Freedom and Power

CHAPTER VII POLITICAL CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

AT THE TIME of the utmost degradation of the Athenian democracy, when the commanders at Arginusae were condemned by an unconstitutional decree, and Socrates alone upheld the sanctity of the law, the people, says Xenophon, cried out that it was monstrous to prevent them from doing whatever they pleased.1 A few years later the archonship of Euclides witnessed the restoration of the old constitution, by which the liberty, though not the power, of Athens was revived and prolonged for ages; and the palladium of the new settlement was the provision that no decree of the council or of the people should be permitted to overrule any existing law.2

The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choice it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other, the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition. It must stand or fall according to its choice, whether to give the supremacy to the law or to the will of the people; whether to constitute a moral association maintained by duty, or a physical one kept together by force. Republics offer, in this respect, a strict analogy with monarchies, which are also either absolute or organic, either governed by law, and therefore constitutional, or by a will which, being the source, cannot be the object of laws, and is therefore despotic. But in their mode of growth, in the direction in which they gravitate, they are directly contrary to each other. Democracy tends naturally to realise its principle, the sovereignty of the people, and to remove all limits and conditions of its exercise; whilst monarchy tends to surround itself with such conditions. In one instance force yields to right; in the other might prevails over law. The resistance of the king is gradually overcome by those who resist and seek to share his power; in a democracy the power is already in the hands of those who seek to subvert and to abolish the law. The process of subversion is consequently irresistible, and far more rapid.

They differ, therefore, not only in the direction, but in the principle of their development. The organisation of a constitutional monarchy is the work of opposing powers, interests, and opinions, by which the monarch is deprived of his exclusive authority, and the throne is surrounded with and guarded by political institutions. In a purely popular government this antagonism of forces does not exist, for all power is united in the same sovereign; subject and citizen are one, and there is no external power that can enforce the surrender of a part of the supreme authority, or establish a security against its abuse. The elements of organisation are wanting. If not obtained at starting, they will not naturally spring up. They have no germs in the system. Hence monarchy grows more free, in obedience to the laws of its existence, whilst democracy becomes more arbitrary. The people is induced less easily than the king to abdicate the plenitude of its power, because it has not only the right of might on its side, but that which comes from possession, and the absence of a prior claimant. The only antagonism that can arise is that of contending parties and interests in the sovereign community, the condition of whose existence is that it should be homogeneous. These separate interest can protect themselves only by setting bounds to the power of the majority; and to this the majority cannot be compelled, or consistently persuaded, to consent. It would be a surrender of the direct authority of the people, and of the principle that in every political community authority must be commensurate with power.

“Infirma minoris
Vox cedat numeri, parvaque in parte quiescat.”

“La pluralité,” says Pascal, “est la meilleure voie, parcequ’elle est visible, et qu’elle a la force pour se faire obéir; cependant c’est l’avis des moins habiles.” The minority can have no permanent security against the oppression of preponderating numbers, or against the government which these numbers control, and the moment will inevitably come when separation will be preferred to submission. When the classes which compose the majority and the minority are not defined with local distinctness, but are mingled together throughout the country, the remedy is found in emigration; and it was thus that many of the ancient Mediterranean states, and some of the chief American colonies, took their rise. But when the opposite interests are grouped together, so as to be separated not only politically but geographically, there will ensue a territorial disruption of the state, developed with a rapidity and certainty proportioned to the degree of local corporate organisation that exists in the community. It cannot, in the long run, be prevented by the majority, which is made up of many future, contingent minorities, all secretly sympathising with the seceders because they foresee a similar danger for themselves, and unwilling to compel them to remain, because they dread to perpetuate the tyranny of majorities. The strict principle of popular sovereignty must therefore lead to the destruction of the state that adopts it, unless it sacrifices itself by concession.

The greatest of all modern republics has given the most complete example of the truth of this law. The dispute between absolute and limited power, between centralisation and self-government, has been, like that between privilege and prerogative in England, the substance of the constitutional history of the United States. This is the argument which confers on the whole period that intervenes between the convention of 1787 and the election of Mr. Davis in 1861 an almost epic unity. It is this problem that has supplied the impulse to the political progress of the United States, that underlies all the great questions that have agitated the Union, and bestows on them all their constitutional importance. It has recurred in many forms, but on each occasion the solution has failed, and the decision has been avoided. Hence the American government is justly termed a system of compromises, that is to say, an inconsistent system. It is not founded, like the old governments of Europe, on tradition, nor on principles, like those which have followed the French Revolution; but on a series of mutual concessions, and momentary suspensions of war between opposite principles, neither of which could prevail. Necessarily, as the country grew more populous, and the population more extended, as the various interests grew in importance, and the various parties in internal strength, as new regions, contrasting with each other in all things in which the influence of nature and the condition of society bear upon political life, were formed into states, the conflict grew into vaster proportions and greater intensity, each opinion became more stubborn and unyielding, compromise was more difficult, and the peril to the Union increased.

Viewed in the light of recent events, the history of the American Republic is intelligible and singularly instructive. For the dissolution of the Union is no accidental or hasty or violent proceeding, but the normal and inevitable result of a long course of events, which trace their origin to the rise of the constitution itself. There we find the germs of the disunion that have taken seventy years to ripen, the beginning of an antagonism which constantly asserted itself and could never be reconciled, until the differences widened into a breach.

The convention which sat at Philadelphia in 1787, for the purpose of substituting a permanent constitution in the place of the confederacy, which had been formed to resist the arms of England, but which had broken down in the first years of peace, was not a very numerous body, but it included the most eminent men of America. It is astounding to observe the political wisdom, and still more the political foresight, which their deliberations exhibit. Franklin, indeed, appears to have been the only very foolish man among them, and his colleagues seem to have been aware of it. Washington presided, but he exercised very little influence upon the assembly, in which there were men who far exceeded him in intellectual power. Adams and Jefferson were in Europe, and the absence of the latter is conspicuous in the debates and in the remarkable work which issued from them. For it is a most striking thing that the views of pure democracy, which we are accustomed to associate with American politics, were almost entirely unrepresented in that convention. Far from being the product of a democratic revolution, and of an opposition to English institutions, the Constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favour of the traditions of the mother country. On this point nearly all the leading statesmen were agreed, and no contradiction was given to such speeches as the following. Madison said: “In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger. What motives are to restrain them? A prudent regard to the maxim, that honesty is the best policy, is found by experience to be as little regarded by bodies of men as by individuals. Respect for character is always diminished in proportion to the number among whom the blame or praise is to be divided. Conscience, the only remaining tie, is known to be inadequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected from it.”3

Mr. Sherman opposed the election by the people, “insisting that it ought to be by the State legislatures. The people immediately should have as little to do as may be about the government.”

Mr. Gerry said: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots..... He had been too republican heretofore; he was still, however, republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit” Mr. Mason “admitted that we had been too democratic, but was afraid we should incautiously run into the opposite extreme.” Mr. Randolph observed “that the generai object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States laboured; that, in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy; that some check, therefore, was to be sought for against this tendency of our governments.”4

Mr. Wilson, speaking in 1787, as if with the experience of the seventy years that followed, said, “Despotism comes on mankind in different shapes; sometimes in an executive, sometimes in a military one. Is there no danger of a legislative despotism? Theory and practice both proclaim it. If the legislative authority be not restrained, there can be neither liberty nor stability.”5 “However the legislative power may be formed,” said Gouverneur Morris, the most conservative man in the convention, “it will, if disposed, be able to ruin the country.”6

Still stronger was the language of Alexander Hamilton: “If government is in the hands of the few, they will tyrannise over the many; if in the hands of the many, they will tyrannise over the few. It ought to be in the hands of both, and they should be separated. This separation must be permanent. Representation alone will not do; demagogues will generally prevail; and, if separated, they will need a mutual check. This check is a monarch.... The monarch must have proportional strength. He ought to be hereditary, and to have so much power that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more.... Those who mean to form a solid republican government ought to proceed to the confines of another government.... But if we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”7 “He acknowledged himself not to think favourably of republican government, but addressed his remarks to those who did think favourably of it, in order to prevail on them to tone their government as high as possible.”8 Soon after, in the New York convention, for the adoption of the constitution, he said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny.”9

Hamilton’s opinions were in favour of monarchy, though he despaired of introducing it into America. He constantly held up the British constitution as the only guide and model; and Jefferson has recorded his conversations, which show how strong his convictions were. Adams had said that the English government might, if reformed, be made excellent; Hamilton paused and said: “Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government; as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.” And on another occasion he declared to Jefferson, “I own it is my own opinion... that the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society, by giving stability and protection to its rights; and that it will probably be found expedient to go into the British form.”10

In his great speech on the constitution, he spoke with equal decision: “He had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was by the opinion of so many of the wise and good, that the British government was the best in the world, and that he doubted much whether anything short of it would do in America..... As to the executive, it seemed to be admitted that no good one could be established on republican principles. Was not this giving up the merits of the question? for can there be a good government without a good executive? The English model was the only good one on this subject..... We ought to go as far, in order to attain stability and permanency, as republican principles will admit.”11

Mr. Dickinson “wished the Senate to consist of the most distinguished characters, — distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”12

Mr. Pinckney, of South Carolina, said, “Much has been said of the constitution of Great Britain. I will confess that I believe it to be the best constitution in existence; but, at the same time, I am confident it is one that will not or cannot be introduced into this country for many centuries.”13

The question on which the founders of the constitution really differed, and which has ever since divided, and at last dissolved the Union, was to determine how far the rights of the States were merged in the federal power, and how far they retained their independence. The problem arose chiefly upon the mode in which the central Congress was to be elected. If the people voted by numbers or by electoral districts, the less populous States must entirely disappear. If the States, and not the population, were represented, the necessary unity could never be obtained, and all the evils of the old confederation would be perpetuated. “The knot,” wrote Madison in 1831, “felt as the Gordian one, was the question between the larger and the smaller States, on the rule of voting.”

