MR. LOWELL ON DEMOCRACY.
ENGLISHMEN of all parties, but especially Unionists, should read with attention the speech delivered last week by Mr. Lowell in New York on behalf of "the Inde- pendents," and reported at some length in the Daily News of Monday. The great American satirist, who so often in England defended American institutions, being, as he says, at home, deems it his duty to point out to his countrymen the radical vice of their mode of government.. Democracy in America is ceasing, he says, to produce great statesmen. There are great men in business, great men in finance, great men in various kinds of organisation, but there are no great men in politics. The history of the community is becoming as the history of ants or bees, for there are no great men to lead. They were produced once, and the soil is still fertile, but they do not come to maturity. "There is as much of the raw material of statesmanship as ever ; but the duties levied by the local rings of majority-manufacturers are so high as to prohibit its entrance into competition with the protected article." The wirepullers have got hold of the electors, mean and vicious leaders control local majorities, and "tricks of management are more and more superseding the science of government." It was only when the house was on fire that Lincoln appeared, and in normal times "the door is made so narrow and so low as to admit only petty and crouching men." Like France, America "has gone into the manufacture of small politicians." If this lasts, "the first duty of a nation, the production of great men," will cease to be performed, and therefore, says Mr. Lowell, rising to a height of restrained eloquence hardly to be attained except by a poet, I stand for the Independents :—" What we want is an active class who shall insist in season and out of season that we shall have a country whose greatness is measured not only by its square miles, its number of yards woven, of hogs packed, of bushels of wheat raised, not only by its skill to feed and clothe the body, but also by its power to feed and clothe the soul ; a country which shall be as great morally as it is materially ; a country whose very name shall not. only, as now it does, stir us with the sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is in us by offering us the radiant. image of something better and nobler and more enduring than we ; that shall fulfil our own thwarted aspirations when we are but a handful of forgotten dust in a soil trodden by a race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of their inheritance than ourselves." That magnificent peroration, which the Daily News deserves high credit for telegraphing, instead of the rubbish we usually receive, will be quoted everywhere as a sentence passed by an American upon democracy ; and such in one way it is. The American people are perfectly free and perfectly equal, as completely masters of their own destinies as men may be, and able, if not to modify at will their own institutions, at least to decide on their own aims, and to select the men who shall secure those aims and work those institutions. There is not throughout the Union even the appearance of resistance to the popular vote. If, therefore, the Americans submit to mean men, if they bar out the intelligent and independent, if they permit tricksters and plunderers to rule, if they are con- tent to seek only material aims, and rise to a glow of emotion only when they read the statistics of their export of wheat, democracy has for the time being failed, for its one superiority as a mode of government is that it protects the dignity of man, and enables him to aspire unchecked by pressure, from above. The rule of the wise must be better than the rule of numbers, but that there is in the latter a possibility or a promise of greater nobleness for all. The lives of nations are long ; but such a failure, even for a period which is only as a month in the lifetime of a man, is most disheartening.
But then, is Mr. Lowell quite fair in ascribing the evil so exclusively to democracy ? Is it only the sovereignty of the people which has momentarily debased America, or is it not in at least as great a degree the method which the democracy has there adopted of tying its own hands,—in a word, the Federal system ? It seems to us that except in the gravest crises, there is no true democracy in America, that the nation never can act, that all initiative, all reform, all progress, is left not to the people, but to snippets or sections of the people, carefully walled off from each other, sedulously and, so to speak, scientifically debarred from transmuting the general feeling or conclusion or instinct into decisive action. When the nation was threatened, and the life of the whole body appeared to be in danger, and the extremity of the crisis threw down all sectional barriers, and the democracy for a moment really ruled, the Americans showed no meanness of spirit, and elected no mean men. The result of that appeal to democracy was the elevation of Abraham Lincoln to a virtual sovereignty, and the rush of a million peaceful citizens to die for the common weal. There was no lack of nobleness then, or of great men either ; but in time of peace, which is the normal time, there is in America no true nation, and democracy does not rule. There is a State life and a city life ; but these are petty lives, and the men they produce and the aims they seek are necessarily petty. The national life, which might be, probably would be, large, remains in torpor, and power passes almost inevitably to the corrupt cliques and organised factions and wirepulling leaders who, though utterly unable to control the nation, can control and do control the States and cities, and "interests" and corpora- tions which under the Fecieral system and in peaceful times are alone truly alive. A democracy is like water, and to escape the danger of becoming rotten in time of calm, must be of a certain mass. In the villages, in the cities, even in the States, mean men will acquire power, low aims will become dominant, corrupt practices will flourish which in the larger area of the nation could never attain their evil -vigour. So thoroughly is this understood even in America, that when a city becomes from any cause thoroughly corrupt, when justice ends, or there is danger of anarchy, the appeal is always to the State, and the State, however corrupt itself, always stays the corruption in the city. The larger body is always found purer than the smaller. It is only to the nation that the power of appeal is never used. Under the Federal system, the democracy has no means of exerting its reserved power. If New York protects d.ynamiters, the Union, which detests dynamiters, has no power of hanging them up. The whole Union may be sound on the marriage law, but cannot prevent its suspension in Connecticut or Iowa. The whole nation may loathe bribable Judges, but cannot punish them for taking bribes. Let us take that crucial instance. The immense majority of Americans hold that to sell justice, or a fortiori to sell injustice, is one of the highest crimes against God and man that it is possible to commit. Nevertheless, in places, justice, and injustice too, are notoriously sold. Suppose the American people suddenly to rise into a fury of indignation, and to decide that this crime shall not go on, that if no other means will serve, the corrupt Judge shall die a shameful death, what means have they of carrying out that purifying regolve ? Practically none whatever, unless the advocates of justice possess not only a majority, but a majority so distributed as to control two-thirds of the States. The sovereignty of the State bars the way even to a reform like that. That there are defences to be made for this system, we are well aware, the main one being that it prohibits change ; but it cannot be fair, while it exists, to charge the evil on the democracy alone, which, unless carried out of itself till it disregards the Con- stitution, is powerless to act. Great men under such a system are paralysed, placed in fetters, almost reduced to silence. Abraham Lincoln would have been as powerless to reform the judiciary of the Union as the smallest wire- puller, and had he attempted to act, would have been held to have "exceeded his constitutional functions." How is it possible for great men to grow under a system which leaves them, when grown, no power of action, no area wide enough either for their powers or their aims ? Suppose in England we enacted that Parliament should pass no general law it desired, that the Cabinet should give no order it thought wise, that Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gladstone should be debarred from so much as proposing general reforms, what would be the result? Clearly, at all events, not the production of great men. They have never grown in Switzerland, which also is Federal ; and even in America, where everything is gigantic, and a State may be like a European Kingdom in wealth and area, their growth, says Mr. Lowell, endorsed by all that is most intellectual and independent in the Union, has stopped. Great men are not, like the genii of the Arab story-teller, squeezable into little boxes ; they must have room ; and it is the very essence of the Federal system, which English Home-rulers think so superior to our own, that room shall be refused. A man in America may show his whole strength in war occasionally, in commerce always, in litera- ture when publishers permit, but in politics never, unless, indeed, when the country is on fire, as in 1860-64, and the Federal pens which split a People into crowds are for a time burnt up.
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