of the
constitution of Great Britain as if it were ‘writ in water,’ because
nothing but the will of Parliament stands between it and revolutionary
change. But is there nothing back of the will of Parliament? Parliament
dare not go faster than the public thought. There are vast barriers
of conservative public opinion to be overrun before a ruinous speed
in revolutionary change can be attained. In the last analysis, our
own Constitution has no better safeguard. We have, as I have already
pointed out, the salient advantage of knowing just what the standards
of our Constitution are. They are formulated in a written code, wherein
all men may look and read; whereas many of the designs of the British
system are to be sought only in a cloud-land of varying individual
readings of affairs. From the constitutional student’s point of view,
there are, for instance, as many different Houses of Lords as there
are writers upon the historical functions of that upper chamber. But
the public opinion of Great Britain is no more a juggler of precedents
than is the public opinion of this country. Perhaps the absence
of a written constitution makes it even less a fancier of logical
refinements. The arrangements of the British constitution have, for all
their theoretical instability, a very firm and definite standing in the
political habit of Englishmen: and the greatest of those arrangements
can be done away with only by the extraordinary force of conscious
revolution.

It is wholesome to observe how much of our own institutions rests upon
the same basis, upon no other foundations than those that are laid in
the opinions of the people. It is within the undoubted constitutional
power of Congress, for example, to overwhelm the opposition of the
Supreme Court upon any question by increasing the number of justices
and refusing to confirm any appointments to the new places which do
not promise to change the opinion of the court. Once, at least, it
was believed that a plan of this sort had been carried deliberately
into effect. But we do not think of such a violation of the spirit of
the Constitution as possible, simply because we share and contribute
to that public opinion which makes such outrages upon constitutional
morality impossible by standing ready to curse them. There is a close
analogy between this virtual inviolability of the Supreme Court and the
integrity hitherto vouchsafed to the English House of Lords. There may
be an indefinite creation of peers at any time that a strong ministry
chooses to give the sovereign its imperative advice in favor of such
a course. It was, doubtless, fear of the final impression that would
be made upon public opinion by action so extraordinary, as much as the
timely yielding of the Lords upon the question at issue, that held the
ministry back from such a measure, on one notable occasion. Hitherto
that ancient upper chamber has had in this regard the same protection
that shields our federal judiciary.

It is not essentially a different case as between Congress and the
Executive. Here, too, at the very centre of the Constitution, Congress
stands almost supreme, restrained by public opinion rather than by law.
What with the covetous admiration of the presidency recently manifested
by some alarmed theorists in England, and the renewed prestige lately
given that office by the prominence of the question of civil service
reform, it is just now particularly difficult to apply political facts
to an analysis of the President’s power. But a clear conception of his
real position is for that very reason all the more desirable. While
he is a dominant figure in politics would seem to be the best time to
scrutinize and understand him.

It is clearly misleading to use the ascendant influence of the
President in effecting the objects of civil service reform as an
illustration of the constitutional size and weight of his office.
The principal part in making administration pure, business-like, and
efficient must always, under any conceivable system of government,
be taken by the executive. It was certainly taken by the executive
in England thirty years ago; and that much in opposition to the will
of Parliament. The prominence of our President in administrative
reform furnishes no sufficient ground for attributing a singularity of
executive influence to the government of this country.

In estimating the actual powers of the President it is no doubt best
to begin, as almost all writers in England and America now habitually
begin, with a comparison between the executives of the two kindred
countries. Whilst Mr. Bagehot has done more than any other thinker
to clear up the facts of English constitutional practice, he has
also, there is reason to believe, done something toward obscuring
those facts. Everybody, for instance, has accepted as wholly true
his description of the ministry of the Crown as merely an executive
committee of the House of Commons; and yet that description is only
partially true. An English cabinet represents, not the Commons only,
but also the Crown. Indeed, it is itself ‘the Crown.’ All executive
prerogatives are prerogatives which it is within the discretion of the
cabinet itself to make free use of. The fact that it is generally the
disposition of ministers to defer to the opinion of Parliament in the
use of the prerogative, does not make that use the less a privilege
strictly beyond the sphere of direct parliamentary control, to be
exercised independently of its sanction, even secretly on occasion,
when ministers see their way clear to serving the state thereby. “The
ministry of the day,” says a perspicacious expounder of the English
system,[E] “appears in Parliament, on the one hand, as personating the
Crown in the legitimate exercise of its recognized prerogatives; and
on the other hand, as the mere agent of Parliament itself, in the
discharge of the executive and administrative functions of government
cast upon them by law.” Within the province of the prerogative “lie the
stirring topics of foreign negotiations, the management of the army
and navy, public finance, and, in some important respects, colonial
administration.” Very recent English history furnishes abundant and
striking evidence of the vitality of the prerogative in these fields
in the hands of the gentlemen who “personate the Crown” in Parliament.
“No subject has been more eagerly discussed of late,” declares Mr.
Amos (page 187), “than that of the province of Parliament in respect
of the making of treaties and the declaration of war. No prerogative
of the Crown is more undisputed than that of taking the initiative in
all negotiations with foreign governments, conducting them throughout,
and finally completing them by the signature and ratification of a
treaty.... It is a bare fact that during the progress of the British
diplomatic movements which terminated in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878,
or more properly in the Afghan war of that year,”--including the
secret treaty by which Turkey ceded Cyprus to England, and England
assumed the protectorate of Asia Minor,--“Parliament never had an
opportunity of expressing its mind on any one of the important and
complicated engagements to which the country was being committed, or
upon the policy of the war upon the northwest frontier of India. The
subjects were, indeed, over and over again discussed in Parliament,
but always subsequent to irreparable action having been taken by the
government” (page 188). Had Mr. Amos lived to take his narrative
of constitutional affairs beyond 1880, he would have had equally
significant instances of ministerial initiative to adduce in the cases
of Egypt and Burmah.

    [E] Mr. Sheldon Amos: Fifty Years of the English Constitution,
        page 338.

