effectively organized in the United States. The candidate has to run the gauntlet of public star-gazing before the election, but, after it, he is secure from (competent) inspection. We have really no regular responsibility, but an overplus of sensational exposures. The people are therefore ever alarmed, for they feel instinctively that there is no public economy, no supervision, no correctionary action, in the right sense. They have no rest, and yet their perpetual wakefulness is almost useless; for the ballot-box is but a makeshift and no real remedy as long as the normal inter-inspection and control between the superior, co-ordinate, and subordinate public offices is not enforced. The indifference of the people in the exercise of the elective franchise, and the consequent extra importunities that have to be used to bring them to the polls, should long ago have warned us, that the futility of the ballot-box as an elective, and also as a correctionary agency in the public service, was becoming patent to even the most stolid amongst the masses, and that they recoiled from being for ever the

"Chaos of thought and passion all confused."

Evidently some other public measure must be adopted to secure to us an efficient and honest public administration.

We allow ourselves now to suggest, that the erroneousness of the prevailing conceptions and practices in reference to the ballot-box, proceeded from our not heeding the masonic rule, that it takes very different methods for building a house from what it does for tearing one down. For the latter purpose it needs hardly any measuring tools; questions of foundation, order, and beauty are in abeyance; all that is necessary for an effective tear-down is to shake and push with strength and caution. But for erecting an edifice it takes a plan and a policy, an architect, good mechanics, and vigilant supervisors, or else the thing built is

"A naked subject to the weeping clouds."

In matters of government this point is so very important; because those employed for abolishing some obnoxious social or political power are very apt to be used in organizing the new order of things. This mistake was committed in the United States, when popular agitation was elected master-builder, after it had proved useful as a master-revolutionist. The ballot-box, as we have it, with its nominating conventions, their platforms, the partisan campaigns and elections, were the natural children of this action; it was to our politics what the drum and fife are in military operations. Popular agitation had, pre

ceding and during the revolutionary struggle, one single point; it was to bring out all the martial strength in the struggle for independence. When it was achieved, much of this strength was useless in political matters; for now peace, the development of wealth, and social order, were the things to be accomplished; and it was as senseless to keep up popular political agitation as it would have been to keep sending patrols round the country playing "Yankee Doodle" with drum and fife. Yet this very senseless procedure was gone into. Suspicions were excited, issues were manufactured, and speakers and writers volunteered to press them upon the people, and to get verdicts upon them, through the ballot-box. The politicians got the offices as a reward for disturbing the public peace, the people got the bubbles! And they liked to look at them, as they rose against the sky, variegated in color as either an aurora or a sundown was in the public mind. And thus it has gone on to our day. Or do you deny it, kind reader? If so, please tell us: What else did you get at the last presidential election except a bubble, illuminated by your own fancies ?

We feel free to say, that Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, and Jay acted on the rule quoted from Virchow at the head of this chapter; that is, they had policies, principles, and views, which they expected to have supported by the people. Jefferson seemed to form an exception, for we are told, that he was ever listening for the voice of the people so as to know his duty. We have studiously read his letters and state papers, and while we meet occasionally expressions justifying the idea that he was a follower of popular inspiration, we cannot find a single instance in which he co-operated in a public measure or argument or proposition, that did not either originate in his own. mind or was the result of reading standard works. He once in a while loved to profess himself a disciple of the people; in fact he never was such. He led in the colonial legislature of Virginia, in the revolutionary Congress, in Washington's Cabinet, as President, in public addresses and messages, and in private life always by his letters. His unguarded professions became, however, watchwords in the mouths of demagogues, and his actual conduct has been overlooked. The same thing has happened to Jackson, and we cannot blame Von Holst, whose late work on America lies before us, for saying: "The American politicians declared the people to be God, and the people took them at their word and compelled them to fall down and worship their idol." But when Jackson's messages are carefully examined, it will be found that the old hero never worshipped at the popular shrine to the extent here intimated. His usual

language, repeated in his farewell address, is: "The good sense and practical judgment of the people, when the subject was brought before them, sustained the course of the Executive " (himself). It was Douglas who finally became the high priest of the modern Moloch (popular sovereignty). He wanted it applied to the territories as the fundamental idea of their institutions, and we must admit that he remained faithful to his idol, even after it had discarded him in 1860, for he knelt to it ever after that election.

