Introductory Note
James Russell Lowell, poet, essayist, diplomatist, and scholar, was born at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 22, 1819, the son of a Unitarian minister. Educated
at Harvard College, he tried the law, but soon gave it up for literature. His poem on
"The Present Crisis," written in 1844, was his first really notable production,
and one that made a deep impression on the public mind. In the twenty years of troubled
politics that followed, one finds it constantly quoted. The year 1848 saw four volumes
from Lowell's pen - a book of "Poems," the "Fable for Critics,"
"The Biglow Papers," and the "Vision of Sir Launfal." The second of
these exhibited the author as wit and critic, the third as political reformer, the fourth
as poet and mystic; and these various sides of his personality continue to appear with
varying prominence throughout his career.
On the retirement of Longfellow from the chair of belles-lettres at Harvard in
1854, Lowell was elected to succeed him, and by way of preparation spent the next two
years in Europe studying modern languages and literatures. In 1857 he became the first
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and after 1864 he collaborated with Charles Eliot Norton
in the editorship of the North American Review. Throughout the period of the war Lowell
wrote much both in prose and verse on behalf of the Union; his work on the North American
was largely literary criticism.
In 1877 Lowell went to Spain as American Minister, and in 1880 to London, where for
five years he represented the United States with great distinction, and did much to
improve the relations of the two countries. Six years after his return, on August 12,
1891, he died in Elmwood, the house in Cambridge where he was born.
Lowell's literary gifts were so various that it is difficult to say on which of
them his final reputation will rest. But it is certain that he will long be esteemed for
the grace, vivacity, and eloquence of the prose in which he placed before the world his
views on such great American principles and personalities as are dealt with in the
following essay on "Democracy".
On Democracy
Inaugural Address on Assuming the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland
Institute, Birmingham, England, 6 October, 1884
He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world
unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance - wheel which we call a sense of
humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of
bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very
condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage,
and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the
elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he
has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves
to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding
mankind by the button while he is expounding it. And in a world of daily - nay, almost
hourly - journalism, where every clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom
anybody else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point - blank and at
the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or on what sometimes
seems to him very much the same thing, on every inconceivable display of human want of
thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the
permitted staple of public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new tune
out of the one - stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming so long. In this
desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that, if all the words of the dictionary
were tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations
that made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them
some poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But, alas! it is only
the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable
phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said
before, and said over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will be apt to think that
observation has on most points of general applicability said its last word, and he who has
mounted the tower of Plato to took abroad from it will never hope to climb another with so
lofty a vantage of speculation. Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one's
peace, why add to the general confusion of tongues? There is something disheartening, too,
in being expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind were
an hour - glass, that need only be shaken and set on one end or the other, as the case may
be, to run its allotted sixty minutes with decorous exactitude. I recollect being once
told by the late eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first
lecture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his ability to occupy
the prescribed three quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, and glancing
anxiously from time to time at the watch that lay before him on the desk. "When I had
spoken a half hour," he said, "I had told them everything I knew in the world,
everything! Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly "and I have done
nothing else ever since. "Beneath the humorous exaggeration of the story I seemed to
see the face of a very serious and improving moral. And yet if one were to say only what
he had to say and then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of their honest measure.
Let us take courage by the example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines
increases as the area of their land in vineyards is diminished.
To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the undelayable year has rolled
round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this place, where so many wiser
men have spoken before me. Precluded, in my quality of national guest, by motives of taste
and discretion, from dealing with any question of immediate and domestic concern, it
seemed to me wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of comparatively
abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks on a
matter concerning which I had some experimental knowledge, derived from the use of such
eyes and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such report as I had been
able to win from them. The subject which most readily suggested itself was the spirit and
the working of those conceptions of life and polity which are lumped together, whether for
reproach or commendation, under the name of Democracy. By temperament and education of a
conservative turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers saw
with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change (to me a sad one) from
an agricultural to a proletary population. The testimony of Balaam should carry some
conviction. I have grown to manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this system
of government in my native land, have watched its advances, or what some would call its
encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an ear - witness
to the forebodings of wise and good and timid men and have lived to see those forebodings
belied by the course of events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the
reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman say in 1840 that the
doing away with the property qualification for suffrage twenty years before had been the
ruin of the State of Massachusetts; that it had put public credit and private estate alike
at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later paying
the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her sometimes nearly three for one to
keep her faith, and that while suffering an unparalleled drain of men and treasure in
helping to sustain the unity and self - respect of the nation.
