Chapter 3

While, however, the influences at work are thus general and the manifestations whether on the other side of the Atlantic or here bear a strong resemblance, yet difference of conditions and detail --constitutional peculiarities, so to speak--must not be disregarded. One form of treatment may not be prescribed for all. In our case, therefore, it remains to consider how best to adapt this country and ourselves to the unforeseeable,--the navigation of uncharted waters; and this adaptation cannot be considered hi any correct and helpful, because scientific, spirit, unless the cause of change is located. Surface manifestations are, in and of themselves, merely deceptive. A physician, diagnosing the chances of a patient, must first correctly ascertain, or at least ascertain with approximate correctness, the seat of the trouble under which the patient is suffering. So, we.

And here I must frankly confess to small respect for the politician,--the man whose voice is continually heard, whether from the Senate Chamber or the Hustings. There is in those of his class a continual and most noticeable tendency to what may best be described as the _post ergo propter_ dispensation. With them, the eye is fixed on the immediate manifestation. Because one event preceded another, the first event is obviously and indisputably the cause of the later event. For instance, in the present case, the cause or seat of our existing and very manifest social, political and financial disturbances is attributed as of course to some peculiarity of legislation, either a subtreasury bill passed in the administration of General Jackson, or a tariff bill passed in the administration of Mr. Taft, or the demonetization of silver in the Hayes period,--that "Crime of the Century," the Crucifixion of Labor on the Cross of Gold! Once for all, let me say, I contemplate this school of politicians and so-called "thinkers" with sentiments the reverse of respectful. In plain language, I class them with those known in professional parlance as quacks and charlatans. Not always, not even in the majority of cases, does that which preceded bear to that which follows the relation of cause and effect. A marked example of this false attribution is afforded in more recent political history by the everlasting recurrence of the statement that American prosperity is the result of an American protective system. Yet in the Protectionist dispensation, this has become an article of faith. To my mind, it is undeserving of even respectful consideration.

If I were asked the cause of that change, little short of revolutionary, if indeed in any respect short of it, which has occurred in the material condition of the American people, and consequently in all its theories and ideals, within the last thirty years, I should attribute it to a wholly different cause. Mr. Lecky some years ago, in his book entitled "Liberty and Democracy," made the following statement, in no way original, but, as he put it, sufficiently striking: "The produce of the American mines [incident to the discoveries made by Columbus] created, in the most extreme form ever known in Europe, the change which beyond all others affects most deeply and universally the material well-being of men: it revolutionized the value of the precious metals, and, in consequence, the price of all articles, the effects of all contracts, the burden of all debts."

In other words, referring to the first half of the sixteenth century,--the sixty years, we will say, following the land-fall of Columbus,--the historian attributed the great change which then occurred and which stands forth so markedly in history, to the increased New-World production of the precious metals, combined with the impetus given to trade and industry as a consequence of that discovery, and of the mastery of man over additional globe areas. Now, dismissing from consideration the so-called American protective system, likewise our currency issues and, generally, the patchwork, so to speak, of crazy-quilt legislation to which so much is attributed during the last thirty years, I confidently submit that in the production of the results under discussion, they are quantities and factors hardly worthy of consideration. The cause of the change which has taken place lies far deeper and must be sought in influences of a wholly different nature, influences developed into an increased and still ever increasing activity, over which legislation has absolutely no control. I refer, of course, to man's mastery over the latent forces of Nature. Of these Steam and Electricity are the great examples, which, because always apparent, at once strike the imagination. These, as tools, it is to be remembered, date practically from within one hundred years back. It may, indeed, safely be asserted that up to 1815, the end of the Wars of Napoleon and the time of your Professor Lieber, steam even had not as yet practically affected the operations of man, while electricity, when not a terror, was as yet but a toy. Commerce was still exclusively carried on by the sailing ship and canal-boat. The years from the fall of Napoleon to our own War of Secession--from Waterloo to Gettysburg--were practically those of early and partial development. Not until well after Appomattox, that is, since the year 1870,--a period covering but little more than the life of a generation,--did what is known to you here as the Applied Sciences cover a range difficult to specialize. As factors in development, it is safe to say that those three tremendous agencies--Steam, Electricity, Chemistry--have, so to speak, worked all their noticeable results within the lifetime of the generation born since we celebrated the Centennial of Independence. The manifestations now resulting and apparent to all are the natural outcome of the use of these modern appliances, become in our case everyday working tools in the hands of the most resourceful, adaptive, ingenious and energetic of communities, developing a virgin continent of undreamed-of wealth. Naturally, under such conditions, the advance has been not only general and continuous, but one of ever increasing celerity. So Protection and the Currency become flies on the fast revolving wheel!

