CHAPTER XXVI.
REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT
AMONG our Californian passengers, we had many strong party men, and political conversation never flagged throughout the voyage. In every discussion it became more and more clear that the Democratic is the Constitutional, the Republican the Utilitarian party – rightly called “Radical,” from its habit of going to the root of things, to see whether they are good or bad. Such, however, is the misfortune of America in the possession of a written Constitution, such the reverence paid to that document on account of the character of the men who penned it, that even the extremest radicals dare not admit in public that they aim at essential change, and the party loses, in consequence, a portion of the strength that attaches to outspoken honesty.
The President‘s party at their convention – known as the “Wigwam” – which met while I was in Philadelphia, maintained that the war had but restored the “Union as it was,” with State rights unimpaired. The Republicans say that they gave their blood, as they are ready again to shed it, for the “Union as it was not;” for one nation, and not for thirty-six, or forty-five. The Wigwam declared that the Washington government had no constitutional right to deny representation in Congress to any State. The Republicans ask how, if this constitutional provision is to be observed, the government of the country is to be carried on. The Wigwam laid it down as a principle, that Congress has no power to interfere with the right possessed by each State to prescribe qualifications for the elective franchise. The Radicals say that State sovereignty should have vanished when slavery went down, and ask how the South is to be governed consistently with republicanism unless by negro suffrage, and how this is to be maintained except by Federal control over the various States – by abolition, in short, of the old Union, and creation of a new. The more honest among the Republicans admit that for the position which they have taken up, they can find no warrant in the Constitution; that, according to the doctrine which the “continental statesmen” and the authors of “The Federalist” would lay down, were they living, thirty-five of the States, even if they were unanimous, could have no right to tamper with the constitution of the thirty-sixth. The answer to all this can only be that, were the Constitution to be closely followed, the result would be the ruin of the land.
The Republican party have been blamed because their theory and practice alike tend toward a consolidation of power, and a strengthening of the hands of the government at Washington. It is in this that lies their chief claim to support. Local government is an excellent thing; it is the greatest of the inventions of our inventive race, the chief security for continued freedom possessed by a people already free. This local government is consistent with a powerful executive; between the village municipality and Congress, between the cabinet and the district council of selectmen, there can be no conflict: it is State sovereignty, and the pernicious heresy of primary allegiance to the State, that have already proved as costly to the Republic as they are dangerous to her future.
It has been said that America, under the Federal system, unites the freedom of the small State with the power of the great; but though this is true, it is brought about, not through the federation of the States, but through that of the townships and districts. The latter are the true units to which the consistent Republican owes his secondary allegiance. It is, perhaps, only in the tiny New England States that Northern men care much about their commonwealth; a citizen of Pennsylvania or New York never talks of his State, unless to criticise its legislature. After all, where intelligence and education are all but universal, where a spirit of freedom has struck its roots into the national heart of a great race, there can be no danger in centralization, for the power that you strengthen is that of the whole people, and a nation can have nothing to fear from itself.
In watching the measures of the Radicals, we must remember that they have still to guard their country against great dangers. The war did not last long enough to destroy anti-republicanism along with slavery. The social system of the Carolinas was upset; but the political fabric built upon a slavery foundation in such “free” States as New York and Maryland is scarcely shaken.
If we look to the record of the Republican party with a view to making a forecast of its future conduct, we find that at the end of the war the party had before it the choice between military rule and negro rule for the South – between a government carried on through generals and provost-marshals, unknown to the Constitution and to the courts, and destined to prolong for ages the disruption of the Union and disquiet of the nation, and, on the other hand, a rule founded upon the principles of equity and self-government, dear to our race, and supported by local majorities, not by foreign bayonets. Although possessed of the whole military power of the nation, the Republicans refuse to endanger their country, and established a system intended to lead by gradual steps to equal suffrage in the South. The immediate interest of the party, as distinguished from that of the country at large, was the other way. The Republican majority of the presidential elections of 1860 and 1864 had been increased by the success of the Federal arms, borne mainly by the Republicans of New England and the West, in a war conducted to a triumphant issue under the leadership of Republican Congressmen and generals. The apparent magnanimity of the admission of a portion of the rebels, warm-handed, to the poll, would still further have strengthened the Republicans in the Western and Border States; and while the extreme wing would not have dared to desert the party, the moderate men would have been conciliated by the refusal of the franchise to the blacks. A foresight of the future of the nation happily prevailed over a more taking policy, and, to the honor of the Republican leaders, equal franchise was the result.
