THE GREAT STRUGGLE
Is it true that 'our democratic institutions are now on trial?' Everybody, or nearly everybody, says so. The London Times says so, and is or has been gloating over their failure. Many of our 'able editors' say so, and are trying desperately to prove that they will not fail. Thus, while there is a wide difference in opinion as to what may be the result, there seems to be a quite general agreement as to the fact that the trial is going on. There appears to be no suspicion that the question is not properly stated. Doubtless the assertion will excite surprise, if heeded at all, that in fact the great struggle here and now is not between aristocracy or despotism on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Most people in the United States have come to entertain the fixed idea that the only natural political antagonisms are democratic as opposed to despotic in any and all shapes. And this idea has become so ingrained in the American mind that it will be difficult to gain credence for the assertion that the terms constitutionalism and absolutism represent the forces or systems which, have really been antagonistic ever since Christianity began to affect and animate social and political relations.
It may be a new idea to many readers that absolutism can be democratic, as well as aristocratic or autocratic. Yet such is the fact, and the whole history of Greece and Rome proves it. Plato, the friend of the people, taught the absolute power of the state—of the power holder, whoever that might be, whether the people, the aristocracy, the triumvirate, the archon, or the consul. It was not possible for Plato, Demosthenes, or Cicero, to conceive the idea of constitutionalism.
Wherever the will of the power holder operates directly upon the subject or object, there is absolutism. Interpose a medium between the two, separate the law maker from the law executor, make both the subjects or servants of the law, and then, if the people are virtuous, you can harmonize private liberty with public order. The individual must not be absorbed by the state; individual liberty must not be merged in absolutism. Nor must the state go down before individualism.
The problem is to render possible and reconcile the coexistence of the largest private liberty and the highest public authority. This implies the idea of mediation. There must be mediatizing institutions standing between the state and the individual, insuring the safe transmission of power, and guaranteeing justice between the state and individuals, as well as between individuals in their relations with each other. This done, you realize or actualize the grand idea of mediation in the political relations of men. The distinguishing idea of Christianity—the God-man reconciling man with God, and thus harmonizing the finite with the infinite—this idea must actualize itself in the affairs of men, in order to harmonize perfect liberty with salutary authority. Animated by this idea, penetrated with profoundest belief of the infinite worth of the individual man because the God-man had wonderfully renewed his nature, the early Christian heroes and martyrs took hold of the hostile and disorganized elements of European society—the fragments of the Roman empire on the one hand, and the barbarians of the north on the other—and brought order out of chaos. They re-organized society by naturally, though slowly, developing those numerous intermediary institutions—guilds, corporations, trial by jury, the judiciary, and representation of interests, orders, guilds and corporations, not of individual heads, in Parliament—all which, as a living, harmonious system, constitute, or did constitute, the English Constitution, and were essentially reproduced in the Constitution of the United States, and which wonderfully distinguish constitutionalism from absolutism.
'The will of the emperor has the force of law,' was the fundamental maxim of the civil law. Emperor, imperator;—hence, imperialism, Cæsarism, absolutism. That maxim obtained with pagans—civilized it may be, but none the less pagans—whose theory or gospel was that 'man is his own end.' Man's infinite moral worth as man, was not known or not recognized in the pagan civilization of the classic Greeks and Romans. Hence the state, which outlived the individual, was of more importance than the individual, and naturally absorbed the individual. Man being his own end, and existence being next to impossible without society, the state was the best means to obtain his end, and therefore Plato taught that man lives for the state, must be trained up for the state, belongs to the state, and is of no value outside of the state. Hence the pagan civilization of Greece and Rome, being intensely human, while it became very splendid and refined, became also, and could not help becoming intensely and unutterably corrupt—so corrupt that St. Paul refrained from finishing the disgusting catalogue of its awful sins and vices. The church, Christianity, could save man, but it could not save the empire. The principle of social harmony being lost, government and society fell to pieces.