If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it certainly has, this
has been mainly because the hands that wielded it were untrained to its use. There the
election of a majority of the trustees of the public money is controlled by the most
ignorant and vicious of a population which has come to us from abroad, wholly unpractised
in self - government and incapable of assimilation by American habits and methods. But the
finances of our towns, where the native tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are
discussed and settled in a public assembly of the people, have been in general honestly
and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a majority of the voters
live by their daily wages, it is not so often the recklessness as the moderation of public
expenditure that surprises an old fashioned observer. "The beggar is in the saddle at
last," cries Proverbial Wisdom. "Why, in the name of all former experience,
doesn't he ride to the Devil?" Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to be a
beggar and became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last thing we need
be anxious about is property. It always has friends or the means of making them. If riches
have wings to fly away from their owner, they have wings also to escape danger.
I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in
the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this because, in
virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody
else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers
which some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to
the same skill in the manufacture of them? But bad weather is not the worst thing that is
laid at our door. A French gentleman, not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how
unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole people, has charged us with the
responsibility of whatever he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his
countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent witness would only go into the box and tell
us what those morals and manners were before our example corrupted them! But I confess
that I find little to interest and less to edify me in these international bandyings of
"You're another."
I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we
are more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the rest. It is that we
are infecting the Old World with what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of
Democracy. It is generally people who are in what are called easy circumstances who can
afford the leisure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and these experience an
immediate alleviation when once they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it by.
There is something consolatory also, something flattering to their sense of personal
dignity, and to that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil from our uneasy
consciousness of being commonplace, in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which no
one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they find it simpler to class under one
comprehensive heading whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their taste, their
interests, or what they suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as
physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross - grained fellows lay their ill -
temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is America
answerable for it? Even if she were, would it account for the phylloxera, and hoof - and -
mouth disease, and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German bands, and the Boers, and
all the other discomforts with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that go
in chariots? Yet I have seen the evil example of Democracy in America cited as the source
and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite as little connected with it by any
sequence of cause and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It has been at work for
centuries, and we are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where
the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he has, the
bubbles and scum thrown up by it are more noticeable on the surface than in those dumb
ages when there was a cover of silence and suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo Navagero,
speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria in 1546, tells us that "in them there are
five sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of these last no
account is made, because they have no voice in the Diet."1
[Footnote 1: Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still another even more
helpless class, the servile farm - laborers. The same witness informs us that of the
extraordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their
estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together. Moreover, the upper
classes were assessed at their own valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the
Peasants, who had no voice, ("Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti," Serie I.,
tomo i., pp. 378, 379, 389.)]
Nor was it among the people that subversive or mistaken doctrines had their rise. A
Father of the Church said that property was theft many centuries before Proudhon was born.
Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops, and of the
theory that the State owed every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the first
organized Democracy? A few centuries ago the chief end of man was to keep his soul alive,
and then the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work was religious, and
produced the Reformation. Even in that, far - sighted persons like the Emperor Charles V.
saw the germ of political and social revolution. Now that the chief end of man seems to
have become the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably alive as possible, the
leaven also has become wholly political and social. But there had also been social
upheavals before the Reformation and contemporaneously with it, especially among men of
Teutonic race. The Reformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing.
Formerly the immense majority of men - our brothers - knew only their sufferings, their
wants, and their desires. They are beginning now to know their opportunity and their
power. All persons who see deeper than their plates are rather inclined to thank God for
it than to bewail it, for the sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which Dives
has no antidote.
