shows an alarming capacity for exciting them. The habit of association by voluntary societies maintains itself. The defects of the professional politicians, a term which now more precisely describes those whom Tocqueville calls by the inappropriate European name of the governors,' continue at least as marked as in his time. So, too, the House of Representatives continues less influential than the Senate, but for other reasons than those which Tocqueville assigns, and to a less degree than he describes. The Senate has not, since 1880, maintained the character he gives it; and the fact that it is ⚫ still chosen in the way which he commended shows that the merits he ascribed to it were not due to its mode of choice. Indeed in the judgement of most thoughtful men, popular election in the States would give a better Senate than election by the State Legislatures now does. American magistrates never did in general enjoy the arbitrary power Tocqueville ascribes to them. They assuredly do not enjoy it now, but in municipalities there is a growing tendency to concentrate power, especially the appointing power, in the hands of one or a few officers in order that the people may have some one person on whom responsibility can be fixed. Such power is sometimes very wide, but it cannot be called arbitrary. A few minor offices are unsalaried; the salaries of the greater ones have been raised, particularly in the older States. The methods of administration, especially of Federal administration, have been much improved, but are still behind those of the most advanced European countries, one or two departments excepted. Government is far from economical. The war of the Rebellion was conducted in the most lavish way: the high protective tariff raises a vast revenue, and direct local taxation takes more from the citizen than in most European countries. An enormous sum is spent upon pensions to persons who purport to have served in the Northern armies during the Civil War 1. Congress does not pass many public statutes, nor do they greatly alter ordinary law within the sphere open to federal legislation. Many legislative experiments are tried in the newer States, but the ordinary private law is in no such condition of mutability as Tocqueville describes. The law of England suffered more changes between 1868 and 1885 than either the common or statute law of the older States of the Union. The respect for the rights of others, for the regular course of legal process, for the civil magistrate, remains strong; nor have the rich (although of late years more threatened) seriously begun to apprehend any attacks on them, otherwise than as stockholders in great railway and other corporations. The tyranny of the majority is not a serious evil in the America of to-day, though people still sometimes profess alarm at it. It cannot act through a State legislature so much as it may have done in Tocqueville's days, for the wings of these bodies have been effectively clipped by the newer State constitutions. Faint are the traces which remain of that intolerance of heterodoxy in politics, religion or social views whereon he dilates 2. Politicians on the stump still flatter the crowd, but many home truths are told to it nevertheless in other ways and places, and the man who ventures to tell them need no longer fear social proscription (at least in time of peace) in the Northern or Western States, perhaps not even in the Southern. The Republic came scatheless out of a terrible civil war, and although the laurels of the general who concluded that war twice secured for him the Presidency, they did not make his influence dangerous to freedom. 1 In 1892 the expenditure on this head was $155,000,000; in 1901 it was estimated at $142,000,000. Competent American observers in Tocqueville's own time thought he greatly exaggerated this danger. See a letter from Jared Sparks printed in Professor Herbert B. Adams' interesting monograph Jared Sparks and Alexis de Tocque ville, in Johns Hopkins University Studies, 1898. There is indeed no great capital, but there are cities. greater than most European capitals, and the Republic has not been imperilled by their growth. The influence of the clergy on public affairs has declined: whether or no that of religion has also been weakened it is more difficult to say. But all Americans are still agreed that religion gains by its entire detachment from the State. The negro problem remains, but it has passed into a new and for the moment less threatening phase. Neither Tocqueville nor any one else then living could have foreseen that manumission would come as a war measure, and be followed by the grant of political rights. It is no impeachment of his judgement that he omitted. to contemplate a state of things in which the blacks have been made politically the equals of the whites, while inferior in most other respects, and destined, apparently, to remain wholly separate from them. He was right in perceiving that fusion was not possible, and that liberation would not solve the problem, because it would not make the liberated fit for citizenship. Fit-that is to say, as fit as a considerable part of the white population -they will probably in the long run become, but even then the social problem will remain. His remark that the repulsion between the races in the South would probably be greater under freedom than under slavery has so far been strikingly verified by the result. All the forces that made for the maintenance of the Federal Union are now stronger than they were then, while the chief force that opposed it, viz., the difference of character and habits between North and South, largely produced by the existence of slavery, tends to vanish. Nor does the growth of the Union make the retention of its parts in one body more difficult. On the contrary, the United States is a smaller country now when it stretches from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of California, with its seventy-six millions of people, than it was then with its thirteen millions, just as the civilized world was larger in the time of Herodotus than it is now, for it took twice as many months to travel from Persepolis or the Caspian Sea to the Pillars of Hercules as it does now to circumnavigate the globe, one was obliged to use a greater number of languages, and the journey was incomparably more dangerous. Before steamboats plied on rivers, and trains ran on railways, three or four weeks at least were consumed in reaching Missouri from Maine. Now one goes in six days of easy travelling right across the continent. Nor has the increased number of States bred more dissensions. The forty-five States of to-day are not as Tocqueville assumes, and this is the error which vitiates his reasonings, forty-five nations. The differences in their size and wealth have become greater, but they work more harmoniously together than ever heretofore, because neither the lines which divide parties nor the substantial issues which affect men's minds coincide with State boundaries. The Western States are now, so far as population goes, the dominant section of the Union, and become daily more so. But their interests link them more closely than ever to the North Atlantic States, through which their products pass to Europe, and the notion once entertained of moving the capital from Washington to the Mississippi valley has been quietly dropped. VIII. CONCLUDING SUMMARY. Before bidding farewell to our philosopher, let us summarize his conclusions. He sees in the United States by far the most successful and durable form of democratic government that has yet appeared in the world. Its merits are the unequalled measure of freedom, freedom of action, but not of thought, which it secures to the ordinary citizen, the material and social benefits it confers on him, the stimulus it gives to all his practical faculties. These benefits are likely to be permanent, for they rest upon the assured permanence of Social equality; Local self-government; Widely diffused education. It is true that these benefits would not have been attained so quickly nor in such ample measure but for the extraordinary natural advantages of the New World. Nevertheless, these natural advantages are but subsidiary causes. The character of the people, trained to freedom by experience and by religion, is the chief cause, their institutions the second, their material conditions only the third; for what have the Spaniards made of like conditions in Central and South America 1? Nevertheless, the horizon is not free from clouds. Besides slavery and the existence of a vast negro population they are The conceit and ignorance of the masses, perpetually flattered by their leaders, and therefore slow to correct their faults. The withdrawal from politics of the rich, and inferior tone of 'the governors,' i.e. the politicians. The tyranny of the majority, which enslaves not only the legislatures, but individual thought and speech, checking literary progress, and preventing the emergence of great men. The concentration of power in the legislatures (Federal and State), which weakens the Executive, and makes all laws unstable. The probable dissolution of the Federal Union, either by the secession of recalcitrant States or by the slow decline of Federal authority. There is therefore warning for France in the example 1 The conditions of most parts of the tropical regions of South and Central America are in reality quite different from those of the American Union taken as a whole. |