On a certain memorable occasion, the present Emperor of France uttered the mystic phrase: The empire is peace! So it is. But how? I answer: Several centuries of Godless French statesmanship—engineered by men who, though nominal Christians or Catholics, discarded God in affairs of state, and attempted to rule without God in the world, except to use Him (pardon the expression) as a sort of scarecrow for the 'lower orders'—resulted in gradually drying up those intermediary institutions which had served at once to develop a manly civic life and to protect private liberty, and in reabsorbing and concentrating all power in the central government. Even in the early part of these centuries, Louis the Fourteenth made his boast, 'I am the state,' and thereby announced the substantial reinauguration of pagan imperialism or absolutism. His successors, aided by the ever-growing influence of the renaissance, which was but the revivification of classic paganism, continued his system, and when at last their cruel, inhuman, and unchristian oppressions drove men to the assertion of their rights in the fierce whirlwind of the French Revolution, that very assertion, 'clad in hell fire,' as Carlyle says, was based on the self-same fundamental principle that 'man is his own end.' The Revolution also ignored the divine idea, and failed. The subsequent revolutions, and especially that of 1848, were no wiser. The last was simply the triumph of democratic absolutism by universal suffrage, in place of autocratic or monarchic absolutism, as De Tocqueville clearly demonstrated in his 'Ancient Regime and the Revolution.' De Tocqueville had thoroughly mastered the constitutional system, as had also Lacordaire and Montalembert, and he, as well as they, joined the so-called republican movement of 1848, hoping that constitutionalism would triumph at last. But he soon saw that European Democrats or Red Republicans did not comprehend the idea;—that, in fact, they meant absolutism, though democratic; and he retired in disappointment, though calm hopefulness, to his estate, and there wrote his 'Ancient Regime.'
True, the Red Republicans issued high-sounding phrases about liberty, rights of man, and the right of the people to govern. But they meant rights of man independent of God, and the right of the people to be absolute; and they continued the system of centralism, or government by bureaucracy, without God. The French have learned by sad experience that there is a thousand times more danger of change, turbulence, and disruption, under democratic absolutism than under autocratic absolutism. Louis Napoleon knows it well, and hence his significant phrase, 'The empire is peace.' It is the strong iron band around a mass of antagonistic atoms, which have lost, at least in the sphere of politics, the cohesive principle of harmony: union with each other by virtue of union with the God-man.
Through all the terrific scenes of turbulence and carnage, the frequent dynastic changes, and the fearful scourgings of the French empire since the days of Louis the Fourteenth, the nation itself has not been destroyed, because, after all, there was and is a vast deal of virtue in the people as individuals. God never destroyed a nation for its public or national sins until the people themselves had become individually thoroughly corrupt. The city of Sodom itself would have been spared had even five good men been found therein. And so the French nation does not go to pieces, as the Roman empire did, because, notwithstanding the vice of Paris, of which we hear and read so much, and the godlessness of French statesmanship and French literature, the great body of the people, even in Paris, still retain their integrity, and a wholesome fear of God. But because their current literature is heathenish, and their statesmanship has ignored honesty and the divine origin of man's rights, those intermediary institutions, which were developed by Christian charity from the idea that man's rights are sacred because God-given and dignified by the God-man, have been undermined or disanimated, and it has come to pass that the only government possible, where the divine idea is eliminated from politics, is one in the form of absolutism. How long this form will continue in France remains to be seen. But it is certain that European Democrats or Red Republicans, with their ideas—or rather lack of ideas—will never comprehend the constitutional system, and will never rehabilitate or reanimate those intermediary municipal institutions, the monuments of which De Tocqueville was surprised to find scattered so generally through continental Europe, as well as in England and in New England.
