DEMOCRACY
Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reason that it has its great career. Its faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be the labour of a long age. The life of historic nations has been a pursuit toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurely comprehended,--world-ideas as we call them,--which they have embodied in accomplished facts and in the inst.i.tutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious of greatness. That men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided; that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifying limitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied.
These three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are the substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and all else is but consequence.
It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between races. In most parts of the world the first true governments were tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. Aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have alleged that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from the relation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it; some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of both in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality of man reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature of the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to a freeman"s life; but such a condition is rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right that democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historical existence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing is more inc.u.mbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy a.s.sumption that so elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamental ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.
Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmental theory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it, is a result of underlying principles. There is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is the main thing. The State, as a social aggregate with a joint life which const.i.tutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of human conviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom and energy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government is no more than the mode of administration under which it achieves its results both in national life and in the lives of its citizens. All society is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations of power and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in so far, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies and strengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with the general life of men,--that universal and typical life which they have in common and which moulds them with similar characteristics. It is by this fusion of the individual with the ma.s.s, this identification of himself with mankind in a joint activity, this reenforcement of himself by what is himself in others, that a man becomes a social being. The process is the same, whether in clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, political parties, or the all-embracing body of the State. It is by making himself one with human nature in America, its faith, its methods, and the controlling purposes in our life among nations, and not by birth merely, that a man becomes an American.
The life of society, however, includes various affairs, and man deals with them by different means; thus property is a mode of dealing with things. Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls. Men commonly speak as if the soul were something they expect to possess in another world; men are souls, and this is a fundamental conception of democracy. This spiritual element is the substance of democracy, in the large sense; and the special governmental theory which it has developed and organized, and in which its ideas are partially included, is, like other such systems, a mode of administration under which it seeks to realize its ideal of what life ought to be, with most speed and certainty, and on the largest scale. What characterizes that ideal is that it takes the soul into account in a way hitherto unknown; not that other governments have not had regard to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law and rules the issue. Hence, a great preparation was needed before democracy could come into effective control of society.
Christianity mainly afforded this, in respect to the ideas of equality and fraternity, which were clarified and ill.u.s.trated in the life of the Church for ages, before they entered practically into politics and the general secular arrangements of state organization; the nations of progress, of which freedom is a condition, developed more definitely the idea of liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts of men. Democracy belongs to a comparatively late age of the world, and to advanced nations, because such ideas could come into action only after the crude material necessities of human progress--ill.u.s.trated in the warfare of nations, in military organizations for the extension of a common rule and culture among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order, justice, and the general ideas of civilization--had relaxed, and a free course, by comparison at least, was opened for the higher nature of man in both private and public action. A conception of the soul and its destiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies democracy; this is why it is the most spiritual government known to man, and therefore the highest reach of man"s evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritual element in society expressing itself now in politics with an unsuspected and incalculable force.
Democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free, equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle term that is cardinal, and the root of all. Yet it is the doctrine of the equality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, and provocative more of laughter than of argument. What, then, is this equality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men among themselves? It is our common human nature, that ident.i.ty of the soul in all men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of Christ"s death for all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equal value in the eyes of G.o.d, its Creator, and had the same t.i.tle to the rites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness of an infinite immortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the very fountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that which levelled king and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion of our Lord. Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birth itself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men"s souls seem a play of fancy. There are men of almost divine intelligence, men of almost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and they are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity, circ.u.mstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality and wholesomeness, in the body which is her work. Such differences do exist, and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which acc.u.mulates inequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin shrieks against our creed." But we have not now to learn for the first time that nature, though not the enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soul has erected in man"s own realm, peculiar to humanity. What has nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom or of fraternity? Man"s life to her is all one, tyrant or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her imperative physical conditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to; society itself is not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that belongs to man above the brute. Her word, consequently, need not disturb us; she is not our oracle. It rather belongs to us to win further victory over her, if it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as we are now coming to control her material, powers and their operation.
This equality which democracy affirms--the ident.i.ty of the soul, the sameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment--draws after it as a consequence the soul"s right to opportunity for self-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall be its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both by inherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals, cla.s.ses, and races; but the determination of democracy is that, so far as may be, it will secure equality of opportunity to every soul born within its dominion, in the expectation that much in human conditions which has. .h.i.therto fed and heightened inequality, in both heredity and circ.u.mstance, may be lessened if not eradicated; and life after birth is subject to great control. This is the meaning of the first axiom of democracy, that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and its early cries--"an open career," and "the tools to him who can use them."
