Part 2

The principles under the inspiration of which this government had its birth, are set forth in the Declaration of Independence. They were when realized by the people, when incorporated into the organic law, to give them independence; and they were thought to be of so much importance that the people fought a long and bloody war to acquire a right to their possession and enjoyment. Who can think of Bunker Hill, of Brandy-wine, of Princeton, of Valley Forge, of Yorktown, think of those long eight years of alternate hope and despair, and not feel that the price paid for independence was too great to have it limited to a mere minority of the people, when it was purchased for the whole; was too great a price to pay for principles that were to be restricted to fewer than half of the descendants of those who paid it. Our fathers would have never fought for the liberty to have a King or an aristocratic ruler of their own. They endured the hardships and privations of that war for independence for themselves and their posterity. Nothing less than this was the inspiration of those years of suffering, nothing less than this could have given them inspiration to gain their independence.

But this was scarcely more than won, before those from whom this inspiration came were doomed to see their work robbed of half its value. At the convention that met to frame a government, there were men whose minds were too narrow to grasp the significance of the truths which had been the inspiration of the people; and which had sustained them through the war. They were men bred and born in English customs. They were not willing to make a complete departure from the established legal forms of the mother country, and make the Declaration, the inspiration of the Constitution, as it had been of the revolution. That inspiration came from these truths, and they were declared to be self-evident, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No trace of any single one of these truths is to be found in the Constitution as then adopted; nor in any of the Amendments that have since been added, save in Sec. I., Art. XIV., which the self-constituted citizens have rendered nugatory.

OUR COPYING OF ENGLAND.

Our constitution and laws have nothing specifically American about them. They are copies from the English, modified in some particulars, which have been the inducement “to gather the spoils while we may.” The President is an English king under another name, selected by the “caucus,” the worst element in politics, and elected by the people, because, under the vicious methods that are in vogue they have no way to vote save for one of the two at whom ten thousand papers vie with each other in throwing mud during the campaign. Many who have come to know how Presidents are made have abandoned the polls in disgust. The Senate is a badly abridged edition of the House of Lords, while the House of Representatives is the same of the House of Commons. In the law of primogeniture only do our laws differ materially from those of England, this good feature having been borrowed from another source. Nor have we any political literature save the Declaration of Independence which has a distinct national character about it that is purely American, and it is this that we celebrate year after year; it is this and this only that calls out the patriotism of the people.

As far as the Constitution is concerned it is Dead Sea fruit. It is an old and musty English sermon to which we have prefixed a new and vital text, the text and sermon having no common ground or meaning. The condition of the people and the country could scarcely have been worse had we had Kings and Parliaments, instead of Presidents and Congresses. A tree, let it be called by whatever name, is known by the fruit it bears. If we are to judge the political tree in this country in this way, shall we not be forced to say that we have gathered thorns from grapes and thistles from figs? In purity in the administration of justice, our Government can stand no comparison with that of England. Money here is king, and judge and jury also. Then must there not be something radically wrong somewhere, and what can this be, except the engrafting of a new political idea into an old political system? This is what is the matter, and cringe as we may, there can never be a change greatly for the better until the institutions of the country are remodelled by the inspiration of that which led to their establishment.

OUR LACK OF GREAT STATESMEN.

Had there been any really great men among our statesmen they would have discovered the cause of the alternate “ups and downs” in the prosperity of the country, and, at least, have attempted some remedy. But we may look in vain through the whole list of those who have, one after another, prominently occupied public attention, for a great mind in the sense of instituting reforms in government; in replacing vicious by beneficent legislation. Washington, who will always be deservedly revered, was in no sense a great man save in goodness. As a general or statesman he has been excelled by dozens since his time, not one of whom has left anything behind him that will make his name immortal. To be immortal in history requires that there shall be some basis for it living in the Government, or in the industrial habits of the people, or in their religious faiths or rites. Buddha in India, Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, Mahomet among Mahomedans, and Jesus amongst Christians, have immortality. But the religious element, per se, never would have civilized the world. Indeed the nations most under the influence of religious sentiments have done the least to spread civilization into unknown countries. It is the warlike and intellectual, in contradistinction to the religious and æsthetic, nations to whom we owe the almost world-wide enlightenment of the present, while the latter have remained shut up within themselves, and are nothing but what their religion makes them. The contrast between Egypt and India or China is, in this respect, most striking. Egypt, becoming great at home, pushed out into the surrounding world. With its immense armies under Sesostris and its no less potent power emanating from the wise men who made the Alexandrian library a possibility, it left its impress so fixed upon the world that, even to this day, there are many things in the habits and customs of the nations, especially in their literature and philosophies, that are Egyptian. It was an Egyptian colony which laid the foundation in Greece at Athens for the splendid civilization that was there developed; for the glory, the military renown and the arts and sciences that afterwards made Greece at once the admiration and wonder of the world.