There was a general apprehension on the part of the smaller States that they would be reduced to subjection by the rest. Not that any great specific differences separated the different States; for though the questions of the regulation of commerce and of slavery afterwards renewed the dispute, yet interests were so different from what they have since become, and so differently distributed, that there is little analogy, excepting in principle, with later contests; what was then a dispute on a general principle, has since been envenomed by the great interests and great passions which have become involved in it. South Carolina, which at that time looked forward to a rapid increase by immigration, took part with the large States on behalf of the central power; and Charles Pinckney presented a plan of a constitution which nearly resembled that which was ultimately adopted. The chief subject of discussion was the Virginia plan, presented by Edmund Randolph, in opposition to which the small State of New Jersey introduced another plan founded on the centrifugal or State-rights principle. The object of this party was to confirm the sovereignty of the several States, and to surrender as little as possible to the federal government. This feeling was expressed by Mr. Bedford: “Is there no difference of interests, no rivalship of commerce, of manufacture? Will not these large States crush the small ones, whenever they stand in the way of their ambitions or interested views?”14

“The State legislatures,” said Colonel Mason, “ought to have some means of defending themselves against encroachments of the national government. In every other department we have studiously endeavoured to provide for its self-defence. Shall we leave the States alone unprovided with means for this purpose?”15

These speakers may have been good or bad politicians, they were certainly good prophets. They were nearly balanced in numbers, and surpassed in ability, by the centralising party. Madison, at that time under the powerful influence of Hamilton, and a federalist, but who afterwards was carried by Jefferson into the democratic camp, occupied an uncertain intermediate position. A note preserved in Washington’s handwriting records: “Mr. Madison thinks an individual independence of the States utterly irreconcilable with their aggregate sovereignty, and that a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable.”16

In convention he said: “Any government for the United States formed on the supposed practicability of using force against the unconstitutional proceedings of the States, would prove as visionary and fallacious as the government of Congress.”17

The consistent Federalists went farther: “Too much attachment,” said Mr. Read, “is betrayed to the State governments. We must look beyond their continuance; a national government must soon, of necessity, swallow them all up.”18

Two years before the meeting of the convention, in 1785, Jay, the very type of a federalist, wrote: “It is my first wish to see the United States assume and merit the character of one great nation, whose territory is divided into different States merely for more convenient government.”

Alexander Hamilton went further than all his colleagues. He had taken no part in the early debates, when he brought forward an elaborate plan of his own; the most characteristic features of which are, that the State governments are to be altogether superseded; their governors to be appointed by the general government, with a veto on all State laws, and the president is to hold office on good behaviour. An executive, elected for life, but personally responsible, made the nearest possible approach to an elective monarchy; and it was with a view to this all but monarchical constitution that he designed to destroy the independence of the States. This scheme was not adopted as the basis of discussion. “He has been praised,” said Mr. Johnson, “by all, but supported by none.” Hamilton’s speech is very imperfectly reported, but his own sketch, the notes from which he spoke, are preserved, and outweigh, in depth and in originality of thought, all that we have ever heard or read of American oratory. He left Philadelphia shortly after, and continued absent many weeks; but there can be no doubt that the spirit of his speech greatly influenced the subsequent deliberations. “He was convinced,” he said, “that no amendment of the confederation, leaving the States in possession of their sovereignty, could answer the purpose.... The general power, whatever be its form, if it preserves itself, must swallow up the State powers..... They are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture. Subordinate authorities, he was aware, would be necessary. There must be distinct tribunals; corporations for local purposes..... By an abolition of the States, he meant that no boundary could be drawn between the national and State legislatures; that the former must therefore have indefinite authority. If it were limited at all, the rivalship of the States would gradually subvert it..... As States, he thought they ought to be abolished. But he admitted the necessity of leaving in them subordinate jurisdictions.”19

This policy could be justified only on the presumption that when all State authorities should disappear before a great central power, the democratic principles, against which the founders of the Constitution were contending, would be entirely overcome. But in this Hamilton’s hopes were not fulfilled. The democratic principles acquired new force, the spirit of the convention did not long survive, and then a strong federal authority became the greatest of all dangers to the opinions and institutions which he advocated. It became the instrument of the popular will instead of its barrier; the organ of arbitrary power instead of a security against it. There was a fundamental error and contradiction in Hamilton’s system. The end at which he aimed was the best, but he sought it by means radically wrong, and necessarily ruinous to the cause they were meant to serve. In order to give to the Union the best government it could enjoy, it was necessary to destroy, or rather to ignore, the existing authorities. The people was compelled to return to a political state of nature, irrespective of the governments it already possessed, and to assume to itself powers of which there were constituted administrators. No adaptation of existing facts to the ideal was possible. They required to be entirely sacrificed to the new design. All political rights, authorities, and powers must be restored to the masses, before such a scheme could be carried into effect. For the most conservative and anti-democratic government the most revolutionary basis was sought. These objections were urged against all plans inconsistent with the independence of the several States by Luther Martin, Attorney General for Maryland.

“He conceived,” he said, “that the people of the States, having already vested their powers in their respective legislatures, could not resume them without a dissolution of their governments..... To resort to the citizens at large for their sanction to a new government, will be throwing them back into a state of nature; the dissolution of the State governments is involved in the nature of the process; — the people have no right to do this without the consent of those to whom they have delegated their power for State purposes.”20 And in his report to the convention of Maryland of the proceedings out of which the constitution arose, he said: “If we, contrary to the purpose for which we were intrusted, considering ourselves as master-builders, too proud to amend our original government, should demolish it entirely, and erect a new system of our own, a short time might show the new system as defective as the old, perhaps more so. Should a convention be found necessary again, if the members thereof, acting upon the same principles, instead of amending and correcting its defects, should demolish that entirely, and bring forward a third system, that also might soon be found no better than either of the former; and thus we might always remain young in government, and always suffering the inconveniences of an incorrect imperfect System.”21

It is very remarkable that, while the Federalists, headed by Hamilton and Madison, advocated, for the soundest and wisest object, opinions which have since been fatal to the Union, by furnishing the democratic party with an irresistible instrument, and consequently an irresistible temptation, Martin supported a policy in reality far more conservative, although his opinions were more revolutionary, and although he quoted as political authorities writers such as Price and Priestley. The controversy, although identical in substance with that which has at last destroyed the Union, was so different in form, and consequently in its bearings, that the position of the contending parties became inverted as their interests or their principles predominated. The result of this great constitutional debate was, that the States were represented as units in the Senate, and the people according to numbers in the House. This was the first of the three great compromises. The others were the laws by which the regulation of commerce was made over to the central power, and the slave-trade was tolerated for only twenty years. On these two questions, the regulation of commerce and the extension of slavery, the interests afterwards grew more divided, and it is by them that the preservation of the Union has been constantly called in question. This was not felt at first, when Jay wrote “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”22 The weakening of all these bonds of union gradually brought on the calamities which are described by Madison in another number of the same publication: “A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilised nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government..... When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens..... It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by common interests, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority, that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render one unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable..... In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists, in the one case, in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”23 That Madison should have given so absurd a reason for security in the new Constitution, can be explained only by the fact that he was writing to recommend it as it was, and had to make the best of his case. It had been Hamilton’s earnest endeavour to establish that security for right which Madison considers peculiar to monarchy, an authority which should not be the organ of the majority. “’Tis essential there should be a permanent will in a community..... The principle chiefly intended to be established is this, that there must be a permanent will..... There ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular current.”24

This is precisely what Judge Story means when he says: “I would say in a republican government the fundamental truth, that the minority have indisputable and inalienable rights; that the majority are not everything, and the minority nothing; that the people may not do what they please.”

Webster thought the same, but he took a sanguine view of actual facts when he said: “It is another principle, equally true and certain, and, according to my judgment of things, equally important, that the people often limit themselves. They set bounds to their own power. They have chosen to secure the institutions which they establish against the sudden impulses of mere majorities.”25

Channing was nearer the truth when he wrote: “The doctrine that the majority ought to govern passes with the multitude as an intuition, and they have never thought how far it is to be modified in practice, and how far the application of it ought to be controlled by other principles.”26

In reality, the total absence of a provision of this kind, which should raise up a law above the arbitrary will of the people, and prevent it from being sovereign, led the greatest of the statesmen who sat in the convention to despair of the success and permanence of their work. Jefferson informs us that it was so with Washington: “Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. Washington was influenced by the belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution.”