The one great issue between the Radicals and the Democrats since the conclusion of the war is this: the “Democracy” deny that the readmission to Congress of the representatives of the Southern States is a matter of expediency at all; to them they declare that it is a matter of right. There was a rebellion in certain States which temporarily prevented their sending representatives; it is over, and their men must come. Either the Union is or is not dissolved; the Radicals admit that it is not, that all their endeavors were to prevent the Union being destroyed by rebels, and that they succeeded in so doing. The States, as States, were never in rebellion; there was only a powerful rebellion localized in certain States. “If you admit, then,” say the Democrats, “that the Union is not dissolved, how can you govern a number of States by major-generals?” Meanwhile the Radicals go on, not wasting their time in words, but passing through the House and over the President‘s veto the legislation necessary for the reconstruction of free government – with their illogical, but thoroughly English, good sense, avoiding all talk about constitutions that are obsolete, and laws that it is impossible to enforce, and pressing on steadily to the end that they have in view: equal rights for all men, free government as soon as may be. The one thing to regret is, that the Republicans have not the courage to appeal to the national exigencies merely, but that their leaders are forced by public opinion to keep up the sham of constitutionalism. No one in America seems to dream that there can be anything to alter in the “matchless Constitution,” which was framed by a body of slaveowners filled with the narrowest aristocratic prejudices, for a country which has since abolished slavery, and become as democratic as any nation in the world.
The system of presidential election and the constitution of the Senate are matters to which the Republicans will turn their attention as soon as the country is rested from the war. It is not impossible that a lifetime may see the abolition of the Presidency proposed, and carried by the vote of the whole nation. If this be not done, the election will come to be made directly by the people, without the intervention of the electoral college. The Senate, as now constituted, rests upon the States, and that State rights are doomed no one can doubt who remembers that of the population of New York State less than half are native-born New Yorkers. What concern can the cosmopolitan moiety of her people have with the State rights of New York? When a system becomes purely artificial, it is on the road to death; when State rights represented the various sovereign powers which the old States had allowed to sleep while they entered a federal union, State rights were historical; but now that Congress by a single vote cuts and carves territories as large as all the old States put together, and founds new commonwealths in the wilderness, the doctrine is worn out.
It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all before them without a check; but though one Conservative reaction may follow another, although time after time the Democrats may return victorious from the fall elections, in the end Radicalism must inevitably win the day. A party which takes for its watch-word, “The national good,” will always beat the Constitutionalists.
Except during some great crisis, the questions which come most home at election times in a democratic country are minor points, in which the party not in power has always the advantage over the office-holders: it is on these petty matters that a cry of jobbery and corruption can be got up, and nothing in American politics is more taking than such a cry. “We are a liberal people, sir,” said a Californian to me, “but among ourselves we don‘t care to see some men get more than their share of Uncle Sam‘s money. It doesn‘t go down at election time to say that the Democrats are spoiling the country; but it‘s a mighty strong plank that you‘ve got if you prove that Hank Andrews has made a million of dollars by the last Congressional job. We say, ‘Smart boy, Hank Andrews;’ but we generally vote for the other man.” It is these small questions, or “side issues,” as they are termed, which cause the position of parties to fluctuate frequently in certain States.
The first reaction against the now triumphant Radicals will probably be based upon the indignation excited by the extension of Maine liquor laws throughout the whole of the States in which the New Englanders have the mastery. Prohibitive laws are not supported in America by the arguments with which all of us in Britain are familiar. The New England Radicals concede that, so far as the effects of the use of alcohol are strictly personal, there is no ground for the interference of society. They go even further, and say that no ground for general and indiscriminate interference with the sale of liquor is to be found in the fact that drink maddens certain men, and causes them to commit crime. They are willing to admit that, were the evils confined to individuals, it would be their own affair; but they attempt to show that the use of alcohol affects the condition, moral and physical, of the drinker‘s offspring, and that this is a matter so bound up with the general weal that public interference may be necessary. It is the belief of a majority of the thinkers of New England that the taint of alcoholic poison is hereditary; that the children of drunkards will furnish more than the ordinary proportion of great criminals; that the descendants of habitual tipplers will be found to lack vital force, and will fall into the ranks of pauperism and dependence: not only are the results of morbid appetites, they say, transmitted to the children, but the appetites themselves descend to the offspring with the blood. If this be true, the New England Radicals urge, the use of alcohol becomes a moral wrong, a crime even, of which the law might well take cognizance.
