acts according to his vocation. Both are needed and useful if employed at the right time and in the right way. Both are, however, useless, yea mischievous, if placed in power at the wrong time. The men of iron always follow remiss statesmen ; the former are the ultima ratio, the latter the prima ratio; just as generals have to cut the Gordian knots of entangling diplomates. Society, when it fails to have good instructors, or, having them, will not learn from them, falls quickly into conditions when all its normal authorities seem useless, when indeed they are in the way, and when the sword leaps forth to solve neglected problems. But it is also true that the continuance of force, and of men that look to it as the remedy in all cases, after they have performed the little they can do, soon necessitates the return to normal conditions and the recall of the men who teach, persuade, and build up. Occasionally both faculties are united in the same personages, as for instance in Cyrus, Charlemagne, Alfred, and Frederick the Great and Washington. And they evince their double capacities by voluntarily dropping the sword and taking up the work of peace. Such men mankind stare at as miracles, and if one of them is prevented, either by assassination or ostracism, from performing his functions, the masses mourn for them for ever, for they know that they were deprived of their best men. Cæsar's assassination was an instance hereof.

Let us apply this to the case in hand. The normal-the only really good-solution comes through statesmen with whom a well-instructed popular mind co-operates; the abnormal (mostly incomplete) solution comes through forces that need "blind obedience," as Moltke said so honestly and pointedly.

Where are we now in the United States as to commonwealthism? Is our status to Communism and Socialism where the slavery question was in 1860? Or is there still time to solve the problem in normal ways? We feel certain that the latter is still the case. Let us inaugurate then at once all those processes that will bring out the truth and enable us to dispense (in the domestic government of our society) with the hardfeatured men whose ways are necessarily bloody. But do not let us forget, that it is our neglect that brings them into public life. If we do our duty they will not be needed. Obey the laws of health and you need no doctors.

What then, we may be asked, constitutes the main objection to so-called "Communism and Socialism"? Is it that they would have an annual per capita division of property, or that they would introduce a community of wives, or that they propose unheard-of ways and means in commonwealthism? No! and

no again must be the answer to the last three questions, for no portion of our society is disposed to share wealth indiscriminately; none is willing to have wives in common, and few are less inclined to invade other person's connubial rights, prone to try novelties, than the working-men who make up the body of our "communists and socialists." They want, as they say, a just distribution of wealth, a superior family life, and ask no more than, that the organisms that have proved serviceable in the post-office, the "Regie" in France and Austria, in the Catholic Church, in public works, in military organizations, &c., shall be extended to all production and its apportionments. The mode of measurement for services, that is in salaries, in fees, and in all public ascertainments of the values of work and materials when applied to public uses, is to be the general rule. In short, it is not an exuberance of suggestiveness, but rather a poverty of original thinking and acting that may be charged upon them; and this brings us to the most serious objection to the cause, to wit that it renders future developments, in accordance with coming radical changes in production as well as social organization, almost, if not entirely impossible. This may be deemed a rather stretched accusation against men who glory in being the men of the future. But the reader need only reflect on the reasons why Plato's Republic, Dante's Imperialism, More's Utopia, Harrington's Oceana, down to Fourier's Phylansteries, fell dead-born? It was not because these "masterpieces" were not up to the most advanced conceptions that could be drawn from history and deep reflection on the conditions of their own time; it was because they had not, could not have, before them the lessons of unwritten history, those of the social embryos in the womb of time; the still unborn "necessary relations of persons and things." In the words of a modern author, Putlitz, "they have not yet been weighed in the golden scale of time." And, with a view to illustrate this point, we venture to mention that within our own memory the best organized shops, or the most perfect commercial establishments, or wisest public organisms had to undergo thorough changes. And this proves how inadequate all plans must be which take into account only existing relations, even if those who do it are the most advanced thinkers. Individual capacities change continually. The fleets of Cunard, Inman, &c., as well as Vanderbilt's railroads, the Herald newspaper, or Stewart's stores were as inconceivable fifty years ago, as those very individualities and their corporations will be, which will oppress our posterity though they seemed to elevate us.