Hamilton, who by his writings contributed more than any other man to the adoption of the Constitution, declared in the convention that “no man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his own,” and he explained what he thought of the kind of security that had been obtained: “Gentlemen say that we need to be rescued from the democracy. But what the means proposed? A democratic Assembly is to be checked by a democratic Senate, and both these by a democratic chief magistrate.”27

“A large and well-organised republic,” he said, “can scarcely lose its liberty from any other cause than that of anarchy, to which a contempt of the laws is the high-road..... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government..... The instruments by which it must act are either the authority of the laws, or force. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government, there is an end to liberty.”28

His anticipations may be gathered from the following passages: “A good administration will conciliate the confidence and affection of the people, and perhaps enable the government to acquire more consistency than the proposed constitution seems to promise for so great a country. It may then triumph altogether over the State governments, and reduce them to an entire subordination, dividing the larger States into smaller districts..... If this should not be the case, in the course of a few years it is probable that the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular governments and the general government, and the momentum of the larger States in such contests, will produce a dissolution of the Union. This, after all, seems to be the most likely result..... The probable evil is, that the general government will be too dependent on the State legislatures, too much governed by their prejudices, and too obsequious to their humours; that the States, with every power in their hands, will make encroachments on the national authority, till the Union is weakened and dissolved.”29

The result has justified the fears of Hamilton, and the course of events has been that which he predicted. Democratic opinions, which he had so earnestly combated, gained ground rapidly during the French revolutionary period. Jefferson, who, even at the time of the Declaration of Independence, which was his work, entertained views resembling those of Rousseau and Paine, and sought the source of freedom in the abstract rights of man, returned from France with his mind full of the doctrines of equality and popular sovereignty. By the defeat of Adams in the contest for the presidency, he carried these principles to power, and altered the nature of the American government. As the Federalists interpreted and administered the constitution, under Washington and Adams, the executive was, what Hamilton intended it to be, supreme in great measure over the popular will. Against this predominance the State legislatures were the only counterpoise, and accordingly the democratic party, which was the creature of Jefferson, vehemently defended their rights as a means of giving power to the people. In apparent contradiction, but in real accordance with this, and upon the same theory of the direct sovereignty of the people, Jefferson, when he was elected president, denied the right of the States to control the action of the executive. Regarding the President as the representative and agent of a power wholly arbitrary, he admitted no limits to its exercise. He held himself bound to obey the popular will even against his own opinions, and to allow of no resistance to it. He acted as the helpless tool of the majority, and the absolute ruler of the minority, as endowed with despotic power, but without freewill.

It is of this principle of the revolution that Tocqueville says: “Les gouvernements qu’elle a fondés sont plus fragiles, il est vrai, mais cent fois plus puissants qu’aucun de ceux qu’elle a renversés; fragiles et puissants par les mêmes causes.”30

Hence Jefferson’s determined aversion to every authority which could oppose or restrain the will of the sovereign people, especially to the State legislatures and to the judiciary. Speaking of an occasion in which the judges had acted with independence, Hildreth says: “Jefferson was not a little vexed at this proceeding, which served, indeed, to confirm his strong prejudices against judges and courts. To him, indeed, they were doubly objects of hatred, as instruments of tyranny in the hands of the Federalists, and as obstacles to himself in exercises of power.”31

His views of government are contained in a paper which is printed in Rayner’s life of him, p. 378: “Governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.... Each generation is as independent of the one preceding as that was of all which had gone before. It has, then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness.... it is for the peace and good of mankind, that a solemn opportunity of doing this, every nineteen or twenty years, should be provided by the constitution..... The dead have no rights..... This corporeal globe and everything upon it belong to its present corporeal inhabitants during their generation..... That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution which they think will be best for themselves..... Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass.” With these doctrines Jefferson subverted the republicanism of America, and consequently the Republic itself.

Hildreth describes as follows the contest between the two systems, at the time of the accession of Jefferson to power, in 1801: “From the first moment that party lines had been distinctly drawn, the opposition had possessed a numerical majority, against which nothing but the superior energy, intelligence, and practical skill of the Federalists, backed by the great and venerable name and towering influence of Washington, had enabled them to maintain for eight years past an arduous and doubtful struggle. The Federal party, with Washington and Hamilton at its head, represented the experience, the prudence, the practical wisdom, the discipline, the conservative reason and instincts of the country. The opposition, headed by Jefferson, expressed its hopes, wishes, theories, many of them enthusiastic and impracticable, more especially its passions, its sympathies and antipathies, its impatience of restraint. The Federalists had their strength in those narrow districts where a concentrated population had produced and contributed to maintain that complexity of institutions, and that reverence for social order, which, in proportion as men are brought into contiguity, become more absolutely necessaries of existence. The ultrademocratical ideas of the opposition prevailed in all that more extensive region in which the dispersion of population, and the despotic authority vested in individuals over families of slaves, kept society in a state of immaturity.”32

Upon the principle that the majority have no duties, and the minority no rights, that it is lawful to do whatever it is possible to do, measures were to be expected which would oppress most tyrannically the rights and interests of portions of the Union, for whom there was no security and no redress. The apprehension was so great among the Federalists, that Hamilton wrote in 1804: “The ill opinion of Jefferson, and jealousy of the ambition of Virginia, is no inconsiderable prop of good principles in that country (New England). But these causes are leading to an opinion, that a dismemberment of the Union is expedient.”33

Jefferson had given the example of such threats, and owed his election to them during his contest for the presidency with Colonel Burr. He wrote to Monroe, 15 February, 1801: “If they could have been permitted to pass a law for putting the government into the hands of an officer, they would certainly have prevented an election. But we thought it best to declare openly and firmly, one and all, that the day such an act passed the middle States would arm, and that no such usurpation, even for a single day, should be submitted to.”

Shortly afterwards, a conjuncture arose in which Jefferson put his principles into practice in such a way as greatly to increase the alarm of the North-Eastern States. In consequence of Napoleon’s Berlin decree and of the British orders in council, he determined to lay an embargo on all American vessels. He sent a pressing message to Congress, and the Senate passed the measure after a four hours’ debate with closed doors. In the House the debate was also secret, but it lasted several days, and was often prolonged far into the night, in the hope of obtaining a division. The Bill was passed December 22, 1807. The public had no voice in the matter; those whom the measure touched most nearly were taken by surprise, and a conspicuous example was given of secrecy and promptitude in a species of government which is not commonly remarkable for these qualities.

The embargo was a heavy blow to the ship-owning states of New England. The others were less affected by it. “The natural situation of this country,” says Hamilton, “seems to divide its interests into different classes. There are navigating and non-navigating States. The Northern are properly the navigating states; the Southern appear to possess neither the means nor the spirit of navigation. This difference in situation naturally produces a dissimilarity of interests and views respecting foreign commerce.”34

Accordingly the law was received in those States with a storm of indignation. Quincy, of Massachusetts, declared in the House: “It would be as unreasonable to undertake to stop the rivers from running into the sea, as to keep the people of New England from the ocean. They did not believe in the constitutionality of any such law. He might be told that the courts had already settled that question. But it was one thing to decide a question before a court of law, and another to decide it before the people.”35

Even in a juridical point of view the right to make such a law was very doubtful. Story, who first took part in public affairs on this occasion, says: “I have ever considered the embargo a measure which went to the extreme limit of constructive power under the constitution. It stands upon the extreme verge of the constitution.”36

The doctrine of State-rights, or nullification, which afterwards became so prominent in the hands of the Southern party, was distinctly enunciated on behalf of the North on this occasion. Governor Trumbull, of Connecticut, summoned the legislature to meet, and in his opening address to them he took the ground that, on great emergencies, when the national legislature had been led to overstep its constitutional power, it became the right and duty of the State legislatures “to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people, and the assumed power of the general government.”37

They went further, and prepared to secede from the Union, and thus gave the example which has been followed, on exactly analogous grounds, by the opposite party. Randolph warned the administration that they were treading fast in the fatal footsteps of Lord North.”38

John Quincy Adams declared in Congress that there was a determination to secede. “He urged that a continuance of the embargo much longer would certainly be met by forcible resistance, supported by the legislature, and probably by the judiciary of the State..... Their object was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union, and the establishment of a separate confederation.” Twenty years later, when Adams was President, the truth of this statement was impugned. At that time the tables had been turned, and the South was denying the right of Congress to legislate for the exclusive benefit of the North-Eastern States, whilst these were vigorously and profitably supporting the federal authorities. It was important that they should not be convicted out of their own mouths, and that the doctrine they were opposing should not be shown to have been inaugurated by themselves. Adams therefore published a statement, October 21, 1828, reiterating his original declaration. “The people were constantly instigated to forcible resistance against it, and juries after juries acquitted the violators of it, upon the ground that it was unconstitutional, assumed in the face of a solemn decision of the District Court of the United States. A separation of the Union was openly stimulated in the public prints, and a convention of delegates of the New England States, to meet at New Haven, was intended and proposed.” That this was true is proved by the letters of Story, written at the time. “I was well satisfied,” he says, “that such a course would not and could not be borne by New England, and would bring on a direct rebellion..... The stories here of rebellion in Massachusetts are continually circulating. My own impressions are, that the Junto would awaken it, i£ they dared; but it will not do..... A division of the States has been meditated, but I suspect that the public pulse was not sufficiently inflamed..... I am sorry to perceive the spirit of disaffection in Massachusetts increasing to so high a degree; and I fear that it is stimulated by a desire, in a very few ambitious men, to dissolve the Union..... I have my fears when I perceive that the public prints openly advocate a resort to arms to sweep away the present embarrassments of commerce.”39

It was chiefly due to the influence of Story that the embargo was at length removed, with great reluctance and disgust on the part of the President. “I ascribe all this,” he says, “to one pseudo-republican, Story.”40 On which Story, who was justly proud of his achievement, remarks, “Pseudo-republican of course I must be, as everyone was, in Mr. Jefferson’s opinion, who dared to venture upon a doubt of his infallibility.”41 In reality Jefferson meant that a man was not a republican who made the interests of the minority prevail against the wish of the majority. His enthusiastic admirer, Professor Tucker, describes very justly and openly his policy in this affair. “If his perseverance in the embargo policy so long, against the wishes and interests of New England, and the mercantile community generally, may seem to afford some contradiction to the self-denying merit here claimed, the answer is, that he therein fulfilled the wishes of a large majority of the people..... A portion of the community here suffered an evil necessarily incident to the great merit of a republican government, that the will of the majority must prevail.”42