We are often told that party organization has become so dictatorial, so despotic, in America, that no one not chosen by the preliminary convention, no one, in short, whose name is not upon the party ticket, has any chance of election to an office. To those who reflect upon the matter, it would seem as though this is but a consequence of the existence of party and of the system of local representation: in England itself the like abuse is not unknown. Where neither party possesses overwhelming strength, division is failure; and some knot or other of pushing men must be permitted to make the selection of a candidate, to which, when made, the party must adhere, or suffer a defeat. As to the composition of the nominating conventions, the grossest misstatements have been made to us in England, for we have been gravely assured that a nation which is admitted to present the greatest mass of education and intelligence with the smallest intermixture of ignorance and vice of which the world has knowledge, allows itself to be dictated to in the matter of the choice of its rulers by caucuses and conventions composed of the idlest and most worthless of its population. Bribery, we have been told, reigns supreme in these assemblies; the nation‘s interest is but a phrase; individual selfishness the true dictator of each choice; the name of party is but a cloak for private ends, and the wire-pullers are equaled in rascality only by their nominees.
It need hardly be shown that, were these stories true, a people so full of patriotic sentiment as that which lately furnished a million and a half of volunteers for a national war, would without doubt be led to see its safety in the destruction of conventions and their wire-pullers – of party government itself, if necessary. It cannot be conceived that the American people would allow its institutions to be stultified and law itself insulted to secure the temporary triumph of this party or of that, on any mere question of the day.
The secret of the power of caucus and convention is, general want of time on the part of the community. Your honest and shrewd Western farmer, not having himself the leisure to select his candidate, is fain to let caucus or convention choose for him. In practice, however, the evil is far from great: the party caucus, for its own interest, will, on the whole, select the fittest candidate available, and, in any case, dares not, except perhaps in New York City, fix its choice upon a man of known bad character. Even where party is most despotic, a serious mistake committed by one of the nominating conventions will seldom fail to lose its side so many votes as to secure a triumph for the opponents.
King Caucus is a great monarch, however; it would be a mistake to despise him, and conventions are dear to the American people – at least it would seem so, to judge from their number. Since I have been in America there have been sitting, besides doubtless a hundred others, the names of which I have not noticed, the Philadelphia “Copper Johnson Wigwam,” or assembly of the Presidential party (of which the Radicals say that it is but “the Copperhead organization with a fresh snout”), a dentists’ convention, a phrenological convention, a pomological congress, a school-teachers’ convention, a Fenian convention, an eight-hour convention, an insurance companies’ convention, and a loyal soldiers’ convention. One is tempted to think of the assemblies of ’48 in Paris, and of the caricatures representing the young bloods of the Paris Jockey Club being addressed by their President as “Citoyens Vicomtes,” whereas, when the café waiters met in their congress, it was “Messieurs les Garçons-limonadiers.”
The pomological convention was an extremely jovial one, all the horticulturists being whisky-growers themselves, and having a proper wish to compare their own with their neighbors’ “Bourbon” or “old Rye.” Caucuses (or cauci: which is it?) of this kind suggest a derivation of this name for what many consider a low American proceeding, from an equally low Latin word of similar sound and spelling. In spite of the phrase “a dry caucus” being not unknown in the temperance State of Maine, many might be inclined to think that caucuses, if not exactly vessels of grace, were decidedly “drinking vessels;” but Americans tell you that the word is derived from the phrase a “caulker‘s meeting,” caulkers being peculiarly given to noise.
The cry against conventions is only a branch of that against “politicians,” which is continually being raised by the adherents of the side which happens at the moment to be the weaker, and which evidently helps to create the evils against which its authors are protesting. It is now the New York Democrats who tell such stories as that of the Columbia District census-taker going to the Washington house of a wealthy Boston man to find out his religious tenets. The door was opened by a black boy, to whom the white man began: “What‘s your name?” “Sambo, sah, am my Christian name.” “Wall, Sambo, is your master a Christian?” To which Sambo‘s indignant answer was: “No, sah! Mass member ob Congress, sah!” When the Democrats were in power, it was the Republicans of Boston and the Cambridge professors who threw out sly hints, and violent invectives too, against the whole tribe of “politicians.” Such unreasoning outcries are to be met only by bare facts; but were a jury of readers of the debates in Parliament and in Congress to be impaneled to decide whether political immorality were not more rife in England than in America, I should, for my part, look forward with anxiety to the result.
The organization of the Republican party is hugely powerful; it has its branches in every township and district in the Union; but it is strong, not in the wiles of crafty plotters, not in the devices of unknown politicians, but in the hearts of the loyal people of the country. If there were nothing else to be said to Englishmen on the state of parties in America, it should be sufficient to point out that, while the “Democracy” claim the Mozart faction of New York and the shoddy aristocracy, the pious New Englanders and their sons in the Northwest are, by a vast majority, Republicans; and no “side issues” should be allowed to disguise the fact that the Democratic is the party of New York, the Republican the party of America.