GREAT MINDS THE FOUNTAIN OF ALL GOOD.

The Egyptians were also a maritime people who made voyages for discovery. It was under the instructions of one of its kings—Nechos—that some skilful Phœnician sailors first sailed round the coast of Africa. Six hundred years B.C. an attempt was also made to do what the French engineer Lesseps has since done—to cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. I mention these facts to show how all the really great things that have done the world most good have had their origin in some one great mind, who still lives in the immortality of his creations, having impressed himself inexpungibly upon the descent of the race and on civilization; and by this showing to call attention to the further fact that the number of the great who live in the present is extremely small, and finally to show that this country has not produced even one such mind outside the purely intellectual plane. The names of Fulton and Field will live until steam, as a motor power, shall be superseded by some more potent agent, and until the telegraphic wires shall be no longer required to transmit the thoughts of one to another at the antipodes of the earth; but in government the list is blank.

Our basis must, however, be made still broader. Greece was founded upon principles brought from Egypt; but in that small country a new era was born. Egyptian achievements were the culmination of an era of civilization of which Greece was fruit, and became the seed for the next. Not only did Greece dim the splendour of Egyptian warfare, but she also surpassed her in intellectual attainment. The names of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, Xenophon, will live in philosophy as long as there is a literature; while Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Platea and Mycale will stand for ever unapproachable in military and naval glory, conclusive evidence of the power of order and organization over mere numbers and brute force.

THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.

There was, however, another power behind this one of order which made it invulnerable, irresistible. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, testified of this power in these words: “The eloquence of Demosthenes did me more harm than all the armies and fleets of the Athenians. His harangues are like machines of war, and batteries raised at a long distance, by which all my projects and enterprises are ruined. Had I been present and heard that vehement orator declaim, I should have been the first to conclude that it was necessary to declare war against me. Nor could I reach him with gold, for in this respect, by which I had gained so many cities, I found him invulnerable.” Antipater also said of the same power: “I value not the galleys nor armies of the Athenians. Demosthenes alone I fear. Without him the Athenians are no better than the meanest Greeks. It is he who rouses them from their lethargy and puts arms into their hands almost against their wills. Incessantly representing the battles of Marathon and Salamis, he transforms them into new men. Nothing escapes his penetrating eye, nor his consummate prudence. He foresees all our designs; he countermines all our projects and disconcerts us in everything. Did the Athenians confide in him and follow his advice we should be irredeemably undone.”

’Tis true that this was in the days of the declining Grecian glory; but it is none the less true that it was the same power in others previously that lifted a whole people to sublime achievements and into grand and noble character. It was here, also, that patriotism had birth; here that men devoted their lives to their country for the country’s sake rather than for private gain or glory. In this respect the character of Grecian generals and statesmen has never been approached by any other nation. It was this character that gave the Greeks as a nation, and to the world as an example, the first code of laws; gave a Constitution as a conservatory of the people’s rights, and made a Lycurgus possible, the principles of whose Spartan code are only now beginning to be appreciated. It is to this code that we must look as the prime source of political economy, and it has been the inspiration of all the modifications of laws ever made in the interests of the people. In this respect, Lycurgus will be known in the future ages as the Spartan law-giver of the world.

LESSONS FROM ROMAN HISTORY.

Roman history is a second edition of Grecian, enlarged in its sphere of operations, and in its influence over the world. Rome, however, would never have been possible, had Greece not first been a fact. But Rome was vitiated in the character of her public men, as compared with those of Greece, in about the same ratio that she was greater in other respects. Greece was the admiration of the world, but Rome was its astonishment. All that she was, sank with her as she went down into the dark ages. The best of what made Greece, still lives in the people of the world. Greece was the garden of modern civilization and will remain its inspiration until three elements of character—the religious, the intellectual and the social—shall join their powers to construct the future government of the world.

