  In Two VolumesVOL. IICONTENTS
CHAPTER I.WASHINGTON. |
| Dollars | |
| Wages of privates, including sergeants and corporals | 86,640,000 |
| Salaries of regimental officers | 23,784,000 |
| Extra wages of privates; extra pay to mounted officers, and salary of officers above the rank of colonel | 17,000,000 |
| 127,424,000 or £25,484,000 sterling. |
To this must be added the cost of diet and clothing. The food of the men, I was informed, was supplied at an average cost of 17 cents a day, which, for an army of 500,000 men, would amount to £6,200,000 per annum. The clothing of the men is shown by the printed statement of their war department to amount to 3 dollars a month for a period of five years. That, at least, is the amount allowed to a private of infantry or artillery. The cost of the cavalry uniforms and of the dress of the non-commissioned officers is something higher, but not sufficiently so to make it necessary to make special provision for the difference in a statement so rough as this. At 3 dollars a month the clothing of the army would amount to £3,600,000. The actual annual cost would therefore be as follows:—
| Salaries and wages | £25,484,400 |
| Diet of the soldiers | 6,200,000 |
| Clothing for the soldiers | 3,600,000 |
| £35,284,400 |
I believe that these figures may be trusted, unless it be with reference to that sum of $17,000,000 or £3,400,000, which is presumed to include the salaries of all general-officers with their staffs, and also the extra wages paid to soldiers in certain cases. This is given as an estimate, and may be over or under the mark. The sum named as the cost of clothing would be correct, or nearly so, if the army remained in its present force for five years. If it so remained for only one year the cost would be one-fifth higher. It must of course be remembered that the sum above named includes simply the wages, clothes, and food of the men. It does not comprise the purchase of arms, horses, ammunition, or waggons; the forage of horses; the transport of troops, or any of those incidental expenses of warfare which are always, I presume, heavier than the absolute cost of the men, and which in this war have been probably heavier than in any war ever waged on the face of God's earth. Nor does it include that terrible item of peculation as to which I will say a word or two before I finish this chapter.
The yearly total payment of the officers and soldiers of the armies is as follows. As regards the officers it must be understood that this includes all the allowances made to them, except as regards those on the staff. The sums named apply only to the infantry and artillery. The pay of the cavalry is about ten per cent. higher.
| Lieutenant-General. | £1,850 |
| General Scott alone holds that rank in the States' army | |
| Major-General | 1,150 |
| Brigadier-General | 800 |
| *Colonel | 530 |
| *Lieutenant-Colonel | 475 |
| Major | 430 |
| Captain | 300 |
| First Lieutenant | 265 |
| Second Lieutenant | 245 |
| First Sergeant | 48 |
| Sergeant | 40 |
| Corporal | 34 |
| Private | 31 |
| *A Colonel and Lieutenant-Colonel are attached to each regiment. |
In every grade named the pay is, I believe, higher than that given by us, or, as I imagine, by any other nation. It is, however, probable that the extra allowances paid to some of our higher officers when on duty may give to their positions for a time a higher pecuniary remuneration. It will of course be understood that there is nothing in the American army answering to our colonel of a regiment. With us the officer so designated holds a nominal command of high dignity and emolument as a reward for past services.
I have already spoken of my visits to the camps of the other armies in the field, that of General Halleck, who held his head-quarters at St. Louis, in Missouri, and that of General Buell, who was at Louisville, in Kentucky. There was also a fourth army under General Hunter, in Kansas, but I did not make my way as far west as that. I do not pretend to any military knowledge, and should be foolish to attempt military criticism; but as far as I could judge by appearance, I should say that the men in Buell's army were, of the three, in the best order. They seemed to me to be cleaner than the others, and, as far as I could learn, were in better health. Want of discipline and dirt have, no doubt, been the great faults of the regiments generally, and the latter drawback may probably be included in the former. These men have not been accustomed to act under the orders of superiors, and when they entered on the service hardly recognized the fact that they would have to do so in ought else than in their actual drill and fighting. It is impossible to conceive any class of men to whom the necessary discipline of a soldier would come with more difficulty than to an American citizen. The whole training of his life has been against it. He has never known respect for a master, or reverence for men of a higher rank than himself. He has probably been made to work hard for his wages,—harder than an Englishman works,—but he has been his employer's equal. The language between them has been the language of equals, and their arrangement as to labour and wages has been a contract between equals. If he did not work he would not get his money,—and perhaps not if he did. Under these circumstances he has made his fight with the world; but those circumstances have never taught him that special deference to a superior, which is the first essential of a soldier's duty. But probably in no respect would that difficulty be so severely felt as in all matters appertaining to personal habits. Here at any rate the man would expect to be still his own master, acting for himself and independent of all outer control. Our English Hodge, when taken from the plough to the camp, would, probably, submit without a murmur to soap and water and a barber's shears; he would have received none of that education which would prompt him to rebel against such ordinances; but the American citizen, who for a while expects to shake hands with his captain whenever he sees him, and is astonished when he learns that he must not offer him drinks, cannot at once be brought to understand that he is to be treated like a child in the nursery;—that he must change his shirt so often, wash himself at such and such intervals, and go through a certain process of cleansing his outward garments daily. I met while travelling a sergeant of an old regular American regiment, and he spoke of the want of discipline among the volunteers as hopeless. But even he instanced it chiefly by their want of cleanliness. "They wear their shirts till they drop off their backs," said he; "and what can you expect from such men as that?" I liked that sergeant for his zeal and intelligence, and also for his courtesy when he found that I was an Englishman; for previous to his so finding he had begun to abuse the English roundly,—but I did not quite agree with him about the volunteers. It is very bad that soldiers should be dirty, bad also that they should treat their captains with familiarity and desire to exchange drinks with the majors. But even discipline is not everything; and discipline will come at last even to the American soldiers, distasteful as it may be, when the necessity for it is made apparent. But these volunteers have great military virtues. They are intelligent, zealous in their cause, handy with arms, willing enough to work at all military duties, and personally brave. On the other hand they are sickly, and there has been a considerable amount of drunkenness among them. No man who has looked to the subject can, I think, doubt that a native American has a lower physical development than an Irishman, a German, or an Englishman. They become old sooner, and die at an earlier age. As to that matter of drink, I do not think that much need be said against them. English soldiers get drunk when they have the means of doing so, and American soldiers would not get drunk if the means were taken away from them. A little drunkenness goes a long way in a camp, and ten drunkards will give a bad name to a company of a hundred. Let any man travel with twenty men of whom four are tipsy, and on leaving them he will tell you that every man of them was a drunkard.
I have said that these men are brave, and I have no doubt that they are so. How should it be otherwise with men of such a race? But it must be remembered that there are two kinds of courage, one of which is very common and the other very uncommon. Of the latter description of courage it cannot be expected that much should be found among the privates of any army, and perhaps not very many examples among the officers. It is a courage self-sustained, based on a knowledge of the right and on a life-long calculation that any results coming from adherence to the right will be preferable to any that can be produced by a departure from it. This is the courage which will enable a man to stand his ground in battle or elsewhere, though broken worlds should fall around him. The other courage, which is mainly an affair of the heart or blood and not of the brain, always requires some outward support. The man who finds himself prominent in danger bears himself gallantly, because the eyes of many will see him; whether as an old man he leads an army, or as a young man goes on a forlorn hope, or as a private carries his officer on his back out of the fire, he is sustained by the love of praise. And the men who are not individually prominent in danger, who stand their ground shoulder to shoulder, bear themselves gallantly also, each trusting in the combined strength of his comrades. When such combined strength has been acquired, that useful courage is engendered which we may rather call confidence, and which of all courage is the most serviceable in the army. At the battle of Bull's Run the army of the North became panic-stricken and fled. From this fact many have been led to believe that the American soldiers would not fight well, and that they could not be brought to stand their ground under fire. This I think has been an unfair conclusion. In the first place the history of the battle of Bull's Run has yet to be written; as yet the history of the flight only has been given to us. As far as I can learn, the northern soldiers did at first fight well;—so well, that the army of the South believed itself to be beaten. But a panic was created—at first, as it seems, among the teamsters and waggons. A cry was raised, and a rush was made by hundreds of drivers with their carts and horses; and then men who had never seen war before, who had not yet had three months' drilling as soldiers, to whom the turmoil of that day must have seemed as though hell were opening upon them, joined themselves to the general clamour, and fled to Washington, believing that all was lost. But at the same time the regiments of the enemy were going through the same farce in the other direction! It was a battle between troops who knew nothing of battles; of soldiers who were not yet soldiers. That individual high-minded courage, which would have given to each individual recruit the self-sustained power against a panic, which is to be looked for in a general, was not to be looked for in them. Of the other courage of which I have spoken, there was as much as the circumstances of the battle would allow.
On subsequent occasions the men have fought well. We should, I think, admit that they have fought very well when we consider how short has been their practice at such work. At Somerset, at Fort Henry, at Fort Donnelson, at Corinth, the men behaved with courage, standing well to their arms, though at each place the slaughter among them was great. They have always gone well into fire, and have generally borne themselves well under fire. I am convinced that we in England can make no greater mistake than to suppose that the Americans as soldiers are deficient in courage.
But now I must come to a matter in which a terrible deficiency has been shown, not by the soldiers, but by those whose duty it has been to provide for the soldiers. It is impossible to speak of the army of the North and to leave untouched that hideous subject of army contracts. And I think myself the more specially bound to allude to it because I feel that the iniquities which have prevailed, prove with terrible earnestness the demoralizing power of that dishonesty among men in high places, which is the one great evil of the American States. It is there that the deficiency exists, which must be supplied before the public men of the nation can take a high rank among other public men. There is the gangrene, which must be cut out before the government, as a government, can be great. To make money is the one thing needful, and men have been anxious to meddle with the affairs of government, because there might money be made with the greatest ease. "Make money," the Roman satirist said; "make it honestly if you can, but at any rate make money." That first counsel would be considered futile and altogether vain by those who have lately dealt with the public wants of the American States.
This is bad in a most fatal degree, not mainly because men in high places have been dishonest, or because the government has been badly served by its own paid officers. That men in high places should be dishonest, and that the people should be cheated by their rulers is very bad. But there is worse than this. The thing becomes so common, and so notorious, that the American world at large is taught to believe that dishonesty is in itself good. "It behoves a man to be smart, sir!" Till the opposite doctrine to that be learned; till men in America,—ay, and in Europe, Asia, and Africa,—can learn that it specially behoves a man not to be smart, they will have learned little of their duty towards God, and nothing of their duty towards their neighbour.
In the instances of fraud against the States' government to which I am about to allude, I shall take all my facts from the report made to the House of Representatives at Washington by a Committee of that House in December, 1861. "Mr. Washbourne, from the Select Committee to inquire into the Contracts of the Government, made the following Report." That is the heading of the pamphlet. The Committee was known as the Van Wyck Committee, a gentleman of that name having acted as chairman.
The Committee first went to New York, and began their inquiries with reference to the purchase of a steam-boat called the "Catiline." In this case a certain Captain Comstock had been designated from Washington as the agent to be trusted in the charter or purchase of the vessel. He agreed on behalf of the Government to hire that special boat for £2000 a month for three months, having given information to friends of his on the matter, which enabled them to purchase it out-and-out for less than £4000. These friends were not connected with shipping matters, but were lawyers and hotel proprietors. The Committee conclude "that the vessel was chartered to the Government at an unconscionable price; and that Captain Comstock, by whom this was effected, while enjoying the peculiar confidence of the Government, was acting for and in concert with the parties who chartered the vessel, and was in fact their agent." But the report does not explain why Captain Comstock was selected for this work by authority from Washington, nor does it recommend that he be punished. It does not appear that Captain Comstock had ever been in the regular service of the Government, but that he had been master of a steamer.
In the next place one Starbuck is employed to buy ships. As a government agent he buys two for £1300, and sells them to the government for £2900. The vessels themselves, when delivered at the Navy Yard, were found to be totally unfit for the service for which they had been purchased. But why was Starbuck employed, when, as appears over and over again in the report, New York was full of paid government servants ready and fit to do the work? Starbuck was merely an agent, and who will believe that he was allowed to pocket the whole difference of £1600? The greater part of the plunder was, however, in this case refunded.
Then we come to the case of Mr. George D. Morgan, brother-in-law of Mr. Welles, the Secretary of the Navy. I have spoken of this gentleman before, and of his singular prosperity. He amassed a large fortune in five months, as a government agent for the purchase of vessels, he having been a wholesale grocer by trade. This gentleman had had no experience whatsoever with reference to ships. It is shown by the evidence that he had none of the requisite knowledge, and that there were special servants of the government in New York at that time, sent there specially for such services as these, who were in every way trustworthy, and who had the requisite knowledge. Yet Mr. Morgan was placed in this position by his brother-in-law the Secretary of the Navy, and in that capacity made about £20,000 in five months, all of which was paid by the government, as is well shown to have been the fact in the report before me. One result of such a mode of agency is given;—one other result, I mean, besides the £20,000 put into the pocket of the brother of the Secretary of the Navy. A ship called the "Stars and Stripes" was bought by Mr. Morgan for £11,000, which had been built some months before for £7000. This vessel was bought from a company which was blessed with a President. The President made the bargain with the government agent, but insisted on keeping back from his own company £2000 out of the £11,000 for expenses incident to the purchase. The company did not like being mulcted of its prey, and growled heavily; but their President declared that such bargains were not got at Washington for nothing. Members of Congress had to be paid to assist in such things. At least he could not reduce his little private bill for such assistance below £1600. He had, he said, positively paid out so much to those venal Members of Congress, and had made nothing for himself to compensate him for his own exertions. When this President came to be examined, he admitted that he had really made no payments to Members of Congress. His own capacity had been so great that no such assistance had been found necessary. But he justified his charge on the ground that the sum taken by him was no more than the company might have expected him to lay out on Members of Congress, or on ex-Members who are specially mentioned, had he not himself carried on the business with such consummate discretion! It seems to me that the Members or ex-Members of Congress were shamefully robbed in this matter.
The report deals manfully with Mr. Morgan, showing that for five months' work,—which work he did not do and did not know how to do,—he received as large a sum as the President's salary for the whole Presidential term of four years. So much better is it to be an agent of government than simply an officer! And the Committee adds, that they "do not find in this transaction the less to censure in the fact that this arrangement between the Secretary of the Navy and Mr. Morgan was one between brothers-in-law." After that who will believe that Mr. Morgan had the whole of that £20,000 for himself? And yet Mr. Welles still remains Secretary of the Navy, and has justified the whole transaction in an explanation admitting everything, and which is considered by his friends to be an able State paper. "It behoves a man to be smart, sir." Mr. Morgan and Secretary Welles will no doubt be considered by their own party to have done their duty well as high trading public functionaries. The faults of Mr. Morgan and of Secretary Welles are nothing to us in England; but the light in which such faults may be regarded by the American people is much to us.
I will now go on to the case of a Mr. Cummings. Mr. Cummings, it appears, had been for many years the editor of a newspaper in Philadelphia, and had been an intimate political friend and ally of Mr. Cameron. Now at the time of which I am writing, April, 1861, Mr. Cameron was Secretary-at-War, and could be very useful to an old political ally living in his own State. The upshot of the present case will teach us to think well of Mr. Cameron's gratitude.
In April, 1861, stores were wanted for the army at Washington, and Mr. Cameron gave an order to his old friend Cummings to expend 2,000,000 dollars, pretty much according to his fancy, in buying stores. Governor Morgan, the Governor of New York State and a relative of our other friend Morgan, was joined with Mr. Cummings in this commission, Mr. Cameron no doubt having felt himself bound to give the friends of his colleague at the Navy a chance. Governor Morgan at once made over his right to his relative; but better things soon came in Mr. Morgan's way, and he relinquished his share in this partnership at an early date. In this transaction he did not himself handle above 25,000 dollars. Then the whole job fell into the hands of Mr. Cameron's old political friend.
The 2,000,000 of dollars, or £400,000, were paid into the hands of certain government treasurers at New York, but they had orders to honour the draft of the political friend of the Secretary-at-War, and consequently £50,000 was immediately withdrawn by Mr. Cummings, and with this he went to work. It is shown that he knew nothing of the business; that he employed a clerk from Albany whom he did not know, and confided to this clerk the duty of buying such stores as were bought; that this clerk was recommended to him by Mr. Weed, the editor of a newspaper at Albany, who is known in the States as the special political friend of Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State; and that in this way he spent £32,000. He bought linen pantaloons and straw hats to the amount of £4200, because he thought the soldiers looked hot in the warm weather; but he afterwards learned that they were of no use. He bought groceries of a hardware dealer named Davidson, at Albany, that town whence came Mr. Weed's clerk. He did not know what was Davidson's trade, nor did he know exactly what he was going to buy; but Davidson proposed to sell him something which Mr. Cummings believed to be some kind of provisions, and he bought it. He did not know for how much,—whether over £2000 or not. He never saw the articles and had no knowledge of their quality. It was out of the question that he should have such knowledge, as he naÏvely remarks. His clerk Humphreys saw the articles. He presumed they were brought from Albany, but did not know. He afterwards bought a ship,—or two or three ships. He inspected one ship "by a mere casual visit:" that is to say, he did not examine her boilers; he did not know her tonnage, but he took the word of the seller for everything. He could not state the terms of the charter, or give the substance of it. He had had no former experience in buying or chartering ships. He also bought 75,000 pair of shoes at only 25 cents, or one shilling a pair, more than their proper price. He bought them of a Mr. Hall, who declares that he paid Mr. Cummings nothing for the job, but regarded it as a return for certain previous favours conferred by him on Mr. Cummings in the occasional loans of £100 or £200.
At the end of the examination it appears that Mr. Cummings still held in his hand a slight balance of £28,000, of which he had forgotten to make mention in the body of his own evidence. "This item seems to have been overlooked by him in his testimony," says the report. And when the report was made nothing had yet been learned of the destiny of this small balance.
Then the report gives a list of the army supplies miscellaneously purchased by Mr. Cummings:—280 dozen pints of ale at 9s. 6d. a dozen; a lot of codfish and herrings; 200 boxes of cheeses and a large assortment of butter; some tongues; straw hats and linen "pants;" 23 barrels of pickles; 25 casks of Scotch ale, price not stated; a lot of London porter, price not stated; and some Hall carbines of which I must say a word more further on. It should be remembered that no requisition had come from the army for any of the articles named; that the purchase of herrings and straw hats was dictated solely by the discretion of Cummings and his man Humphreys,—or, as is more probable, by the fact that some other person had such articles by him for sale; and that the government had its own established officers for the supply of things properly ordered by military requisition. These very same articles also were apparently procured, in the first place, as a private speculation, and were made over to the government on the failure of that speculation. "Some of the above articles," says the report, "were shipped by the 'Catiline,' which were probably loaded on private account, and not being able to obtain a clearance was in some way, through Mr. Cummings, transferred over to the government,—Scotch ale, London porter, selected herrings, and all." The italics as well as the words are taken from the report.
This was the confidential political friend of the Secretary-at-War, by whom he was intrusted with £400,000 of public money! £28,000 had not been accounted for when the report was made, and the army supplies were bought after the fashion above named. That Secretary-at-War, Mr. Cameron, has since left the Cabinet; but he has not been turned out in disgrace; he has been nominated as minister to Russia, and the world has been told that there was some difference of opinion between him and his colleagues respecting slavery! Mr. Cameron in some speech or paper declared on his leaving the Cabinet that he had not intended to remain long as Secretary-at-War. This assertion, I should think, must have been true.
And now about the Hall carbines, as to which the gentlemen on this Committee tell their tale with an evident delight in the richness of its incidents which at once puts all their readers in accord with them. There were altogether some five thousand of these, all of which the government sold to a Mr. Eastman in June, 1861, for 14s. each, as perfectly useless, and afterwards bought in August for £4 8s. each, about 4s. a carbine having been expended in their repair in the mean time. But as regards 790 of these now famous weapons, it must be explained they had been sold by the government as perfectly useless, and at a nominal price, previously to this second sale made by the government to Mr. Eastman. They had been so sold, and then, in April, 1861, they had been bought again for the government by the indefatigable Cummings for £3 each. Then they were again sold as useless for 14s. each to Eastman, and instantly rebought on behalf of the government for £4 8s. each! Useless for war purposes they may have been, but as articles of commerce it must be confessed that they were very serviceable.
This last purchase was made by a man named Stevens on behalf of General Fremont, who at that time commanded the army of the United States in Missouri. Stevens had been employed by General Fremont as an agent on the behalf of government, as is shown with clearness in the report, and on hearing of these muskets telegraphed to the General at once. "I have 5000 Hall's rifled cast-steel muskets, breech-loading, new, at 22 dollars." General Fremont telegraphed back instantly, "I will take the whole 5000 carbines … I will pay all extra charges …" And so the purchase was made. The muskets, it seems, were not absolutely useless even as weapons of war. "Considering the emergency of the times," a competent witness considered them to be worth "10 or 12 dollars." The government had been as much cheated in selling them as it had in buying them. But the nature of the latter transaction is shown by the facts that Stevens was employed, though irresponsibly employed, as a government agent by General Fremont; that he bought the muskets in that character himself, making on the transaction £1 18s. on each musket; and that the same man afterwards appeared as an aide-de-camp on General Fremont's staff. General Fremont had no authority himself to make such a purchase, and when the money was paid for the first instalment of the arms, it was so paid by the special order of General Fremont himself out of moneys intended to be applied to other purposes. The money was actually paid to a gentleman known at Fremont's head-quarters as his special friend, and was then paid in that irregular way because this friend desired that that special bill should receive immediate payment. After that who can believe that Stevens was himself allowed to pocket the whole amount of the plunder?
There is a nice little story of a clergyman in New York who sold for £40 and certain further contingencies, the right to furnish 200 cavalry horses; but I should make this too long if I told all the nice little stories. As the frauds at St. Louis were, if not in fact the most monstrous, at any rate the most monstrous which have as yet been brought to the light, I cannot finish this account without explaining something of what was going on at that western Paradise in those halcyon days of General Fremont.
General Fremont, soon after reaching St. Louis, undertook to build ten forts for the protection of that city. These forts have since been pronounced as useless, and the whole measure has been treated with derision by officers of his own army. But the judgment displayed in the matter is a military question with which I do not presume to meddle. Even if a general be wrong in such a matter, his character as a man is not disgraced by such error. But the manner of building them was the affair with which Mr. Van Wyck's committee had to deal. It seems that five of the forts, the five largest, were made under the orders of a certain Major Kappner at a cost of £12,000, and that the other five could have been built at least for the same sum. Major Kappner seems to have been a good and honest public servant, and therefore quite unfit for the superintendence of such work at St. Louis. The other five smaller forts were also in progress, the works on them having been continued from 1st September to 25th September, 1861; but on the 25th September General Fremont himself gave special orders that a contract should be made with a man named Beard, a Californian, who had followed him from California to St. Louis. This contract is dated the 25th of September. But nevertheless the work specified in that contract was done previous to that date, and most of the money paid was paid previous to that date. The contract did not specify any lump sum, but agreed that the work should be paid for by the yard and by the square foot. No less a sum was paid to Beard for this work—the cormorant Beard, as the report calls him—than £24,200, the last payment only, amounting to £4000, having been made subsequent to the date of the contract. £20,200 was paid to Beard before the date of the contract! The amounts were paid at five times, and the last four payments were made on the personal order of General Fremont. This Beard was under no bond, and none of the officers of the government knew anything of the terms under which he was working. On the 14th of October General Fremont was ordered to discontinue these works, and to abstain from making any further payments on their account. But, disobeying this order, he directed his Quartermaster to pay a further sum of £4000 to Beard out of the first sums he should receive from Washington, he then being out of money. This however was not paid. "It must be understood," says the report, "that every dollar ordered to be paid by General Fremont on account of these works was diverted from a fund specially appropriated for another purpose." And then again, "The money appropriated by Congress to subsist and clothe and transport our armies was then, in utter contempt of all law and of the army regulations, as well as in defiance of superior authority, ordered to be diverted from its lawful purpose and turned over to the cormorant Beard. While he had received 170,000 dollars (£24,200) from the Government, it will be seen from the testimony of Major Kappner that there had only been paid to the honest German labourers, who did the work on the first five forts built under his directions, the sum of 15,500 dollars (£3100), leaving from 40,000 to 50,000 dollars (£8000 to £10,000) still due; and while these labourers, whose families were clamouring for bread, were besieging the Quartermaster's department for their pay, this infamous contractor Beard is found following up the army and in the confidence of the Major-General, who gives him orders for large purchases, which could only have been legally made through the Quartermaster's department." After that who will believe that all the money went into Beard's pocket? Why should General Fremont have committed every conceivable breach of order against his government, merely with the view of favouring such a man as Beard?
The collusion of the Quartermaster M'Instry with fraudulent knaves in the purchase of horses is then proved. M'Instry was at this time Fremont's Quartermaster at St. Louis. I cannot go through all these. A man of the name of Jim Neil comes out in beautiful pre-eminence. No dealer in horses could get to the Quartermaster except through Jim Neil, or some such go-between. The Quartermaster contracted with Neil and Neil with the owners of horses; Neil at the time being also military inspector of horses for the Quartermaster. He bought horses as cavalry horses for £24 or less, and passed them himself as artillery horses for £30. In other cases the military inspectors were paid by the sellers to pass horses. All this was done under Quartermaster M'Instry, who would himself deal with none but such as Neil. In one instance, one Elleard got a contract from M'Instry, the profit of which was £8000. But there was a man named Brady. Now Brady was a friend of M'Instry's, who, scenting the carrion afar off, had come from Detroit, in Michigan, to St. Louis. M'Instry himself had also come from Detroit. In this case Elleard was simply directed by M'Instry to share his profits with Brady, and consequently paid to Brady £4000, although Brady gave to the business neither capital nor labour. He simply took the £4000 as the Quartermaster's friend. This Elleard, it seems, also gave a carriage and horses to Mrs. Fremont. Indeed Elleard seems to have been a civil and generous fellow. Then there is a man named Thompson, whose case is very amusing. Of him the Committee thus speaks:—"It must be said that Thompson was not forgetful of the obligations of gratitude, for, after he got through with the contract, he presented the son of Major M'Instry with a riding pony. That was the only mark of respect," to use his own words, "that he showed to the family of Major M'Instry."
General Fremont himself desired that a contract should be made with one Augustus Sacchi for a thousand Canadian horses. It turned out that Sacchi was "nobody: a man of straw living in a garret in New York whom nobody knew, a man who was brought out there"—to St. Louis—"as a good person through whom to work." "It will hardly be believed," says the report, "that the name of this same man Sacchi appears in the newspapers as being on the staff of General Fremont, at Springfield, with the rank of captain."
I do not know that any good would result from my pursuing further the details of this wonderful report. The remaining portion of it refers solely to the command held by General Fremont in Missouri, and adds proof upon proof of the gross robberies inflicted upon the government of the States by the very persons set in high authority to protect the government. We learn how all utensils for the camp, kettles, blankets, shoes, mess-pans, &c., were supplied by one firm, without a contract, at an enormous price, and of a quality so bad as to be almost useless, because the Quartermaster was under obligations to the partners. We learn that one partner in that firm gave £40 towards a service of plate for the Quartermaster, and £60 towards a carriage for Mrs. Fremont. We learn how futile were the efforts of any honest tradesman to supply good shoes to soldiers who were shoeless, and the history of one special pair of shoes which was thrust under the nose of the Quartermaster is very amusing. We learn that a certain paymaster properly refused to settle an account for matters with which he had no concern, and that General Fremont at once sent down soldiers to arrest him unless he made the illegal payment. In October £1000 was expended in ice, all which ice was wasted. Regiments were sent hither and thither with no military purpose, merely because certain officers, calling themselves generals, desired to make up brigades for themselves. Indeed every description of fraud was perpetrated, and this was done not through the negligence of those in high command, but by their connivance and often with their express authority.
It will be said that the conduct of General Fremont during the days of his command in Missouri is not a matter of much moment to us in England; that it has been properly handled by the Committee of Representatives appointed by the American Congress to inquire into the matter; and that after the publication of such a report by them, it is ungenerous in a writer from another nation to speak upon the subject. This would be so if the inquiries made by that Committee and their report had resulted in any general condemnation of the men whose misdeeds and peculations have been exposed. This, however, is by no means the case. Those who were heretofore opposed to General Fremont on political principles are opposed to him still; but those who heretofore supported him are ready to support him again.*
*Since this was written General Fremont has been restored to high military command, and now holds equal rank and equal authority with Maclellan and Halleck. In fact, the charges made against him by the Committee of the House of Representatives have not been allowed to stand in his way. He is politically popular with a large section of the nation, and therefore it has been thought well to promote him to high place. Whether he be fit for such place, either as regards capability or integrity, seems to be considered of no moment. [back]
The same argument must be used with reference to the other gentlemen named. Mr. Welles is still a Cabinet Minister and Secretary for the Navy. It has been found impossible to keep Mr. Cameron in the Cabinet, but he was named as the Minister of the States government to Russia after the publication of the Van Wyck report, when the result of his old political friendship with Mr. Alexander Cummings was well known to the President who appointed him and to the Senate who sanctioned his appointment. The individual corruption of any one man—of any ten men—is not much. It should not be insisted on loudly by any foreigner in making up a balance-sheet of the virtues and vices of the good and bad qualities of any nation. But the light in which such corruption is viewed by the people whom it most nearly concerns is very much. I am far from saying that democracy has failed in America. Democracy there has done great things for a numerous people, and will yet, as I think, be successful. But that doctrine as to the necessity of smartness must be eschewed before a verdict in favour of American democracy can be pronounced. "It behoves a man to be smart, sir." In those words are contained the curse under which the States' government has been suffering for the last thirty years. Let us hope that the people will find a mode of ridding themselves of that curse. I, for one, believe that they will do so.
CHAPTER VIII.
BACK TO BOSTON.
From Louisville we returned to Cincinnati, in making which journey we were taken to a place called Seymour in Indiana, at which spot we were to "make connection" with the train running on the Mississippi and Ohio line from St. Louis to Cincinnati. We did make the connection, but were called upon to remain four hours at Seymour in consequence of some accident on the line. In the same way, when going eastwards from Cincinnati to Baltimore a few days later, I was detained another four hours at a place called Crossline, in Ohio. On both occasions I spent my time in realizing, as far as that might be possible, the sort of life which men lead who settle themselves at such localities. Both these towns,—for they call themselves towns,—had been created by the railways. Indeed this has been the case with almost every place at which a few hundred inhabitants have been drawn together in the western States. With the exception of such cities as Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, settlers can hardly be said to have chosen their own localities. These have been chosen for them by the originators of the different lines of railway. And there is nothing in Europe in any way like to these western railway settlements. In the first place the line of the rails runs through the main street of the town, and forms not unfrequently the only road. At Seymour I could find no way of getting away from the rails unless I went into the fields. At Crossline, which is a larger place, I did find a street in which there was no railroad, but it was deserted, and manifestly out of favour with the inhabitants. As there were railway junctions at both these posts, there were of course cross-streets, and the houses extended themselves from the centre thus made along the lines, houses being added to houses at short intervals as new comers settled themselves down. The panting and groaning, and whistling of engines is continual; for at such places freight trains are always kept waiting for passenger trains, and the slower freight trains for those which are called fast. This is the life of the town; and indeed as the whole place is dependent on the railway, so is the railway held in favour and beloved. The noise of the engines is not disliked, nor are its puffings and groanings held to be unmusical. With us a locomotive steam-engine is still, as it were, a beast of prey, against which one has to be on one's guard,—in respect to which one specially warns the children. But there, in the western States, it has been taken to the bosoms of them all as a domestic animal; no one fears it, and the little children run about almost among its wheels. It is petted and made much of on all sides,—and, as far as I know, it seldom bites or tears. I have not heard of children being destroyed wholesale in the streets, or of drunken men becoming frequent sacrifices. But had I been consulted beforehand as to the natural effects of such an arrangement, I should have said that no child could have been reared in such a town, and that any continuance of population under such circumstances must have been impracticable.
Such places, however, do thrive and prosper with a prosperity especially their own, and the boys and girls increase and multiply in spite of all dangers. With us in England, it is difficult to realize the importance which is attached to a railway in the States, and the results which a railway creates. We have roads everywhere, and our country had been cultivated throughout, with more or less care, before our system of railways had been commenced; but in America, especially in the North, the railways have been the precursors of cultivation. They have been carried hither and thither, through primeval forests and over prairies, with small hope of other traffic than that which they themselves would make by their own influences. The people settling on their edges have had the very best of all roads at their service; but they have had no other roads. The face of the country between one settlement and another is still in many cases utterly unknown; but there is the connecting road by which produce is carried away, and new comers are brought in. The town that is distant a hundred miles by the rail is so near that its inhabitants are neighbours; but a settlement twenty miles distant across the uncleared country is unknown, unvisited, and probably unheard of by the women and children. Under such circumstances the railway is everything. It is the first necessity of life, and gives the only hope of wealth. It is the backbone of existence from whence spring, and by which are protected, all the vital organs and functions of the community. It is the right arm of civilization for the people, and the discoverer of the fertility of the land. It is all in all to those people, and to those regions. It has supplied the wants of frontier life with all the substantial comfort of the cities, and carried education, progress, and social habits into the wilderness. To the eye of the stranger such places as Seymour and Crossline are desolate and dreary. There is nothing of beauty in them, given either by nature or by art. The railway itself is ugly, and its numerous sidings and branches form a mass of iron road which is bewildering and, according to my ideas, in itself disagreeable. The wooden houses open down upon the line, and have no gardens to relieve them. A foreigner, when first surveying such a spot, will certainly record within himself a verdict against it; but in doing so he probably commits the error of judging it by a wrong standard. He should compare it with the new settlements which men have opened up in spots where no railway has assisted them, and not with old towns in which wealth has long been congregated. The traveller may see what is the place with the railway; then let him consider how it might have thriven without the railway.
I confess that I became tired of my sojourn at both the places I have named. At each I think that I saw every house in the place, although my visit to Seymour was made in the night; and at both I was lamentably at a loss for something to do. At Crossline I was all alone, and began to feel that the hours which I knew must pass before the missing train could come, would never make away with themselves. There were many others stationed there as I was, but to them had been given a capability for loafing which niggardly Nature has denied to me. An American has the power of seating himself in the close vicinity of a hot stove and feeding in silence on his own thoughts by the hour together. It may be that he will smoke; but after a while his cigar will come to an end. He sits on, however, certainly patient, and apparently contented. It may be that he chews, but if so, he does it with motionless jaws, and so slow a mastication of the pabulum on which he feeds, that his employment in this respect only disturbs the absolute quiet of the circle when, at certain long, distant intervals, he deposits the secretion of his tobacco in an ornamental utensil which may probably be placed in the furthest corner of the hall. But during all this time he is happy. It does not fret him to sit there and think and do nothing. He is by no means an idle man,—probably one much given to commercial enterprise. Idle men out there in the West we may say there are none. How should any idle man live in such a country? All who were sitting hour after hour in that circle round the stove of the Crossline Hotel hall,—sitting there hour after hour in silence, as I could not sit,—were men who earned their bread by labour. They were farmers, mechanics, storekeepers; there was a lawyer or two, and one clergyman. Sufficient conversation took place at first to indicate the professions of many of them. One may conclude that there could not be place there for an idle man. But they all of them had a capacity for a prolonged state of doing nothing, which is to me unintelligible, and which is very much to be envied. They are patient as cows, which from hour to hour lie on the grass chewing their cud. An Englishman, if he be kept waiting by a train in some forlorn station in which he can find no employment, curses his fate and all that has led to his present misfortune with an energy which tells the story of his deep and thorough misery. Such, I confess, is my state of existence under such circumstances. But a western American gives himself up to "loafing," and is quite happy. He balances himself on the back legs of an arm-chair, and remains so, without speaking, drinking, or smoking for an hour at a stretch; and while he is doing so he looks as though he had all that he desired. I believe that he is happy, and that he has all that he wants for such an occasion;—an arm-chair in which to sit, and a stove on which he can put his feet, and by which he can make himself warm.
Such was not the phase of character which I had expected to find among the people of the West. Of all virtues, patience would have been the last which I should have thought of attributing to them. I should have expected to see them angry when robbed of their time, and irritable under the stress of such grievances as railway delays; but they are never irritable under such circumstances as I have attempted to describe, nor, indeed, are they a people prone to irritation under any grievances. Even in political matters they are long-enduring, and do not form themselves into mobs for the expression of hot opinion. We in England thought that masses of the people would rise in anger if Mr. Lincoln's government should consent to give up Slidell and Mason; but the people bore it without any rising. The habeas corpus has been suspended, the liberty of the press has been destroyed for a time, the telegraph wires have been taken up by the government into their own hands; but nevertheless the people have said nothing. There has been no rising of a mob, and not even an expression of an adverse opinion. The people require to be allowed to vote periodically, and having acquired that privilege permit other matters to go by the board. In this respect we have, I think, in some degree misunderstood their character. They have all been taught to reverence the nature of that form of government under which they live, but they are not specially addicted to hot political fermentation. They have learned to understand that democratic institutions have given them liberty, and on that subject they entertain a strong conviction which is universal. But they have not habitually interested themselves deeply in the doings of their legislators or of their government. On the subject of slavery there have been and are different opinions, held with great tenacity and maintained occasionally with violence; but on other subjects of daily policy the American people have not, I think, been eager politicians. Leading men in public life have been much less trammelled by popular will than among us. Indeed with us the most conspicuous of our statesmen and legislators do not lead, but are led. In the States the noted politicians of the day have been the leaders, and not unfrequently the coercers of opinion. Seeing this, I claim for England a broader freedom in political matters than the States have as yet achieved. In speaking of the American form of government, I will endeavour to explain more clearly the ideas which I have come to hold on this matter.
I survived my delay at Seymour, after which I passed again through Cincinnati, and then survived my subsequent delay at Crossline. As to Cincinnati, I must put on record the result of a country walk which I took there,—or rather on which I was taken by my friend. He professed to know the beauties of the neighbourhood, and to be well acquainted with all that was attractive in its vicinity. Cincinnati is built on the Ohio, and is closely surrounded by picturesque hills which overhang the suburbs of the city. Over these I was taken, ploughing my way through a depth of mud which cannot be understood by any ordinary Englishman. But the depth of mud was not the only impediment, nor the worst which we encountered. As we began to ascend from the level of the outskirts of the town we were greeted by a rising flavour in the air, which soon grew into a strong odour, and at last developed itself into a stench that surpassed in offensiveness anything that my nose had ever hitherto suffered. When we were at the worst we hardly knew whether to descend or to proceed. It had so increased in virulence, that at one time I felt sure that it arose from some matter buried in the ground beneath my feet. But my friend, who declared himself to be quite at home in Cincinnati matters, and to understand the details of the great Cincinnati trade, declared against this opinion of mine. Hogs, he said, were at the bottom of it. It was the odour of hogs going up to the Ohio heavens;—of hogs in a state of transit from hoggish nature to clothes-brushes, saddles, sausages, and lard. He spoke with an authority that constrained belief; but I can never forgive him in that he took me over those hills, knowing all that he professed to know. Let the visitors to Cincinnati keep themselves within the city, and not wander forth among the mountains. It is well that the odour of hogs should ascend to heaven and not hang heavy over the streets; but it is not well to intercept that odour in its ascent. My friend became ill with fever, and had to betake himself to the care of nursing friends; so that I parted company with him at Cincinnati. I did not tell him that his illness was deserved as well as natural, but such was my feeling on the matter. I myself happily escaped the evil consequences which his imprudence might have entailed on me.
I passed again through Pittsburg, and over the Alleghany mountains by Altoona, and down to Baltimore,—back into civilization, secession, conversation, and gastronomy. I never had secessionist sympathies and never expressed them. I always believed in the North as a people,—discrediting, however, to the utmost the existing northern Government, or, as I should more properly say, the existing northern Cabinet; but nevertheless, with such feelings and such belief, I found myself very happy at Baltimore. Putting aside Boston, which must, I think, be generally preferred by Englishmen to any other city in the States, I should choose Baltimore as my residence if I were called upon to live in America. I am not led to this opinion, if I know myself, solely by the canvas-back ducks; and as to the terrapins, I throw them to the winds. The madeira, which is still kept there with a reverence which I should call superstitious were it not that its free circulation among outside worshippers prohibits the just use of such a word, may have something to do with it; as may also the beauty of the women,—to some small extent. Trifles do bear upon our happiness in a manner that we do not ourselves understand, and of which we are unconscious. But there was an English look about the streets and houses which I think had as much to do with it as either the wine, the women, or the ducks; and it seemed to me as though the manners of the people of Maryland were more English than those of other Americans. I do not say that they were on this account better. My English hat is, I am well aware, less graceful, and I believe less comfortable, than a Turkish fez and turban; nevertheless I prefer my English hat. New York I regard as the most thoroughly American of all American cities. It is by no means the one in which I should find myself the happiest, but I do not on that account condemn it.
I have said that in returning to Baltimore I found myself among secessionists. In so saying, I intend to speak of a certain set whose influence depends perhaps more on their wealth, position, and education than on their numbers. I do not think that the population of the city was then in favour of secession, even if it had ever been so. I believe that the mob of Baltimore is probably the roughest mob in the States,—is more akin to a Paris mob, and I may, perhaps, also say to a Manchester mob, than that of any other American city. There are more roughs in Baltimore than elsewhere, and the roughs there are rougher. In those early days of secession, when the troops were being first hurried down from New England for the protection of Washington, this mob was vehemently opposed to its progress. Men had been taught to think that the rights of the State of Maryland were being invaded by the passage of the soldiers; and they also were undoubtedly imbued with a strong prepossession for the southern cause. The two ideas had then gone together. But the mob of Baltimore had ceased to be secessionists within twelve months of their first exploit. In April, 1861, they had refused to allow Massachusetts soldiers to pass through the town on their way to Washington; and in February, 1862, they were nailing Union flags on the door-posts of those who refused to display such banners as signs of triumph at the northern victories!
