THE POLITICAL FUTURE.
[FROM OITR SPECIAL CORP.ESPONDENT1
Washington, 12th April, 1862. THE outlook for the future of America occupies, I think, far more attention amongst foreign observers than it does at home. The crew of a vessel, labouring beneath a hurricane, are not likely to devote much attention to the consideration of what they are to do when they get safely into harbour; and so, in like manner, in the midst of this insurrection, there is little time or care to think of anything but how it can be suppressed. After all, what is to be done, or rather what is to happen hereafter, is still a matter of ab- stract speculation, and the Americans, as a people, have an Anglo- Saxon distaste anti incapacity for abstract speculation of any kind. The men by whom this country is ruled and represented are, as a body, shrewd, self-made men, with very little appreciation for the philosophy of government. Though the average culture of America is probably higher than that of any country in the world, yet at the same time any very high degree of intellectual culture is uncommon. There are no public men here of the class of Mill, or Gladstone, or Lord Stanley, and if there were, their influence on the country would be very limited. It is a land of workers, not of thinkers.
Still, making all allowance for this, and for a natural reluctance to face the belief that the Union is not in itself a remedy for every evil, it seems strange to me to observe how little thought there appears to be in the public mind about the inevitable future. The future, too, is not only inevitable, but so near at hand. Of course it is possible the South may retrieve its fortunes, and in that case the questions which must force themselves for solution whenever the insurrection is suppressed, may be retarded indefinitely. This, how- ever, is not probable, and is not the prevalent belief. All the plans of the Government (and in saying this I am not expressing merely a private opinion) are based upon the idea that by the end of June at the very latest the insurrection will be so far suppressed as to present no further military dangers. Enlistments are now stopped, contracts for army supplies are being curtailed, and sufficient funds have only been provided to meet the current military expendi- ture for some ten weeks more. So far the scheme has worked favourably, and if McClellan can make up his mind to fight and win a battle before Richmond, it seems likely that the scheme will in the main be realized. Within three months, then, it is expected that the Government of the United States will have to reorganize its rule over the revolted States, and yet neither Government, nor Congress, nor people, appear to have any definite idea or prospect of how that reorganization is to be effected. The truth is, the country is drift- ing into peace just as it drifted into war.
The never-ending negro question is only the most pressing, per- haps, not the most difficult of those the country has to deal with. Throughout almost all English speculations on American affairs there is a constant assumption that the United States Government resembles our old-world governments, and has unlimited powers of action, if only it chooses to exert them. Now, the truth is, that by the nature of its Constitution, the powers of the Government are so strictly defined, that in cases not provided for by the letter of the law it has no authorized power of action. Thus, in Europe, the refusal of the Federal Government to recognize the fact that the Confederates were belligerents appeared a childish refusal to acknow- ledge an unpleasing truth. In reality, it was constitutionally impos- sible for the North to admit the belligerent character of the South. The Federal Government has power by the Constitution to suppress an insurrection, in the supposed interest of the insurgent State ; it has no power whatever to make war upon a State. In order to keep within the Constitution, it was essential for the Federal Government to assume the theory that the insurgent States still form part of the Union. Yet the adoption of this theory involves inconceivable diffi- culties in practice. If the States are still within the Union, they must be dealt with by the laws of the Constitution. Thus, to quote one simple instance, the insurgents must be tried in their own State, by a jury taken from the State, and no South Carolina jury would ever convict an insurgent of treason. Again, all taxes by the Con- stitution must be uniformly imposed on all the States. It is, there- fore, impossible, when the war is over, to tax ,the insurgent States so as to make them bear the expenses of the war. These are no theoretical difficulties, but practical and immediate ones. The other day a cavalry officer with whom I am acquainted was making an ex- pedition into Virginia. He was in extreme want of horses to mount his men, and seized fifteen horses belonging to notorious rebels ; but, on reporting the fact, he received orders from head-quarters to restore the horses at once, as there was no constitutional authority for seizing the property of insurgents, and .yet at this time the Federal Government was purchasing horses right and left at prices ranging from 200 dollars and upwards. This scrupulous regard for the theory ,of the Constitution may seem inconsistent with what 1 stated just now as to the practical character of the Ameri- can mind ; but in fact the adherence to the letter of the Consti- tution is a matter of practical rather than abstract interest. If the principle is once admitted that the welfare of the common- wealth overrides all State interests, and justifies any stretch of power, then the doctrine of State rights is virtually defunct in the
NÔ as well as in the South; in the Slave States of the Union asèU as in the Slave States of the Confederacy. The Border Slave States therefore fight against any recognition of this doctrine, which orould be fatal to the existence of slavery; and even the Free States of the North are unwilling to do anything, or permit anything to be done, which may involve the loss of their separate independence. Added to all this, the whole nation has been taught so long and so sedulously that the Constitution is the great bulwark of their liberties, the grandest triumph of legislative power, that they cannot yet, and dare not yet, realize the truth that this Constitution has been tried and found wanting.
