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YALE LECTURES ON THE 
 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP 
 
 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN 
 GOVERNMENT 
 
YALE LECTURES ON THE 
 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP 
 
 The Hindhances to Good Citizenship 
 By the Right Hon. James Brtce 
 (Third printing.) 138 pages, index, 12mo, $1.15 net 
 postage 10 cents. 
 
 Conditions of Pkogbess in Democbatic 
 Government 
 By Hon. Charles Evans Hughes 
 123 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. 
 
 American Citizenship 
 
 By the late David J. Bbeweb, Associate Justice of 
 the Supreme Court 
 131 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. 
 
 The Citizen in his Relation to the Indus- 
 trial Situation 
 By the late Right Rev. Henkt C. Potter, D.D., 
 LL.D. 
 248 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 20 cents. 
 
 Freedom and Responsibility 
 
 By Arthur Twining Hadley, LL.D., President of 
 Yale University 
 175 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. 
 
 America in the Making 
 
 By Rev. Dr. Ltman Abbott, D.D., LL.D. 
 234 pages, 12ino, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. 
 
 Four Aspects of Civic Duty 
 By Hon. William H. Taft 
 111 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. 
 
THE CITIZEN'S PART IN 
 GOVERNMENT 
 
 BT 
 ELIHU ROOT 
 
 NEW HAVEN : TALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON : HENRY FROWDE 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 MCMXI 
 
 s 
 
Copyright, 1907 
 By Yale Univbrsitv 
 
 Published, June, 1907 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAQIE 
 
 Pbbfatobt Bbmares 3 
 
 I. The Task Inherited or Assumed by Mem- 
 bers OF THE Governing Body in a 
 Democracy 5 
 
 II. The Function of Poxiticai Parties as 
 
 Agencies of the Governing Body . 32 
 
 III. The Duties of the Citizen as a Mem- 
 
 ber of a Political Party .... 61 
 
 IV. The Grounds for Encouragement ... 93 
 
THE 
 CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVEENMENT 
 
PREFATORY REMARKS 
 
 Gentlemen of Yale TJniveesity: 
 
 In delivering the lectures of 19fll on the re- 
 sponsihilities of citizenship, upon the foundation 
 established by the late William Earl Dodge, I look 
 hack with pleasure to nearly forty years of friend- 
 ship with Mr. Dodge, and to the example which 
 his whole life gave of unselfish public spirit and 
 of unremitting and intelligent effort for the wel- 
 fare of his country and of his fellow-men. The 
 establishment of this lectureship is but one of a 
 multitude of acts which expressed his constant so- 
 licitude for the welfare of others and his grateful 
 appreciation of all the blessings he owed to the 
 just and equal laws, the liberty, and the oppor- 
 tunities of his country. His life was a better 
 lesson in the responsibility of Christian citizen- 
 ship than any lecturer can put into words ; for he 
 did what we write about and he proved what we 
 
 assert. 
 
 3 
 
4 PREFATORY REMARKS 
 
 It is my purpose to speak to you of your re- 
 sponsibilities regarding the government of your 
 country and to discuss : 
 
 1. The task inherited or assumed by members 
 of the governing body in a democracy. 
 
 2. The function of political parties as agencies 
 of the governing body. 
 
 3. The duties of the citizen as a member of a 
 political party. 
 
 4. The grounds for encouragement. 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED BY MEM- 
 BERS OF THE GOVERNING BODY IN A 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 A large part of mankind still regard govern- 
 ment as something quite apart from the main 
 business of life — something which is undoubtedly 
 necessary to enable them to attend to their busi- 
 ness, but only incidental or accessory to it. They 
 plough and sow and harvest; they manufacture 
 and buy and sell ; they practise the professions and 
 the arts; they write and preach; they work and 
 they play, under a subconscious impression that 
 government is something outside all this real busi- 
 ness — a function to be performed by some one else 
 with whom they have little or no concern, as the 
 janitor of an apartment house, whom somebody 
 or other has hired to keep out thieves and keep 
 the furnace running. In reality, government is 
 an essential part in evei^ act_of_all this wide 
 range of human activity. If it is bad, ruin comes 
 
 to all; if it is good, success comes according to 
 
 5 
 
6 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 capacity and courage. The fairest and most fer- 
 tile parts of the earth have been for centuries wil- 
 derness and desert because of bad government; 
 not only lands capable of supporting multitudes 
 in comfort and prosperity, but lands that have 
 actually done so in the past, are to-day filled 
 with wretchedness and squalor, with ignorance 
 and vice, because of bad government ; while under 
 good government industry and comfort flourish on 
 the most sterile soil and under the most rigorous 
 climate. 
 