There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great and prosperous Democracy on the
other side of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and political theories
of men in the Old World who do not find things to their mind; but, whether for good or
evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the
British oak. Every successive swarm that has gone out from this officina gentium has, when
left to its own instincts - may I not call them hereditary instincts? assumed a more or
less thoroughly democratic form. This would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact,
that the British Constitution, under whatever disguises of prudence or decorum, is
essentially democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with democratic
tendencies, the United States a democracy with conservative instincts. People are
continually saying that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this
means only that a clearer conception of human claims and human duties is beginning to be
prevalent. The discontent with the existing order of things, however, pervaded the
atmosphere wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back
door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America. I say wherever the
conditions were favorable, for it is certain that the germs of disease do not stick or
find a prosperous field for their development and noxious activity unless where the
simplest sanitary precautions have been neglected. "For this effect defective comes
by cause," as Polonius said long ago. It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men
that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then only
that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are
dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence:
"The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion."
Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much heed to their
proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need never have severed
that spinal marrow of orderly and secular tradition through which in a normally
constituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion
thither. It is only when the reasonable and practicable are denied that men demand the
unreasonable and impracticable; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy
the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor. No; the
sentiment which lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am speaking always of a
sentiment, a spirit, and not of a form of government; for this was but the outgrowth of
the other and not its cause. This sentiment is merely an expression of the natural wish of
people to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the management of their won
affairs. What is new is that they are more and more gaining that control, and learning
more and more how to be worthy of it. What we used to call the tendency or drift - what we
are being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things - has for some time been
setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The
only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case,
also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some
people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were
that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it
be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet
comes of what nurses and other experienced persons call growing pains, and need not
seriously alarm us. They are what every generation before us - certainly every generation
since the invention of printing - has gone through with more or less good fortune. To the
door of every generation there comes a knocking, and unless the household, like the Thane
of Cawdor and his wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder.
It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes to come in out of the cold. The
porter always grumbles and is slow to open. "Who's there, in the name of
Beelzebub?" he mutters. Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has
ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it, - have not prophesied with
the alderman that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. The
world, on the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes about
its business as if nothing had happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition of
slavery, trade unions, at all of these excellent people shook their heads despondingly,
and murmured "Ichabod." But the trade unions are now debating instead of
conspiring, and we all read their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are
learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties of practical legislation.
One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the
emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for
centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in
it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and
consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and
hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the
bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion. We drove
them into a corner, but they had their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have it
sooner or later. They made their corner the counter and banking - house of the world, and
thence they rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. Your grandfathers mobbed
Priestley only that you might set up his statue and make Birmingham the headquarters of
English Unitarianism. We hear it said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if
that made matters clearer; but can any one point us to an age that was not? If he could,
he would show us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before
us, is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so that
the train may not come to grief. For we should remember that nothing is more natural for
people whose education has been neglected than to spell evolution with an initial
"r." A great man struggling with the storms of fate has been called a sublime
spectacle; but surely a great man wrestling with these new forces that have come into the
world, mastering them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would be a yet sublimer.
Here is not a danger, and if there were it would be only a better school of manhood, a
nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is
less the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and
consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in
character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of
morals, manners, and conduct - to endanger the rights of property and possession. But I
believe that the real gravamen of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself
generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most inconvenient moment
whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condition to
give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way
discomfited by it.
Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this
would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the
indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with
spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more
likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or
fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual
motion in politics any more than in mechanics. President Lincoln defined democracy to be
"the government of the people by the people for the people." This is a
sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrangement. Theodore Parker said that
"Democracy meant not 'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.'"