That Maryland can ever go with the South, even in the event of the South succeeding in secession, no Marylander can believe. It is not pretended that there is any struggle now going on with such an object. No such result has been expected, certainly since the possession of Washington was secured to the North by the army of the Potomac. By few, I believe, was such a result expected even when Washington was insecure. And yet the feeling for secession among a certain class in Baltimore is as strong now as ever it was. And it is equally strong in certain districts of the State,—in those districts which are most akin to Virginia in their habits, modes of thought, and ties of friendship. These men, and these women also, pray for the South if they be pious, give their money to the South if they be generous, work for the South if they be industrious, fight for the South if they be young, and talk for the South morning, noon, and night in spite of General Dix and his columbiads on Federal Hill. It is in vain to say that such men and women have no strong feeling on the matter, and that they are praying, working, fighting, and talking under dictation. Their hearts are in it. And judging from them, even though there were no other evidence from which to judge, I have no doubt that a similar feeling is strong through all the seceding States. On this subject the North, I think, deceives itself in supposing that the southern rebellion has been carried on without any strong feeling on the part of the southern people. Whether the mob of Charleston be like the mob of Baltimore I cannot tell; but I have no doubt as to the gentry of Charleston and the gentry of Baltimore being in accord on the subject.
In what way, then, when the question has been settled by the force of arms, will these classes find themselves obliged to act? In Virginia and Maryland they comprise, as a rule, the highest and best educated of the people. As to parts of Kentucky the same thing may be said, and probably as to the whole of Tennessee. It must be remembered that this is not as though certain aristocratic families in a few English counties should find themselves divided off from the politics and national aspirations of their countrymen,—as was the case long since with reference to the Roman Catholic adherents of the Stuarts, and as has been the case since then in a lesser degree with the firmest of the old Tories who had allowed themselves to be deceived by Sir Robert Peel. In each of these cases the minority of dissentients was so small that the nation suffered nothing, though individuals were all but robbed of their nationality. But as regards America it must be remembered that each State has in itself a governing power, and is in fact a separate people. Each has its own legislature, and must have its own line of politics.
The secessionists of Maryland and of Virginia may consent to live in obscurity; but if this be so, who is to rule in those States? From whence are to come the senators and the members of Congress; the governors and attorney-generals? From whence is to come the national spirit of the two States, and the salt that shall preserve their political life? I have never believed that these States would succeed in secession. I have always felt that they would be held within the Union, whatever might be their own wishes. But I think that they will be so held in a manner and after a fashion that will render any political vitality almost impossible till a new generation shall have sprung up. In the meantime life goes on pleasantly enough in Baltimore, and ladies meet together, knitting stockings and sewing shirts for the southern soldiers, while the gentlemen talk southern politics and drink the health of the (southern) President in ambiguous terms, as our Cavaliers used to drink the health of the king.
During my second visit to Baltimore I went over to Washington for a day or two, and found the capital still under the empire of King Mud. How the elite of a nation—for the inhabitants of Washington consider themselves to be the elite—can consent to live in such a state of thraldom, a foreigner cannot understand. Were I to say that it was intended to be typical of the condition of the government, I might be considered cynical; but undoubtedly the sloughs of despond which were deepest in their despondency were to be found in localities which gave an appearance of truth to such a surmise. The Secretary of State's office in which Mr. Seward was still reigning, though with diminished glory, was divided from the Head-Quarters of the Commander-in-Chief, which are immediately opposite to it, by an opaque river which admitted of no transit. These buildings stand at the corner of President Square, and it had been long understood that any close intercourse between them had not been considered desirable by the occupants of the military side of the causeway. But the Secretary of State's office was altogether unapproachable without a long circuit and begrimed legs. The Secretary-at-War's department was, if possible, in a worse condition. This is situated on the other side of the President's house, and the mud lay, if possible, thicker in this quarter than it did round Mr. Seward's chambers. The passage over Pennsylvania Avenue, immediately in front of the War Office, was a thing not to be attempted in those days. Mr. Cameron, it is true, had gone, and Mr. Stanton was installed; but the labour of cleansing the interior of that establishment had hitherto allowed no time for a glance at the exterior dirt, and Mr. Stanton should, perhaps, be held as excused. That the Navy Office should be buried in mud, and quite debarred from approach, was to be expected. The space immediately in front of Mr. Lincoln's own residence was still kept fairly clean, and I am happy to be able to give testimony to this effect. Long may it remain so. I could not, however, but think that an energetic and careful President would have seen to the removal of the dirt from his own immediate neighbourhood. It was something that his own shoes should remain unpolluted; but the foul mud always clinging to the boots and leggings of those by whom he was daily surrounded must, I should think, have been offensive to him. The entrance to the Treasury was difficult to achieve by those who had not learned by practice the ways of the place; but I must confess that a tolerably clear passage was maintained on that side which led immediately down to the halls of Congress. Up at the Capitol the mud was again triumphant in the front of the building; this however was not of great importance, as the legislative chambers of the States are always reached by the back-door. I, on this occasion, attempted to leave the building by the grand entrance, but I soon became entangled among rivers of mud and mazes of shifting sand. With difficulty I recovered my steps, and finding my way back to the building was forced to content myself by an exit among the crowd of senators and representatives who were thronging down the back-stairs.
Of dirt of all kinds it behoves Washington and those concerned in Washington to make themselves free. It is the Augean stables through which some American Hercules must turn a purifying river before the American people can justly boast either of their capital or of their government. As to the material mud, enough has been said. The presence of the army perhaps caused it, and the excessive quantity of rain which had fallen may also be taken as a fair plea. But what excuse shall we find for that other dirt? It also had been caused by the presence of the army, and by that long-continued down-pouring of contracts which had fallen like DanaË's golden shower into the laps of those who understood how to avail themselves of such heavenly waters. The leaders of the rebellion are hated in the North. The names of Jefferson Davis, of Cobb, Tombes, and Floyd are mentioned with execration by the very children. This has sprung from a true and noble feeling; from a patriotic love of national greatness and a hatred of those who, for small party purposes, have been willing to lessen the name of the United States. I have reverenced the feeling even when I have not shared it. But, in addition to this, the names of those also should be execrated who have robbed their country when pretending to serve it; who have taken its wages in the days of its great struggle, and at the same time have filched from its coffers; who have undertaken the task of steering the ship through the storm in order that their hands might be deep in the meal-tub and the bread-basket, and that they might stuff their own sacks with the ship's provisions. These are the men who must be loathed by the nation,—whose fate must be held up as a warning to others before good can come! Northern men and women talk of hanging Davis and his accomplices. I myself trust that there will be no hanging when the war is over. I believe there will be none, for the Americans are not a blood-thirsty people. But if punishment of any kind be meted out, the men of the North should understand that they have worse offenders among them than Davis and Floyd.
At the period of which I am now speaking, there had come a change over the spirit of Mr. Lincoln's cabinet. Mr. Seward was still his Secretary of State, but he was, as far as outside observers could judge, no longer his Prime Minister. In the early days of the war, and up to the departure of Mr. Cameron from out of the cabinet, Mr. Seward had been the Minister of the nation. In his despatches he talks ever of We or of I. In every word of his official writings, of which a large volume has been published, he shows plainly that he intends to be considered as the man of the day,—as the hero who is to bring the States through their difficulties. Mr. Lincoln may be King, but Mr. Seward is Mayor of the Palace and carries the King in his pocket. From the depth of his own wisdom he undertakes to teach his ministers in all parts of the world, not only their duties, but their proper aspiration. He is equally kind to foreign statesmen, and sends to them messages as though from an altitude which no European politician had ever reached. At home he has affected the Prime Minister in everything, dropping the We and using the I in a manner that has hardly made up by its audacity for its deficiency in discretion. It is of course known everywhere that he had run Mr. Lincoln very hard for the position of republican candidate for the Presidency. Mr. Lincoln beat him, and Mr. Seward is well aware that in the States a man has never a second chance for the Presidential chair. Hence has arisen his ambition to make for himself a new place in the annals of American politics. Hitherto there has been no Prime Minister known in the Government of the United States. Mr. Seward has attempted a revolution in that matter, and has essayed to fill the situation. For awhile it almost seemed that he was successful. He interfered with the army, and his interferences were endured. He took upon himself the business of the police, and arrested men at his own will and pleasure. The habeas corpus was in his hand, and his name was current through the States as a covering authority for every outrage on the old laws. Sufficient craft, or perhaps cleverness, he possessed to organize a position which should give him a power greater than the power of the President; but he had not the genius which would enable him to hold it. He made foolish prophecies about the war, and talked of the triumphs which he would win. He wrote state papers on matters which he did not understand, and gave himself the airs of diplomatic learning while he showed himself to be sadly ignorant of the very rudiments of diplomacy. He tried to joke as Lord Palmerston jokes, and nobody liked his joking. He was greedy after the little appanages of power, taking from others who loved them as well as he did, privileges with which he might have dispensed. And then, lastly, he was successful in nothing. He had given himself out as the commander of the Commander-in-Chief; but then under his command nothing got itself done. For a month or two some men had really believed in Mr. Seward. The policemen of the country had come to have an absolute trust in him, and the underlings of the public offices were beginning to think that he might be a great man. But then, as is ever the case with such men, there came suddenly a downfall. Mr. Cameron went from the cabinet, and everybody knew that Mr. Seward would be no longer commander of the Commander-in-Chief. His prime ministership was gone from him, and he sank down into the comparatively humble position of Minister for Foreign Affairs. His lettres de cachet no longer ran. His passport system was repealed. His prisoners were released. And though it is too much to say that writs of habeas corpus were no longer suspended, the effect and very meaning of the suspension were at once altered. When I first left Washington Mr. Seward was the only minister of the cabinet whose name was ever mentioned with reference to any great political measure. When I returned to Washington Mr. Stanton was Mr. Lincoln's leading minister, and, as Secretary-at-War, had practically the management of the army and of the internal police.
I have spoken here of Mr. Seward by name, and in my preceding paragraphs I have alluded with some asperity to the dishonesty of certain men who had obtained political power under Mr. Lincoln and used it for their own dishonest purposes. I trust that I may not be understood as bringing any such charges against Mr. Seward. That such dishonesty has been frightfully prevalent all men know who knew anything of Washington during the year 1861. In a former chapter I have alluded to this more at length, stating circumstances and in some cases giving the names of the persons charged with offences. Whenever I have done so, I have based my statements on the Van Wyck Report, and the evidence therein given. This is the published report of a Committee appointed by the House of Representatives; and as it has been before the world for some months without refutation, I think that I have a right to presume it to be true.*
*I ought perhaps to state that General Fremont has published an answer to the charges preferred against him. That answer refers chiefly to matters of military capacity or incapacity, as to which I have expressed no opinion. General Fremont does allude to the accusations made against him regarding the building of the forts;—but in doing so he seems to me rather to admit than to deny the facts as stated by the Committee. [back]
At the period of which I am writing, February, 1862, the long list of military successes which attended the northern army through the late winter and early spring had commenced. Fort Henry, on the Tennessee river, had first been taken, and after that, Fort Donnelson on the Cumberland river, also in the State of Tennessee. Price had been driven out of Missouri into Arkansas by General Curtis, acting under General Halleck's orders. The chief body of the Confederate army in the West had abandoned the fortified position which they had long held at Bowling Green, in the south-western district of Kentucky. Roanoke Island, on the coast of North Carolina, had been taken by General Burnside's expedition, and a belief had begun to manifest itself in Washington that the army of the Potomac was really about to advance. It is impossible to explain in what way the renewed confidence of the northern party showed itself, or how one learned that the hopes of the secessionists were waxing dim; but it was so; and even a stranger became aware of the general feeling as clearly as though it were a defined and established fact. In the early part of the winter, when I reached Washington, the feeling ran all the other way. Northern men did not say that they were despondent; they did not with spoken words express diffidence as to their success; but their looks betrayed diffidence, and the moderation of their self-assurance almost amounted to despondency. In the capital the parties were very much divided. The old inhabitants were either secessionists or influenced by "secession proclivities," as the word went; but the men of the government and of the two houses of Congress were, with a few exceptions, of course northern. It should be understood that these parties were at variance with each other on almost every point as to which men can disagree. In our civil war it may be presumed that all Englishmen were at any rate anxious for England. They desired and fought for different modes of government; but each party was equally English in its ambition. In the States there is the hatred of a different nationality added to the rancour of different politics. The Southerners desire to be a people of themselves,—to divide themselves by every possible mark of division from New England; to be as little akin to New York as they are to London,—or if possible less so. Their habits, they say, are different; their education, their beliefs, their propensities, their very virtues and vices are not the education, or the beliefs, or the propensities, or the virtues and vices of the North. The bond that ties them to the North is to them a Mezentian marriage, and they hate their northern spouses with a Mezentian hatred. They would be anything sooner than citizens of the United States. They see to what Mexico has come, and the republics of Central America; but the prospect of even that degradation is less bitter to them than a share in the glory of the stars and stripes. Better, with them, to reign in hell than serve in heaven! It is not only in politics that they will be beaten, if they be beaten,—as one party with us may be beaten by another; but they will be beaten as we should be beaten if France annexed us, and directed that we should live under French rule. Let an Englishman digest and realize that idea, and he will comprehend the feelings of a southern gentleman as he contemplates the probability that his State will be brought back into the Union. And the northern feeling is as strong. The northern man has founded his national ambition on the territorial greatness of his nation. He has panted for new lands, and for still extended boundaries. The western world has opened her arms to him, and has seemed to welcome him as her only lord. British America has tempted him towards the north, and Mexico has been as a prey to him on the south. He has made maps of his empire, including all the continent, and has preached the Monroe doctrine as though it had been decreed by the gods. He has told the world of his increasing millions, and has never yet known his store to diminish. He has pawed in the valley, and rejoiced in his strength. He has said among the trumpets, Ha, ha! He has boasted aloud in his pride, and called on all men to look at his glory. And now shall he be divided and shorn? Shall he be hemmed in from his ocean and shut off from his rivers? Shall he have a hook run into his nostrils, and a thorn driven into his jaw? Shall men say that his day is over, when he has hardly yet tasted the full cup of his success? Has his young life been a dream, and not a truth? Shall he never reach that giant manhood which the growth of his boyish years has promised him? If the South goes from him, he will be divided, shorn, and hemmed in. The hook will have pierced his nose, and the thorn will fester in his jaw. Men will taunt him with his former boastings, and he will awake to find himself but a mortal among mortals.
Such is the light in which the struggle is regarded by the two parties, and such the hopes and feelings which have been engendered. It may therefore be surmised with what amount of neighbourly love secessionist and northern neighbours regarded each other in such towns as Baltimore and Washington. Of course there was hatred of the deepest dye; of course there were muttered curses, or curses which sometimes were not simply muttered. Of course there were wretchedness, heart-burnings, and fearful divisions in families. That, perhaps, was the worst of all. The daughter's husband would be in the northern ranks, while the son was fighting in the South; or two sons would hold equal rank in the two armies, sometimes sending to each other frightful threats of personal vengeance. Old friends would meet each other in the street, passing without speaking; or, worse still, would utter words of insult for which payment is to be demanded when a southern gentleman may again be allowed to quarrel in his own defence.
And yet society went on. Women still smiled, and men were happy to whom such smiles were given. Cakes and ale were going and ginger was still hot in the mouth. When many were together no words of unhappiness were heard. It was at those small meetings of two or three that women would weep instead of smiling, and that men would run their hands through their hair and sit in silence, thinking of their ruined hopes and divided children.
I have spoken of southern hopes and northern fears, and have endeavoured to explain the feelings of each party. For myself I think that the Southerners have been wrong in their hopes, and that those of the North have been wrong in their fears. It is not better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. Of course a southern gentleman will not admit the premises which are here by me taken for granted. The hell to which I allude is, the sad position of a low and debased nation. Such, I think, will be the fate of the Gulf States, if they succeed in obtaining secession,—of a low and debased nation, or, worse still, of many low and debased nations. They will have lost their cotton monopoly by the competition created during the period of the war, and will have no material of greatness on which either to found themselves or to flourish. That they had much to bear when linked with the North, much to endure on account of that slavery from which it was all but impossible that they should disentangle themselves, may probably be true. But so have all political parties among all free nations much to bear from political opponents, and yet other free nations do not go to pieces. Had it been possible that the slave-owners and slave properties should have been scattered in parts through all the States and not congregated in the South, the slave party would have maintained itself as other parties do; but in such case, as a matter of course, it would not have thought of secession. It has been the close vicinity of slave-owners to each other, the fact that their lands have been coterminous, that theirs was especially a cotton district, which has tempted them to secession. They have been tempted to secession, and will, as I think, still achieve it in those Gulf States,—much to their misfortune.
And the fears of the North are, I think, equally wrong. That they will be deceived as to that Monroe doctrine is no doubt more than probable. That ambition for an entire continent under one rule will not, I should say, be gratified. But not on that account need the nation be less great, or its civilization less extensive. That hook in its nose and that thorn in its jaw will, after all, be but a hook of the imagination and an ideal thorn. Do not all great men suffer such ere their greatness be established and acknowledged? There is scope enough for all that manhood can do between the Atlantic and the Pacific, even though those hot, swampy cotton-fields be taken away; even though the snows of the British provinces be denied to them. And as for those rivers and that sea-board, the Americans of the North will have lost much of their old energy and usual force of will, if any southern Confederacy be allowed to deny their right of way or to stop their commercial enterprises. I believe that the South will be badly off without the North; but I feel certain that the North will never miss the South when once the wounds to her pride have been closed.
From Washington I journeyed back to Boston through the cities which I had visited in coming thither, and stayed again on my route for a few days at Baltimore, at Philadelphia, and at New York. At each town there were those whom I now regarded almost as old friends, and as the time of my departure drew near I felt a sorrow that I was not to be allowed to stay longer. As the general result of my sojourn in the country, I must declare that I was always happy and comfortable in the eastern cities, and generally unhappy and uncomfortable in the West. I had previously been inclined to think that I should like the roughness of the West, and that in the East I should encounter an arrogance which would have kept me always on the verge of hot water; but in both these surmises I found myself to have been wrong. And I think that most English travellers would come to the same conclusion. The western people do not mean to be harsh or uncivil, but they do not make themselves pleasant. In all the eastern cities,—I speak of the eastern cities north of Washington,—a society may be found which must be esteemed as agreeable by Englishmen who like clever genial men, and who love clever pretty women.
I was forced to pass twice again over the road between New York and Boston, as the packet by which I intended to leave America was fixed to sail from the former port. I had promised myself, and had promised others, that I would spend in Boston the last week of my sojourn in the States, and this was a promise which I was by no means inclined to break. If there be a gratification in this world which has no alloy, it is that of going to an assured welcome. The belief that men's arms and hearts are open to receive one,—and the arms and hearts of women, too, as far as they allow themselves to open them,—is the salt of the earth, the sole remedy against sea-sickness, the only cure for the tedium of railways, the one preservative amidst all the miseries and fatigue of travel. These matters are private, and should hardly be told of in a book; but in writing of the States, I should not do justice to my own convictions of the country if I did not say how pleasantly social intercourse there will ripen into friendship, and how full of love that friendship may become. I became enamoured of Boston at last. Beacon Street was very pleasant to me, and the view over Boston Common was dear to my eyes. Even the State House, with its great yellow-painted dome, became sightly; and the sunset over the western waters that encompass the city beats all other sunsets that I have seen.
During my last week there the world of Boston was moving itself on sleighs. There was not a wheel to be seen in the town. The omnibuses and public carriages had been dismounted from their axles and put themselves upon snow runners, and the private world had taken out its winter carriages, and wrapped itself up in buffalo robes. Men now spoke of the coming thaw as of a misfortune which must come, but which a kind Providence might perhaps postpone,—as we all, in short, speak of death. In the morning the snow would have been hardened by the night's frost, and men would look happy and contented. By an hour after noon the streets would be all wet, and the ground would be slushy and men would look gloomy and speak of speedy dissolution. There were those who would always prophesy that the next day would see the snow converted into one dull, dingy river. Such I regarded as seers of tribulation, and endeavoured with all my mind to disbelieve their interpretations of the signs. That sleighing was excellent fun. For myself I must own that I hardly saw the best of it at Boston, for the coming of the end was already at hand when I arrived there, and the fresh beauty of the hard snow was gone. Moreover when I essayed to show my prowess with a pair of horses on the established course for such equipages, the beasts ran away, knowing that I was not practised in the use of snow chariots, and brought me to grief and shame. There was a lady with me on the sleigh whom, for a while, I felt that I was doomed to consign to a snowy grave,—whom I would willingly have overturned into a drift of snow, so as to avoid worse consequences, had I only known how to do so. But Providence, even though without curbs and assisted only by simple snaffles, did at last prevail; and I brought the sleigh, horses, and lady alive back to Boston, whether with or without permanent injury I have never yet ascertained.
At last the day of tribulation came, and the snow was picked up and carted out of Boston. Gangs of men, standing shoulder to shoulder, were at work along the chief streets, picking, shovelling, and disposing of the dirty blocks. Even then the snow seemed to be nearly a foot thick; but it was dirty, rough, half-melted in some places, though hard as stone in others. The labour and cost of cleansing the city in this way must be very great. The people were at it as I left, and I felt that the day of tribulation had in truth come.
Farewell to thee, thou western Athens! When I have forgotten thee my right hand shall have forgotten its cunning, and my heart forgotten its pulses. Let us look at the list of names with which Boston has honoured itself in our days, and then ask what other town of the same size has done more. Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Dana, Agassiz, Holmes, Hawthorne! Who is there among us in England who has not been the better for these men? Who does not owe to some of them a debt of gratitude? In whose ears is not their names familiar? It is a bright galaxy and far extended, for so small a city. What city has done better than this? All these men, save one, are now alive and in the full possession of their powers. What other town of the same size has done as well in the same short space of time? It may be that this is the Augustan Æra of Boston,—its Elizabethan time. If so, I am thankful that my steps have wandered thither at such a period.
While I was at Boston I had the sad privilege of attending the funeral of President Felton, the head of Harvard College. A few months before I had seen him a strong man, apparently in perfect health and in the pride of life. When I reached Boston, I heard of his death. He also was an accomplished scholar, and as a Grecian has left few behind him who were his equals. At his installation as President, four ex-Presidents of Harvard College assisted. Whether they were all present at his funeral I do not know, but I do know that they were all still living. These are Mr. Quincy, who is now over ninety; Mr. Sparks; Mr. Everett, the well-known orator; and Mr. Walker. They all reside in Boston or its neighbourhood, and will probably all assist at the installation of another President.
CHAPTER IX.
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.
It is, I presume, universally known that the citizens of the Western American colonies of Great Britain which revolted, declared themselves to be free from British dominion by an Act which they called the Declaration of Independence. This was done on the 4th of July, 1776, and was signed by delegates from the thirteen colonies, or States as they then called themselves. These delegates in this document declare themselves to be the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled. The opening and close of this declaration have in them much that is grand and striking; the greater part of it, however, is given up to enumerating, in paragraph after paragraph, the sins committed by George III. against the colonies. Poor George III.! There is no one now to say a good word for him; but of all those who have spoken ill of him, this declaration is the loudest in its censure.
In the following year, on the 15th November, 1777, were drawn up the Articles of Confederation between the States, by which it was then intended that a sufficient bond and compact should be made for their future joint existence and preservation. A reference to this document, which, together with the Declaration of Independence and the subsequently framed Constitution of the United States, is given in the Appendix, will show how slight was the then intended bond of union between the States. The second article declares that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence. The third article avows that "the said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made upon, them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretext whatever." And the third article, "the better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship," declares that the free citizens of one State shall be free citizens of another. From this it is, I think, manifest that no idea of one united nation had at that time been received and adopted by the citizens of the States. The articles then go on to define the way in which Congress shall assemble and what shall be its powers. This Congress was to exercise the authority of a national Government rather than perform the work of a national Parliament. It was intended to be executive rather than legislative. It was to consist of delegates, the very number of which within certain limits was to be left to the option of the individual States, and to this Congress was to be confided certain duties and privileges, which could not be performed or exercised separately by the Governments of the individual States. One special article, the eleventh, enjoins that "Canada, acceding to the Confederation, and joining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted into the same unless such admission be agreed to by nine States." I mention this to show how strong was the expectation at that time that Canada also would revolt from England. Up to this day few Americans can understand why Canada has declined to join her lot to them.
But the compact between the different States made by the Articles of Confederation, and the mode of national procedure therein enjoined, were found to be inefficient for the wants of a people who to be great must be united in fact as well as in name. The theory of the most democratic among the Americans of that day was in favour of self-government carried to an extreme. Self-government was the Utopia which they had determined to realize, and they were unwilling to diminish the reality of the self-government of the individual States by any centralization of power in one head, or in one Parliament, or in one set of ministers for the nation. For ten years, from 1777 to 1787, the attempt was made; but then it was found that a stronger bond of nationality was indispensable, if any national greatness was to be regarded as desirable. Indeed, all manner of failure had attended the mode of national action ordained by the Articles of Confederation. I am not attempting to write a history of the United States, and will not therefore trouble my readers with historic details, which are not of value unless put forward with historic weight. The fact of the failure is however admitted, and the present written constitution of the United States, which is the splendid result of that failure, was "Done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the States present."*
*It must not, however, be supposed that by this "doing in convention," the constitution became an accepted fact. It simply amounted to the adoption of a proposal of the constitution. The constitution itself was formally adopted by the people in conventions held in their separate State capitals. It was agreed to by the people in 1788, and came into operation in 1789. [back]
I call the result splendid, seeing that under this constitution so written a nation has existed for three quarters of a century and has grown in numbers, power, and wealth till it has made itself the political equal of the other greatest nations of the earth. And it cannot be said that it has so grown in spite of the constitution, or by ignoring the constitution. Hitherto the laws there laid down for the national guidance have been found adequate for the great purpose assigned to them, and have done all that which the framers of them hoped that they might effect. We all know what has been the fate of the constitutions which were written throughout the French revolution for the use of France. We all, here in England, have the same ludicrous conception of Utopian theories of government framed by philosophical individuals who imagine that they have learned from books a perfect system of managing nations. To produce such theories is especially the part of a Frenchman; to disbelieve in them is especially the part of an Englishman. But in the States a system of government has been produced, under a written constitution, in which no Englishman can disbelieve, and which every Frenchman must envy. It has done its work. The people have been free, well-educated, and politically great. Those among us who are most inclined at the present moment to declare that the institutions of the United States have failed, can at any rate only declare that they have failed in their finality; that they have shown themselves to be insufficient to carry on the nation in its advancing strides through all times. They cannot deny that an amount of success and prosperity, much greater than the nation even expected for itself, has been achieved under this constitution and in connection with it. If it be so they cannot disbelieve in it. Let those who now say that it is insufficient, consider what their prophecies regarding it would have been had they been called on to express their opinions concerning it when it was proposed in 1787. If the future as it has since come forth had then been foretold for it, would not such a prophecy have been a prophecy of success? That constitution is now at the period of its hardest trial, and at this moment one may hardly dare to speak of it with triumph; but looking at the nation even in its present position, I think I am justified in saying that its constitution is one in which no Englishman can disbelieve. When I also say that it is one which every Frenchman must envy, perhaps I am improperly presuming that Frenchmen could not look at it with Englishmen's eyes.
When the constitution came to be written, a man had arisen in the States who was peculiarly suited for the work in hand; he was one of those men to whom the world owes much, and of whom the world in general knows but little. This was Alexander Hamilton, who alone on the part of the great State of New York signed the constitution of the United States. The other States sent two, three, four, or more delegates; New York sent Hamilton alone; but in sending him New York sent more to the constitution than all the other States together. I should be hardly saying too much for Hamilton if I were to declare that all those parts of the constitution emanated from him in which permanent political strength has abided. And yet his name has not been spread abroad widely in men's mouths. Of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison, we have all heard; our children speak of them and they are household words in the nursery of history. Of Hamilton however it may, I believe, be said that he was greater than any of those.
Without going with minuteness into the early contests of democracy in the United States, I think I may say that there soon arose two parties, each probably equally anxious in the cause of freedom, one of which was conspicuous for its French predilections, and the other for its English aptitudes. It was the period of the French revolution,—the time when the French revolution had in it as yet something of promise, and had not utterly disgraced itself. To many in America the French theory of democracy not unnaturally endeared itself, and foremost among these was Thomas Jefferson. He was the father of those politicians in the States who have since taken the name of democrats, and in accordance with whose theory it has come to pass that everything has been referred to the universal suffrage of the people. James Madison, who succeeded Jefferson as President, was a pupil in this school, as indeed have been most of the Presidents of the United States. At the head of the other party, from which through various denominations have sprung those who now call themselves republicans, was Alexander Hamilton. I believe I may say that all the political sympathies of George Washington were with the same school. Washington, however, was rather a man of feeling and of action, than of theoretical policy or speculative opinion. When the constitution was written, Jefferson was in France, having been sent thither as minister from the United States, and he therefore was debarred from concerning himself personally in the matter. His views, however, were represented by Madison, and it is now generally understood that the Constitution, as it stands, is the joint work of Madison and Hamilton.*
*It should, perhaps, be explained that the views of Madison were originally not opposed to those of Hamilton. Madison, however, gradually adopted the policy of Jefferson,—his policy rather than his philosophy. [back]
The very preamble of the constitution at once declares that the people of the different States do hereby join themselves together with the view of forming themselves into one nation. "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." Here a great step was made towards centralization,—towards one national government and the binding together of the States into one nation. But from that time down to the present, the contest has been going on, sometimes openly and sometimes only within the minds of men, between the still alleged sovereignty of the individual States and the acknowledged sovereignty of the central Congress and central Government. The disciples of Jefferson,—even though they have not known themselves to be his disciples,—have been carrying on that fight for State rights which has ended in secession; and the disciples of Hamilton,—certainly not knowing themselves to be his disciples,—have been making that stand for central government, and for the one acknowledged republic, which is now at work in opposing secession, and which, even though secession should to some extent be accomplished, will, we may hope, nevertheless, and not the less on account of such secession, conquer and put down the spirit of democracy.
The political contest of parties which is being waged now, and which has been waged throughout the history of the United States, has been pursued on one side in support of that idea of an undivided nationality of which I have spoken,—of a nationality in which the interests of a part should be esteemed as the interests of the whole; and on the other side it has been pursued in opposition to that idea. I will not here go into the interminable question of slavery,—though it is on that question that the southern or democratic States have most loudly declared their own sovereign rights and their aversion to national interference. Were I to do so I should fail in my present object of explaining the nature of the constitution of the United States. But I protest against any argument which shall be used to show that the constitution has failed because it has allowed slavery to produce the present division among the States. I myself think that the Southern or Gulf States will go. I will not pretend to draw the exact line, or to say how many of them are doomed; but I believe that South Carolina with Georgia, and perhaps five or six others, will be extruded from the Union. But their very extrusion will be a political success, and will, in fact, amount to a virtual acknowledgment in the body of the Union of the truth of that system for which the conservative republican party has contended. If the North obtain the power of settling that question of boundary, the abandonment of those southern States will be a success, even though the privilege of retaining them be the very point for which the North is now in arms.
The first clause of the constitution declares that all the legislative powers granted by the constitution shall be vested in a Congress, which shall consist of a Senate and of a House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is to be rechosen every two years, and shall be elected by the people, such persons in each State having votes for the national Congress as have votes for the legislature of their own States. If therefore South Carolina should choose—as she has chosen—to declare that the electors of her own legislature shall possess a property qualification, the electors of members of Congress from South Carolina must also have that qualification. In Massachusetts universal suffrage now prevails, although it is not long since a low property qualification prevailed even in Massachusetts. It therefore follows that members of the House of Representatives in Congress need by no means be all chosen on the same principle. As a fact, universal suffrage*
*Perhaps the better word would have been manhood suffrage; and even that word should be taken with certain restrictions. Aliens, minors, convicts, and men who pay no taxes cannot vote. In some States none can vote unless they can read and write. In some there is a property qualification. In all there are special restrictions against negroes. There is in none an absolutely universal suffrage. But I keep the name as it best expresses to us in England the system of franchise which has practically come to prevail in the United States. [back]
The Senate of the United States is composed of two senators from each State. These senators are chosen for six years, and are elected in a manner which shows the conservative tendency of the constitution with more signification than perhaps any other rule which it contains. This branch of Congress, which, as I shall presently endeavour to show, is by far the more influential of the two, is not in any way elected by the people. "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two senators from each State, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years, and each senator shall have one voice." The Senate sent to Congress is therefore elected by the State legislatures. Each State legislature has two Houses; and the senators sent from that State to Congress are either chosen by vote of the two Houses voting together—which is, I believe, the mode adopted in most States, or are voted for in the two Houses separately—in which cases, when different candidates have been nominated, the two Houses confer by committees and settle the matter between them. The conservative purpose of the constitution is here sufficiently evident. The intention has been to take the election of the senators away from the people, and to confide it to that body in each State which may be regarded as containing its best trusted citizens. It removes the senators far away from the democratic element, and renders them liable to the necessity of no popular canvas. Nor am I aware that the constitution has failed in keeping the ground which it intended to hold in this matter. On some points its selected rocks and chosen standing ground have slipped from beneath its feet, owing to the weakness of words in defining and making solid the intended prohibitions against democracy. The wording of the constitution has been regarded by the people as sacred; but the people has considered itself justified in opposing the spirit as long as it revered the letter of the constitution. And this was natural. For the letter of the constitution can be read by all men; but its spirit can be understood comparatively but by few. As regards the election of the senators, I believe that it has been fairly made by the legislatures of the different States. I have not heard it alleged that members of the State legislatures have been frequently constrained by the outside popular voice to send this or that man as senator to Washington. It was clearly not the intention of those who wrote the constitution that they should be so constrained. But the Senators themselves in Washington have submitted to restraint. On subjects in which the people are directly interested they submit to instructions from the legislatures which have sent them as to the side on which they shall vote, and justify themselves in voting against their convictions by the fact that they have received such instructions. Such a practice, even with the members of a House which has been directly returned by popular election, is, I think, false to the intention of the system. It has clearly been intended that confidence should be put in the chosen candidate for the term of his duty, and that the electors are to be bound in the expression of their opinion by his sagacity and patriotism for that term. A member of a representative House so chosen, who votes at the bidding of his constituency in opposition to his convictions, is manifestly false to his charge, and may be presumed to be thus false in deference to his own personal interests, and with a view to his own future standing with his constituents. Pledges before election may be fair, because a pledge given is after all but the answer to a question asked. A voter may reasonably desire to know a candidate's opinion on any matter of political interest before he votes for or against him. The representative when returned should be free from the necessity of further pledges. But if this be true with a House elected by popular suffrage, how much more than true must it be with a chamber collected together as the Senate of the United States is collected! Nevertheless it is the fact that many senators, especially those who have been sent to the House as democrats, do allow the State legislatures to dictate to them their votes, and that they do hold themselves absolved from the personal responsibility of their votes by such dictation. This is one place in which the rock which was thought to have been firm has slipped away, and the sands of democracy have made their way through. But with reference to this it is always in the power of the Senate to recover its own ground, and re-establish its own dignity; to the people in this matter the words of the constitution give no authority, and all that is necessary for the recovery of the old practice is a more conservative tendency throughout the country generally. That there is such a conservative tendency no one can doubt; the fear is whether it may not work too quickly and go too far.
In speaking of these instructions given to senators at Washington, I should explain that such instructions are not given by all States, nor are they obeyed by all senators. Occasionally they are made in the form of requests, the word "instruct" being purposely laid aside. Requests of the same kind are also made to representatives, who, as they are not returned by the State legislatures, are not considered to be subject to such instructions. The form used is as follows: "We instruct our senators and request our representatives," &c. &c.
The senators are elected for six years, but the same Senate does not sit entire throughout that term. The whole chamber is divided into three equal portions or classes, and a portion goes out at the end of every second year; so that a third of the Senate comes in afresh with every new House of Representatives. The Vice-President of the United States, who is elected with the President, and who is not a senator by election from any State, is the ex-officio President of the Senate. Should the President of the United States vacate his seat by death or otherwise, the Vice-President becomes President of the United States; and in such case the Senate elects its own President pro tempore.
In speaking of the Senate, I must point out a matter to which the constitution does not allude, but which is of the gravest moment in the political fabric of the nation. Each State sends two senators to Congress. These two are sent altogether independently of the population which they represent, or of the number of members which the same State supplies to the Lower House. When the constitution was framed, Delaware was to send one member to the House of Representatives, and Pennsylvania eight; nevertheless, each of these States sent two senators. It would seem strange that a young people, commencing business as a nation on a basis intended to be democratic, should consent to a system so directly at variance with the theory of popular representation. It reminds one of the old days when Yorkshire returned two members, and Rutlandshire two also. And the discrepancy has greatly increased as young States have been added to the Union, while the old States have increased in population. New York, with a population of about 4,000,000, and with thirty-three members in the House of Representatives, sends two senators to Congress. The new State of Oregon, with a population of 50,000 or 60,000, and with one member in the House of Representatives, sends also two senators to Congress. But though it would seem that in such a distribution of legislative power, the young nation was determined to preserve some of the old fantastic traditions of the mother-country which it had just repudiated; the fact, I believe, is that this system, apparently so opposed to all democratic tendencies, was produced and specially insisted upon by democracy itself. Where would be the State sovereignty and individual existence of Rhode Island and Delaware, unless they could maintain, in at least one House of Congress, their State equality with that of all other States in the Union? In those early days, when the constitution was being framed, there was nothing to force the small States into a Union with those whose populations preponderated. Each State was sovereign in its municipal system, having preserved the boundaries of the old colony, together with the liberties and laws given to it under its old colonial charter. A union might be, and no doubt was, desirable; but it was to be a union of sovereign States, each retaining equal privileges in that union, and not a fusion of the different populations into one homogeneous whole. No State was willing to abandon its own individuality, and least of all were the small States willing to do so. It was therefore ordained that the House of Representatives should represent the people, and that the Senate should represent the States.
From that day to the present time the arrangement of which I am speaking has enabled the democratic or southern party to contend at a great advantage with the republicans of the North. When the constitution was founded, the seven northern States—I call those northern which are now free-soil States, and those southern in which the institution of slavery now prevails—the seven northern States were held to be entitled by their population to send thirty-five members to the House of Representatives, and they sent fourteen members to the Senate. The six southern States were entitled to thirty members in the Lower House, and to twelve senators. Thus the proportion was about equal for the North and South. But now,—or rather in 1860, when secession commenced,—the northern States, owing to the increase of population in the North, sent one hundred and fifty representatives to Congress, having nineteen States and thirty-eight senators; whereas the South, with fifteen States and thirty senators, was entitled by its population to only ninety representatives, although by a special rule in its favour, which I will presently explain, it was in fact allowed a greater number of representatives in proportion to its population than the North. Had an equal balance been preserved, the South, with its ninety representatives in the Lower House, would have but twenty-three senators, instead of thirty, in the Upper.*
*It is worthy of note that the new northern and western States have been brought into the Union by natural increase and the spread of population. But this has not been so with the new southern States. Louisiana and Florida were purchased, and Texas was—annexed. [back]
And here I must explain, in order that the nature of the contest may be understood, that the senators from the South maintained themselves ever in a compact body, voting together, true to each other, disciplined as a party, understanding the necessity of yielding in small things in order that their general line of policy might be maintained. But there was no such system, no such observance of political tactics among the senators of the North. Indeed, they appear to have had no general line of politics, having been divided among themselves on various matters. Many had strong southern tendencies, and many more were willing to obtain official power by the help of southern votes. There was no great bond of union among them, as slavery was among the senators from the South. And thus, from these causes, the power of the Senate and the power of the Government fell into the hands of the southern party.
I am aware that in going into these matters here I am departing somewhat from the subject of which this chapter is intended to treat; but I do not know that I could explain in any shorter way the manner in which those rules of the constitution have worked by which the composition of the Senate is fixed. That State basis, as opposed to a basis of population in the Upper House of Congress, has been the one great political weapon, both of offence and defence, in the hands of the democratic party. And yet I am not prepared to deny that great wisdom was shown in the framing of the constitution of the Senate. It was the object of none of the politicians then at work to create a code of rules for the entire governance of a single nation such as is England or France. Nor, had any American politician of the time so desired, would he have had reasonable hope of success. A federal union of separate sovereign States was the necessity, as it was also the desire, of all those who were concerned in the American policy of the day; and I think it may be understood and maintained that no such federal union would have been just, or could have been accepted by the smaller States, which did not in some direct way recognize their equality with the larger States. It is moreover to be observed, that in this, as in all matters, the claims of the minority were treated with indulgence. No ordinance of the constitution is made in a niggardly spirit. It would seem as though they who met together to do the work had been actuated by no desire for selfish preponderance or individual influence. No ambition to bind close by words which shall be exacting as well as exact is apparent. A very broad power of interpretation is left to those who were to be the future interpreters of the written document.
It is declared that "Representation and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union according to their respective numbers," thereby meaning that representation and taxation in the several States shall be adjusted according to the population. This clause ordains that throughout all the States a certain amount of population shall return a member to the Lower House of Congress,—say one member to 100,000 persons, as is I believe about the present proportion,—and that direct taxation shall be levied according to the number of representatives. If New York return thirty-three members and Kansas one, on New York shall be levied, for the purposes of the United States' revenue, thirty-three times as much direct taxation as on Kansas. This matter of direct taxation was not then, nor has it been since, matter of much moment. No direct taxation has hitherto been levied in the United States for national purposes. But the time has now come when this proviso will be a terrible stumbling-block in the way.
But before we go into that matter of taxation, I must explain how the South was again favoured with reference to its representation. As a matter of course no slaves, or even negroes—no men of colour—were to vote in the southern States. Therefore, one would say, that in counting up the people with reference to the number of the representatives, the coloured population should be ignored altogether. But it was claimed on behalf of the South that their property in slaves should be represented, and in compliance with this claim, although no slave can vote or in any way demand the services of a representative, the coloured people are reckoned among the population. When the numbers of the free persons are counted, to this number is added "three-fifths of all other persons." Five slaves are thus supposed to represent three white persons. From the wording, one would be led to suppose that there was some other category into which a man might be put besides that of free or slave! But it may be observed, that on this subject of slavery the framers of the constitution were tender-mouthed. They never speak of slavery or of a slave. It is necessary that the subject should be mentioned, and therefore we hear first of persons other than free, and then of persons bound to labour!
Such were the rules laid down for the formation of Congress, and the letter of those rules has, I think, been strictly observed. I have not thought it necessary to give all the clauses, but I believe I have stated those which are essential to a general understanding of the basis upon which Congress is founded. A reference to the Appendix will show all those which I have omitted.
