Chapter 4

And, in the first place, let us have a clear conception of the end in view. That end is, I submit, exactly the same to-day which Aristotle had in view more than twenty centuries ago. It is, not to solve all political problems, but to put political problems as they arise in the hands of those whom he termed the "best,"--but whom we know as the most intelligent, observant and expert,--to be, through their agency, in the way of ultimate solution. If, adopting every ill-considered and half-fledged measure of so-called reform which might be the fancy of the day, we incorporated them in our fundamental law, but one thing could result therefrom,--ultimate confusion. The Constitution is neither a legislative crazy-quilt nor a receptacle of fads. To make it such is in every respect the reverse of scientific. The work immediately in hand, therefore, is to devise such changes in the fundamental law as will tend most effectually to bring about the solution of issues as they may arise, by the most expert, observant and reliable. This accomplished, if its accomplishment were only practicable, all possible would have been done; and the necessary and inevitable readjustment of things would, in politics as in medicine and in science, be left to solve itself as occasion arose. Provision cannot be made against every contingency.

This premised, the Constitution of the United States is an instrument through which powers are delegated by several local communities to a central government. The instrument, it was originally held, should be strictly construed and the powers delegated limited; and in this respect, with certain alterations made obviously necessary to meet changed conditions, I would return to the fundamental idea of the framers.

In saying this I feel confidence also that here in South Carolina at least I shall meet with an earnest response. The time is not yet remote when local self-government worked salvation for South Carolina, as for her sister States of the Confederacy. You here will never forget what immediately followed the close of our Civil War. As an historic fact, the Constitution was then suspended. It was suspended by act of an irresponsible Congress, exercising revolutionary but unlimited powers over a large section of the common country. You then had an illustration, not soon to be forgotten, of concentration of legislative power. An episode at once painful and discreditable, it is not necessary here to refer to it in detail. Appeal, however, was made to the principle of local self-government,--it was, so to speak, a recurrence to the theory of State Sovereignty. The appeal struck a responsive, because traditional, chord; and it was through a recurrence to State Sovereignty as the agency of local self-government that loyalty and contentment were restored, and, I may add, that I am here to-day. Ceasing to be a Military Department, South Carolina once more became a State. Not improbably the demand will in a not remote future be heard that State lines and local autonomy be practically obliterated. In that event, I feel a confident assurance that, recurring in memory to the evil days which followed 1865, the spirit of enlightened conservatism will assert itself here and in the sister States of what was once the Confederacy; and again it will prevail. In the future, as in the past, you in South Carolina at least will cling to what in 1876 proved the ark of your social and political salvation.

Taking another step in the discussion of changes, the Constitution is founded on that well-known distribution and allocation of powers first theoretically suggested by Montesquieu. There is a division, accompanied by a mutual limitation of authority, through the Judiciary, the Executive, and the Legislative. As respects this allocation, how would I modify that instrument? I freely say that the tendency of my thought, based on observation, is to conservatism. I have never yet in a single instance found that when the people of this or any other country accustomed to parliamentary government desired a thing, they failed to obtain it within a reasonable limit of time. Hasty changes are wisely deprecated; but I think I speak within limitation when I say that neither in the history of Great Britain,--the mother of Parliaments--nor in the history of the United States, has any modification which the people, on sober second thought, have considered to be for the best, long been deferred. Action, revolutionary in character, has not, as a rule, been needful, or, when taken, proved salutary. This is a record and result that no careful student of our history will, I take it, deny.

Such being the case, so far as our Judiciary is concerned, I do not hesitate to say I would adhere to older, and, as I think, better principles, or revert to them where they have been experimentally abandoned. It took the Anglo-Saxon race two centuries of incessant conflict to wrest from a despotic executive, practically an autocracy, judicial independence. That was effected through what is known as a tenure during good behavior, as opposed to a tenure at the will of the monarch. This, then, for two centuries, was accepted as a fundamental principle of constitutional government. Of late, a new theory has been propounded, and by those chafing at all restraint--constitutionally lawless in disposition--it is said the Recall should also be applied to the Judiciary. Having, therefore, wrested the independence of the Judiciary from the hand of the Autocrat, we now propose to place it, in all trustfulness, in the hands of the Democrat. To me the proposition does not commend itself. It is founded on no correct principle, for the irresponsible democratic majority is even more liable to ill-considered and vacillating action than is the responsible autocrat. In that matter I would not trust myself; why, then, should I trust the composite Democrat? In the case of the Judiciary, therefore, I would so far as the fundamental law is concerned abide by the older and better considered principles of the framers.