CHAPTER XXVII.
BROTHERS
I HAD landed in America at the moment of what is known in Canada as “the great scare” – that is, the Fenian invasion at Fort Erie. Before going South, I had attended at New York a Fenian meeting held to protest against the conduct of the President and Mr. Seward, who, it was asserted, after deluding the Irish with promises of aid, had abandoned them, and even seized their supplies and arms. The chief speaker of the evening was Mr. Gibbons, of Philadelphia, “Vice-President of the Irish Republic,” a grave and venerable man; no rogue or schemer, but an enthusiast as evidently convinced of the justice as of the certainty of the ultimate triumph of the cause.
At Chicago, I went to the monster meeting at which Speaker Colfax addressed the Brotherhood; at Buffalo, I was present at the “armed picnic” which gave the Canadian government so much trouble. On Lake Michigan, I went on board a Fenian ship; in New York, I had a conversation with an ex-rebel officer, a long-haired Georgian, who was wearing the Fenian uniform of green-and-gold in the public streets. The conclusion to which I came was, that the Brotherhood has the support of ninety-nine hundredths of the Irish in the States. As we are dealing not with British, but with English politics and life, this is rather a fact to be borne in mind than a text upon which to found a homily; still, the nature of the Irish antipathy to Britain is worth a moment‘s consideration; and the probable effect of it upon the future of the race is a matter of the gravest import.
The Fenians, according to a Chicago member of the Roberts’ wing, seek to return to the ancient state of Ireland, of which we find the history in the Brehon laws – a communistic tenure of land (resembling, no doubt, that of the Don Cossacks), and a republic or elective kingship. Such are their objects; nothing else will in the least conciliate the Irish in America. No abolition of the Establishment, no reform of land-laws, no Parliament on College Green, nothing that England can grant while preserving the shadow of union, can dissolve the Fenian league.
All this is true, and yet there is another great Irish nation to which, if you turn, you find that conciliation may still avail us. The Irish in Ireland are not Fenians in the American sense: they hate us, perhaps, but they may be mollified; they are discontented, but they may be satisfied; customs and principles of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the Irish soil, can be recognized, and made the basis of legislation, without bringing about the disruption of the empire.
The first Irish question that we shall have to set ourselves to understand is that of land. Permanent tenure is as natural to the Irish as freeholding to the English people. All that is needed of our statesmen is, that they recognize in legislation that which they cannot but admit in private talk – namely, that there may be essential differences between race and race.
The results of legislation which proceeds upon this basis may follow very slowly upon the change of system, for there is at present no nucleus whatever for the feeling of amity which we would create. Even the alliance of the Irish politicians with the English Radicals is merely temporary; the Irish antipathy to the English does not distinguish between Conservative and Radical. Years of good government will be needed to create an alliance against which centuries of oppression and wrong-doing protest. We may forget, but the Irish will hardly find themselves able to forget at present that, while we make New Zealand savages British citizens as well as subjects, protect them in the possession of their lands, and encourage them to vote at our polling-booths, and take their place as constables and officers of the law, our fathers “planted” Ireland, and declared it no felony to kill an Irishman on his mother-soil.
In spite of their possession of much political power, and of the entire city government of several great towns, the Irish in America are neither physically nor morally well off. Whatever may be the case at some future day, they still find themselves politically in English hands. The very language that they are compelled to speak is hateful, even to men who know no other. With an impotent spite which would be amusing were it not very sad, a resolution was carried by acclamation through both houses of the Fenian congress, at Philadelphia, this year, “that the word ‘English’ be unanimously dropped, and that the words ‘American language’ be used in the future.”
From the Cabinet, from Congress, from every office, high or low, not controlled by the Fenian vote, the Irish are systematically excluded; but it cannot be American public opinion which has prevented the Catholic Irish from rising as merchants and traders, even in New York. Yet, while there are Belfast names high up on the Atlantic side and in San Francisco, there are none from Cork, none from the southern counties. It would seem as though the true Irishman wants the perseverance to become a successful merchant, and thrives best at pure brain-work, or upon land. Three-fourths of the Irish in America remain in towns, losing the attachment to the soil which is the strongest characteristic of the Irish in Ireland, and finding no new home: disgusted at their exclusion in America from political life and power, it is these men who turn to Fenianism as a relief. Through drink, through gambling, and the other vices of homeless, thriftless men, they are soon reduced to beggary; and, moral as they are by nature, the Irish are nevertheless supplying America with that which she never before possessed – a criminal and pauper class. Of ten thousand people sent to jail each year in Massachusetts, six thousand are Irish born; in Chicago, out of the 3598 convicts of last year, only eighty-four were native born Americans.