The unfortunate campaign in the Soudan was the direct outcome of the
purchase of the Suez Canal shares by the British government in 1875.
The result of that purchase was that “England became pledged in a
wholly new and peculiar way to the support of the existing Turkish and
Egyptian dominion in Egypt; that large English political interests
were rendered subservient to the decisions of local tribunals in a
foreign country; and that English diplomatic and political action in
Egypt, and indeed in Europe, was trammelled, or at least indirectly
influenced, by a narrow commercial interest which could not but weigh,
however slightly, upon the apparent purity and simplicity of the
motives of the English government.” And yet the binding engagements
which involved all this were entered into “despite the absence of all
assistance from, or consent of, Parliament.”[F] Such exercises of the
prerogatives of the Crown receive additional weight from “the almost
recognized right of evolving an army of almost any size from the Indian
seed-plot, of using reserve forces without communication to Parliament
in advance, and of obtaining large votes of credit for prospective
military operations of an indefinite character, the nature of which
Parliament is allowed only dimly to surmise” (page 392). The latest
evidence of the “almost recognized” character of such rights was the
war preparations made by England against Russia in 1885. If to such
powers of committing the country irrevocably to far-reaching foreign
policies, of inviting or precipitating war, and of using Indian troops
without embarrassment from the trammels of the Mutiny Act, there be
added the great discretionary functions involved in the administration
of colonial affairs, some measure may be obtained of the power wielded
by ministers, not as the mere agents of Parliament, but as personating
the Crown. Such is in England the independence of action possible to
the executive.

    [F] Amos, page 384.

As compared with this, the power of the President is insignificant.
Of course, as everybody says, he is more powerful than the sovereign
of Great Britain. If relative personal power were the principle of
etiquette, Mr. Cleveland would certainly not have to lift his hat
to the Queen, because the Queen is not the English executive. The
prerogatives of the Crown are still much greater than the prerogatives
of the presidency; they are exercised, however, not by the wearer of
the crown, but by the ministry of the Crown.

As Sir Henry Maine rightly says, the framers of our Constitution,
consciously or unconsciously, made the President’s office like the
King’s office under the English constitution of their time,--the
constitution, namely, of George III., who chose his advisers with or
without the assent of Parliament. They took care, however, to pare
down the model where it seemed out of measure with the exercise of the
people’s liberty. They allowed the President to choose his ministers
freely, as George then seemed to have established his right to do; but
they made the confirmation of the Senate a necessary condition to his
appointments. They vested in him the right of negotiating treaties
with foreign governments; but he was not to sign and ratify treaties
until he had obtained the sanction of the Senate. That oversight of
executive action which Parliament had not yet had the spirit or the
inclination to exert, and which it had forfeited its independence by
not exerting, was forever secured to our federal upper chamber by the
fundamental law. The conditions of mutual confidence and co-operation
between executive and legislature now existing in England had not
then been developed, and consequently could not be reproduced in this
country. The posture and disposition of mutual wariness which were
found existing there were made constitutional here by express written
provision. In short, the transitional relations of the Crown and
Parliament of that day were crystallized in our Constitution, such
guarantees of executive good faith and legislative participation in the
weightier determinations of government as were lacking in the model
being sedulously added in the copy.

The really subordinate position of the presidency is hidden from
view partly by that dignity which is imparted to the office by its
conspicuous place at the front of a great government, and its security
and definiteness of tenure; partly by the independence apparently
secured to it by its erection into an entirely distinct and separate
‘branch’ of the government; and partly by those circumstances of our
history which have thrust our Presidents forward, during one or two
notable periods, as real originators of policy and leaders in affairs.
The President has never been powerful, however, except at such times
as he has had Congress at his back. While the new government was
a-making--and principally because it was a-making--Washington and
his secretaries were looked to by Congress for guidance; and during
the presidencies of several of Washington’s immediate successors the
continued prominence of questions of foreign policy and of financial
management kept the officers of the government in a position of
semi-leadership. Jackson was masterful with or without right. He
entered upon his presidency as he entered upon his campaign in Florida,
without asking too curiously for constitutional warrant for what he was
to undertake. In the settlement of the southern question Congress went
for a time on all-fours with the President. He was powerful because
Congress was acquiescent.

But such cases prove rather the usefulness than the strength of the
presidency. Congress has, at several very grave crises in national
affairs, been seasonably supplied with an energetic leader or agent
in the person of the President. At other times, when Congress was in
earnest in pushing views not shared by the President, our executives
have either been overwhelmed, as Johnson was, or have had to decline
upon much humbler services. Their negotiations with foreign governments
are as likely to be disapproved as approved; their budgets are cut down
like a younger son’s portion; their appointments are censured and their
administrations criticised without chance for a counter-hearing. They
create nothing. Their veto is neither revisory nor corrective. It is
merely obstructive. It is, as I have said, a simple blunt negation,
oftentimes necessarily spoken without discrimination against a good
bill because of a single bad clause in it. In such a contest between
origination and negation origination must always win, or government
must stand still.

In England the veto of the Crown has not passed out of use, as is
commonly said. It has simply changed its form. It does not exist as an
imperative, obstructive ‘No,’ uttered by the sovereign. It has passed
over into the privilege of the ministers to throw their party weight,
reinforced by their power to dissolve Parliament, against measures of
which they disapprove. It is a much-tempered instrument, but for that
reason all the more flexible and useful. The old, blunt, antagonistic
veto is no longer needed. It is needed here, however, to preserve the
presidency from the insignificance of merely administrative functions.
Since executive and legislature cannot come into relations of mutual
confidence and co-operation, the former must be put in a position to
maintain a creditable competition for consideration and dignity.

A clear-headed, methodical, unimaginative President like Mr. Cleveland
unaffectedly recognizes the fact that all creating, originating power
rests with Congress, and that he can do no more than direct the
details of such projects as he finds commended by its legislation. The
suggestions of his message he acknowledges to be merely suggestions,
which must depend upon public opinion for their weight. If Congress
does not regard them, it must reckon with the people, not with him. It
is his duty to tell Congress what he thinks concerning the pending
questions of the day; it is not his duty to assume any responsibility
for the effect produced on Congressmen.