And this is the ethical conception of it, necessary as a complement of the other; a
conception which, could it be made actual and practical, would easily solve all the
riddles that the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has
been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular
talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever
breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true gentleman. The characters
may be easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful and profound
parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that "One knocked at the Beloved's
door, and a voice asked from within 'Who is there?' and he answered 'It is I.' Then the
voice said, 'This house will not hold me and thee'; and the door was not opened. Then went
the lover into the desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he returned
and knocked again at the door; and again the voice asked 'Who is there?' and he said 'It
is thyself;' and the door was opened to him." But that is idealism, you will say, and
this is an only too practical world. I grant it; but I am one of those who believe that
the real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be
thought that a democracy was possible only in a small territory, and this is doubtless
true of a democracy strictly defined, for in such all the citizens decide directly upon
every question of public concern in a general assembly. An example still survives in the
tiny Swiss canton of Appenzell. But this immediate intervention of the people in their own
affairs is not of the essence of democracy; it is not necessary, nor indeed, in most
cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. Lincoln's definition would fairly enough
apply have existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme authority reside in the
people, yet they can act only indirectly on the national policy. This generation has seen
a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in all that have ever existed the body
politic has never embraced all the inhabitants included within its territory, the right to
share in the direction of affairs has been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been
further restricted by various limitations, sometimes of property, sometimes of nativity,
and always of age and sex.
The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a
democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of
the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this
has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in
fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of
breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of
government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of
ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the
stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating.
They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence
and stability. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and
many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed. The day of sentiment was
over, and no dithyrambic affirmations or fine - drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would
serve their present turn. This was a practical question, and they addressed themselves to
it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English
principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with
singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of
the people's will, but of their whim. With few exceptions they probably admitted the logic
of the then accepted syllogism, - democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was
framed upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their narrow walls,
where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where
every passion was reverberated from house to house and from man to man with gathering
rumor till every impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular
assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all the more
dangerous because sanctified with the formality of law.2
[Footnote 2: The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this trooping of
emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The effect of Darwinism as a
disintegrator of humanitarianism is also to be reckoned with.]
Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for a widely
scattered population and for States already practised in the discipline of a partial
independence. They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous advantages. The material
they had to work upon was already democratical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered
to their hands by more than a century's schooling in self - government. They had but to
give permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to
their new institutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, they had a
great help and safeguard in their federal organization. The different, sometimes
conflicting, interests and social systems of the several States made existence as a Union
and coalescence into a nation conditional on a constant practice of moderation and
compromise. The very elements of disintegration were the best guides in political
training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the
application of it to a question of fundamental morals that cost us our civil war. We
learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a
temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in
statesmanship.
The Success Of American Democracy - Suffrage
Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the whole, successful? If it had
not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving contagious? This trial
would have been less severe could it have been made with a people homogeneous in race,
language, and traditions, whereas the United States have been called on to absorb and
assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all these respects, and
drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say that the world was not their friend,
nor the world's law. The previous condition too often justified the traditional Irishman,
who, landing in New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a
Government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, "Thin I'm agin
it!" We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the most turbulent of
her people, and have made them over into good citizens, who have added to our wealth, and
who are ready to die in defence of a country and of institutions which they know to be
worth drying for. The exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where
these hordes of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the social
system is yet to seek which has not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On the
other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buying up the worn - out farms of
Massachusetts, and making them productive again by the same virtues of industry and thrift
that once made them profitable to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them.
To have achieved even these prosaic results (if you choose to call them so), and that out
of materials the most discordant, - I might say the most recalcitrant, - argues a certain
beneficent virtue in the system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere
luck.
Carlyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day for everybody.
He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on their bellies. As for the security of
property, it should be tolerably well secured in a country where every other man hopes to
be rich, even though the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands that
add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest the
largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its division?
In point of fact, far - seeing men count the increasing power of wealth and its
combinations as one of the chief dangers with which the institutions of the United States
are threatened in the not distant future. The right of individual property is no doubt the
very corner - stone of civilization as hitherto understood, but I am a little impatient of
being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the
burdens of the State. It bears those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty
pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. Wealth should not
forget this, for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then. Let me not be
misunderstood. I see as clearly as any man possibly can, and rate as highly, the value of
wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the security of refinement, the feeder of all those
arts that ennoble and beautify life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an
ancestral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture which has been of
example and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old
to be capable of secreting.