Still, with all this, all Americans of reflective minds whom I have talked to admit that the nation will shortly have to deal with a work for which the machinery of its Government is not adequate. They allow, too, though generally with reluctance, that the machinery will have to be modified, but how, or in what direction, they can form little idea. The possibility of a military revolution, which I
see has been much canvassed in Europe, is not a contingency even thought of here. You cannot live any time in this country without coming to an instinctive conviction that a military despotism is not an event upon the cards. To any one who knows France it would be impossible to prove, by any amount of arguments, that she was ever likely to adopt the government. of an aristocratic oligarchy.; and so you perceive, possibly without being. able to state your reasons for it, that the whole nature and genius and development of the American people (I am speaking of the North) is opposed to military rule. The moral tendency of the present civil war has not been to create a prestige in favour of military rule. "The great lesson of this war,' said an old American politician to me the other day, "will be the power of self-government. The people has done everything, the Government nothing; the people has led, and the Government has followed." Whether this view is altogether correct or not, it is the prevailing one, and will have its influence on the destinies of the nation. Then, again, this war has brought forth no dictator, either political or military. As an old Polish exile who had fought in every European revolution for the last forty years re- marked to me, "There is one good thing about this revolution, and that is, we shall have no fathers of the country, no saviours of society left when the war is over." The gigantic size of the army is in itself a protection for the future against an undue exercise of military influence. As far as I can learn, of the 672;000 men in arms, under 100,000 belong to the regular army. Amongst the volun- teers the regular military spirit has not, and could hardly have been, developed. With officers chosen from amongst themselves, and in many instances by themselves, they are not likely to merge the volun- teer in the soldier. The great majority of the volunteers look forward to returning to their former pursuits the moment the insurrection is suppressed: "And then," as one of the privates said within my hear- ing, "the first thing we shall do, is to show our officers we are as good as they are." The regular army, with its strict discipline, poor pay and slow promotion, will present little attraction to the disbanded volunteers, in a country where labour can command its own price; and the wild life of the Western States will attract those restless spirits who cannot live without excitement. Still, though the volunteer army will disband itself, yet its members will be scattered throughout the States, and their knowledge of war would present a strong obstacle to any attempt of the military power to encroach on the liberties of the country. Besides, the enormous extent of the territory of the United States is in itself a fatal bar to any military dictatorship. If France, with an area of 208,000 square miles, is presumed to require an army of half a million to maintain a military regime, what would be the force required to keep up a like system in this country, with its 3,250,000 square miles of ter- ritory, where every institution and custom is opposed to centraliza- tion? I have often heard the Federal Government sneered at for the bulk of its unwieldy army, but the truth is, that the territory of even the Southern States is so enormous as to require an enormous army to occupy it in any way. The English officers who come down here to inspect the army, are always very confident in their assertions that it would have no chance against a small force of well-trained troops. So far I agree with them, that I think it possible that, say a French army of 50,000 men; might march from New York to New Orleans, and defeat every force it pet on its path, but when that was done no vital result would be produced; and with 50,000 men it would be impossible to occupy more than a single State.
