Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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from the other. The American type of legislator is eminently shrewd, business-like, and free from prejudice, and he is quite prepared to make good laws, as long as they do not affect injuriously his personal and party interests. Public opinion insists on this, and it makes, as we have seen, occasional spasmodic efforts to diminish the great corruption of American political life.
America, during the last three quarters of the nineteenth century, has changed greatly. It is very different from the country which Dickens and Mrs. Trollope described, and even the great work of Tocqueville occasionally wears an aspect of some unreality. The population of the United States has quadrupled since Tocqueville visited it, and it is not surprising that many conditions should have been changed and some predictions falsified. Tocqueville believed much more in the permanence of republican institutions in America than in the permanence of the Union. He predicted very confidently that the power of the Federal Government would steadily decline and the power of the separate States increase; that any serious resistance of the States to the Federal Union must certainly succeed; that the Union would only endure as long as all the States continued to wish to form part of it.85 The War of the Secession showed that he was mistaken, and it produced for some years a strong tendency in the direction of centralisation.
In many respects, however, he judged with singular accuracy both the dangers and the tendencies of American political life. He deplored the custom, which had already begun in his time, of making the judges elective. He predicted that the habit of treating representatives as mere delegates bound by imperative instructions would destroy the essence of representative government. He dwelt with much perspicuity on the dangers in a pure democracy of the multiplication of great towns; on the gradual displacement of power which would follow the rise of new territories eclipsing or superseding the old States; on the moral and political effects of slavery, and of the increase of the negro race; on the deep and menacing line of division which the combined influence of slavery and climate, and the resulting difference of character and habits were drawing between the Northern and the Southern States. He imagined, indeed, that slavery would make it the special interest of the latter to cling to the Union, as they had every reason to fear the consequences if they were left alone with their negroes; but he doubted whether this bond of interest would prove ultimately as strong as the antagonism of sentiment. The system of party in America he never seems to have clearly understood, and he altogether failed to foresee the enormous power and the corrupting influence of ‘the Machine.’
The America he described was, in some respects, very unlike that of our own day. He speaks of a despotism of opinion which prevented all free expression of independent, eccentric, or heretical ideas; of American dislike to general ideas and theoretical discoveries; of a jealousy of wealth which compelled rich men, like the Jews of the Middle Ages, to abstain from all the ostentation of luxury. These things are wholly changed. America is no longer a country without pauperism and without great wealth. It contains some of the largest fortunes in the world. American wealth is certainly by no means averse to ostentation, and is rather peculiarly apt to take forms that are dangerous and injurious to the community. We are accustomed to hear, in some quarters, the enormous landed properties possessed by a few English landlords described as a great evil; but as long as those who wish to buy land, or to take land on a long lease, have no difficulty in doing so, it is not easy to see what real interest is seriously injured. The power the great landlord possesses may, no doubt, be abused; but great abuse is neither easy nor common, while the benefits resulting to the nation from the existence of this class are very real and evident. But, of all forms that great wealth can take, I know of none that gives greater opportunities or temptations of abuse than that of the railway king, who controls for his own selfish purposes the chief lines of communication in the country. In no other country has this class of men been so prominent as in America, and in no other has their power been more hideously abused. Nowhere else have there been such scandalous examples of colossal, ostentatious fortunes built up by reckless gambling, by the acquisition of gigantic monopolies, by a deadly and unscrupulous competition bringing ruin into countless homes, by a systematic subordination of public to private interests, by enormous political and municipal corruption. If such men as Lincoln, and Emerson, and Lowell have, in our generation, represented with supreme perfection the distinctive beauty of the American type, such a career as that of Jay Gould has, in its own way, been not less truly characteristic.
Integrity in the management of great companies and corporations is certainly not, in these latter days, a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race on either side of the Atlantic, but I believe it is even less so in America than in England. The contrast between the management of railways in England and in the United States is extremely significant. America is now one of the richest countries in the world, and its people have certainly no superiors in business talent. Yet it has been stated on excellent authority that, in the fifteen years between 1875 and 1890, the aggregate foreclosure sales on the railways of the United States comprised 50,525 miles, with $2,865,000,000 of combined stocks and bonds, or an average of $191,000,000 per annum. In 1890, twenty-nine companies were subject to foreclosure sales.86 A great railway authority, speaking in the beginning of 1894, said: ‘There is no less than one-fourth of the American railways in extent of mileage and capital now under the control of the courts of law, and during the year 1893 alone seventy-four railway companies including a mileage of 30,000 miles and a capital of 360 millions sterling, passed into the hands of receivers.87 Making the fullest allowance for trade depressions and vicissitudes, and for currency troubles, what an amount of gigantic and deliberate dishonesty, as well as unscrupulous gambling, does such a state of things represent! The system of monopolising articles of the first necessity, under the name of Trusts, in order to force up their price, which is one of the most mischievous forms that modern industry has assumed, has been especially American, and the origin of some of the greatest American fortunes.
These evils are certainly not unconnected with political conditions. In a country where there is no rank, and where political eminence gives little or no dignity, the thirst for wealth acquires a maddening power. Corrupt political organisations come in constant contact with great railway and industrial corporations, and each can do much to assist and to demoralise the other. Even independently of these mutual services, there is an analogy between the two things. To run a company is very like running the machine, and the low standard which public opinion admits in the one is, not unnaturally, extended to the other.
Slavery has passed away in America, and with it one great blot and danger has disappeared; but the negro race, with its doubtful future, remains. The character of the constituencies has been profoundly lowered by the negro voters, and the extraordinary prevalence and ferocity of lynch law seems to show that the old habits of violence which slavery did so much to foster are by no means extinct. A great improvement, however, has incontestably taken place in the character of American foreign policy since the close of the war. The many violent and unscrupulous acts that once marked that policy were nearly all distinctly traceable to the ascendency of Southern statesmen. Something was due to the character of the men, for the conditions of slave labour produce a type which is much more military and adventurous than pacific and industrial. But the main cause was the imperious necessity imposed on these States of acquiring new slave territories, in order to counteract the increasing preponderance which increasing population was giving to the Northern States, and thus secure their share of power in the Union. This was the origin of the annexation of Texas; of the conquest of New Mexico and California; of the filibustering expedition of General Lopez against Cuba in 1851; of the unscrupulous attempts to force a quarrel upon Spain in 1854, in order to find a pretext for seizing Cuba; of the shameless Ostend manifesto, in which American ministers declared their determination to acquire Cuba by force if they could not do so by purchase; of the countenance that was given to the filibustering expedition of William Walker to Nicaragua in 1857; of the renewed attempts to acquire Cuba in 1858 and 1859. Since the question of secession has been settled this spirit of aggression seems to have wholly passed out of American foreign policy. There have been occasions when American statesmen, in order to win the favour of some class of voters, have shown a disregard of the courtesies tesies and decorum of international dealings which no European country would have displayed, but in the great lines of her foreign policy, America has of late years been in general eminently honourable and unaggressive. It is no small thing that this vast section of the human race, so rich