The constitution ordains that members of both the Houses shall be paid for their time, but it does not decree the amount. "The senators and representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States." In the remarks which I have made as to the present Congress I have spoken of the amount now allowed. The understanding, I believe, is that the pay shall be enough for the modest support of a man who is supposed to have raised himself above the heads of the crowd. Much may be said in favour of this payment of legislators, but very much may also be said against it. There was a time when our members of the House of Commons were entitled to payment for their services, and when, at any rate, some of them took the money. It may be that with a new nation such an arrangement was absolutely necessary. Men whom the people could trust, and who would have been able to give up their time without payment, would not have probably been found in a new community. The choice of senators and of representatives would have been so limited that the legislative power would have fallen into the hands of a few rich men. Indeed it may be said that such payment was absolutely necessary in the early days of the life of the Union. But no one, I think, will deny that the tone of both Houses would be raised by the gratuitous service of the legislators. It is well known that politicians find their way into the Senate and into the Chamber of Representatives solely with a view to the loaves and fishes. The very word "politician" is foul and unsavoury throughout the States, and means rather a political blackleg than a political patriot. It is useless to blink this matter in speaking of the politics and policy of the United States. The corruption of the venial politicians of the nation stinks aloud in the nostrils of all men. It behoves the country to look to this. It is time now that she should do so. The people of the nation are educated and clever. The women are bright and beautiful. Her charity is profuse; her philanthropy is eager and true; her national ambition is noble and honest,—honest in the cause of civilization. But she has soiled herself with political corruption, and has disgraced the cause of republican government by the dirt of those whom she has placed in her high places. Let her look to it now. She is nobly ambitious of reputation throughout the earth; she desires to be called good as well as great; to be regarded not only as powerful, but also as beneficent. She is creating an army; she is forging cannon and preparing to build impregnable ships of war. But all these will fail to satisfy her pride, unless she can cleanse herself from that corruption by which her political democracy has debased itself. A politician should be a man worthy of all honour, in that he loves his country; and not one worthy of all contempt, in that he robs his country.
I must not be understood as saying that every senator and representative who takes his pay is wrong in taking it. Indeed, I have already expressed an opinion that such payments were at first necessary, and I by no means now say that the necessity has as yet disappeared. In the minds of thorough democrats it will be considered much that the poorest man of the people should be enabled to go into the legislature, if such poorest man be worthy of that honour. I am not a thorough democrat, and consider that more would be gained by obtaining in the legislature that education, demeanour, and freedom from political temptation which easy circumstances produce. I am not, however, on this account inclined to quarrel with the democrats,—not on that account if they can so manage their affairs that their poor and popular politicians shall be fairly honest men. But I am a thorough republican, regarding our own English form of government as the most purely republican that I know, and as such I have a close and warm sympathy with those trans-Atlantic anti-monarchical republicans who are endeavouring to prove to the world that they have at length founded a political Utopia. I for one do not grudge them all the good they can do, all the honour they can win. But I grieve over the evil name which now taints them, and which has accompanied that wider spread of democracy which the last twenty years has produced. This longing for universal suffrage in all things—in voting for the President, in voting for judges, in voting for the representatives, in dictating to senators, has come up since the days of President Jackson, and with it has come corruption and unclean hands. Democracy must look to it, or the world at large will declare her to have failed.
One would say that at any rate the Senate might be filled with unpaid servants of the public. Each State might surely find two men who could afford to attend to the public weal of their country without claiming a compensation for their time. In England we find no difficulty in being so served. Those cities among us in which the democratic element most strongly abounds, can procure representatives to their mind—even though the honour of filling the position is not only not remunerative, but is very costly. I cannot but think that the Senate of the United States would stand higher in the public estimation of its own country if it were an unpaid body of men.
It is enjoined that no person holding any office under the United States shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office. At first sight such a rule as this appears to be good in its nature; but a comparison of the practice of the United States' Government with that of our own makes me think that this embargo on members of the legislative bodies is a mistake. It prohibits the President's ministers from a seat in either House, and thereby relieves them from the weight of that responsibility to which our ministers are subjected. It is quite true that the United States' ministers cannot be responsible as are our ministers, seeing that the President himself is responsible and that the Queen is not so. Indeed, according to the theory of the American constitution, the President has no ministers. The constitution speaks only of the principal officers of the executive departments. "He," the President, "may require the opinion in writing of the principal officer in each of the executive departments." But in practice he has his cabinet, and the irresponsibility of that cabinet would practically cease if the members of it were subjected to the questionings of the two Houses. With us the rule which prohibits servants of the State from going into Parliament is, like many of our constitutional rules, hard to be defined, and yet perfectly understood. It may perhaps be said, with the nearest approach to a correct definition, that permanent servants of the State may not go into Parliament, and that those may do so whose services are political, depending for the duration of their term on the duration of the existing ministry. But even this would not be exact, seeing that the Master of the Rolls and the officers of the army and navy can sit in Parliament. The absence of the President's ministers from Congress certainly occasions much confusion, or rather prohibits a more thorough political understanding between the executive and the legislative than now exists. In speaking of the Government of the United States in the next chapter, I shall be constrained to allude again to this subject.*
*It will be alleged by Americans that the introduction into Congress of the President's ministers would alter all the existing relations of the President and of Congress, and would at once produce that Parliamentary form of Government which England possesses, and which the States have chosen to avoid. Such a change would elevate Congress, and depress the President. No doubt this is true. Such elevation, however, and such depression seem to me to be the two things needed. [back]
The duties of the House of Representatives are solely legislative. Those of the Senate are legislative and executive—as with us those of the Upper House are legislative and judicial. The House of Representatives is always open to the public. The Senate is so open when it is engaged on legislative work; but it is closed to the public when engaged in executive session. No treaties can be made by the President, and no appointments to high offices confirmed without the consent of the Senate; and this consent must be given—as regards the confirmation of treaties—by two-thirds of the members present. This law gives to the Senate the power of debating with closed doors upon the nature of all treaties, and upon the conduct of the Government as evinced in the nomination of the officers of State. It also gives to the Senate a considerable control over the foreign relations of the Government. I believe that this power is often used, and that by it the influence of the Senate is raised much above that of the Lower House. This influence is increased again by the advantage of that superior statecraft and political knowledge which the six years of the senator gives him over the two years of the representative. The tried representative, moreover, very frequently blossoms into a senator; but a senator does not frequently fade into a representative. Such occasionally is the case, and it is not even unconstitutional for an ex-President to re-appear in either House. Mr. Benton, after thirty years' service in the Senate, sat in the House of Representatives. Mr. Crittenden, who was returned as senator by Kentucky, I think seven times, now sits in the Lower House; and John Quincy Adams appeared as a representative from Massachusetts after he had filled the Presidential chair.
And, moreover, the Senate of the United States is not debarred from an interference with money bills, as the House of Lords is debarred with us. "All bills for raising revenue," says the seventh section of the first article of the constitution, "shall originate with the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills." By this the Senate is enabled to have an authority in the money matters of the nation almost equal to that held by the Lower House,—an authority quite sufficient to preserve to it the full influence of its other powers. With us the House of Commons is altogether in the ascendant, because it holds and jealously keeps to itself the exclusive command of the public purse.
Congress can levy custom duties in the United States, and always has done so; hitherto the national revenue has been exclusively raised from custom duties. It cannot levy duties on imports. It can levy excise duties, and is now doing so; hitherto it has not done so. It can levy direct taxes, such as an income-tax and a property-tax; it hitherto has not done so, but now must do so. It must do so, I think I am justified in saying; but its power of doing this is so hampered by constitutional enactment, that it would seem that the constitution as regards this heading must be altered before any scheme can be arranged by which a moderately just income-tax can be levied and collected. This difficulty I have already mentioned, but perhaps it will be well that I should endeavour to make the subject more plain. It is specially declared, "That all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." And again, "That no capitation or other direct tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken." And again, in the words before quoted, "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which shall be included in this Union, according to their respective numbers." By these repeated rules it has been intended to decree that the separate States shall bear direct taxation according to their population and the consequent number of their representatives; and this intention has been made so clear, that no direct taxation can be levied in opposition to it without an evident breach of the constitution. To explain the way in which this will work, I will name the two States of Rhode Island and Iowa as opposed to each other, and the two States of Massachusetts and Indiana as opposed to each other. Rhode Island and Massachusetts are wealthy Atlantic States, containing, as regards enterprise and commercial success, the cream of the population of the United States. Comparing them in the ratio of population, I believe that they are richer than any other States. They return between them thirteen representatives, Rhode Island sending two and Massachusetts eleven. Iowa and Indiana also send thirteen representatives, Iowa sending two, and being thus equal to Rhode Island; Indiana sending eleven and being thus equal to Massachusetts. Iowa and Indiana are western States; and though I am not prepared to say that they are the poorest States of the Union, I can assert that they are exactly opposite in their circumstances to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The two Atlantic States of New England are old established, rich, and commercial. The two western States I have named are full of new immigrants, are comparatively poor, and are agricultural. Nevertheless any direct taxation levied on those in the East and on those in the West must be equal in its weight. Iowa must pay as much as Rhode Island; Indiana must pay as much as Massachusetts. But Rhode Island and Massachusetts could pay without the sacrifice of any comfort to its people, without any sensible suffering, an amount of direct taxation which would crush the States of Iowa and Indiana,—which indeed no tax-gatherer could collect out of those States. Rhode Island and Massachusetts could with their ready money buy Iowa and Indiana; and yet the income-tax to be collected from the poor States is to be the same in amount as that collected from the rich States. Within each individual State the total amount of income-tax or of other direct taxation to be levied from that State may be apportioned as the State may think fit; but an income-tax of two per cent. on Rhode Island would probably produce more than an income-tax of ten per cent. in Iowa; whereas Rhode Island could pay an income-tax of ten per cent. easier than could Iowa one of two per cent.
It would in fact appear that the constitution as at present framed is fatal to all direct taxation. Any law for the collection of direct taxation levied under the constitution would produce internecine quarrel between the western States and those which border on the Atlantic. The western States would not submit to the taxation. The difficulty which one here feels is that which always attends an attempt at finality in political arrangements. One would be inclined to say at once that the law should be altered, and that as the money required is for the purposes of the Union and for State purposes, such a change should be made as would enable Congress to levy an income-tax on the general income of the nation. But Congress cannot go beyond the constitution.
It is true that the constitution is not final, and that it contains an express article ordaining the manner in which it may be amended. And perhaps I may as well explain here the manner in which this can be done, although by doing so, I am departing from the order in which the constitution is written. It is not final, and amendments have been made to it. But the making of such amendments is an operation so ponderous and troublesome, that the difficulty attached to any such change envelops the constitution with many of the troubles of finality. With us there is nothing beyond an act of parliament. An act of parliament with us cannot be unconstitutional. But no such power has been confided to Congress, or to Congress and the President together. No amendment of the constitution can be made without the sanction of the State legislatures. Congress may propose any amendments, as to the expediency of which two-thirds of both Houses shall be agreed; but before such amendments can be accepted they must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States, or by conventions in three-fourths of the States, "as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by Congress." Or Congress, instead of proposing the amendments, may, on an application from the legislatures of two-thirds of the different States, call a convention for the proposing of them. In which latter case the ratification by the different States must be made after the same fashion as that required in the former case. I do not know that I have succeeded in making clearly intelligible the circumstances under which the constitution can be amended; but I think I may have succeeded in explaining that those circumstances are difficult and tedious. In a matter of taxation why should States agree to an alteration proposed with the very object of increasing their proportion of the national burden? But unless such States will agree,—unless Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York will consent to put their own necks into the yoke,—direct taxation cannot be levied on them in a manner available for national purposes. I do believe that Rhode Island and Massachusetts at present possess a patriotism sufficient for such an act. But the mode of doing the work will create disagreement, or at any rate, tedious delay and difficulty. How shall the constitution be constitutionally amended while one-third of the States are in revolt?
In the eighth section of its first article the Constitution gives a list of the duties which Congress shall perform,—of things, in short, which it shall do, or shall have power to do:—To raise taxes; to regulate commerce and the naturalization of citizens; to coin money and protect it when coined; to establish postal communication; to make laws for defence of patents and copyrights; to constitute national courts of law inferior to the Supreme Court; to punish piracies; to declare war; to raise, pay for, and govern armies, navies, and militia; and to exercise exclusive legislation in a certain district which shall contain the seat of Government of the United States, and which is therefore to be regarded as belonging to the nation at large, and not to any particular State. This district is now called the district of Columbia. It is situated on the Potomac and contains the city of Washington.
Then the ninth section of the same article declares what Congress shall not do. Certain immigration shall not be prohibited; the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, except under certain circumstances; no ex post facto law shall be passed; no direct tax shall be laid unless in proportion to the census; no tax shall be laid on exports; no money shall be drawn from the treasury but by legal appropriation; no title of nobility shall be granted.
The above are lists or catalogues of the powers which Congress has, and of the powers which Congress has not; of what Congress may do, and of what Congress may not do; and having given them thus seriatim, I may here perhaps be best enabled to say a few words as to the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the United States. It is generally known that this privilege has been suspended during the existence of the present rebellion very many times; that this has been done by the executive, and not by Congress; and that it is maintained by the executive, and by those who defend the conduct of the now acting executive of the United States, that the power of suspending the writ has been given by the constitution to the President, and not to Congress. I confess that I cannot understand how any man, familiar either with the wording or with the spirit of the constitution should hold such an argument. To me it appears manifest that the executive, in suspending the privilege of the writ without the authority of Congress, has committed a breach of the constitution. Were the case one referring to our British constitution, a plain man, knowing little of Parliamentary usage, and nothing of law lore, would probably feel some hesitation in expressing any decided opinion on such a subject, seeing that our constitution is unwritten. But the intention has been that every citizen of the United States should know and understand the rules under which he is to live,—and he that runs may read.
As this matter has been argued by Mr. Horace Binney, a lawyer of Philadelphia, much trusted, of very great and of deserved eminence throughout the States, in a pamphlet in which he defends the suspension of the privilege of the writ by the President, I will take the position of the question as summed up by him in his last page, and compare it with that clause in the constitution by which the suspension of the privilege under certain circumstances is decreed; and to enable me to do this I will, in the first place, quote the words of the clause in question:—
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when, in case of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." It is the second clause of that section which states what Congress shall not do.
Mr. Binney argues as follows:—"The conclusion of the whole matter is this: that the constitution itself is the law of the privilege, and of the exception to it; that the exception is expressed in the constitution, and that the constitution gives effect to the act of suspension when the conditions occur; that the conditions consist of two matters of fact,—one a naked matter of fact, and the other a matter-of-fact conclusion from facts, that is to say, rebellion and the public danger, or the requirement of public safety." By these words Mr. Binney intends to imply that the constitution itself gave the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and itself prescribes the taking away of that privilege under certain circumstances. But this is not so. The constitution does not prescribe the suspension of the privilege of the writ under any circumstances. It says that it shall not be suspended except under certain circumstances. Mr. Binney's argument, if I understand it, then goes on as follows. As the constitution prescribes the circumstances under which the privilege of the writ shall be suspended, the one circumstance being the naked matter-of-fact rebellion, and the other circumstance the public safety supposed to have been endangered by such rebellion,—which Mr. Binney calls a matter-of-fact conclusion from facts, the constitution must be presumed itself to suspend the privilege of the writ. Whether the President or Congress be the agent of the constitution in this suspension is not matter of moment. Either can only be an agent, and as Congress cannot act executively, whereas the President must ultimately be charged with the executive administration of the order for that suspension, which has in fact been issued by the constitution itself, therefore the power of exercising the suspension of the writ may properly be presumed to be in the hands of the President, and not to be in the hands of Congress.
If I follow Mr. Binney's argument, it amounts to so much. But it seems to me that Mr. Binney is wrong in his premises, and wrong in his conclusion. The article of the constitution in question does not define the conditions under which the privilege of the writ shall be suspended. It simply states that this privilege shall never be suspended, except under certain conditions. It shall not be suspended unless when the public safety may require such suspension on account of rebellion or invasion. Rebellion or invasion is not necessarily to produce such suspension. There is indeed no naked matter of fact to guide either President or Congress in the matter, and therefore I say that Mr. Binney is wrong in his premises. Rebellion or invasion might occur twenty times over, and might even endanger the public safety, without justifying the suspension of the privilege of the writ under the constitution. I say also that Mr. Binney is wrong in his conclusion. The public safety must require the suspension before the suspension can be justified, and such requirement must be a matter for judgment, and for the exercise of discretion. Whether or no there shall be any suspension is a matter for deliberation,—not one simply for executive action, as though it were already ordered. There is no matter-of-fact conclusion from facts. Should invasion or rebellion occur, and should the public safety, in consequence of such rebellion or invasion, require the suspension of the privilege of the writ, then, and only then, may the privilege be suspended. But to whom is the power, or rather the duty, of exercising this discretion delegated? Mr. Binney says that "there is no express delegation of the power in the constitution." I maintain that Mr. Binney is again wrong, and that the constitution does expressly delegate the power, not to the President, but to Congress. This is done so clearly, to my mind, that I cannot understand the misunderstanding which has existed in the States upon the subject. The first article of the constitution treats "of the legislature." The second article treats "of the executive." The third treats "of the judiciary." After that there are certain "miscellaneous articles," so called. The eighth section of the first article gives, as I have said before, a list of things which the legislature or Congress shall do. The ninth section gives a list of things which the legislature or Congress shall not do. The second item in this list is the prohibition of any suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, except under certain circumstances. This prohibition is therefore expressly placed upon Congress, and this prohibition contains the only authority under which the privilege can be constitutionally suspended. Then comes the article on the executive, which defines the powers that the President shall exercise. In that article there is no word referring to the suspension of the privilege of the writ. He that runs may read.
I say, therefore, that Mr. Lincoln's Government has committed a breach of the constitution in taking upon itself to suspend the privilege;—a breach against the letter of the constitution. It has assumed a power which the constitution has not given it,—which, indeed, the constitution, by placing it in the hands of another body, has manifestly declined to put into the hands of the executive; and it has also committed a breach against the spirit of the constitution. The chief purport of the constitution is to guard the liberties of the people, and to confide to a deliberative body the consideration of all circumstances by which those liberties may be affected. The President shall command the army; but Congress shall raise and support the army. Congress shall declare war. Congress shall coin money. Congress, by one of its bodies, shall sanction treaties. Congress shall establish such law courts as are not established by the constitution. Under no circumstances is the President to decree what shall be done. But he is to do those things which the constitution has decreed or which Congress shall decree. It is monstrous to suppose that power over the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus would, among such a people, and under such a constitution, be given without limit to the chief officer, the only condition being that there should be some rebellion. Such rebellion might be in Utah territory; or some trouble in the uttermost bounds of Texas would suffice. Any invasion, such as an inroad by the savages of Old Mexico upon New Mexico, would justify an arbitrary President in robbing all the people of all the States of their liberties! A squabble on the borders of Canada would put such a power into the hands of the President for four years; or the presence of an English frigate in the St. Juan channel might be held to do so. I say that such a theory is monstrous.
And the effect of this breach of the constitution at the present day has been very disastrous. It has taught those who have not been close observers of the American struggle to believe that, after all, the Americans are indifferent as to their liberties. Such pranks have been played before high heaven by men utterly unfitted for the use of great power, as have scared all the nations. Mr. Lincoln, the President by whom this unconstitutional act has been done, apparently delegated his assumed authority to his minister, Mr. Seward. Mr. Seward has revelled in the privilege of unrestrained arrests, and has locked men up with reason and without. He has instituted passports and surveillance; and placed himself at the head of an omnipresent police system with all the gusto of a FouchÉ, though luckily without a FouchÉ's craft or cunning. The time will probably come when Mr. Seward must pay for this,—not with his life or liberty, but with his reputation and political name. But in the mean time his lettres de cachet have run everywhere through the States. The pranks which he played were absurd, and the arrests which he made were grievous. After a while, when it became manifest that Mr. Seward had not found a way to success, when it was seen that he had inaugurated no great mode of putting down rebellion, he apparently lost his power in the cabinet. The arrests ceased, the passports were discontinued, and the prison-doors were gradually opened. Mr. Seward was deposed, not from the cabinet, but from the premiership of the cabinet. The suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus was not countermanded, but the operation of the suspension was allowed to become less and less onerous; and now, in April, 1862, within a year of the commencement of the suspension, it has, I think, nearly died out. The object in hand now is rather that of getting rid of political prisoners, than of taking others.
This assumption by the government of an unconstitutional power has, as I have said, taught many lookers-on to think that the Americans are indifferent to their liberties. I myself do not believe that such a conclusion would be just. During the present crisis the strong feeling of the people—that feeling which for the moment has been dominant—has been one in favour of the government as against rebellion. There has been a passionate resolution to support the nationality of the nation. Men have felt that they must make individual sacrifices, and that such sacrifices must include a temporary suspension of some of their constitutional rights. But I think that this temporary suspension is already regarded with jealous eyes;—with an increasing jealousy which will have created a reaction against such policy as that which Mr. Seward has attempted, long before the close of Mr. Lincoln's Presidency. I know that it is wrong in a writer to commit himself to prophecies, but I find it impossible to write upon this subject without doing so. As I must express a surmise on this subject, I venture to prophesy that the Americans of the States will soon show that they are not indifferent to the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. On that matter of the illegality of the suspension by the President I feel in my own mind that there is no doubt.
The second article of the constitution treats of the executive, and is very short. It places the whole executive power in the hands of the President, and explains with more detail the mode in which the President shall be chosen, than the manner after which the duties shall be performed. The first section states that the executive shall be vested in a President, who shall hold his office for four years. With him shall be chosen a Vice-President. I may here explain that the Vice-President, as such, has no power either political or administrative. He is, ex officio, the speaker of the Senate; and should the President die, or be by other cause rendered unable to act as President, the Vice-President becomes President either for the remainder of the Presidential term or for the period of the President's temporary absence. Twice since the constitution was written, the President has died and the Vice-President has taken his place. No President has vacated his position, even for a period, through any cause other than death.
Then come the rules under which the President and Vice-President shall be elected,—with reference to which there has been an amendment of the constitution subsequent to the fourth presidential election. This was found to be necessary by the circumstances of the contest between John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr. It was then found that the complications in the method of election created by the original clause were all but unendurable, and the constitution was amended.
I will not describe in detail the present mode of election, as the doing so would be tedious and unnecessary. Two facts I wish, however, to make specially noticeable and clear. The first is, that the President of the United States is now chosen by universal suffrage; and the second is, that the constitution expressly intended that the President should not be chosen by universal suffrage, but by a body of men who should enjoy the confidence and fairly represent the will of the people. The framers of the constitution intended so to write the words, that the people themselves should have no more immediate concern in the nomination of the President than in that of the Senate. They intended to provide that the election should be made in a manner which may be described as thoroughly conservative. Those words, however, have been inefficient for their purpose. They have not been violated. But the spirit has been violated, while the words have been held sacred,—and the Presidential elections are now conducted on the widest principles of universal suffrage. They are essentially democratic.
The arrangement, as written in the constitution, is that each State shall appoint a body of electors equal in number to the senators and representatives sent by that State to Congress, and that thus a body or college of electors shall be formed equal in number to the two joint Houses of Congress, by which the President shall be elected. No member of Congress, however, can be appointed an elector. Thus New York, with thirty-three representatives in the Lower House, would name thirty-five electors; and Rhode Island, with two members in the Lower House, would name four electors;—in each case two being added for the two senators.
It may perhaps be doubted whether this theory of an election by electors has ever been truly carried out. It was probably the case even at the election of the first Presidents after Washington, that the electors were pledged in some informal way as to the candidate for whom they should vote; but the very idea of an election by electors has been abandoned since the Presidency of General Jackson. According to the theory of the constitution the privilege and the duty of selecting a best man as President was to be delegated to certain best men chosen for that purpose. This was the intention of those who framed the constitution. It may, as I have said, be doubted whether this theory has ever availed for action; but since the days of Jackson it has been absolutely abandoned. The intention was sufficiently conservative. The electors to whom was to be confided this great trust, were to be chosen in their own States as each State might think fit. The use of universal suffrage for this purpose was neither enjoined nor forbidden in the separate States,—was neither treated as desirable or undesirable by the constitution. Each State was left to judge how it would elect its own electors. But the President himself was to be chosen by those electors and not by the people at large. The intention is sufficiently conservative, but the intention is not carried out.
The electors are still chosen by the different States in conformity with the bidding of the constitution. The constitution is exactly followed in all its biddings, as far as the wording of it is concerned; but the whole spirit of the document has been evaded in the favour of democracy, and universal suffrage in the Presidential elections has been adopted. The electors are still chosen, it is true; but they are only chosen as the mouthpiece of the people's choice, and not as the mind by which that choice shall be made. We have all heard of Americans voting for a ticket,—for the democratic ticket, or the republican ticket. All political voting in the States is now managed by tickets. As regards these Presidential elections, each party decides on a candidate. Even this primary decision is a matter of voting among the party itself. When Mr. Lincoln was nominated as its candidate by the republican party, the names of no less than thirteen candidates were submitted to the delegates who were sent to a convention at Chicago, assembled for the purpose of fixing upon a candidate. At that convention, Mr. Lincoln was chosen as the republican candidate; and in that convention was in fact fought the battle which was won in Mr. Lincoln's favour, although that convention was what we may call a private arrangement, wholly irrespective of any constitutional enactment. Mr. Lincoln was then proclaimed as the republican candidate, and all republicans were held as bound to support him. When the time came for the constitutional election of the electors, certain names were got together in each State as representing the republican interest. These names formed the republican ticket, and any man voting for them voted in fact for Lincoln. There were three other parties, each represented by a candidate, and each had its own ticket in the different States. It is not to be supposed that the supporters of Mr. Lincoln were very anxious about their ticket in Alabama, or those of Mr. Breckinridge as to theirs in Massachusetts. In Alabama, a democratic slave-ticket would of course prevail. In Massachusetts, a republican free-soil ticket would do so. But it may, I think, be seen that in this way the electors have in reality ceased to have any weight in the elections,—have in very truth ceased to have the exercise of any will whatever. They are mere names, and no more. Stat nominis umbra. The election of the President is made by universal suffrage, and not by a college of electors. The words as they are written are still obeyed; but the constitution in fact has been violated, for the spirit of it has been changed in its very essence.
The President must have been born a citizen of the United States. This is not necessary for the holder of any other office or for a senator or representative; he must be thirty-four years old at the time of his election.
His executive power is almost unbounded. He is much more powerful than any minister can be with us, and is subject to a much lighter responsibility. He may be impeached by the House of Representatives before the Senate, but that impeachment only goes to the removal from office and permanent disqualification for office. But in these days, as we all practically understand, responsibility does not mean the fear of any great punishment, but the necessity of accounting from day to day for public actions. A leading statesman has but slight dread of the axe, but is in hourly fear of his opponent's questions. The President of the United States is subject to no such questionings; and as he does not even require a majority in either House for the maintenance of his authority, his responsibility sits upon him very slightly. Seeing that Mr. Buchanan has escaped any punishment for maladministration, no President need fear the anger of the people.
The President is Commander-in-chief of the army and of the navy. He can grant pardons,—as regards all offences committed against the United States. He has no power to pardon an offence committed against the laws of any State, and as to which the culprit has been tried before the tribunals of that State. He can make treaties; but such treaties are not valid till they have been confirmed by two-thirds of the senators present in executive session. He appoints all ambassadors and other public officers,—but subject to the confirmation of the Senate. He can convene either or both Houses of Congress at irregular times, and under certain circumstances can adjourn them. His executive power is in fact almost unlimited; and this power is solely in his own hands, as the constitution knows nothing of the President's ministers. According to the constitution these officers are merely the heads of his bureaux. An Englishman, however, in considering the executive power of the President, and in making any comparison between that and the executive power of any officer or officers attached to the Crown in England, should always bear in mind that the President's power, and even authority, is confined to the Federal Government, and that he has none with reference to the individual States. Religion, education, the administration of the general laws which concern every man and woman, and the real de facto Government which comes home to every house;—these things are not in any way subject to the President of the United States.
His legislative power is also great. He has a veto upon all acts of Congress. This veto is by no means a dead letter, as is the veto of the Crown with us; but it is not absolute. The President, if he refuses his sanction to a bill sent up to him from Congress, returns it to that House in which it originated, with his objections in writing. If, after that, such bill shall again pass through both the Senate and the House of Representatives, receiving in each House the approvals of two-thirds of those present, then such bill becomes law without the President's sanction. Unless this be done the President's veto stops the bill. This veto has been frequently used, but no bill has yet been passed in opposition to it.
The third article of the constitution treats of the judiciary of the United States, but as I purpose to write a chapter devoted to the law courts and lawyers of the States, I need not here describe at length the enactments of the constitution on this head. It is ordained that all criminal trials, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury.
There are after this certain miscellaneous articles, some of which belong to the constitution as it stood at first, and others of which have been since added as amendments. A citizen of one State is to be a citizen of every State. Criminals from one State shall not be free from pursuit in other States. Then comes a very material enactment:—"No person held to service or labour in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due." In speaking of a person held to labour the constitution intends to speak of a slave, and the article amounts to a fugitive slave law. If a slave run away out of South Carolina and find his way into Massachusetts, Massachusetts shall deliver him up when called upon to do so by South Carolina. The words certainly are clear enough. But Massachusetts strongly objects to the delivery of such men when so desired. Such men she has delivered up, with many groanings and much inward perturbation of spirit. But it is understood, not in Massachusetts only, but in the free-soil States generally, that fugitive slaves shall not be delivered up by the ordinary action of the laws. There is a feeling strong as that which we entertain with reference to the rendition of slaves from Canada. With such a clause in the constitution as that, it is hardly too much to say that no free-soil State will consent to constitutional action. Were it expunged from the constitution, no slave State would consent to live under it. It is a point as to which the advocates of slavery and the enemies of slavery cannot be brought to act in union. But on this head I have already said what little I have to say.
New States may be admitted by Congress, but the bounds of no old State shall be altered without the consent of such State. Congress shall have power to rule and dispose of the territories and property of the United States. The United States guarantee every State a republican form of Government; but the constitution does not define that form of Government. An ordinary citizen of the United States, if asked, would probably say that it included that description of franchise which I have called universal suffrage. Such, however, was not the meaning of those who framed the constitution. The ordinary citizen would probably also say that it excluded the use of a king, though he would, I imagine, be able to give no good reason for saying so. I take a republican government to be that in which the care of the people is in the hands of the people. They may use an elected President, an hereditary king, or a chief magistrate called by any other name. But the magistrate, whatever be his name, must be the servant of the people and not their lord. He must act for them and at their bidding,—not they at his. If he do so, he is the chief officer of a republic;—as is our Queen with us.
The United States' constitution also guarantees to each State protection against invasion, and, if necessary, against domestic violence,—meaning, I presume, internal violence. The words domestic violence might seem to refer solely to slave insurrections; but such is not the meaning of the words. The free State of New York would be entitled to the assistance of the Federal Government in putting down internal violence, if unable to quell such violence by her own power.
This constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance of it, are to be held as the supreme law of the land. The judges of every State are to be bound thereby, let the laws or separate constitution of such State say what they will to the contrary. Senators and others are to be bound by oath to support the constitution; but no religious test shall be required as a qualification to any office.
In the amendments to the constitution, it is enacted that Congress shall make no law as to the establishment of any religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and also that it shall not abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of petition.—The Government, however, as is well known, has taken upon itself to abridge the freedom of the press.—The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. Then follow various clauses intended for the security of the people in reference to the administration of the laws. They shall not be troubled by unreasonable searches. They shall not be made to answer for great offences except by indictment of a grand jury. They shall not be put twice in jeopardy for the same offence. They shall not be compelled to give evidence against themselves. Private property shall not be taken for public use without compensation. Accused persons in criminal proceedings shall be entitled to speedy and public trial. They shall be confronted with the witnesses against them, and shall have assistance of counsel. Suits in which the value controverted is above 20 dollars (£4) shall be tried before juries. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. In all which enactments we see, I think, a close resemblance to those which have been time-honoured among ourselves.
The remaining amendments apply to the mode in which the President and Vice-President shall be elected, and of them I have already spoken.
The constitution is signed by Washington as President,—as President and Deputy from Virginia. It is signed by deputies from all the other States, except Rhode Island. Among the signatures is that of Alexander Hamilton, from New York; of Franklin, heading a crowd in Pennsylvania, in the capital of which State the convention was held; and that of James Madison, the future President, from Virginia.
In the beginning of this chapter I have spoken of the splendid results attained by those who drew up the constitution; and then, as though in opposition to the praise thus given to their work, I have insisted throughout the chapter both on the insufficiency of the constitution and on the breaches to which it has been subjected. I have declared my opinion that it is inefficient for some of its required purposes, and have said that, whether inefficient or efficient, it has been broken and in some degree abandoned. I maintain, however, that in this I have not contradicted myself. A boy, who declares his purpose of learning the Æneid by heart, will be held as being successful if at the end of the given period he can repeat eleven books out of the twelve. Nevertheless the reporter, in summing up the achievement, is bound to declare that that other book has not been learned. Under this constitution of which I have been speaking, the American people have achieved much material success and great political power. As a people they have been happy and prosperous. Their freedom has been secured to them, and for a period of seventy-five years they have lived and prospered without subjection to any form of tyranny. This in itself is much, and should, I think, be held as a preparation for greater things to follow. Such, I think, should be our opinion, although the nation is at the present burdened by so heavy a load of troubles. That any written constitution should serve its purposes and maintain its authority in a nation for a dozen years is in itself much for its framers. Where are now the constitutions which were written for France? But this constitution has so wound itself into the affections of the people, has become a mark for such reverence and love, has, after a trial of three quarters of a century, so recommended itself to the judgment of men, that the difficulty consists in touching it, not in keeping it. Eighteen or twenty millions of people who have lived under it,—in what way do they regard it? Is not that the best evidence that can be had respecting it? Is it to them an old woman's story, a useless parchment, a thing of old words at which all must now smile? Heaven mend them, if they reverence it more, as I fear they do, than they reverence their Bible. For them, after seventy-five years of trial, it has almost the weight of inspiration. In this respect,—with reference to this worship of the work of their forefathers, they may be in error. But that very error goes far to prove the excellence of the code. When a man has walked for six months over stony ways in the same boots, he will be believed when he says that his boots are good boots. No assertion to the contrary from any bystander will receive credence, even though it be shown that a stitch or two has come undone, and that some required purpose has not effectually been carried out. The boots have carried the man over his stony roads for six months, and they must be good boots. And so I say that the constitution must be a good constitution.
As to that positive breach of the constitution which has, as I maintain, been committed by the present Government, although I have been at some trouble to prove it, I must own that I do not think very much of it. It is to be lamented, but the evil admits, I think, of easy repair. It has happened at a period of unwonted difficulty, when the minds of men were intent rather on the support of that nationality which guarantees their liberties, than on the enjoyment of those liberties themselves, and the fault may be pardoned if it be acknowledged. But it is essential that it should be acknowledged. In such a matter as that there should at any rate be no doubt. Now, in this very year of the rebellion, it may be well that no clamour against Government should arise from the people, and thus add to the difficulties of the nation. But it will be bad, indeed, for the nation if such a fault shall have been committed by this Government and shall be allowed to pass unacknowledged, unrebuked,—as though it were a virtue and no fault. I cannot but think that the time will soon come in which Mr. Seward's reading of the constitution and Mr. Lincoln's assumption of illegal power under that reading will receive a different construction in the States than that put upon it by Mr. Binney.
But I have admitted that the constitution itself is not perfect. It seems to me that it requires to be amended on two separate points;—especially on two; and I cannot but acknowledge that there would be great difficulty in making such amendments. That matter of direct taxation is the first. As to that I shall speak again in referring to the financial position of the country. I think, however, that it must be admitted, in any discussion held on the constitution of the United States, that the theory of taxation as there laid down will not suffice for the wants of a great nation. If the States are to maintain their ground as a great national power, they must agree among themselves to bear the cost of such greatness. While a custom duty was sufficient for the public wants of the United States, this fault in the constitution was not felt. But now that standing armies have been inaugurated, that iron-clad ships are held as desirable, that a great national debt has been founded, custom duties will suffice no longer, nor will excise duties suffice. Direct taxation must be levied, and such taxation cannot be fairly levied without a change in the constitution. But such a change may be made in direct accordance with the spirit of the constitution, and the necessity for such an alteration cannot be held as proving any inefficiency in the original document for the purposes originally required.
As regards the other point which seems to me to require amendment, I must acknowledge that I am about to express simply my own opinion. Should Americans read what I write, they may probably say that I am recommending them to adopt the blunders made by the English in their practice of government. Englishmen, on the other hand, may not improbably conceive that a system which works well here under a monarchy, would absolutely fail under a presidency of four years' duration. Nevertheless I will venture to suggest that the government of the United States would be improved in all respects, if the gentlemen forming the President's cabinet were admitted to seats in Congress. At present they are virtually irresponsible. They are constitutionally little more than head clerks. This was all very well while the Government of the United States was as yet a small thing; but now it is no longer a small thing. The President himself cannot do all, nor can he be, in truth, responsible for all. A cabinet, such as is our cabinet, is necessary to him. Such a cabinet does exist, and the members of it take upon themselves the honours which are given to our cabinet ministers. But they are exempted from all that parliamentary contact which, in fact, gives to our cabinet ministers their adroitness, their responsibility, and their position in the country. On this subject also I must say another word or two further on.
But how am I to excuse the constitution on those points as to which it has, as I have said, fallen through,—in respect to which it has shown itself to be inefficient by the weakness of its own words? Seeing that all the executive power is intrusted to the President, it is especially necessary that the choice of the President should be guarded by constitutional enactments;—that the President should be chosen in such a manner as may seem best to the concentrated wisdom of the country. The President is placed in his seat for four years. For that term he is irremovable. He acts without any majority in either of the legislative Houses. He must state reasons for his conduct, but he is not responsible for those reasons. His own judgment is his sole guide. No desire of the people can turn him out; nor need he fear any clamour from the press. If an officer so high in power be needed, at any rate the choice of such an officer should be made with the greatest care. The constitution has decreed how such care should be exercised, but the constitution has not been able to maintain its own decree. The constituted electors of the President have become a mere name; and that officer is chosen by popular election, in opposition to the intention of those who framed the constitution. The effect of this may be seen in the characters of the men so chosen. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the two Adamses, and Jackson were the owners of names that have become known in history. They were men who have left their marks behind them. Those in Europe who have read of anything, have read of them. Americans, whether as republicans they admire Washington and the Adamses, or as democrats hold by Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson, do not at any rate blush for their old Presidents. But who has heard of Polk, of Pierce, and of Buchanan? What American is proud of them? In the old days the name of a future President might be surmised. He would probably be a man honoured in the nation; but who now can make a guess as to the next President? In one respect a guess may be made with some safety. The next President will be a man whose name has as yet offended no one by its prominence. But one requisite is essential for a President; he must be a man whom none as yet have delighted to honour.
This has come of universal suffrage; and seeing that it has come in spite of the constitution, and not by the constitution, it is very bad. Nor in saying this am I speaking my own conviction so much as that of all educated Americans with whom I have discussed the subject. At the present moment universal suffrage is not popular. Those who are the highest among the people certainly do not love it. I doubt whether the masses of the people have ever craved it. It has been introduced into the Presidential elections by men called politicians—by men who have made it a matter of trade to dabble in state affairs, and who have gradually learned to see how the constitutional law, with reference to the Presidential electors, could be set aside without any positive breach of the constitution.*
*On this matter one of the best, and best informed Americans that I have known told me that he differed from me. "It introduced itself," said he. "It was the result of social and political forces. Election of the President by popular choice became a necessity." The meaning of this is, that in regard to their Presidential elections the United States drifted into universal suffrage. I do not know that his theory is one more comfortable for his country than my own. [back]
Whether or no any backward step can now be taken,—whether these elections can again be put into the hands of men fit to exercise a choice in such a matter,—may well be doubted. Facilis descensus Averni. But the recovery of the downward steps is very difficult. On that subject, however, I hardly venture here to give an opinion. I only declare what has been done, and express my belief that it has not been done in conformity with the wishes of the people,—as it certainly has not been done in conformity with the intention of the constitution.
In another matter a departure has been made from the conservative spirit of the constitution. This departure is equally grave with the other, but it is one which certainly does admit of correction. I allude to the present position assumed by many of the senators, and to the instructions given to them by the State legislatures, as to the votes which they shall give in the Senate. An obedience on their part to such instructions is equal in its effects to the introduction of universal suffrage into the elections. It makes them hang upon the people, divests them of their personal responsibility, takes away all those advantages given to them by a six years' certain tenure of office, and annuls the safety secured by a conservative method of election. Here again I must declare my opinion that this democratic practice has crept into the Senate without any expressed wish of the people. In all such matters the people of the nation has been strangely undemonstrative. It has been done as part of a system which has been used for transferring the political power of the nation to a body of trading politicians who have become known and felt as a mass, and not known and felt as individuals. I find it difficult to describe the present political position of the States in this respect. The millions of the people are eager for the constitution, are proud of their power as a nation, and are ambitious of national greatness. But they are not, as I think, especially desirous of retaining political influences in their own hands. At many of the elections it is difficult to induce them to vote. They have among them a half-knowledge that politics is a trade in the hands of the lawyers, and that they are the capital by which those political tradesmen carry on their business. These politicians are all lawyers. Politics and law go together as naturally as the possession of land and the exercise of magisterial powers do with us. It may be well that it should be so, as the lawyers are the best educated men of the country, and need not necessarily be the most dishonest. Political power has come into their hands, and it is for their purposes and by their influences that the spread of democracy has been encouraged.
As regards the Senate, the recovery of their old dignity and former position is within their own power. No amendment of the constitution is needed here, nor has the weakness come from any insufficiency of the constitution. The Senate can assume to itself to-morrow its own glories, and can, by doing so, become the saviours of the honour and glory of the nation. It is to the Senate that we must look for that conservative element which may protect the United States from the violence of demagogues on one side and from the despotism of military power on the other. The Senate, and the Senate only, can keep the President in check. The Senate also has a power over the Lower House with reference to the disposal of money, which deprives the House of Representatives of that exclusive authority which belongs to our House of Commons. It is not simply that the House of Representatives cannot do what is done by the House of Commons. There is more than this. To the Senate, in the minds of all Americans, belongs that superior prestige, that acknowledged possession of the greater power and fuller scope for action, which is with us as clearly the possession of the House of Commons. The United States' Senate can be conservative, and can be so by virtue of the constitution. The love of the constitution in the hearts of all Americans is so strong that the exercise of such power by the Senate would strengthen rather than endanger its position. I could wish that the senators would abandon their money payments, but I do not imagine that that will be done exactly in these days.