Next, the Executive. Again, we hear the demand of Democracy,--the Recall! Once more I revert to the record. This Republic has now been in working operation, and, taken altogether, most successful operation, for a century and a quarter. During that century and a quarter we have had, we will say, some five and twenty different chief magistrates. There is an ancient and somewhat vulgar adage to the effect that the proof of a certain dietary article is in its eating. Apply that homely adage to the matter under consideration. What is the lesson taught? It is simply this,--during a whole century and a quarter of existence there has not been one single chief executive of the United States to whom the arbitrary Recall could have been applied with what would now be agreed upon as a fortunate result. In the Andrew Johnson impeachment case was it not better that things were as they were? On the other hand, every one of the seven independent, self-respecting Senators who then by a display of high moral courage saved the country from serious prejudice would have been recalled out-of-hand had the Recall now demanded been in existence. Its working would have received prompt exemplification; as it was, the recall was effected in time, and after due deliberation. The delay occasioned no public detriment. In this life, experience is undeniably worth something; and the experience here referred to is fairly entitled to consideration. No political system possible to devise is wholly above criticism,--not open to exceptional contingencies or to dangers possible to conjure up. Such have from time to time arisen in the past; in the future such will inevitably arise. This consideration must, however, be balanced against a general average of successful working; and I confidently submit that, weighing thus the proved advantage of the system we have against the possibilities of danger which hereafter may occur, but which never yet have occurred, the scale on which are the considerations in favor of change kicks the beam.

In view, however, of the growth of the country, the vastly increased complexity of interests involved, the intricacy and the cost of the election processes to which recourse is necessarily had, I would substitute for the present brief tenure of the presidential office--a tenure well enough perhaps in the comparatively simple days which preceded our Civil War--a tenure sufficiently long to enable the occupant of the presidential chair to have a policy and to accomplish at least something towards its adoption. As the case stands to-day, a President for the first time elected has during his term of four years, one year, and one year only, in which really to apply himself to the accomplishment of results. The first year of his term is necessarily devoted to the work of acquiring a familiarity with the machinery of the government, and the shaping of a policy. The second year may be devoted to a more or less strenuous effort at the adoption of the policy thus formulated. As experience shows, the action of the third and fourth years is gravely affected--if not altogether perverted from the work in hand--by what are known as the political exigencies incident to a succession. Manifestly, this calls for correction. The remedy, however, to my mind, is obvious and suggests itself. As the presidency is the one office under our Constitution national in character, and in no way locally representative, I would extend the term to seven years, and render the occupant of the office thereafter ineligible for reelection. Seven years is, I am aware, under our political system, an unusual term; and here my ears will, I know, be assailed by the great "mandate" cackle. The count of noses being complete, the mind of the composite Democrat is held to be made up. It only remains to formulate the consequent decree; and, with least possible delay, put it in way of practical enforcement. Again, I, as a publicist, demur. It is the old issue, that between instant action and action on second thought, presented once more. Briefly, the experience of sixty years strongly inclines me to a preference of matured and considerate action over that immediate action which notoriously is in nine cases out of ten as ill-advised as it is precipitate. Only in the field of politics is the expediency of the latter assumed as of course; yet, as in science and literature and art so in politics, final, because satisfactory, results are at best but slowly thrashed out. As respects wisdom, the modern statute book does not loom, monumental. Its contemplation would indeed perhaps even lead to a surmise that reasonable delay in formulating his "mandate" might, in the case of the composite Democrat as in that of the individual Autocrat, prove a not altogether unmixed, and so in the end an intolerable, evil.

Thus while a change of the Executive and Legislative branches of the government might not be always simultaneously effected, by selecting seven years as the presidential term the election would be brought about, as frequently as might be, by itself, uncomplicated by local issues connected with the fortunes or political fate of individual candidates for office, whether State, Congressional, or Senatorial; and during the seven years of tenure, four, at least, it might reasonably be anticipated, would be devoted to the promotion of a definite policy, in place of one year in a term of four, as now. If also ineligible for reelection, there is at least a fair presumption that the occupant of the position might from start to finish apply himself to its duties and obligations, without being distracted therefrom by ulterior personal ends as constantly as humanly held in view.