I should not think of coming before you to defend or to criticise any form of
government. All have their virtues, all their defects, and all have illustrated one period
or another in the history of the race, with signal services to humanity and culture. There
is not one that could stand a cynical cross - examination by an experienced criminal
lawyer, except that of a perfectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the world has
never seen, except in that white - haired king of Browning's who
"Lived long ago In the morning of the world,
When Earth was nearer Heaven than now."
The English race, if they did not invent government by discussion, have at least
carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable
contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of
settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not
rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while
before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning
to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the
editors' rooms of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything debated before the
authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of government
by a majority of voices? To a person who in the last century would have called himself an
Impartial Observer, a numerical preponderance seems, on the whole, as clumsy a way of
arriving at truth as could well be devised, but experience has apparently shown it to be a
convenient arrangement for determining what may be expedient or advisable or practicable
at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would
be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well,
for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image
at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far
better looking than he had imagined.
The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unanswerable. "What," we
exclaim, "shall Tom, Dick, and Harry have as much weight in the scale as I?" Of
course, nothing could be more absurd. And yet universal suffrage has not been the
instrument of greater unwisdom than contrivances of a more select description. Assemblies
could be mentioned composed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity which have
sometimes shown traces of human passion or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene
Highnesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the business of Mankind so well, then, that
there is no use in trying a less costly method? The democratic theory is that those
Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right
to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how
to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic
one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one,
"Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured
that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the
ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.
At any rate this is the dilemma to which the drift of opinion has been for some time
sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns
than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of suffrage is not valued when it is
indiscriminately bestowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I have observed that
when men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. But
is there not danger that it will be valued at more than its worth if denied, and that some
illegitimate way will be sought to make up for the want of it? Men who have a voice in
public affairs are at once affiliated with one or other of the great parties between which
society is divided, merge their individual hopes and opinions in its safer, because more
generalized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics, and acquire, to a certain
degree, the orderly qualities of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to a body
corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be certain, that, under whatever method of
helping things to go wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have the divine right to
govern will be found to govern in the end, and that the highest privilege to which the
majority of mankind can aspire is that of being governed by those wiser than they.
Universal suffrage has in the United States sometimes been made the instrument of
inconsiderate changes, under the notion of reform, and this from a misconception of the
true meaning of popular government. One of these has been the substitution in many of the
States of popular election for official selection in the choice of judges. The same system
applied to military officers was the source of much evil during our civil war, and, I
believe, had to be abandoned. But it has been also true that on all great questions of
national policy a reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought out at the critical
moment to turn the scale in favor of a wiser decision. An appeal to the reason of the
people has never been known to fail in the long run. It is, perhaps, true that, by
effacing the principle of passive obedience, democracy, ill understood, has slackened the
spring of that ductility to discipline which is essential to "the unity and married
calm of States." But I feel assured that experience and necessity will cure this
evil, as they have shown their power to cure others. And under what frame of policy have
evils ever been remedied till they became intolerable, and shook men out of their indolent
indifference through their fears?
We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap the foundations of
personal independence, to weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect due to
eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius. If these things were so, society could
not hold together. Perhaps the best forcing - house of robust individuality would be where
public opinion is inclined to be most overbearing, as he must be of heroic temper who
should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the season in a soft hat. As for authority,
it is one of the symptoms of the time that the religious reverence for it is declining
everywhere, but this is due partly to the fact that statecraft is no longer looked upon as
a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay of superstition, by which I mean the
habit of respecting what we are told to respect rather than what is respectable in itself.
There is more rough and tumble in the American democracy than is altogether agreeable to
people of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and the people take their political duties
lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatural nor unbecoming in a young giant.