I have now endeavoured to describe the strength of the constitution of the United States, and to explain its weakness. The great question is at this moment being solved, whether or no that constitution will still be found equal to its requirements. It has hitherto been the mainspring in the government of the people. They have trusted with almost childlike confidence to the wisdom of their founders, and have said to their rulers,—"There; in those words, you must find the extent and the limit of your powers. It is written down for you, so that he who runs may read." That writing down, as it were, at a single sitting, of a sufficient code of instructions for the governors of a great nation, had not hitherto in the world's history been found to answer. In this instance it has, at any rate, answered better than in any other, probably because the words so written contained in them less pretence of finality in political wisdom than other written constitutions have assumed. A young tree must bend, or the winds will certainly break it. For myself I can honestly express my hope that no storm may destroy this tree.
CHAPTER X.
THE GOVERNMENT.
In speaking of the American constitution I have said so much of the American form of government that but little more is left to me to say under that heading. Nevertheless, I should hardly go through the work which I have laid out for myself if I did not endeavour to explain more continuously, and perhaps more graphically, than I found myself able to do in the last chapter, the system on which public affairs are managed in the United States.
And here I must beg my readers again to bear in mind how moderate is the amount of governing which has fallen to the lot of the government of the United States; how moderate, as compared with the amount which has to be done by the Queen's officers of state for Great Britain, or by the Emperor, with such assistance as he may please to accept from his officers of state, for France. That this is so must be attributed to more than one cause; but the chief cause is undoubtedly to be found in the very nature of a federal government. The States are individually sovereign, and govern themselves as to all internal matters. All the judges in England are appointed by the Crown; but in the United States only a small proportion of the judges are nominated by the President. The greater number are servants of the different States. The execution of the ordinary laws for the protection of men and property does not fall on the government of the United States, but on the executives of the individual States,—unless in some special matters, which will be defined in the next chapter. Trade, education, roads, religion, the passing of new measures for the internal or domestic comfort of the people,—all these things are more or less matters of care to our government. In the States they are matters of care to the governments of each individual State, but are not so to the central government at Washington.
But there are other causes which operate in the same direction, and which have hitherto enabled the Presidents of the United States, with their ministers, to maintain their positions without much knowledge of statecraft, or the necessity for that education in state matters which is so essential to our public men. In the first place, the United States have hitherto kept their hands out of foreign politics. If they have not done so altogether, they have so greatly abstained from meddling in them that none of that thorough knowledge of the affairs of other nations has been necessary to them which is so essential with us, and which seems to be regarded as the one thing needed in the cabinets of other European nations. This has been a great blessing to the United States, but it has not been an unmixed blessing. It has been a blessing because the absence of such care has saved the country from trouble and from expense. But such a state of things was too good to last; and the blessing has not been unmixed, seeing that now, when that absence of concern in foreign matters has been no longer possible, the knowledge necessary for taking a dignified part in foreign discussions has been found wanting. Mr. Seward is now the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the States, and it is hardly too much to say that he has made himself a laughing-stock among the diplomatists of Europe, by the mixture of his ignorance and his arrogance. His reports to his own ministers during the single year of his office, as published by himself apparently with great satisfaction, are a monument not so much of his incapacity as of his want of training for such work. We all know his long state papers on the "Trent" affair. What are we to think of a statesman who acknowledges the action of his country's servant to have been wrong, and in the same breath declares that he would have held by that wrong, had the material welfare of his country been thereby improved? The United States have now created a great army and a great debt. They will soon also have created a great navy. Affairs of other nations will press upon them, and they will press against the affairs of other nations. In this way statecraft will become necessary to them; and by degrees their ministers will become habile, graceful, adroit;—and perhaps crafty, as are the ministers of other nations.
And, moreover, the United States have had no outlying colonies or dependencies, such as an India and Canada are to us, as Cuba is and Mexico was to Spain, and as were the provinces of the Roman empire. Territories she has had, but by the peculiar beneficence of her political arrangements, these territories have assumed the guise of sovereign States, and been admitted into federal partnership on equal terms, with a rapidity which has hardly left to the central Government the reality of any dominion of its own. We are inclined to suppose that these new States have been allowed to assume their equal privileges and State rights because they have been contiguous to the old States—as though it were merely an extension of frontier. But this has not been so. California and Oregon have been very much further from Washington than the Canadas are from London. Indeed they are still further, and I hardly know whether they can be brought much nearer than Canada is to us, even with the assistance of railways. But nevertheless California and Oregon were admitted as States, the former as quickly and the latter much more quickly than its population would seem to justify Congress in doing, according to the received ratio of population. A preference in this way has been always given by the United States to a young population over one that was older. Oregon with its 60,000 inhabitants has one representative. New York with 4,000,000 inhabitants has thirty-three. But in order to be equal with Oregon, New York should have sixty-six. In this way the outlying populations have been encouraged to take upon themselves their own governance, and the governing power of the President and his cabinet has been kept within moderate limits.
But not the less is the position of the President very dominant in the eyes of us Englishmen by reason of the authority with which he is endowed. It is not that the scope of his power is great, but that he is so nearly irresponsible in the exercise of that power. We know that he can be impeached by the representatives and expelled from his office by the verdict of the Senate; but this, in fact, does not amount to much. Responsibility of this nature is doubtless very necessary, and prevents ebullitions of tyranny such as those in which a Sultan or an Emperor may indulge; but it is not that responsibility which especially recommends itself to the minds of free men. So much of responsibility they take as a matter of course, as they do the air which they breathe. It would be nothing to us to know that Lord Palmerston could be impeached for robbing the Treasury, or Lord Russell punished for selling us to Austria. It is well that such laws should exist, but we do not in the least suspect those noble lords of such treachery. We are anxious to know, not in what way they may be impeached and beheaded for great crimes, but by what method they may be kept constantly straight in small matters. That they are true and honest is a matter of course. But they must be obedient also, discreet, capable, and above all things of one mind with the public. Let them be that; or if not they, then with as little delay as may be, some others in their place. That with us is the meaning of ministerial responsibility. To that responsibility all the cabinet is subject. But in the Government of the United States there is no such responsibility. The President is placed at the head of the executive for four years, and while he there remains no man can question him. It is not that the scope of his power is great. Our own Prime Minister is doubtless more powerful,—has a wider authority. But it is that within the scope of his power the President is free from all check. There are no reins, constitutional or unconstitutional, by which he can be restrained. He can absolutely repudiate a majority of both Houses, and refuse the passage of any act of Congress even though supported by those majorities. He can retain the services of ministers distasteful to the whole country. He can place his own myrmidons at the head of the army and navy,—or can himself take the command immediately on his own shoulders. All this he can do, and there is no one that can question him.
It is hardly necessary that I should point out the fundamental difference between our King or Queen, and the President of the United States. Our Sovereign, we all know, is not responsible. Such is the nature of our constitution. But there is not on that account any analogy between the irresponsibility of the Queen and that of the President. The Queen can do no wrong; but therefore, in all matters of policy and governance, she must be ruled by advice. For that advice her ministers are responsible; and no act of policy or governance can be done in England as to which responsibility does not immediately settle on the shoulders appointed to bear it. But this is not so in the States. The President is nominally responsible. But from that every-day working responsibility, which is to us so invaluable, the President is in fact free.
I will give an instance of this. Now, at this very moment of my writing, news has reached us that President Lincoln has relieved General Maclellan from the command of the whole army, that he has given separate commands to two other generals,—to General Halleck, namely, and alas! to General Fremont, and that he has altogether altered the whole organization of the military command as it previously existed. This he did not only during war, but with reference to a special battle, for the special fighting of which he, as ex-officio Commander-in-Chief of the forces, had given orders. I do not hereby intend to criticise this act of the President's, or to point out that that has been done which had better have been left undone. The President, in a strategetical point of view, may have been,—very probably has been, quite right. I, at any rate, cannot say that he has been wrong. But then neither can anybody else say so with any power of making himself heard. Of this action of the President's, so terribly great in its importance to the nation, no one has the power of expressing any opinion to which the President is bound to listen. For four years he has this sway, and at the end of four years he becomes so powerless that it is not then worth the while of any demagogue in a fourth-rate town to occupy his voice with that President's name. The anger of the country as to the things done both by Pierce and Buchanan is very bitter. But who wastes a thought upon either of these men? A past President in the United States is of less consideration than a past Mayor in an English borough. Whatever evil he may have done during his office, when out of office he is not worth the powder which would be expended in an attack.
But the President has his ministers as our Queen has hers. In one sense he has such ministers. He has high state servants who under him take the control of the various departments, and exercise among them a certain degree of patronage and executive power. But they are the President's ministers, and not the ministers of the people. Till lately there has been no chief minister among them, nor am I prepared to say that there is any such chief at present. According to the existing theory of the government these gentlemen have simply been the confidential servants of the commonwealth under the President, and have been attached each to his own department without concerted political alliance among themselves, without any acknowledged chief below the President, and without any combined responsibility even to the President. If one minister was in fault—let us say the Postmaster-General,—he alone was in fault, and it did not fall to the lot of any other minister either to defend him, or to declare that his conduct was indefensible. Each owed his duty and his defence to the President alone; and each might be removed alone, without explanation given by the President to the others. I imagine that the late practice of the President's cabinet has in some degree departed from this theory; but if so, the departure has sprung from individual ambition rather than from any preconcerted plan. Some one place in the cabinet has seemed to give to some one man an opportunity of making himself pre-eminent, and of this opportunity advantage has been taken. I am not now intending to allude to any individual, but am endeavouring to indicate the way in which a ministerial cabinet, after the fashion of our British cabinet, is struggling to get itself created. No doubt the position of Foreign Secretary has for some time past been considered as the most influential under the President. This has been so much the case that many have not hesitated to call the Secretary of State the chief minister. At the present moment, May, 1862, the gentleman who is at the head of the war department has, I think, in his own hands greater power than any of his colleagues.
It will probably come to pass before long that one special minister will be the avowed leader of the cabinet, and that he will be recognized as the chief servant of the State under the President. Our own cabinet, which now-a-days seems with us to be an institution as fixed as Parliament and as necessary as the throne, has grown by degrees into its present shape, and is not, in truth, nearly so old as many of us suppose it to be. It shaped itself, I imagine, into its present form, and even into its present joint responsibility, during the reign of George III. It must be remembered that even with us there is no such thing as a constitutional Prime Minister, and that our Prime Minister is not placed above the other ministers in any manner that is palpable to the senses. He is paid no more than the others; he has no superior title; he does not take the highest rank among them; he never talks of his subordinates, but always of his colleagues; he has a title of his own, that of First Lord of the Treasury, but it implies no headship in the cabinet. That he is the head of all political power in the nation, the Atlas who has to bear the globe, the god in whose hands rest the thunderbolts and the showers, all men do know. No man's position is more assured to him. But the bounds of that position are written in no book, are defined by no law, have settled themselves not in accordance with the recorded wisdom of any great men, but as expediency and the fitness of political things in Great Britain have seemed from time to time to require. This drifting of great matters into their proper places is not as closely in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of the American people as it is with our own. They would prefer to define by words, as the French do, what shall be the exact position of every public servant connected with their Government; or rather of every public servant with whom the people shall be held as having any concern. But nevertheless, I think it will come to pass that a cabinet will gradually form itself at Washington as it has done at London, and that of that cabinet there will be some recognized and ostensible chief.
But a Prime Minister in the United States can never take the place there which is taken here by our Premier. Over our Premier there is no one politically superior. The highest political responsibility of the nation rests on him. In the States this must always rest on the President, and any minister, whatever may be his name or assumed position, can only be responsible through the President. And it is here especially that the working of the United States system of Government seems to me deficient,—appears as though it wanted something to make it perfect and round at all points. Our ministers retire from their offices, as do the Presidents; and indeed the ministerial term of office with us, though of course not fixed, is in truth much shorter than the Presidential term of four years. But our ministers do not, in fact, ever go out. At one time they take one position, with pay, patronage, and power; and at another time another position, without these good things; but in either position they are acting as public men, and are, in truth, responsible for what they say and do. But the President, on whom it is presumed that the whole of the responsibility of the United States Government rests, goes out at a certain day, and of him no more is heard. There is no future before him to urge him on to constancy; no hope of other things beyond, of greater honours and a wider fame, to keep him wakeful in his country's cause. He has already enrolled his name on the list of his country's rulers, and received what reward his country can give him. Conscience, duty, patriotism may make him true to his place. True to his place, in a certain degree, they will make him. But ambition and hope of things still to come are the moving motives in the minds of most men. Few men can allow their energies to expand to their fullest extent in the cold atmosphere of duty alone. The President of the States must feel that he has reached the top of the ladder, and that he soon will have done with life. As he goes out he is a dead man. And what can be expected from one who is counting the last lingering hours of his existence? "It will not be in my time," Mr. Buchanan is reported to have said, when a friend spoke to him with warning voice of the coming rebellion. "It will not be in my time." In the old days, before democracy had prevailed in upsetting that system of Presidential election which the constitution had intended to fix as permanent, the Presidents were generally re-elected for a second term. Of the seven first Presidents five were sent back to the White House for a second period of four years. But this has never been done since the days of General Jackson; nor will it be done, unless a stronger conservative reaction takes place than the country even as yet seems to promise. As things have lately ordered themselves, it may almost be said that no man in the Union would be so improbable a candidate for the Presidency as the outgoing President. And it has been only natural that it should be so. Looking at the men themselves who have lately been chosen, the fault has not consisted in their non-reelection, but in their original selection. There has been no desire for great men; no search after a man of such a nature, that when tried the people should be anxious to keep him. "It will not be in my time," says the expiring President. And so, without dismay, he sees the empire of his country slide away from him.
A President, with the possibility of re-election before him, would be as a minister who goes out, knowing that he may possibly come in again before the session is over,—and perhaps believing that the chances of his doing so are in his favour. Under the existing political phase of things in the United States, no President has any such prospect;—but the ministers of the President have that chance. It is no uncommon thing at present for a minister under one President to reappear as a minister under another; but a statesman has no assurance that he will do so because he has shown ministerial capacity. We know intimately the names of all our possible ministers,—too intimately as some of us think,—and would be taken much by surprise if a gentleman without an official reputation were placed at the head of a high office. If something of this feeling prevailed as to the President's cabinet, if there were some assurance that competent statesmen would be appointed as Secretaries of State, a certain amount of national responsibility would by degrees attach itself to them, and the President's shoulders would, to that amount, be lightened. As it is, the President pretends to bear a burden which, if really borne, would indicate the possession of Herculean shoulders. But, in fact, the burden at present is borne by no one. The government of the United States is not in truth responsible either to the people or to Congress.
But these ministers, if it be desired that they shall have weight in the country, should sit in Congress either as senators or as representatives. That they cannot so sit without an amendment of the constitution I have explained in the previous chapter; and any such amendment cannot be very readily made. Without such seats they cannot really share the responsibility of the President, or be in any degree amenable to public opinion for the advice which they give in their public functions. It will be said that the constitution has expressly intended that they should not be responsible, and such, no doubt, has been the case. But the constitution, good as it is, cannot be taken as perfect. The government has become greater than seems to have been contemplated when that code was drawn up. It has spread itself as it were over a wider surface, and has extended to matters which it was not then necessary to touch. That theory of governing by the means of little men was very well while the government itself was small. A President and his clerks may have sufficed when there were from thirteen to eighteen States; while there were no territories, or none at least that required government; while the population was still below five millions; while a standing army was an evil not known and not feared; while foreign politics was a troublesome embroglio in which it was quite unnecessary that the United States should take a part. Now there are thirty-four States. The territories populated by American citizens stretch from the States on the Atlantic to those on the Pacific. There is a population of thirty million souls. At the present moment the United States are employing more soldiers than any other nation, and have acknowledged the necessity of maintaining a large army even when the present troubles shall be over. In addition to this the United States have occasion for the use of statecraft with all the great kingdoms of Europe. That theory of ruling by little men will not do much longer. It will be well that they should bring forth their big men and put them in the place of rulers.
The President has at present seven ministers. They are the Secretary of State, who is supposed to have the direction of Foreign Affairs; the Secretary of the Treasury, who answers to our Chancellor of the Exchequer; the Secretaries of the Army and of the Navy; the Minister of the Interior; the Attorney-General; and the Postmaster-General. If these officers were allowed to hold seats in one House or in the other,—or rather if the President were enjoined to place in these offices men who were known as members of Congress, not only would the position of the President's ministers be enhanced and their weight increased, but the position also of Congress would be enhanced and the weight of Congress would be increased. I may, perhaps, best exemplify this by suggesting what would be the effect on our Parliament by withdrawing from it the men who at the present moment,—or at any moment,—form the Queen's cabinet. I will not say that by adding to Congress the men who usually form the President's cabinet, a weight would be given equal to that which the withdrawal of the British cabinet would take from the British Parliament. I cannot pay that compliment to the President's choice of servants. But the relationship between Congress and the President's ministers would gradually come to resemble that which exists between Parliament and the Queen's ministers. The Secretaries of State and of the Treasury would after a while obtain that honour of leading the Houses which is exercised by our high political officers, and the dignity added to the positions would make the places worthy of the acceptance of great men. It is hardly so at present. The career of one of the President's ministers is not a very high career as things now stand; nor is the man supposed to have achieved much who has achieved that position. I think it would be otherwise if the ministers were the leaders of the legislative Houses. To Congress itself would be given the power of questioning and ultimately of controlling these ministers. The power of the President would no doubt be diminished as that of Congress would be increased. But an alteration in that direction is in itself desirable. It is the fault of the present system of government in the United States that the President has too much of power and weight, while the Congress of the nation lacks power and weight. As matters now stand, Congress has not that dignity of position which it should hold; and it is without it because it is not endowed with that control over the officers of the government which our Parliament is enabled to exercise.
The want of this close connection with Congress and the President's ministers has been so much felt, that it has been found necessary to create a medium of communication. This has been done by a system which has now become a recognized part of the machinery of the government, but which is, I believe, founded on no regularly organized authority. At any rate no provision is made for it in the constitution; nor, as far as I am aware, has it been established by any special enactment or written rule. Nevertheless, I believe I am justified in saying that it has become a recognized link in the system of government adopted by the United States. In each House standing committees are named, to which are delegated the special consideration of certain affairs of state. There are, for instance, committees of foreign affairs, of finance, the judiciary committee, and others of a similar nature. To these committees are referred all questions which come before the House bearing on the special subject to which each is devoted. Questions of taxation are referred to the finance committee before they are discussed in the House; and the House, when it goes into such discussion, has before it the report of the committee. In this way very much of the work of the legislature is done by branches of each House, and by selected men whose time and intellects are devoted to special subjects. It is easy to see that much time and useless debate may be thus saved, and I am disposed to believe that this system of committees has worked efficiently and beneficially. The mode of selection of the members has been so contrived as to give to each political party that amount of preponderance in each committee which such party holds in the House. If the democrats have in the Senate a majority, it would be within their power to vote none but democrats into the committee on finance; but this would be manifestly unjust to the republican party, and the injustice would itself frustrate the object of the party in power; therefore the democrats simply vote to themselves a majority in each committee, keeping to themselves as great a preponderance in the committee as they have in the whole House, and arranging also that the chairman of the committee shall belong to their own party. By these committees the chief legislative measures of the country are originated and inaugurated,—as they are with us by the ministers of the Crown, and the chairman of each committee is supposed to have a certain amicable relation with that minister who presides over the office with which his committee is connected. Mr. Sumner is at present chairman of the committee on foreign affairs, and he is presumed to be in connection with Mr. Seward, who, as Secretary of State, has the management of the foreign relations of the Government.
But it seems to me that this supposed connection between the committees and the ministers is only a makeshift, showing by its existence the absolute necessity of close communication between the executive and the legislative, but showing also by its imperfections the great want of some better method of communication. In the first place the chairman of the committee is in no way bound to hold any communication with the minister. He is simply a senator, and as such has no ministerial duties, and can have none. He holds no appointment under the President, and has no palpable connection with the executive. And then it is quite as likely that he may be opposed in politics to the minister as that he may agree with him. If the two be opposed to each other on general politics, it may be presumed that they cannot act together in union on one special subject. Nor, whether they act in union or do not so act, can either have any authority over the other. The minister is not responsible to Congress, nor is the chairman of the committee in any way bound to support the minister. It is presumed that the chairman must know the minister's secrets, but the chairman may be bound by party considerations to use those secrets against the minister.
The system of committees appears to me to be good as regards the work of legislation. It seems well adapted to effect economy of time and the application of special men to special services. But I am driven to think that that connection between the chairmen of the committees and the ministers, which I have attempted to describe, is an arrangement very imperfect in itself, but plainly indicating the necessity of some such close relation between the executive and the legislature of the United States as does exist in the political system of Great Britain. With us the Queen's minister has a greater weight in Parliament than the President's minister could hold in Congress, because the Queen is bound to employ a minister in whom the Parliament has confidence. As soon as such confidence ceases, the minister ceases to be minister. As the Crown has no politics of its own, it is simply necessary that the minister of the day should hold the politics of the people as testified by their representatives. The machinery of the President's Government cannot be made to work after this fashion. The President himself is a political officer, and the country is bound to bear with his politics for four years, whatever those politics may be. The ministry which he selects on coming to his seat will probably represent a majority in Congress, seeing that the same suffrages which have elected the President will also have elected the Congress. But there exists no necessity on the part of the President to employ ministers who shall carry with them the support of Congress. If, however, the ministers sat in Congress,—if it were required of each minister that he should have a seat either in one House or in the other,—the President would, I think, find himself constrained to change a ministry in which Congress should decline to confide. It might not be so at first, but there would be a tendency in that direction.
The governing powers do not rest exclusively with the President, or with the President and his ministers; they are shared in a certain degree with the Senate, which sits from time to time in executive Session, laying aside at such periods its legislative character. It is this executive authority which lends so great a dignity to the Senate, gives it the privilege of preponderating over the other House, and makes it the political safeguard of the nation. The questions of government as to which the Senate is empowered to interfere are soon told. All treaties made by the President must be sanctioned by the Senate; and all appointments made by the President must be confirmed by the Senate. The list is short, and one is disposed to think, when first hearing it, that the thing itself does not amount to much. But it does amount to very much; it enables the Senate to fetter the President, if the Senate should be so inclined, both as regards foreign politics and home politics. A Secretary for Foreign Affairs at Washington may write what despatches he pleases without reference to the Senate; but the Senate interferes before those despatches can have resulted in any fact which may be detrimental to the nation. It is not only that the Senate is responsible for such treaties as are made, but that the President is deterred from the making of treaties for which the Senate would decline to make itself responsible. Even though no treaty should ever be refused its sanction by the Senate, the protecting power of the Senate in that matter would not on that account have been less necessary or less efficacious. Though the bars with which we protect our house may never have been tried by a thief, we do not therefore believe that our house would have been safe if such bars had been known to be wanting. And then, as to that matter of state appointments, is it not the fact that all governing powers consist in the selection of the agents by whom the action of Government shall be carried on? It must come to this, I imagine, when the argument is pushed home. The power of the most powerful man depends only on the extent of his authority over his agents. According to the constitution of the United States, the President can select no agent either at home or abroad, for purposes either of peace or war, or to the employment of whom the Senate does not agree with him. Such a rule as this should save the nation from the use of disreputable agents as public servants. It might, perhaps, have done more towards such salvation than it has as yet effected;—and it may well be hoped that it will do more in future.
Such are the executive powers of the Senate; and it is, I think, remarkable that the Senate has always used these powers with extreme moderation. It has never shown a factious inclination to hinder Government by unnecessary interference, or a disposition to clip the President's wings by putting itself altogether at variance with him. I am not quite sure whether some fault may not have lain on the other side; whether the Senate may not have been somewhat slack in exercising the protective privileges given to it by the constitution. And here I cannot but remark how great is the deference paid to all governors and edicts of Government throughout the United States. One would have been disposed to think that such a feeling would be stronger in an old country such as Great Britain than in a young country such as the States. But I think that it is not so. There is less disposition to question the action of government either at Washington or at New York, than there is in London. Men in America seem to be content when they have voted in their governors, and to feel that for them all political action is over until the time shall come for voting for others. And this feeling, which seems to prevail among the people, prevails also in both Houses of Congress. Bitter denunciations against the President's policy or the President's ministers are seldom heard. Speeches are not often made with the object of impeding the action of Government. That so small and so grave a body as the Senate should abstain from factious opposition to the Government when employed on executive functions was perhaps to be expected. It is of course well that it should be so. I confess, however, that it has appeared to me that the Senate has not used the power placed in its hands as freely as the constitution has intended. But I look at the matter as an Englishman, and as an Englishman I can endure no government action which is not immediately subject to Parliamentary control.
Such are the governing powers of the United States. I think it will be seen that they are much more limited in their scope of action than with us; but within that scope of action much more independent and self-sufficient. And, in addition to this, those who exercise power in the United States are not only free from immediate responsibility, but are not made subject to the hope or fear of future judgment. Success will bring no award, and failure no punishment. I am not aware that any political delinquency has ever yet brought down retribution on the head of the offender in the United States, or that any great deed has been held as entitling the doer of it to his country's gratitude. Titles of nobility they have none; pensions they never give; and political disgrace is unknown. The line of politics would seem to be cold and unalluring. It is cold;—and would be unalluring, were it not that as a profession it is profitable. In much of this I expect that a change will gradually take place. The theory has been that public affairs should be in the hands of little men. The theory was intelligible while the public affairs were small; but they are small no longer, and that theory, I fancy, will have to alter itself. Great men are needed for the government, and in order to produce great men a career of greatness must be opened to them. I can see no reason why the career and the men should not be forthcoming.
CHAPTER XI.
THE LAW COURTS AND LAWYERS
OF THE UNITED STATES.
I do not propose to make any attempt to explain in detail the practices and rules of the American Courts of Law. No one but a lawyer should trust himself with such a task, and no lawyer would be enabled to do so in the few pages which I shall here devote to the subject. My present object is to explain, as far as I may be able to do so, the existing political position of the country. As this must depend more or less upon the power vested in the hands of the judges, and upon the tenure by which those judges hold their offices, I shall endeavour to describe the circumstances of the position in which the American judges are placed; the mode in which they are appointed; the difference which exists between the national judges and the State judges; and the extent to which they are or are not held in high esteem by the general public whom they serve.
It will, I think, be acknowledged that this last matter is one of almost paramount importance to the welfare of a country. At home in England we do not realize the importance to us in a political as well as social view of the dignity and purity of our judges, because we take from them all that dignity and purity can give as a matter of course. The honesty of our bench is to us almost as the honesty of heaven. No one dreams that it can be questioned or become questionable, and therefore there are but few who are thankful for its blessings. Few Englishmen care to know much about their own courts of law, or are even aware that the judges are the protectors of their liberties and property. There are the men, honoured on all sides, trusted by every one, removed above temptation, holding positions which are coveted by all lawyers. That it is so is enough for us; and as the good thence derived comes to us so easily, we forget to remember that we might possibly be without it. The law courts of the States have much in their simplicity and the general intelligence of their arrangements to recommend them. In all ordinary causes justice is done with economy, with expedition, and I believe with precision. But they strike an Englishman at once as being deficient in splendour and dignity, as wanting that reverence which we think should be paid to words falling from the bench, and as being in danger as to that purity, without which a judge becomes a curse among a people, a chief of thieves, and an arch-minister of the Evil One. I say as being in danger;—not that I mean to hint that such want of purity has been shown, or that I wish it to be believed that judges with itching palms do sit upon the American bench; but because the present political tendency of the State arrangements threatens to produce such danger. We in England trust implicitly in our judges,—not because they are Englishmen, but because they are Englishmen carefully selected for their high positions. We should soon distrust them if they were elected by universal suffrage from all the barristers and attorneys practising in the different courts; and so elected only for a period of years, as is the case with reference to many of the State judges in America. Such a mode of appointment would, in our estimation, at once rob them of their prestige. And our distrust would not be diminished if the pay accorded to the work were so small that no lawyer in good practice could afford to accept the situation. When we look at a judge in court, venerable beneath his wig and adorned with his ermine, we do not admit to ourselves that that high officer is honest because he is placed above temptation by the magnitude of his salary. We do not suspect that he, as an individual, would accept bribes and favour suitors if he were in want of money. But, still, we know as a fact that an honest man, like any other good article, must be paid for at a high price. Judges and bishops expect those rewards which all men win who rise to the highest steps on the ladder of their profession. And the better they are paid, within measure, the better they will be as judges and bishops. Now, the judges in America are not well paid, and the best lawyers cannot afford to sit upon the bench.
With us the practice of the law and the judicature of our law courts are divided. We have Chancery barristers and Common Law barristers; and we have Chancery Courts and Courts of Common Law. In the States there is no such division. It prevails neither in the national or federal courts of the United States, nor in the courts of any of the separate States. The code of laws used by the Americans is taken almost entirely from our English laws,—or rather, I should say, the federal code used by the nation is so taken, and also the various codes of the different States,—as each State takes whatever laws it may think fit to adopt. Even the precedents of our courts are held as precedents in the American courts, unless they chance to jar against other decisions given specially in their own courts with reference to cases of their own. In this respect the founders of the American law proceedings have shown a conservation bias and a predilection for English written and traditional law, which are much at variance with that general democratic passion for change by which we generally presume the Americans to have been actuated at their revolution. But though they have kept our laws, and still respect our reading of those laws, they have greatly altered and simplified our practice. Whether a double set of courts for Law and Equity are or are not expedient, either in the one country or in the other, I do not pretend to know. It is, however, the fact that there is no such division in the States.
Moreover there is no division in the legal profession. With us we have barristers and attorneys. In the States the same man is both barrister and attorney; and, which is perhaps in effect more startling, every lawyer is presumed to undertake law cases of every description. The same man makes your will, sells your property, brings an action for you of trespass against your neighbour, defends you when you are accused of murder, recovers for you two-and-sixpence, and pleads for you in an argument of three days' length when you claim to be the sole heir to your grandfather's enormous property. I need not describe how terribly distinct with us is the difference between an attorney and a barrister, or how much further than the poles asunder is the future Lord Chancellor, pleading before the Lords Justices at Lincoln's Inn, from the gentleman who at the Old Bailey is endeavouring to secure the personal liberty of the ruffian who a week or two since walked off with all your silver spoons. In the States no such differences are known. A lawyer there is a lawyer, and is supposed to do for any client any work that a lawyer may be called on to perform. But though this is the theory, and as regards any difference between attorney and barrister is altogether the fact, the assumed practice is not, and cannot be maintained as regards the various branches of a lawyer's work. When the population was smaller, and the law cases were less complicated, the theory and the practice were no doubt alike. As great cities have grown up, and properties large in amount have come under litigation, certain lawyers have found it expedient and practicable to devote themselves to special branches of their profession. But this, even up to the present time, has not been done openly as it were, or with any declaration made by a man as to his own branch of his calling. I believe that no such declaration on his part would be in accordance with the rules of the profession. He takes a partner, however, and thus attains his object;—or more than one partner, and then the business of the house is divided among them according to their individual specialities. One will plead in court, another will give chamber-counsel, and a third will take that lower business which must be done, but which first-rate men hardly like to do.
It will easily be perceived that law in this way will be made cheaper to the litigant. Whether or no that may be an unadulterated advantage, I have my doubts. I fancy that the united professional incomes of all the lawyers in the States would exceed in amount those made in England. In America every man of note seems to be a lawyer, and I am told that any lawyer who will work may make a sure income. If it be so, it would seem that Americans per head pay as much or more for their law as men do in England. It may be answered that they get more law for their money. That may be possible, and even yet they may not be gainers. I have been inclined to think that there is an unnecessarily slow and expensive ceremonial among us in the employment of barristers through a third party; it has seemed that the man of learning, on whose efforts the litigant really depends, is divided off from his client and employer by an unfair barrier, used only to enhance his own dignity and give an unnecessary grandeur to his position. I still think that the fault with us lies in this direction. But I feel that I am less inclined to demand an immediate alteration in our practice than I was before I had seen any of the American courts of law.
It should be generally understood that lawyers are the leading men in the States, and that the governance of the country has been almost entirely in their hands ever since the political life of the nation became full and strong. All public business of importance falls naturally into their hands, as with us it falls into the hands of men of settled wealth and landed property. Indeed, the fact on which I insist is much more clear and defined in the States than it is with us. In England the lawyers also obtain no inconsiderable share of political and municipal power. The latter is perhaps more in the hands of merchants and men in trade than of any other class; and even the highest seats of political greatness are more open with us to the world at large than they seem to be in the States to any that are not lawyers. Since the days of Washington every President of the United States has, I think, been a lawyer, excepting General Taylor. Other Presidents have been generals, but then they have also been lawyers. General Jackson was a successful lawyer. Almost all the leading politicians of the present day are lawyers. Seward, Cameron, Welles, Stanton, Chase, Sumner, Crittenden, Harris, Fessenden, are all lawyers. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Cass were lawyers. Hamilton and Jay were lawyers. Any man with an ambition to enter upon public life becomes a lawyer as a matter of course. It seems as though a study and practice of the law were necessary ingredients in a man's preparation for political life. I have no doubt that a very large proportion of both Houses of legislature would be found to consist of lawyers. I do not remember that I know of the circumstance of more than one senator who is not a lawyer. Lawyers form the ruling class in America as the landowners do with us. With us that ruling class is the wealthiest class; but this is not so in the States. It might be wished that it were so.
The great and ever-present difference between the national or federal affairs of the United States government, and the affairs of the government of each individual State should be borne in mind at all times by those who desire to understand the political position of the States. Till this be realized no one can have any correct idea of the bearings of politics in that country. As a matter of course we in England have been inclined to regard the Government and Congress of Washington as paramount throughout the States, in the same way that the Government of Downing Street and the Parliament of Westminster are paramount through the British isles. Such a mistake is natural; but not the less would it be a fatal bar to any correct understanding of the constitution of the United States. The national and State governments are independent of each other, and so also are the national and State tribunals. Each of these separate tribunals has its own judicature, its own judges, its own courts, and its own functions. Nor can the supreme tribunal at Washington exercise any authority over the proceedings of the Courts in the different States, or influence the decisions of their judges. For not only are the national judges and the State judges independent of each other; but the laws in accordance with which they are bound to act, may be essentially different. The two tribunals, those of the nation and of the State, are independent and final in their several spheres. On a matter of State jurisprudence no appeal lies from the supreme tribunal of New York or Massachusetts to the supreme tribunal of the nation at Washington.
The national tribunals are of two classes. First, there is the Supreme Court specially ordained by the constitution. And then there are such inferior courts as Congress may from time to time see fit to establish. Congress has no power to abolish the Supreme Court, or to erect another tribunal superior to it. This court sits at Washington, and is a final court of appeal from the inferior national courts of the federal empire. A system of inferior courts, inaugurated by Congress, has existed for about sixty years. Each State for purposes of national jurisprudence is constituted as a district; some few large States, such as New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, being divided into two districts. Each district has one district court presided over by one judge. National causes in general, both civil and criminal, are commenced in these district courts, and those involving only small amounts are ended there. Above these district courts are the national circuit courts, the districts or States having been grouped into circuits as the counties are grouped with us. To each of these circuits is assigned one of the judges of the Supreme Court of Washington, who is the ex-officio judge of that circuit, and who therefore travels as do our Common Law judges. In each district he sits with the judge of that district, and they two together form the circuit court. Appeals from the district court lie to the circuit court in cases over a certain amount, and also in certain criminal cases. It follows therefore that appeals lie from one judge to the same judge when sitting with another,—an arrangement which would seem to be fraught with some inconvenience. Certain causes, both civil and criminal, are commenced in the circuit courts. From the circuit courts the appeal lies to the Supreme Court at Washington; but such appeal beyond the circuit court is not allowed in cases which are of small magnitude or which do not involve principles of importance. If there be a division of opinion in the circuit court the case goes to the Supreme Court;—from whence it might be inferred that all cases brought from the district court to the circuit court would be sent on to the Supreme Court, unless the circuit judge agreed with the district judge; for the district judge having given his judgment in the inferior court, would probably adhere to it in the superior court. No appeal lies to the Supreme Court at Washington in criminal cases.
All questions that concern more than one State, or that are litigated between citizens of different States, or which are international in their bearing, come before the national judges. All cases in which foreigners are concerned, or the rights of foreigners, are brought or may be brought into the national courts. So also are all causes affecting the Union itself, or which are governed by the laws of Congress and not by the laws of any individual State. All questions of Admiralty law and maritime jurisdiction, and cases affecting ambassadors or consuls, are there tried. Matters relating to the Post-office, to the Customs, the collection of national taxes, to patents, to the army and navy, and to the mint, are tried in the national courts. The theory is that the national tribunals shall expound and administer the national laws and treaties, protect national offices and national rights; and that foreigners and citizens of other States shall not be required to submit to the decisions of the State tribunals;—in fact, that national tribunals shall take cognizance of all matters as to which the general government of the nation is responsible. In most of such cases the national tribunals have exclusive jurisdiction. In others it is optional with the plaintiff to select his tribunal. It is then optional with the defendant, if brought into a State court, to remain there or to remove his cause into the national tribunal. The principle is, that either at the beginning, or ultimately, such questions shall or may be decided by the national tribunals. If in any suit properly cognizable in a State court the decision should turn on a clause in the constitution, or on a law of the United States, or on the act of a national offence, or on the validity of a national act, an appeal lies to the Supreme Court of the United States and to its officers. The object has been to give to the national tribunals of the nation full cognizance of its own laws, treaties, and congressional acts.
The judges of all the national tribunals, of whatever grade or rank, hold their offices for life, and are removable only on impeachment. They are not even removable on an address of Congress; thus holding on a firmer tenure even than our own judges, who may, I believe, be moved on an address by Parliament. The judges in America are not entitled to any pension or retiring allowances; and as there is not, as regards the judges of the national courts, any proviso that they shall cease to sit after a certain age, they are, in fact, immoveable whatever may be their infirmities. Their position in this respect is not good, seeing that their salaries will hardly admit of their making adequate provision for the evening of life. The salary of the Chief Justice of the United States is only £1300 per annum. All judges of the national courts of whatever rank are appointed by the President, but their appointments must be confirmed by the Senate. This proviso, however, gives to the Senate practically but little power, and is rarely used in opposition to the will of the President. If the President name one candidate, who on political grounds is distasteful to a majority of the Senate, it is not probable that a second nomination made by him will be more satisfactory. This seems now to be understood, and the nomination of the cabinet ministers and of the judges, as made by the President, are seldom set aside or interfered with by the Senate, unless on grounds of purely personal objection.
The position of the national judges as to their appointments and mode of tenure is very different from that of the State judges, to whom in a few lines I shall more specially allude. This should, I think, be specially noticed by Englishmen when criticising the doings of the American courts. I have observed statements made to the effect that decisions given by American judges as to international or maritime affairs affecting English interests could not be trusted, because the judges so giving them would have been elected by popular vote, and would be dependent on the popular voice for reappointment. This is not so. Judges are appointed by popular vote in very many of the States. But all matters affecting shipping, and all questions touching foreigners are tried in the national courts before judges who have been appointed for life. I should not myself have had any fear with reference to the ultimate decision in the affair of Slidell and Mason had the "Trent" been carried into New York. I would, however, by no means say so much had the cause been one for trial before the tribunals of the State of New York.
I have been told that we in England have occasionally fallen into the error of attributing to the Supreme Court at Washington a quasi political power which it does not possess. This court can give no opinion to any department of the Government, nor can it decide upon or influence any subject that has not come before it as a regularly litigated case in law. Though especially founded by the constitution, it has no peculiar power under the constitution, and stands in no peculiar relation either to that or to Acts of Congress. It has no other power to decide on the constitutional legality of an act of Congress or an act of a State legislature or of a public officer than every court, State and national, high and low, possesses and is bound to exercise. It is simply the national court of last appeal.
In the different States such tribunals have been established as each State by its constitution and legislation has seen fit to adopt. The States are entirely free on this point. The usual course is to have one Supreme Court, sometimes called by that name, sometimes the Court of Appeals, and sometimes the Court of Errors. Then they have such especial courts as their convenience may dictate. The State jurisprudence includes all causes not expressly or by necessary implication secured to the national courts. The tribunals of the States have exclusive control over domestic relations, religion, education, the tenure and descent of land, the inheritance of property, police regulations, municipal economy, and all matters of internal trade. In this category of course come the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, owner and slave, guardian and ward, tradesman and apprentice. So also do all police and criminal regulations not external in their character,—highways, railroads, canals, schools, colleges, the relief of paupers, and those thousand other affairs of the world by which men are daily surrounded in their own homes and their own districts. As to such subjects Congress can make no law, and over them Congress and the national tribunals have no jurisdiction. Congress cannot say that a man shall be hung for murder in New York; nor if a man be condemned to be hung in New York can the President pardon him. The legislature of New York must say whether or no hanging shall be the punishment adjudged to murder in that State; and the Governor of the State of New York must pronounce the man's pardon,—if it be that he is to be pardoned. But Congress must decide whether or no a man shall be hung for murder committed on the high seas, or in the national forts or arsenals; and in such a case it is for the President to give or to refuse the pardon.
The judges of the States are appointed as the constitution or the laws of each State may direct in that matter. The appointments, I think, in all the old States were formerly vested in the Governor. In some States such is still the case. In some, if I am not mistaken, the nomination is now made, directly, by the legislature. But in most of the States the power of appointing has been claimed by the people, and the judges are voted in by popular election, just as the President of the Union and the Governors of the different States are voted in. There has for some years been a growing tendency in this direction, and the people in most of the States have claimed the power;—or rather the power has been given to the people by politicians who have wished to get into their hands in this way the patronage of the courts. But now, at the present moment, there is arising a strong feeling of the inexpediency of appointing judges in such a manner. An antidemocratic bias is taking possession of men's minds, causing a reaction against that tendency to universal suffrage in everything which prevailed before the war began. As to this matter of the mode of appointing judges, I have heard but one opinion expressed; and I am inclined to think that a change will be made in one State after another, as the constitutions of the different States are revised. Such revisions take place generally at periods of about twenty-five years' duration. If, therefore, it be acknowledged that the system be bad, the error can be soon corrected.
