CHAPTER XXXIII.

A PROGNOsis of american poLITICS.

"Life belongs to the living, and those that live must be prepared for changes." -Goethe.

THE title of this closing chapter will, we presume, be distasteful to American readers, because it implies, that politics are diseased here, and that they need a cure. But having taken, in the preceding chapters, the diagnosis of our patient, a prognosis had logically to follow.

No people on earth are so positively sure, in their own minds, that they are well and hearty in all their public relations, as that of the United States. They listen to and read the most fulsome flatteries of themselves and their institutions, without even suspecting that they are treated insincerely. So sure are they of their present and future healthfulness, that they trifle with reforms, as foolhardy individuals do with patent medicines. A few only, seeing the same or similar precipices ahead of our partisan strifes which have occurred before, think the way to public safety lies in a retracing of our public steps to a supposed previous correcter conduct of public affairs; and they prescribe as a remedy, a return to the ways of the so-called Fathers of the republic. We take as little stock in the hallucinations, as to the American past, as we do in those for the future; for our retrospect has furnished us only the causes of present ailments, and we have seldom, and then merely individually, met with wise suggestions for a better future. And our prognosis leads us to think, that this nation, though it spells itself with a big N, must get out of its political ruts and not run in them either backward or forward; on the contrary, it must reform its politics by the light of universal historic experience, and thus find truer principles and better practices in matters of government, than those, that have hitherto passed for sound in America.

American society is to-day but a vast field into which seeds of mischief are sown broadcast, and it has become:

"A wild where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,"

with the decided advantage for the weeds. The tares are choking

the wholesome grain, and party politics are rapidly outgrowing the little left of true politics. Party contests are the allabsorbing object of the people, as well as of their servants, and we are therefore theoretically engaged in settling (in fact unsettling) our domestic affairs, but actually neglecting our foreign relations, especially those with our northern, southern, and south-western neighbors. A change in the right direction must be preceded by the comprehension, that geographical politics antedate as well as outlast institutional politics. Then the perception that Canada having the more outlying ports both on the Atlantic and the Pacific, and also military advantages on the lakes, it becomes us, the otherwise climatically favored, to cultivate friendly commercial and even fiscal relations, such as the German Zollverein with Canada, and not to waste their and our vitalities in tricky diplomacy or foolish as well as wicked war.

As to the West Indies we have not had for a long time a policy worthy of that name. Our present rulers may plead for their inaction, that their acts would be sure to be misconstrued, because the memories of attempts at the annexation of Cuba, &c., for the purpose of increasing the political power of the South in the Union, are too recent to allow a fair public judgment to be formed. The treatment, which Grant's Domingo negotiations received, favor such an apprehension; but the real truth is, that our authorities are cowardly before public opinion, and politically poverty-stricken as to international relations. Were it otherwise and they would know, that these annexation projects were the poorest as well as the least sagacious mode of dealing with neighboring lands; and particularly so where a free interchange of products is not only more natural but more civilized. Let the world know, and tell the countries specially alarmed at our grasping proclivities, that we seek no further annexations, but desire with them the free-est possible commercial intercourse, and they will no longer fear us. When the strong give, voluntarily, pledges of a sincere respect for a neighbor's territorial integrity, and evince their truthfulness by acts of kindness, then the weak may and will confide in them, and fall in with suggestions for an intimate and mutually beneficial commerce.

Our people think, that because they have had an easy part to play and played it easily, that they have played it well. And we are prone to make invidious comparisons against other nations, whose task has been difficult, and remains so in spite of much good government. We presume, that because they are still correcting their affairs, they are not progressing as fast and as well as we; but is not all political progress correction? Is there any

real progress, where there is no correction? In many branches of public administration, we appreciate this; and we evince the fact by our habitual mistrust of our authorities, and our adoption of substitutes. They are indeed full of danger to liberty, beside being more inefficient in fiscal management, than public administration should be. Our corporation and other social administrations of public matters, including of course our political parties, churches, trusteeships, and commissionerships, are a regress from higher political developments, and not an advance as we imagine. Hence, what lies mostly behind them in Europe -allowing public undertakings to be a source of private gain and speculation, and a cause of false distribution of wealth-it is still in full blast in this Union. And as we fell into and remain in this our defective condition, because we believed ourselves to have the best government and most superior politics in the world, the cure lies in our learning the opposite truth, and in dismissing for ever, as a standard of the quality of public authority, a minimum of feeble action, and adopting the truer criterion, that of public administration worthy of the utmost confidence, and deserving it by much and good work.