Charlemagne was the basis of the first great national character that evolved after the dark ages, and Otho the Great laid the foundation for the present dominance of Bismarck and Von Moltke in Central Europe. Cromwell, more than any other, is the inspiration of English character, modified by its respect for the political rights of women by the influence of Queen Elizabeth, under whom England reached the acme of its power and glory. But in French history is to be found the most distinct evidence of a communication to a whole people of the character of a single individual that there is to be found anywhere. The French character, both as a nation and as an individual, may be summed up in one word—Bonaparte. With the advent of this giant mind came a crisis over all modern Europe. Under his influence not only did the national character of the French people change, but the individual character also underwent many modifications. Nor was this confined to France, for this man’s genius was felt in every capital in the world. He conquered the nations and compelled them to change their laws, while to France he gave an entire new code, to which, more than to anything else, France owes her position among nations. It was the result of these laws that gave to France the capacity to rise from the disaster inflicted upon her by Prussia. Her immense loans came in small sums from the peasantry, and when paid will remain in France, which will not suffer the double impoverishment that most nations suffer from a public debt. The possibility of this was due to the far-reaching statesmanship of Napoleon Bonaparte, when he changed the laws regarding the inheritance of property, taking the estate from the deceased and dividing it equally among all the children—the greatest innovation that had ever been made upon the old feudal system, and together with other reforms, fixing France in a position to become more prosperous internally than any other European nation. Bonaparte also broke down the barriers that divided the nations and races of Europe, and opened up the way for closer commercial and literary relations, and performed, during the twenty years that he was in France, a greater service for the advancement of civilization than was ever performed by any other person who ever lived. In a sense, and in a good sense, too, it may be said that he dictated to the world, because the changes that he instituted and compelled have produced a modifying influence over the whole world. Taken as a whole, Bonaparte was the greatest man who ever lived. Certainly he equalled the greatest generals, and his campaigns, with those of Hannibal and Scipio-Africanus, will be the textbooks for military students as long as the art of war remains a study; while as a statesman he stands at the head of the greatest. He was Lycurgus, Alexander, Hannibal, Talleyrand, Bismarck combined. He represented, if he did not excel, the greatest of all ages, save Confucius and Jesus, save Demosthenes and Cicero. He never taught morality, per se, but he believed that a well-governed and industrially-thrifty people would necessarily be also moral, and he never made a speech except to point out the enemy to his soldiers. The treachery of a single man—Grouchy—who permitted Blucher to hurl the Prussian army unopposed upon his wearied troops after they had defeated Wellington at Waterloo, changed the whole future destiny of Europe, and prevented Bonaparte from becoming the beneficent law-giver of the world as he had been of France. For behind all his ambition in which only he is known to the world, and, therefore, not known at all, he had an unalterably fixed purpose to raise the common people of Europe to their proper position; but this he could do only by first conquering the rulers who stood in his way.

LYCURGUS AND BONAPARTE.

It is, therefore, to Lycurgus and to Bonaparte, more than to any others, to whom we must look as the master-minds in government; as those who instituted sweeping changes in the political institutions of the world, and in this sense they are the greatest of all the great who live in profane history. Many slight reforms have been effected; but they alone conceived and reduced to a system the changes that revolutionized and replaced the old beneficently to the people.

Bonaparte himself recognized that his greatness consisted in this, for, when he asked his friends to which of his achievements he would owe his life in history, and they replied, naming some campaign or battle, he corrected them and said; “I shall go down in history with my Code Napoleon in my hands.” So it was not Marengo, not Wagram, not Austerlitz, not Dresden, not any nor all his great victories to which he looked as his best achievement; but it was the code of laws by which he made France the happiest country in Europe. It is not to be wondered at that his name lives in the hearts of the French and moves them as no other name ever moved a people.

Great as Bismarck may be, he is not great in the true sense of greatness, for he is building up a power that the next fifty years will have to overthrow. True greatness works in the direction of and not against progress, and its works live. Compared with him, Disraeli may after all, should his intentions toward India have a humanitarian tendency, turn out to be the greater man.