Nor is this mode of appointment the only evil that has been adopted in the State judicatures. The judges in most of the States are not appointed for life, nor even during good behaviour. They enter their places for a certain term of years, varying from fifteen down, I believe, to seven. I do not know whether any are appointed for a term of less than seven years. When they go out they have no pensions; and as a lawyer who has been on the bench for seven years can hardly recall his practice, and find himself at once in receipt of his old professional income, it may easily be imagined how great will be the judge's anxiety to retain his position on the bench. This he can do only by the universal suffrages of the people, by political popularity, and a general standing of that nature which enables a man to come forth as the favourite candidate of the lower orders. This may or may not be well when the place sought for is one of political power,—when the duties required are political in all their bearings. But no one can think it well when the place sought for is a judge's seat on the bench;—when the duties required are solely judicial. Whatever hitherto may have been the conduct of the judges in the courts of the different States, whether or no impurity has yet crept in, and the sanctity of justice has yet been outraged, no one can doubt the tendency of such an arrangement. At present even a few visits to the courts constituted in this manner will convince an observer that the judges on the bench are rather inferior than superior to the lawyers who practise before them. The manner of address, the tone of voice, the lack of dignity in the judge, and the assumption by the lawyer before him of a higher authority than his, all tell this tale. And then the judges in these courts are not paid at a rate which will secure the services of the best men. They vary in the different States, running from about £600 to about £1000 per annum. But a successful lawyer practising in the courts in which these judges sit, not unfrequently earns £3000 a year. A professional income of £2000 a year is not considered very high. When the different conditions of the bench are considered, when it is remembered that the judge may lose his place after a short term of years, and that during that short term of years he receives a payment much less than that earned by his successful professional brethren, it can hardly be expected that first-rate judges should be found. The result is seen daily in society. You meet Judge This and Judge That, not knowing whether they are ex-judges or in-judges; but you soon learn that your friends do not hold any very high social position on account of their forensic dignity.
It is, perhaps, but just to add that in Massachusetts, which I cannot but regard as in many respects the noblest of the States, the judges are appointed by the Governor, and are appointed for life.
CHAPTER XII.
THE FINANCIAL POSITION.
The Americans are proud of much that they have done in this war, and indeed much has been done which may justify pride; but of nothing are they so proud as of the noble dimensions and quick growth of their Government debt. That Mr. Secretary Chase, the American Chancellor of the Exchequer, participates in this feeling I will not venture to say; but if he do not, he is well nigh the only man in the States who does not do so. The amount of expenditure has been a subject of almost national pride, and the two million of dollars a day which has been roughly put down as the average cost of the war, has always been mentioned by northern men in a tone of triumph. This feeling is, I think, intelligible; and although we cannot allude to it without a certain amount of inward sarcasm,—a little gentle laughing in the sleeve, at the nature of this national joy, I am not prepared to say that it is altogether ridiculous. If the country be found able and willing to pay the bill, this triumph in the amount of the cost will hereafter be regarded as having been anything but ridiculous. In private life an individual will occasionally be known to lavish his whole fortune on the accomplishment of an object which he conceives to be necessary to his honour. If the object be in itself good, and if the money be really paid, we do not laugh at such a man for the sacrifices which he makes.
For myself, I think that the object of the northern States in this war has been good. I think that they could not have avoided the war without dishonour, and that it was incumbent on them to make themselves the arbiters of the future position of the South, whether that future position shall or shall not be one of secession. This they could only do by fighting. Had they acceded to secession without a civil war, they would have been regarded throughout Europe as having shown themselves inferior to the South, and would for many years to come have lost that prestige which their spirit and energy had undoubtedly won for them; and in their own country such submission on their part would have practically given to the South the power of drawing the line of division between the two new countries. That line, so drawn, would have given Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri to the southern Republic. The great effect of the war to the North will be, that the northern men will draw the line of secession, if any such line be drawn. I still think that such line will ultimately be drawn, and that the southern States will be allowed to secede. But if it be so, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri will not be found among these seceding States; and the line may not improbably be driven south of North Carolina and Tennessee. If this can be so, the object of the war will, I think, hereafter be admitted to have been good. Whatever may be the cost in money of joining the States which I have named to a free-soil northern people, instead of allowing them to be buried in that dismal swamp, which a confederacy of southern slave States will produce, that cost can hardly be too much. At the present moment there exists in England a strong sympathy with the South, produced partly by the unreasonable vituperation with which the North treated our Government at the beginning of the war, and by the capture of Mason and Slidell; partly also by that feeling of good-will which a looker-on at a combat always has for the weaker side. But, although this sympathy does undoubtedly exist, I do not imagine that many Englishmen are of opinion that a confederacy of southern slave States will ever offer to the general civilization of the world very many attractions. It cannot be thought that the South will equal the North in riches, in energy, in education, or general well-being. Such has not been our experience of any slave country; such has not been our experience of any tropical country; and such especially has not been our experience of the southern States of the North American Union. I am no abolitionist; but to me it seems impossible that any Englishman should really advocate the cause of slavery against the cause of free soil. There are the slaves, and I know that they cannot be abolished,—neither they nor their chains; but, for myself, I will not willingly join my lot with theirs. I do not wish to have dealings with the African negro either as a free man or as a slave, if I can avoid them, believing that his employment by me in either capacity would lead to my own degradation.*
*In saying this I fear that I shall be misunderstood, let me use what foot-note or other mode of protestation I may to guard myself. In thus speaking of the African negro, I do not venture to despise the work of God's hands. That He has made the negro, for His own good purposes, as He has the Esquimaux, I am aware. And I am aware that it is my duty, as it is the duty of us all, to see that no injury be done to him, and, if possible, to assist him in his condition. When I declare that I desire no dealings with the negro, I speak of him in the position in which I now find him, either as a free servant or a slave. In either position he impedes the civilization and the progress of the white man. [back]
In considering this matter it must be remembered that the five or six States of which we are speaking are at present slave States, but that, with the exception of Virginia,—of part only of Virginia,—they are not wedded to slavery. But even in Virginia, great as has been the gain which has accrued to that unhappy State from the breeding of slaves for the southern market,—even in Virginia slavery would soon die out if she were divided from the South, and joined to the North. In those other States, in Maryland, in Kentucky, and in Missouri there is no desire to perpetuate the institution. They have been slave States, and as such have resented the rabid abolition of certain northern orators. Had it not been for those orators, and their oratory, the soil of Kentucky would now have been free. Those five or six States are now slave States; but a line of secession drawn south of them will be the line which cuts off slavery from the North. If those States belong to the North when secession shall be accomplished, they will belong to it as free States; but if they belong to the South, they will belong to the South as slave States. If they belong to the North, they will become rich as the North is, and will share in the education of the North. If they belong to the South they will become poor as the South is, and will share in the ignorance of the South. If we presume that secession will be accomplished,—and I for one am of that opinion,—has it not been well that a war should be waged with such an object as this? If those five or six States can be gained, stretching east and west from the Atlantic to the centre of the continent, hundreds of miles beyond the Mississippi, and north and south over four degrees of latitude,—if that extent of continent can be added to the free soil of the northern territory, will not the contest that has done this have been worth any money that can have been spent on it?
So much as to the object to be gained by the money spent on the war! And I think that in estimating the nature of the financial position which the war has produced, it was necessary that we should consider the value of the object which has been in dispute. The object I maintain has been good. Then comes the question whether or no the bill will be fairly paid;—whether they who have spent the money will set about that disagreeable task of settling the account with a true purpose and an honest energy. And this question splits itself into two parts. Will the Americans honestly wish to pay the bill; and if they do so wish, will they have the power to pay it? Again that last question must be once more divided. Will they have the power to pay, as regards the actual possession of the means, and if possessing them, will they have the power of access to those means?
The nation has obtained for itself an evil name for repudiation. We all know that Pennsylvania behaved badly about her money affairs, although she did at last pay her debts. We all know that Mississippi has behaved very badly about her money affairs, and has never paid her debts, nor does she intend to pay them. And, which is worse than this, for it applies to the nation generally and not to individual States, we all know that it was made a matter of boast in the States that in the event of a war with England the enormous amount of property held by Englishmen in the States should be confiscated. That boast was especially made in the mercantile city of New York; and when the matter was discussed it seemed as though no American realized the iniquity of such a threat. It was not apparently understood that such a confiscation on account of a war would be an act of national robbery justified simply by the fact that the power of committing it would be in the hands of the robbers. Confiscation of so large an amount of wealth would be a smart thing, and men did not seem to perceive that any disgrace would attach to it in the eyes of the world at large. I am very anxious not to speak harsh words of the Americans; but when questions arise as to pecuniary arrangements I find myself forced to acknowledge that great precaution is at any rate necessary.
But, nevertheless, I am not sure that we shall be fair if we allow ourselves to argue as to the national purpose in this matter from such individual instances of dishonesty as those which I have mentioned. I do not think it is to be presumed that the United States as a nation will repudiate its debts because two separate States may have been guilty of repudiation. Nor am I disposed to judge of the honesty of the people generally from the dishonest threatenings of New York, made at a moment in which a war with England was considered imminent. I do believe that the nation, as a nation, will be as ready to pay for the war as it has been ready to carry on the war. That "ignorant impatience of taxation," to which it is supposed that we Britons are very subject, has not been a complaint rife among the Americans generally. We, in England, are inclined to believe that hitherto they have known nothing of the merits and demerits of taxation, and have felt none of its annoyances, because their entire national expenditure has been defrayed by light Custom duties; but the levies made in the separate States for State purposes, or chiefly for municipal purposes, have been very heavy. They are, however, collected easily, and, as far as I am aware, without any display of ignorant impatience. Indeed, an American is rarely impatient of any ordained law. Whether he be told to do this, or to pay for that, or to abstain from the other, he does do and pay and abstain without grumbling, provided that he has had a hand in voting for those who made the law and for those who carry out the law. The people generally have, I think, recognized the fact that they will have to put their necks beneath the yoke, as the peoples of other nations have put theirs, and support the weight of a great national debt. When the time comes for the struggle,—for the first uphill heaving against the terrible load which they will henceforth have to drag with them in their career, I think it will be found that they are not ill-inclined to put their shoulders to the work.
Then as to their power of paying the bill! We are told that the wealth of a nation consists in its labour, and that that nation is the most wealthy which can turn out of hand the greatest amount of work. If this be so the American States must form a very wealthy nation, and as such be able to support a very heavy burden. No one, I presume, doubts that that nation which works the most, or works rather to the best effect, is the richest. On this account England is richer than other countries, and is able to bear, almost without the sign of an effort, a burden which would crush any other land. But of this wealth the States own almost as much as Great Britain owns. The population of the northern States is industrious, ambitious of wealth, and capable of work as is our population. It possesses, or is possessed by, that restless longing for labour which creates wealth almost unconsciously. Whether this man be rich or be a bankrupt, whether the bankers of that city fail or make their millions, the creative energies of the American people will not become dull. Idleness is impossible to them, and therefore poverty is impossible. Industry and intellect together will always produce wealth; and neither industry nor intellect is ever wanting to an American. They are the two gifts with which the fairy has endowed him. When she shall have added honesty as a third, the tax-gatherer can desire no better country in which to exercise his calling.
I cannot myself think that all the millions that are being spent would weigh upon the country with much oppression, if the weight were once properly placed upon the muscles that will have to bear it. The difficulty will be in the placing of the weight. It has, I know, been argued that the circumstances under which our national debt has extended itself to its present magnificent dimensions cannot be quoted as parallel to those of the present American debt, because we, while we were creating the debt, were taxing ourselves very heavily, whereas the Americans have gone a-head with the creation of their debt before they have levied a shilling on themselves towards the payment of those expenses for which the debt has been encountered. But this argument, even if it were true in its gist, goes no way towards proving that the Americans will be unable to pay. The population of the present free-soil States is above eighteen millions; that of the States which will probably belong to the Union if secession be accomplished is about twenty-two millions. At a time when our debt had amounted to six hundred millions sterling, we had no population such as that to bear the burden. It may be said that we had more amassed wealth than they have. But I take it that the amassed wealth of any country can go but a very little way in defraying the wants or in paying the debts of a people. We again come back to the old maxim, that the labour of a country is its wealth; and that a country will be rich or poor in accordance with the intellectual industry of its people.
But the argument drawn from that comparison between our own conduct when we were creating our debt, and the conduct of the Americans while they have been creating their debt,—during the twelve months from April 1, 1861, to March 31, 1862, let us say,—is hardly a fair argument. We, at any rate, knew how to tax ourselves,—if only the taxes might be forthcoming. We were already well used to the work; and a minister with a willing House of Commons had all his material ready to his hand. It has not been so in the United States. The difficulty has not been with the people who should pay the taxes, but with the minister and the Congress which did not know how to levy them. Certainly not as yet have those who are now criticising the doings on the other side of the water, a right to say that the American people are unwilling to make personal sacrifices for the carrying out of this war. No sign has as yet been shown of an unwillingness on the part of the people to be taxed. But wherever a sign could be given, it has been given on the other side. The separate States have taxed themselves very heavily for the support of the families of the absent soldiers. The extra allowances made to maimed men, amounting generally to twenty-four shillings a month, have been paid by the States themselves, and have been paid almost with too much alacrity.
I am of opinion that the Americans will show no unwillingness to pay the amount of taxation which must be exacted from them; and I also think that as regards their actual means they will have the power to pay it. But as regards their power of obtaining access to those means, I must confess that I see many difficulties in their way. In the first place they have no financier,—no man who by natural aptitude and by long continued contact with great questions of finance, has enabled himself to handle the money affairs of a nation with a master's hand. In saying this I do not intend to impute any blame to Mr. Chase, the present Secretary at the Treasury. Of his ability to do the work properly, had he received the proper training, I am not able to judge. It is not that Mr. Chase is incapable. He may be capable or incapable. But it is that he has not had the education of a national financier, and that he has no one at his elbow to help him who has had that advantage.
And here we are again brought to that general absence of state craft which has been the result of the American system of government. I am not aware that our Chancellors of the Exchequer have in late years always been great masters of finance; but they have at any rate been among money men and money matters, and have had financiers at their elbows if they have not deserved the name themselves. The very fact that a Chancellor of the Exchequer sits in the House of Commons and is forced in that House to answer all questions on the subject of finance, renders it impossible that he should be ignorant of the rudiments of the science. If you put a white cap on a man's head and place him in a kitchen, he will soon learn to be a cook. But he will never be made a cook by standing in the dining-room and seeing the dishes as they are brought up. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is our cook; and the House of Commons, not the Treasury chambers, is his kitchen. Let the Secretary of the United States Treasury sit in the House of Representatives. He would learn more there by contest with opposing members than he can do by any amount of study in his own chamber.
But the House of Representatives itself has not as yet learned its own lesson with reference to taxation. When I say that the United States are in want of a financier, I do not mean that the deficiency rests entirely with Mr. Chase. This necessity for taxation, and for taxation at so tremendous a rate, has come suddenly, and has found the representatives of the people unprepared for such work. To us, as I conceive, the science of taxation, in which we certainly ought to be great, has come gradually. We have learned by slow lessons what taxes will be productive, under what circumstances they will be most productive, and at what point they will be made unproductive by their own weight. We have learned what taxes may be levied so as to afford funds themselves, without injuring the proceeds of other taxes, and we know what taxes should be eschewed as being specially oppressive to the general industry and injurious to the well-being of the nation. This has come of much practice, and even we, with all our experience, have even got something to learn. But the public men in the States who are now devoting themselves to this matter of taxing the people have, as yet, no such experience. That they have inclination enough for the work is, I think, sufficiently demonstrated by the national tax bill, the wording of which is now before me, and which will have been passed into law before this volume can be published. It contains a list of every taxable article on the earth or under the earth. A more sweeping catalogue of taxation was probably never put forth. The Americans, it has been said by some of us, have shown no disposition to tax themselves for this war; but before the war has as yet been well twelve months in operation, a bill has come out with a list of taxation so oppressive, that it must, as regards many of its items, act against itself and cut its own throat. It will produce terrible fraud in its evasion, and create an army of excise officers who will be as locusts over the face of the country. Taxes are to be laid on articles which I should have said that universal consent had declared to be unfit for taxation. Salt, soap, candles, oil, and other burning fluids, gas, pins, paper, ink, and leather, are to be taxed. It was at first proposed that wheat-flour should be taxed, but that item has, I believe, been struck out of the bill in its passage through the House. All articles manufactured of cotton, wool, silk, worsted, flax, hemp, jute, india-rubber, gutta percha, wood (?), glass, pottery wares, leather, paper, iron, steel, lead, tin, copper, zinc, brass, gold and silver, horn, ivory, bone, bristles, wholly or in part, or of other materials, are to be taxed;—provided always that books, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, and reviews shall not be regarded as manufactures. It will be said that the amount of taxation to be levied on the immense number of manufactured articles which must be included in this list will be light,—the tax itself being only 3 per cent. ad valorem. But with reference to every article, there will be the necessity of collecting this 3 per cent.! As regards each article that is manufactured, some government official must interfere to appraise its value and to levy the tax. Who shall declare the value of a barrel of wooden nutmegs; or how shall the Excise-officer get his tax from every cobbler's stall in the country? And then tradesmen are to pay licences for their trades,—a confectioner £2, a tallow-chandler £2, a horsedealer £2. Every man whose business it is to sell horses shall be a horsedealer. True. But who shall say whether or no it be a man's business to sell horses? An apothecary £2, a photographer £2, a pedlar £4, £3, £2, or £1, according to his mode of travelling. But if the gross receipts of any of the confectioners, tallow-chandlers, horsedealers, apothecaries, photographers, pedlars, or the like do not exceed £200 a year, then such tradesmen shall not be required to pay for any licence at all. Surely such a proviso can only have been inserted with the express view of creating fraud and ill blood! But the greatest audacity has, I think, been shown in the levying of personal taxes,—such taxes as have been held to be peculiarly disagreeable among us, and have specially brought down upon us the contempt of lightly-taxed people, who, like the Americans, have known nothing of domestic interference. Carriages are to be taxed,—as they are with us. Pianos also are to be taxed, and plate. It is not signified by this clause that such articles shall pay a tax, once for all, while in the maker's hands, which tax would no doubt fall on the future owner of such piano or plate; in such case the owner would pay, but would pay without any personal contact with the tax-gatherer. But every owner of a piano or of plate is to pay annually according to the value of the articles he owns. But perhaps the most audacious of all the proposed taxes is that on watches. Every owner of a watch is to pay 4s. a year for a gold watch and 2s. a year for a silver watch! The American tax-gatherers will not like to be cheated. They will be very keen in searching for watches. But who can say whether they or the carriers of watches will have the best of it in such a hunt. The tax-gatherers will be as hounds ever at work on a cold scent. They will now be hot and angry, and then dull and disheartened. But the carriers of watches who do not choose to pay will generally, one may predict, be able to make their points good.
With such a tax bill,—which I believe came into action on the 1st of May, 1862,—the Americans are not fairly open to the charge of being unwilling to tax themselves. They have avoided none of the irritating annoyances of taxation, as also they have not avoided, or attempted to lighten for themselves, the dead weight of the burden. The dead weight they are right to endure without flinching; but their mode of laying it on their own backs justifies me, I think, in saying that they do not yet know how to obtain access to their own means. But this bill applies simply to matters of excise. As I have said before, Congress, which has hitherto supported the government by custom duties, has also the power of levying excise duties, and now, in its first session since the commencement of the war, has begun to use that power without much hesitation or bashfulness. As regards their taxes levied at the Custom House, the government of the United States has always been inclined to high duties, with the view of protecting the internal trade and manufactures of the country. The amount required for national expenses was easily obtained, and these duties were not regulated, as I think, so much with a view to the amount which might be collected, as to that of the effect which the tax might have in fostering native industry. That, if I understand it, was the meaning of Mr. Morrill's bill, which was passed immediately on the secession of the southern members of Congress, and which instantly enhanced the price of all foreign manufactured goods in the States. But now the desire for protection, simply as protection, has been swallowed up in the acknowledged necessity for revenue; and the only object to be recognized in the arrangement of the custom duties is the collection of the greatest number of dollars. This is fair enough. If the country can at such a crisis raise a better revenue by claiming a shilling a pound on coffee than it can by claiming sixpence, the shilling may be wisely claimed, even though many may thus be prohibited from the use of coffee. But then comes the great question, What duty will really give the greatest product? At what rate shall we tax coffee so as to get at the people's money? If it be so taxed that people won't use it, the tax cuts its own throat. There is some point at which the tax will be most productive; and also there is a point up to which the tax will not operate to the serious injury of the trade. Without the knowledge which should indicate these points, a Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his myrmidons, would be groping in the dark. As far as we can yet see, there is not much of such knowledge either in the Treasury Chambers or the House of Representatives at Washington.
But the greatest difficulty which the States will feel in obtaining access to their own means of taxation, is that which is created by the constitution itself, and to which I alluded when speaking of the taxing powers which the constitution had given to Congress, and those which it had denied to Congress. As to custom duties and excise duties, Congress can do what it pleases, as can the House of Commons. But Congress cannot levy direct taxation according to its own judgment. In those matters of customs and excise, Congress and the Secretary of the Treasury will probably make many blunders; but having the power they will blunder through, and the money will be collected. But direct taxation, in an available shape, is beyond the power of Congress under the existing rule of the constitution. No income-tax, for instance, can be laid on the general incomes of the United States, that shall be universal throughout the States. An income-tax can be levied, but it must be levied in proportion to the representation. It is as though our Chancellor of the Exchequer, in collecting an income-tax, were obliged to demand the same amount of contribution from the town of Chester as from the town of Liverpool, because both Chester and Liverpool return two Members to Parliament. In fitting his tax to the capacity of Chester, he would be forced to allow Liverpool to escape unscathed. No skill in money matters on the part of the Treasury Secretary, and no aptness for finance on the part of the Committee on Ways and Means, can avail here. The constitution must apparently be altered before any serviceable resort can be had to direct taxation. And yet, at such an emergency as that now existing, direct taxation would probably give more ready assistance than can be afforded either by the Customs or the Excise.
It has been stated to me that this difficulty in the way of direct taxation can be overcome without any change in the constitution. Congress could only levy from Rhode Island the same amount of income-tax that it might levy from Iowa; but it will be competent to the legislature of Rhode Island itself to levy what income-tax it may please on itself; and to devote the proceeds to national or federal purposes. Rhode Island may do so; and so may Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and the other rich Atlantic States. They may tax themselves according to their riches, while Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and such-like States are taxing themselves according to their poverty. I cannot myself think that it would be well to trust to the generosity of the separate States for the finances needed by the national Government. We should not willingly trust to Yorkshire or Sussex to give us their contributions to the national income, especially if Yorkshire and Sussex had small Houses of Commons of their own, in which that question of giving might be debated. It may be very well for Rhode Island or New York to be patriotic! But what shall be done with any State that declines to evince such patriotism? The legislatures of the different States may be invited to impose a tax of 5 per cent. on all incomes in each State; but what will be done if Pennsylvania, for instance, should decline, or Illinois should hesitate? What if the legislature of Massachusetts should offer 6 per cent., or that of New Jersey decide that 4 per cent. was sufficient? For a while the arrangement might possibly be made to answer the desired purpose. During the first ebullition of high feeling, the different States concerned might possibly vote the amount of taxes required for federal purposes. I fear it would not be so, but we may allow that the chance is on the card. But it is not conceivable that such an arrangement should be continued when, after a year or two, men came to talk over the war with calmer feelings and a more critical judgment. The State legislatures would become inquisitive, opinionative, and probably factious. They would be unwilling to act in so great a matter under the dictation of the federal Congress; and by degrees one, and then another, would decline to give its aid to the central government. However broadly the acknowledgment may have been made, that the levying of direct taxes was necessary for the nation, each State would be tempted to argue that a wrong mode and a wrong rate of levying had been adopted, and words would be forthcoming instead of money. A resort to such a mode of taxation would be a bad security for government Stock.
All matters of taxation, moreover, should be free from any taint of generosity. A man who should attempt to lessen the burdens of his country by gifts of money to its Exchequer would be laying his country under an obligation, for which his country would not thank him. The gifts here would be from States, and not from individuals; but the principle would be the same. I cannot imagine that the United States' Government would be willing to owe its revenue to the good will of different States, or its want of revenue to their caprice. If under such an arrangement the western States were to decline to vote the quota of income-tax or property-tax to which the eastern States had agreed,—and in all probability they would decline,—they would in fact be seceding. They would thus secede from the burdens of their general country; but in such event no one could accuse such States of unconstitutional secession.
It is not easy to ascertain with precision what is the present amount of debt due by the United States; nor probably has any tolerably accurate guess been yet given of the amount to which it may be extended during the present war. A statement made in the House of Representatives, by Mr. Spaulding, a member of the Committee of Ways and Means, on the 29th of January last, may perhaps be taken as giving as trustworthy information as any that can be obtained. I have changed Mr. Spaulding's figures from dollars into pounds, that they may be more readily understood by English readers.
This was the amount of the debt due up to January 15th, 1862. Mr. Spaulding then calculates that the sum required to carry on the Government up to July 1st, 1862, will be £68,647,077. And that a further sum of £110,000,000 will be wanted on or before the 1st of July, 1863. Thus the debt at that latter date would stand as follows:—
| Amount of Debt up to January, 1862 | £61,352,923 |
| Added by July 1st, 1862 | 68,647,077 |
| Again added by July 1st, 1863 | 110,000,000 |
| £240,000,000 |
The first of these items may no doubt be taken as accurate. The second has probably been founded on facts which leave little doubt as to its substantial truth. The third, which professes to give the proposed expense of the war for the forthcoming year, viz. from 1st July, 1862, to 30th June, 1863, must necessarily have been obtained by a very loose estimate. No one can say what may be the condition of the country during the next year,—whether the war may then be raging throughout the southern States, or whether the war may not have ceased altogether. The North knows little or nothing of the capacity of the South. How little it knows may be surmised from the fact that the whole southern army of Virginia retreated from their position at Manassas before the northern generals knew that they were moving; and that when they were gone no word whatever was left of their numbers. I do not believe that the northern Government is even yet able to make any probable conjecture as to the number of troops which the southern confederacy is maintaining, and if this be so, they can certainly make no trustworthy estimates as to their own expenses for the ensuing year.
Two hundred and forty millions is, however, the sum named by a gentleman presumed to be conversant with the matter, as the amount of debt which may be expected by midsummer, 1863; and if the war be continued till then, it will probably be found that he has not exceeded the mark. It is right, however, to state that Mr. Chase in his estimate does not rate the figures so high. He has given it as his opinion that the debt will be about one hundred and four millions in July, 1862, and one hundred and eighty millions in July, 1863. As to the first amount, with reference to which a tolerably accurate calculation may probably be made, I am inclined to prefer the estimate as given by the member of the committee; and as to the other, which hardly, as I think, admits of any calculation, his calculation is at any rate as good as that made in the Treasury.
But it is the immediate want of funds, and not the prospective debt of the country, which is now doing the damage. In this opinion Mr. Chase will probably agree with me; but readers on this side of the water will receive what I say with a smile. Such a state of affairs is certainly one that has not uncommonly been reached by financiers; it has also often been experienced by gentlemen in the management of their private affairs. It has been common in Ireland, and in London has created the wealth of the pawnbrokers. In the States at the present time the government is very much in this condition. The prospective wealth of the country is almost unbounded, but there is great difficulty in persuading any pawnbroker to advance money on the pledge. In February last Mr. Chase was driven to obtain the sanction of the legislature for paying the national creditors by bills drawn at twelve months' date, and bearing 6 per cent. interest. It is the old story of the tailor who calls with his little account, and draws on his insolvent debtor at ninety days. If the insolvent debtor be not utterly gone as regards solvency he will take up the bill when due, even though he may not be able to pay a simple debt. But then, if he be utterly insolvent, he can do neither the one nor the other! The Secretary of the Treasury, when he asked for permission to accept these bills,—or to issue these certificates, as he calls them,—acknowledged to pressing debts of over five millions sterling which he could not pay; and to further debts of eight millions which he could not pay, but which he termed floating;—debts, if I understand him, which were not as yet quite pressing. Now I imagine that to be a lamentable condition for any Chancellor of an Exchequer,—especially as a confession is at the same time made that no advantageous borrowing is to be done under the existing circumstances. When a Chancellor of the Exchequer confesses that he cannot borrow on advantageous terms, the terms within his reach must be very bad indeed. This position is indeed a sad one, and at any rate justifies me in stating that the immediate want of funds is severely felt.
But the very arguments which have been used to prove that the country will be ultimately crushed by the debt, are those which I should use to prove that it will not be crushed. A comparison has more than once been made between the manner in which our debt was made, and that in which the debt of the United States is now being created; and the great point raised in our favour is, that while we were borrowing money we were also taxing ourselves, and that we raised as much by taxes as we did by loans. But it is too early in the day to deny to the Americans the credit which we thus take to ourselves. We were a tax-paying nation when we commenced those wars which made our great loans necessary, and only went on in that practice which was habitual to us. I do not think that the Americans could have taxed themselves with greater alacrity than they have shown. Let us wait, at any rate, till they shall have had time for the operation, before we blame them for not making it. It is then argued that we in England did not borrow nearly so fast as they have borrowed in the States. That is true. But it must be remembered that the dimensions and proportions of wars now are infinitely greater than they were when we began to borrow. Does any one imagine that we would not have borrowed faster, if by faster borrowing we could have closed the war more speedily? Things go faster now than they did then. Borrowing for the sake of a war may be a bad thing to do,—as also it may be a good thing; but if it be done at all, it should be so done as to bring the war to the end with what greatest despatch may be possible.
The only fair comparison, as it seems to me, which can be drawn between the two countries with reference to their debts, and the condition of each under its debt, should be made to depend on the amount of the debt and probable ability of the country to bear that burden. The amount of the debt must be calculated by the interest payable on it, rather than by the figures representing the actual sum due. If we debit the United States Government with seven per cent. on all the money borrowed by them, and presume that amount to have reached in July, 1863, the sum named by Mr. Spaulding, they will then have loaded themselves with an annual charge of £16,800,000 sterling. It will have been an immense achievement to have accomplished in so short a time, but it will by no means equal the annual sum with which we are charged. And, moreover, the comparison will have been made in a manner that is hardly fair to the Americans. We pay our creditors three per cent. now that we have arranged our affairs, and have settled down into the respectable position of an old gentleman whose estates, though deeply mortgaged, are not over-mortgaged. But we did not get our money at three per cent. while our wars were on hand, and there yet existed some doubt as to the manner in which they might be terminated.
This attempt, however, at guessing what may be the probable amount of the debt at the close of the war is absolutely futile. No one can as yet conjecture when the war may be over, or what collateral expenses may attend its close. It may be the case that the government in fixing some boundary between the future United States and the future southern Confederacy, will be called on to advance a very large sum of money as compensation for slaves who shall have been liberated in the border States, or have been swept down south into the cotton regions with the retreating hordes of the southern army. The total of the bill cannot be reckoned up while the work is still unfinished. But, after all, that question as to the amount of the bill is not to us the question of the greatest interest. Whether the debt shall amount to two, or three, or even to four hundred millions sterling,—whether it remain fixed at its present modest dimensions, or swell itself out to the magnificent proportions of our British debt,—will the resources of the country enable it to bear such a burden? Will it be found that the Americans share with us that elastic power of endurance which has enabled us to bear a weight that would have ruined any other people of the same number? Have they the thews and muscles, the energy and endurance, the power of carrying which we possess? They have got our blood in their veins, and have these qualities gone with the blood? It is of little avail either to us or to the truth that we can show some difference between our position and their position which may seem to be in our favour. They, doubtless, could show other points of difference on the other side. With us, in the early years of this century, it was a contest for life and death, in which we could not stop to count the cost,—in which we believed that we were fighting for all that we cared to call our own, and in which we were resolved that we would not be beaten, as long as we had a man to fight and a guinea to spend. Fighting in this mind we won. Had we fought in any other mind, I think I may say that we should not have won. To the Americans of the northern States this also is a contest for life and death. I will not here stay to argue whether this need have been so. I think they are right; but this at least must be accorded to them—that having gone into this matter of civil war, it behoves them to finish it with credit to themselves. There are many Englishmen who think that we were wrong to undertake the French war; but there is, I take it, no Englishman who thinks that we ought to have allowed ourselves to be beaten when we had undertaken it. To the Americans it is now a contest of life and death. They also cannot stop to count the cost. They also will go on as long as they have a dollar to spend or a man to fight.
It appears that we were paying fourteen millions a year interest on our national debt in the year 1796. I take this statement from an article in "The Times," in which the question of the finances of the United States is handled. But our population in 1796 was only sixteen millions. I estimate the population of the northern section of the United States, as the States will be after the war, at twenty-two millions. In the article alluded to these northern Americans are now stated to be twenty millions. If then we, in 1796, could pay fourteen millions a year with a population of sixteen millions, the United States, with a population of twenty or twenty-two millions, will be able to pay the sixteen or seventeen millions sterling of interest which will become due from them,—if their circumstances of payment are as good as were ours. They can do that and more than that if they have the same means per man as we had. And as the means per man resolves itself at last into the labour per man, it may be said that they can pay what we could pay, if they can and will work as hard as we could and did work. That which did not crush us will not crush them, if their future energy be equal to our past energy.
And on this question of energy I think that there is no need for doubt. Taking man for man and million for million, the Americans are equal to the English in intellect and industry. They create wealth at any rate as fast as we have done. They develop their resources, and open out the currents of trade, with an energy equal to our own. They are always at work, improving, utilizing, and creating. Austria, as I take it, is succumbing to monetary difficulties, not because she has been extravagant, but because she has been slow at progress;—because it has been the work of her rulers to repress rather than encourage the energies of her people; because she does not improve, utilize, and create. England has mastered her monetary difficulties because the genius of her government and her people has been exactly opposite to the genius of Austria. And the States of America will master their money difficulties, because they are born of England, and are not born of Austria. What! Shall our eldest child become bankrupt in its first trade difficulty; be utterly ruined by its first little commercial embarrassment? The child bears much too strong a resemblance to its parent for me to think so.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE POST-OFFICE.
Any Englishman or Frenchman residing in the American States cannot fail to be struck with the inferiority of the Post-office arrangements in that country to those by which they are accommodated in their own country. I have not been a resident in the States, and as a traveller might probably have passed the subject without special remark, were it not that the service of the Post-office has been my own profession for many years. I could therefore hardly fail to observe things which to another man would have been of no material moment. At first I was inclined to lean heavily in my judgment upon the deficiencies of a department which must be of primary importance to a commercial nation. It seemed that among a people so intelligent, and so quick in all enterprises of trade, a well arranged Post-office would have been held to be absolutely necessary, and that all difficulties would have been made to succumb in their efforts to put that establishment, if no other, upon a proper footing. But as I looked into the matter, and in becoming acquainted with the circumstances of the Post-office learned the extent of the difficulties absolutely existing, I began to think that a very great deal had been done, and that the fault, as to that which had been left undone, rested, not with the Post-office officials, but was attributable partly to political causes altogether outside the Post-office, and partly,—perhaps chiefly,—to the nature of the country itself.
It is, I think, undoubtedly true that the amount of accommodation given by the Post-office of the States is small,—as compared with that afforded in some other countries, and that that accommodation is lessened by delays and uncertainty. The point which first struck me was the inconvenient hours at which mails were brought in and despatched. Here, in England, it is the object of our Post-office to carry the bulk of our letters at night; to deliver them as early as possible in the morning, and to collect them and take them away for despatch as late as may be in the day;—so that the merchant may receive his letters before the beginning of his day's business, and despatch them after its close. The bulk of our letters is handled in this manner, and the advantage of such an arrangement is manifest. But it seemed that in the States no such practice prevailed. Letters arrived at any hour in the day miscellaneously, and were despatched at any hour, and I found that the postmaster at one town could never tell me with certainty when letters would arrive at another. If the towns were distant, I would be told that the conveyance might take about two or three days; if they were near, that my letter would get to hand "some time to-morrow." I ascertained, moreover, by painful experience that the whole of a mail would not always go forward by the first despatch. As regarded myself this had reference chiefly to English letters and newspapers.—"Only a part of the mail has come," the clerk would tell me. With us the owners of that part which did not "come," would consider themselves greatly aggrieved and make loud complaint. But, in the States, complaints made against official departments are held to be of little moment.
Letters also in the States are subject to great delays by irregularities on railways. One train does not hit the town of its destination before another train, to which it is nominally fitted, has been started on its journey. The mail trains are not bound to wait; and thus, in the large cities, far distant from New York, great irregularity prevails. It is, I think, owing to this,—at any rate partly to this,—that the system of telegraphing has become so prevalent. It is natural that this should be so between towns which are in the due course of post perhaps forty-eight hours asunder; but the uncertainty of the post increases the habit, to the profit, of course, of the companies which own the wires,—but to the manifest loss of the Post-office.
But the deficiency which struck me most forcibly in the American Post-office, was the absence of any recognized official delivery of letters. The United States Post-office does not assume to itself the duty of taking letters to the houses of those for whom they are intended, but holds itself as having completed the work for which the original postage has been paid, when it has brought them to the window of the Post-office of the town to which they are addressed. It is true that in most large towns,—though by no means in all,—a separate arrangement is made by which a delivery is afforded to those who are willing to pay a further sum for that further service; but the recognized official mode of delivery is from the office window. The merchants and persons in trade have boxes at the windows, for which they pay. Other old-established inhabitants in towns, and persons in receipt of a considerable correspondence, receive their letters by the subsidiary carriers and pay for them separately. But the poorer classes of the community, those persons among which it is of such paramount importance to increase the blessing of letter writing, obtain their letters from the Post-office windows.
In each of these cases the practice acts to the prejudice of the department. In order to escape the tax on delivery, which varies from two cents to one cent a letter, all men in trade, and many who are not in trade, hold office boxes; consequently immense space is required. The space given at Chicago, both to the public without and to the officials within, for such delivery, is more than four times that required at Liverpool for the same purpose. But Liverpool is three times the size of Chicago. The corps of clerks required for the window delivery is very great, and the whole affair is cumbrous in the extreme. The letters at most offices are given out through little windows, to which the inquirer is obliged to stoop. There he finds himself opposite to a pane of glass with a little hole; and when the clerk within shakes his head at him, he rarely believes but what his letters are there if he could only reach them. But in the second case, the tax on the delivery, which is intended simply to pay the wages of the men who take them out, is paid with a bad grace; it robs the letter of its charm, and forces it to present itself in the guise of a burden. It makes that disagreeable which for its own sake the Post-office should strive in every way to make agreeable. This practice, moreover, operates as a direct prevention to a class of correspondence, which furnishes in England a large proportion of the revenue of the Post-office. Mercantile houses in our large cities send out thousands of trade circulars, paying postage on them; but such circulars would not be received, either in England or elsewhere, if a demand for postage were made on their delivery. Who does not receive these circulars in our country by the dozen, consigning them generally to the waste-paper basket, after a most cursory inspection? As regards the sender, the transaction seems to us often to be very vain; but the Post-office gets its penny. So also would the American Post-office get its three cents.
But the main objection in my eyes to the American Post-office system is this,—that it is not brought nearer to the poorer classes. Everybody writes or can write in America, and therefore the correspondence of their millions should be, million for million, at any rate equal to ours. But it is not so: and this, I think, comes from the fact that communication by Post-office is not made easy to the people generally. Such communication is not found to be easy by a man who has to attend at a Post-office window on the chance of receiving a letter. When no arrangement more comfortable than that is provided, the Post-office will be used for the necessities of letter-writing, but will not be esteemed as a luxury. And thus not only do the people lose a comfort which they might enjoy, but the Post-office also loses that revenue which it might make.
I have said that the correspondence circulating in the United States is less than that of the United Kingdom. In making any comparison between them I am obliged to arrive at facts, or rather at the probabilities of facts, in a somewhat circuitous mode, as the Americans have kept no account of the number of letters which pass through their post-offices in a year. We can, however, make an estimate which, if incorrect, shall not at any rate be incorrect against them. The gross postal revenue of the United States, for the year ended 30th June, 1861, was in round figures £1,700,000. This was the amount actually earned, exclusive of a sum of £140,000 paid to the Post-office by the government for the carriage of what is called in that country free mail matter; otherwise, books, letters, and parcels franked by members of Congress. The gross postal revenue of the United Kingdom was in the last year, in round figures, £3,358,000, exclusive of a sum of £179,000 claimed as earned for carrying official postage, and also exclusive of £127,866, that being the amount of money order commission which in this country is considered a part of the Post-office revenue. In the United States there is at present no money order office. In the United Kingdom the sum of £3,358,000 was earned by the conveyance and delivery of
| 593 | millions of letters, |
| 73 | millions of newspapers, |
| 12 | millions of books. |
What number of each was conveyed through the post in the United States we have no means of knowing; but presuming the average rate of postage on each letter in the States to be the same as it is in England, and presuming also that letters, newspapers, and books circulated in the same proportion there as they do with us, the sum above named of £1,700,000 will have been earned by carrying about 300 millions of letters. But the average rate of postage in the States is, in fact, higher than it is in England. The ordinary single rate of postage there is three cents or three half-pence, whereas with us it is a penny; and if three half-pence might be taken as the average rate in the United States, the number of letters would be reduced from 300 to 200 millions a year. There is however a class of letters which in the States are passed through the Post-office at the rate of one halfpenny a letter, whereas there is no rate of postage with us less than a penny. Taking these halfpenny letters into consideration, I am disposed to regard the average rate of American postage at about five farthings, which would give the number of letters at 250 millions. We shall at any rate be safe in saying that the number is considerably less than 300 millions, and that it does not amount to half the number circulated with us. But the difference between our population and their population is not great. The population of the States during the year in question was about 27 millions, exclusive of slaves, and that of the British isles was about 29 millions. No doubt, in the year named, the correspondence of the States had been somewhat disturbed by the rebellion; but that disturbance, up to the end of June, 1861, had been very trifling. The division of the southern from the northern States, as far as the Post-office was concerned, did not take place till the end of May, 1861; and therefore but one month in the year was affected by the actual secession of the South. The gross postal revenue of the States which have seceded was, for the year prior to secession, twelve hundred thousand five hundred dollars, and for that one month of June it would therefore have been a little over one hundred thousand dollars, or £20,000. That sum may therefore be presumed to have been abstracted by secession from the gross annual revenue of the Post-office. Trade, also, was no doubt injured by the disturbance in the country, and the circulation of letters was, as a matter of course, to some degree affected by this injury; but it seems that the gross revenue of 1861 was less than that of 1860 by only one thirty-sixth. I think, therefore, that we may say, making all allowance that can be fairly made, that the number of letters circulating in the United Kingdom is more than double that which circulates, or ever has circulated, in the United States.
That this is so, I attribute not to any difference in the people of the two countries,—not to an aptitude for letter writing among us which is wanting with the Americans,—but to the greater convenience and wider accommodation of our own Post-office. As I have before stated, and will presently endeavour to show, this wider accommodation is not altogether the result of better management on our part. Our circumstances as regards the Post-office have had in them less of difficulties than theirs. But it has arisen in great part from better management; and in nothing is their deficiency so conspicuous as in the absence of a free delivery for their letters.