Democracies can no more jump away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no
doubt sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. But they do this
because they believe them worthy of it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure
of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ of a nobler religion. But is it
democracies alone that fall into these errors? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a
statue to Hudson, the railway king, and have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the saviour of
society by men who certainly had no democratic associations or leanings, am not ready to
think so. But democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have also seen the wisest
statesman and most pregnant speaker of our generation, a man of humble birth and ungainly
manners, of little culture beyond what his own genius supplied, become more absolute in
power than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for his
honesty, his wisdom, his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly humane
simplicity of his character. And I remember another whom popular respect enveloped as with
a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely genial, and the most independent of
opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere neighbors and friends
proud of him as their ornament and decoration. Institutions which could bear and breed
such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely some energy for good. No, amid all the
fruitless turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be one thing steadfast and of
favorable omen, one thing to make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is the
rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves. The
touchstone of political and social institutions is their ability to supply them with
worthy objects of this sentiment, which is the very tap - root of civilization and
progress. There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it with the elements of growth
and vigor than such an organization of society as will enable men to respect themselves,
and so to justify them in respecting others.
Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than those of an avowedly
democratical Constitution. For I take it that the real essence of democracy was fairly
enough defined by the First Napoleon when he said that the French Revolution meant
"la carriere ouverte aux talents" - a clear pathway for merit of whatever kind.
I should be inclined to paraphrase this by calling democracy that form of society, no
matter what its political classification, in which every man had a chance and knew that he
had it. If a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to climb, from a coalpit to the
highest position for which he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what name is
given to the government under which he lives. The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more
famous tribune of that name, wrote in 1771: "The English are, in my opinion, a
hundred times more agitated and more unfortunate than the very Algerines themselves,
because they do not know and will not know till the destruction of their over - swollen
power, which I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy,
and wish to play the part of all three."
England has not been obliging enough to fulfill the Bailli's prophecy, and perhaps it
was this very carelessness about the name, and concern about the substance of popular
government, this skill in getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all the
motives which influence men, and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a
principal factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten
Constitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands, whereas they
are more willing to let time and circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance
have made. All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public
opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It
is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of
life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this
atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious
levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its
best sense is merely the letting in of light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual
epigrammatic terseness, bids you educate your future rulers. But would this alone be a
sufficient safeguard? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the horizon of its desires
and wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper and
prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in so far as they are legitimate.
What is really ominous of danger to the existing order of things is not democracy (which,
properly understood, is a conservative force), but the Socialism, which may find a fulcrum
in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and fortunes any more than we can equalize the
brains of men - and a very sagacious person has said that "where two men ride of a
horse one must ride behind" - we can yet, perhaps, do something to correct those
methods and influences that lead to enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing
more enormous. It is all very well to pooh - pooh Mr. George and to prove him mistaken in
his political economy. I do not believe that land should be divided because the quantity
of it is limited by nature. Of what may this not be said? A fortiori, we might on the same
principle insist on a division of human wit, for I have observed that the quantity of this
has been even more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an inequitably large
share of it. But he is right in his impelling motive; right, also, I am convinced, in
insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most important part, of political
economy; and in thinking man to be of more concern and more convincing than the longest
columns of figures in the world. For unless you include human nature in your addition,
your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Communism means
barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and community of interests,
sympathy, the giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger
share than hitherto in the wealth they must combine to produce - means, in short, the
practical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and
benign reconstruction. State Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal character
- self-help, forethought, and frugality - which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches
of every vigorous Commonwealth.
Concluding Remarks
I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a
very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that
the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as
natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that
they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that
this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure,
outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will
always hold good that you must
"Be your own palace or the world's your gaol."
But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought, thought must find
a remedy somewhere. There has been no period of time in which wealth has been more
sensible of its duties than now. It builds hospitals, it establishes missions among the
poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the
leisure it renders possible, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows of
their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and palliative merely. It is as if we
should apply plasters to a single pustule of the small - pox with a view of driving out
the disease. The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now
constituted these are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem,
and which it has always believed, to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil elements
it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses. Let us be of
good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which
never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have
contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more
than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn
will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it
is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still
small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser
humanity.