 The proportional part played by government in 
 the personal affairs of every individual life is rap- 
 idly increasing. The crowdii^ and complications, 
 the inventions and improvements and cooperation 
 of modern life have enormously increased the de- 
 pendence of men upon each other. A century ago 
 the farmers, who made up the bulk of the people 
 of the United States, were quite independent in 
 their comparatively isolated lives and with their 
 few wants. I can recall a picture drawn by one 
 who remembered the life of that time upon a farm 
 familiar to my childhood. He said: 
 
 We had abundance of food and clothing; we raised 
 our own wheat and corn, which were ground into flour 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 7 
 
 and meal at a neighboring mill for a share of the grain ; 
 we raised all the beef and pork and vegetables that we 
 required ; we raised sheep and sheared them, and carded 
 and spun and wove the cloth for our winter clothing;^ 
 we raised flax and from it made our own linen; we 
 dipped our own candles, which afforded sufficient artifi- 
 cial light for a life in which it was the rule to rise 
 with daylight and go to bed when it was dark ; we had 
 milk from our own cows, eggs from our own fowls, and 
 abundant firewood from our own forest. We had every- 
 thing we needed except money and we had little need 
 for that; the chief occasion for its use was to pay the 
 small taxes which were required each year. There was 
 little money in the community and it was sometimes 
 hard to get enough to meet the taxes. 
 
 Under such conditions, government might well 
 have been regarded as an outside affair, of which 
 the less people heard the tetter. 
 
 Compare such a life with that of a resident in 
 one of the cities, in which a third of the popula- 
 tion of the United States are now crowded to- 
 gether. The city family is dependent for every 
 article of food and clothing upon the products of 
 far-distant places. These products are supplied 
 through great and complicated agencies of trans- 
 portation, and for the most part have been pre- 
 
8 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 pared for use by a variety of distant mills and 
 factories. The family depends upon fuel brought 
 from distant coal-mines ; its light comes from gas 
 and electrical plants over which it has no control ; 
 the habits of business and social life are all ad- 
 justed to means of communication furnished by 
 great telegraph and telephone companies and a 
 govermnent postal serviGeT^liexercises no control 
 at all over the things that are absolutely necessary 
 to its daily life. A strike in the coal-mines, like 
 that which occurred in Pennsylvania five years 
 ago, may at any time put out not only the furnace 
 but the kitchen fire ; a strike in the lighting plants, 
 like that which happened in Paris a few weeks 
 ago, may plunge the house and the neighborhood 
 into darkness. A quarrel between railroad com- 
 panies and their employees, or the inability of a 
 railroad company to furnish sufficient transporta- 
 tion, may cut off the most necessary supplies ; the 
 meat is liable to be diseased unless some one in- 
 spects the packing-house, the name and place of 
 which no one in the family knows. The milk may 
 be full of tuberculosis and the water full of ty- 
 phoid germs unless some one has tested the cattle 
 and some one enforced sanitary ordinances upon 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 9 
 
 distant farms. Access to the house depends upon 
 a street department, safety from thieves upon a 
 police force, and freedom from pestilence upon 
 the sanitary disposal of the sewage of thousands 
 of other families. Under these circumstances of \ 
 complete interdependence, the individual is en- j 
 t.irely hpilpTfiaa. The only way in which he can 
 compel the continuance of conditions under which i 
 he and his family can go on living is by combina-j 
 tion with others equally dependent with himself, 
 and by organization for whatever control over! 
 those conditions is necessary. That combination! 
 and organization is government. 
 