Europe has its "sick man," and cause of war and contention, in the East; we think to have ours in the South, whilst in reality our divisions have originated and will originate about the West; for there, as in Europe in the East, lie for us the acquisitions of easy wealth by appropriating masterless possessions. The exaggerated wrath at Aaron Burr's plans; the indignation at Sam Houston's operations in Texas, and their final adoption by the United States; the passionate anger at the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and its sequence secession, were one and all animosities. very similar to those breaking out on the other side of the Atlantic between the great powers of Europe, whenever one wants to take territory for its aggrandizement, and the others deem this dangerous to their ideas of a proper political equilibrium. Europe, respectively England, will be cured of her spleens on this point when it is understood, that the recivilization of the East cannot fail to be good for all Europe. And this country will get over her agitations, when the public mind comprehends, that all western questions concern all our states, and that the West cannot for a long time develop in resources without benefiting every section of the Union. The same is true of Mexico, the West Indies, the various projects of canals over the Isthmus of Suez, the Nicaragua route, and that of Tehuantepec, including all such improvements in Mexico, whether running from the north to the south, or from east to west. The only question, that should be raised, is: Who will accom

plish the works soonest and best? And so as to our own South. What retards her retards us. As Lincoln said: "We must be friends." Why then are we enemies?

Our bodies-politic are sick of many political verbosities and assumptions as to foundations of our public institutions and their administration; but sickest of all of the word "people." A French author says that we are "demo-malade." From the day when the phrase: "We the people of the United States" was first written into our federal Constitution, to 1880, when the only living Ex-President of the Union (Grant) demagogues upon it, the public mind has been and is at sea as to its definite meaning; and it has remained a flexible and litigious term to this day. The remedy lies in dropping the word and using in its stead: Society, distinguishing between inorganic and organic society, or, if you please, between social and political organisms. Take up at the same time the methods as well as rules of reasoning pursued by the best modern thinkers, such as have been referred to in these pages, and in a few years we shall have a healthy public mind as to the fundamental reason, sphere, and object of all government. And when we shall have sloughed off, all the indigestible nonsense about popular, state, or federal sovereignty, we shall find the true basis, viz: peaceable social interhabitation for purposes of human enhancement.

Then will go overboard another source of our political ailments, the conception, borrowed from false ideas as to the coherency of the universe, that the centrifugal is per se the securer tendency in politics. We shall see, that the necessary relations of social interhabitation cause fully as often the centripetal as the centrifugal currents. They arise from excesses in centralization or separatism. And the currents thus caused, run not merely nationally, but also locally and even in neighbourhood circles. Not the respective totalities or local societies seek or flee to or fro their totality and central unity; but the individuals within are in like diverse motion all the time. And what's more, these movements, though each of them is the necessary result of previous conditions, are none of them exactly right at any time, but ever seeking to be right.

"To be or not to be, that is the question."

True wisdom consists for this country in having at all times, in efficient condition, public organs and politic ways for enabling society to right itself, when it has gone aglee in either the centrifugal or centripetal directions; in other words: to be ever politically alive and active for its safety and happiness, with proper correcting processes.

What will it be said: Do you mean to assert, that the past did not see the fundamental doctrines on which the American Union is to live for ever? Is popular, state as well as national sovereignty then: a delusion? Yea, and all other sovereignty, that has to give, as a justification for the exercise of its authority, no better reason than the fact, that it is authority. The American States as well as the American Union are incidents to an object, and not objects in themselves. That object is: we repeat it, peaceable social interhabitation. State lines are arbitrary divisions in nine out of ten cases, and organic society is always the product of more or less permanent necessities. Obey these and remove the impediments to the better organizations, which time requires. That is true of nearly all our state, county, and city formation now existing. How, then, can they be held sacred? Look at Germany and all its manifold territorial readjustments. The inherent central cohesiveness has survived all inner changes, while not one inner demarcation has remained. intact. So it will be in America, and the Union will be the better the more it makes American society and all its common interests call them national if you please-the object of its existence, and subjects all else to this criterion. No legal or political fictions should be allowed to intervene.

And in this connection we must once more protest against the further thoughtless use of the word "national" It is never correctly applied, when it designates anything else than a higher ethical condition of politics. A federal government is always nationalized when its ethics are improved; but it is not so nationalized, when it merely holds together its members by force. A society whose one-half must have sleepless vigilance to keep the other half from ruining the country, is not national. It is party governed, and, if a Union, it is under poor federal ethics.

Not the country-for it may be an arbitrary construction— but its society, is the political object of institutions. Out of society issue the enslaving causes, and even disunion. A society that is party divided, will end in being generally divided; as our late conflict proves. The United States, as a land, are made for union; its society followed only natural hints when it formed and when it maintained a Union. And had it only followed the spirit in the country's very nature, that of submitting to the inevitable; and as there are harmonizations, equalizations, and reconciliations meteorologically, so there would be politically. But that spirit was wanting since 1830, and is still wanting; and it is a lamentable fact, that it has transatlantic historic sources, that sprang up in the reformation. It will take an effort greater than any society is likely to be capable of, to