We have seen that in the case of the embargo, as soon as this democratic theory was acted upon, it called up a corresponding claim of the right of the minority to secede, and that the democratic principle was forced to yield. But secession was not a theory of the Constitution, but a remedy against a vicious theory of the Constitution. A sounder theory would have avoided the absolutism of the democrats and the necessity for secession. The next great controversy was fought upon this ground. It exhibits an attempt to set up a law against the arbitrary will of the government, and to escape the tyranny of the majority, and the remedy, which was worse than the disease. An ideal of this kind had already been sketched by Hamilton. “This balance between the national and state governments ought to be dwelt on with peculiar attention, as it is of the utmost importance. It forms a double security to the people. If one encroaches on their rights, they will find a powerful protection in the other. Indeed, they will both be prevented from overpassing their constitutional limits, by a certain rivalship which will ever subsist between them.”43 This was also what Mr. Dickinson looked forward to when he said in the Convention of 1787: “One source of stability is the double branch of the legislature. The division of the country into distinct States forms the other principal source of stability.”44

The war with England, and the long suspension of commerce which preceded it, laid the foundations of a manufacturing interest in the United States. Manufactories began to spring up in Pennsylvania, and more slowly in New England. In 1816 a tariff was introduced, bearing a slightly protective character, as it was necessary to accommodate the war prohibitions to peaceful times. It was rather intended to facilitate the period of transition than to protect the new industry; and that interest was still so feeble, and so little affected by the tariff, that Webster, who was already a representative of Massachusetts in Congress, voted against it. It was carried by the coalition of Clay with the South-Carolina statesmen, Lowndes and Calhoun, against whom this vote was afterwards a favourite weapon of attack. In the following years the increasing importance of the cultivation of cotton, and the growth of manufactures, placed the Northern and Southern interests in a new position of great divergency. Hamilton had said long before: “The difference of property is already great amongst us. Commerce and industry will still increase the disparity. Your government must meet this state of things, or combinations will, in process of time, undermine your system.”45

The New England manufacturers were awakened to the advantage of protection for their wares. In a memorial of the merchants of Salem, written by Story in 1820, he says: “Nothing can be more obvious than that many of the manufacturers and their friends are attempting, by fallacious statements, founded on an interested policy, or a misguided zeal, or very short-sighted views, to uproot some of the fundamental principles of our revenue policy..... If we are unwilling to receive foreign manufacturers, we cannot reasonably suppose that foreign nations will receive our raw materials..... We cannot force them to become buyers when they are not sellers, or to consume our cotton when they cannot pay the price in their own fabrics. We may compel them to use the cotton of the West Indies, or of the Brazils, or of the East Indies.” About the same time, May 20, 1820, he writes to Lord Stowell on the same subject: “We are beginning also to become a manufacturing nation; but I am not much pleased, I am free to confess, with the efforts made to give an artificial stimulus to these establishments in our country..... The example of your great manufacturing cities, apparently the seats of great vices, and great political fermentations, affords no very agreeable contemplation to the statesman or the patriot, or the friend of liberty.”46 The manufacturers obtained a new tariff in 1824, another was carried by great majorities in 1828, and another in 1832 by a majority of two to one. It is the measure of 1828, which raised the duties on an average to nearly fifty per cent on the value of the imports, that possesses the greatest importance in a constitutional point of view. “To it,” says the biographer of Mr. Calhoun, “may be traced almost every important incident in our political history since that time, as far as our internal affairs are concerned.”47 At this time the interests of North and South were perfectly distinct. The South was teeming with agricultural produce, for which there was a great European demand; whilst the industry of the North, unable to compete with European manufacturers, tried to secure the monopoly of the home market. Unlike the course of the same controversy in England, the agriculturists (at least the cotton-growers) desired free trade, because they were exporters; the manufacturers protection because they could not meet competition. “The question,” said Calhoun, “is in reality one between the exporting and non-exporting interests of the country.” The exporting interest required the utmost freedom of imports, in order not to barter at a disadvantage. “He must be ignorant of the first principles of commerce, and the policy of Europe, particularly England, who does not see that it is impossible to carry on a trade of such vast extent on any other basis than barter; and that if it were not so carried on, it would not long be tolerated.... The last remains of our great and once flourishing agriculture must be annihilated in the conflict. In the first place, we will be thrown on the home market, which cannot consume a fourth of our products; and instead of supplying the world, as we would with a free trade, we would be compelled to abandon the cultivation of three-fourths of what we now raise, and receive for the residue whatever the manufacturers—who would then have their policy consummated by the entire possession of our market —might choose to give.”48 It seemed a fulfilment of the prophecy of Mr. Lowndes, who, in resisting the adoption of the constitution in South Carolina forty years before, declared, that “when this new constitution should be adopted, the sun of the Southern States would set, never to rise again..... The interest of the Northern States would so predominate as to divest us of any pretensions to the title of a republic.”49 Cobbett, who knew America better than any Englishman of that day, described, in his Political Register for 1833, the position of these hostile interests in a way which is very much to the point. “All these Southern and Western States are, commercially speaking, closely connected with Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds;.... they have no such connection with the Northern States, and there is no tie whatsoever to bind them together, except that which is of a mere political nature..... Here is a natural division of interests, and of interests so powerful, too, as not to be counteracted by anything that man can do. The heavy duties imposed by the Congress upon British manufactured goods is neither more nor less than so many millions a year taken from the Southern and Western States, and given to the Northern States.”50

Whilst in England protection benefited one class of the population at the expense of another, in America it was for the advantage of one part of the country at the expense of another. “Government,” said Calhoun, “is to descend from its high appointed duty, and become the agent of a portion of the community to extort, under the guise of protection, tribute from the rest of the community.”51

Where such a controversy is carried on between opposite classes in the same State, the violence of factions may endanger the government, but they cannot divide the State. But the violence is much greater, the wrong is more keenly felt, the means of resistance are more legitimate and constitutional, where the oppressed party is a sovereign State.

The South had every reason to resist to the utmost a measure which would be so injurious to them. It was opposed to their political as well as to their financial interests. For the tariff, while it impoverished them, enriched the government, and filled the treasury with superfluous gold. Now the Southern statesmen were always opposed to the predominance of the central authority, especially since it lent itself to a policy by which they suffered. They had practical and theoretical objections to it. The increase of the revenue beyond the ordinary wants of the government placed in its hands a tempting and dangerous instrument of influence. Means must be devised for the disposal of these sums, and the means adopted by the advocates of restriction was the execution of public works, by which the people of the different States were bribed to favour the central power. A protective tariff therefore, and internal improvement, were the chief points in the policy of the party, which, headed by Henry Clay, sought to strengthen the Union at the expense of the States, and which the South opposed, as both hostile to their interests and as unconstitutional. “It would be in vain to attempt to conceal,” wrote Calhoun of the tariff in 1831, “that it has divided the country into two great geographical divisions, and arrayed them against each other, in opinion at least, if not interests also, on some of the most vital of political subjects—on its finance, its commerce, and its industry..... Nor has the effect of this dangerous conflict ended here. It has not only divided the two sections on the important point already stated, but on the deeper and more dangerous questions, the constitutionality of a protective tariff, and the general principles and theory of the constitution itself: the stronger, in order to maintain their superiority, giving a construction to the instrument which the other believes would convert the general government into a consolidated irresponsible government, with the total destruction of liberty.”52 “On the great and vital point—the industry of the country, which comprehends almost every interest—the interest of the two great sections is opposed. We want free trade, they restrictions; we want moderate taxes, frugality in the government, economy, accountability, and a rigid application of the public money to the payment of the debt, and to the objects authorised by the constitution. In all these particulars, if we may judge by experience, their views of their interest are precisely the opposite.”53 In 1828 he said of the protective system: “No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy;” wherein he is again supported by Cobbett, in the well-known saying, uttered five years later, concerning the United States: “It is there the aristocracy of money, the most damned of all aristocracies.” South Carolina took the lead in resisting the introduction of the protective system, and being defeated by many votes on the question itself, took its stand on the constitutional right of each sovereign State to arrest by its veto any general legislation of a kind which would be injurious to its particular interests. “The country,” said Calhoun, “is now more divided than in 1824, and then more than in 1816. The majority may have increased, but the opposite sides are, beyond dispute, more determined and excited than at any preceding period. Formerly the system was resisted mainly as inexpedient, but now as unconstitutional, unequal, unjust, and oppressive. Then relief was sought exclusively from the general government; but now many, driven to despair, are raising their eyes to the reserved sovereignty of the States as the only refuge.”54 Calhoun was at that time Vice-President of the United States, and without a seat in Congress. The defence of his theory of the Constitution devolved therefore upon the senator from South Carolina, General Hayne; and a debate ensued between Hayne and Webster, in January 1830, which is reckoned by Americans the most memorable in the parliamentary history of their country. Hayne declared that he did not contend for the mere right of revolution, but for the right of constitutional resistance; and in reply to Webster’s defence of the supreme power, he said: “This I know is a popular notion, and it is founded on the idea that as all the States are represented here, nothing can prevail which is not in conformity with the will of the majority; and it is supposed to be a republican maxim, ‘that the majority must govern.’.... If the will of a majority of congress is to be the supreme law of the land, it is clear the Constitution is a dead letter, and has utterly failed of the very object for which it was designed — the protection of the rights of the minority..... The whole difference between us consists in this — the gentleman would make force the only arbiter in all cases of collision between the States and the federal government; I would resort to a peaceful remedy.”55

Two years later Mr. Calhoun succeeded Hayne as senator for South Carolina, and the contest was renewed. After the tariff of 1828 Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina joined in the recognition of the principle of nullification. When the tariff of 1832 was carried, South Carolina announced that the levying of dues would be resisted in the State. Calhoun defended the nullifying ordinance in the Senate, and in speeches and writings, with arguments which are the very perfection of political truth, and which combine with the realities of modern democracy the theory and the securities of mediaeval freedom. “The essence of liberty,” he said, “comprehends the idea of responsible power,—that those who make and execute the laws should be controlled by those on whom they operate,—that the governed should govern...... No government based on the naked principle that the majority ought to govern, however true the maxim in its proper sense, and under proper restrictions, can preserve its liberty even for a single generation. The history of all has been the same,-violence, injustice, and anarchy, succeeded by the government of one, or a few, under which the people seek refuge from the more oppressive despotism of the many..... Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or a consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting ultimately on the solid basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice and violence and force must finally prevail. Let it never be forgotten that, where the majority rules without restriction, the minority is the subject...... Nor is the right of suffrage more indispensable to enforce the responsibility of the rulers to the ruled, than a federal organisation to compel the parts to respect the rights of each other. It requires the united action of both to prevent the abuse of power and oppression, and to constitute really and truly a constitutional government. To supersede either is to convert it in fact, whatever may be its theory, into an absolute government.”56

In his disquisition on government Calhoun has expounded his theory of a constitution in a manner so profound, and so extremely applicable to the politics of the present day, that we regret that we can only give a very feeble notion of the argument by the few extracts for which we can make room.

