Part 15 (2/2)

Whereas danger is a great, perhaps an indispensable condition of autocracy, [Footnote: Fisher Ames, frightened by the democratic revolution of 1800, wrote to Rufus King in 1802: ”We need, as all nations do, the compression on the outside of our circle of a formidable neighbor, whose presence shall at all times excite stronger fears than demagogues can inspire the people with towards their government.” Cited by Ford, _Rise and Growth of American Politics,_ p. 69.] security was seen to be a necessity if democracy was to work. There must be as little disturbance as possible of the premise of a self-contained community. Insecurity involves surprises.

It means that there are people acting upon your life, over whom you have no control, with whom you cannot consult. It means that forces are at large which disturb the familiar routine, and present novel problems about which quick and unusual decisions are required. Every democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of ma.s.ses is such that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather blindly. This has not made non-resistants out of democrats, but it has resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist aims. Even when the wars are in fact wars of conquest, they are sincerely believed to be wars in defense of civilization.

These various attempts to enclose a part of the earth's surface were not inspired by cowardice, apathy, or, what one of Jefferson's critics called a willingness to live under monkish discipline. The democrats had caught sight of a dazzling possibility, that every human being should rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations. With what they knew of the art of government, they could, no more than Aristotle before them, conceive a society of autonomous individuals, except an enclosed and simple one. They could, then, select no other premise if they were to reach the conclusion that all the people could spontaneously manage their public affairs.

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Having adopted the premise because it was necessary to their keenest hope, they drew other conclusions as well. Since in order to have spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self-contained community, they took it for granted that one man was as competent as the next to manage these simple and self-contained affairs. Where the wish is father to the thought such logic is convincing. Moreover, the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes true in the rural towns.h.i.+p. Everybody in a village sooner or later tries his hand at everything the village does. There is rotation in office by men who are jacks of all trades. There was no serious trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the democratic stereotype was universally applied, so that men looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.

Not only was the individual citizen fitted to deal with all public affairs, but he was consistently public-spirited and endowed with unflagging interest. He was public-spirited enough in the towns.h.i.+p, where he knew everybody and was interested in everybody's business.

The idea of enough for the towns.h.i.+p turned easily into the idea of enough for any purpose, for as we have noted, quant.i.tative thinking does not suit a stereotype. But there was another turn to the circle.

Since everybody was a.s.sumed to be interested enough in important affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody was interested.

This meant that men formed their picture of the world outside from the unchallenged pictures in their heads. These pictures came to them well stereotyped by their parents and teachers, and were little corrected by their own experience. Only a few men had affairs that took them across state lines. Even fewer had reason to go abroad. Most voters lived their whole lives in one environment, and with nothing but a few feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their religious training, and rumor to go on, they had to conceive that larger environment of commerce and finance, of war and peace. The number of public opinions based on any objective report was very small in proportion to those based on casual fancy.

And so for many different reasons, self-sufficiency was a spiritual ideal in the formative period. The physical isolation of the towns.h.i.+p, the loneliness of the pioneer, the theory of democracy, the Protestant tradition, and the limitations of political science all converged to make men believe that out of their own consciences they must extricate political wisdom. It is not strange that the deduction of laws from absolute principles should have usurped so much of their free energy.

The American political mind had to live on its capital. In legalism it found a tested body of rules from which new rules could be spun without the labor of earning new truths from experience. The formulae became so curiously sacred that every good foreign observer has been amazed at the contrast between the dynamic practical energy of the American people and the static theorism of their public life. That steadfast love of fixed principles was simply the only way known of achieving self-sufficiency. But it meant that the public opinions of any one community about the outer world consisted chiefly of a few stereotyped images arranged in a pattern deduced from their legal and their moral codes, and animated by the feeling aroused by local experiences.

Thus democratic theory, starting from its fine vision of ultimate human dignity, was forced by lack of the instruments of knowledge for reporting its environment, to fall back upon the wisdom and experience which happened to have acc.u.mulated in the voter. G.o.d had, in the words of Jefferson, made men's b.r.e.a.s.t.s ”His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” These chosen people in their self-contained environment had all the facts before them. The environment was so familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking about substantially the same things. The only real disagreements, therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts. There was no need to guarantee the sources of information. They were obvious, and equally accessible to all men. Nor was there need to trouble about the ultimate criteria. In the self-contained community one could a.s.sume, or at least did a.s.sume, a h.o.m.ogeneous code of morals. The only place, therefore, for differences of opinion was in the logical application of accepted standards to accepted facts. And since the reasoning faculty was also well standardized, an error in reasoning would be quickly exposed in a free discussion. It followed that truth could be obtained by liberty within these limits. The community could take its supply of information for granted; its codes it pa.s.sed on through school, church, and family, and the power to draw deductions from a premise, rather than the ability to find the premise, was regarded as the chief end of intellectual training.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE

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”IT has happened as was to have been foreseen,” wrote Hamilton, [Footnote: _Federalist,_ No. 15] ”the measures of the Union have not been executed; the delinquencies of the States have, step by step, matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the wheels of the national government and brought them to an awful stand.”... For ”in our case the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills is requisite, under the confederation, to the complete execution of every important measure that proceeds from the Union.”