In order that the advantages of the Post-office should reach all persons, the delivery of letters should extend not only to towns, but to the country also. In France all letters are delivered free. However remote may be the position of a house or cottage, it is not too remote for the postman. With us all letters are not delivered; but the exceptions refer to distant solitary houses and to localities which are almost without correspondence. But in the United States there is no free delivery, and there is no delivery at all except in the large cities. In small towns, in villages, even in the suburbs of the largest cities, no such accommodation is given. Whatever may be the distance, people expecting letters must send for them to the Post-office;—and they who do not expect them, leave their letters uncalled for. Brother Jonathan goes out to fish in these especial waters with a very large net. The little fish, which are profitable, slip through; but the big fish, which are by no means profitable, are caught,—often at an expense greater than their value.
There are other smaller sins upon which I could put my finger,—and would do so were I writing an official report upon the subject of the American Post-office. In lieu of doing so, I will endeavour to explain how much the States' office has done in this matter of affording Post-office accommodation,—and how great have been the difficulties in the way of Post-office reformers in that country.
In the first place, when we compare ourselves to them, we must remember that we live in a tea-cup, and they in a washing-tub. As compared with them we inhabit towns which are close to each other. Our distances, as compared with theirs, are nothing. From London to Liverpool the line of railway traverses about two hundred miles, but the mail train which conveys the bags for Liverpool, carries the correspondence of probably four or five millions of persons. The mail train from New York to Buffalo passes over about four hundred miles, and on its route serves not one million. A comparison of this kind might be made with the same effect between any of our great internal mail routes and any of theirs. Consequently, the expense of conveyance to them is, per letter, very much greater than with us, and the American Post-office is as a matter of necessity driven to an economy in the use of railways for the Post-office service, which we are not called on to practise. From New York to Chicago is nearly 1000 miles. From New York to St. Louis is over 1600. I need not say that in England we know nothing of such distances, and that therefore our task has been comparatively easy. Nevertheless the States have followed in our track, and have taken advantage of Sir Rowland Hill's wise audacity in the reduction of postage with greater quickness than any other nation but our own. Through all the States letters pass for three cents over a distance less than 3000 miles. For distances above 3000 miles the rate is ten cents or five-pence. This increased rate has special reference to the mails for California, which are carried daily across the whole continent at a cost to the States Government of two hundred thousand pounds a year.
With us the chief mail trains are legally under the management of the Postmaster-General. He fixes the hours at which they shall start and arrive, being of course bound by certain stipulations as to pace. He can demand trains to run over any line at any hour, and can in this way secure the punctuality of mail transportation. Of course such interference on the part of a government official in the working of a railway is attended with a very heavy expense to the Government. Though the British Post-office can demand the use of trains at any hour, and as regards those trains can make the despatch of mails paramount to all other matters, the British Post-office cannot fix the price to be paid for such work. This is generally done by arbitration, and of course for such services the payment is very high. No such practice prevails in the States. The Government has no power of using the mail lines as they are used by our Post-office, nor could the expense of such a practice be borne or nearly borne by the proceeds of letters in the States. Consequently the Post-office is put on a par with ordinary customers, and such trains are used for mail matter as the directors of each line may see fit to use for other matter. Hence it occurs that no offence against the Post-office is committed when the connection between different mail trains is broken. The Post-office takes the best it can get, paying as other customers pay, and grumbling as other customers grumble when the service rendered falls short of that which has been promised.
It may, I think, easily be seen that any system such as ours, carried across so large a country, would go on increasing in cost at an enormous ratio. The greater the distance, the greater is the difficulty in securing the proper fitting of fast-running trains. And moreover, it must be remembered that the American lines have been got up on a very different footing from ours, at an expense per mile of probably less than a fifth of that laid out on our railways. Single lines of rail are common, even between great towns with large traffic. At the present moment—May, 1862—the only railway running into Washington, that namely from Baltimore, is a single line over the greater distance. The whole thing is necessarily worked at a cheaper rate than with us; not because the people are poorer, but because the distances are greater. As this is the case throughout the whole railway system of the country, it cannot be expected that such despatch and punctuality should be achieved in America as are achieved here, in England, or in France. As population and wealth increase, it will come. In the mean time that which has been already done over the extent of the vast North American continent is very wonderful. I think, therefore, that complaint should not be made against the Washington Post-office, either on account of the inconvenience of the hours, or on the head of occasional irregularity. So much has been done in reducing the rate to three cents, and in giving a daily mail throughout the States, that the department should be praised for energy, and not blamed for apathy.
In the year ended 30th June, 1861, the gross revenue of the Post-office of the States was, as I have stated, £1,700,000. In the same year its expenditure was in round figures £2,720,000. Consequently there was an actual loss, to be made up out of general taxation, amounting to £1,020,000. In the accounts of the American officers this is lessened by £140,000, that sum having been arbitrarily fixed by the Government as the amount earned by the Post-office in carrying free mail matter. We have a similar system in computing the value of the service rendered by our Post-office to the Government in carrying government despatches; but with us the amount named as the compensation depends on the actual weight carried. If the matter so carried be carried solely on the Government service, as is I believe the case with us, any such claim on behalf of the Post-office is apparently unnecessary. The Crown works for the Crown, as the right hand works for the left. The Post-office pays no rates or taxes, contributes nothing to the poor, runs its mails on turnpike roads free of toll, and gives receipts on unstamped paper. With us no payment is in truth made, though the Post-office in its accounts presumes itself to have received the money. But in the States the sum named is handed over by the State Treasury to the Post-office Treasury. Any such statement of credit does not in effect alter the real fact, that over a million sterling is required as a subsidy by the American Post-office, in order that it may be enabled to pay its way. In estimating the expenditure of the office the department at Washington debits itself with the sums paid for the ocean transit of its mails, amounting to something over £150,000. We also now do the same, with the much greater sum paid by us for such service, which now amounts to £949,228, or nearly a million sterling. Till lately this was not paid out of the Post-office moneys, and the Post-office revenue was not debited with the amount.
Our gross Post-office revenue is, as I have said, £3,358,250. As before explained, this is exclusive of the amount earned by the money order department, which, though managed by the authorities of the Post-office, cannot be called a part of the Post-office; and exclusive also of the official postage, which is, in fact, never received. The expenditure of our British Post-office, inclusive of the sum paid for the ocean mail service, is £3,064,527. We therefore make a net profit of £293,723 out of the Post-office, as compared with a loss of £1,020,000, on the part of the United States.
But perhaps the greatest difficulty with which the American Post-office is burdened, is that "free mail matter" to which I have alluded, for carrying which, the Post-office claims to earn £140,000, and for the carriage of which, it might as fairly claim to earn £1,350,000, or half the amount of its total expenditure, for I was informed by a gentleman whose knowledge on the subject could not be doubted, that the free mail matter so carried, equalled in bulk and weight all that other matter which was not carried free. To such an extent has the privilege of franking been carried in the States! All members of both Houses frank what they please,—for in effect the privilege is stretched to that extent. All Presidents of the Union, past and present, can frank, as, also, all Vice-Presidents, past and present; and there is a special act, enabling the widow of President Polk to frank! Why it is that widows of other Presidents do not agitate on the matter, I cannot understand. And all the Secretaries of State can frank; and ever so many other public officers. There is no limit in number to the letters so franked, and the nuisance has extended itself to so huge a size, that members of Congress in giving franks, cannot write the franks themselves. It is illegal for them to depute to others the privilege of signing their names for this purpose, but it is known at the Post-office that it is done. But even this is not the worst of it. Members of the House of Representatives have the power of sending through the post all those huge books which, with them as with us, grow out of Parliamentary debates and workings of Committees. This, under certain stipulations, is the case also in England; but in England, luckily, no one values them. In America, however, it is not so. A voter considers himself to be noticed if he gets a book. He likes to have the book bound, and the bigger the book may be, the more the compliment is relished. Hence it comes to pass that an enormous quantity of useless matter is printed and bound, only that it may be sent down to constituents and make a show on the parlour shelves of constituents' wives. The Post-office groans and becomes insolvent, and the country pays for the paper, the printing, and the binding. While the public expenses of the nation were very small, there was, perhaps, no reason why voters should not thus be indulged; but now the matter is different, and it would be well that the conveyance by post of these Congressional libraries should be brought to an end. I was also assured that members very frequently obtain permission for the printing of a speech which has never been delivered,—and which never will be delivered,—in order that copies may be circulated among their constituents. There is in such an arrangement an ingenuity which is peculiarly American in its nature. Everybody concerned is no doubt cheated by the system. The constituents are cheated; the public, which pays, is cheated; and the Post-office is cheated. But the House is spared the hearing of the speech, and the result on the whole is perhaps beneficial.
We also, within the memory of many of us, had a franking privilege, which was peculiarly objectionable inasmuch as it operated towards giving a free transmission of their letters by post to the rich, while no such privilege was within reach of the poor. But with us it never stretched itself to such an extent as it has now achieved in the States. The number of letters for members was limited. The whole address was written by the franking member himself, and not much was sent in this way that was bulky. I am disposed to think that all government and Congressional jobs in the States bear the same proportion to government and Parliamentary jobs which have been in vogue among us. There has been an unblushing audacity in the public dishonesty,—what I may perhaps call the State dishonesty,—at Washington, which I think was hardly ever equalled in London. Bribery, I know, was disgracefully current in the days of Walpole, of Newcastle, and even of Castlereagh;—so current, that no Englishman has a right to hold up his own past government as a model of purity. But the corruption with us did blush and endeavour to hide itself. It was disgraceful to be bribed, if not so to offer bribes. But at Washington corruption has been so common that I can hardly understand how any honest man can have held up his head in the vicinity of the Capitol, or of the State office.
But the country has, I think, become tired of this. Hitherto it has been too busy about its more important concerns, in extending commerce, in making railways, in providing education for its youth, to think very much of what was being done at Washington. While the taxes were light and property was secure, while increasing population gave daily increasing strength to the nation, the people as a body were content with that theory of being governed by their little men. They gave a bad name to politicians, and allowed politics, as they say, "to slide." But all this will be altered now. The tremendous expenditure of the last twelve months has allowed dishonesty of so vast a grasp to make its ravages in the public pockets, that the evil will work its own cure. Taxes will be very high, and the people will recognize the necessity of having honest men to look after them. The nation can no longer afford to be indifferent about its Government, and will require to know where its money goes, and why it goes. This franking privilege is already doomed, if not already dead. When I was in Washington a Bill was passed through the Lower House by which it would be abolished altogether. When I left America its fate in the Senate was still doubtful, and I was told by many that that Bill would not be allowed to become law without sundry alterations. But, nevertheless, I regard the franking privilege as doomed, and offer to the Washington Post-office officials my best congratulations on their coming deliverance.
The Post-office in the States is also burdened by another terrible political evil, which in itself is so heavy, that one would at first sight declare it to be enough to prevent anything like efficiency. The whole of its staff is removeable every fourth year,—that is to say, on the election of every new President. And a very large proportion of its staff is thus removed periodically to make way for those for whom a new President is bound to provide, by reason of their services in sending him to the White House. They have served him and he thus repays them by this use of his patronage in their favour. At four hundred and thirty-four Post-offices in the States,—those being the offices to which the highest salaries are attached,—the President has this power, and exercises it as a matter of course. He has the same power with reference, I believe, to all the appointments held in the Post-office at Washington. This practice applies by no means to the Post-office only. All the government clerks,—clerks employed by the central government at Washington,—are subject to the same rule. And the rule has also been adopted in the various States with reference to State offices.
To a stranger this practice seems so manifestly absurd, that he can hardly conceive it possible that a government service should be conducted on such terms. He cannot, in the first place, believe that men of sufficient standing before the world could be found to accept office under such circumstances; and is led to surmise that men of insufficient standing must be employed, and that there are other allurements to the office beyond the very moderate salaries which are allowed. He cannot, moreover, understand how the duties can be conducted, seeing that men must be called on to resign their places as soon as they have learned to make themselves useful. And, finally, he is lost in amazement as he contemplates this barefaced prostitution of the public employ to the vilest purposes of political manoeuvring. With us also patronage has been used for political purposes, and to some small extent is still so used. We have not yet sufficiently recognized the fact, that in selecting a public servant nothing should be regarded but the advantage of the service in which he is to be employed. But we never, in the lowest times of our political corruption, ventured to throw over the question of service altogether, and to declare publicly, that the one and only result to be obtained by Government employment was political support. In the States political corruption has become so much a matter of course, that no American seems to be struck with the fact that the whole system is a system of robbery.
From sheer necessity some of the old hands are kept on when these changes are made. Were this not done the work would come absolutely to a dead lock. But it may be imagined how difficult it must be for men to carry through any improvements in a great department, when they have entered an office under such a system, and are liable to be expelled under the same. It is greatly to the praise of those who have been allowed to grow old in the service that so much has been done. No men, however, are more apt at such work than Americans, or more able to exert themselves at their posts. They are not idle. Independently of any question of remuneration, they are not indifferent to the well-being of the work they have in hand. They are good public servants, unless corruption come in their way.
While speaking on the subject of patronage, I cannot but allude to two appointments which had been made by political interest, and with the circumstances of which I became acquainted. In both instances a good place had been given to a gentleman by the incoming President,—not in return for political support, but from motives of private friendship,—either his own friendship or that of some mutual friend. In both instances I heard the selection spoken of with the warmest praise, as though a noble act had been done in the nomination of a private friend instead of a political partisan. And yet in each case a man was appointed who knew nothing of his work; who, from age and circumstances, was not likely to become acquainted with his work; who, by his appointment, kept out of the place those who did understand the work, and had earned a right to promotion by so understanding it. Two worthy gentlemen,—for they were both worthy,—were pensioned on the government for a term of years under a false pretence. That this should have been done is not perhaps remarkable; but it did seem remarkable to me that everybody regarded such appointments as a good deed—as a deed so exceptionably good as to be worthy of great praise. I do not allude to these selections on account of the political vice shown by the Presidents in making them, but on account of the political virtue;—in order that the nature of political virtue in the States may be understood. It had never occurred to any one to whom I spoke on the subject, that a President in bestowing such places was bound to look for efficient work in return for the public money which was to be paid.
Before I end this chapter I must insert a few details respecting the Post-office of the States, which, though they may not be specially interesting to the general reader, will give some idea of the extent of the department. The total number of post-offices in the States on 30th June, 1861, was 28,586. With us the number in England, Scotland, and Ireland, at the same period was about 11,400. The population served may be regarded as nearly the same. Our lowest salary is £3 per annum. In the States the remuneration is often much lower. It consists of a commission on the letters, and is sometimes less than ten shillings a year. The difficulty of obtaining persons to hold these offices, and the amount of work which must thereby be thrown on what is called the "appointment branch," may be judged by the fact that 9235 of these offices were filled up by new nominations during the last year. When the patronage is of such a nature it is difficult to say which give most trouble, the places which nobody wishes to have, or those which everybody wishes to have.
The total amount of postage on European letters, i.e., letters passing between the States and Europe, in the last year as to which accounts were kept between Washington and the European post-offices, was £275,000. Of this over £150,000 was on letters for the United Kingdom; and £130,000 was on letters carried by the Cunard packets.
According to the accounts kept by the Washington office, the letters passing from the States to Europe and from Europe to the States are very nearly equal in number, about 101 going to Europe for every 100 received from Europe. But the number of newspapers sent from the States is more than double the number received in the States from Europe.
On 30th June, 1861, mails were carried through the then loyal States of the Union over 140,400 miles daily. Up to 31st May preceding, at which time the Government mails were running all through the United States, 96,000 miles were covered in those States which had then virtually seceded, and which in the following month were taken out from the Post-office accounts,—making a total of 236,400 miles daily. Of this mileage something less than one third is effected by railways, at an average cost of about sixpence a mile. Our total mileage per day is 151,000 miles, of which 43,823 are done by railway, at a cost of about sevenpence-halfpenny per mile.
As far as I could learn the servants of the Post-office are less liberally paid in the States than with us,—excepting as regards two classes. The first of these is that class which is paid by weekly wages,—such as letter-carriers and porters. Their remuneration is of course ruled by the rate of ordinary wages in the country; and as ordinary wages are higher in the States than with us, such men are paid accordingly. The other class is that of postmasters at second-rate towns. They receive the same compensation as those at the largest towns;—unless indeed there be other compensation than those written in the books at Washington. A postmaster is paid a certain commission on letters, till it amounts to £400 per annum: all above that going back to the Government. So also out of the fees paid for boxes at the window he receives any amount forthcoming, not exceeding £400 a year; making in all a maximum of £800. The postmaster of New York can get no more. But any moderately large town will give as much, and in this way an amount of patronage is provided which in a political view is really valuable.
But with all this the people have made their way, because they have been intelligent, industrious, and in earnest. And as the people have made their way, so has the Post-office. The number of its offices, the mileage it covers, its extraordinary cheapness, the rapidity with which it has been developed, are all proofs of great things done; and it is by no means standing still even in these evil days of war. Improvements are even now on foot, copied in a great measure from ourselves. Hitherto the American office has not taken upon itself the task of returning to their writers undelivered and undeliverable letters. This it is now going to do. It is, as I have said, shaking off from itself that terrible incubus the franking privilege. And the expediency of introducing a money-order office into the States, connected with the Post-office as it is with us, is even now under consideration. Such an accommodation is much needed in the country; but I doubt whether the present moment, looking at the fiscal state of the country, is well adapted for establishing it.
I was much struck by the great extravagance in small things manifested by the Post-office through the States, and have reason to believe that the same remark would be equally true with regard to other public establishments. They use needless forms without end,—making millions of entries which no one is ever expected to regard. Their expenditure in stationery might, I think, be reduced by one half, and the labour might be saved which is now wasted in the abuse of that useless stationery. Their mail-bags are made in a costly manner, and are often large beyond all proportion or necessity. I could greatly lengthen this list if I were addressing myself solely to Post-office people; but as I am not doing so, I will close these semi-official remarks with an assurance to my colleagues in Post-office work on the other side of the water that I greatly respect what they have done, and trust that before long they may have renewed opportunities for the prosecution of their good work.
CHAPTER XIV.
AMERICAN HOTELS.
I find it impossible to resist the subject of inns. As I have gone on with my journey, I have gone on with my book, and have spoken here and there of American hotels as I have encountered them. But in the States the hotels are so large an institution, having so much closer and wider a bearing on social life than they do in any other country, that I feel myself bound to treat them in a separate chapter as a great national feature in themselves. They are quite as much thought of in the nation as the legislature, or judicature, or literature of the country; and any falling off in them, or any improvement in the accommodation given, would strike the community as forcibly as a change in the constitution, or an alteration in the franchise.
Moreover I consider myself as qualified to write a chapter on hotels;—not only on the hotels of America but on hotels generally. I have myself been much too frequently a sojourner at hotels. I think I know what an hotel should be, and what it should not be; and am almost inclined to believe, in my pride, that I could myself fill the position of a landlord with some chance of social success, though probably with none of satisfactory pecuniary results.
Of all hotels known to me, I am inclined to think that the Swiss are the best. The things wanted at an hotel are, I fancy, mainly as follows:—a clean bedroom with a good and clean bed,—and with it also plenty of water. Good food, well dressed and served at convenient hours, which hours should on occasions be allowed to stretch themselves. Wines that shall be drinkable. Quick attendance. Bills that shall not be absolutely extortionate, smiling faces, and an absence of foul smells. There are many who desire more than this;—who expect exquisite cookery, choice wines, subservient domestics, distinguished consideration, and the strictest economy. But they are uneducated travellers who are going through the apprenticeship of their hotel lives;—who may probably never become free of the travellers' guild, or learn to distinguish that which they may fairly hope to attain from that which they can never accomplish.
Taking them as a whole I think that the Swiss hotels are the best. They are perhaps a little close in the matter of cold water, but even as to this, they generally give way to pressure. The pressure, however, must not be violent, but gentle rather, and well continued. Their bedrooms are excellent. Their cookery is good, and to the outward senses is cleanly. The people are civil. The whole work of the house is carried on upon fixed rules which tend to the comfort of the establishment. They are not cheap, and not always quite honest. But the exorbitance or dishonesty of their charges rarely exceeds a certain reasonable scale, and hardly ever demands the bitter misery of a remonstrance.
The inns of the Tyrol are, I think, the cheapest I have known, affording the traveller what he requires for half the price, or less than half, that demanded in Switzerland. But the other half is taken out in stench and nastiness. As tourists scatter themselves more profusely, the prices of the Tyrol will no doubt rise. Let us hope that increased prices will bring with them besoms, scrubbing-brushes, and other much needed articles of cleanliness.
The inns of the north of Italy are very good, and indeed, the Italian inns throughout, as far as I know them, are much better than the name they bear. The Italians are a civil, kindly people, and do for you, at any rate, the best they can. Perhaps the unwary traveller may be cheated. Ignorant of the language, he may be called on to pay more than the man who speaks it, and who can bargain in the Italian fashion as to price. It has often been my lot, I doubt not, to be so cheated. But then I have been cheated with a grace that has been worth all the money. The ordinary prices of Italian inns are by no means high.
I have seldom thoroughly liked the inns of Germany which I have known. They are not clean, and water is very scarce. Smiles too are generally wanting, and I have usually fancied myself to be regarded as a piece of goods out of which so much profit was to be made.
The dearest hotels I know are the French;—and certainly not the best. In the provinces they are by no means so cleanly as those of Italy. Their wines are generally abominable, and their cookery often disgusting. In Paris grand dinners may no doubt be had, and luxuries of every description,—except the luxury of comfort. Cotton-velvet sofas and ormolu clocks stand in the place of convenient furniture, and logs of wood, at a franc a log, fail to impart to you the heat which the freezing cold of a Paris winter demands. They used to make good coffee in Paris, but even that is a thing of the past. I fancy that they import their brandy from England, and manufacture their own cigars. French wines you may get good at a Paris hotel; but you would drink them as good and much cheaper if you bought them in London and took them with you.
The worst hotels I know are in the Havana. Of course I do not speak here of chance mountain huts, or small far-off roadside hostels in which the traveller may find himself from time to time. All such are to be counted apart, and must be judged on their merits, by the circumstances which surround them. But with reference to places of wide resort, nothing can beat the hotels of the Havana in filth, discomfort, habits of abomination, and absence of everything which the traveller desires. All the world does not go to the Havana, and the subject is not, therefore, one of general interest. But in speaking of hotels at large, so much I find myself bound to say.
In all the countries to which I have alluded the guests of the house are expected to sit down together at one table. Conversation is at any rate possible, and there is the show if not the reality of society.
And now one word as to English inns. I do not think that we Englishmen have any great right to be proud of them. The worst about them is that they deteriorate from year to year instead of becoming better. We used to hear much of the comfort of the old English wayside inn, but the old English wayside inn has gone. The railway hotel has taken its place, and the railway hotel is too frequently gloomy, desolate, comfortless, and almost suicidal. In England too, since the old days are gone, there are wanting the landlord's bow, and the kindly smile of his stout wife. Who now knows the landlord of an inn, or cares to inquire whether or no there be a landlady? The old welcome is wanting, and the cheery warm air which used to atone for the bad port and tough beef has passed away;—while the port is still bad and the beef too often tough.
In England, and only in England, as I believe, is maintained in hotel life the theory of solitary existence. The sojourner at an English inn,—unless he be a commercial traveller, and, as such, a member of a universal, peripatetic tradesman's club,—lives alone. He has his breakfast alone, his dinner alone, his pint of wine alone, and his cup of tea alone. It is not considered practicable that two strangers should sit at the same table, or cut from the same dish. Consequently his dinner is cooked for him separately, and the hotel keeper can hardly afford to give him a good dinner. He has two modes of life from which to choose. He either lives in a public room,—called a coffee-room,—and there occupies during his comfortless meal a separate small table too frequently removed from fire and light, though generally exposed to draughts; or else he indulges in the luxury of a private sitting-room, and endeavours to find solace on an old horse-hair sofa, at the cost of seven shillings a day. His bedroom is not so arranged that he can use it as a sitting-room. Under either phase of life he can rarely find himself comfortable, and therefore he lives as little at an hotel as the circumstances of his business or of his pleasure will allow. I do not think that any of the requisites of a good inn are habitually to be found in perfection at our Kings' Heads and White Horses, though the falling-off is not so lamentably distressing as it sometimes is in other countries. The bedrooms are dingy rather than dirty. Extra payment to servants will generally produce a tub of cold water. The food is never good, but it is usually eatable, and you may have it when you please. The wines are almost always bad, but the traveller can fall back upon beer. The attendance is good, provided always that the payment for it is liberal. The cost is generally too high, and unfortunately grows larger and larger from year to year. Smiling faces are out of the question unless specially paid for; and as to that matter of foul smells there is often room for improvement. An English inn to a solitary traveller without employment is an embodiment of dreary desolation. The excuse to be made for this is that English men and women do not live much at inns in their own country.
The American inn differs from all those of which I have made mention, and is altogether an institution apart, and a thing of itself. Hotels in America are very much larger and more numerous than in other countries. They are to be found in all towns, and I may almost say in all villages. In England and on the Continent we find them on the recognized routes of travel and in towns of commercial or social importance. On unfrequented roads and in villages there is usually some small house of public entertainment in which the unexpected traveller may obtain food and shelter, and in which the expected boon companions of the neighbourhood smoke their nightly pipes, and drink their nightly tipple. But in the States of America the first sign of an incipient settlement is an hotel five stories high, with an office, a bar, a cloak-room, three gentlemen's parlours, two ladies' parlours, a ladies' entrance, and two hundred bedrooms.
These, of course, are all built with a view to profit, and it may be presumed that in each case the originators of the speculation enter into some calculation as to their expected guests. Whence are to come the sleepers in those two hundred bedrooms, and who is to pay for the gaudy sofas and numerous lounging chairs of the ladies' parlours? In all other countries the expectation would extend itself simply to travellers;—to travellers or to strangers sojourning in the land. But this is by no means the case as to these speculations in America. When the new hotel rises up in the wilderness, it is presumed that people will come there with the express object of inhabiting it. The hotel itself will create a population,—as the railways do. With us railways run to the towns; but in the States the towns run to the railways. It is the same thing with the hotels.
Housekeeping is not popular with young married people in America, and there are various reasons why this should be so. Men there are not fixed in their employment as they are with us. If a young Benedict cannot get along as a lawyer at Salem, perhaps he may thrive as a shoemaker at ThermopylÆ. Jefferson B. Johnson fails in the lumber line at Eleutheria, but hearing of an opening for a Baptist preacher at Big Mud Creek moves himself off with his wife and three children at a week's notice. Aminadab Wiggs takes an engagement as a clerk at a steam-boat office on the Pongowonga river, but he goes to his employment with an inward conviction that six months will see him earning his bread elsewhere. Under such circumstances even a large wardrobe is a nuisance, and a collection of furniture would be as appropriate as a drove of elephants. Then, again, young men and women marry without any means already collected on which to commence their life. They are content to look forward and to hope that such means will come. In so doing they are guilty of no imprudence. It is the way of the country; and, if the man be useful for anything, employment will certainly come to him. But he must live on the fruits of that employment, and can only pay his way from week to week and from day to day. And as a third reason I think I may allege that the mode of life found in these hotels is liked by the people who frequent them. It is to their taste. They are happy, or at any rate contented, at these hotels, and do not wish for household cares. As to the two first reasons which I have given I can agree as to the necessity of the case, and quite concur as to the expediency of marriage under such circumstances. But as to that matter of taste, I cannot concur at all. Anything more forlorn than a young married woman at an American hotel, it is impossible to conceive.
Such are the guests expected for those two hundred bedrooms. The chance travellers are but chance additions to these, and are not generally the main stay of the house. As a matter of course the accommodation for travellers which these hotels afford increases and creates travelling. Men come because they know they will be fed and bedded at a moderate cost, and in an easy way, suited to their tastes. With us, and throughout Europe, inquiry is made before an unaccustomed journey is commenced, on that serious question of wayside food and shelter. But in the States no such question is needed. A big hotel is a matter of course, and therefore men travel. Everybody travels in the States. The railways and the hotels have between them so churned up the people that an untravelled man or woman is a rare animal. We are apt to suppose that travellers make roads, and that guests create hotels; but the cause and effect run exactly in the other way. I am almost disposed to think that we should become cannibals if gentlemen's legs and ladies' arms were hung up for sale in purveyors' shops.
After this fashion and with these intentions hotels are built. Size and an imposing exterior are the first requisitions. Everything about them must be on a large scale. A commanding exterior, and a certain interior dignity of demeanour is more essential than comfort or civility. Whatever an hotel may be it must not be "mean." In the American vernacular the word "mean" is very significant. A mean white in the South is a man who owns no slaves. Men are often mean, but actions are seldom so called. A man feels mean when the bluster is taken out of him. A mean hotel, conducted in a quiet unostentatious manner, in which the only endeavour made had reference to the comfort of a few guests, would find no favour in the States. These hotels are not called by the name of any sign, as with us in our provinces. There are no "Presidents' Heads" or "General Scotts." Nor by the name of the landlord, or of some former landlord, as with us in London, and in many cities of the Continent. Nor are they called from some country or city which may have been presumed at some time to have had special patronage for the establishment. In the nomenclature of American hotels the speciality of American hero-worship is shown, as in the nomenclature of their children. Every inn is a house, and these houses are generally named after some hero, little known probably in the world at large, but highly estimated in that locality at the moment of the christening.
They are always built on a plan which to a European seems to be most unnecessarily extravagant in space. It is not unfrequently the case that the greater portion of the ground-floor is occupied by rooms and halls which make no return to the house whatever. The visitor enters a great hall by the front door, and almost invariably finds it full of men who are idling about, sitting round on stationary seats, talking in a listless manner, and getting through their time as though the place were a public lounging room. And so it is. The chances are that not half the crowd are guests at the hotel. I will now follow the visitor as he makes his way up to the office. Every hotel has an office. To call this place the bar, as I have done too frequently, is a lamentable error. The bar is held in a separate room appropriated solely to drinking. To the office, which is in fact a long open counter, the guest walks up, and there inscribes his name in a book. This inscription was to me a moment of misery which I could never go through with equanimity. As the name is written, and as the request for accommodation is made, half a dozen loungers look over your name and listen to what you say. They listen attentively, and spell your name carefully, but the great man behind the bar does not seem to listen or to heed you. Your destiny is never imparted to you on the instant. If your wife or any other woman be with you, (the word "lady" is made so absolutely distasteful in American hotels that I cannot bring myself to use it in writing of them) she has been carried off to a lady's waiting room, and there remains in august wretchedness till the great man at the bar shall have decided on her fate. I have never been quite able to fathom the mystery of these delays. I think they must have originated in the necessity of waiting to see what might be the influx of travellers at the moment, and then have become exaggerated and brought to their present normal state by the gratified feeling of almost divine power with which for the time it invests that despotic arbiter. I have found it always the same, though arriving with no crowd, by a conveyance of my own, when no other expectant guests were following me. The great man has listened to my request in silence, with an imperturbable face, and has usually continued his conversation with some loafing friend, who at the time is probably scrutinizing my name in the book. I have often suffered in patience; but patience is not specially the badge of my tribe, and I have sometimes spoken out rather freely. If I may presume to give advice to my travelling countrymen how to act under such circumstances I should recommend to them freedom of speech rather than patience. The great man when freely addressed generally opens his eyes, and selects the key of your room without further delay. I am inclined to think that the selection will not be made in any way to your detriment by reason of that freedom of speech. The lady in the ballad who spoke out her own mind to Lord Bateman was sent to her home honourably in a coach and three. Had she held her tongue we are justified in presuming that she would have been returned on a pillion behind a servant.
I have been greatly annoyed by that silence on the part of the hotel clerk. I have repeatedly asked for room, and received no syllable in return. I have persisted in my request, and the clerk has nodded his head at me. Until a traveller is known, these gentlemen are singularly sparing of speech,—especially in the West. The same economy of words runs down from the great man at the office all through the servants of the establishment. It arises, I believe, entirely from that want of courtesy which democratic institutions create. The man whom you address has to make a battle against the state of subservience, presumed to be indicated by his position, and he does so by declaring his indifference to the person on whose wants he is paid to attend. I have been honoured on one or two occasions by the subsequent intimacy of these great men at the hotel offices, and have then found them ready enough at conversation.
That necessity of making your request for rooms before a public audience is not in itself agreeable, and sometimes entails a conversation which might be more comfortably made in private. "What do you mean by a dressing-room, and why do you want one?" Now that is a question which an Englishman feels awkward at answering before five-and-twenty Americans, with open mouths and eager eyes; but it has to be answered. When I left England, I was assured that I should not find any need for a separate sitting-room, seeing that drawing-rooms more or less sumptuous were prepared for the accommodation of "ladies." At first we attempted to follow the advice given to us, but we broke down. A man and his wife travelling from town to town, and making no sojourn on his way, may eat and sleep at an hotel without a private parlour. But an Englishwoman cannot live in comfort for a week, or even, in comfort, for a day, at any of these houses, without a sitting-room for herself. The ladies' drawing-room is a desolate wilderness. The American women themselves do not use it. It is generally empty, or occupied by some forlorn spinster, eliciting harsh sounds from the wretched piano which it contains.
The price at these hotels throughout the Union is nearly always the same, viz., two and a half dollars a day, for which a bedroom is given, and as many meals as the guest can contrive to eat. This is the price for chance guests. The cost to monthly boarders is, I believe, not more than the half of this. Ten shillings a day, therefore, covers everything that is absolutely necessary, servants included. And this must be said in praise of these inns: that the traveller can compute his expenses accurately, and can absolutely bring them within that daily sum of ten shillings. This includes a great deal of eating, a great deal of attendance, the use of reading-rooms and smoking-rooms—which, however, always seem to be open to the public as well as to the guests,—and a bedroom with accommodation which is at any rate as good as the average accommodation of hotels in Europe. In the large Eastern towns baths are attached to many of the rooms. I always carry my own, and have never failed in getting water. It must be acknowledged that the price is very low. It is so low that I believe it affords, as a rule, no profit whatsoever. The profit is made upon extra charges, and they are higher than in any other country that I have visited. They are so high that I consider travelling in America, for an Englishman with his wife or family, to be more expensive than travelling in any part of Europe. First in the list of extras comes that matter of the sitting-room, and by that for a man and his wife the whole first expense is at once doubled. The ordinary charge is five dollars, or one pound a day! A guest intending to stay for two or three weeks at an hotel, or perhaps for one week, may, by agreement, have this charge reduced. At one inn I stayed a fortnight, and having made no such agreement was charged the full sum. I felt myself stirred up to complain, and did in that case remonstrate. I was asked how much I wished to have returned,—for the bill had been paid,—and the sum I suggested was at once handed to me. But even with such reduction the price is very high, and at once makes the American hotel expensive. Wine also at these houses is very costly, and very bad. The usual price is two dollars, or eight shillings, a bottle. The people of the country rarely drink wine at dinner in the hotels. When they do so, they drink champagne; but their normal drinking is done separately, at the bar, chiefly before dinner, and at a cheap rate. "A drink," let it be what it may, invariably costs a dime, or fivepence. But if you must have a glass of sherry with your dinner, it costs two dollars; for sherry does not grow into pint bottles in the States. But the guest who remains for two days can have his wine kept for him. Washing also is an expensive luxury. The price of this is invariable, being always fourpence for everything washed. A cambric handkerchief or muslin dress all come out at the same price. For those who are cunning in the matter this may do very well; but for men and women whose cuffs and collars are numerous it becomes expensive. The craft of those who are cunning is shown, I think, in little internal washings, by which the cambric handkerchiefs are kept out of the list, while the muslin dresses are placed upon it. I am led to this surmise by the energetic measures taken by the hotel keepers to prevent such domestic washings, and by the denunciations which in every hotel are pasted up in every room against the practice. I could not at first understand why I was always warned against washing my own clothes in my own bedroom, and told that no foreign laundress could on any account be admitted into the house. The injunctions given on this head are almost frantic in their energy, and therefore I conceive that hotel keepers find themselves exposed to much suffering in the matter. At these hotels they wash with great rapidity, sending you back your clothes in four or five hours if you desire it.
Another very stringent order is placed before the face of all visitors at American hotels, desiring them on no account to leave valuable property in their rooms. I presume that there must have been some difficulty in this matter in bygone years, for in every State a law has been passed declaring that hotel keepers shall not be held responsible for money or jewels stolen out of rooms in their houses, provided that they are furnished with safes for keeping such money, and give due caution to their guests on the subject. The due caution is always given, but I have seldom myself taken any notice of it. I have always left my portmanteau open, and have kept my money usually in a travelling desk in my room. But I never to my knowledge lost anything. The world, I think, gives itself credit for more thieves than it possesses. As to the female servants at American inns, they are generally all that is disagreeable. They are uncivil, impudent, dirty, slow,—provoking to a degree. But I believe that they keep their hands from picking and stealing.
I never yet made a single comfortable meal at an American hotel, or rose from my breakfast or dinner with that feeling of satisfaction which should, I think, be felt at such moments in a civilized land in which cookery prevails as an art. I have had enough, and have been healthy and am thankful. But that thankfulness is altogether a matter apart, and does not bear upon the question. If need be I can eat food that is disagreeable to my palate, and make no complaint. But I hold it to be compatible with the principles of an advanced Christianity to prefer food that is palatable. I never could get any of that kind at an American hotel. All meal-times at such houses were to me periods of disagreeable duty; and at this moment, as I write these lines at the hotel in which I am still staying, I pine for an English leg of mutton. But I do not wish it to be supposed that the fault of which I complain,—for it is a grievous fault,—is incidental to America as a nation. I have stayed in private houses, and have daily sat down to dinners quite as good as any my own kitchen could afford me. Their dinner parties are generally well done, and as a people they are by no means indifferent to the nature of their comestibles. It is of the hotels that I speak, and of them I again say that eating in them is a disagreeable task,—a painful labour. It is as a schoolboy's lesson, or the six hours' confinement of a clerk at his desk.
The mode of eating is as follows. Certain feeding hours are named, which generally include nearly all the day. Breakfast from six till ten. Dinner from one till five. Tea from six till nine. Supper from nine till twelve. When the guest presents himself at any of these hours he is marshalled to a seat, and a bill is put into his hand containing the names of all the eatables then offered for his choice. The list is incredibly and most unnecessarily long. Then it is that you will see care written on the face of the American hotel liver, as he studies the programme of the coming performance. With men this passes off unnoticed, but with young girls the appearance of the thing is not attractive. The anxious study, the elaborate reading of the daily book, and then the choice proclaimed with clear articulation. "Boiled mutton and caper sauce, roast duck, hashed venison, mashed potatoes, poached eggs and spinach, stewed tomatoes. Yes; and waiter,—some squash." There is no false delicacy in the voice by which this order is given, no desire for a gentle whisper. The dinner is ordered with the firm determination of an American heroine, and in some five minutes' time all the little dishes appear at once, and the lady is surrounded by her banquet.
How I did learn to hate those little dishes and their greasy contents! At a London eating-house things are often not very nice, but your meat is put on a plate and comes before you in an edible shape. At these hotels it is brought to you in horrid little oval dishes, and swims in grease. Gravy is not an institution at American hotels, but grease has taken its place. It is palpable, undisguised grease, floating in rivers,—not grease caused by accidental bad cookery, but grease on purpose. A beef-steak is not a beef-steak unless a quarter of a pound of butter be added to it. Those horrid little dishes! If one thinks of it how could they have been made to contain Christian food? Every article in that long list is liable to the call of any number of guests for four hours. Under such circumstances how can food be made eatable? Your roast mutton is brought to you raw;—if you object to that you are supplied with meat that has been four times brought before the public. At hotels on the continent of Europe different dinners are cooked at different hours, but here the same dinner is kept always going. The house breakfast is maintained on a similar footing. Huge boilers of tea and coffee are stewed down and kept hot. To me those meals were odious. It is of course open to any one to have separate dinners and separate breakfasts in his own room; but by this little is gained and much is lost. He or she who is so exclusive pays twice over for such meals,—as they are charged as extras on the bill; and, after all, receives the advantage of no exclusive cooking. Particles from the public dinners are brought to the private room, and the same odious little dishes make their appearance.
But the most striking peculiarity of the American hotels is in their public rooms. Of the ladies' drawing-room I have spoken. There are two and sometimes three in one hotel, and they are generally furnished at any rate expensively. It seems to me that the space and the furniture are almost thrown away. At watering places, and sea-side summer hotels they are, I presume, used; but at ordinary hotels they are empty deserts. The intention is good, for they are established with the view of giving to ladies at hotels the comforts of ordinary domestic life; but they fail in their effect. Ladies will not make themselves happy in any room, or with ever so much gilded furniture, unless some means of happiness be provided for them. Into these rooms no book is ever brought, no needle-work is introduced; from them no clatter of many tongues is ever heard. On a marble table in the middle of the room always stands a large pitcher of iced water, and from this a cold, damp, uninviting air is spread through the atmosphere of the ladies' drawing-room.
Below, on the ground floor, there is, in the first place, the huge entrance hall, at the back of which, behind a bar, the great man of the place keeps the keys and holds his court. There are generally seats around it, in which smokers sit,—or men not smoking but ruminating. Opening off from this are reading rooms, smoking rooms, shaving rooms, drinking rooms, parlours for gentlemen in which smoking is prohibited, and which are generally as desolate as the ladies' sitting-rooms above. In those other more congenial chambers is always gathered together a crowd, apparently belonging in no way to the hotel. It would seem that a great portion of an American inn is as open to the public as an Exchange, or as the wayside of the street. In the West, during the early months of this war, the traveller would always see many soldiers among the crowd,—not only officers, but privates. They sit in public seats, silent but apparently contented, sometimes for an hour together. All Americans are given to gatherings such as these. It is the much-loved institution to which the name of "loafing" has been given.
I do not like the mode of life which prevails in the American hotels. I have come across exceptions, and know one or two that are comfortable,—always excepting that matter of eating and drinking. But taking them as a whole I do not like their mode of life. I feel, however, bound to add that the hotels of Canada, which are kept, I think, always after the same fashion, are infinitely worse than those of the United States. I do not like the American hotels; but I must say in their favour that they afford an immense amount of accommodation. The traveller is rarely told that an hotel is full, so that travelling in America is without one of those great perils to which it is subject in Europe. It must also be acknowledged that for the ordinary purposes of a traveller they are very cheap.
CHAPTER XV.
LITERATURE.
In speaking of the literature of any country we are, I think, too much inclined to regard the question as one appertaining exclusively to the writers of books,—not acknowledging, as we should do, that the literary character of a people will depend much more upon what it reads than what it writes. If we can suppose any people to have an intimate acquaintance with the best literary efforts of other countries, we should hardly be correct in saying that such a people had no literary history of their own because it had itself produced nothing in literature. And, with reference to those countries which have been most fertile in the production of good books, I doubt whether their literary histories would not have more to tell of those ages in which much has been read than of those in which much has been written.