“The powers which it is necessary for government to possess, in order to repress violence and preserve order, cannot execute themselves. They must be administered by men in whom, like others, the individual are stronger than the social feelings. And hence the powers vested in them to prevent injustice and oppression on the part of others, will, if left unguarded, be by them converted into instruments to oppress the rest of the community. That by which this is prevented, by whatever name called, is what is meant by constitution, in its most comprehensive sense, when applied to government. Having its origin in the same principle of our nature, constitution stands to government as government stands to society; and, as the end for which society is ordained would be defeated without government, so that for which government is ordained would, in a great measure, be defeated without constitution..... Constitution is the contrivance of man, while government is of divine ordination..... Power can only be resisted by power, and tendency by tendency..... I call the right of suffrage the indispensable and primary principle; for it would be a great and dangerous mistake to suppose, as many do, that it is of itself sufficient to form constitutional governments. To this erroneous opinion may be traced one of the causes why so few attempts to form constitutional governments have succeeded; and why, of the few which have, so small a number have had durable existence..... So far from being of itself sufficient,—however well guarded it might be, and however enlightened the people,—it would, unaided by other provisions, leave the government as absolute as it would be in the hands of irresponsible rulers, and with a tendency at least as strong towards oppression and abuse of its powers.... The process may be slow, and much time may be required before a compact, organised majority can be formed; but formed it will be in time, even without preconcert or design, by the sure workings of that principle or constitution of our nature in which government itself originates..... The dominant majority, for the time, would have the same tendency to oppression and abuse of power which, without the right of suffrage, irresponsible rulers would have. No reason, indeed, can be assigned why the latter would abuse their power, which would not apply with equal force to the former..... The minority, for the time, will be as much the governed or subject portion as are the people in an aristocracy, or the subject in a monarchy..... The duration or uncertainty of the tenure by which power is held cannot of itself counteract the tendency inherent in government to oppression and abuse of power. On the contrary, the very uncertainty of the tenure, combined with the violent party warfare which must ever precede a change of parties under such governments, would rather tend to increase than diminish the tendency to oppression..... It is manifest that this provision must be of a character calculated to prevent any one interest, or combination of interests, from using the powers of government to aggrandise itself at the expense of the others..... This too can be accomplished only in one way, and that is, by such an organism of the government—and, if necessary for the purpose, of the community also—as will, by dividing and distributing the powers of government, give to each division or interest, through its appropriate organ, either a concurrent voice in making and executing the laws, or a veto on their execution..... Such an organism as this, combined with the right of suffrage, constitutes, in fact, the elements of constitutional government. The one, by rendering those who make and execute the laws responsible to those on whom they operate, prevents the rulers from oppressing the ruled; and the other, by making it impossible for any one interest or combination of interests, or class, or order, or portion of the community, to obtain exclusive control, prevents any one of them from oppressing the other.... It is this negative power,—the power of preventing or arresting the action of the government,—be it called by what term it may, veto, interposition, nullification, check, or balance of power,—which in fact forms the constitution..... It is, indeed, the negative power which makes the constitution, and the positive which makes the government..... It follows necessarily that where the numerical majority has the sole control of the government, there can be no constitution; as constitution implies limitation or restriction;.... and hence, the numerical, unmixed with the concurrent majority, necessarily forms in all cases absolute government..... Constitutional governments, of whatever form, are, indeed, much more similar to each other in their structure and character than they are, respectively, to the absolute governments even of their own class;.... and hence the great and broad distinction between governments is, — not that of the one, the few, or the many, — but of the constitutional and the absolute..... Among the other advantages which governments of the concurrent have over those of the numerical majority,—and which strongly illustrates their more popular character,—is, that they admit, with safety, a much greater extension of the right of suffrage. It may be safely extended in such governments to universal suffrage, that is, to every male citizen of mature age, with few ordinary exceptions; but it cannot be so far extended in those of the numerical majority, without placing them ultimately under the control of the more ignorant and dependent portions of the community. For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilised, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked, and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community..... The tendency of the concurrent government is to unite the community, let its interests be ever so diversified or opposed; while that of the numerical is to divide it into two conflicting portions, let its interest be naturally ever so united and identified..... The numerical majority, by regarding the community as a unit, and having as such the same interests throughout all its parts, must, by its necessary operation, divide it into two hostile parts, waging, under the forms of law, incessant hostilities against each other..... To make equality of condition essential to liberty, would be to destroy liberty and progress. The reason is both that inequality of condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is at the same time indispensable to progress.... It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files. This gives to progress its greatest impulse..... These great and dangerous errors have their origin in the prevalent opinion, that all men are born free and equal, than which nothing can be more unfounded and false..... In an absolute democracy party conflicts between the majority and minority.... can hardly ever terminate in compromise. The object of the opposing minority is to expel the majority from power, and of the majority to maintain their hold upon it. It is on both sides a struggle for the whole; a struggle that must determine which shall be the governing and which the subject party..... Hence, among other reasons, aristocracies and monarchies more readily assume the constitutional form than absolute popular governments.”57

This was written in the last years of Calhoun’s life, and published after his death; but the ideas, though he matured them in the subsequent contest on slavery, guided him in the earlier stage of the dispute which developed nullification into secession, during the tariff controversy of the years 1828 to 1833. Many of those who differed from him most widely deemed that his resistance was justified by the selfish and unscrupulous policy of the North. Legaré, the most accomplished scholar among American statesmen, afterwards attorney-general, made a Fourth-of-July oration in South Carolina, during the height of the excitement of 1831, in which he said: “The authors of this policy are indirectly responsible for this deplorable state of things, and for all the consequences that may grow out of it. They have been guilty of an inexpiable offence against their country. They found us a united, they have made us a distracted people. They found the union of these States an object of fervent love and religious veneration; they have made even its utility a subject of controversy among very enlightened men..... I do not wonder at the indignation which the imposition of such a burden of taxation has excited in our people, in the present unprosperous state of their affairs..... Great nations cannot be held together under a united government by any thing short of despotic power, if any one part of the country is to be arrayed against another in a perpetual scramble for privilege and protection, under any system of protection.”58

Brownson, at that time the most influential journalist of America, and a strong partisan of Calhoun, advocated in 1844 his claims to the Presidency, and would, we believe, have held office in his cabinet if he had been elected. In one of the earliest numbers of his well-known Review he wrote: “Even Mr. Calhoun’s theory, though unquestionably the true theory of the federal constitution, is yet insufficient..... It does not, as a matter of fact, arrest the unequal, unjust, and oppressive measures of the federal government. South Carolina in 1833 forced a compromise; but in 1842 the obnoxious policy was revived, is pursued now successfully, and there is no State to attempt again the virtue of State interposition..... The State, if she judged proper, had the sovereign right to set aside this obnoxious tariff enactment in her own dominions, and prohibit her subjects or citizens from obeying it..... The parties to the compact being equal, and there being no common umpire, each, as a matter of course, is its own judge of the infraction of the compact, and of the mode and measure of redress.”59

The President, General Jackson, had a strong aversion for the theory and for the person of Calhoun. He swore that he would have him impeached for treason, and that he should hang on a gallows higher than Haman’s. One of the nullifying declarations of his Vice-President reached him late at night; in a fit of exultation he had the law officers of the government called out of their beds, to say whether at last here was not hanging matter. He issued a manifesto condemning the doctrine of nullification and the acts of South Carolina, which was very ably drawn up by Livingston, the Secretary of State, famous in the history of legislation as the author of the Louisiana code. Webster, the first orator of the day, though not a supporter of the administration, undertook to answer Calhoun in the Senate, and he was fetched from his lodging, when the time came, in the President’s carriage. His speech, considered the greatest he ever delivered, was regarded by the friends of the Union as conclusive against State-rights. Madison, who was approaching the term of his long career, wrote to congratulate the speaker in words which ought to have been a warning: “It crushes nullification, and must hasten an abandonment of secession. But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression.”