And this explains to us a thing that has puzzled some very

fair minds, and even led them to harsh accusations, to wit: the want of full avowals and definite plans and measures in the programme of Marx, and the bigger minds among the communists and socialists. Is their hesitancy not evidence of their superiority over others, that are acting or have had to act their part? The poet says: "Quickly ready are small minds with their plans." Whether Marx and his consorts withhold the details of their propositions from a conscious sense of their inability to produce that now, which is to be the ultimate outcome when common sense has acted, interacted, and reacted on their "Communism and Socialism," we do not pretend to know. It is enough for us to understand that it would be wrong and foolish in them to present them—not but what there might be individuals in our day, as there were of old, who could frame institutions for ages ahead. But surely they would have to be as much greater than their contemporaries as the modern world is faster, wider, and wiser than that of antiquity. Still, as the laws of human, particularly social life, become better known, and forecast grows more and more into a practical faculty, the time may, nay, will come, when there will be not only individuals that can draw good plans for the future, but there will be with them also a society capable to criticize them fairly, and to correct them where necessary. That will be when there will be both more private as well as more general public wealth.

And, in conclusion, we must find that both American and European "Communism and Socialism" have a tendency to make the State everything and individuality next to nothing. And we marvel how men who now complain, with some justice, of the social and political ostracism of the ruling elements of society as now organized, can advocate a status where all will be collective national wealth. Communistic bodies are always less tolerant of superior or inferior individualities than single persons. And here it is proposed to have everything done in common, and nearly nothing in private. All persons will then keep asking, what Webster once asked when all the dominant parties were closed to him, "Where am I to go?" From the Russian villages, where they own all the land in common, those escape and turn wanderers who find their homes too narrow for their individuality; but where will men go after Communism and Socialism shall be international? To us it seems that all common power that does not also enfranchise and elevate individual self-capacity, is dangerous to society. And this danger we apprehend from modern "Communism and Socialism." In it individualism will be very hard to maintain! And this is the reason why we regard a 66 com

monwealthism," in which there is no private wealth, fully as objectionable as an individual-wealthism in which there is no common wealth. It is the common interest of all to have both in due measure and degree. That was the way in the past; it will and should be so in the future.

America has had more good as well as bad commonwealthism than Europe, and not less! But the good has been more marred by deficient public administration in the New World than in the Old. Perceiving the latter fact was Washington's great sorrow, through the Revolution, and he carried it to his grave. It exists yet! And why? Because we are still an emigrating people, with many public wants, which we are in haste to have fulfilled. We gather experience fast, as history, but slowly, very slowly, as guides to our conduct.

Good institutions are with us still easily abolished, whilst good ones are very difficult to establish. Our public desires do yet outstrip our public virtues. And hasty action and hasty standstills, with plenty of regrets for our leisure, are still our characteristics. And notwithstanding all this, it is true, and it must be stated, that this people has had great moments, one of which was, when the nation, hardly born, declared itself subject to the Law of nations; when it established the Constitution of 1787, and when, two-thirds of a century afterward, New York set in motion its constitutional reforms. We are on the eve of another great step, civil service reform. Would that we could say that it will be untainted by partisan misconduct. May good commonwealthism multiply, and the time soon come when the false partisan brood shall have to hide their heads and slink away before the gaze of a wise and virtuous public mind.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE SITUATION, 1880.

'Party is the madness of the many for the benefit of the few.”—Pope.

THE first inquiries, as to the situation, in a book on American politics, are, of course: Who rules in the United States? What kind of government have they? These questions seem idle; for do not here the people rule? Is not the government democratic? So would certainly every one answer on the spur of the moment; but, on reflection, how then? The reply will perhaps be more definite, and we shall be told, that the United States are a federal democracy, in which the general government is supreme in all the functions granted to it, or clearly implied by the Constitution. Well, but how about the remainder? Then the answer would depend very much on the person that might have to answer it; for no two men agree on this point, not even if they are members of the same party.

There was a time when you could hardly go amiss in making the inquiry of any citizen, for they would promptly either affirm or deny the respective sovereignty in accordance with the respective party tenets. But now it is party blindness alone, that will not let men see, the blindness in American politics.

This result of these inquiries does not therefore satisfy us. Suppose, then, we reverse our queries and ask: Who does not govern in this country? What kind of rule does not exist? And now we find readily, that we have no hereditary king, no political aristocracy, no privileged oligarchy, no state church, no cut-and-dried democracy, no republic in the classic sense, no theocracy, no states-union, no union-state. But if we may accept all these negatives, we will still want to know: What positive institutions has this land and its people? And to this question, as it implies that we have no positive politics, we have a right to answer by asking: Is a thing no government, because none of the usual names apply to it? Are not our institutions, standing as we are before a long history of