But what has otherwise resulted?--An unrest, social, economical, political. Not contentment, but a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong! We hear it in the continual cry over what is known as the increased cost of living, and feel its pressure in the higher standard of living. What was considered wealth by our ancestors is to-day hardly competence. What sufficed for luxury in our childhood barely now supplies what are known as the comforts of life. Take, for instance, the motor,--the automobile. I speak within bounds, I think, when I say there are many fold more motors to-day racing over the streets, the highways and the byways of America than there were one-horse wagons thirty-five years ago. Six hundred, I am told, are to be found within the immediate neighborhood of Columbia; and, since I have been here I have seen in your streets just one man on horse-back! These figures and that statement tell the tale. A few years only back, every Carolinian rode to town, and the motor was unknown. A single illustrative example, this could be duplicated in innumerable ways everywhere and in all walks of life.

The result is obvious, and was inevitable. Entered on a new phase of existence, the world is not as it was in the days of Columbus, when a single new continent was discovered containing in it what we would now regard as a limited accumulation of the precious metals. It is, on the contrary, as if, in the language of Dr. Johnson, "the potentiality of wealth" had been revealed "beyond the dreams of avarice"; together with not one or two, but a dozen continents, the existence and secrets of which are suddenly laid bare. The Applied Sciences have been the magicians,--not Protection or the Currency.

And still scientists are continually dinning in our ears the question whether this state of affairs is going to continue,--whether the era of disturbance has reached its limit! I hold such a question to be little short of childish. That era has not reached its limits, nor has it even approximated those limits. On the contrary, we have just entered on the uncharted sea. We know what the last thirty years have brought about as the result of the agencies at work; but as yet we can only dimly dream of what the next sixty years are destined to see brought about. Imagination staggers at the suggestion.

What, then, has been of this the inevitable consequence,--the consequence which even the blindest should have foreseen? It has resulted in all those far-reaching changes suggested in the earlier part of what I have said to-day, as respects our ideals, our political theories, our social conditions. In other words, the old era is ended; what is implied when we say a new era is entered upon?

To attempt a partial answer to the query implies no claim to a prophetic faculty. Whether we like to face the fact or not, far-reaching changes in our economical theories and social conditions are imminent, involving corresponding readjustments in our constitutional arrangements and political machinery. Tennyson foreshadowed it all in his "Locksley Hall" seventy years ago:--"The individual withers, and the world is more and more." The day of individualism as it existed in the American ideal of sixty years since is over; that of collectivism and possibly socialism has opened. The day of social equality is relegated to what may be considered a somewhat patriarchal past,--that patriarchal past having come to a close during the memory of those still in active life.

And yet, though all this can now be studied in the political discussion endlessly dragging on, strangely and sadly enough that discussion carries in it hardly a note of encouragement. It is, in a word, unspeakably shallow. And here, having sufficiently for my present purpose though in hurried manner, diagnosed the situation,--located the seat of disturbance,--we come to the question of treatment. Involving, as it necessarily does, problems of the fundamental law, and a rearrangement and different allocation of the functions of government, this challenges the closest thought of the publicist. That the problem is here crying aloud for solution is apparent. The publications which cumber the counters of our book-stores, those for which the greatest popular call to-day exists--treatises relating to trade interests, to collectivism, to socialism, even to anarchism--tell the tale in part; in part it is elsewhere and otherwise told. Only recently, in once Puritan Massachusetts, processions paraded the streets carrying banners marked with this device, more suggestive than strange:--"No master and no God!"

What are the remedies popularly proposed? In that important branch of polity known as Political Ethics, or, as he termed them, Hermeneutics, which your Professor Lieber sixty years ago endeavored to treat of, what advance has since his time been effected?--Nay! what advance has been effected since the time, over two thousand years, of his great predecessor, Aristotle? I confidently submit that what progress is now being made in this most erudite of sciences is in the nature of that of the crab--backwards! In the discussions of Aristotle, the problem in view was, how to bring about government by the wisest,--that is, the most observant and expert. In other words, government, the object of politics, was by Aristotle treated in a scientific spirit. And this is as it should be. Take, for example, any problem,--I do not care whether it is legal or medical or one of engineering: How successfully dispose of it? Uniformly, in one way. Those problems are successfully solved, if at all, only when their solution is placed in the hands of the most proficient. Judged by the discussions of to-day, what advance has in politics been effected? Do the _Outlook_ and the _Commoner_ imply progress since the Stagirite? Not to any noticeable extent. We are, on the contrary, fumbling and wallowing about where the Greek pondered and philosophized.