In this effort society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature; for in human history the acc.u.mulation of the selfish advantage of inequality has told with as much effect as ever it did in the original struggle of reptile and beast; and in our present complex and extended civilization a slight gain over the ma.s.s entails a telling mortgage of the future to him who makes it and to his heirs, while efficiency is of such high value in such a society that it must needs be favoured to the utmost; on the other hand a complex civilization encourages a vast variety of talent, and finds a special place for that individuation of capacity which goes along with social evolution. The end, too, which democracy seeks is not a sameness of specific results, but rather an equivalence; and its duty is satisfied if the child of its rule finds such development as was possible to him, has a free course, and cannot charge his deficiency to social interference and the restriction of established law.
The great hold that the doctrine of equality has upon the ma.s.ses is not merely because it furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, which is a logic they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishes their t.i.tle to such good in human life as they can obtain, on the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. What other claim, so rational and n.o.ble in itself, can they put forth in the face of what they find established in the world they are born into? The results of past civilization are still monopolized by small minorities of mankind, who receive by inheritance, under natural and civil law, the greater individual share of material comfort, of large intelligence, of fortunate careers. It does not matter that the things which belong to life as such, the greater blessings essential to human existence, cannot be monopolized; all that man can take and appropriate they find preoccupied so far as human discovery and energy have been able to reach, understand, and utilize it; and what proposition can they a.s.sert as against this sequestering of social results and material and intellectual opportunity, except to say, "we, too, are men," and with the word to claim a share in such parts of social good as are not irretrievably pledged to men better born, better educated, better supplied with the means of subsistence and the acc.u.mulated h.o.a.rd of the past, which has come into their hands by an award of fortune? It is not a fanciful idea. It is founded in the unity of human nature, which is as certain as any philosophic truth, and has been proclaimed by every master-spirit of our race time out of mind. It is supported by the universal faith, in which we are bred, that we are children of a common Father, and saved by one Redeemer and destined to one immortality, and cannot be balked of the fulness of life which was our gift under divine providence. I emphasize the religious basis, because I believe it is the rock of the foundation in respect to this principle, which cannot be successfully impeached by any one who accepts Christian truth; while in the lower sphere, on worldly grounds alone, it is plain that the immense advantage of the doctrine of equality to the ma.s.ses of men, justifies the advancement of it as an a.s.sumption which they call on the issue in time to approve.
It is in this portion of the field that democracy relies most upon its prophetic power. Within the limits of nature and mortal life the hope of any equal development of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment extends, in men of the same race and community it appears to me that the sameness in essentials is so great as to leave the differences inessential, so far as power to take hold of life and possess it in thought, will, or feeling is in question. I do not see, if I may continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men"s lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among the common people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, which remains life as all know it--a thing of affection, of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it may be of human use. Is it not reasonable, then, on the ground of what makes up the substance of life within our observation, to accept this principle of equality, fortified as it is by any conception of heaven"s justice to its creatures? and to a.s.sume, if the word must be used, the principle primary in democracy, that all men are equally endowed with destiny? and thus to allow its prophetic claim, till disproved, that equal opportunity, linked with the service of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? At all events, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement than would otherwise be attained within our national limits; and what is found to be true of us may be extended to less developed communities and races in their degree.
The doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent right to equality of opportunity for self-development as a part of social justice, establishes a common basis of conviction, in respect to man, and a definite end as one main object of the State; and these elements are primary in the democratic scheme.
Liberty is the next step, and is the means by which that end is secured.