In conclusion, we must sum up the whole subject by saying: Fill the ballot-box ever so much with tickets, and still it is but an empty schematism; a domineering in a vacuum, out of which no good government can come except by accident. The highest it can accomplish, for the voter is to let them be dead particles of an improvised majority. It is not an organic thing, it is not even a personification of the people, nor of society! It is said to be the fountain of government, really it is the source of anarchy! Fondly it has been called "the nestling of a whole family of modern political improvements," and its mamma— democracy-loves it for this and dandles it on her knees; but nevertheless it is and remains but the spoiled child of the state. And as we all helped to spoil it and to represent it to others as a good child, so also is it our duty to tell the truth about it, to help to break its will, to send it to school to learn, and to help the schoolmaster to teach it manners, and to change it from a petted, ill-tempered, capricious big baby into a useful, properlyrestrained and lovable member of society. That is accomplished when the ballot-box is a self-recording census; when we shall know not only how many vote, but also what influence we are to accord to each vote. Let us know, whether a man votes his interests, his prejudices, and his desires, but weigh and value also when he votes impartially his intelligence and virtue. The regeneration we most need is a reformed ballot-box. Or, if the reader likes the late words, of a political scientist, better: "True politics require the education of the electors, and not the manipulation of elections."

CHAPTER XIII.

AMERICAN SLAVERY.

"Some folks become unjust out of an intense love of justice.”—Pufjendorf.

THE introduction of American slavery was an immoral act on the part of the American purchaser of negroes; because it planted in American society a certain future evil, with a view to a very questionable present profit. The guilt of the sellers in Africa was also a social wrong; it exiled a population for which useful employment should have been found at home. But it was a lesser barbarism than the old murderous customs of killing captives. That the American buyers were more civilized than the African sellers is evident from the fact, that they knew how to make useful a laboring force which the sellers could only waste. And this rendering serviceable an otherwise worthless people, is the fundamental good reason for all that hangs around the subject of American slavery. And by it objective social and political science will ultimately judge this phase of American society.

The standard of the abstract justice of an ownership in human beings, was always a petitio principii; and while it confused many minds, it never settled anything right. The American master's superiority was all the justification he had for his assumption of control over the negro, and it dwindled and expired, as the slave developed into a higher human being. The imported negro felt his own inferiority and submitted; but as he rose in real value his self-esteem developed, and his restlessness in his chattel relation increased. Evidently, then, American slavery was ever digging its own grave, for it improved the negro and, as compared with his African home, gave him a joyful existence. The negro had a hell behind him and a paradise before him, and the memories of that fact are the basis of all the good feeling and gratitude, which the negro still feels for his old master.

It was indeed a mistake, yea a crime, to take the negro to a

land that must be eventually but a vast negro graveyard; a country of which the negro might speak Lenau's words

"My home-land had a warmer grave for me."

For he was taken into a climate too cold for him, and mingled with a people, that must dislike him the more, the less he was an abject slave. As the negro had no will of his own on the subject, the culpability hereof lies at the door of those who sold, transported, and bought this victim race to America. The only excuse they can offer is the ignorance of their age of the social laws, and their blindness to the things transpiring around them. It is illustrative of the ease, with which human beings will conceal from themselves their inner consciousness of wrongs, to note some of the casuistries which made the American slaveholders overlook the true issue, that would be joined between their and the world's judgment eventually. One of these plausibilities was the idea that the right to hold slaves was a question of blood or race, and thousands of mean white men tyrannized over negroes on that plea. This fallacy led in time to the other extreme that all questions connected with slavery must be judged by the principle, that it is per se criminal to own a slave. Had the true economic reason been the basis of all legislation on the subject and there would have been a series of ethical enactments, that would have restrained the immoralities of slavery and curbed the atrocious master or made him impossible. As it was, the legal profession of America transferred to slave property the false British ideas of the absolute rights of property, and added to it the self-adoration of AngloSaxonism, that went under the phrase "Caucasian race" in America; so that slave proprietorship attained a sanctity that never was due to it, and which allowed it to say to all who would have reformed its abuses, " Noli me tangere!" Thus two false extremes (slave-holders and abolitionists) kept arguing and intensifying their respective false premises. And by 1860 there stood, opposite to each other, two monomaniacs, that were so void of all common sense that nothing but the ultima ratio regum would solve the heated quarrel. And we are still so much under the momentum of the war that followed, that we seem incapable of rectifying the false courses pursued by the extreme pro-slavery men, as well as those pursued by the extreme abolitionists. We are still far from that public action

1 An ancient republic had a law disqualifying a man from owning slaves, if he maltreated them. We have the progressed reasoning hereof in our laws regulating apprenticeships. No state allows a person to be a master, unless qualified to educate him.