the short-sighted, spectacles, and the deaf and dumb do finger signs. The nation has really no policy, it lives from hand to mouth; party necessities are so overwhelming in the minds of our public authorities that they steer by them almost exclusively, and when they make mistakes they charge them upon the people, whose will they claim to have obeyed, but whom they had only humored to get them to vote their party ticket.

America will yet have to learn that besides thinking ourselves a great people, they must be in fact one. That we can only do through public organisms that are recognized in our constitution. Without such organs there is no people, either in the States or the Union. American society and an American people exist only so soon and so long as they are organic.

CHAPTER III

THE SOURCES OF AMERICAN POLITICS.

"Culture develops from traditional ideas and sayings, that were the slow growth of forgotten centuries."-Johannes von Müller.

WHEN We survey the political history of the people of the United States, we find many similitudes with, but more variations from ancient theories and practices; and yet in the institutions of antiquity and their modifications lie the sources of American politics. Our way to them leads us first back to British politics, until we get to Alfred the Great, and with him rises before us the overshadowing figure of that centuryCharlemagne. And there we halt; but by no means because there are not examples for our institutions further back-for instance, the Amphictyonic Council of the twelve free Grecian cities, the prototype of our Senate; or the Demiurgus of the Achæan League, the original of our President-but because we have in the Carlovingian period a new start from the then effected confluence of previous periods. And the results of this new departure are embodied in the institutions of England and respectively of America, as they are in those of Germany and France. Their present forms are modern, but their fundamental principles are still much the same as of old. They are the elements of nearly all the main parts of our constitutions.

This view of the sources of American politics will be displeasing to those who have imbibed the idea that the United States have original institutions; and they will interpose and contend that at least the separation of church and state was a new step. We beg leave, however, to reply, that while we may have severed the union of church and state, we have not abolished the duality of the sources of law for regulating human conduct, which was consummated A.D. 800. And that duality is the very thing which Charlemagne, and after him Alfred I., introduced and established, and we have continued it much more than we suppose. When America shall determine that there shall be but one source of law, to wit, the regular political authorities of the country, then will our posterity find

out how innumerable are still the relations which are left to ecclesiastical control. Then it will appear most clear that the two powers, that went by the name sacerdotium (our church) and imperium (our state), though they are under less close relations, nevertheless exist, and that the state obeys much more the voice of the churches than is generally believed. We shall discuss this matter in a special chapter, but permit ourselves here to refer the reader who wishes to understand this question to an article in the " British Quarterly Review," October 1876, p. 198. We have freed the state from church rule, but have much more freed the church from state rule; and it will cost America a civil revolution to establish the supremacy of civil government over all the relations in society, or at least all public bodies and their relations to the people at large.

We say, then, that the subjection of society to codes and creeds, that were evolved as social and political rules of action in other lands and times, was the thing agreed to by Charlemagne A.D. 800, and followed by Alfred I. afterwards. Alfred learned it from his stepmother, a French princess, and it led to a social and political framework for government, which, though altered, remains with us in its main features. The various religious and political conflicts, including those of the Reformation, and embracing names like Cranmer, Cromwell, and Wesley, were disputes of factions that desired a change in, but not the abrogation of ecclesiastical rule. They desired the substitution of their religious views and authority over the state, but never contemplated the repeal of the duality in the source of law. The Protestantism of the United States is even now rather a negation of the right to rule in the Catholic Church, than of their own. The manifold agitations as to the Sabbath Temperance, "God in the Constitution," the "Bible in the Schools," are but attempts to enforce in our society laws which it did not evolve, and which are not the product of its own collective public will. And it all means that we shall admit that antecedent to our constitutions and to all constitutional rights of person and property, there was a sacerdotium, or a ministerium verbum divini, that is the source of all law. We have this in the Constitution of Ohio, in the words, "Grateful to Almighty God for our freedom." It means the same as the Dei gratiâ of the kings of Europe.

The insular situation of Great Britain, its distance from Rome, and its four times renewed hatreds of foreign subjugations, have kept alive the zest for home independence more securely there, than was possible in France or Germany or Spain; but it allowed also the preservation of many home prejudices. The worst of the latter has been the English habit of

ascribing, directly in the face of truth, all that is good in that country to its own innate superiority, and all that is bad to foreign introduction. It has been the bow-string by which the English people have ever been led by the nose.1 And they have carried it with them wherever they went, particularly to their most favorite field, the North American colonies. That it sticks in native Americanism we need not point out, nor is it necessary to reiterate that it is a sentiment which we respect for its healthy undertone, but despise for its unhealthy excrescences and extravagances. We must state, however, that we know of no people entirely free from them. It is at this time specially reprehensible in every people; because all nations are moving amidst most numerous and most positive proofs that in the mutual international exchange of knowledge and of advances in mechanics and means of intercommunication has lain and lies the main progress of all. A foreigner that moves in British society will find the prejudice still all-pervading, but much subdued. It has been so fed by adventitious circumstances in America, that it obtrudes its brazen front on all occasions, especially through politicians that wish to curry to public favor.

We are aware that it goes against the grain of Anglicans to acknowledge the influence which Rome and France formerly had on England; but it would be just as foolish in us to deny the effect Great Britain has and does exercise on us. Why not confess that centre of power and intelligence varies in time as to localities, and that at one period it was in Athens, then Rome, at another time in Florence, Paris, London, not to forget Berlin and Vienna. The Anglo-Saxon princes, Cadwell, Conrad, Offar, who pilgrimed to Pope Gregory I. and Roma, went there to learn what they could not learn at home; and both the predecessors as well as the successors of Alfred, and he himself, were benefited by visiting their princely relations on the continent. There they saw schools and learned societies under men like Alcuin of England (who had to emigrate to be appreciated), Peter of Pisa, and Warnefried the Lombard, which pleased them, and they introduced them in their own countries. Alfred took Erigena from Paris back to England and to Oxford. Our own common school system rests on Carlovingian ideas. Charlemagne was also an expert organizer of political institutions. His local "Diets" are the model bodies of our state legislatures, his missi dominici are our various kinds of commissions. The diets were in lieu of the ancient C ic annual meetings of

1 With that illusion in their head, Er Charta: "Nullemus mutare leges And