CHAPTER III.

DEVELOPMENT OF GOVERNMENT.

"Hitherto the world has assumed some inherent antagonism between freedom and centralization. A true democracy has as last established itself, that not only develops an intenser centralization than despotism ever boasted, but that develops and also vindicates it by a completer freedom than ever before could be permitted." — Partridge.

Ir cannot be said that society in America was ever resolved into its original elements. The first successful emigrants came here with no feeling of reckless anarchy, no idea of release from the restraints of law. If there were some vicious and irresponsible men among them, who fled from needed control or merited punishment at home, they were never strong enough to overwhelm the stern representatives of order placed by Providence at the head of affairs. Government in some form was clearly recognized in the organizations of companies, in grants and charters at home; and the power of control, however falsely conceived or unwisely located, was, from the first, evident and vigorous. This was so far civilization, in distinction from barbarism.

A POPULAR GOVERNMENT.

Government by the people came to this land in " The Mayflower," and began at once a career of development which has never been successfully resisted. The idea of government by an oligarchy came to the South earlier. It asserted hereditary rights, and gathered to itself the power of king and council, nobles and proprietaries, the church and the sword. It antagonized and suppressed the will of the peo

ple; and the people, in their turn, stood up against it calmly, but firmly, and wrenched from it one concession after another, until, by the struggles of a hundred and fifty years, they overthrew and utterly destroyed it.

In the mean time, the people were the government in fact, and of right. It is interesting to observe that the pretensions of oligarchy in America have always been subject to the will of the people, sometimes shrinking from sight to avoid a storm and the wreck of property interests, and sometimes, with an ill grace, yielding to the claims of constitutional law. When, however, it exerted ostensible power, it was obliged first to seduce the people from their allegiance to God and the right, prostitute them to its own level of demoralization and injustice, and thus make them the fit instruments of usurpation and oppression.

But the inchoate United States were never without government by the people. While their legal relations to the crown of Great Britain were loyally acknowledged, they arranged promptly and everywhere to supply the defects of the home government by the quiet organization of their own power. It may be naturally supposed that those earlier forms. of democratic government were very crude and imperfect; but whoever studies them carefully will perceive that they contained nearly all the great principles of justice and the most profound elements of constitutional law.

The parent government of the Great Republic was a pure democracy, - a government by all the people. They were few in number, and their acts of legislation were the voice of the whole. Their great concern was liberty. Oppression had taught them so thoroughly, and the steady light of Christianity revealed to them so clearly, the way to obtain it, that they were resolved from the first that they would keep in their own hands whatever authority they could wrest from the grasp of the king. It may be regarded as strange that they did not bring with them a love of monarchy so strong that it would be their first and only thought,

as the power of the king of England so far declined as to suggest the possibility, and at length the necessity, of American independence. But it was exactly and sternly otherwise. The entire period of preparation was, as we have seen, pervaded by the idea of a democracy. The public acts of the people all indicated the conviction that they were their own rulers; that no man was ever born to be king over them. So clear and general and lasting was this impression, that we must refer it to the providence of God.

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It availed nothing with the statesmen of these early times. to suggest that all attempts at republican government had been utter failures; that the people were too ignorant and selfish to establish a firm and enlightened government. Something within them said, "We are free, and no man or number of men shall wrest our liberties from us: others could not, but we can govern ourselves. Paganism could form no bond of union strong enough to hold the republics of Greece and Rome together; but Christianity can do for us what no other system of religion ever did, ever could do, for any people. God will help us, and we can be free." They had heard a solemn voice pronounce the potent word, Ephrata!" and their eyes were open. They could see that a new dispensation of government was dawning upon the race; that they were the vanguard of liberty in a new world: and with the vision came a feeling of power that was too mighty for the despotism of the old and dying past. This was God, slowly bringing to the inhabitants of earth the knowledge of the fact that he is the Sovereign of nations; that the regeneration originates a new and all-pervading sense of justice; and this alone realized the idea and the fact of equality among men, and complete subordination to the will of God. Here it was to be demonstrated that "He whose right it is to reign would reign until he had put all enemies under his feet." The doctrine of liberty and of equal rights is wrapped up in this announcement; is utterly and forever inseparable from it.

But this, with every other great truth, was militant in America. It must fight for its place among the philosophies and politics of its times; and so it did through the generations, achieving its progressive and final triumphs amid the sweat and grime, the tears and blood, of battling ages. But its triumph is at length complete. The people, the whole people, are the acknowledged rulers of the Great Republic.

A REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT.

It soon became, of course, impossible for the people to assemble en masse for purposes of legislation and administrative law; and they were sufficiently sensible to adopt a system of representation. The great legal maxim, "What a man does by another he does himself," was well understood and hence the great "town-meetings," which were available for local purposes, became convenient for the earliest use of the elective franchise; and the orderly use of the ballot chose men to whom matters of general interest to neighborhoods could be submitted.

These contiguous colonies had interests in common; and they could not meet as a whole for the settlement of colonial policy, but they could meet by their representatives. Hence conventions and commissions of various kinds began to struggle with this immense problem of unity, and commenced the search, through mists and darkness profound, for those subtle principles and spheres of prerogatives which belonged to the whole, and to separate them from duties and powers which were local in their rights and necessities.

This was not only convenient on account of numbers, but it was indispensable for the security of wisdom. These grave deliberations upon matters vital to the commonwealth could thus be intrusted to men of calmer, broader, riper thought than can be expected from the great whole of any community. And such men were here. Men of long and pro

found experience in problems of State came with the earliest settlers; and it is of intense interest now to mark the shrinking diffidence with which these great men accepted positions of trust actually thrust upon them by the will and necessities of the people.

We must, however, concede that the true idea of representation has been slow in reaching its exact definitions and place in this Republic. It was a grand propriety that assumed from the first that a Christian man was, all other things being equal, far the most eligible for official rank; that true religion would qualify a man for the better, safer exercise of the elective franchise: but it was a narrow judgment that disfranchised all others, and a still narrower opinion that excluded from the right of the ballot all Christians, however pure, unless they were members of a particular church. Property qualifications were more naturally suggested, but they were not consistent with republican equality of rights; nor could it ever be made to appear that either wisdom or patriotism dwelt alone in the purse. Still more absurd was the notion, that the right of the vote depended upon the color of the skin; as though honesty and fidelity, social wants and available intelligence, were of the complexion rather than of the soul. And the extreme of all absurdity and injustice was the idea that disfranchised slaves should become the basis of free representation, and that the same arbitrary minds which should rob the black man of his inborn rights should confer these rights upon themselves.

From all these ideas, foreign to the doctrine of liberty, it has been necessary to free the people. It may seem strange to us that they could ever obtain rank and influence, in any part of our country, with those who seemed predestined by Providence as the pioneers of representative liberty. But we must again come to the remembrance of the great fact, so frequently recurring in these discussions, that every great principle must have its conflicts; that this is the trial state for all political virtue: and then the slow development of