To the Americans, Fenianism has many aspects. The greater number hate the Irish, but sympathize profoundly with Ireland. Many are so desirous of seeing republicanism prevail throughout the world that they support the Irish republic in any way, except, indeed, by taking its paper money, and look upon its establishment as a first step toward the erection of a free government that shall include England and Scotland as well. Some think the Fenians will burn the Capitol and rob the banks; some regard them with satisfaction, or the reverse, from the religious point of view. One of the latter kind of lookers-on said to me: “I was glad to see the Fenian movement, not that I wish success to the Brotherhood as against you English, but because I rejoice to see among Irishmen a powerful center of resistance to the Catholic Church. We, in this country, were being delivered over, bound hand and foot, to the Roman Church, and these Fenians, by their power and their violence against the priests, have divided the Irish camp and rescued us.” The unfortunate Canadians, for their part, ask why they should be shot and robbed because Britain maltreats the Irish; but we must not forget that the Fenian raid on Canada was an exact repetition, almost on the same ground, of the St. Alban‘s raid into the American territory during the rebellion.
The Fenians would be as absolutely without strength in America as they are without credit were it not for the anti-British traditions of the Democratic party, and the rankling of the Alabama question, or rather of the remembrance of our general conduct during the rebellion, in the hearts of the Republicans. It is impossible to spend much time in New England without becoming aware that the people of the six Northeastern States love us from the heart. Nothing but this can explain the character of their feeling toward us on these Alabama claims. That we should refuse an arbitration upon the whole question is to them inexplicable, and they grieve with wondering sorrow at our perversity.
It is not here that the legal question need be raised; for observers of the present position of the English race it is enough that there exists between Britain and America a bar to perfect friendship – a ground for future quarrel – upon which we refuse to allow an all-embracing arbitration. We allege that we are the best judges of a certain portion of the case, that our dignity would be compromised by arbitration upon these points; but such dignity must always be compromised by arbitration, for common friends are called in only when each party to the dispute has a case, in the justice of which his dignity is bound up. Arbitration is resorted to as a means of avoiding wars; and, dignity or no dignity, everything that can cause war is proper matter for arbitration. What even if some little dignity be lost by the affair, in addition to that which has been lost already? No such loss can be set against the frightful hurtfulness to the race and to the cause of freedom, of war between Britain and America.
The question comes plainly enough to this point; we say we are right; America says we are wrong; they offer arbitration, which we refuse upon a point of etiquette – for on that ground we decline to refer to arbitration a point which to America appears essential. It looks to the world as though we offer to submit to the umpire chosen those points only on which we are already prepared to admit that we are in the wrong. America asks us to submit, as we should do in private life, the whole correspondence on which the quarrel stands. Even if we, better instructed in the precedents of international law than were the Americans, could not but be in the right, still, as we know that intelligent and able men in the United States think otherwise, and would fancy their cause the just one in a war which might arise upon the difficulty, surely there is ground for arbitration. It would be to the eternal disgrace of civilization that we should set to work to cut our brothers’ throats upon a point of etiquette; and, by declining on the ground of honor to discuss these claims, we are compromising that honor in the eyes of all the world.
In democracies such as America or France, every citizen feels an insult to his country as an insult to himself. The Alabama question is in the mouth or in the heart – which is worse – of every American who talks with an Englishman in England or America.
All nations commit, at times, the error of acting as though they think that every people on earth, except themselves, are unanimous in their policy. Neglecting the race distinctions and the class distinctions which in England are added to the universal essential differences of minds, the Americans are convinced that, during the late war, we thought as one man, and that, in this present matter of the Alabama claims, we stand out and act as a united people.
A New Yorker with whom I stayed at Quebec – a shrewd but kindly fellow – was an odd instance of the American incapacity to understand the British nation, which almost equals our own inability to comprehend America. Kind and hospitable to me, as is any American to every Englishman in all times and places, he detested British policy, and obstinately refused to see that there is an England larger than Downing Street, a nation outside Pall Mall. “England was with the rebels throughout the war.” “Excuse me; our ruling classes were so, perhaps, but our rulers don‘t represent us any more than your 39th Congress represents George Washington.” In America, where Congress does fairly represent the nation, and where there has never been less than a quarter of the body favorable to any policy which half the nation supported, men cannot understand that there should exist a country which thinks one way, but, through her rulers, speaks another. We may disown the national policy, but we suffer for it.