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public authorities, necessary eclectic? So they are; but still comes the further inquiry: Do you mean to claim, that you have the best down in positive law? And if you answer, Ay! then we ask still more searchingly: Are you carrying out your eclecticism in your political practice? Sharp critics will answer for you, and deny all your premises and assert: You have not even a nondescript government.

We might ourselves adopt this conclusion, if our five senses. did not contradict it; for have we not elections, executives, administrations, a Congress, legislatures, judiciaries, armies, penitentiaries, jails, taxes, public improvements, and the various municipalities, and, to put the seal on it, public debts with all? Do not our stump-speakers and our public press point out to us a bit of incipient monarchy here, and of aristocracy or plutocracy there? Are we not warned of the beginnings of hierarchies and of strongly-developed centralizations in every fibre of our institutions? Are we not pointed to tyrannic designs in the various public, semi-public, and half or wholly secret corporations, such as banks, railroads, orders, and associations? We have evidently, then, not only much government, but what's more, much cry for reform! Are we, then, you ask, not justified in saying as we did: Our governments are eclectic. Do they not, for that reason, fit into the old nomenclature? Can we not honestly say, that our legitimacy consists in being under processes of improving on all the old orthodox rulings; and that freedom is our all-absorbing object? Improving?! Freedom?! Words easily spoken, but have they a definite meaning? Is not the crucial question still to be asked and to be answered: Do our public organisms counteract the ever-impending tendency of social masteries fixing themselves into political potentialities? For only where that is done, exist governments that are governments in the true sense, to wit: that of being the perennial fountains of liberty, social harmonizations, and peace, with prosperity and lawful order.

It may now be said: We do attend to all this in the right way; for we leave to all interests their freedom to contest each other's attempts at undue advantages. That there is a good deal of private and public vigilance on the subject, is undeniable. But its effects in good laws and correct and efficient public administration are not so clear. The fact, that public opinion, the preparatory organ of politics, is here continually spasmodic and vaporous; and that it upsets public authority, as often as it inaugurates it, would seem to indicate, that the public mind is undecided as to the effectuality of its vigilance. Are we not then justified? in saying: the present status of the

universally claimed regulator of American politics - public opinion is one of dissatisfaction with itself? And if that is admitted, as it must be, then we may venture a step further, and say, that the reason of this dissatisfaction is the awakening consciousness of the American people, that it lacks the initials as well as the essence of all good governmental processes for ripening the public will. Each voter mistakes his opinion for public opinion, and tries to pass it for genuine authority. Newspapers, stump-speakers, reporters of real or fictitious interviews, are ever busy in manufacturing it. Each day has its own litter, each new breed being a contradiction of the one previously expressed. Town meetings, conventions, and congresses are used to catch the buzzing butterfly of American politics; but as each of those attending them goes home, they know, that the real thing is at last not down on paper, and that our politics are ever but a new round of delusions. Obviously, then, a government governed by public opinion, or a public opinion manufactured by government, are synonyms to no government at all. It means incessant disputations; it makes haphazard action the rule; and authoritative public policy the exception.

The question arises now very naturally: Have we not then, perhaps semi-consciously, arrived at that beau-ideal of philosophers, a self-governing society, that knows and does the right by a sort of rightful spontaneity; so that it may treat political institutions and functionaries as so many supernumeraries? It would seem as if we might affirm this proposition; for have we not religion without a church, politics without statesmen, public peace without a police? Have we not chief magistrates that have not and dare not have a personal policy? That we have such conditions, as the fancies of certain brains, is true, for our press is full of them; but, when they are uttered, wise men smile at each other, for they know them to be supposititious, not real. Our actual public life is still but a protracted quarrel about the distribution of power and its emoluments, we have incessant partisan struggles; but are at sea without compass or rudder as to our laws, our morals and our manners, and have not, for that reason, that "conjunction of individual wills," that forms, as Montesquieu says, " the State." Our Constitutions, statutes, adjudications, and ordinances have nominal, but no real authority; and the liberty we most prize, is the right to have unhindered and unregulated partisan as well as social strife. Science may state its truths, religion may plead for morals, politics may suggest policies, but it is all subject to "the next election," in which the balderdash, uttered during the preparatory campaign, is to be formed into a public will.

Grant it! we hear some one say, "that we have merely a party government;" but is it not an improvement on its British model? Softly, dear reader! We have more partisanism, but do you call that an improvement? Is it not a less "regular" government and therefore less good? The English parties have recognized leaders; and we had such under Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, and Clay. But has either the present republican or democratic party an acknowledged leader? And as it has none: can it be called a government? Nay more, have we any well-understood processes by which we arrive at comprehensions of the relation of causes to men and men to causes? Are we not helpless before every great public question? Everybody knows that we are. And the "why?" is near at hand. It is because wisdom, virtue, and intelligence are either directly overborne by the ill-informed, immoral, and brutal forces that propel our society and its politics; or they are compromised by actions, that are as much a defeat as a victory for that which is right. The spoils of office furnish the motives, but they are fully as much a disturbing as a cohesive element in our parties. And the advantage is ever on the side of the lower characters. The idea is, that they are a check on each other, but the fact is, that they coalesce often in the only object they have-the division of the spoils. When in Rome the triumvirates were formed, it was the coalition of the three greatest citizens of the Republic, but our combinations are the secret intrigues and agreements between the meaner politicians of both parties. We are as to our political condition under a similar hallucination, as mankind is as to its place on earth. They think themselves walking about on the top of our globe, when they are really groping about on the bottom of an air-sea. So we think we are on the summit of politics, when we are merely on the ground-floor of nasty partisanisms.