Democracy, as it is called, is to-day the great panacea,--the political nostrum; as such it is confidently advocated by statesmen and professors and even by the presidents of our institutions of the advanced education. "Trust the People" is the shibboleth! "Let the People rule!" "The cure for too much Liberty is more Liberty!" To Democracy plain and simple--Composite Wisdom--I frankly confess I feel no call,--no call greater than, for instance, towards Autocracy or Aristocracy or Plutocracy. Taken simply, and applied as hitherto applied, all and each lead to but one result,--failure! And that result, let me here predict, will, in the future, be the same in the case of pure Democracy that, in the past, it was in the case of the pure Autocracy of the Caesars, or the case of the pure Aristocracy of Rome or of the so-called Republics of the Middle Ages. A political edifice on shifting sands.

Yet, to-day what do we see and hear in America? Tell it not in Gath; publish it not in the streets of Askalon I Two thousand years after the time of Aristotle, we see a prevailing school working directly back to the condition of affairs which existed in the Athenian agora under the disapproving eyes of the father of political philosophy. Panaceas, universal cure-alls, and quack remedies--the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall are paraded as if these--nostrums of the mountebanks of the county fair--would surely remedy the perplexing ills of new and hitherto unheard-of social, economical, and political conditions. Democracy! What is Democracy? Democracy, as it is generally understood, I submit, is nothing but the reaching of political conclusions through the frequent counting of noses; or, as Macaulay two generations ago better phrased it, "the majority of citizens told by the head";--the only question at just this juncture being whether, in order to the arriving at more acceptable results, both sexes shall be "told," instead of one sex only. Moreover, I with equal confidence make bold to suggest that while conceded, and while men have even persuaded themselves that they have faith in it, and really do believe in this "telling" of noses as the best and fairest attainable means of reaching correct results, yet in so doing and so professing they simply, as men are prone to do, deceive themselves. In other words, victims of their own cant, they preach a panacea in which they really do not believe. Nor of this is proof far to seek. _Vox populi, vox Dei_! If you extend the application of this principle by a single step, its loudest advocates draw back in alarm from the inevitable. They seek refuge in the assertion--"Oh! That is different!" For instance, take a concrete case; so best can we illustrate.

One of the greatest scientific triumphs reached in modern times--perhaps I might fairly say the greatest--is the discovery of the cause of yellow fever, and its consequent control. As a result of the studies, the patient experimentation and self-sacrifice of the wisest,--that is, the most observant and expert,--the amazing conclusion was reached that not only the yellow fever but the innumerable ills of the flesh known under the caption of "malarial," were due to causes hitherto unsuspected, though obvious when revealed,--to the existence in the atmosphere of a venomous insect, in comparison with the work of which the ravages on mankind of the entire carnivorous and reptile creation were of comparatively small account. The mosquito flew disclosed, the atmospheric viper,--a viper most venomous and deadly. How was the disclosure brought about? What was the remedy applied? Was the discovery effected through universal suffrage? Was the remedy sought for and decided upon by the Initiative, or through a Referendum at an election held on the Tuesday succeeding the first Monday of a certain month and year? Had recourse in this case been had to the panacea now in greatest political vogue, we all know perfectly well what would have followed. History tells us. The quarantine, as it is called, would have been decreed, and a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer appointed. The mosquito, quite ignored, would then have gone on in his deadly work. We all equally well know that the man, even the politician or the statesman, who had suggested a solution of that problem by a count of noses would have been effaced with ridicule. Even the most simple minded would have rejected that method of reaching a result. Yet the ilia of the body politic, too, are complicated. Indeed, far more intricate in their processes and more deceitful in their aspects, they more deeply affect the general well-being and happiness than any ill or epidemic which torments the physical being, even the mosquito malaria. Yet the ills of the body politic, the complications which surround us on every side,--for these the unfailing panacea is said to lie in universal suffrage, that remedy which is immediately and of course laughed out of court if suggested in case of the simpler ills of the flesh.

This, I submit, is demonstration. The true remedy is not to be sought in that direction in the one case any more than the other.