The English have transformed their Crown into a Ministry, and in
doing so have recognized both the supremacy of Parliament and the
rôle of leadership in legislation properly belonging to a responsible
executive. The result has been that they have kept a strong executive
without abating either the power or the independence of the
representative chamber in respect of its legislative function. We, on
the contrary, have left our executive separate, as the Constitution
made it; chiefly, it is to be suspected, because the explicit and
confident gifts of function contained in that positive instrument
have blinded us by their very positiveness to the real subordination
of the executive resulting from such a separation. We have supposed
that our President was great because his powers were specific, and
that our Congress was not supreme because it could not lay its hands
directly upon his office and turn him out. In fact, neither the dignity
and power of the executive nor the importance of Congress is served
by the arrangement. Being held off from authoritative suggestion in
legislation, the President becomes, under ordinary circumstances,
merely a ministerial officer; whilst Congress, on its part, deprived
of such leadership, becomes a legislative mass meeting instead of a
responsible co-operating member of a well-organized government. Being
under the spell of the Constitution, we have been unable to see the
facts which written documents can neither establish nor change.

Singularly enough, there is sharp opposition to the introduction
into Congress of any such leadership on the part of the executive as
the Ministers of the Crown enjoy in Parliament, on the ground of the
increase of power which would accrue as a result to the legislature.
It is said that such a change would, by centring party and personal
responsibility in Congress, give too great a prominence to legislation;
would make Congress the object of too excited an interest on the part
of the people. Legislation in Parliament, instead of being piecemeal,
tessellated work, such as is made up in Congress of the various
fragments contributed by the standing committees, is, under each
ministry, a continuous, consistent, coherent whole; and, instead of
bearing the sanction of both national parties, is the peculiar policy
of only one of them. It is thought that, if such coherence of plan,
definiteness and continuity of aim, and sanction of party were to be
given the work of Congress, the resulting concentration of popular
interest and opinion would carry Congress over all the barriers of the
Constitution to an undisputed throne of illimitable power. In short,
the potential supremacy of Congress is thought to be kept within
bounds, not by the constitutional power of the executive and the
judiciary, its co-ordinate branches, but by the intrinsic dulness and
confusion of its own proceedings. It cannot make itself interesting
enough to be great.

But this is a two-edged argument, which one must needs handle with
great caution. It is evidently calculated to destroy every argument
constructed on the assumption that it is written laws which are
effective to the salvation of our constitutional arrangements; for
it is itself constructed on the opposite assumption, that it is the
state of popular interest in the nation which balances the forces of
the government. It would, too, serve with equal efficacy against any
scheme whatever for reforming the present methods of legislation in
Congress, with which almost everybody is dissatisfied. Any reform
which should tend to give to national legislation that uniform, open,
intelligent, and responsible character which it now lacks, would also
create that popular interest in the proceedings of Congress which, it
is said, would unhinge the Constitution. Democracy is so delicate a
form of government that it must break down if given too great facility
or efficacy of operation. No one body of men must be suffered to utter
the voice of the people, lest that voice become, through it, directly
supreme.

The fact of the overtopping power of Congress, however, remains. The
houses create all governmental policy, with that wide latitude of
‘political discretion’ in the choice of means which the Supreme Court
unstintingly accords them. Congress has often come into conflict
with the Supreme Court by attempting to extend the province of the
federal government as against the States; but it has seldom, I believe,
been brought effectually to book for any alleged exercise of powers
as against its directly competing branch, the executive. Having by
constitutional grant the last word as to foreign relations, the control
of the finances, and even the oversight of executive appointments,
Congress exercises what powers of direction and management it pleases,
as fulfilling, not as straining, the Constitution. Government lives
in the origination, not in the defeat, of measures of government. The
President obstructs by means of his ‘No;’ the houses govern by means of
their ‘Yes.’ He has killed some policies that are dead; they have given
birth to all policies that are alive.

But the measures born in Congress have no common lineage. They have
not even a traceable kinship. They are fathered by a score or two of
unrelated standing committees: and Congress stands godfather to them
all, without discrimination. Congress, in effect, parcels out its great
powers amongst groups of its members, and so confuses its plans and
obscures all responsibility. It is a leading complaint of Sir Henry
Maine’s against the system in England, which is just under his nose,
that it confers the preliminary shaping and the initiation of all
legislation upon the cabinet, a body which deliberates and resolves in
strict secrecy,--and so reminds him, remotely enough, of the Spartan
Ephors and the Venetian Council of Ten. He commends, by contrast,
that constitution (our own, which he sees at a great distance) which
reserves to the legislature itself the origination and drafting of
its measures. It is hard for us, who have this commended constitution
under our noses, to perceive wherein we have the advantage. British
legislation is for the most part originated and shaped by a single
committee, acting in secret, whose proposals, when produced, are
eagerly debated and freely judged by the sovereign legislative body.
Our legislation is framed and initiated by a great many committees,
deliberating in secret, whose proposals are seldom debated and only
perfunctorily judged by the sovereign legislative body. It is
impossible to mistake the position and privileges of the Brutish
cabinet, so great and conspicuous and much discussed are they. They
simplify the whole British system for men’s comprehension by merely
standing at the centre of it. But our own system is simple only in
appearance. It is easy to see that our legislature and executive are
separate, and that the legislature matures its own measures by means of
committees of its own members. But it may readily escape superficial
observation that our legislature, instead of being served, is ruled
by its committees; that those committees prepare their measures in
private; that their number renders their privacy a secure secrecy, by
making them too many to be watched, and individually too insignificant
to be worth watching; that their division of prerogatives results in a
loss, through diffusion, of all actual responsibility; and that their
co-ordination leads to such a competition among them for the attention
of their respective houses that legislation is rushed, when it is not
paralyzed.

It is thus that, whilst all real power is in the hands of Congress,
that power is often thrown out of gear and its exercise brought
almost to a standstill. The competition of the committees is the clog.
Their reports stand in the way of each other, and so the complaint is
warranted that Congress can get nothing done. Interests which press for
attention in the nation are reported upon by the appropriate committee,
perhaps, but the report gets pushed to the wall. Or they are not
reported upon. They are brought to the notice of Congress, but they
go to a committee which is unfavorable. The progress of legislation
depends both upon the fortunes of competing reports and upon the
opinions held by particular committees.