Having thus disposed of the Judiciary and the Executive, we come to the Legislative. And here I submit is the weak point in our American system,--manifestly the weak point, and to those who, like myself, have had occasion to know, undeniably so. I am here as a publicist; not as a writer of memoirs: so, on this head, I do not now propose to dilate or bear witness. I will only briefly say that having at one period, and for more than the lifetime of a generation, been in charge of large corporate and financial interests, I have had much occasion to deal with legislative bodies, National, State and Municipal. That page of my experiences is the one I care least to recall, and would most gladly forget. I am not going to specify, or give names of either localities or persons; but, knowing what I know, it is useless to approach me on this topic with the usual good-natured and optimistic, if somewhat unctuous and conventional, commonplaces on general uprightness and the tendency to improved conditions and a higher standard. I know better! I have seen legislators bought like bullocks--they selling themselves. I have watched them cover their tracks with a cunning more than vulpine. I have myself been black-mailed and sandbagged, while whole legislative bodies watched the process, fully cognizant at every step of what was going on. This, I am glad to say, was years ago. The legislative conditions were then bad, scandalously bad; nor have I any reason to believe in a regeneration since. The stream will never rise higher than its source; but it generally indicates the level thereof. In this case, I can only hope that in my experience it failed so to do. Running at a low level, the waters of that stream were deplorably dirty.

That the legislative branch of our government has fallen so markedly in public estimation is not, I think, open to denial. To my mind, under the conditions I have referred to, such could not fail to be the case. It has, consequently, lost public confidence. Hence this popular demand for immediate legislation by the People,--this twentieth-century appeal to the Agora and Forum methods which antedate the era of Christ. It is true the world outgrew them two thousand years ago, and they were discarded; but, living in a progressive and not a reactionary period, all that, we are assured, is changed! The heart is no longer on the right-hand side of the body. To secure desired results it is only necessary to start quite fresh, as a mere preliminary discarding all lessons of experience.

Such reasoning does not commend itself to my judgment. On the contrary, the failure of the American legislative to command an increasing public confidence, while both natural and obvious, is, if my observation guides me to conclusions in any degree correct, traceable to two reasons. So far as government is concerned, the law-making branch is assumed to be made up of the wisest and the most expert. Meanwhile, it is as a matter of fact chosen by the process I have not over-respectfully referred to as the counting of noses; and, moreover, by an unwritten law more binding than any in the Statute Book, that counting of noses is with us localized. In other words, when it comes to the choice of our law-makers, reducing provincialism to a system we make the local numerical majority supreme, and any one is considered competent to legislate. He can do that, even if by common knowledge he is incompetent or untrustworthy in every other capacity. Localization thus becomes the stronghold of mediocrity, the sure avenue to office of the second-and third-rate man,--he who wishes always to enjoy his share of a little brief authority, to have, he also, a taste of public life. In this respect our American system is, I submit, manifestly and incomparably inferior to the system of parliamentary election existing in Great Britain, itself open to grave criticism. In Great Britain the public man seeks the constituency wherever he can find it; or the constituency seeks its representative wherever it recognizes him. The present Prime Minister of Great Britain, for instance, represents a small Scotch constituency in which he never resided, but by which he was elected more than twenty years ago, and through which he has since consecutively remained in public life. On the other hand, look at the waste and extravagance of the system now and traditionally in use with us. To get into public life a man must not only be in sympathy with the majority of the citizens of the locality in which he lives, but he must continue to be in sympathy with that majority; or, at any election, like Mr. Cannon in the election just held, where for any passing cause a majority of his neighbors in the locality in which he lives may fail to support him, he must go into retirement. I cannot here enlarge on this topic, vital as I see it; I have neither space nor time, and must, therefore, needs content myself with the "hints" of Paracelsus. I will merely say that as an outcome this localized majority system practically disfranchises the more intelligent and the more disinterested, the more individual and independent of every constituency. It reduces their influence, and negatives their action. It operates in like fashion everywhere. My field of observation has been at home, here in America; but it has been the same in France. For instance, while preparing this address I came across the following in that most respectable sheet, the London _Athenaum_. A very competent Frenchman was there criticising a recent book entitled "Idealism in France." Reference was by him made to what, in France, is known as the "_scrutin d'arrondissement,"_ or, in other words, the district representative system. The critic declares that this system has there "created a party machine which has brought the country under the sway of a sort of Radical-Socialist Tammany, and bound together the voter and the deputy by a tie of mutual corruption, the candidate promising Government favors to the elector in return for his vote, and the elector supporting the candidate who promises most. Hence a policy in which ideas and ideals are forgotten for personal and local interests, as each candidate strives to outbid his rivals in the bribes that he offers to his constituents. Hence, finally, a general lowering in the tone of French home politics, every question being made subservient by the deputies to that of their reelection."