For all these reasons, I doubt the possibility of a military dictator- ship being amongst the eventualities of the United States. Nor, as I before stated, is any apprehension of it entertained here. The loose talk one reads in the New rork Herald, and other papers of the same class, about military dictatorship and Napoleonic regimes, are of the nature of sensation paragraphs. The literary taste of America is not highly developed, and to the ordinary newspaper reader vehe- mence of language is identical with powerful writing. A skirmish is always either the most disastrous defeat or the most heroic victory ever witnessed in both hemispheres, and a discharge of cannon always shakes the earth to its very foundation. In the same way, a dicta- torship is talked of, when in our more sober language we should speak of an energetic government, and the term is understood in its more natural and unexaggerated sense.
A more reasonable fear for the stability of the Government, and one more generally entertained by Americans, is derived from the vast influx of the foreign emigration. It was to this fear that the short-lived Know-nothing party owed its existence, and there is no doubt that the native Americans still look with fear on the strength of the foreign element. The new settlers are men who know neither Washington nor his works; who have, most of them, strong revolution- ary memories, if not principles, and who have little respect for the Constitution in itself. The fact, however, that the powerful Know- nothing organization broke down by its own weakness, is a proof
that tins fear had no strong hold upon the country, and, I think,
with reason. The power of the Anglo-Saxon element in ab- sorbing the other foreign elements is something wonderful. Of
those Americans who know the name of their grandfather, a vast proportion will tell you that they have foreign blood amongst their ancestors ; but by the third generation there is no trace left, except physically, of foreign parentage. The only two races who preserve a marked individuality are the Irish and the Germans—about the negroes I am not speaking now—and the children of Irish settlers born in this country soon lose every trace of Ireland except an here- ditary dislike to England. A friend of mine told me that a priest went once to an Irish neighbour of his, and asked him for a subscrip- tion to found Catholic schools in the parish. The Irishman, who was well to do, readily agreed ; but when the priest added that he hoped he would send his own children to the Catholic school, he refused point-blank. "They mast go," he said, "to the public schools, for I can't have them learn to speak the brogue." This feeling is a uni- versal one; and the natural desire of Irishmen that tteir children should become genuine Americans operates strongly against the efforts of the Catholic priesthood to keep them apart from Protestant influences. The Germans, no doubt, keep their individuality much longer, and all preserve their own language, especially in the outlying districts of the West. Still, they are an orderly, law-loving people naturally, and they have shown so little talent for organization at home, that it is not likely they will develop it in America. More- over, the extreme disproportion, as yet, between the area and the population of the United States, has scattered the settlers so widely, that any combined action on their part is almost impossible. No doubt in New York and Philadelphia, where the lowest class of settlers always take up their abode at first, the influence of the Ger- man and Irish population is very powerful, and in some respects alarmingly so. But as long as the State system endures, neither New York, nor Pennsylvania, nor any individual State or town, can rule the country, and the influence of a mob in any one of these cities does not extend at the farthest beyond its own State. The probability is, that the present troubles will greatly check the tide of emigration, and thus give time for the existing foreign population to be thoroughly absorbed in the native one. I do not believe, therefore, that the only two causes which could effect a revolution in the government, the military power, or the foreign element, are likely to be called into action. The government must, I am convinced, be changed somehow, but the change will be an orderly and gradual one. The difficulties of restoring the status quo in the insurgent States will convince the popular mind of the necessity of a more united and centralized government. To secure this end, the States will have to surrender many of their individual rights. The one clearest result of this war has been to bring the people of the States together, to give them common recollections, common interests, and common dangers. This, in itself will lead to a more real union. Again, for years to come, the country will be subject to a heavy taxation. The necessity for keeping up a large standing army will cause a much heavier expenditure than has been the case hitherto. This taxation will create a much keener interest in the management of the central government throughout all the States ; and probably the conviction will become general that a system of thirty-four separate- sovereign governments is a very ex- pensive and cumbrous one. The tone oh politics will be wider and more national, and with a_higher tone, a higher class of men (morally, I mean, rather than socially) will be entrusted with the government of affairs. Such, at least, are the hopes of those Americans who seem to me to judge most philosophically of the political future.
AN ENGLISH TRAVELLER.
Previous page