The United States have been by no means barren in the production of literature. The truth is so far from this that their literary triumphs are perhaps those which of all their triumphs are the most honourable to them, and which, considering their position as a young nation, are the most permanently satisfactory. But though they have done much in writing, they have done much more in reading. As producers they are more than respectable, but as consumers they are the most conspicuous people on the earth. It is impossible to speak of the subject of literature in America without thinking of the readers rather than of the writers. In this matter their position is different from that of any other great people, seeing that they share the advantages of our language. An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand MoliÈre. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture. It may be suggested that an Englishman has the same advantages as regards America; and it is true that he is obtaining much of such advantage. Irving, Prescott, and Longfellow are the same to England as though she herself had produced them. But the balance of advantage must be greatly in favour of America. We have given her the work of four hundred years, and have received back in return the work of fifty.
And of this advantage the Americans have not been slow to avail themselves. As consumers of literature they are certainly the most conspicuous people on the earth. Where an English publisher contents himself with thousands of copies an American publisher deals with ten thousands. The sale of a new book, which in numbers would amount to a considerable success with us, would with them be a lamentable failure. This of course is accounted for, as regards the author and the publisher, by the difference of price at which the book is produced. One thousand in England will give perhaps as good a return as the ten thousand in America. But as regards the readers there can be no such equalization. The thousand copies cannot spread themselves as do the ten thousand. The one book at a guinea cannot multiply itself, let Mr. Mudie do what he will, as do the ten books at a dollar. Ultimately there remain the ten books against the one; and if there be not the ten readers against the one, there are five, or four, or three. Everybody in the States has books about his house. "And so has everybody in England," will say my English reader, mindful of the libraries, or book-rooms, or book-crowded drawing-rooms of his friends and acquaintances. But has my English reader who so replies examined the libraries of many English cabmen, of ticket porters, of warehousemen, and of agricultural labourers? I cannot take upon myself to say that I have done so with any close search in the States. But when it has been in my power I have done so, and I have always found books in such houses as I have entered. The amount of printed matter which is poured forth in streams from the printing-presses of the great American publishers is, however, a better proof of the truth of what I say than anything that I can have seen myself.
But of what class are the books that are so read? There are many who think that reading in itself is not good unless the matter read be excellent. I do not myself quite agree with this, thinking that almost any reading is better than none; but I will of course admit that good matter is better than bad matter. The bulk of the literature consumed in the States is no doubt composed of novels,—as it is also, now-a-days, in this country. Whether or no an unlimited supply of novels for young people is or is not advantageous, I will not here pretend to say. The general opinion with ourselves I take it is, that novels are bad reading if they be bad of their kind. Novels that are not bad are now-a-days accepted generally as indispensable to our households. Whatever may be the weakness of the American literary taste in this respect, it is, I think, a weakness which we share. There are more novel readers among them than with us, but only, I think, in the proportion that there are more readers.
I have no hesitation in saying, that works by English authors are more popular in the States than those written by themselves; and, among English authors of the present day, they by no means confine themselves to the novelists. The English names of whom I heard most during my sojourn in the States were perhaps those of Dickens, Tennyson, Buckle, Tom Hughes, Martin Tupper, and Thackeray. As the owners of all these names are still living, I am not going to take upon myself the delicate task of criticising the American taste. I may not perhaps coincide with them in every respect. But if I be right as to the names which I have given, such a selection shows that they do get beyond novels. I have little doubt but that many more copies of Dickens's novels have been sold during the last three years, than of the works either of Tennyson or of Buckle; but such also has been the case in England. It will probably be admitted that one copy of the "Civilization" should be held as being equal to five-and-twenty of "Nicholas Nickleby," and that a single "In Memoriam" may fairly weigh down half-a-dozen "Pickwicks." Men and women after their day's work are not always up to the "Civilization." As a rule they are generally up to "Proverbial Philosophy," and this, perhaps, may have had something to do with the great popularity of that very popular work.
I would not have it supposed that American readers despise their own authors. The Americans are very proud of having a literature of their own. Among the literary names which they honour, there are none, I think, more honourable than those of Cooper and Irving. They like to know that their modern historians are acknowledged as great authors, and as regards their own poets will sometimes demand your admiration for strains with which you hardly find yourself to be familiar. But English books are, I think, the better loved;—even the English books of the present day. And even beyond this,—with those who choose to indulge in the costly luxuries of literature,—books printed in England are more popular than those which are printed in their own country; and yet the manner in which the American publishers put out their work is very good. The book sold there at a dollar, or a dollar and a quarter, quite equals our ordinary five shilling volume. Nevertheless English books are preferred,—almost as strongly as are French bonnets. Of books absolutely printed and produced in England the supply in the States is of course small. They must necessarily be costly, and as regards new books, are always subjected to the rivalry of a cheaper American copy. But of the reprinted works of English authors the supply is unlimited, and the sale very great. Almost everything is reprinted; certainly everything which can be said to attain any home popularity. I do not know how far English authors may be aware of the fact; but it is undoubtedly a fact that their influence as authors is greater on the other side of the Atlantic than on this. It is there that they have their most numerous school of pupils. It is there that they are recognized as teachers by hundreds of thousands. It is of those thirty millions that they should think, at any rate in part, when they discuss within their own hearts that question which all authors do discuss, whether that which they write shall in itself be good or bad,—be true or false. A writer in England may not, perhaps, think very much of this with reference to some trifle of which his English publisher proposes to sell some seven or eight hundred copies. But he begins to feel that he should have thought of it when he learns that twenty or thirty thousand copies of the same have been scattered through the length and breadth of the United States. The English author should feel that he writes for the widest circle of readers ever yet obtained by the literature of any country. He provides not only for his own country and for the States, but for the readers who are rising by millions in the British colonies. Canada is supplied chiefly from the presses of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, but she is supplied with the works of the mother country. India, as I take it, gets all her books direct from London, as do the West Indies. Whether or no the Australian colonies have as yet learned to reprint our books I do not know, but I presume that they cannot do so as cheaply as they can import them. London with us, and the three cities which I have named on the other side of the Atlantic, are the places at which this literature is manufactured; but the demand in the western hemisphere is becoming more brisk than that which the old world creates. There is, I have no doubt, more literary matter printed in London than in all America put together. A greater extent of letter-press is put up in London than in the three publishing cities of the States. But the number of copies issued by the American publishers is so much greater than those which ours put forth, that the greater bulk of literature is with them. If this be so, the demand with them is of course greater than it is with us.
I have spoken here of the privilege which an English author enjoys by reason of the ever widening circle of readers to whom he writes. I speak of the privilege of an English author as distinguished from that of an American author. I profess my belief that in the United States an English author has an advantage over one of that country merely in the fact of his being English, as a French milliner has undoubtedly an advantage in her nationality let her merits or demerits as a milliner be what they may. I think that English books are better liked because they are English. But I do not know that there is any feeling with us either for or against an author because he is American. I believe that Longfellow stands in our judgment exactly where he would have stood had he been a tutor at a college in Oxford instead of a Professor at Cambridge in Massachusetts. Prescott is read among us as an historian without any reference as to his nationality, and by many, as I take it, in absolute ignorance of his nationality. Hawthorne, the novelist, is quite as well known in England as he is in his own country. But I do not know that to either of these three is awarded any favour or is denied any justice because he is an American. Washington Irving published many of his works in this country, receiving very large sums for them from Mr. Murray, and I fancy that in dealing with his publisher he found neither advantage nor disadvantage in his nationality;—that is, of course, advantage or disadvantage in reference to the light in which his works would be regarded. It must be admitted that there is no jealousy in the States against English authors. I think that there is a feeling in their favour, but no one can at any rate allege that there is a feeling against them. I think I may also assert on the part of my own country that there is no jealousy here against American authors. As regards the tastes of the people, the works of each country flow freely through the other. That is as it should be. But when we come to the mode of supply, things are not exactly as they should be; and I do not believe that any one will contradict me when I say that the fault is with the Americans.
I presume that all my readers know the meaning of the word copyright. A man's copyright, or right in his copy, is that amount of legal possession in the production of his brains which has been secured to him by the laws of his own country and by the laws of others. Unless an author were secured by such laws, his writings would be of but little pecuniary value to him, as the right of printing and selling them would be open to all the world. In England and in America, and as I conceive in all countries possessing a literature, there is such a law securing to authors and to their heirs for a term of years the exclusive right over their own productions. That this should be so in England as regards English authors is so much a matter of course, that the copyright of an author would seem to be as naturally his own as a gentleman's deposit at his bank or his little investment in the three per cents. The right of an author to the value of his own productions in other countries than his own is not so much a matter of course; but nevertheless, if such productions have any value in other countries, that value should belong to him. This has been felt to be the case between England and France, and treaties have been made securing his own property to the author in each country. The fact that the languages of England and France are different makes the matter one of comparatively small moment. But it has been found to be for the honour and profit of the two countries, that there should be such a law, and an international copyright does exist. But if such an arrangement be needed between two such countries as France and England,—between two countries which do not speak the same language or share the same literature,—how much more necessary must it be between England and the United States? The literature of the one country is the literature of the other. The poem that is popular in London will certainly be popular in New York. The novel that is effective among American ladies will be equally so with those of England. There can be no doubt as to the importance of having a law of copyright between the two countries. The only question can be as to the expediency and the justice. At present there is no international copyright between England and the United States, and there is none because the States have declined to sanction any such law. It is known by all who are concerned in the matter on either side of the water that as far as Great Britain is concerned such a law would meet with no impediment.
Therefore it is to be presumed that the legislators of the States think it expedient and just to dispense with any such law. I have said that there can be no doubt as to the importance of the question, seeing that the price of English literature in the States must be most materially affected by it. Without such a law the Americans are enabled to import English literature without paying for it. It is open to any American publisher to reprint any work from an English copy, and to sell his reprints without any permission obtained from the English author or from the English publisher. The absolute material which the American publisher sells, he takes, or can take, for nothing. The paper, ink, and composition he supplies in the ordinary way of business; but of the very matter which he professes to sell,—of the book which is the object of his trade, he is enabled to possess himself for nothing. If you, my reader, be a popular author, an American publisher will take the choicest work of your brain and make dollars out of it, selling thousands of copies of it in his country, whereas you can, perhaps, only sell hundreds of it in your own; and will either give you nothing for that he takes,—or else will explain to you that he need give you nothing, and that in paying you anything he subjects himself to the danger of seeing the property which he has bought taken again from him by other persons. If this be so that question whether or no there shall be a law of international copyright between the two countries cannot be unimportant.
But it may be inexpedient that there shall be such a law. It may be considered well, that as the influx of English books into America is much greater than the out-flux of American books back to England, the right of obtaining such books for nothing should be reserved, although the country in doing so robs its own authors of the advantage which should accrue to them from the English market. It might perhaps be thought anything but smart to surrender such an advantage by the passing of an international copyright bill. There are not many trades in which the tradesman can get the chief of his goods for nothing; and it may be thought, that the advantage arising to the States from such an arrangement of circumstances should not be abandoned. But how then about the justice? It would seem that the less said upon that subject the better. I have heard no one say that an author's property in his own works should not, in accordance with justice, be insured to him in the one country as well as in the other. I have seen no defence of the present position of affairs, on the score of justice. The price of books would be enhanced by an international copyright law, and it is well that books should be cheap. That is the only argument used. So would mutton be cheap, if it could be taken out of a butcher's shop for nothing!
But I absolutely deny the expediency of the present position of the matter, looking simply to the material advantage of the American people in the matter, and throwing aside altogether that question of justice. I must here, however, explain that I bring no charge whatsoever against the American publishers. The English author is a victim in their hands, but it is by no means their fault that he is so. As a rule, they are willing to pay for the works of popular English writers, but in arranging as to what payments they can make, they must of course bear in mind the fact that they have no exclusive right whatsoever in the things which they purchase. It is natural, also, that they should bear in mind when making their purchases, and arranging their prices, that they can have the very thing they are buying without any payment at all, if the price asked do not suit them. It is not of the publishers that I complain, or of any advantage which they take; but of the legislators of the country, and of the advantage which accrues, or is thought by them to accrue to the American people from the absence of an international copyright law. It is mean on their part to take such advantage if it existed; and it is foolish in them to suppose that any such advantage can accrue. The absence of any law of copyright no doubt gives to the American publisher the power of reprinting the works of English authors without paying for them,—seeing that the English author is undefended. But the American publisher who brings out such a reprint is equally undefended in his property. When he shall have produced his book, his rival in the next street may immediately reprint it from him, and destroy the value of his property by underselling him. It is probable that the first American publisher will have made some payment to the English author for the privilege of publishing the book honestly,—of publishing it without recurrence to piracy,—and in arranging his price with his customers he will be, of course, obliged to debit the book with the amount so paid. If the author receive ten cents a copy on every copy sold, the publisher must add that ten cents to the price he charges for it. But he cannot do this with security, because the book can be immediately reprinted, and sold without any such addition to the price. The only security which the American publisher has against the injury which may be so done to him, is the power of doing other injury in return. The men who stand high in the trade, and who are powerful because of the largeness of their dealings, can in a certain measure secure themselves in this way. Such a firm would have the power of crushing a small tradesman who should interfere with him. But if the large firm commits any such act of injustice, the little men in the trade have no power of setting themselves right by counter injustice. I need hardly point out what must be the effect of such a state of things upon the whole publishing trade; nor need I say more to prove that some law which shall regulate property in foreign copyrights would be as expedient with reference to America, as it would be just towards England. But the wrong done by America to herself does not rest here. It is true that more English books are read in the States than American books in England, but it is equally true that the literature of America is daily gaining readers among us. That injury to which English authors are subjected from the want of protection in the States, American authors suffer from the want of protection here. One can hardly believe that the legislators of the States would willingly place the brightest of their own fellow countrymen in this position, because in the event of a copyright bill being passed, the balance of advantage would seem to accrue to England!
Of the literature of the United States, speaking of literature in its ordinary sense, I do not know that I need say much more. I regard the literature of a country as its highest produce, believing it to be more powerful in its general effect, and more beneficial in its results, than either statesmanship, professional ability, religious teaching, or commerce. And in no part of its national career have the United States been so successful as in this. I need hardly explain that I should commit a monstrous injustice were I to make a comparison in this matter between England and America. Literature is the child of leisure and wealth. It is the produce of minds which by a happy combination of circumstances have been enabled to dispense with the ordinary cares of the world. It can hardly be expected to come from a young country, or from a new and still struggling people. Looking around at our own magnificent colonies I hardly remember a considerable name which they have produced, except that of my excellent old friend, Sam Slick. Nothing, therefore, I think, shows the settled greatness of the people of the States more significantly than their firm establishment of a national literature. This literature runs over all subjects. American authors have excelled in poetry, in science, in history, in metaphysics, in law, in theology, and in fiction. They have attempted all, and failed in none. What Englishman has devoted a room to books, and devoted no portion of that room to the productions of America?
But I must say a word of literature in which I shall not speak of it in its ordinary sense, and shall yet speak of it in that sense which of all perhaps, in the present day, should be considered the most ordinary. I mean the every-day periodical literature of the press. Most of those who can read, it is to be hoped, read books; but all who can read do read newspapers. Newspapers in this country are so general that men cannot well live without them; but to men, and to women also, in the United States they may be said to be the one chief necessary of life. And yet in the whole length and breadth of the United States there is not published a single newspaper which seems to me to be worthy of praise.
A really good newspaper,—one excellent at all points,—would indeed be a triumph of honesty and of art! Not only is such a publication much to be desired in America, but it is still to be desired in Great Britain also. I used, in my younger days, to think of such a newspaper as a possible publication, and in a certain degree I then looked for it. Now I expect it only in my dreams. It should be powerful without tyranny, popular without triumph, political without party passion, critical without personal feeling, right in its statements and just in its judgments, but right and just without pride. It should be all but omniscient, but not conscious of its omniscience; it should be moral, but not strait-laced; it should be well-assured, but yet modest; though never humble, it should be free from boasting. Above all these things it should be readable; and above that again it should be true. I used to think that such a newspaper might be produced, but I now sadly acknowledge to myself the fact that humanity is not capable of any work so divine.
The newspapers of the States generally may not only be said to have reached none of the virtues here named, but to have fallen into all the opposite vices. In the first place they are never true. In requiring truth from a newspaper the public should not be anxious to strain at gnats. A statement setting forth that a certain gooseberry was five inches in circumference, whereas in truth its girth was only two and a half, would give me no offence. Nor would I be offended at being told that Lord Derby was appointed to the premiership, while in truth the Queen had only sent for his lordship, having as yet come to no definite arrangement. The demand for truth which may reasonably be made upon a newspaper amounts to this,—that nothing should be stated not believed to be true, and that nothing should be stated as to which the truth is important, without adequate ground for such belief. If a newspaper accuse me of swindling, it is not sufficient that the writer believe me to be a swindler. He should have ample and sufficient ground for such belief;—otherwise in making such a statement he will write falsely. In our private life we all recognize the fact that this is so. It is understood that a man is not a whit the less a slanderer because he believes the slander which he promulgates. But it seems to me that this is not sufficiently recognized by many who write for the public press. Evil things are said, and are probably believed by the writers; they are said with that special skill for which newspaper writers have in our days become so conspicuous, defying alike redress by law or redress by argument; but they are too often said falsely. The words are not measured when they are written, and they are allowed to go forth without any sufficient inquiry into their truth. But if there be any ground for such complaint here in England, that ground is multiplied ten times—twenty times—in the States. This is not only shown in the abuse of individuals, in abuse which is as violent as it is perpetual, but in the treatment of every subject which is handled. All idea of truth has been thrown overboard. It seems to be admitted that the only object is to produce a sensation, and that it is admitted by both writer and reader that sensation and veracity are incompatible. Falsehood has become so much a matter of course with American newspapers that it has almost ceased to be falsehood. Nobody thinks me a liar because I deny that I am at home when I am in my study. The nature of the arrangement is generally understood. So also is it with the American newspapers.
But American newspapers are also unreadable. It is very bad that they should be false, but it is very surprising that they should be dull. Looking at the general intelligence of the people, one would have thought that a readable newspaper, put out with all pleasant appurtenances of clear type, good paper, and good internal arrangement, would have been a thing specially within their reach. But they have failed in every detail. Though their papers are always loaded with sensation headings, there are seldom sensation paragraphs to follow. The paragraphs do not fit the headings. Either they cannot be found, or if found they seem to have escaped from their proper column to some distant and remote portion of the sheet. One is led to presume that no American editor has any plan in the composition of his newspaper. I never know whether I have as yet got to the very heart's core of the daily journal, or whether I am still to go on searching for that heart's core. Alas, it too often happens that there is no heart's core! The whole thing seems to have been put out at hap-hazard. And then the very writing is in itself below mediocrity;—as though a power of expression in properly arranged language was not required by a newspaper editor, either as regards himself or as regards his subordinates. One is driven to suppose that the writers for the daily press are not chosen with any view to such capability. A man ambitious of being on the staff of an American newspaper should be capable of much work, should be satisfied with small pay, should be indifferent to the world's good usage, should be rough, ready, and of long sufferance; but, above all, he should be smart. The type of almost all American newspapers is wretched—I think I may say of all;—so wretched that that alone forbids one to hope for pleasure in reading them. They are ill-written, ill-printed, ill-arranged, and in fact are not readable. They are bought, glanced at, and thrown away.
They are full of boastings,—not boastings simply as to their country, their town, or their party,—but of boastings as to themselves. And yet they possess no self-assurance. It is always evident that they neither trust themselves, nor expect to be trusted. They have made no approach to that omniscience which constitutes the great marvel of our own daily press; but finding it necessary to write as though they possessed it, they fall into blunders which are almost as marvellous. Justice and right judgment are out of the question with them. A political party end is always in view, and political party warfare in America admits of any weapons. No newspaper in America is really powerful or popular; and yet they are tyrannical and overbearing. The "New York Herald" has, I believe, the largest sale of any daily newspaper; but it is absolutely without political power, and in these times of war has truckled to the Government more basely than any other paper. It has an enormous sale, but so far is it from having achieved popularity, that no man on any side ever speaks a good word for it. All American newspapers deal in politics as a matter of course; but their politics have ever regard to men and never to measures. Vituperation is their natural political weapon; but since the President's ministers have assumed the power of stopping newspapers which are offensive to them, they have shown that they can descend to a course of eulogy which is even below vituperation.
I shall be accused of using very strong language against the newspaper press of America. I can only say that I do not know how to make that language too strong. Of course there are newspapers as to which the editors and writers may justly feel that my remarks, if applied to them, are unmerited. In writing on such a subject, I can only deal with the whole as a whole. During my stay in the country, I did my best to make myself acquainted with the nature of its newspapers, knowing in how great a degree its population depends on them for its daily store of information. Newspapers in the States of America have a much wider, or rather closer circulation, than they do with us. Every man and almost every woman sees a newspaper daily. They are very cheap, and are brought to every man's hand without trouble to himself, at every turn that he takes in his day's work. It would be much for the advantage of the country, that they should be good of their kind; but, if I am able to form a correct judgment on the matter, they are not good.
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCLUSION.
In one of the earlier chapters of this volume,—now some seven or eight chapters past,—I brought myself on my travels back to Boston. It was not that my way homewards lay by that route, seeing that my fate required me to sail from New York; but I could not leave the country without revisiting my friends in Massachusetts. I have told how I was there in the sleighing time, and how pleasant were the mingled slush and frost of the snowy winter. In the morning the streets would be hard and crisp, and the stranger would surely fall if he were not prepared to walk on glaciers. In the afternoon he would be wading through rivers,—and if properly armed at all points with india-rubber, would enjoy the rivers as he waded. But the air would be always kindly, and the east wind there, if it was east as I was told, had none of that power of dominion which makes us all so submissive to its behests in London. For myself, I believe that the real east wind blows only in London.
And when the snow went in Boston I went with it. The evening before I left I watched them as they carted away the dirty uncouth blocks which had been broken up with pickaxes in Washington Street, and was melancholy as I reflected that I too should no longer be known in the streets. My weeks in Boston had not been very many, but nevertheless there were haunts there which I knew as though my feet had trodden them for years. There were houses to which I could have gone with my eyes blindfold; doors of which the latches were familiar to my hands; faces which I knew so well that they had ceased to put on for me the fictitious smiles of courtesy. Faces, houses, doors, and haunts, where are they now? For me they are as though they had never been. They are among the things which one would fain remember as one remembers a dream. Look back on it as a vision and it is all pleasant. But if you realize your vision and believe your dream to be a fact, all your pleasure is obliterated by regret.
I know that I shall never again be at Boston, and that I have said that about the Americans which would make me unwelcome as a guest if I were there. It is in this that my regret consists;—for this reason that I would wish to remember so many social hours as though they had been passed in sleep. They who will expect blessings from me, will say among themselves that I have cursed them. As I read the pages which I have written I feel that words which I intended for blessings when I prepared to utter them have gone nigh to turn themselves into curses.
I have ever admired the United States as a nation. I have loved their liberty, their prowess, their intelligence, and their progress. I have sympathized with a people who themselves have had no sympathy with passive security and inaction. I have felt confidence in them, and have known, as it were, that their industry must enable them to succeed as a people, while their freedom would insure to them success as a nation. With these convictions I went among them wishing to write of them good words,—words which might be pleasant for them to read, while they might assist perhaps in producing a true impression of them here at home. But among my good words there are so many which are bitter, that I fear I shall have failed in my object as regards them. And it seems to me, as I read once more my own pages, that in saying evil things of my friends, I have used language stronger than I intended; whereas I have omitted to express myself with emphasis when I have attempted to say good things. Why need I have told of the mud of Washington, or have exposed the nakedness of Cairo? Why did I speak with such eager enmity of those poor women in the New York cars, who never injured me, now that I think of it? Ladies of New York, as I write this, the words which were written among you, are printed and cannot be expunged; but I tender to you my apologies from my home in England. And as to that Van Wyck committee! Might I not have left those contractors to be dealt with by their own Congress, seeing that that Congress committee was by no means inclined to spare them? I might have kept my pages free from gall, and have sent my sheets to the press unhurt by the conviction that I was hurting those who had dealt kindly by me! But what then? Was any people ever truly served by eulogy; or an honest cause furthered by undue praise?
O my friends with thin skins,—and here I protest that a thick skin is a fault not to be forgiven in a man or a nation, whereas a thin skin is in itself a merit, if only the wearer of it will be the master and not the slave of his skin,—O, my friends with thin skins, ye whom I call my cousins and love as brethren, will ye not forgive me these harsh words that I have spoken? They have been spoken in love,—with a true love, a brotherly love, a love that has never been absent from the heart while the brain was coining them. I had my task to do, and I could not take the pleasant and ignore the painful. It may perhaps be that as a friend I had better not have written either good or bad. But no! To say that would indeed be to speak calumny of your country. A man may write of you truly, and yet write that which you would read with pleasure;—only that your skins are so thin! The streets of Washington are muddy and her ways are desolate. The nakedness of Cairo is very naked. And those ladies of New York—is it not to be confessed that they are somewhat imperious in their demands? As for the Van Wyck committee, have I not repeated the tale which you have told yourselves? And is it not well that such tales should be told?
And yet ye will not forgive me; because your skins are thin, and because the praise of others is the breath of your nostrils.
I do not know that an American as an individual is more thin-skinned than an Englishman; but as the representative of a nation it may almost be said of him that he has no skin at all. Any touch comes at once upon the net-work of his nerves and puts in operation all his organs of feeling with the violence of a blow. And for this peculiarity he has been made the mark of much ridicule. It shows itself in two ways; either by extreme displeasure when anything is said disrespectful of his country; or by the strong eulogy with which he is accustomed to speak of his own institutions and of those of his countrymen whom at the moment he may chance to hold in high esteem. The manner in which this is done is often ridiculous. "Sir, what do you think of our Mr. Jefferson Brick? Mr. Jefferson Brick, sir, is one of our most remarkable men." And again. "Do you like our institutions, sir? Do you find that philanthropy, religion, philosophy, and the social virtues are cultivated on a scale commensurate with the unequalled liberty and political advancement of the nation?" There is something absurd in such a mode of address when it is repeated often. But hero-worship and love of country are not absurd; and do not these addresses show capacity for hero-worship and an aptitude for the love of country? Jefferson Brick may not be a hero; but a capacity for such worship is something. Indeed the capacity is everything, for the need of a hero will at last produce the hero needed. And it is the same with that love of country. A people that are proud of their country will see that there is something in their country to justify their pride. Do we not all of us feel assured by the intense nationality of an American that he will not desert his nation in the hour of her need? I feel that assurance respecting them; and at those moments in which I am moved to laughter by the absurdities of their addresses, I feel it the strongest.
I left Boston with the snow, and returning to New York found that the streets there were dry and that the winter was nearly over. As I had passed through New York to Boston the streets had been by no means dry. The snow had lain in small mountains over which the omnibuses made their way down Broadway, till at the bottom of that thoroughfare, between Trinity Church and Bowling Green, alp became piled upon alp, and all traffic was full of danger. The accursed love of gain still took men to Wall Street, but they had to fight their way thither through physical difficulties which must have made even the state of the money market a matter almost of indifference to them. They do not seem to me to manage the winter in New York so well as they do in Boston. But now, on my last return thither, the alps were gone, the roads were clear, and one could travel through the city with no other impediment than those of treading on women's dresses if one walked, or having to look after women's band-boxes and pay their fares and take their change, if one used the omnibuses.
And now had come the end of my adventures, and as I set my foot once more upon the deck of the Cunard steamer I felt that my work was done. Whether it were done ill or well, or whether indeed any approach to the doing of it had been attained, all had been done that I could accomplish. No further opportunity remained to me of seeing, hearing, or of speaking. I had come out thither, having resolved to learn a little that I might if possible teach that little to others; and now the lesson was learned, or must remain unlearned. But in carrying out my resolution I had gradually risen in my ambition, and had mounted from one stage of inquiry to another, till at last I had found myself burdened with the task of ascertaining whether or no the Americans were doing their work as a nation well or ill; and now, if ever, I must be prepared to put forth the result of my inquiry. As I walked up and down the deck of the steamboat I confess I felt that I had been somewhat arrogant.
I had been a few days over six months in the States, and I was engaged in writing a book of such a nature that a man might well engage himself for six years, or perhaps for sixty, in obtaining the materials for it. There was nothing in the form of government, or legislature, or manners of the people, as to which I had not taken upon myself to say something. I was professing to understand their strength and their weakness; and was daring to censure their faults and to eulogize their virtues. "Who is he," an American would say, "that he comes and judges us? His judgment is nothing." "Who is he," an Englishman would say, "that he comes and teaches us? His teaching is of no value."
In answer to this I have but a small plea to make. I have done my best. I have nothing "extenuated, and have set down nought in malice." I do feel that my volumes have blown themselves out into proportions greater than I had intended;—greater not in mass of pages, but in the matter handled. I am frequently addressing my own muse, who I am well aware is not Clio, and asking her whither she is wending. "Cease, thou wrong-headed one, to meddle with these mysteries." I appeal to her frequently, but ever in vain. One cannot drive one's muse, nor yet always lead her. Of the various women with which a man is blessed, his muse is by no means the least difficult to manage.
But again I put in my slight plea. In doing as I have done, I have at least done my best. I have endeavoured to judge without prejudice, and to hear with honest ears, and to see with honest eyes. The subject, moreover, on which I have written, is one which, though great, is so universal in its bearings, that it may be said to admit of being handled without impropriety by the unlearned as well as the learned;—by those who have grown gray in the study of constitutional lore, and by those who have simply looked on at the government of men as we all look on at those matters which daily surround us. There are matters as to which a man should never take a pen in hand unless he has given to them much labour. The botanist must have learned to trace the herbs and flowers before he can presume to tell us how God has formed them. But the death of Hector is a fit subject for a boy's verses though Homer also sang of it. I feel that there is scope for a book on the United States' form of government as it was founded, and as it has since framed itself, which might do honour to the life-long studies of some one of those great constitutional pundits whom we have among us; but, nevertheless, the plain words of a man who is no pundit need not disgrace the subject, if they be honestly written, and if he who writes them has in his heart an honest love of liberty. Such were my thoughts as I walked the deck of the Cunard steamer. Then I descended to my cabin, settled my luggage, and prepared for the continuance of my work. It was fourteen days from that time before I reached London, but the fourteen days to me were not unpleasant. The demon of sea-sickness usually spares me, and if I can find on board one or two who are equally fortunate—who can eat with me, drink with me, and talk with me—I do not know that a passage across the Atlantic is by any means a terrible evil.
In finishing these volumes after the fashion in which they have been written throughout, I feel that I am bound to express a final opinion on two or three points, and that if I have not enabled myself to do so, I have travelled through the country in vain. I am bound by the very nature of my undertaking to say whether, according to such view as I have enabled myself to take of them, the Americans have succeeded as a nation politically and socially; and in doing this I ought to be able to explain how far slavery has interfered with such success. I am bound also, writing at the present moment, to express some opinion as to the result of this war, and to declare whether the North or the South may be expected to be victorious,—explaining in some rough way what may be the results of such victory, and how such results will affect the question of slavery. And I shall leave my task unfinished if I do not say what may be the possible chances of future quarrel between England and the States. That there has been and is much hot blood and angry feeling no man doubts; but such angry feeling has existed among many nations without any probability of war. In this case, with reference to this ill-will that has certainly established itself between us and that other people, is there any need that it should be satisfied by war and allayed by blood?
No one, I think, can doubt that the founders of the great American Commonwealth made an error in omitting to provide some means for the gradual extinction of slavery throughout the States. That error did not consist in any liking for slavery. There was no feeling in favour of slavery on the part of those who made themselves prominent at the political birth of the nation. I think I shall be justified in saying that at that time the opinion that slavery is itself a good thing, that it is an institution of divine origin and fit to be perpetuated among men as in itself excellent, had not found that favour in the southern States in which it is now held. Jefferson, who has been regarded as the leader of the southern or democratic party, has left ample testimony that he regarded slavery as an evil. It is, I think, true that he gave such testimony much more freely when he was speaking or writing as a private individual than he ever allowed himself to do when his words were armed with the weight of public authority. But it is clear that, on the whole, he was opposed to slavery, and I think there can be little doubt that he and his party looked forward to a natural death for that evil. Calculation was made that slavery when not recruited afresh from Africa could not maintain its numbers, and that gradually the negro population would become extinct. This was the error made. It was easier to look forward to such a result and hope for such an end of the difficulty, than to extinguish slavery by a great political movement, which must doubtless have been difficult and costly. The northern States got rid of slavery by the operation of their separate legislatures, some at one date and some at others. The slaves were less numerous in the North than in the South, and the feeling adverse to slaves was stronger in the North than in the South. Mason and Dixon's line, which now separates slave soil from free soil, merely indicates the position in the country at which the balance turned. Maryland and Virginia were not inclined to make great immediate sacrifices for the manumission of their slaves; but the gentlemen of those States did not think that slavery was a divine institution, destined to flourish for ever as a blessing in their land.
The maintenance of slavery was, I think, a political mistake;—a political mistake, not because slavery is politically wrong, but because the politicians of the day made erroneous calculations as to the probability of its termination. So the income tax may be a political blunder with us;—not because it is in itself a bad tax, but because those who imposed it conceived that they were imposing it for a year or two, whereas, now, men do not expect to see the end of it. The maintenance of slavery was a political mistake; and I cannot think that the Americans in any way lessen the weight of their own error by protesting, as they occasionally do, that slavery was a legacy made over to them from England. They might as well say, that travelling in carts without springs, at the rate of three miles an hour, was a legacy made over to them by England. On that matter of travelling they have not been contented with the old habits left to them, but have gone ahead and made railroads. In creating those railways the merit is due to them; and so also is the demerit of maintaining those slaves.
That demerit and that mistake have doubtless brought upon the Americans the grievances of their present position; and will, as I think, so far be accompanied by ultimate punishment that they will be the immediate means of causing the first disintegration of their nation. I will leave it to the Americans themselves to say, whether such disintegration must necessarily imply that they have failed in their political undertaking. The most loyal citizens of the northern States would have declared a month or two since,—and for aught I know would declare now,—that any disintegration of the States implied absolute failure. One stripe erased from the banner, one star lost from the firmament, would entail upon them all the disgrace of national defeat! It had been their boast that they would always advance, never retreat. They had looked forward to add ever State upon State, and territory to territory, till the whole continent should be bound together in the same union. To go back from that now, to fall into pieces and be divided, to become smaller in the eyes of the nations,—to be absolutely halfed, as some would say of such division, would be national disgrace, and would amount to political failure. "Let us fight for the whole," such men said, and probably do say. "To lose anything is to lose all!"
But the citizens of the States who speak and think thus, though they may be the most loyal, are perhaps not politically the most wise. And I am inclined to think that that defiant claim of every star, that resolve to possess every stripe upon the banner, had become somewhat less general when I was leaving the country than I had found it to be at the time of my arrival there. While things were going badly with the North,—while there was no tale of any battle to be told except of those at Bull's Run and Springfield, no northern man would admit a hint that secession might ultimately prevail in Georgia or Alabama. But the rebels had been driven out of Missouri when I was leaving the States, they had retreated altogether from Kentucky, having been beaten in one engagement there, and from a great portion of Tennessee, having been twice beaten in that State. The coast of North Carolina, and many points of the southern coast, were in the hands of the northern army, while the army of the South was retreating from all points into the centre of their country. Whatever may have been the strategetical merits or demerits of the northern generals, it is at any rate certain that their apparent successes were greedily welcomed by the people, and created an idea that things were going well with the cause. And, as all this took place, it seemed to me that I heard less about the necessary integrity of the old flag. While as yet they were altogether unsuccessful, they were minded to make no surrender. But with their successes came the feeling, that in taking much they might perhaps allow themselves to yield something. This was clearly indicated by the message sent to Congress by the President in February, 1862, in which he suggested that Congress should make arrangements for the purchase of the slaves in the border States; so that in the event of secession—accomplished secession—in the gulf States, the course of those border States might be made clear for them. They might hesitate as to going willingly with the North, while possessing slaves,—as to setting themselves peaceably down as a small slave adjunct to a vast free soil nation, seeing that their property would always be in peril. Under such circumstances a slave adjunct to the free soil nation would not long be possible. But if it could be shown to them that in the event of their adhering to the North, compensation would be forthcoming, then, indeed, the difficulty in arranging an advantageous line between the two future nations might be considerably modified. This message of the President's was intended to signify, that secession on favourable terms might be regarded by the North as not undesirable. Moderate men were beginning to whisper that, after all, the gulf States were no source either of national wealth or of national honour. Had there not been enough at Washington of cotton lords and cotton laws? When I have suggested that no senator from Georgia would ever again sit in the United States senate, American gentlemen have received my remark with a slight demur, and have then proceeded to argue the case. Six months before they would have declaimed against me and not have argued.
I will leave it to Americans themselves to say whether that disintegration of the States, should it ever be realized, will imply that they have failed in their political undertaking. If they do not protest that it argues failure, their feelings will not be hurt by any such protestations on the part of others. I have said that the blunder made by the founders of the nation with regard to slavery has brought with it this secession as its punishment. But such punishments come generally upon nations as great mercies. Ireland's famine was the punishment of her imprudence and idleness, but it has given to her prosperity and progress. And indeed, to speak with more logical correctness, the famine was no punishment to Ireland, nor will secession be a punishment to the northern States. In the long result step will have gone on after step, and effect will have followed cause, till the American people will at last acknowledge, that all these matters have been arranged for their advantage and promotion. It may be that a nation now and then goes to the wall, and that things go from bad to worse with a large people. It has been so with various nations and with many people since history was first written. But when it has been so, the people thus punished have been idle and bad. They have not only done evil in their generation, but have done more evil than good, and have contributed their power to the injury rather than to the improvement of mankind. It may be that this or that national fault may produce or seem to produce some consequent calamity. But the balance of good or evil things which fall to a people's share will indicate with certainty their average conduct as a nation. The one will be the certain consequence of the other. If it be that the Americans of the northern States have done well in their time, that they have assisted in the progress of the world, and made things better for mankind rather than worse, then they will come out of this trouble without eventual injury. That which came in the guise of punishment for a special fault, will be a part of the reward resulting from good conduct in the general. And as to this matter of slavery, in which I think that they have blundered both politically and morally,—has it not been found impossible hitherto for them to cleanse their hands of that taint? But that which they could not do for themselves the course of events is doing for them. If secession establish herself, though it be only secession of the gulf States, the people of the United States will soon be free from slavery.
In judging of the success or want of success of any political institutions or of any form of government, we should be guided, I think, by the general results, and not by any abstract rules as to the right or wrong of those institutions or of that form. It might be easy for a German lawyer to show that our system of trial by jury is open to the gravest objections, and that it sins against common sense. But if that system gives us substantial justice, and protects us from the tyranny of men in office, the German lawyer will not succeed in making us believe that it is a bad system. When looking into the matter of the schools at Boston, I observed to one of the committee of management that the statements with which I was supplied, though they told me how many of the children went to school, did not tell me how long they remained at school. The gentleman replied that that information was to be obtained from the result of the schooling of the population generally. Every boy and girl around us could read and write, and could enjoy reading and writing. There was therefore evidence to show that they remained at school sufficiently long for the required purposes. It was fair that I should judge of the system from the results. Here in England, we generally object to much that the Americans have adopted into their form of government, and think that many of their political theories are wrong. We do not like universal suffrage. We do not like a periodical change in the first magistrate; and we like quite as little a periodical permanence in the political officers immediately under the chief magistrate. We are, in short, wedded to our own forms and therefore opposed by judgment to forms differing from our own. But I think we all acknowledge that the United States, burdened as they are with these political evils,—as we think them, have grown in strength and material prosperity with a celerity of growth hitherto unknown among nations. We may dislike Americans personally, we may find ourselves uncomfortable when there, and unable to sympathize with them when away; we may believe them to be ambitious, unjust, self-idolatrous, or irreligious. But, unless we throw our judgment altogether overboard, we cannot believe them to be a weak people, a poor people, a people with low spirits or a people with idle hands. To what is it that the government of a country should chiefly look? What special advantages do we expect from our own government? Is it not that we should be safe at home and respected abroad;—that laws should be maintained, but that they should be so maintained that they should not be oppressive? There are, doubtless, countries in which the government professes to do much more than this for its people,—countries in which the government is paternal; in which it regulates the religion of the people, and professes to enforce on all the national children respect for the governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters. But that is not our idea of a government. That is not what we desire to see established among ourselves or established among others. Safety from foreign foes, respect from foreign foes and friends, security under the law and security from the law,—this is what we expect from our government; and if I add to this that we expect to have these good things provided at a fairly moderate cost, I think I have exhausted the list of our requirements.
And if the Americans with their form of government have done for themselves all that we expect our government to do for us; if they have with some fair approach to general excellence obtained respect abroad and security at home from foreign foes; if they have made life, liberty, and property safe under their laws, and have also so written and executed their laws as to secure their people from legal oppression,—I maintain that they are entitled to a verdict in their favour, let us object as we may to universal suffrage, to four years' Presidents, and four years' presidential cabinets. What, after all, matters the theory or the system, whether it be King or President, universal suffrage or ten-pound voter, so long as the people be free and prosperous? King and President, suffrage by poll and suffrage by property, are but the means. If the end be there, if the thing has been done, King and President, open suffrage and close suffrage may alike be declared to have been successful. The Americans have been in existence as a nation for seventy-five years, and have achieved an amount of foreign respect during that period greater than any other nation ever obtained in double the time. And this has been given to them, not in deference to the statesman-like craft of their diplomatic and other officers, but on grounds the very opposite of those. It has been given to them because they form a numerous, wealthy, brave, and self-asserting nation. It is, I think, unnecessary to prove that such foreign respect has been given to them: but were it necessary, nothing would prove it more strongly than the regard which has been universally paid by European governments to the blockade placed during this war on the southern ports by the government of the United States. Had the United States been placed by general consent in any class of nations below the first, England, France, and perhaps Russia would have taken the matter into their own hands, and have settled for the States, either united or disunited, at any rate that question of the blockade. And the Americans have been safe at home from foreign foes; so safe, that no other strong people but ourselves have enjoyed anything approaching to their security since their foundation. Nor has our security been equal to theirs if we are to count our nationality as extending beyond the British Isles. Then as to security under their laws and from their laws! Those laws and the system of their management have been taken almost entirely from us, and have so been administered that life and property have been safe, and the subject also has been free from oppression. I think that this may be taken for granted, seeing that they who have been most opposed to American forms of government, have never asserted the reverse. I may be told of a man being lynched in one State, or tarred and feathered in another, or of a duel in a third being "fought at sight." So I may be told also of men garotted in London, and of tithe proctors buried in a bog without their ears in Ireland. Neither will seventy years of continuance nor will seven hundred secure such an observance of laws as will prevent temporary ebullition of popular feeling, or save a people from the chance disgrace of occasional outrage. Taking the general, life and limb and property have been as safe in the States as in other civilized countries with which we are acquainted.