 Men may leave all this part of the business of 
 life to others and treat it as no concern of theirs ; 
 men may voluntarily elect to play no part in the 
 control of the affairs which make up their daily 
 life and to play no part in the working out of the 
 great questions upon which the prosperity of their 
 country, the future of their children, and the wel- 
 fare of the race depend ; but they need not flatter 
 themselves that these things are matters apart 
 from them, or that they are leading free and in- 
 dependent lives. Abstention is impossible under ^ 
 the conditions of modem life and modem popular 
 
10 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 government. ;^njnustjdthfiX.-gQSErn„oxJbfi..gpv- 
 jerned,;. they must take part in_J]ie -control of . ±heic 
 ownjiyes^ or they jnust lead. subject lives, help- 
 lessly ■4ependfint-Jn-Jie-Jittlfi_thin£s and great- 
 things o£-life upon ih©-will_aBd power of others. 
 The theory and practice of govemmenf have 
 vastly changed within the past few centuries, and 
 especially within the last century and a half. 
 Control by superior authority, claiming by divine 
 right, selected by inheritance, and supported by a 
 comparatively small governing class selected in 
 the same way was repressive and directive. Gov- 
 ernment was then apart from the main and gen- 
 eral activities of life, but it was apart from them 
 by being above them, by exercising rights over 
 them and making them all pay tribute. Under 
 our modern systems of popular government the 
 repressive function still continues, but entirely 
 new and different modes of action have been de- 
 veloped. The repression is self-repression, and 
 the direction is the resultant of internal forces 
 determining the character of the directed mass. 
 "Popular government is organized self-control — or- 
 I ganized capacity for the development of the race. 
 It is the good and noble impulses and the selfish 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED H 
 
 and cruel passions of man struggling -with each 
 other for the maintenance or the denial of justice ; 
 it is the lust for power and savage instinct for 
 oppression struggling against manhood and self- 
 respect for the maintenance or destruction of lib- 
 erty ; it is the greed and cunning that have shamed 
 the history of the world struggling with honesty 
 and virtue for public purity; it is the longing in 
 the heart of man for better things up through 
 education to broader knowledge and higher life; 
 it is the vast elemental forces of humanity mov- 
 ing great masses of men in violent protest against 
 the ills of life, to the destraetien-of social order; 
 it is the instinct of self-preservation which rallies 
 other multitudes in defence of vested interests and 
 traditional rights; it is the dreams of Utopia to 
 be realized by changing everything, and the rever- 
 ence for the past that is horrified by changing 
 anything. These tremendous forces express them- 
 selves in laws, in the enforcement of laws, in con- 
 tempt for laws, in good administration and bad 
 administration, in sudden outbursts of feeling 
 altering the surface of things, and in gradual 
 movements affecting the whole relation of nations 
 toward the ideals of peace and order and justice 
 
12 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 and righteousness. Upon them and the results 
 they work out depend the prosperity and honor 
 and life of nations, and the future of civilization ; 
 and upon them depend the value of every farm 
 and factory and shop, of every bond and share of 
 stock, the peaceful prosperity of every home, the 
 opportunities for success of every child. 
 i Heavy responsibilities were assumed and seri- 
 ous dangers were confronted in departing from the 
 theory that government must come from above, 
 that the selfishness and cruelty and lust of man- 
 kind can be successfully controlled only by a class 
 of superior men, by a small number of specially 
 qualified experts in the art of government bred to 
 power and trained in its exercise ; and in adopting 
 the idea that the great masses of men, who had 
 always been subject to repression, control, and 
 direction, could be trusted to govern themselves 
 without any superior control ; that by a process of 
 evolution, through education and practice, the 
 popular mass would acquire the self-restraint, the 
 soberness of judgment, the loyalty to the funda- 
 mental principles of justice and liberty necessary 
 to stable and effective government. The new de- 
 parture was regarded by many of the wisest and 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 13 
 
 best of mankind Avith the most gloomy forebod- 
 ings. There was widespread belief that when ' 
 political power was vested in the poor they would 
 promptly proceed to divide among themselves the 
 property of the rich, and that the control of de- 
 mocracy would prove to be the tyranny of the 
 mob — the most frightful form of oppression man- 
 kind has yet known. Jack Cade and Wat Tyler 
 rebellions, peasant insurrections, the Ked Terror 
 of the French Revolution, the excesses of the Com- 
 mune of Paris, the reign of assassination in Rus- 
 sia, the Jacquerie in Eoumania, the perpetual 
 revolutions of undeveloped Latin-America, have 
 seemed to give color to these anticipations. 
 