Secession is but the alternative of interposition. The defeat of the latter doctrine on the ground of the Constitution, deprived the South of the only possible protection from the increasing tyranny of the majority, for the defeat of nullification coincided in time with the final triumph of the pure democratic views; and at the same time that it was resolved that the rights of the minority had no security, it was established that the power of the majority had no bounds. Calhoun’s elaborate theory was an earnest attempt to save the Union from the defects of its Constitution. It is useless to inquire whether it is legally right, according to the letter of the Constitution, for it is certain that it is in contradiction with its spirit as it has grown up since Jefferson. Webster may have been the truest interpreter of the law; Calhoun was the real defender of the Union. Even the Unionists made the dangerous admission, that there were cases in which, as there was no redress known to the law, secession was fully justified. Livingston gave the opinion, that “if the act be one of the few which, in its operation, cannot be submitted to the Supreme Court, and be one that will, in the opinion of the State, justify the risk of a withdrawal from the Union, this last extremity may at once be resorted to.”60

The intimate connection between nullification and secession is shown by the biographer of Clay, though he fails to see that one is not the consequence, but the surrogate, of the other: “The first idea of nullification was doubtless limited to the action of a State in making null and void a federal law or laws within the circle of its own jurisdiction, without contemplating the absolute independence of a secession. Seeing, however, that nullification, in its practical operation, could hardly stop short of secession, the propounders of the doctrine in its first and limited signification, afterwards came boldly up to the claim of the right of secession.”61

Practically, South Carolina triumphed, though her claims were repudiated. The tariff was withdrawn, and a measure of compromise was introduced by Clay, the leading protectionist, which was felt to be so great a concession that Calhoun accepted, whilst Webster opposed it, and it was carried. But the evil day, the final crisis, was only postponed. The spirit of the country had taken a course in which it could not be permanently checked; and it was certain that new opportunities would be made to assert the omnipotence of the popular will, and to exhibit the total subservience of the executive to it.62 Already a new controversy had begun, which has since overshadowed that which shook the Union from 1828 to 1833. The commercial question was not settled; the economical antagonism, and the determination on the part of the North to extend its advantages, did not slumber from Clay’s Compromise Act to the Morrill Tariff in 1861; and in his farewell address, in 1837, Jackson drew a gloomy and desponding picture of the period which is filled with his name. “Many powerful interests are continually at work to procure heavy duties on commerce, and to swell the revenue beyond the real necessities of the public service; and the country has already felt the injurious effects of their combined influence. They succeeded in obtaining a tariff of duties bearing most oppressively on the agricultural and labouring classes of society, and producing a revenue that could not be usefully employed within the range of the powers conferred upon Congress; and in order to fasten upon the people this unjust and unequal system of taxation, extravagant schemes of internal improvement were got up in various quarters to squander the money and to purchase support..... Rely upon it, the design to collect an extravagant revenue, and to burden you with taxes beyond the economical wants of the government, is not yet abandoned. The various interests which have combined together to impose a heavy tariff, and to produce an overflowing treasury, are too strong, and have too much at stake, to surrender the contest. The corporations, and wealthy individuals who are engaged in large manufacturing establishments, desire a high tariff to increase their gains. Designing politicians will support it to conciliate their favour, and to obtain the means of profuse expenditure, for the purpose of purchasing influence in other quarters..... It is from within, among yourselves—from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition, and inordinate thirst for power,—that factions will be formed and liberty endangered.”63

Jackson was himself answerable for much of what was most deplorable in the political state of the country. The democratic tendency, which began under Jefferson, attained in Jackson’s presidency its culminating point. The immense change in this respect may be shown in a single example. Pure democracy demands quick rotation of office, in order that, as all men have an equal claim to official power and profit, and must be supposed nearly equally qualified for it, and require no long experience (so that at Athens offices were distributed by lot), the greatest possible number of citizens should successively take part in the administration. It diminishes the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, between the State and the community, and increases the dependence of the first upon the last. At first such changes were not contemplated. Washington dismissed only nine officials in eight years, Adams removed only ten, Madison five, Monroe nine, John Quincy Adams only two, both on specific disqualifying grounds. Jefferson was naturally in favour of rotation in office, and caused a storm of anger when he displaced 39 official men in order to supply vacancies for supporters. Jackson, on succeeding the younger Adams, instantly made 176 alterations, and in the course of the first year 491 postmasters lost their places. Mr. Everett says very truly: “It may be stated as the general characteristic of the political tendencies of this period, that there was a decided weakening of respect for constitutional restraint. Vague ideas of executive discretion prevailed on the one hand in the interpretation of the constitution, and of popular sovereignty on the other, as represented by a President elevated to office by overwhelming majorities of the people.”64

This was the period of Tocqueville’s visit to America, when he passed the following judgment: “When a man, or a party, suffers an injustice in the United States, to whom can he have recourse? To public opinion? It is that which forms the majority. To the legislative body? It represents the majority, and obeys it blindly. To the executive power? It is appointed by the majority, and serves as its passive instrument. To public force? It is nothing but the majority under arms. To the jury? It is the majority invested with the right of finding verdicts. The judges themselves, in some States, are elected by the majority. However iniquitous, therefore, or unreasonable the measure from which you suffer, you must submit.”65 Very eminent Americans66 quite agreed with him in his censure of the course things had taken, and which had been seen long beforehand. In 1818 Story writes: “A new race of men is springing up to govern the nation; they are the hunters after popularity; men ambitious, not of the honour so much as of the profits of office,—the demagogues whose principles hang laxly upon them, and who follow, not so much what is right as what leads to a temporary vulgar applause. There is great, very great danger that these men will usurp so much of popular favour that they will rule the nation; and if so, we may yet live to see many of our best institutions crumble in the dust.”67

The following passages are from the conclusion of his commentary on the Constitution: “The influence of the disturbing causes, which, more than once in the convention, were on the point of breaking up the Union, have since immeasurably increased in concentration and vigour.... If, under these circumstances, the Union should once be broken up, it is impossible that a new constitution should ever be formed, embracing the whole territory. We shall be divided into several nations or confederacies, rivals in power and interest, too proud to brook injury, and too close to make retaliation distant or ineffectual.” On the 18th February, 1834, he writes of Jackson’s administration: “I feel humiliated at the truth, which cannot be disguised, that though we live under the form of a republic, we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man.” And a few years later, 3d November, 1837, he tells Miss Martineau that she has judged too favourably of his country: “You have overlooked the terrible influence of a corrupting patronage, and the system of exclusiveness in official appointments, which have already wrought such extensive mischiefs among us, and threaten to destroy all the safeguards of our civil liberties..... You would have learned, I think, that there may be a despotism exercised in a republic, as irresistible and as ruinous as in any form of monarchy.”

The foremost of the Southern statesmen thought exactly like the New England judge. “I care not” said Calhoun, “what the form of the government is; it is nothing, if the government be despotic, whether it be in the hands of one, or a few, or of many men, without limitation.... While these measures were destroying the equilibrium between the two sections, the action of the government was leading to a radical change in its character, by concentrating all the power of the system in itself.... What was once a constitutional federal republic is now converted, in reality, into one as absolute as that of the autocrat of Russia, and as despotic in its tendency as any absolute government that ever existed.... The increasing power of this government, and of the control of the Northern section over all its departments, furnished the cause. It was this which made an impression on the minds of many, that there was little or no restraint to prevent the government from doing whatever it might choose to do.”68 At the same period, though reverting to a much earlier date, Cobbett wrote: “I lived eight years under the republican government of Pennsylvania; and I declare that I believe that to have been the most corrupt and tyrannical government that the world ever knew..... I have seen enough of republican government to convince me that the mere name is not worth a straw.”69 Channing touches on a very important point, the influence of European liberalism on the republicanism of America: “Ever since our revolution we have had a number of men who have wanted faith in our free institutions, and have seen in our almost unlimited extension of the elective franchise the germ of convulsion and ruin. When the demagogues succeed in inflaming the ignorant multitude, and get office and power, this anti-popular party increases; in better times it declines. It has been built up in a measure by the errors and crimes of the liberals of Europe.... I have endeavoured on all occasions to disprove the notion that the labouring classes are unfit depositaries of political power. I owe it, however, to truth to say that I believe that the elective franchise is extended too far in this country.”70 In 1841 he described very accurately the perils which have since proved fatal: “The great danger to our institutions, which alarms our conservatives most, has not perhaps entered Mr. Smith’s mind. It is the danger of a party organisation, so subtle and strong as to make the government the monopoly of a few leaders, and to insure the transmission of the executive power from hand to hand almost as regularly as in a monarchy..... That this danger is real cannot be doubted. So that we have to watch against despotism as well as, or more than, anarchy.”71 On this topic it is impossible to speak more strongly, and nobody could speak with greater authority than Dr. Brownson: “Our own government, in its origin and constitutional form, is not a democracy, but, if we may use the expression, a limited elective aristocracy.... But practically the government framed by our fathers no longer exists, save in name. Its original character has disappeared, or is rapidly disappearing. The constitution is a dead letter, except so far as it serves to prescribe the modes of election, the rule of the majority, the distribution and tenure of offices, and the union and separation of the functions of government. Since 1828 it has been becoming in practice, and is now substantially, a pure democracy, with no effective constitution but the will of the majority for the time being.... The constitution is practically abolished, and our government is virtually, to all intents and purposes, as we have said, a pure democracy, with nothing to prevent it from obeying the interest or interests which for the time being can succeed in commanding it.”72 Shortly before his conversion he wrote: “Looking at what we were in the beginning, and what we now are, it may well be doubted whether another country in Christendom has so rapidly declined as we have, in the stern and rigid virtues, in the high-toned and manly principles of conduct essential to the stability and wise administration of popular government.... The established political order in this country is not the democratic; and every attempt to apply the democratic theory as the principle of its interpretation is an attempt at revolution, and to be resisted. By a democracy I understand a political order,—if that may be called order which is none, —in which the people, primarily and without reference to any authority constituting them a body politic, are held to be the source of all the legitimate power in the state”73

The partisans of democratic absolutism who opposed State-rights in the affair of the tariff, and led to the unhappy consequences and lamentations we have seen, were already supplied with another topic to test the power of their principle. The question of abolition, subordinate at first, though auxiliary to the question of protection, came into the front when the other had lost its interest, and had been suspended for a season by the Compromise Act. It served to enlist higher sympathies on the side of revolution than could be won by considerations of mere profit. It adorned cupidity with the appearance of philanthropy, but the two motives were not quite distinct, and one is something of a pretext, and serves to disguise the other. They were equally available as means of establishing the supremacy of the absolute democracy, only one was its own reward; the other was not so clearly a matter of pecuniary interest, but of not inferior political advantage. A power which is questioned, however real it may be, must assert and manifest itself if it is to last. When the right of the States to resist the Union was rejected, although the question which occasioned the dispute was amicably arranged, it was certain to be succeeded by another, in order that so doubtful a victory might be commemorated by a trophy.