As to their personal liberty under their laws, I know it will be said that they have surrendered all claim to any such precious possession by the facility with which they have now surrendered the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. It has been taken from them, as I have endeavoured to show, illegally, and they have submitted to the loss and to the illegality without a murmur! But in such a matter I do not think it fair to judge them by their conduct in such a moment as the present. That this is the very moment in which to judge of the efficiency of their institutions generally, of the aptitude of those institutions for the security of the nation, I readily acknowledge. But when a ship is at sea in a storm, riding out all that the winds and waves can do to her, one does not condemn her because a yard-arm gives way, nor even though the mainmast should go by the board. If she can make her port, saving life and cargo, she is a good ship, let her losses in spars and rigging be what they may. In this affair of the habeas corpus we will wait a while before we come to any final judgment. If it be that the people, when the war is over, shall consent to live under a military or other dictatorship,—that they shall quietly continue their course as a nation without recovery of their rights of freedom, then we shall have to say that their institutions were not founded in a soil of sufficient depth, and that they gave way before the first high wind that blew on them. I myself do not expect such a result.
I think we must admit that the Americans have received from their government, or rather from their system of policy, that aid and furtherance which they required from it; and, moreover, such aid and furtherance as we expect from our system of government. We must admit that they have been great, and free, and prosperous, as we also have become. And we must admit, also, that in some matters they have gone forward in advance of us. They have educated their people, as we have not educated ours. They have given to their millions a personal respect, and a standing above the abjectness of poverty, which with us are much less general than with them. These things, I grant, have not come of their government, and have not been produced by their written constitution. They are the happy results of their happy circumstances. But so, also, those evil attributes which we sometimes assign to them are not the creatures of their government, or of their constitution. We acknowledge them to be well educated, intelligent, philanthropic, and industrious; but we say that they are ambitious, unjust, self-idolatrous, and irreligious. If so, let us at any rate balance the virtues against the vices. As to their ambition, it is a vice that leans so to virtue's side, that it hardly needs an apology. As to their injustice, or rather dishonesty, I have said what I have to say on that matter. I am not going to flinch from the accusation I have brought, though I am aware that in bringing it I have thrown away any hope that I might have had of carrying with me the good will of the Americans for my book. The love of money,—or rather of making money,—carried to an extreme, has lessened that instinctive respect for the rights of meum and tuum which all men feel more or less, and which, when encouraged within the human breast, finds its result in perfect honesty. Other nations, of which I will not now stop to name even one, have had their periods of natural dishonesty. It may be that others are even now to be placed in the same category. But it is a fault which industry and intelligence combined will after a while serve to lessen and to banish. The industrious man desires to keep the fruit of his own industry, and the intelligent man will ultimately be able to do so. That the Americans are self-idolaters is perhaps true,—with a difference. An American desires you to worship his country, or his brother; but he does not often, by any of the usual signs of conceit, call upon you to worship himself. As an American, treating of America, he is self-idolatrous; but that is a self-idolatry which I can endure. Then, as to his want of religion—and it is a very sad want—I can only say of him, that I, as an Englishman, do not feel myself justified in flinging the first stone at him. In that matter of religion, as in the matter of education, the American, I think, stands on a level higher than ours. There is not in the States so absolute an ignorance of religion as is to be found in some of our manufacturing and mining districts, and also, alas! in some of our agricultural districts; but also, I think, there is less of respect and veneration for God's word among their educated classes, than there is with us; and, perhaps, also less knowledge as to God's word. The general religious level is, I think, higher with them; but there is with us, if I am right in my supposition, a higher eminence in religion, as there is also a deeper depth of ungodliness.
I think then that we are bound to acknowledge that the Americans have succeeded as a nation, politically and socially. When I speak of social success, I do not mean to say that their manners are correct according to this or that standard. I will not say that they are correct, or are not correct. In that matter of manners I have found that those, with whom it seemed to me natural that I should associate, were very pleasant according to my standard. I do not know that I am a good critic on such a subject, or that I have ever thought much of it with the view of criticising. I have been happy and comfortable with them, and for me that has been sufficient. In speaking of social success I allude to their success in private life as distinguished from that which they have achieved in public life;—to their successes in commerce, in mechanics, in the comforts and luxuries of life, in medicine and all that leads to the solace of affliction, in literature, and I may add also, considering the youth of the nation, in the arts. We are, I think, bound to acknowledge that they have succeeded. And if they have succeeded, it is vain for us to say that a system is wrong which has, at any rate, admitted of such success. That which was wanted from some form of government, has been obtained with much more than average excellence; and therefore the form adopted has approved itself as good. You may explain to a farmer's wife with indisputable logic, that her churn is a bad churn; but as long as she turns out butter in greater quantity, in better quality, and with more profit than her neighbours, you will hardly induce her to change it. It may be that with some other churn she might have done even better; but, under such circumstances, she will have a right to think well of the churn she uses.
The American constitution is now, I think, at the crisis of its severest trial. I conceive it to be by no means perfect, even for the wants of the people who use it; and I have already endeavoured to explain what changes it seems to need. And it has had this defect,—that it has permitted a falling away from its intended modes of action, while its letter has been kept sacred. As I have endeavoured to show, universal suffrage and democratic action in the Senate were not intended by the framers of the constitution. In this respect, the constitution has, as it were, fallen through, and it is needed that its very beams should be re-strengthened. There are also other matters as to which it seems that some change is indispensable. So much I have admitted. But, not the less, judging of it by the entirety of the work that it has done, I think that we are bound to own that it has been successful.
And now, with regard to this tedious war, of which from day to day we are still, in this month of May, 1862, hearing details which teach us to think that it can hardly as yet be near its end;—to what may we rationally look as its result? Of one thing I myself feel tolerably certain,—that its result will not be nothing, as some among us have seemed to suppose may be probable. I cannot believe that all this energy on the part of the North will be of no avail, more than I suppose that southern perseverance will be of no avail. There are those among us who say that as secession will at last be accomplished, the North should have yielded to the South at once, and that nothing will be gained by their great expenditure of life and treasure. I can by no means bring myself to agree with these. I also look to the establishment of secession. Seeing how essential and thorough are the points of variance between the North and the South, how unlike the one people is to the other, and how necessary it is that their policies should be different; seeing how deep are their antipathies, and how fixed is each side in the belief of its own rectitude and in the belief also of the other's political baseness, I cannot believe that the really southern States will ever again be joined in amicable union with those of the North. They, the States of the Gulf, may be utterly subjugated, and the North may hold over them military power. Georgia and her sisters may for a while belong to the Union, as one conquered country belongs to another. But I do not think that they will ever act with the Union;—and, as I imagine, the Union before long will agree to a separation. I do not mean to prophesy that the result will be thus accomplished. It may be that the South will effect their own independence before they lay down their arms. I think, however, that we may look forward to such independence, whether it be achieved in that way, or in this, or in some other.
But not on that account will the war have been of no avail to the North. I think it must be already evident to all those who have looked into the matter that had the North yielded to the first call made by the South for secession all the slave States must have gone. Maryland would have gone, carrying Delaware in its arms; and if Maryland, all south of Maryland. If Maryland had gone, the capital would have gone. If the Government had resolved to yield, Virginia to the east would assuredly have gone, and I think there can be no doubt that Missouri, to the west, would have gone also. The feeling for the Union in Kentucky was very strong, but I do not think that even Kentucky could have saved itself. To have yielded to the southern demands would have been to have yielded everything. But no man now believes, let the contest go as it will, that Maryland and Delaware will go with the South. The secessionists of Baltimore do not think so, nor the gentlemen and ladies of Washington, whose whole hearts are in the southern cause. No man thinks that Maryland will go; and few, I believe, imagine that either Missouri or Kentucky will be divided from the North. I will not pretend what may be the exact line, but I myself feel confident that it will run south both of Virginia and of Kentucky.
If the North do conquer the South, and so arrange their matters that the southern States shall again become members of the Union, it will be admitted that they have done all that they sought to do. If they do not do this;—if instead of doing this, which would be all that they desire, they were in truth to do nothing;—to win finally not one foot of ground from the South,—a supposition which I regard as impossible;—I think that we should still admit after a while that they had done their duty in endeavouring to maintain the integrity of the empire. But if, as a third and more probable alternative, they succeed in rescuing from the South and from slavery four or five of the finest States of the old Union,—a vast portion of the continent, to be beaten by none other in salubrity, fertility, beauty, and political importance,—will it not then be admitted that the war has done some good, and that the life and treasure have not been spent in vain?
That is the termination of the contest to which I look forward. I think that there will be secession, but that the terms of secession will be dictated by the North, not by the South; and among these terms I expect to see an escape from slavery for those border States to which I have alluded. In that proposition which, in February last (1862), was made by the President, and which has since been sanctioned by the Senate, I think we may see the first step towards this measure. It may probably be the case that many of the slaves will be driven south; that as the owners of those slaves are driven from their holdings in Virginia they will take their slaves with them, or send them before them. The manumission, when it reaches Virginia, will not probably enfranchise the half million of slaves who, in 1860, were counted among its population. But as to that I confess myself to be comparatively careless. It is not the concern which I have now at heart. For myself, I shall feel satisfied if that manumission shall reach the million of whites by whom Virginia is populated; or if not that million in its integrity then that other million by which its rich soil would soon be tenanted. There are now about four millions of white men and women inhabiting the slave States which I have described, and I think it will be acknowledged that the northern States will have done something with their armies if they succeed in rescuing those four millions from the stain and evil of slavery.
There is a third question which I have asked myself, and to which I have undertaken to give some answer. When this war be over between the northern and southern States will there come upon us Englishmen a necessity of fighting with the Americans? If there do come such necessity, arising out of our conduct to the States during the period of their civil war, it will indeed be hard upon us, as a nation, seeing the struggle that we have made to be just in our dealings towards the States generally, whether they be North or South. To be just in such a period, and under such circumstances, is very difficult. In that contest between Sardinia and Austria it was all but impossible to be just to the Italians without being unjust to the Emperor of Austria. To have been strictly just at the moment one should have begun by confessing the injustice of so much that had gone before! But in this American contest such justice, though difficult, was easier. Affairs of trade rather than of treaties chiefly interfered; and these affairs, by a total disregard of our own pecuniary interests, could be so managed that justice might be done. This I think was effected. It may be, of course, that I am prejudiced on the side of my own nation; but striving to judge of the matter as best I may without prejudice, I cannot see that we, as a nation, have in aught offended against the strictest justice in our dealings with America during this contest. But justice has not sufficed. I do not know that our bitterest foes in the northern States have accused us of acting unjustly. It is not justice which they have looked for at our hands, and looked for in vain;—not justice, but generosity! We have not, as they say, sympathized with them in their trouble! It seems to me that such a complaint is unworthy of them as a nation, as a people, or as individuals. In such a matter generosity is another name for injustice,—as it too often is in all matters. A generous sympathy with the North would have been an ostensible and crashing enmity to the South. We could not have sympathized with the North without condemning the South, and telling to the world that the South were our enemies. In ordering his own household a man should not want generosity or sympathy from the outside; and if not a man, then certainly not a nation. Generosity between nations must in its very nature be wrong. One nation may be just to another, courteous to another, even considerate to another with propriety. But no nation can be generous to another without injustice either to some third nation, or to itself.
But though no accusation of unfairness has, as far as I am aware, ever been made by the government of Washington against the government of London, there can be no doubt that a very strong feeling of antipathy to England has sprung up in America during this war, and that it is even yet so intense in its bitterness, that were the North to become speedily victorious in their present contest very many Americans would be anxious to turn their arms at once against Canada. And I fear that that fight between the Monitor and the Merrimac has strengthened this wish by giving to the Americans an unwarranted confidence in their capability of defending themselves against any injury from British shipping. It may be said by them, and probably would be said by many of them, that this feeling of enmity had not been engendered by any idea of national injustice on our side;—that it might reasonably exist, though no suspicion of such injustice had arisen in the minds of any. They would argue that the hatred on their part had been engendered by scorn on ours,—by scorn and ill words heaped upon them in their distress.
They would say that slander, scorn, and uncharitable judgments create deeper feuds than do robbery and violence, and produce deeper enmity and worse rancour. "It is because we have been scorned by England, that we hate England. We have been told from week to week, and from day to day, that we were fools, cowards, knaves, and madmen. We have been treated with disrespect, and that disrespect we will avenge." It is thus that they speak of England, and there can be no doubt that the opinion so expressed is very general. It is not my purpose here to say whether in this respect England has given cause of offence to the States, or whether either country has given cause of offence to the other. On both sides have many hard words been spoken, and on both sides also have good words been spoken. It is unfortunately the case that hard words are pregnant, and as such they are read, digested, and remembered; while good words are generally so dull that nobody reads them willingly, and when read they are forgotten. For many years there have been hard words bandied backwards and forwards between England and the United States, showing mutual jealousies and a disposition on the part of each nation to spare no fault committed by the other. This has grown of rivalry between the two, and in fact proves the respect which each has for the other's power and wealth. I will not now pretend to say with which side has been the chiefest blame, if there has been chiefest blame on either side. But I do say that it is monstrous in any people or in any person to suppose that such bickerings can afford a proper ground for war. I am not about to dilate on the horrors of war. Horrid as war may be, and full of evil, it is not so horrid to a nation, nor so full of evil, as national insult unavenged, or as national injury unredressed. A blow taken by a nation and taken without atonement is an acknowledgment of national inferiority than which any war is preferable. Neither England nor the States are inclined to take such blows. But such a blow, before it can be regarded as a national insult, as a wrong done by one nation on another, must be inflicted by the political entity of the one on the political entity of the other. No angry clamours of the press, no declamations of orators, no voices from the people, no studied criticisms from the learned few or unstudied censures from society at large, can have any fair weight on such a question or do aught towards justifying a national quarrel. They cannot form a casus belli. Those two Latin words, which we all understand, explain this with the utmost accuracy. Were it not so, the peace of the world would indeed rest upon sand. Causes of national difference will arise,—for governments will be unjust as are individuals. And causes of difference will arise because governments are too blind to distinguish the just from the unjust. But in such cases the government acts on some ground which it declares. It either shows or pretends to show some casus belli. But in this matter of threatened war between the States and England it is declared openly that such war is to take place because the English have abused the Americans, and because, consequently, the Americans hate the English. There seems to exist an impression that no other ostensible ground for fighting need be shown, although such an event as that of war between the two nations would, as all men acknowledge, be terrible in its results. "Your newspapers insulted us when we were in our difficulties. Your writers said evil things of us. Your legislators spoke of us with scorn. You exacted from us a disagreeable duty of retribution just when the performance of such a duty was most odious to us. You have shown symptoms of joy at our sorrow. And, therefore, as soon as our hands are at liberty, we will fight you." I have known schoolboys to argue in that way, and the arguments have been intelligible. But I cannot understand that any government should admit such an argument.
Nor will the American government willingly admit it. According to existing theories of government the armies of nations are but the tools of the governing powers. If at the close of the present civil war the American government,—the old civil government consisting of the President with such checks as Congress constitutionally has over him,—shall really hold the power to which it pretends, I do not fear that there will be any war. No President, and I think no Congress, will desire such a war. Nor will the people clamour for it, even should the idea of such a war be popular. The people of America are not clamorous against their government. If there be such a war it will be because the army shall have then become more powerful than the Government. If the President can hold his own the people will support him in his desire for peace. But if the President do not hold his own;—if some General with two or three hundred thousand men at his back shall then have the upper hand in the nation,—it is too probable that the people may back him. The old game will be played again that has so often been played in the history of nations, and some wretched military aspirant will go forth to flood Canada with blood, in order that the feathers of his cap may flaunt in men's eyes and that he may be talked of for some years to come as one of the great curses let loose by the Almighty on mankind.
I must confess that there is danger of this. To us the danger is very great. It cannot be good for us to send ships laden outside with iron shields instead of inside with soft goods and hardware to those thickly thronged American ports. It cannot be good for us to have to throw millions into those harbours instead of taking millions out from them. It cannot be good for us to export thousands upon thousands of soldiers to Canada of whom only hundreds would return. The whole turmoil, cost, and paraphernalia of such a course would be injurious to us in the extreme, and the loss of our commerce would be nearly ruinous. But the injury of such a war to us would be as nothing to the injury which it would inflict upon the States. To them for many years it would be absolutely ruinous. It would entail not only all those losses which such a war must bring with it; but that greater loss which would arise to the nation from the fact of its having been powerless to prevent it. Such a war would prove that it had lost the freedom for which it had struggled, and which for so many years it has enjoyed. For the sake of that people as well as for our own,—and for their sakes rather than for our own,—let us, as far as may be, abstain from words which are needlessly injurious. They have done much that is great and noble, even since this war has begun, and we have been slow to acknowledge it. They have made sacrifices for the sake of their country which we have ridiculed. They have struggled to maintain a good cause, and we have disbelieved in their earnestness. They have been anxious to abide by their constitution, which to them has been as it were a second gospel, and we have spoken of that constitution as though it had been a thing of mere words in which life had never existed. This has been done while their hands were very full and their back heavily laden. Such words coming from us, or from parties among us, cannot justify those threats of war which we hear spoken; but that they should make the hearts of men sore and their thoughts bitter against us can hardly be matter of surprise.
As to the result of any such war between us and them, it would depend mainly, I think, on the feelings of the Canadians. Neither could they annex Canada without the good-will of the Canadians, nor could we keep Canada without that good-will. At present the feeling in Canada against the northern States is so strong and so universal that England has little to fear on that head.
I have now done my task, and may take leave of my readers on either side of the water with a hearty hope that the existing war between the North and South may soon be over, and that none other may follow on its heels to exercise that new-fledged military skill which the existing quarrel will have produced on the other side of the Atlantic. I have written my book in obscure language if I have not shown that to me social successes and commercial prosperity are much dearer than any greatness that can be won by arms. The Americans had fondly thought that they were to be exempt from the curse of war,—at any rate from the bitterness of the curse. But the days for such exemption have not come as yet. While we are hurrying on to make twelve-inch shield-plates for our men-of-war, we can hardly dare to think of the days when the sword shall be turned into the ploughshare. May it not be thought well for us if, with such work on our hands, any scraps of iron shall be left to us with which to pursue the purposes of peace? But at least let us not have war with these children of our own. If we must fight, let us fight the French, "for King George upon the throne." The doing so will be disagreeable, but it will not be antipathetic to the nature of an Englishman. For my part, when an American tells me that he wants to fight with me, I regard his offence as compared with that of a Frenchman under the same circumstances, as I would compare the offence of a parricide or a fratricide with that of a mere common-place murderer. Such a war would be plus quam civile bellum. Which of us two could take a thrashing from the other and afterwards go about our business with contentment?
On our return to Liverpool, we stayed for a few hours at Queenstown, taking in coal, and the passengers landed that they might stretch their legs and look about them. I also went ashore at the dear old place which I had known well in other days, when the people were not too grand to call it Cove, and were contented to run down from Cork in river steamers, before the Passage railway was built. I spent a pleasant summer there once in those times;—God be with the good old days! And now I went ashore at Queenstown, happy to feel that I should be again in a British isle, and happy also to know that I was once more in Ireland. And when the people came around me as they did, I seemed to know every face and to be familiar with every voice. It has been my fate to have so close an intimacy with Ireland, that when I meet an Irishman abroad, I always recognize in him more of a kinsman than I do in an Englishman. I never ask an Englishman from what county he comes, or what was his town. To Irishmen I usually put such questions, and I am generally familiar with the old haunts which they name. I was happy therefore to feel myself again in Ireland, and to walk round from Queenstown to the river at Passage by the old way that had once been familiar to my feet.
Or rather I should have been happy if I had not found myself instantly disgraced by the importunities of my friends! A legion of women surrounded me, imploring alms, begging my honour to bestow my charity on them for the love of the Virgin, using the most holy names in their adjurations for halfpence, clinging to me with that half joking, half lachrymose air of importunity which an Irish beggar has assumed as peculiarly her own. There were men too, who begged as well as women. And the women were sturdy and fat, and, not knowing me as well as I knew them, seemed resolved that their importunities should be successful. After all, I had an old world liking for them in their rags. They were endeared to me by certain memories and associations which I cannot define. But then what would those Americans think of them;—of them and of the country which produced them? That was the reflection which troubled me. A legion of women in rags clamorous for bread, protesting to heaven that they are starving, importunate with voices and with hands, surrounding the stranger when he puts his foot on the soil so that he cannot escape, does not afford to the cynical American who then first visits us,—and they all are cynical when they visit us,—a bad opportunity for his sarcasm. He can at any rate boast that he sees nothing of that at home. I myself am fond of Irish beggars. It is an acquired taste,—which comes upon one as does that for smoked whisky, or Limerick tobacco. But I certainly did wish that there were not so many of them at Queenstown.
I tell all this here not to the disgrace of Ireland;—not for the triumph of America. The Irishman or American who thinks rightly on the subject will know that the state of each country has arisen from its opportunities. Beggary does not prevail in new countries, and but few old countries have managed to exist without it. As to Ireland we may rejoice to say that there is less of it now than there was twenty years since. Things are mending there. But though such excuses may be truly made,—although an Englishman when he sees this squalor and poverty on the quays at Queenstown, consoles himself with reflecting that the evil has been unavoidable, but will perhaps soon be avoided,—nevertheless he cannot but remember that there is no such squalor and no such poverty in the land from which he has returned. I claim no credit for the new country. I impute no blame to the old country. But there is the fact. The Irishman when he expatriates himself to one of those American States loses much of that affectionate, confiding, master-worshipping nature which makes him so good a fellow when at home. But he becomes more of a man. He assumes a dignity which he never has known before. He learns to regard his labour as his own property. That which he earns he takes without thanks, but he desires to take no more than he earns. To me personally he has perhaps become less pleasant than he was. But to himself—! It seems to me that such a man must feel himself half a god, if he has the power of comparing what he is with what he was.
It is right that all this should be acknowledged by us. When we speak of America and of her institutions we should remember that she has given to our increasing population rights and privileges which we could not give;—which as an old country we probably can never give. That self-asserting, obtrusive independence which so often wounds us, is, if viewed aright, but an outward sign of those good things which a new country has produced for its people. Men and women do not beg in the States;—they do not offend you with tattered rags; they do not complain to heaven of starvation; they do not crouch to the ground for halfpence. If poor, they are not abject in their poverty. They read and write. They walk like human beings made in God's form. They know that they are men and women, owing it to themselves and to the world that they should earn their bread by their labour, but feeling that when earned it is their own. If this be so,—if it be acknowledged that it is so,—should not such knowledge in itself be sufficient testimony of the success of the country and of her institutions?
APPENDIX A.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments, long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature—a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the repository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose, obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration thither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in time of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.
He has combined, with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States.
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.
For imposing taxes on us without our consent
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury.
For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences.
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies.
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments.
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injuries. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of the attempts by their legislature, to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.
The foregoing declaration was, by order of Congress, engrossed, and signed by the following members:
JOHN HANCOCK.
|
|
| 4 July, 1776. |
APPENDIX B.
ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION, ETC.
TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME.
We, the undersigned, delegates of the States, affixed to our names, send greeting:
Whereas, the delegates of the United States of America, in Congress assembled did, on the fifteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven, and in the second year of the independence of America, agree to certain articles of confederation and perpetual union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, in the words following, viz:
Articles of confederation and perpetual union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Article 1. The style of this confederacy shall be, "The United States of America."
Art. 2. Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.
Art. 3. The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare; binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretext whatever.
Art. 4. The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions, as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided, also, that no imposition, duties, or restriction, shall be laid by any State on the property of the United States, or either of them.
If any person guilty of or charged with treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor, in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any of the United States, he shall upon demand of the Governor, or executive power of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, and removed to the State having jurisdiction of his offence.
Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other State.
Art. 5. For the more convenient management of the general interests of the United States, delegates shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislature of each State shall direct, to meet in Congress on the first Monday in November, in every year, with a power reserved to each State to recall its delegates or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their stead for the remainder of the year.
No State shall be represented in Congress by less than two nor more than seven members; and no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years; nor shall any person, being a delegate, be capable of holding an office under the United States, for which he, or another for his benefit, receives any salary, fees, or emolument of any kind.
Each State shall maintain its own delegates in a meeting of the States, and while they act as members of the committee of the States.
In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote.
Freedom of speech and debate in Congress shall not be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Congress; and the members of Congress shall be protected in their persons from arrests and imprisonments, during the time of their going to and from and attendance on Congress, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.
Art. 6. No State, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send an embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance, or treaty, with any king, prince, or State; nor shall any person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States or any of them, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign State; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility.
No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation, or alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purpose for which the same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue.
No State shall lay any imposts or duties, which may interfere with any stipulations in treaties entered into by the United States in Congress assembled, with any king, prince, or State, in pursuance of any treaties already proposed by Congress to the courts of France and Spain.
No vessels of war shall be kept up in time of peace, by any State, except such number as shall be deemed necessary by the United States in Congress assembled, for the defence of such State or its trade; nor shall any body of forces be kept up by any State in time of peace, except such number only as, in the judgment of the United States in Congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the defence of such State; but every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutred, and shall provide and have constantly ready for use, in public stores, a number of field pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition, and camp equipage.
No State shall engage in any war without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be actually invaded by enemies, or shall, have received certain advice of a resolution being formed by some nation of Indians to invade such State, and the danger is so imminent as not to admit of a delay till the United States in Congress assembled can be consulted; nor shall any State grant commissions to any ships or vessels of war, or letters of marque or reprisal, except it be after a declaration of war by the United States in Congress assembled, and then only against the Kingdom or State, and the subjects thereof, against which war has been so declared, and under such regulations as shall be established by the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be infested by pirates, in which case vessels of war may be fitted out for that occasion, and kept so long as the danger shall continue, or until the United States in Congress assembled shall determine otherwise.
Art. 7. When land forces are raised by any State for the common defence, all officers of or under the rank of colonel, shall be appointed by the legislature of each State respectively, by whom such forces shall be raised, or in such manner as such State shall direct; and all vacancies shall be filled up by the State which first made the appointment.
Art. 8. All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defence or general welfare, and allowed by the United States in Congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several States in proportion to the value of all land within each State granted to or surveyed for any person, as such land and the buildings and improvements thereon shall be estimated, according to such mode as the United States in Congress assembled shall from time to time direct and appoint.
The taxes for paying that proportion shall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the several States, within the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled.
Art. 9. The United States in Congress assembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war, except in the cases mentioned in the sixth Article: of sending and receiving ambassadors: entering into treaties and alliances; provided that no treaty of commerce shall be made whereby the legislative power of the respective States shall be restrained from imposing such imposts and duties on foreigners as their own people are subjected to, or from prohibiting the exportation or importation of any species of goods or commodities whatsoever: of establishing rules for deciding in all cases, what captures on land or water shall be legal, and in what manner prizes taken by land or naval forces in the service of the United States shall be divided or appropriated: of granting letters of marque and reprisal, in times of peace: appointing courts for the trial of piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and establishing courts for receiving and determining finally appeals in all cases of captures; provided, that no member of Congress shall be appointed a judge of any of the said courts.
The United States in Congress assembled shall also be the last resort on appeal in all disputes and differences now subsisting, or that hereafter may arise between two or more States concerning boundary, jurisdiction, or any other cause whatever; which authority shall always be exercised in the manner following: whenever the legislative or executive authority or lawful agent of any State in controversy with another shall present a petition to Congress, stating the matter in question, and praying for a hearing, notice thereof shall be given by order of Congress to the legislative or executive authority of the other State in controversy, and a day assigned for the appearance of the parties, by their lawful agents, who shall then be directed to appoint by joint consent commissioners or judges to constitute a court for hearing and determining the matter in question; but if they cannot agree, Congress shall name three persons out of each of the United States, and from the list of such persons each party shall alternately strike out one, the petitioners beginning, until the number shall be reduced to thirteen; and from that number not less than seven nor more than nine names, as Congress shall direct, shall, in the presence of Congress, be drawn out by lot; and the persons whose names shall be so drawn, or any five of them, shall be commissioners or judges, to hear and finally determine the controversy, so always as a major part of the judges, who shall hear the cause, shall agree in the determination; and if either party shall neglect to attend at the day appointed, without showing reasons which Congress shall judge sufficient, or being present shall refuse to strike, the Congress shall proceed to nominate three persons out of each State, and the Secretary of Congress shall strike in behalf of such party absent or refusing; and the judgment and sentence of the court to be appointed in the manner before prescribed, shall be final and conclusive; and if any of the parties shall refuse to submit to the authority of such court, or to appear, or defend their claim or cause, the court shall nevertheless proceed to pronounce sentence or judgment, which shall in like manner be final and decisive, the judgment or sentence, and other proceedings, being in either case transmitted to Congress, and lodged among the acts of Congress for the security of the parties concerned: provided, that every commissioner, before he sits in judgment, shall take an oath, to be administered by one of the judges of the supreme or superior court of the State, where the cause shall be tried, "well and truly to hear and determine the matter in question, according to the best of his judgment, without favour, affection, or hope of reward;" provided also, that no State shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States.
All controversies concerning the private right of soil, claimed under different grants of two or more States, whose jurisdiction as they may respect such lands and the States which passed such grants are adjusted, the said grants or either of them being at the same time claimed to have originated antecedent to such settlement of jurisdiction, shall, on the petition of either party to the Congress of the United States, be finally determined, as near as may be, in the same manner as is before prescribed for deciding disputes respecting territorial jurisdiction between different States.
The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective States; fixing the standard of weights and measures throughout the United States: regulating the trade and managing all affairs with Indians not members of any of the States; provided, that the legislative right of any State within its own limits be not infringed or violated: establishing and regulating post-offices from one State to another, throughout all the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of the said office: appointing all officers of the land forces in the service of the United States, excepting regimental officers: appointing all the officers of the naval forces, and commissioning all officers whatever in the service of the United States: making rules for the government and regulation of the said land and naval forces, and directing their operations.
The United States in Congress assembled shall have authority to appoint a committee to sit in the recess of Congress, to be denominated "a Committee of the States;" and to consist of one delegate from each State, and to appoint such other committees and civil officers as may be necessary for managing the general affairs of the United States, under their direction: to appoint one of their number to preside, provided that no person be allowed to serve in the office of President more than one year in any term of three years: to ascertain the necessary sums of money to be raised for the service of the United States, and to appropriate and apply the same for defraying the public expenses: to borrow money or emit bills on the credit of the United States, transmitting every half year to the respective States an account of the sums of money so borrowed or emitted: to build and equip a navy: to agree upon the number of land forces, and to make requisitions from each State for its quota, in proportion to the number of white inhabitants in each State; which requisition shall be binding, and thereupon the legislature of each State shall appoint the regimental officers, raise the men, and clothe, arm, and equip them in a soldier-like manner, at the expense of the United States; and the officers and men so clothed, armed, and equipped, shall march to the place appointed, and within the time agreed on by the United States in Congress assembled: but if the United States in Congress assembled, shall, on consideration of circumstances, judge proper that any State should not raise men, or should raise a smaller number than its quota, and that any other State should raise a greater number of men than the quota thereof, such extra number shall be raised, officered, clothed, armed, and equipped, in the same manner as the quota of such State, unless the legislature of such State shall judge that such extra number cannot safely be spared out of the same; in which case they shall raise, officer, clothe, arm, and equip, as many of such extra number as they judge can safely be spared. And the officers and men so clothed, armed, and equipped, shall march to the place appointed, and within the time agreed on by the United States in Congress assembled.
The United States in Congress assembled shall never engage in a war, nor grant letters of marque and reprisal in time of peace, nor enter into any treaties or alliances, nor coin money, nor regulate the value thereof, nor ascertain the sums and expenses necessary for the defence and welfare of the United States or any of them, nor emit bills, nor borrow money on the credit of the United States, nor appropriate money, nor agree upon the number of vessels of war to be built or purchased, or the number of land or sea forces to be raised, nor appoint a commander in chief of the army or navy, unless nine States assent to the same; nor shall a question on any other point, except for adjourning from day to day, be determined, unless by the votes of a majority of the United States in Congress assembled.
The Congress of the United States shall have power to adjourn to any time within the year, and to any place within the United States, so that no period of adjournment be for a longer duration than the space of six months; and shall publish the journal of their proceedings monthly, except such parts thereof relating to treaties, alliances, or military operations, as in their judgment require secresy; and the yeas and nays of the delegates of each State on any question shall be entered on the journal when it is desired by any delegate; and the delegates of a State, or any of them, at his or their request, shall be furnished with a transcript of the said journal, except such parts as are above excepted, to lay before the legislatures of the several States.
Art. 10. The Committee of the States, or any nine of them, shall be authorized to execute in the recess of Congress, such of the powers of Congress as the United States in Congress assembled, by the consent of nine States, shall, from time to time, think expedient to vest them with; provided that no power be delegated to the said committee, for the exercise of which, by the articles of confederation, the voice of nine States in the Congress of the United States assembled is requisite.
Art. 11. Canada, acceding to this confederation, and joining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to, all the advantages of this union: but no other colony shall be admitted into the same unless such admission be agreed to by nine States.
Art. 12. All bills of credit emitted, moneys borrowed, debts contracted, by or under the authority of Congress, before the assembling of the United States, in pursuance of the present confederation, shall be deemed and considered as a charge against the United States, for payment and satisfaction whereof the said United States and the public faith are hereby solemnly pledged.
Art. 13. Every State shall abide by the determination of the United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which, by this confederation, are submitted to them. And the Articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislature of every State.
And whereas it has pleased the Great Governor of the world to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in Congress, to approve of and to authorize us to ratify the said Articles of confederation and perpetual union: Know ye, That we, the undersigned delegates, by virtue of the power and authority to us given for that purpose, do, by these presents, in the name and in behalf of our respective constituents, fully and entirely ratify and confirm each and every of the said Articles of confederation and perpetual union, and all and singular the matters and things therein contained; and we do further solemnly plight and engage the faith of our respective constituents, that they shall abide by the determinations of the United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which, by the said confederation, are submitted to them; and that the Articles thereof shall be inviolably observed by the States we respectively represent; and that the union shall be perpetual.
In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands, in Congress. Done at Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania, the ninth day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight, and in the third year of the independence of America.
Note.—From the circumstance of delegates from the same State having signed the Articles of confederation at different times, as appears by the dates, it is probable they affixed their names as they happened to be present in Congress, after they had been authorized by their constituents.
The above Articles of confederation continued in force until the 4th day of March, 1789, when the constitution of the United States took effect.
APPENDIX C.
CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.
PREAMBLE.
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
ARTICLE I.
Of the Legislature.
SECTION I.
1. All legislative powers herein granted, shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
SECTION II.
1. The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States; and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature.
2. No person shall be a representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty-five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
3. Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to choose three; Massachusetts, eight; Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, one; Connecticut, five; New York, six; New Jersey, four; Pennsylvania, eight; Delaware, one; Maryland, six; Virginia, ten; North Carolina, five; South Carolina, five; and Georgia, three.
4. When vacancies happen in the representation from any State, the executive authority thereof shall issue writs of election to fill up such vacancies.
5. The House of Representatives shall choose their speaker and other officers, and shall have the sole power of impeachment.
SECTION III.
1. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two senators from each State, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years, and each senator shall have one vote.
2. Immediately after they shall be assembled in consequence of the first election, they shall be divided, as equally as may be, into three classes. The seats of the senators of the first class shall be vacated at the expiration of the second year, of the second class at the expiration of the fourth, and of the third class at the expiration of the sixth year, so that one-third may be chosen every second year; and if vacancies happen, by resignation or otherwise, during the recess of the legislature of any State, the executive thereof may make temporary appointments until the next meeting of the legislature, which shall then fill such vacancies.
3. No person shall be a senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.
4. The Vice-President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.
5. The Senate shall choose their other officers, and also a president pro tempore, in the absence of the Vice-President, or when he shall exercise the office of President of the United States.
6. The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the chief justice shall preside; and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.
7. Judgment in case of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honour, trust, or profit, under the United States; but the party convicted shall, nevertheless, be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law.
SECTION IV.
1. The times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations, except as to the place of choosing senators.
2. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
SECTION V.
1. Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members; and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner and under such penalties as each House may provide.
2. Each House may determine the rule of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behaviour, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.
3. Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House, on any question, shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.
4. Neither House during the Session of Congress shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.
SECTION VI.
1. The senators and representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except treason, felony, and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to or returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.
2. No senator or representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased, during such time; and no person holding any office under the United States shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.
SECTION VII.
1. All Bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments, as on other Bills.
2. Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States; if he approve, he shall sign it; but if not, he shall return it, with his objections, to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the objection at large on their journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If, after such reconsideration, two-thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two-thirds of that House, it shall become a law. But in all such cases the votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law.
3. Every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary, (except a question of adjournment), shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the same shall take effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two-thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the case of a Bill.
SECTION VIII.
The Congress shall have power—
1. To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States:
2. To borrow money on the credit of the United States:
3. To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes:
4. To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies, throughout the United States:
5. To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures:
6. To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States:
7. To establish post offices and post roads:
8. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries:
9. To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court:
10. To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations:
11. To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water:
12. To raise and support armies; but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years:
13. To provide and maintain a navy:
14. To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces:
15. To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions:
16. To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively the appointment of the officers and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress:
17. To exercise exclusive legislation, in all cases whatsoever, over such district (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular States and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased, by the consent of the legislature of the State in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings: and,
18. To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or any department or officer thereof.
SECTION IX.
1. The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.
2. The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when, in case of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.
3. No Bill of attainder, or ex-post-facto law, shall be passed.
4. No capitation or other direct tax shall be laid; unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken.
5. No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State. No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one State over those of another; nor shall vessels bound to or from one State be obliged to enter, clear, or pay duties in another.
6. No money shall be drawn from the treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.
7. No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States, and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign State.
SECTION X.
1. No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any Bill of attainder, ex-post-facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts; or grant any title of nobility.
2. No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws; and the net produce of all duties and imposts laid by any State on imports or exports shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States, and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of Congress. No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty on tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another State, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.
ARTICLE II.
Of the Executive.
SECTION I.
1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice-President, chosen for the same term, be elected as follows:—
2. Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress; but no senator or representative, or person holding any office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.
3. The electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such a majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then, from the five highest on the list, the said House shall in like manner choose the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States; the representation from each State having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be Vice-President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice-President.
4. The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors and the day on which they shall give their votes, which day shall be the same throughout the United States.
5. No person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.
6. In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President; and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability, both of the President and Vice-President, declaring what officer shall then act as President: and such officer shall act accordingly, until the disability be removed or a President shall be elected.
7. The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.
8. Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
SECTION II.
1. The President shall be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion in writing of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices; and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
2. He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur: and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law. But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
3. The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions, which shall expire at the end of their next session.
SECTION III.
1. He shall, from time to time, give to Congress information of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them; and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed; and shall commission all the officers of the United States.
SECTION IV.
1. The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
ARTICLE III.
Of the Judiciary.
SECTION I.
1. The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as Congress may, from time to time, order and establish. The judges, both of the Supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour; and shall, at stated times, receive for their services a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.
SECTION II.
1. The judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority; to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls; to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; to controversies to which the United States shall be a party; to controversies between two or more states; between a State and citizens of another State; between citizens of different States; between citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants of different States; and between a State, or the citizens thereof and foreign States, citizens or subjects.
2. In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls, and those in which a State shall be a party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as Congress shall make.
3. The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury, and such trial shall be held in the State where the said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the trial shall be at such place or places as Congress may by law have directed.
SECTION III.
1. Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason, unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or confession in open court.
2. Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason; but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of the person attainted.
ARTICLE IV.
Miscellaneous.
SECTION I.
1. Full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other State. And Congress may, by general laws, prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.
SECTION II.
1. The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.
2. A person charged in any State with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice and be found in another State, shall, on demand of the executive authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the crime.
3. No person held to service or labour in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.
SECTION III.
1. New States may be admitted by Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State, nor any State be formed by the junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the legislatures of the States concerned, as well as of Congress.
2. Congress shall have power to dispose of, and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory, or other property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States or of any particular State.
SECTION IV.
1. The United States shall guarantee to every State in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and, on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.
ARTICLE V.
Of Amendments.
1. Congress, whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution; or, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, or by conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by Congress; provided, that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first Article; and that no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
ARTICLE VI.
Miscellaneous.
1. All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the confederation.
2. This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
3. The senators and representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several State legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States, and of the several States, shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, under the United States.
ARTICLE VII.
Of the Ratification.
1. The ratification of the conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.
Done in Convention, by the unanimous consent of the States present, the seventeenth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the twelfth. In witness whereof, we have hereunto subscribed our names.
GEORGE WASHINGTON,
President, and Deputy from Virginia.
|
|
| Attest.,WILLIAM JACKSON, Secretary. |
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION.
Art. 1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Art. 2. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Art. 3. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner; nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Art. 4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Art. 5. No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia when in actual service in time of war, or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence, to be put twice in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled, in any criminal case, to be witness against himself; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Art. 6. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favour; and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence.
Art. 7. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved; and no fact tried by jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States than according to the rules of the common law.
Art. 8. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Art. 9. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Art. 10. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Art. 11. The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another State, or by citizens or subjects of another State, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign State.
Art. 12. § 1. The electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same State as themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for with Vice-President; and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate: the President of the Senate shall in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted; the person having the greatest number of votes for President shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have such a majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers, not exceeding three, on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately by ballot the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.
2. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President: a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.
3. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
Note.—At the fourth presidential election, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were the democratic candidates for President and Vice-President. By the electoral returns they had an even number of votes. In the House of Representatives, Burr, by intrigue, got up a party to vote for him for President; and the House was so divided that there was a tie. A contest was carried on for several days, and so warmly, that even sick members were brought to the House on their beds. Finally one of Burr's adherents withdrew, and Jefferson was elected by one majority—which was the occasion of this twelfth article.
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
/1/8/6/1866
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed.
1.F.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org