It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly secondary to equality in importance. Every State, every social organization whatever, implies a principle of authority commanding obedience; it may be of the absolute type of military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in const.i.tutional monarchies; but some obedience and some authority are necessary in order that the will of the State may be realized. The problem of democracy is to find that principle of authority which is most consistent with the liberty it would establish, and which acts with the greatest furtherance and the least interference in the accomplishment of the chief end in view. It composes authority, therefore, of personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consent of the governed, and not merely from their consent but from their active decree. The social will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not of men; particular wills enter into it, and make it, so const.i.tuted, themselves in a larger and external form. The citizen has parted with no portion of his freedom of will; the will of the State is still his own will, projected in unison with other wills, all jointly making up one sum,--the authority of the nation. This is social self-government,--not the anarchy of individuals each having his own way for himself, but government through a delegated self, if one may use the phrase, organically combined with others in the single power of control belonging to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the secondary stage, for the continuous action of the State, by representation, technically; but, in its primary stage and original validity, by universal suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that in const.i.tuting this authority, which is social as opposed to personal freedom,--personal freedom existing in its social form,--it includes every unit of will, and gives to each equivalence. Democracy thus establishes the will of society in its most universal form, lying between the opposite extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy; it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters into it with the entire original force of the community.
This universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limited forms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the fact that nothing enters into it except man as such. The rival powers which seek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a pure democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has its claim as the custodian of education and property and the advantages flowing from their long possession; the trained mind, the acc.u.mulated capital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most intense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and would appropriate to themselves in the structure of government a representation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds. If it be still allowed that all men should have a share in a self-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, in addition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants of such men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity, a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these three things, education, property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities in human conditions which democracy would minimize. They embody past custom and present results which are a deposit of the past; they plead that they found men wards and were their guardians, and that under their own domination progress was made, and all that now is came into being; but they must show farther some reason in present conditions under democracy now why such potent inequalities and breeders of inequality should be clothed with governing power.
Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument against it is twofold. It is said that, though much in the theory of democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. The operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring knowledge and skill, and it has no limits. In state affairs education should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they will retain deciding power. But is this so? or if there be some truth in the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the special sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally, a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect human life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is a better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the ma.s.ses?
Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally diffused. Education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It is not synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men, and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it.
Intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man applies it, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating, comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man; for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters which touch his own interests, widely shared. The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in the main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting ma.s.ses of men, the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competent to deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, though highly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure of things, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, at a less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mild forms. Besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that are required to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. The sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is really limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfish struggle of material interests in a vast and diversified State.
Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy once put into operation. The capacity of the people to judge the event in the long run must be allowed. But does broad human experience, however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? I am not well a.s.sured that it is not so. The ma.s.ses have been long in existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed that through
"old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain."
The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal conditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life. They listen to those they trust who, by neighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund of information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion and their instruments in the policy they adopt. These leaders may be called demagogues. They may be thought to employ only resources of trickery upon dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is a shallow one, and not justified by facts. It is right in the ma.s.ses to make men like themselves and nigh to them, especially those born and bred in their own condition of life, their leaders, in preference to men, however educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not embodiments of the social conditions, needs, and aspirations of the people in their cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader among themselves. Such a man is a true chief of a party, who is not an individual holding great interests in trust and managing them with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own superior brain; he is the incarnation, as a party chief, of other brains and wills, a representative exceeding by far in wisdom and power himself, a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, have their governmental life. No doubt he has great qualities of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to become a chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of public support, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, which store themselves in him. Such the leaders of the people have always been.
If this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of power rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the result with more determining force--be apparently crude in its early stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever ma.s.ses of men are entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur?
in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodist movement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement, world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort of characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those that belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving ma.s.ses of men upward into more n.o.ble ranges. Men of the people lead, because the people are the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, however well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply in the popular soil. Literary education, it must never be forgotten, is not specially a preparation for political good judgment. It is predominantly concerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate political consequence--with books generally, science, history, language, technical processes and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity of life not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political.
Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of political system, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics, unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing from their pursuits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with ideas in a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas which are in reality as much a part of life as of thought; and the method of dealing with these vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty of its own.
It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated cla.s.s as a whole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been on the side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary era the cla.s.s was not--though it is now coming to be--a germinating element in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius which foresees the times to come and develops principles by which they come; it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property and ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them is deeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable, enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative of the past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a note of despair. I do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutions have come from below, from the ma.s.ses and their native leaders, however they may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some welcome in aristocrats. The power of intellectual education as an element in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which is less than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and arrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection with love or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, or selfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with the field of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in the popular life. Intelligence, in the form of high education, can make no authoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, as a rule, its successful examples in character. The suffrage, except as by natural modes it embodies the people"s practical and general intelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives of themselves whom it elects to serve the State, need not look to high education as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading in matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expert knowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but in so far as it is separable from the business of the State, and stands by itself in a cla.s.s not servants of the State and mainly critical and traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because of any superiority of judgment it may allege. In fact, education has entered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power, in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, and the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of education, if I may use the term, is rather a democratic than an aristocratic trait. Education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the older systems. But in a democracy it remains true, that so far as education deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, and enter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own.