The same system of committee government prevails in our state
legislatures, and has led to some notable results, which have recently
been pointed out in a pamphlet entitled _American Constitutions_,
contributed to the Johns Hopkins series of Studies in History and
Political Science by Mr. Horace Davis. In the state legislatures, as
in Congress, the origination and control of legislation by standing
committees has led to haphazard, incoherent, irresponsible law-making,
and to a universal difficulty about getting anything done. The result
has been that state legislatures have been falling into disrepute in
all quarters. They are despised and mistrusted, and many States have
revised their constitutions in order to curtail legislative powers and
limit the number and length of legislative sessions. There is in some
States an apparent inclination to allow legislators barely time enough
to provide moneys for the maintenance of the governments. In some
instances necessary powers have been transferred from the legislatures
to the courts; in others to the governors. The intent of all such
changes is manifest. It is thought safer to entrust power to a law
court, performing definite functions under clear laws and in accordance
with strict judicial standards, or to a single conspicuous magistrate,
who can be watched and cannot escape responsibility for his official
acts, than to entrust it to a numerous body which burrows toward its
ends in committee-rooms, getting its light through lobbies; and which
has a thousand devices for juggling away responsibility, as well as
scores of antagonisms wherewith to paralyze itself.

Like fear and distrust have often been felt and expressed of late years
concerning Congress, for like reasons. But so far no attempt has been
made to restrict either the powers or the time of Congress. Amendments
to the Constitution are difficult almost to the point of impossibility,
and the few definite schemes nowadays put forward for a revision of the
Constitution involve extensions rather than limitations of the powers
of Congress. The fact is that, though often quite as exasperating to
sober public opinion as any state legislature, Congress is neither so
much distrusted nor so deserving of distrust. Its high place and vast
sphere in the government of the nation cause its members to be more
carefully chosen, and its proceedings to be more closely watched, and
frequently controlled by criticism. The whole country has its eyes
on Congress, and Congress is aware of the fact. It has both the will
and the incentive to be judicious and patriotic. Newspaper editors
have constantly to be saying to their readers, ‘Look what our state
legislators are doing;’ they seldom have to urge, ‘Look what Congress
is doing.’ It cannot, indeed, be watched easily, or to much advantage.
It requires a distinct effort to watch it. It has no dramatic contests
of party leaders to attract notice. Its methods are so much after the
fashion of the game of hide-and-seek that the eye of the ordinary man
is quite baffled in trying to understand or follow them, if he try only
at leisure moments. But, at the same time, the interests handled by
Congress are so vast that at least the newspapers and the business men,
if no others, must watch its legislation as best they may. However hard
it may be to observe, it is too influential in great affairs to make it
safe for the country to give over trying to observe it.

But though Congress may always be watched, and so in a measure
controlled, despite its clandestine and confusing methods, those
methods must tend to increase the distrust with which Congress is
widely regarded; and distrust cannot but enervate, belittle, and
corrupt this will-centre of the Constitution. The question is not
merely, How shall the methods of Congress be clarified and its ways
made purposeful and responsible? There is this greater question at
stake: How shall the essential arrangements of the Constitution be
preserved? Congress is the purposing, designing, aggressive power of
the national government. Disturbing and demoralizing influences in
the organism, if there be any, come out from its restless energies.
Damaging encroachments upon ground forbidden to the federal government
generally originate in measures of its planning. So long as it
continues to be governed by unrelated standing committees, and to take
its resolves in accordance with no clear plan, no single, definite
purpose, so long as what it does continues to be neither evident nor
interesting, so long must all its exertions of power be invidious; so
long must its competition with the executive or the judiciary seem
merely jealous and always underhand: so long must it remain virtually
impossible to control it through public opinion. As well ask the
stranger in the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange to judge of
the proceedings on the floor. As well ask a man who has not time to
read all the newspapers in the Union to judge of passing sentiment in
all parts of the country. Congress in its composition is the country
in miniature. It realizes Hobbes’s definition of liberty as political
power divided into small fragments. The standing committees typify
the individuals of the nation. Congress is better fitted for counsel
than the voters simply because its members are less than four hundred
instead of more than ten millions.

It has been impossible to carry out the programme of the Constitution;
and, without careful reform, the national legislature will even more
dangerously approach the perilous model of a mass meeting. There are
several ways in which Congress can be so integrated as to impart to
its proceedings system and party responsibility. That may be done
by entrusting the preparation and initiation of legislation to a
single committee in each house, composed of the leading men of the
majority in that house. Such a change would not necessarily affect the
present precedents as to the relations between the executive and the
legislature. They might still stand stiffly apart. Congress would be
integrated and invigorated, however, though the whole system of the
government would not be. To integrate that, some common meeting-ground
of public consultation must be provided for the executive and the
houses. That can be accomplished only by the admission to Congress,
in whatever capacity,--whether simply to answer proper questions and
to engage in debate, or with the full privileges of membership,--of
official representatives of the executive who understand the
administration and are interested and able to defend it. Let the tenure
of ministers have what disconnection from legislative responsibility
may seem necessary to the preservation of the equality of House and
Senate, and the separation of administration from legislation; light
would at least be thrown upon administration; it would be given the
same advantages of public suggestion and unhampered self-defence that
Congress, its competitor, has; and Congress would be constrained to
apply system and party responsibility to its proceedings.

The establishment in the United States of what is known as
‘ministerial responsibility’ would unquestionably involve some
important changes in our constitutional system. I am strongly of the
opinion that such changes would not be too great a price to pay for the
advantages secured us by such a government. Ministerial responsibility
supplies the only conditions which have yet proved efficacious, in the
political experience of the world, for vesting recognized leadership
in men chosen for their abilities by a natural selection of debate in
a sovereign assembly of whose contests the whole country is witness.
Such survival of the ablest in debate seems the only process available
for selecting leaders under a popular government. The mere fact that
such a contest proceeds with such a result is the strongest possible
incentive to men of first-rate powers to enter legislative service;
and popular governments, more than any other governments, need leaders
so placed that, by direct contact with both the legislative and the
executive departments of the government, they shall see the problems of
government at first hand; and so trained that they shall at the same
time be, not mere administrators, but also men of tact and eloquence,
fitted to persuade masses of men and to draw about themselves a loyal
following.