There is a considerable element of truth, though possibly a not inconsiderable one of exaggeration, in this statement from a paper I recently chanced upon in the issue of the sober and classical _Edinburgh Review_ for October last,--a paper entitled "Democracy and Liberalism":--"History testifies unmistakably and unanimously to the passion of democracies for incompetence. There is nothing democracy dislikes and suspects so heartily as technical efficiency, particularly when it is independent of the popular vote." But to-day, what is politically proposed by our senatorial charlatans and the mountebanks of the market-place? The Referendum, the constant and easy Recall, the everlasting Initiative are dinned into our ears as the cure-alls of every ill of the body politic. On the contrary, I submit that, while in the absence of any better method as yet devised and accepted, the process of reaching results by a count of the "majority told by the head" of the citizens then present and voting has certain political advantages, yet, for all this, as a final, scientific, political process, it is unworthy of consideration. A passing expedient, it in no degree reflects credit on twentieth-century intelligence.

And now I come to the crux of my discussion. Thus rejecting results reached by the ballot as now in practical use, a query is already in the minds of those who listen. At once suggesting itself and flung in my face, it is asked as a political poser, and not without a sneer,--What else or better have I to propose? Would I advise a return to old and discarded methods,--Heredity, Caste, Autocracy, Plutocracy? I respectfully submit this is a question no one has a right to put, and one I am not called upon to answer. Again, let me take a concrete case. Once more I appeal to the yellow fever precedent. The first step towards a solution of a medical, as of a political, problem is a correct diagnosis. Then necessarily follows a long period devoted to observation, to investigation and experiment. If, in the case of the yellow fever, a score of years only ago an observer had pointed out the nature of the disease and the manifest inadequacy of current theories and prevailing methods of prevention and treatment, do you think others would have had a right to turn upon him and demand that he instantly prescribe a remedy which should be not only complete, but at once recognized as such and so accepted? In the present case, as I have already observed, from the days of Aristotle down through two and twenty centuries, men had been experimenting in all, to them, conceivable ways, on the government of the body politic, exactly as they experimented on the disorders of the physical body. But only yesterday was the source of the yellow fever, for instance, diagnosed and located, and the proper means of prevention applied. The cancer and tuberculosis are to-day unsolved problems. By analogy, they are inviting subjects for an Initiative and a Referendum! Yet would any person who to-day, standing where I stand, expressed a disbelief, at once total and contemptuous, of such a procedure as respects them, be met by a demand for some other panacea of immediate and guaranteed efficiency? And so with the body politic. I here to-day am merely attempting a diagnosis, pointing out the disorders, and exposing as best I can the utter crudeness and insufficiency of the market-place remedies proposed. Have you a right, then, to turn on me, and call for some other prescription, warranted to cure, in place of the nostrums so loudly advertised by the sciolists and the dabblers of the day, and by me so contemptuously set aside? I confess I am unable to respond, or even to attempt a response to any such demand. I am not altogether a quack, nor is this a county fair.

"Paracelsus," so denominated, was one of Robert Browning's earlier poems. In it he causes the fifteenth-century alchemist and forerunner of all modern pharmaceutical chemistry, to declare that as the result of long travel and much research

"I possess Two sorts of knowledge: one,--vast, shadowy, Hints of the unbounded aim.... The other consists of many secrets, caught While bent on nobler prize,--perhaps a few Prime principles which may conduct to much: These last I offer."

So, _longo intervallo_, I have a few suggestions,--the result of an observation extending, as I said at the beginning, over the lives of two generations and a connection with many great events in which I have borne a part,--a part not prominent indeed, and more generally, I acknowledge, mistaken than correct. My errors, however, have at least made me cautious and doubtful of my own conclusions. I submit them for what they are worth. Not much, I fear.

What, then, would I do, were it in my power to prescribe alterations and curatives for the ills of our American body politic, of which I have spoken; or, more correctly, the far-reaching disturbances manifestly due to the agencies at work, to which I have made reference? Let us come at once to the point, taking the existing Constitution of the United States as a concrete example, and recognizing the necessity for its revision and readjustment to meet radically changed conditions,--conditions social, material, geographical, changed and still changing.

It was Mr. Gladstone who, years ago, made the often-quoted assertion that the Constitution of the United States was "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." I do not think he was far wrong; though we, of course, realize that the Federal Constitution was a growth and in no degree an inspiration. That Constitution has through a century and a quarter stood the test of time and stress of war, during a period of almost unlimited growth of the community for which it was devised. It has outlasted many nationalities and most of the dynasties in existence at the time of its adoption; and that, too, under conditions sufficiently trying. I, therefore, regard it with profound respect; and, so regarding it, I would treat it with a cautious and tender hand. Not lightly pronouncing it antiquated, what changes would I make in it if to-morrow it were given me to prescribe alterations adapting it to the altered conditions which confront us? I do not hesitate to say, and I am glad to say, the changes I would suggest would be limited; yet, I fancy, far-reaching.