I would respectfully inquire if the above does not apply word for word to the condition of affairs with which we are familiar in America.

But let me here again cite a concrete case, still fresh in memory; nothing in abstract discussion tells so much. Take the late Carl Schurz. If there was one man in our public life since 1865 who showed a genius for the parliamentary career, and who in six short years in the United States Senate--a single term--displayed there constructive legislating qualities of the highest order, it was Carl Schurz. Yet at the end of that single senatorial term, for local and temporary reasons he failed to obtain the support of a majority, or the support of anything approaching a majority, of those composing the constituency upon which he depended. Consequently he was retired from that parliamentary position necessary for the accomplishment, through him, of best public results. Yet at that very time there was no man in the United States who commanded so large and so personal a constituency as Carl Schurz; for he represented the entire Germanic element in the United States. Distributed as that element was, however, with its vote localized under our law, unwritten as well as statutory, there was no possibility of any constituency so concentrating itself that Carl Schurz could be kept in the position where he could continue to render services of the greatest possible value to the country. I, therefore, confidently here submit a doubt whether human ingenuity could devise any system calculated to lead to a greater waste of parliamentary ability, or more effectually keep from the front and position of influence that legislative superiority which was the arm of Aristotle to secure. "Cant-patriotism," as your Francis Lieber termed it; and, on this score, he waxed eloquent. "Do we not live in a world of cant," he wrote from Columbia here to a friend at the North seventy-five years ago, "that cant-patriotism which plumes itself in selecting men from within the State confines only. The truer a nation is, the more essentially it is elevated, the more it disregards petty considerations, and takes the true and the good from whatever quarter it may come. Look at history and you find the proof. Look around you, where you are, and you find it now." And, were Lieber living to-day, he would find a striking exemplification of the consequences of a total and systematic disregard of this elementary proposition in studying the United States Senate from and through its reporters' gallery. The decline in the standards of that body, whether of aspect, intelligence, education or character, under the operation of the local primary has been not less pronounced than startling. The outcome and ripe result of "cant-patriotism," it affords to the curious observer an impressive object-lesson,--provincialism reduced to a political system; what a witty and incisive French writer has recently termed the "Cult of Incompetence." Speaking of conditions prevailing not here but in France, this observer says:--"Democracy in its modern form chooses its' delegates in its own image.... What ought the character of the legislator to be? The very opposite, it seems to me, of the democratic legislator, for he ought to be well-informed and entirely devoid of prejudice." Taken as a whole, and a few striking individual exceptions apart, are those composing the Senate of the United States conspicuous in these respects? They certainly do not so impress the casual observer. That, as a body, they increasingly fail to command confidence and attention is matter of common remark. Nor is the reason far to seek. It would be the same as respects literature, science and art, were their representatives chosen and results reached through a count of noses localized, with selection severely confined to home talent.

I am well aware of the criticism which will at once be passed on what I now advance. Local representation through choice by numerical majorities within given confines, geographically and mathematically fixed, is a system so rooted and intrenched in the convictions and traditions of the American community that even to question its wisdom evinces a lack of political common-sense. It in fact resembles nothing so much as the attempt to whistle down a strongly prevailing October wind from the West. The attempt so to do is not practical politics! In reply, however, I would suggest that such a criticism is wholly irrelevant. The publicist has nothing to do with practical politics. It is as if it were objected to a physician who prescribed sanitation against epidemics that the community in question was by custom and tradition wedded to filth and surface-drainage, and could not possibly be induced to abandon them in favor of any new-fangled theories of soap-and-water cleanliness. So why waste time in prescribing such? Better be common-sensed and practical, taking things as they are. In the case suggested, and confronted with such criticism, the medical adviser simply shrugs his shoulders, and is silent; the alternative he knows is inescapable. After a sufficiency of sound scourgings the objecting community will probably know better, and may listen to reason; in a way, conforming thereto. So, also, the body politic. If Ephraim is indeed thus joined to idols, the publicist simply shrugs his shoulders, and passes on; possibly, after Ephraim has been sufficiently scourged, he may in that indefinite future popularly known as "one of these days" be more clear sighted and wiser.