If we borrowed ministerial responsibility from England, we should,
too, unquestionably enjoy an infinite advantage over the English in
the use of it. We should sacrifice by its adoption none of that great
benefit and security which our federal system derives from a clear
enumeration of powers and an inflexible difficulty of amendment. If
anything would be definite under cabinet government, responsibility
would be definite; and, unless I am totally mistaken in my estimate of
the legal conscience of the people of this country,--which seems to
me to be the heart of our whole system,--definite responsibility will
establish rather than shake those arrangements of our Constitution
which are really our own, and to which our national pride properly
attaches, namely, the distinct division of powers between the state and
federal governments, the slow and solemn formalities of constitutional
change, and the interpretative functions of the federal courts. If
we are really attached to these principles, the concentration of
responsibility in government will doubly insure their preservation. If
we are not, they are in danger of destruction in any case.

But we cannot have ministerial responsibility in its fulness
under the Constitution as it stands. The most that we can have is
distinct legislative responsibility, with or without any connection
of co-operation or of mutual confidence between the executive and
Congress. To have so much would be an immense gain. Changes made to
this end would leave the federal system still an unwieldy mechanism
of counteracting forces, still without unity or flexibility; but we
should at least have made the very great advance of fastening upon
Congress an even more positive form of accountability than now rests
upon the President and the courts. Questions of vast importance and
infinite delicacy have constantly to be dealt with by Congress; and
there is an evident tendency to widen the range of those questions.
The grave social and economic problems now thrusting themselves
forward, as the result of the tremendous growth and concentration of
our population, and the consequent sharp competition for the means
of livelihood, indicate that our system is already aging, and that
any clumsiness, looseness, or irresponsibility in governmental action
must prove a source of grave and increasing peril. There are already
commercial heats and political distempers in our body politic which
warn of an early necessity for carefully prescribed physic. Under
such circumstances, some measure of legislative reform is clearly
indispensable. We cannot afford to put up any longer with such
legislation as we may happen upon. We must look and plan ahead. We must
have legislation which has been definitely forecast in party programmes
and explicitly sanctioned by the public voice. Instead of the present
arrangements for compromise, piecemeal legislation, we must have
coherent plans from recognized party leaders, and means for holding
those leaders to a faithful execution of their plans in clear-cut Acts
of Congress.




[Illustration]

_LIST OF VOLUMES OF ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, ART, MUSIC, ETC., PUBLISHED
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 743–745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK._

[Illustration]


HENRY ADAMS.

HISTORICAL ESSAYS. (12mo, $2.00.)

CONTENTS: Primitive Rights of Women--Captaine John Smith--Harvard
College, 1786–1787--Napoleon I. at St. Domingo--The Bank of England
Restriction--The Declaration of Paris, 1861--The Legal Tender Act--The
New York Gold Conspiracy--The Session, 1869–1870.

    “Mr. Adams is thorough in research, exact in statement, judicial
    in tone, broad of view, picturesque and impressive in description,
    nervous and expressive in style. His characterizations are terse,
    pointed, clear.”--_New York Tribune._


SIR EDWIN ARNOLD.

JAPONICA. Illustrated by Robert Blum. (Large 8vo, $3.00.)

    “Artistic and handsome. In theme, style, illustrations and
    manufacture, it will appeal to every refined taste, presenting a
    most thoughtful and graceful study of the fascinating people among
    whom the author spent a year.”--_Cincinnati Enquirer._


AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.

OBITER DICTA, First Series. (16mo, $1.00.)

CONTENTS: Carlyle--On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning’s
Poetry--Truth Hunting--Actors--A Rogue’s Memoirs--The Via
Media--Falstaff.

    “Some admirably written essays, amusing and brilliant. The book
    is the book of a highly cultivated man, with a real gift of
    expression, a good deal of humor, a happy fancy.”--_Spectator._

OBITER DICTA, Second Series. (16mo, $1.00.)

CONTENTS: Milton--Pope--Johnson--Burke--The Muse of
History--Lamb--Emerson--The Office of Literature--Worn Out
Types--Cambridge and the Poets--Book-buying.

    “Neat, apposite, clever, full of quaint allusions, happy thoughts,
    and apt, unfamiliar quotations.”--_Boston Advertiser._

RES JUDICATÆ: Papers and Essays. (16mo, $1.00.)

    “Whether Mr. Birrell writes of Richardson or Barrow, Gibbon or
    Newman, he shows himself equally intelligent and appreciative.
    His wit and audacity are backed by sterling sense and fine
    taste.”--_Chicago Tribune._


Prof. H. H. BOYESEN.

ESSAYS ON GERMAN LITERATURE. (12mo, $1.50.)

    “Prof. Boyesen is cultivated without being pedantic, and serious
    without being dull. The literature he analyzes and expounds is the
    literature that has international value.”--_Boston Beacon._


W. C. BROWNELL.

FRENCH TRAITS. (12mo, $1.50.)

CONTENTS: The Social Instinct--Morality--Intelligence--Sense
and Sentiment--Manners--Women--The Art Instinct--The Provincial
Spirit--Democracy--New York after Paris.

    “These chapters form a volume of criticism which is sympathetic,
    intelligent, acute, and contains a great amount of wholesome
    suggestion.”--_Boston Advertiser._

FRENCH ART. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “Brought to the judgment in this cool and scientific spirit, the
    whole course of French painting and sculpture, as shown by the
    masters pre-eminent in each era, is reviewed by a critic as certain
    of his criticisms as he is capable in forming them.”--_Springfield
    Republican._


THOMAS CARLYLE.

LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE. (Now printed for the first time.
12mo, $1.00.)

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS: Literature in General--Language,
Tradition--The Greeks--The Heroic Ages--Homer--Æschylus
to Socrates--The Romans--Middle Ages--Christianity--The
Crusades--Dante--The Spaniards--Chivalry--Cervantes--The
Germans--Luther--The Origin, Work and Destiny of the English--
Shakespeare--Milton--Swift--Hume--Wertherism--The French
Revolution--Goethe and his Works.