How could it be otherwise, he asked: ”The rulers of the respective members... will undertake to judge of the propriety of the measures themselves. They will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims; the momentary conveniences or inconveniences that would attend its adoption. All this will be done, and in a spirit of interested and suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circ.u.mstances and reasons of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to mislead the decision. The same process must be repeated in every member of which the body is const.i.tuted; and the execution of the plans framed by the councils of the whole, will always fluctuate on the discretion of the ill-informed and prejudiced opinion of every part. Those who have been conversant in the proceedings of popular a.s.semblies, who have seen how difficult it often is, when there is no exterior pressure of circ.u.mstances, to bring them to harmonious resolutions on important points, will readily conceive how impossible it must be to induce a number of such a.s.semblies, deliberating at a distance from each other, at different times, and under different impressions, long to cooperate in the same views and pursuits.”

Over ten years of storm and stress with a congress that was, as John Adams said, [Footnote: Ford, _op. cit._, p. 36.] ”only a diplomatic a.s.sembly,” had furnished the leaders of the revolution ”with an instructive but afflicting lesson” [Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 15.]

in what happens when a number of self-centered communities are entangled in the same environment. And so, when they went to Philadelphia in May of 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of Confederation, they were really in full reaction against the fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democracy. Not only were the leaders consciously opposed to the democratic spirit of the time, feeling, as Madison said, that ”democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” but within the national frontiers they were determined to offset as far as they could the ideal of self-governing communities in self-contained environments.

The collisions and failures of concave democracy, where men spontaneously managed all their own affairs, were before their eyes.

The problem as they saw it, was to restore government as against democracy. They understood government to be the power to make national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation; democracy they believed was the insistence of localities and cla.s.ses upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests and aims.

They could not consider in their calculations the possibility of such an organization of knowledge that separate communities would act simultaneously on the same version of the facts. We just begin to conceive this possibility for certain parts of the world where there is free circulation of news and a common language, and then only for certain aspects of life. The whole idea of a voluntary federalism in industry and world politics is still so rudimentary, that, as we see in our own experience, it enters only a little, and only very modestly, into practical politics. What we, more than a century later, can only conceive as an incentive to generations of intellectual effort, the authors of the Const.i.tution had no reason to conceive at all. In order to set up national government, Hamilton and his colleagues had to make plans, not on the theory that men would cooperate because they had a sense of common interest, but on the theory that men could be governed, if special interests were kept in equilibrium by a balance of power. ”Ambition,” Madison said, [Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 51, cited by Ford, _op. cit._, p. 60.] ”must be made to counteract ambition.”

They did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance every interest so that the government would be in a perpetual deadlock. They intended to deadlock local and cla.s.s interest to prevent these from obstructing government. ”In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” wrote Madison, [Footnote: _Id_.]

”the great difficulty lies in this: _you must first enable the government to control the governed_, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” In one very important sense, then, the doctrine of checks and balances was the remedy of the federalist leaders for the problem of public opinion. They saw no other way to subst.i.tute ”the mild influence of the magistracy” for the ”sanguinary agency of the sword” [Footnote: _Federalist, No. 15.] except by devising an ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion. They did not understand how to manipulate a large electorate, any more than they saw the possibility of common consent upon the basis of common information. It is true that Aaron Burr taught Hamilton a lesson which impressed him a good deal when he seized control of New York City in 1800 by the aid of Tammany Hall. But Hamilton was killed before he was able to take account of this new discovery, and, as Mr. Ford says, [Footnote: Ford, _op. cit._, p. 119.] Burr's pistol blew the brains out of the Federal party.

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When the const.i.tution was written, ”politics could still be managed by conference and agreement among gentlemen” [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 144] and it was to the gentry that Hamilton turned for a government. It was intended that they should manage national affairs when local prejudice had been brought into equilibrium by the const.i.tutional checks and balances. No doubt Hamilton, who belonged to this cla.s.s by adoption, had a human prejudice in their favor. But that by itself is a thin explanation of his statecraft. Certainly there can be no question of his consuming pa.s.sion for union, and it is, I think, an inversion of the truth to argue that he made the Union to protect cla.s.s privileges, instead of saying that he used cla.s.s privileges to make the Union. ”We must take man as we find him,” Hamilton said, ”and if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his pa.s.sions in doing so.” [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 47] He needed men to govern, whose pa.s.sions could be most quickly attached to a national interest.

These were the gentry, the public creditors, manufacturers, s.h.i.+ppers, and traders, [Footnote: Beard, _Economic Interpretation of the Const.i.tution, pa.s.sim._] and there is probably no better instance in history of the adaptation of shrewd means to clear ends, than in the series of fiscal measures, by which Hamilton attached the provincial notables to the new government.

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