The question of slavery first exhibited itself as a constitutional difficulty about 1820, in the dispute which was settled by the Missouri compromise. Even at this early period the whole gravity of its consequences was understood by discerning men. Jefferson wrote: “This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

In 1828, when South Carolina was proclaiming the right of veto, and was followed by several of the Southern States, abolition was taken up in the North as a means of coercion against them, by way of reprisal, and as a very powerful instrument of party warfare. Channing writes to Webster, 14th May, 1828: “A little while ago, Mr. Lundy of Baltimore, the editor of a paper called The Genius of Universal Emancipation, visited this part of the country, to stir us up to the work of abolishing slavery at the South; and the intention is to organise societies for this purpose.... My fear in regard to our efforts against slavery is, that we shall make the case worse by rousing sectional pride and passion for its support, and that we shall only break the country into two great parties, which may shake the foundations of government.”

In the heat of the great controversies of Jackson’s administration, on the Bank question and the Veto question, slavery was not brought prominently forward; but when the democratic central power had triumphed, when the Bank question was settled, and there was no longer an immediate occasion for discussing State-rights, the party whose opinions had prevailed in the Constitution resolved to make use of their predominance for its extinction. Thenceforward, from about the year 1835, it became the leading question, and the form in which the antagonism between the principles of arbitrary power and of self-government displayed itself. At every acquisition of territory, at the formation of new States, the same question caused a crisis; then in the Fugitive-Slave Act, and finally in the formation of the republican party, and its triumph in 1860. The first effect of making abolition a political party question, and embodying in it the great constitutional quarrel which had already threatened the existence of the Union in the question of taxation, was to verify the prophecy of Channing. Webster, who had been the foremost antagonist of nullification in the affair of the tariff, lived to acknowledge that even secession was being provoked by the insane aggression of the North. In one of his latest speeches, in that which is known as his speech for the Union, 7th March, 1850, he denounced the policy of the abolitionists: “I do not mean to impute gross motives even to the leaders of these societies, but I am not blind to the consequences of their proceedings. I cannot but see what mischiefs their interference with the South has produced. And is it not plain to every man? Let any gentleman who entertains doubts on this point recur to the debates in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1832, and he will see with what freedom a proposition made by Mr. J. Randolph for the gradual abolition of slavery was discussed in that body.... Public opinion, which in Virginia had begun to be exhibited against slavery, and was opening out for the discussion of the question, drew back and shut itself up in its castle.... We all know the fact, and we all know the cause; and everything that these agitating people have done has been, not to enlarge, but to restrain, not to set free, but to bind faster, the slave-population of the South.”74

Howe, the Virginian historian, in principle though not in policy an abolitionist, says: “That a question so vitally important would have been renewed with more success at an early subsequent period, seems more than probable, if the current opinions of the day can be relied on; but there were obvious causes in operation which paralysed the friends of abolition, and have had the effect of silencing all agitation on the subject. The abolitionists in the Northern and Eastern States, gradually increasing their strength as a party, became louder in their denunciations of slavery, and more and more reckless in the means adopted for assailing the constitutional rights of the South.”75

Story writes, 19th January, 1839: “The question of slavery is becoming more and more an absorbing one, and will, if it continues to extend its influence, lead to a dissolution of the Union. At least there are many of our soundest statesmen Who look to this as a highly probable event.”76

At that time the abolitionist party was yet in its infancy, and had not succeeded in combining together in a single party all the interests that were hostile to the slave States. Lord Carlisle, describing a conversation he had in 1841 with the present Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, says, “I find that I noted at the time that he was the first person I had met who did not speak slightingly of the abolitionists; he thought they were gradually gaining ground.”77

But in the following year the abolitionist policy rapidly grew up into a great danger to the Union, which the great rivals, Webster and Calhoun, united to resist at the close of their lives. Commercially speaking, it is not certain that the North would gain by the abolition of slavery. It would increase the Southern market by encouraging white emigration from the North; but the commerce of New England depends largely on the cotton crop, and the New England merchants are not for abolition. Calhoun did not attribute the movement to a desire of gain: “The crusade against our domestic institution does not originate in hostility of interests..... . . . . The rabid fanatics regard slavery as a sin, and thus regarding it deem it their highest duty to destroy it, even should it involve the destruction of the constitution and the Union.”78

In this view he is fully supported by Webster: “Under the cry of universal freedom, and that other cry that there is a rule for the government of public men and private men which is of superior obligation to the constitution of the country, several of the States have enacted laws to hinder, obstruct, and defeat the enactments in this act of Congress to the utmost of their power..... I suspect all this to be the effect of that wandering and vagrant philanthropy which disturbs and annoys all that is present, in time or place, by heating the imagination on subjects distant, remote, and uncertain.”79

Webster justly considered that the real enemies of the Constitution were the abolitionists, not the slave-owners, who threatened to secede. To appeal from the Constitution to a higher law, to denounce as sinful and contrary to natural right an institution expressly recognized by it, is manifestly an assault upon the Union itself. The South have the letter and the spirit of the law in their favour. The consistent abolitionists must be ready to sacrifice the Union to their theory. If the objection to slavery is on moral grounds, paramount to all political rights and interests, abolition is a peremptory duty, to which the Union itself, whose law is opposed to compulsory abolition, must succumb. It was therefore perfectly just to remind Mr. Seward, that in attacking slavery, and denying that it could be tolerated, he was assailing the law to which he owed his seat in Congress. “No man,” said Webster, “is at liberty to set up, or affect to set up, his own conscience as above the law, in a matter which respects the rights of others, and the obligations, civil, social, and political, due to others from him.”80

Dr. Brownson says, with great truth, as only a Catholic can, “No civil government can exist, none is conceivable even, where every individual is free to disobey its orders, whenever they do not happen to square with his private convictions of what is the law of God.... To appeal from the government to private judgment, is to place private judgment above public authority, the individual above the state.”81

Calhoun was entirely justified in saying that, in the presence of these tendencies, “the conservative power is in the slave-holding States. They are the conservative portion of the country.”82

His own political doctrines, as we have described them, fully bear out this view. But the conservative, anti-revolutionary character of the South depended on other causes than the influence of its master mind. Slavery is itself in contradiction with the equal rights of man, as they are laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Slave-owners are incapacitated from interpreting that instrument with literal consistency, for it would contradict both their interests and their daily experience. But as there are advanced democrats at the South as well as at the North, and as, indeed, they succeeded in resisting so long the Northern politicians, by using the jealousy of the Northern people against the wealthy capitalists, and the appearance of aristocracy, they find means of escaping from this dilemma. This is supplied by the theory of the original inferiority of the African race to the rest of mankind, for which the authority of the greatest naturalist in America is quoted: “The result of my researches,” says Agassiz, “is, that Negroes are intellectually children; physically one of the lowest races; inclining with the other blacks, especially the South-Sea Negroes, most of all to the monkey type, though with a tendency, even in the extremes, towards the real human form. This opinion I have repeatedly expressed, without drawing from it any objectionable consequence, unless, perhaps, that no coloured race, least of all the Negroes, can have a common origin with ourselves.” If this theory were not the property of the infidel science of Europe, one would suppose it must have been invented for the Americans, whom it suits so well.

Webster spoke with great power against the projects of the North: “There is kept up a general cry of one-party against the other, that its rights are invaded, its honour insulted, its character assailed, and its just participation in political power denied. Sagacious men cannot but suspect from all this, that more is intended than is avowed; and that there lies at the bottom a purpose of the separation of the States, for reasons avowed or disavowed, or for grievances redressed or unredressed.

“In the South, the separation of the States is openly professed, discussed, and recommended, absolutely or conditionally, in legislative halls, and in conventions called together by the authority of the law.

“In the North, the State governments have not run into such excess, and the purpose of overturning the government shows itself more clearly in resolutions agreed to in voluntary assemblies of individuals, denouncing the laws of the land, and declaring a fixed intent to disobey them..... It is evident that, if this spirit be not checked, it will endanger the government; if it spread far and wide, it will overthrow the government.”83

The language of Calhoun about the same period is almost identical with Webster’s. “The danger is of a character— whether we regard our safety or the preservation of the Union—which cannot be safely tampered with. If not met promptly and decidedly, the two portions of the Union will become thoroughly alienated, when no alternative will be left to us, as the weaker of the two, but to sever all political ties, or sink down into abject submission.”84

His last great speech, delivered March 4, 1850, a few days before his death, opened with the words, “I have believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion.” And he went on to say: “If something is not done to avert it, the South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession. Indeed, as events are now moving, it will not require the South to secede in order to dissolve the Union.”85

The calamity which these eminent men agreed in apprehending and in endeavouring to avert, was brought on after their death by the rise of the republican party—a party in its aims and principles quite revolutionary, and not only inconsistent with the existence of the Union, but ready from the first to give it up. “I do not see,” said the New England philosopher Emerson, “how a barbarous community and a civilised community can constitute one State.” In order to estimate the extravagance of this party declaration, we will only quote two unexceptionable witnesses, who visited the South at an interval of about forty years from each other; one a Boston divine, the other an eager abolitionist. “How different from our Northern manners! There, avarice and ceremony, at the age of twenty, graft the coldness and unfeelingness of age on the disinterested ardour of youth. I blush for my own people when I compare the selfish prudence of the Yankee with the generous confidence of a Virginian. Here I find great vices, but greater virtues than I left behind me. There is one single trait which attaches me to the people I live with more than all the virtues of New England,—they love money less than we do.”86 Lord Carlisle says, in the lecture already referred to, “It would be uncandid to deny that the planter in the Southern States has much more in his manner and mode of intercourse that resembles the English country gentleman than any other class of his countrymen.”87