    “Every intelligent American reader will instantly wish to read this
    book through, and many will say that it is the clearest and wisest
    and most genuine book that Carlyle ever produced. We could have no
    work from his hand which embodies more clearly and emphatically his
    literary opinions than his rapid and graphic survey of the great
    writers and great literary epochs of the world.”--_Boston Herald._


ALICE MORSE EARLE.

THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “She writes with a keen sense of humor, and out of the full
    stores of adequate knowledge and plentiful explorations among old
    pamphlets, letters, sermons, and that treasury, not yet run dry in
    New England, family traditions. The book is as sympathetic as it is
    bright and humorous.”--_The Independent._

CHINA COLLECTING IN AMERICA. (with 75 illustrations. Sq. 8vo, $3.00.)

    “Her book is full of entertainment, not only for the china hunter
    and collector, but for all who are interested in early times and
    manufactures, in the old houses and country people, in the history
    of America, and the habits and customs of the past.”--_New York
    Observer._

CUSTOMS AND FASHIONS IN OLD NEW ENGLAND. (12mo, $1.25.)

Mrs. Earle describes the daily life and habits, the festivals, larder,
taverns, modes of travel, peculiarities of courtship, marriages,
funerals, the utensils and furniture of the Puritan farm and home, with
the same wit, sympathetic feeling, and copious information so marked in
her former works.


HENRY T. FINCK.

CHOPIN, and Other Musical Essays. (12mo, $1.50.)

    “Written from abundant knowledge: enlivened by anecdote and touches
    of enthusiasm, suggestive, stimulating.”--_Boston Post._


JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

THE SPANISH STORY OF THE ARMADA, AND OTHER ESSAYS. (12mo, $1.50.)

CONTENTS: The Spanish Story of the Armada--Antonio Perez: An
Unsolved Historical Riddle--Saint Teresa--The Templars--The Norway
Fjords--Norway Once More.

SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS. (Half leather, 12mo, 4 vols., each
$1.50.)

CONTENTS:

VOL. I. The Science of History--Times of Erasmus and Luther--The
Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character--The Philosophy
of Catholicism--A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological
Difficulties--Criticism and the Gospel History--The Book of
Job--Spinoza--The Dissolution of Monasteries--England’s Forgotten
Worthies--Homer--The Lives of the Saints--Representative Man--Reynard
the Fox--The Cat’s Pilgrimage--Fables--Parable of the Bread-fruit
Tree--Compensation.

VOL. II. Calvinism--A Bishop of the Twelfth Century--Father
Newman on “The Grammar of Assent”--Conditions and Prospects
of Protestantism--England and Her Colonies--A Fortnight in
Kerry--Reciprocal Duties in State and Subject--The Merchant and His
Wife--On Progress--The Colonies Once More--Education--England’s
War--The Eastern Question--Scientific Method Applied to History.

VOL. III. Annals of an English Abbey--Revival of Romanism--Sea
Studies--Society in Italy in the Last Days of the Roman
Republic--Lucian--Divus Caesar--On the Uses of a Landed Gentry--Party
Politics--Leaves from a South African Journal.

VOL. IV. The Oxford Counter--Reformation--Life and Times of Thomas
Becket--Origen and Celsus--A Cagliostro of the Second Century--Cheneys
and the House of Russell--A Siding at a Railway Station.

    “All the papers here collected are marked by the qualities
    which have made Mr. Froude the most popular of living English
    historians--by skill in argumentative and rhetorical exposition, by
    felicities of diction, by contagious earnestness, and by the rare
    power of fusing the results of research in the imagination so as
    to produce a picture of the past at once exact and vivid.”--_N. Y.
    Sun._


WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.

GLEANINGS OF PAST YEARS, 1843–1879. (7 vols., 16mo, each $1.00.)

CONTENTS: Vol. I., The Throne and the Prince Consort. The Cabinet
and Constitution--Vol. II., Personal and Literary--Vol. III.,
Historical and Speculative--Vol. IV., Foreign--Vol. V. and VI.,
Ecclesiastical--Vol. VII., Miscellaneous.

    “Not only do these essays cover a long period of time, they also
    exhibit a very wide range of intellectual effort. Perhaps their
    most striking feature is the breadth of genuine intellectual
    sympathy, of which they afford such abundant evidence.”--_Nation._


ROBERT GRANT.

THE REFLECTIONS OF A MARRIED MAN. (12mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.)

    “Nothing is more entertaining than to have one’s familiar
    experiences take objective form; and few experiences are more
    familiar than those which Mr. Grant here chronicles for us.
    Altogether Mr. Grant has given us a capital little book, which
    should easily strike up literary comradeship with ‘The Reveries of
    a Bachelor.’”--_Boston Transcript._

OPINIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER. (Illustrated by Reinhart and Smedley. 12mo,
cloth, $1.00.)

A sequel to the author’s “Reflections,” relating the experiences
through middle life of Fred and Josephine, with equal charm and humor.


E. J. HARDY.

THE BUSINESS OF LIFE: A Book for Everyone.--HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH
MARRIED: Being a Handbook to Marriage--THE FIVE TALENTS OF WOMAN: A
Book for Girls and Women--MANNERS MAKYTH MAN--THE SUNNY DAYS OF YOUTH:
A Book for Boys and Young Men. (12mo, each $1.25.)

    “The author has a large store of apposite quotations and anecdotes
    from which he draws with a lavish hand, and he has the art of
    brightening his pages with a constant play of humor that makes what
    he says uniformly entertaining.”--_Boston Advertiser._


W. E. HENLEY.

VIEWS AND REVIEWS. Essays in Appreciation: Literature. (12mo, $1.00.)

CONTENTS:
Dickens--Thackeray--Disraëli--Dumas--Meredith--Byron--Hugo--Heine--
Arnold--Rabelais--Shakespeare--Sidney--Walton--Banville--Berlioz--
Longfellow--Balzac--Hood--Lever--Congreve--Tolstoï--Fielding,
etc., etc.