In this view of greatness, to whom shall we look among our statesmen for any of its evidences? Beyond the legislation that the abolition of slavery forced upon us, the homestead act and one recently introduced by Gen. Banks, enlarging its scope in the interests of the settler, and some concessions to the people, like the eight hour law, we may search the legislation of the country through in vain for any evidence of humanitarian tendencies in our legislators. On the contrary, the inspiration of the privileged classes, the power and use of wealth will be found everywhere; ’tis true that we have a Republican Government in name and form, but it is also true that money rules, that it elects the officers and controls the legislation. The people who are outside of the privileged classes, outside of the offices and the press, are powerless to help themselves. The machinery of the government is in the hands of those who want things to continue as they are, while the few in power who are devoted to the public welfare, beat the air in vain attempts to strike either the causes of, or the remedy for existing evils.

NEED OF A NEW CODE OF LAWS.

But they may be summed up in a few words. The causes lie in the fruitless attempt to run a Republican Government upon an aristocratic code of laws, and the remedy is to remodel the code by the principles of the declaration, which should be made the inspiration of every provision, as well as the key to its construction. I might enumerate the special evils that have grown out of the error made in the Constitution—the vicious legislation for which this error laid the foundation—that the rule of the majority is not a Republican idea; that “the majority” is another name for the despot; that minorities are entitled to, and can be represented; I might show that the United States is, after all, nothing but a confederation of equal and antagonistic powers, and not a Federal Union; that Washington is more a place in which representatives from the several States assemble to quarrel over the spoils of office and to lay the ropes for the succession, than it is the capital of a free and mighty people; that there is such a contrariety of laws in the several States upon any given subject, that it puzzles a Philadelphia lawyer to tell whether a given act is a crime, a misdemeanour, or whether actionable at all in the different States; if people be married in one State, whether they are so legally in any other, or if divorced the same. I might show that taxation is unequal and oppressive, and the revenue unjust; and if there were need of it, which there is not, that official patronage is a polite name for public plunder, and that the public service is a vast system of organized corruption. Had the original error not been made, had the fountain been kept pure, none of these baneful things could have been engrafted into the system. But they have now obtained a root so deep that they can never be exterminated save by uprooting the system. They are the Canada thistles in the fertile meadow, that spread themselves until they absorb the whole vitality of the soil and thrust out the useful harvest. These thistles have spread and seeded in the government until they have thrust out every honest servant of the people, and until one who has any care for his reputation cannot afford to meddle with the government.

MUST WE HAVE A REVOLUTION?

How can such a state of things be remedied save by a revolution? The people may listen to the “outs” who pretend to tell them that it may; but should they come to the “ins” they would follow in the footsteps of their predecessors. The machine is running down hill too fast to be now stopped; the tide of power has set too strongly toward corruption to be reversed; the political body is too thoroughly impregnated with the poison to make its purging possible by any change of medicine. The disease is incurable because it is in the system more than in the individual men who run it. It has had its youth, its manhood, and is now in its old and decaying age. No power can save it; and those who think they can, who think that they can patch it up with tonics for a time, are only preparing for a worse ruin when the crash shall come.

But the people would not care so much about the government; they would be willing to let the politicians run it as they please, and enjoy its spoils as they have for a century; they would even endure, as they have, uncomplainingly, any extortion that their earnings would permit without reducing them to the starvation point; but when in addition to the absorption of all their earnings to pay the debts of official extravagance and vicious legislation it is threatened to foreclose the mortgages on the industries and sell them out, and thus take away their means of livelihood, they have a right, indeed it is their duty, to object, and they are beginning to do it in real earnest.

A WORD TO NON-PRODUCERS.

I do not say this in the interest of the workmen, but speak in appeal to the non-productive classes, those who live without labour, to show them that through their servants, the Congress and the administrators of the laws, they are repeating the folly of the Southern slave-holders, who could not have found a more effectual way to rid themselves of slavery than that which they adopted. Looking upon it now, it seems that they could not have been satisfied with the progress of abolitionism in the North, under the lead of Garrison, Phillips and Douglass, and therefore they stirred up the war at home to precipitate the end, and succeeded admirably. The heartiness with which the Southern members of the St. Louis Convention recently accepted “the results” is evidence that this is a proper view to take of it. It is only a wonder that, going so far as they did, they did not fall into the arms of the Cincinnati Convention and thank its party for the services rendered them. But this aside. Had they been content to keep the power they had, they might have retained their slaves for years to come; but they wanted more! more! more! Nothing less than the whole country as slave territory would satisfy their morbidness upon the subject. Perhaps they did not know what they were doing; but they must have been blind indeed if there were not among them one sagacious mind who understood it.