stand themselves nor the country, can and do easily repeat to themselves: This is our land, and we are its people; but we know that the more thoughtful an American is, the more does he feel the multiplicity of his natural, social and political developments, and how various the influences are that rule his mind. And it actually seems like the perennial fate of America, that the country and its people shall never be long enough together to get used to each other. Waywardness appears to be the special characteristic of both. But in truth it is not waywardness in either; for the country has a persistency that crushes all that do not recognize and obey it. The people, too, have it in a certain sense, and would act it out on all occasions if they were not baffled by the inner multifariousness that sways their judgments. We, who claim to have read the country's last will and testament, venture to say that there is provision in it for all who do their part towards the maintenance of good American society and honest and efficient government. They render the country and the people the best possible service; for they make true what is so often sung, that America is "The home of the free and the land of the brave." To do so they need not only good political, but also strong physical constitutions, because only the hardy and bold can withstand the vicissitudes of American nature. CHAPTER II. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. "A land independent, with a people free, That concourse I would like to see."--Goethe. It is comparatively easy to determine when a land is independent, but more difficult to say when a people are free. We may assume that the first exists when no foreign power rules over it, but freedom within involves far more complicated questions. A people would seem to be unfree when any public authority need but give, as the reason of its conduct, the answer: Car-tel est notre plaisir. But in America, it appears to be held, that there may be such arbitrary power and yet freedom: provided it is exercised by the sovereign people. This idea rests on the premise that the people, or society, as political science better calls it, is its own self object and subject, and that, therefore, self-government, by an absolute democracy, is its normal public authority. We admit the premise but deny the argument, and hold that no public power is rightful that claims the right to rule as it pleases. It is only legitimate authority when it governs as it ought. The Declaration of Independence expresses this same principle when it is not satisfied with saying that the colonies "are" free, but adds, "and of right ought to be." And we insist, therefore, that to the abstract right of self-government must come the ethical qualification, to make a free people. The question for us to settle is therefore first of all: How can a people become ethical? And the answer is, By becoming organic! They are not ethical either individually or collectively by nature, but they may acquire this quality through reflection and culture; not, however, as an inchoate mass, but through public organisms that make the perennial welfare of society their special study and work. These have indeed ever to justify their existence by proving their fitness for their respective public positions; but the abstract necessity for such organs must always be admitted, because it always exists. This right to form a free American people is put in the Declaration of Independence on the right ground; to wit: that they had outgrown colonial conditions, and that "they of right ought to be free states." They proved their right first by the sword, but still more fully afterwards by organizing a Federal Union and maintaining law and order. They had a right, therefore, to speak of themselves in their Constitution as: We the people, because they had ceased to be inorganic masses and had an inner consciousness that they should not endeavor to be a mere demos or populus, but to become an ethnos or natio. That they chose federal institutions as the best method, for bringing this about, was indicated by their American surroundings and their general historic political development; they only obeyed their inherent necessities in doing so. But while they enacted a constitution, that was in general outline federal, they mingled with it provisions derived from the common and also the civil law. They did so from political principles that were more specially applicable to British civic institutions. We can see this in the first seven words of the Constitution of 1787: "We, the people of the United States." We have here a national sovereignty as the constituting authority in the first three words, while the subsequent four words have a federal ring. But it is again taken from them if the latter words were merely titular and not descriptive of a political status. How can a condensed solid people be the base of a union of states? In the previous Articles of Confederation this doubt was avoided; for there the states are named as the factors of the confederation. Must there not be states before there can be "United States"? After the Constitution was made, the ambiguity contained in the first words of the preamble was continued and extended, and is also in Article X. the very one that was intended to preclude the possibility of the federal authorities construing themselves into a civil government. We cannot say, therefore, that the conception of a national American people was then, or ever has been, a clear one; it was, on the contrary, much diffused as well as confused, and there existed a great variety of ideas in regard to it, but in none of them it rose to the