Part 5

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.

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.

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.