There, least of all, does it need privilege. Education is one inequality which democracy seems already dissolving.
What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, as such, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the men they trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. If the suffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness and ignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies not in a guardianship of the people by the educated cla.s.s, but in popular education itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general information which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that is required for the comprehension of the great questions decided by suffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions into effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of such schools and such means for the spread of political information as have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other than political ways. No force has been so great, except the discussion of religious dogma and practice under the Reformation in northern nations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. The suffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about a subst.i.tution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the normal mode of dealing with important differences of view in State affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and the preservative of that great element of liberty, and progress under liberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a continuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as they arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great an acc.u.mulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itself the right of revolution in a peaceable form under law. It is, moreover, a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable of receiving great ma.s.ses of men and accustoming them to political thought, free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in the State, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and that of the State. It is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is it to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questions which come before the suffrage for settlement are, in view of the whole complex and historic body of the State, comparatively few; for society and its inst.i.tutions, as the fathers handed them down, are accepted at birth and by custom and with real veneration, as our birthright,--the birthright of a race, a nation, and a hearth. The suffrage does not undertake to rebuild from the foundations; the people are slow to remove old landmarks; but it does mean to modify and strengthen this inheritance of past ages for the better accomplishment of the ends for which society exists, and the better distribution among men of the goods which it secures.
Fraternity, the third const.i.tuent of democracy, enforces the idea of equality through its doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea of liberty, which thus becomes more than an instrument for obtaining private ends, is inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to its exercise. Fraternity leads us, in general, to share our good, and to provide others with the means of sharing in it. This good is inexhaustible and makes up welfare in the State, the common weal. It is in the sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, and those expressions of the social conscience which we call moral issues, generally arise, and enter more or less completely into political life.
In defining politics as, in the main, a selfish struggle of material interests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, questions of a higher order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, which have in them a finer element; and, though it be true that government has in charge a race which is yet so near to the soil that it is never far from want, and therefore government must concern itself directly and continuously with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higher life has so far developed that matters which concern it more intimately are within the sphere of political action, and among these we reckon all those causes which appeal immediately to great principles, to liberty, justice, and manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and in our consciousness truly spiritual; and such a cause, preeminently, was the war for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate of mankind under democracy. In such crises, which seldom arise, material good is subordinated for the time being, and life and property, our great permanent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that which is their great charter of value, as we conceive our country.
Yet even here material interests are not far distant. Such issues are commonly found to be involved with material interests in conflict, or are alloyed with them in the working out; and these interests are a const.i.tuent, though, it may be, not the controlling matter. It is commonly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material necessity is required in any great political act, for politics, as has been said, is an affair of life, not of free ideas; and without such a plain authorization reform is regarded as an invasion of personal liberty of thought, expression, or action, which is the breeding-place of progressive life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion. In proportion as the material interests are less clearly affected injuriously, a cause is removed into the region of moral suasion, and loses political vigour. Religious issues const.i.tute the extreme of political action without regard to material interests, wars of conversion being their ultimate, and they are more potent with less developed races. For this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere of fraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social inst.i.tutions and habits, which political action may sometimes favour as in public charities, but which usually rely on other resources for their support.
On occasions of crisis, however, a great idea may marshal the whole community in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so championed under democracy is the spiritual right of man.
But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in that principle of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in that subst.i.tution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, which democracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the authority of a delegated and representative liberty. Persuasion, in its moral form, outside of politics,--which is so largely resorted to in a community that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man and decreed by him out of his own soul,--need not be enlarged upon here; but in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and will necessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, since law thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itself no longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it is adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny, recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as that has historically been. But outside of this refinement of thought in the a.n.a.lysis, the fact that the normal att.i.tude of any cause in a democracy is that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before it can impose itself as the will of the State on its citizens, marks a regard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highest consequence in State affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit upon the rest of life.
That portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, and remains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the nature of society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all in turn. Those rights are more respected under democracy than in any other form of government. The important question here, however, is not the conduct of the State toward an opposition in general, which is at one time composed of one element and at another time of a different element, and is a shifting, changeable, and temporary thing; but of its att.i.tude toward the more permanent and inveterate minority existing in cla.s.s interests, which are exposed to popular attack. The capital instance is property, especially in the form of wealth; and here belongs that objection to the suffrage, which was lightly pa.s.sed over, to the effect that, since the social will has no limits, to const.i.tute it by suffrage is to give the people control of what is not their own. Property, reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the great source of inequality in the State and the continuer of it, and gives rise perpetually to political and social questions, attended with violent pa.s.sions; but it is an inst.i.tution common to civilization, it is very old, and it is bound up intimately with the motive energies of individual life, the means of supplying society on a vast scale with production, distribution, and communication, and the process of taking possession of the earth for man"s use. Its social service is incalculable. At times, however, when acc.u.mulated so as to congest society, property has been confiscated in enormous amounts, as in England under Henry VIII, in France at the Revolution, and in Italy in recent times. The principle of paramount right over it in society has been established in men"s minds, and is modified only by the social conviction that this right is one to be exercised with the highest degree of care and on the plainest dictates of a just necessity.
Taxation, nevertheless, though a power to destroy and confiscate in its extreme exercise, normally takes nothing from property that is not due.
It is not a levy of contributions, but the collection of a just debt; for property and its owners are the great gainers by society, under whose bond alone wealth finds security, enjoyment, and increase, carrying with them untold private advantages. Property is deeply indebted to society in a thousand ways; and, besides, much of its material cannot be said to be earned, but was given either from the great stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, conferring privilege, or from the overflowing increments of social progress. If it is naturally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if it has to be subjected to control, if its duties have to be thrust upon it oftentimes, it has such powers of resistance that there need be little fear lest it should suffer injustice. Like education, it has great reserves of influence, and is a.s.sured of enormous weight in the life of the community. Other vested interests stand in a similar relation to the State. These minorities, which are important and lasting elements in society, receive consideration, and bounds are set to liberty of dealing adversely with them in practice, under that principle of fraternity which seeks the good of one in all and the good of all in one.
Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficiently indicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund public education as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great element of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into all parts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme and the organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in a mutual understanding and regard. It has established, too, protection in the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for their own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its salutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, established toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,--a respect that awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,--which as a const.i.tuent of national character cannot be too highly prized.
The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end and summary, to secure justice among mankind. Justice is the most sacred word of men; but it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its social instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in the ma.s.s. It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men"s bosoms; its knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the main a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall be done in certain sets of circ.u.mstances, as an approximation, it may be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of difficulties. This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches.
Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on the broad scale. Those matters which make individual justice impossible,--especially the element of personal responsibility in wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to motives, to reason and to pa.s.sion, in their varieties, and all such considerations,--law ignores in the main question, however it may admit them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, as circ.u.mstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large part of responsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters little into the law"s survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack of this rude world." Death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for the protection of society, not for reformation, though the philanthropic element in the State may use the period of imprisonment with a view to reformation; nor in the history of the punishment of crime, of the vengeance as such taken on men in addition to the social protection sought, has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of its enemies than they were in their attack, or shown any eminent justice toward its victims in the sphere of their own lives. It is a terrible and debasing record, up to this century at least, and uniformly corrupted those who were its own instruments. It was the application of force in its most material forms, and dehumanized those upon whom it was exercised, placing them outside the pale of manhood as a preliminary to its work. The lesson that the criminal remains a man, was one taught to the law, not learned from it. On the civil side, likewise, similar reservations must be made, both as regards its formulation and operation. The law as an instrument of justice is a rough way of dealing with the problems of the individual in society, but it is effective for social ends; and, in its total body and practical results, it is a priceless monument of human righteousness, sagacity, and mercy, and though it lags behind opinion, as it must, and postpones to a new age the moral and prudential convictions of the present, it is in its treasury that these at last are stored.
If such be the case within the law, what indifference to justice does the course of events exhibit in the world at large which comes under the law"s inquisition so imperfectly! How continuous and inevitable, how terrible and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, drama, and tale, in which the n.o.ble nature through some frailty, that was but a part, and by the impulse of some moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, in connection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury upon his victims and all that is theirs. What is here represented as the general lot of mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and fortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always present. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught of vengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. The murdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall one say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great curse that lies in heredity and the circ.u.mstances of early life under depraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? These brutalities, like the primeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard the name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and its operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their own conduct and modifying so far as possible the ma.s.s of injustice continually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they can give by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realm of moral opinion.