    “Interesting, original, keen and felicitous. His criticism will be
    found suggestive, cultivated, independent.”--_N. Y. Tribune._


J. G. HOLLAND.

TITCOMB’S LETTERS TO YOUNG PEOPLE, SINGLE AND MARRIED--GOLD-FOIL,
HAMMERED FROM POPULAR PROVERBS--LESSONS IN LIFE: A Series of Familiar
Essays--CONCERNING THE JONES FAMILY--PLAIN TALKS ON FAMILIAR
SUBJECTS--EVERY-DAY TOPICS, First Series, Second Series. (Small 12mo,
each, $1.25.)

    “Dr. Holland will always find a congenial audience in the homes of
    culture and refinement. He does not affect the play of the darker
    and fiercer passions, but delights in the sweet images that cluster
    around the domestic hearth. He cherishes a strong fellow-feeling
    with the pure and tranquil life in the modest social circles of the
    American people, and has thus won his way to the companionship of
    many friendly hearts.”--_N. Y. Tribune._


WILLIAM RALPH INGE.

SOCIETY IN ROME UNDER THE CÆSARS. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “Every page is brimful of interest. The picture of life
    in Rome under the Cæsars are graphic and thoroughly
    intelligible.”--_Chicago Herald._


ANDREW LANG.

ESSAYS IN LITTLE. (Portrait, 12mo, $1.00.)

CONTENTS: Alexandre Dumas--Mr. Stevenson’s Works--Thomas Haynes
Bayly--Théodore de Banville--Homer and the Study of Greek--The Last
Fashionable Novel--Thackeray--Dickens--Adventures of Buccaneers--The
Sagas--Kingsley--Lever--Poems of Sir Walter Scott--Bunyan--Letter to a
Young Journalist--Kipling’s Stories.

    “One of the most entertaining and bracing of books. It ought to
    win every vote and please every class of readers.”--_Spectator_
    (London).

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. (16mo, $1.00. Cameo Edition, with etched
portrait and four new letters, $1.25.)

Letters to Thackeray--Dickens--Herodotus--Pope--Rabelais--Jane
Austen--Isaak Walton--Dumas--Theocritus--Pope--Scott--Shelley--
Molière--Burns, etc., etc.

    “The book is one of the luxuries of the literary taste. It is meant
    for the exquisite palate, and is prepared by one of the ‘knowing’
    kind. It is an astonishing little volume.”--_N. Y. Evening Post._


SIDNEY LANIER.

THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT. (Crown 8vo,
$2.00.)

    “The critical and analytical portions of his work are always
    in high key, suggestive, brilliant, rather dogmatic and not
    free from caprice.... But when all these abatements are
    made, the lectures remain lofty in tone and full of original
    inspiration.”--_Independent._

THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

    “It contains much sound practical advice to the makers of verse.
    The work shows extensive reading and a refined taste both in poetry
    and in music.”--_Nation._


EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN.

WINDFALLS OF OBSERVATION. Gathered for the Edification of the Young and
the Solace of Others. (12mo, $1.25.)

A collection of brief essays on topics of perennial interest, personal
in quality, literary in treatment, shrewd, and dryly humorous, having a
decided “Roundabout,” though thoroughly American, flavor.


BRANDER MATTHEWS.

FRENCH DRAMATISTS OF THE 19TH CENTURY. (New Edition, 8vo, $1.50.)

CONTENTS: Chronology--The Romantic
Movement--Hugo--Dumas--Scribe--Augier--Dumas
_fils_--Sardou--Feuillet--Labiche--Meilhac and Halévy--Zola and the
Tendencies of French Drama--A Ten Years’ Retrospect: 1881–1891.

    “Mr. Matthews writes with authority of the French Stage. Probably
    no other writer of English has a larger acquaintance with the
    subject than he. His style is easy and graceful, and the book is
    delightful reading.”--_N. Y. Times._

THE THEATRES OF PARIS. (Illustrated. 16mo, $1.25.)

    “An interesting, gossipy, yet instructive little book.”--_Academy_
    (London).


DONALD G. MITCHELL.

ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS AND KINGS. Vol. I., From Celt to Tudor. Vol.
II., From Elizabeth to Anne. (12mo, each $1.50.)

    “Crisp, sparkling, delicate, these brief talks about authors, great
    and small, about kings and queens, schoolmasters and people, whet
    the taste for more. In ‘Ik Marvel’s’ racy, sweet, delightful prose,
    we see the benefits of English literature assimilated.”--_Literary
    World._

REVERIES OF A BACHELOR; or, A Book of the Heart--DREAM LIFE: A Fable of
the Seasons. (Cameo Edition, with etching, 16mo, each $1.25.)

    “Beautiful examples of the art (of book making). The vein of
    sentiment in the text is one of which youth never tires.”--_The
    Nation._

SEVEN STORIES WITH BASEMENT AND ATTIC--WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD, with Old
Farmers, Old Gardeners and Old Pastorals--BOUND TOGETHER, A Sheaf of
Papers--OUT-OF-TOWN PALACES, with Hints for their Improvement--MY FARM
OF EDGEWOOD, A Country Book. (12mo, each $1.25.)

    “No American writer since the days of Washington Irving uses the
    English language as does ‘Ik Marvel.’ His books are as natural
    as spring flowers, and as refreshing as summer rains.”--_Boston
    Transcript._


GEORGE MOORE.

IMPRESSIONS AND OPINIONS. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “Both instructive and entertaining ... still more interesting is
    the problem of an English _Théâtre Libre_, of which Mr. Moore is an
    ingenious advocate. The four concluding essays, which treat of art
    and artists, are all excellent.”--_Saturday Review_ (London.)

MODERN PAINTING. (12mo, $2.00.)

The courage, independence, originality, and raciness with which Mr.
Moore expressed his opinions on matters relating to the stage and to
literature in his “Impressions and Opinions” are equally characteristic
of these essays on art topics.


E. MAX MÜLLER.

CHIPS FROM A GERMAN WORKSHOP. Vol. I., Essays on the Science of
Religion--Vol. II., Essays on Mythology, Tradition and Customs--Vol.
III., Essays on Literature, Biographies and Antiquities--Vol. IV.,
Comparative Philology, Mythology, etc.--Vol. V., On Freedom, etc. (5
vols., Crown 8vo, each $2.00.)