Turning, now, to the United States, it is plainly evident that the whole tendency of our politics, intensely accelerated by the influence of Jefferson's French views, has been, first, to lose out of mind the true significance of those intermediary institutions embodied in the common law of England, and inherited by us from the mother country; and, secondly, to depreciate them as standing in the way of the people's will, or popular sovereignty; and, lastly, to break them down entirely, and substitute for them the tyranny of an irresponsible majority, or democratic absolutism. The persistent efforts to get rid of grand juries and trial by jury, to popularize the judiciary, to make senatorial terms dependent on changing party majorities, to reduce the representative to a mere deputy, and other similar schemes to bring about the direct unmediatized operation of the popular will upon the subject, are all illustrations of this direful tendency.
Concurrently with, and greatly aiding this tendency, there has been a gradual decay of the manly virtue that charactized our fathers. Men have become less conscientious in the performance of their public duties, and more regardless of private rights. A genuine manly self-respect implies sincere respect for the rights of others, and both inevitably decay as the fear of God dies out. When men continually act on the idea that man is his own end, and when each one is intensely engaged in seeking his own interest, what can result but jarring of interests, opposition, repulsion, disregard of law in so far as it clashes with private ends, and thus, finally, social and political disruption more or less extensive? Thus our trouble lies deeper than slavery. Remove the canker of slavery to-day, and yet the tendency to disruption and dissolution would evermore go on while prevailing ideas actuated society. The remorseless mill of selfishness would keep on grinding, grinding, grinding toward dissolution. Look at our literature, our architecture, our science, our political and moral theories, our social arrangements generally, and especially our hideous, almost diabolical arrangements or lack of arrangements for the care of the poor and the unfortunate, and what a confused jumble they present! Having no grand animating idea, no all-pervading principle of harmony, no universally recognized standard for anything, we are necessarily the most anomalous, amorphous, helter-skelter aggregation of independent and antagonistic individualities ever gathered together since nations began to exist. What can prevent such an agglomeration from falling to pieces? What can hold it together?
Thus, with the frightful decay of Christian, and even manly virtue—alas! too plainly visible all around us—and the entire divorcement of morality or religious ideas from politics, what fate is in store for us but the inevitable triumph of anarchy, and through it of despotism? Herein lies our real danger. The great struggle is not, as many assert, between aristocracy, or monarchy, or despotism and democracy. But it is between despotism or absolutism and constitutionalism. It is the struggle of the pagan system (revived by the renaissance), based on the idea that 'man is his own end,' with the Christian system based on the idea of mediation, involving the idea that the true end of man is God. It is not true, therefore, that democratic institutions are now on trial in the United States. Democracy, pure and simple, precisely in the form it is assuming or has assumed in this country, was tried long ago. It was tried in ancient Greece, and found wanting. It was tried in Rome, and ended in the dissolution of the empire. And in both these trials it had, to begin with, a much more highly finished, fresh, robust, and whole-souled manhood to work with and to work upon than that of modern democracy. More recently it was tried in France, and for the present is blooming in the despotism of Napoleon III.
The question, then, I repeat, is whether constitutionalism, as originally developed in England and embodied and reproduced by our fathers—who, perhaps, 'builded wiser than they knew'—can come safely through this crisis and triumph over the two ideas which, thus far, have predominated in the American mind, and driven us with fearful strides toward absolutism. 'Every man for himself' is the first idea. In the family, in church, in politics, in commerce, in all social and political relations, every man striving, pushing, scrambling, straining every nerve to advance himself, regardless of his neighbor or the public interest—such everywhere is the confused and hideous picture of American society. Selfishness predominates, and selfishness is repellant. So it was before the ages were, when Lucifer, in the pride of self, refused obedience to the Word. So it is even yet, and its inevitable tendency is to hostile isolation and final dissolution. Its logical consequence is anarchy. But anarchy is intolerable, and a civilized people, yea, even barbarians, will submit to anything rather than social and political chaos. Then comes the iron band of despotism to hold together the antagonistic fragments.