cognition now attained by political science as to a union of states and their organic society or people. The same must be said of the word state. which the German political writers express by the term, Rechtsstaat, a state in which that is law (right), which should be law (right), was ever wanting. State sovereignty-their idolmeans absolute power. That The higher ethical self-understanding of the people was also hindered by that peculiar mixture of ideas as to the source of the rights and functions of the people in government which prevailed at that period of time. Some had already imbibed the ideas, afterwards uppermost in the French Revolution; and they certainly found a place in the introductory passages of the Declaration of Independence. They were also presented by some political authors in Great Britain like Bentham. Schiller had also given vent to them in the passage— "When the oppressed can't find their rights, When unsupportable they deem their burthens, Inalienable, and imperishable as the stars themselves." The then much-used motto, " Vox populi, vox Dei," gave to the word "people" a divine inspiration, that hid from the advocates of popular sovereignty the absolutism which was imbedded. in it. But there was another impediment to the adoption of the true idea of an ethical popular totality of the people, in the transfer to America of British modes in carrying on politics. In them the people were the perpetual agitating agency for keeping government within safe limits. They were regarded as standing outside of government for this purpose, as indeed they were; and ever ready to carry on, if necessary, an eternal offensive and defensive warfare upon it. The British mode of having an organic society was to have the people divided into two alternating hostile forces, one of which would be in power, the other a national vigilance committee. That such a dual political or partisan antagonism is incompatible with federal institutions was then and is, with us, still persistently denied, or at least ignored. There was, however, yet another incongruity with a federal people; viz., the one that was then expressed in the much-used phrase, the Lord's people. It carried with it the law as revealed in the Bible, and was indeed identical with the kind of government expressed in the Middle Ages by the words ministerium verbi divini. It was, of course, not written down in the Constitution, but it governed more minds than that instrument, and in very many oaths, given in support of the latter, the former was the mental reservation. The highest conception of an American people stood thus deeply in the shadows of the past, and it would never have emerged from them, if it had not been for a stronger power than all of them together; to wit: social necessities. They were so powerful because they had the future with them, and their action was unceasing, like the force of gravitation. They made the immigrants and their descendants, daily and hourly, as well as minutely, less English, Scotch, Irish, French, German, Jewish ; and modified all their political, religious, and social predilections, and are doing it still. That it was always the better development, who dare assert that? That it was on the whole rightful, who dare deny that? The thread of improvement may be hard to find in the tangled mass; but it nevertheless remains true, that there could never be a homogeneous American people if the various races and nationalities had retained, in their full mutual repulsiveness, their respective reciprocal divergencies. Each being modified made affiliations possible, nay, indispensable. The negro is the only one that had everything to learn, nothing to unlearn; and he is and ever will be for that reason an American in a very different sense from the European, who unlearned as well as learned reluctantly, and thus grew into a closely-knit Americanism; while the African has as little tenacity for the new acquirements as he had for his old habits. We may be told that the affiliations are not very visible; that the Indian (the indigenous citizen) is still a foreigner in his native land; that he is treated as an enemy under so-called international law; that the church people still regard the Bible higher than the Constitution; that our parties are as ferocious, yea, more so than ever; that massiveness and numbers have more weight in our politics than intelligence, virtue, and wisdom; that popular sovereignty is still the cloak for stealing absolute power for government; that the Irish still hate the English and love Catholicism and go on sprees; that the English and Scotch are British still; and that the Germans are still clanish. And we cannot gainsay that too much of this is true, but must also add that the native American is still asking for a false Americanism and dreaming of a spurious American people. But, notwithstanding all this, we contend that the processes of a general modification are ever going on, and that it is the only way to a rightful nationalization; and the sooner we learn that our society is not, and never was, a tabula rasa on which zealots could write their idiosyncrasies, the better for us. No one of them can be the absorbent of all. And all attempts, to force this, are in the way of all true ethical development in America. We cannot all adopt any one peculiarity, be it British, Irish, German, French, or African; but we can adopt parts of each other's peculiarities and intertwine with them the experiences of America, for before, and not behind us lies the American Paradise. This process of turning European heterogeneousness into American homogeneousness is the turning-point in all develop 1 |