    “These books afford no end of interesting extracts; ‘chips’ by the
    cord, that are full both to the intellect and the imagination;
    but we may refer the curious reader to the volumes themselves. He
    will find in them a body of combined entertainment and instruction
    such as has hardly ever been brought together in so compact a
    form.”--_N. Y. Evening Post._

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

    “Max Müller is the leading authority of the world in Hindoo
    literature, and his volume on Oriental reformers will be acceptable
    to scholars and literary people of all classes.”--_Chicago Tribune._


THOMAS NELSON PAGE.

THE OLD SOUTH, ESSAYS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “They afford delightful glimpses of aspects and conditions of
    Southern life which few at the North have ever appreciated
    fully.”--_Congregationalist._


AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D.

MY NOTE-BOOK: Fragmentary Studies in Theology and Subjects Adjacent
thereto (12mo, $1.50)--MEN AND BOOKS; or, Studies in Homiletics (8vo,
$2.00)--MY PORTFOLIO (12mo, $1.50)--MY STUDY, AND OTHER ESSAYS (12mo,
$1.50).

    “His great and varied learning, his wide outlook, his profound
    sympathy with concrete men and women, the lucidity and beauty of
    his style, and the fertility of his thought, will secure for him a
    place among the great men of American Congregationalism.”--_N. Y.
    Tribune._


NOAH PORTER, LL.D.

BOOKS AND READING. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

    “It is distinguished by all the rare acumen, discriminating
    taste and extensive literary knowledge of the author. The chief
    departments of literature are reviewed in detail.”--_N. Y. Times._


PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D.

LITERATURE AND POETRY. (With portrait. 8vo, $3.00.)

    “There is a great amount of erudition in the collection, but the
    style is so simple and direct that the reader does not realize that
    he is following the travels of a close scholar through many learned
    volumes in many different languages.”--_Chautauquan._


EDMOND SCHERER.

ESSAYS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE. (With portrait. 12mo, $1.50.)

    “M. Scherer had a number of great qualities, mental and moral,
    which rendered him a critic of English literature, in particular,
    whose views and opinions have not only novelty and freshness, but
    illumination and instruction for English readers, accustomed to
    conventional estimates from the English standpoint.”--_Literary
    World._


WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD, D.D.

LITERARY ESSAYS. (8vo, $2.50.)

    “They bear the marks of the author’s scholarship, dignity
    and polish of style, and profound and severe convictions of
    truth and righteousness as the basis of culture as well as
    character.”--_Chicago Interior._


ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

ACROSS THE PLAINS, WITH OTHER ESSAYS AND MEMORIES. (12mo, $1.25.)

CONTENTS: Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an
Emigrant between New York and San Francisco--The Old Pacific
Capital--Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters--Epilogue to
an Inland Voyage--Contribution to the History of Life--Education of an
Engineer--The Lantern Bearers--Dreams--Beggars--Letter to a Young Man
Proposing to Embrace a Literary Life--A Christmas Sermon.

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS. (12mo, $1.00.)

CONTENTS: Some College Memories--A College Magazine--An Old Scotch
Gardener--Memoirs of an Islet--Thomas Stevenson--Talk and Talkers--The
Character of Dogs--A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas--A Gossip on Romance--A
Humble Remonstrance.

VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE, and Other Papers. (12mo, $1.00; Cameo Edition,
with etched portrait, $1.25.)

FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “If there are among our readers any lovers of good books to whom
    Mr. Stevenson is still a stranger, we may advise them to make
    his acquaintance through either of these collections of essays.
    The papers are full of the rare individual charm which gives a
    distinction to the lightest products of his art and fancy. He is a
    notable writer of good English, who combines in a manner altogether
    his own the flexibility, freedom, quickness and suggestiveness of
    contemporary fashions with a grace, dignity, and high-breeding that
    belong rather to the past.”--_N. Y. Tribune._


CHARLES W. STODDARD.

SOUTH SEA IDYLS. (12mo, $1.50.)

    “Neither Loti nor Stevenson has expressed from tropical life the
    luscious, fruity delicacy, or the rich, wine-like bouquet of these
    sketches.”--_The Independent._


RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

UNDER THE EVENING LAMP. (12mo, $1.25.)

    “A very charming volume of gossipy criticism on such poets as
    Burns, Motherwell and Hartley Coleridge.”--_Public Opinion._


HENRY VAN DYKE, D.D.

THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. (_New and enlarged Edition_, with portrait.
12mo, $2.00.)

CONTENTS: Tennyson’s First Flight--The Palace of Art: Milton and
Tennyson--Two Splendid Failures--The Idylls of the King--The Historic
Triology--The Bible in Tennyson--Fruit from an Old Tree--On the Study
of Tennyson--Chronology--List of Biblical Quotations.

    “The two new chapters and the additional chronological matter have
    greatly enriched the work.”--T. B. ALDRICH.


JOHN C. VAN DYKE.

ART FOR ART’S SAKE. (With 24 illustrations. 12mo, $1.50.)

    “The clear setting forth of the facts and theories of painting
    has its advantages in these days when there is so much art
    analysis that nobody can understand. This essayist deals with the
    subtleties, but in so doing he illuminates them. Moreover he is
    very interesting. His book ‘reads itself,’ as the phrase is.”--_New
    York Sun._


BARRETT WENDELL.

STELLIGERI, AND OTHER ESSAYS CONCERNING AMERICA. (12mo, $1.25.)

A series of interesting and suggestive papers on historical and
literary themes, thoroughly American in spirit.


WOODROW WILSON.

AN OLD MASTER, AND OTHER POLITICAL ESSAYS. (12mo, $1.00.)

These essays, revealing a fine literary taste, deal in a very human and
popular way with some important political problems.


[Illustration]

_THE FOREGOING VOLUMES OF ESSAYS ARE FOR SALE BY ALL BOOKSELLERS, OR
WILL BE SENT POSTPAID, ON RECEIPT OF PRICE, BY THE PUBLISHERS, CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS, 743–745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK_

[Illustration]




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Transcriber removed duplicate hemi-title pages preceding each essay.

Illustrations in this eBook are decorative, used as filler in the
advertisements.




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