'The supremacy of the people's will' is the second idea. Vox Populi, vox Dei! What the people decree is right, and nothing must stand between their will and the subject or object upon which it operates! Such is the political gospel according to democracy, and fifty years' earnest proclamation thereof has wellnigh abolished all the barriers of constitutionalism—barriers, which stood like faithful guardians, stern but just, between the Individual and the State, which reconciled the harmonious coexistence of private liberty and public power—an idea wholly unknown in pagan or classic civilization—and which at once prevented the anarchy of individualism and the tyranny of absolutism. But true it is, whatever a people constantly assert they come to believe, and whatever they believe will at last crystallize itself in action. And thus, with the oft-repeated and ever-increasing assertion that 'man is his own end,' and 'is sufficient unto himself,' and with that other assertion that the will of the people is law and must act directly upon its object, we have gradually lost out of mind the true significance of the constitutional system. Those numberless intermediary institutions—which logically grew out of the Christian idea of mediation, as the oak naturally grows out of the acorn, and which wonderfully reconciled liberty with authority, freedom with order, the finite with the infinite—have become more and more obsolete, and less and less understood. They have crumbled away like the stately columns of a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead branches that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must be removed—relics of monarchy or aristocracy, cunningly devised inventions of priestcraft or kingcraft, that retard the triumph of democracy.
If the will of the people is supreme, then away with your high and life-long judges, or at least let them be elected by the people and for very brief terms. Let grand juries be voted a humbug, and trial by jury a nuisance. Let electoral colleges be abolished as meaningless and cumbersome anomalies. Let the President be the direct representative of a mighty people, and act without let or hindrance—only let him act with gigantic energy and swift execution. Let senatorial terms be dependent upon changing legislative majorities. In fact, let the two legislative houses, as being wholly useless and very expensive, be reduced to one. Let the representative be a tongue-bound deputy, and not a free, manly, self-acting agent. Let county boards of supervisors give way to the one man power of the county judge. And, in short, let us go on, as we have been going on, democratizing or popularising our institutions, 'improving,' or rather impairing and tearing down one after another of the venerable columns of the original system, until every safeguard of personal freedom is removed, and there shall be nothing left to restrain the giant sway of unmitigated and unmediatized public power. Then we shall have despotism or absolutism, pure and simple—and none the less so because it shall be democratic.
The London Times will have nothing to jubilate over if what it mistakenly calls our 'trial of democratic institutions' shall be unsuccessful. For in fact, our constitutional system was but the reproduction, in a broader field and on a grander scale, of the British Constitution, in all its essential features, differing only in what philosophic historians call 'accidentals.' And if that system finally fails here, The Times may have a 'most comfortable assurance' that it will fail in England. True, we have more rapidly departed from and defaced that system than the English, chiefly because, in escaping from the fogs of England, we left behind us that stolid conservatism, that bulldog tenacity for the old because it is old, which are instinctive in the narrow-minded islanders. But they, just as much as we, have lost out of mind the significance of the Christian idea. They, just as much as we, have become thoroughly paganized—have become saturated with the central idea of pagan civilization, that man is his own end, lives for himself alone, and not for God, and therefore is inferior to and must be the mere tool of the state. If Americans hold that the state can make right, as well as enforce it, so do the English. If divine sanctions have no longer any significance in America, so have they not in England. If expediency, and not God's truth, is the universal rule of action here, so is it there. If every American or 'Yankee' seeks his own end in his own way, regardless of his neighbor, his Government, and his God, so does every Englishman. The Englishman has no God except his belly or his purse. Years ago it was said by one of themselves, 'The hell of the English is—not to make money,' If the divine principle of charity is a myth, and selfishness rages against selfishness here, much more so with a people whose only God is Mammon. And finally, if inevitable dissolution shall overtake us, and we rush into absolutism as a refuge from anarchy, we shall have the melancholy pleasure—if it can be a pleasure—of hailing the almost simultaneous wreck of the British Constitution, whose noble ruins, no less than ours, would be mournful monumental witnesses to the glory of ages wiser and better than our own.