Emerson’s saying is a sign of the extent to which rapid abolitionists were ready to go. Declaring that the Federal Government was devoted to Southern interests, against Northern doctrines, they openly defied it. Disunion societies started up at the North for the purpose of bringing about separation. Several States passed laws against the South and against the Constitution, and there were loud demands for separation. This was the disposition of the North at the presidential election of a successor to Pierce. The North threatened to part company, and if it carried its candidate, it threatened the Southern institutions. The South proclaimed the intention of seceding if Fremont should be elected, and threatened to march upon Washington and burn the archives of the Union. Buchanan’s election pacified the South; but it was evident, from the growing strength of the republican party, that it was their last victory. They accordingly made use of their friends in office to take advantage of the time that remained to them to be in readiness when the next election came. Secession was resolved upon and prepared from the time when the strength of the republicans was exhibited in 1856. In spite of all the horrors of American slavery, it is impossible for us to have any sympathy with the party of which Mr. Seward is the chief. His politics are not only revolutionary, but aggressive; he is not only for absolutism but for annexation. In a speech on January 26, 1853, he spoke as follows: “The tendency of commercial and political events invites the United States to assume and exercise á paramount influence in the affairs of the nations situated in this hemisphere; that is, to become and remain a great Western continental power, balancing itself against the possible combinations of Europe. The advance of the country toward that position constitutes what, in the language of many, is called ‘progress,’ and the position itself is what, by the same class, is called ‘manifest destiny.’”88

When Cass moved a resolution affirming the Monroe Doctrine with regard to Cuba, Seward supported it, together with another resolution perfectly consistent with it, of which he said: “It is not well expressed; but it implies the same policy in regard to Canada which the main resolutions assert concerning Cuba.”89 Nor is this the limit of his ambition. “You are already,” he says to his countrymen, “the great continental power of America. But does that content you? I trust it does not. You want the commerce of the world, which is the empire of the world.”90

When Kossuth was received in the Senate, he was introduced by Mr. Seward, whose European policy is as definite and about as respectable as his American. Speaking of Hungary, he writes, in December, 1851: “I trust that some measure may be adopted by the government which, while it will not at all hazard the peace or prosperity of the country, may serve to promote a cause that appeals so strongly to our interests and our sympathies, viz. the establishment of republicanism, in the countries prepared for it, in Europe.”91 And again, two days later: “Every nation may, and every nation ought, to make its position distinctly known in every case of conflict between despots and States struggling for the inalienable and indefeasible rights of independence and self-government, that when despots combine, free States may lawfully unite.”

It is as impossible to sympathise on religious grounds with the categorical prohibition of slavery as, on political grounds, with the opinions of the abolitionists. In this, as in all other things, they exhibit the same abstract, ideal absolutism, which is equally hostile with the Catholic and with the English spirit. Their democratic system poisons everything it touches. All constitutional questions are referred to the one fundamental principle of popular sovereignty, without consideration of policy or expediency. In the Massachusetts convention of 1853, it was argued by one of the most famous Americans, that the election of the judiciary could not be discussed on the grounds of its influence on the administration of justice, as it was clearly consonant with the constitutional theory. “What greater right,” says the North American Review (LXXXVI, 477), “has government to deprive the people of their representation in the executive and judicial, than in the legislative department?” In claiming absolute freedom, they have created absolute powers, whilst we have inherited from the middle ages the notion that both liberty and authority must be subject to limits and conditions. The same intolerance of restraints and obligations, the same aversion to recognise the existence of popular duty, and of the divine right which is its correlative, disturb their notions of government and of freedom. The influence of these habits of abstract reasoning, to which we owe the revolution in Europe, is to make all things questions of principle and of abstract law. A principle is always appealed to in all cases, either of interest or necessity, and the consequence is, that a false and arbitrary political system produces a false and arbitrary code of ethics, and the theory of abolition is as erroneous as the theory of freedom.

Very different is the mode in which the Church labours to reform mankind by assimilating realities with ideals, and accommodating herself to times and circumstances. Her system of Christian liberty is essentially incompatible with slavery; and the power of masters over their slaves was one of the bulwarks of corruption and vice which most seriously impeded her progress. Yet the Apostles never condemned slavery even within the Christian fold. The sort of civil liberty which came with Christianity into the world, and was one of her postulates, did not require the abolition of slavery. If men were free by virtue of their being formed after the image of God, the proportion in which they realised that image would be the measure of their freedom. Accordingly, St. Paul prescribed to the Christian slave to remain content with his condition.92

We have gone at inordinate length into the causes and peculiarities of the revolution in the United States, because of the constant analogy they present to the theories and the events which are at the same time disturbing Europe. It is too late to touch upon more than one further point, which is extremely suggestive. The Secession movement was not provoked merely by the alarm of the slave-owners for their property, when the election of Lincoln sent down the price of slaves from twenty-five to fifty per cent, but by the political danger of Northern preponderance; and the mean whites of the Southern States are just as eager for separation as those who have property in slaves. For they fear lest the republicans, in carrying emancipation, should abolish the barriers which separate the Negroes from their own caste. At the same time, the slaves show no disposition to help the republicans, and be raised to the level of the whites. There is a just reason for this fear, which lies in the simple fact that the United States are a republic. The population of a republic must be homogeneous. Civil equality must be founded on social equality, and on national and physiological unity. This has been the strength of the American republic. Pure democracy is that form of government in which the community is sovereign, in which, therefore, the State is most nearly identified with society. But society exists for the protection of interests; the State for the realisation of right—concilia cœtusque hominum jure sociati, quae civitates appellantur.93 The State sets up a moral, objective law, and pursues a common object distinct from the ends and purposes of society. This is essentially repugnant to democracy, which recognises only the interests and rights of the community, and is therefore inconsistent with the consolidation of authority which is implied in the notion of the State. It resists the development of the social into the moral community. If, therefore, a democracy includes persons with separate interests or an inferior nature, it tyrannises over them. There is no mediator between the part and the whole; there is no room, therefore, for differences of class, of wealth, of race; equality is necessary to the liberty which is sought by a pure democracy.

Where society is constituted without equality of condition or unity of race, where there are different classes and national varieties, they require a protector in a form of government which shall be distinct from and superior to every class, and not the instrument of one of them, in an authority representing the State, not any portion of society. This can be supplied only by monarchy; and in this sense it is fair to say that constitutional government, that is, the authority of law as distinguished from interest, can exist only under a king. This is also the reason why even absolute monarchies have been better governors of dependencies than popular governments. In one case they are governed for the benefit of a ruling class; in the other, there is no ruling class, and they are governed in the name of the State. Rome under the Republic and under the Empire is the most striking instance of this contrast. But the tyranny of republics is greatest when differences of races are combined with distinctions of class. Hence South America was a flourishing and prosperous country so long as the Spanish crown served as moderator between the various races, and is still prosperous where monarchy has been retained; whilst the establishment of republics in countries with classes divided by blood has led to hopeless misery and disorder, and constant recourse to dictatorships as a refuge from anarchy and tyranny. Democracy inevitably takes the tone of the lower portions of society, and, if there are great diversities, degrades the higher. Slavery is the only protection that has ever been known against this tendency, and it is so far true that slavery is essential to democracy. For where there are great incongruities in the constitution of society, if the Americans were to admit the Indians, the Chinese, the Negroes, to the rights to which they are justly jealous of admitting European emigrants, the country would be thrown into disorder, and if not, would be degraded to the level of the barbarous races. Accordingly, the Know-nothings rose up as the reaction of the democratic principle against the influx of an alien population. The Red Indian is gradually retreating before the pioneer, and will perish before many generations, or dwindle away in the desert. The Chinese in California inspire great alarm for the same reason, and plans have been proposed of shipping them all off again. This is a good argument too, in the interest of all parties, against the emancipation of the blacks.

The necessity for social equality and national unity has been felt in all democracies where the mass as a unit governs itself. Above all, it is felt as a necessity in France, since the downfall of the old society, and the recognition, under republic, charter, and despotism, of the sovereignty of the people. Those principles with which France revolutionises Europe are perfectly right in her own case. They are detestable in other countries where they cause revolutions, but they are a true and just consequence of the French Revolution. Men easily lose sight of the substance in the form, and suppose that because France is not a republic she is not a democracy, and that her principles therefore will apply elsewhere. This is the reason of the power of the national principle in Europe. It is essential as a consequence of equality to the notion of the people as the source of power. Where there is an aristocracy it has generally more sympathy and connection with foreign aristocracies than with the rest of the nation. The bonds of class are stronger than those of nationality. A democracy, in abolishing classes, renders national unity imperative.

These are some of the political lessons we have learnt from the consideration of the vast process of which we are witnessing the consummation. We may consult the history of the American Union to understand the true theory of republicanism, and the danger of mistaking it. It is simply the spurious democracy of the French Revolution that has destroyed the Union, by disintegrating the remnants of English traditions and institutions. All the great controversies—on the embargo, restriction, internal improvement, the Bank-Charter Act, the formation of new States, the acquisition of new territory, abolition—are phases of this mighty change, steps in the passage from a constitution framed on an English model to a system imitating that of France. The secession of the Southern States—pregnant with infinite consequences to the African race by altering the condition of slavery, to America by awakening an intenser thirst for conquest, to Europe by its reaction on European democracy, to England, above all, by threatening for a moment one of the pillars of her social existence, but still more by the enormous augmentation of her power, on which the United States were always a most formidable restraint—is chiefly important in a political light as a protest and reaction against revolutionary doctrines, and as a move in the opposite direction to that which prevails in Europe.