The Turks have a proverb: "Round a broken-down carriage stand many counsellors." It fits our case; for we are standing before a broken-down, or at least a breaking-down government. But we must not mistake the wreck for a failure of the particular kind of government down in our Constitutions. On the contrary, the break-down must be charged to the several abandonments of the true synthetic rule for America, that of selecting the best out of historic governments. They abandoned it without putting in its stead anything that answered that great necessity of every human society. Our processes are all decompositions; none, or very few, and they only under stress of circumstances, are synthetic. We were all striving for power over others (through wealth), and neglected the much greater, more lasting, and

purely beneficial power; that which proves its right, to be an example and a rule for others, by self-control; and hence we have not solved a single political or social question. Our elections have from the same cause filled the public service with men, whom the voters themselves wanted or want to be removed as quickly as they were chosen. And in this way the public wealth, that should have been a source of accomplishing those public wants, which are too large for individuals, has, ninetenths of it, become a merely chance-distributary process, by which the better citizens are robbed by taxation for the benefit of bad partisans. Let those who deny this statement, tell us of a single act, or fact, since 1824, which came because the people willed it! Even Jackson's administration, which was the work of popular impulse more than any since, was on every question different from the previous public opinion. And not a single presidential or other election since was the product of popular will. And the election, pending as we write, is least of all due to any popular forecast. There are so-called "booms upon booms; but they are really nothing but the dealings out of cards stocked by jugglers in the press, which have but one object, viz: to substitute bold guesses for prophecy.

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And now mark the great fact in American politics, that the people of the United States have never themselves felt safe under their institutions. They always had an instinctive dread of the quicksands on which they were hurrying along; but their steady rise in wealth and population always again quieted their fears. They would say to themselves: Can our government be bad and we prosper? Had they but looked at the main sources of their wealth, and at the human beings who aided them so materially in their productions, and they would have seen, that most of the first were due to natural resources, existing long before an immigrant from Europe set his foot on these shores; and that the second was far more caused by imported and immigrated labor than their own industry. They would not admit this, hence they failed to see that America could be misgoverned for some time without visible injury. And as their statisticians catered to these illusions by tables that were mere additions of numbers, like their ballot-box government itself, each census was but an intensification of the previous selfoverestimation. And thus the nation went on killing Indians under the plea of extending civilization; they wasted wealth and population in various ways, and yet grew more populous and wealthy. It could impoverish its soil and still augment their products, it could misgovern itself, all with impunity, because it had primitive soils to migrate to, and confluent immigration

to act as second advent agriculturists, both acting like the fabled stream at Lethe, in covering their bad economy and allowing it to be forgotten.

Under these hallucinations the governments have been and are used for public frolic, rather than as a matter of real concern. The public eye was bandaged by popular infallibility, and it became a sort of game of blindman's-buff, in which all might join through the press and on the stump, and call the game Reform. The end is a tragi-comic performance, consisting of tickets being cast into ballot-boxes, which when counted were called: The verdict of the people. This verum dictum is, however, never accepted as true, for it can't satisfy us. It is, on the contrary, persistently tried to be reversed, and a few hundred who unite, in one, may soon after change and give a majority the other way. The questions submitted are always imaginary and unreal, and the whole thing ends in a dumb show of hands. It is the old folkgemote in paper form. The participants are all blindfolded and then fire at each other. By this process, those who administer this government are to find its policy, but there being none there, they treat it as the old oracles did the great" Unknown:" they wait events, and sometimes venturing to hit or miss, they anticipate them; but they do it at that fearful peril, causeless popular condemnation. Being smart, they shield themselves ahead. Where they feel perfectly sure of being applauded, they act without asking popular advice, and then claim credit for their acts; but where they are in doubt, they claim to have merely done the will of the people, and if it turns out bad, it was the fault of the latter. The queerest procedures are those measures by which the people are bribed with their own money, because they are made to believe, that appropriating public money to improvements of special local benefit is not a robbery of some other constituency. One-third of the public expenditures are such selfbriberies. We call them: "log rollings."

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That (politically) the ship of state was sinking, there were too many evidences, to deny it; but they were outshone by glaring manifestations of the country's growing population, wealth, and power. The flatterers of the people have the latter ever on their lips, and if wrongs obtrude on popular vision that are too strong for denial, they charge them on comparatively innocent causes, such as violations of the Sabbath, the use of intoxicating liquors, or religious unbelief; to anything, only not the true cause, to wit: an ill-formed public will. And they mix their charges with fulsome flatteries of the people and the country's institutions, and persuade them to try this or that change of

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