But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the law over men in the ma.s.s, where individuality may be neglected, there remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of the French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar great measures of cla.s.s legislation, if you will. I confess I am one of those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the structure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men"s pa.s.sions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of justice to men in ma.s.ses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid to the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills; nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal. Social justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in inst.i.tutions and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness. Social justice, so defined, under temporal conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. What matters it? It is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman"s dream.
Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. They have been working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation has grown great in their charge. What, in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the configuration of a national life? The diffusion of material comfort among ma.s.ses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantry forever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life to the mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, but through the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the development of human capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under the stimulus of the open career, with a result in enlarging and concentrating the available talent of the State to a compa.s.s and with an efficiency and diversity by which alone was possible the material subjugation of the continent which it has made tributary to man"s life; the planting of self-respect in millions of men, and of respect for others grounded in self-respect, const.i.tuting a national characteristic now first to be found, and to be found in the bosom of every child of our soil, and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the common ways safe and honourable for her, unknown before; the moulding of a conservative force, so sure, so deep, so instinctive, that it has its seat in the very vitals of the State and there maintains as its blood and bone the principles which the fathers handed down in inst.i.tutions containing our happiness, security, and destiny, yet maintains them as a living present, not as a dead past; the incorporation into our body politic of millions of half-alien people, without disturbance, and with an a.s.similating power that proves the universal value of democracy as a mode of dealing with the race, as it now is; an enthronement of reason as the sole arbiter in a free forum where every man may plead, and have the judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance to use force; an aversion to war; a public and private generosity that knows no bounds of sect, race, or climate; a devotion to public duty that excuses no man and least of all the best, and has constantly raised the standard of character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples and warm sympathy with them in their struggles; a love of country as inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparalleled in ardour; and a will to serve the world for the rise of man into such manhood as we have achieved, such prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as, by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. Is it not a great work? and all these blessings, unconfined as the element, belong to all our people. In the course of these results, the imperfection of human nature and its inst.i.tutions has been present; but a just comparison of our history with that of other nations, ages, and systems, and of our present with our past, shows that such imperfection in society has been a diminishing element with us, and that a steady progress has been made in methods, measures, and men. No great issue, in a whole century, has been brought to a wrong conclusion. Our public life has been starred with ill.u.s.trious names, famous for honesty, sagacity, and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our Presidents in particular have been such men as democracy should breed, and some of them such men as humanity has seldom bred. We are a proud nation, and justly; and, looking to the future, beholding these things multiplied million-fold in the lives of the children of the land to be, we may well humbly own G.o.d"s bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits of democracy in the new ages of a humaner world.
It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the individual mingles with the ma.s.s, and becomes one with mankind, and mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh perfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future n.o.bly conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that is, from age to age, in man"s power. It includes the universal wisdom, the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and here manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the form Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Through democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system of government or conception of man"s nature and destiny, the best of men may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, as elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however obstructed by time and circ.u.mstance, are foolish withdrawers from the ways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul in this cause.
THE RIDE
Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child"s element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks intellectually for things definite and clear. Education in general through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early years at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind"s eye saw all that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery in man"s life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage"s knowledge or the poet"s emotion or such common experience of the world as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or the unlighted spirit,
I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had pa.s.sed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least, not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of a wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in this water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget the strangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showers of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were the whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we pa.s.sed by, and I could not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me.
But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, again I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land.
It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the natural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since that morning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of a land men yet might tread as common ground.
"A poet"s mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then accepted as the only complement, the encompa.s.sment, of what we know of our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to mention,--one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of golden time.
But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man"s life. It was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the la.s.so hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend"s eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They"re wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,--brothers and friends.
Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was thinly settling,--the new America growing up before my eyes!
and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I see them in that place, with that n.o.ble prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.
We mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "Poor Robin," he said, "what of him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses" graveyard," I laughed, "in the soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he tells the tale." "I loved his "awakening,"" he replied, "and I have often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Who can tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must care for their own. That "awakening,"" I went on, after a moment of wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the Looking-gla.s.s," and learning only that such was its name, "was when after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human service come back on him like