 We have been accustomed to flatter ourselves 
 that the great American experiment has been suc- 
 cessful. It has indeed carried the demonstration 
 of popular capacity of the people to rule them- 
 selves far beyond the point which originally seemed 
 possible to the enemies of popular government. 
 That demonstration has produced an effect uponv/ 
 the constitution of government throughout the civ- 
 ilized world by the side of which the Roman do- 
 minion sinks to an inferior place as a permanent 
 force. Under its influence the whole continent of 
 
14 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 South America took heart and gathered courage to 
 throw off the hard colonial yoke which held its peo- 
 ple under the subjection of the Iberian Peninsula, 
 and, passing through the storms of internal strife 
 and continual revolution, is gradually emerging 
 into a condition of peaceful industrialism. Its 
 influence reacted upon France and requited her 
 assistance in the cause of our independence, by 
 furnishing proof of the possibilities of humanity 
 to her political philosophers. It inspired the hope 
 that led to the tempestuous revolt against the 
 French Monarchy, which, through many vicissi- 
 tudes, has resulted in the French Eepublic, now 
 for more than a third of a century stable in its 
 peaceful sway. Its example reacted upon England 
 in the series of reforms which began with the 
 Keform Bill of 1832 and enabled that conserva- 
 tive people to impress upon their ancient Monarchy 
 the essentials of a real government by the people, 
 in which justice and liberty are preserved in a 
 very high degree. 
 
 The fact that for more than a century peaceful 
 industry, respect for law, and individual freedom 
 have been maintained under popular government 
 in the United States, and that they have been 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 16 
 
 accompanied by extraordinary material prosperity, 
 has fostered a tendency toward popular govern- 
 ment in every country of Europe. 
 
 Nevertheless, we must not delude ourselves with 
 the idea that the American experiment in govern- 
 ment is ended or that our task is accomplished. 
 Our political system has proved successful under ~ 
 simple conditions. It still remains to be seen how ^ 
 it will stand the strain of the vast complication of 
 life upon which we are now entering. 
 
 Notwithstanding the change in the source of 
 power, which has been the fundamental fact in the 
 development of popular government, that govern- 
 ment has proceeded hitherto with much respect for 
 inherited governmental traditions and methods. 
 The old machinery for the application of govern- 
 mental power to the life of the community has 
 been in a great measure preserved. Legislative - 
 bodies have made laws, and courts have sat in 
 judgment under them and executives have en- 
 forced them, under authority derived from the 
 people, very much as they did under authority 
 derived from a superior power, except that the - 
 spirit has been different and the responsibility has 
 been different. It remains to be seen whether 
 
16 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 democracies will be willing to continue these meth- 
 ods of government, or whether, with their continu- 
 ally increasing realization of their own power, 
 they will change the old methods of government 
 along such lines as are foreshadowed by the pro- 
 posals for the ijaitiative and the referendum — 
 i proposals that would substitute direct democratic 
 action for representative government, as represen- 
 tative government was substituted for absolute 
 monarchical control ; and it remains to be seen what 
 the effect of that kind of government would be. 
 
 ^Notwithstanding the great change at the top 
 involved in the setting aside of monarchical and 
 aristocratic government in modem republics, the 
 substance of the old social system, with its respect 
 for the rights of private property, has been pre- 
 served. Modem democracy has simply engrafted 
 upon that system an assertion of the right of equal 
 individual opportunity, so that no barrier of birth 
 or caste or privilege shall stand between any man 
 and whatever career his ability and industry and 
 courage entitle him to achieve. The very basis 
 of that social system is now widely questioned. 
 Socialists, in no negligible numbers, demand a 
 reorganization of society upon entirely different 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 17 
 
 principles; limitations upon the right of private 
 property are widely favored ; and limitations upon 
 individual opportunity are still more widely en- . 
 forced among all that part of the wage workers who 
 believe in putting a limit upon the amount of work 
 which each workman shall be permitted to do in 
 his day's labor, so that the most industrious, skil- 
 ful, and ambitious workman shall be permitted to 
 do no more and to earn no more than the most 
 dull, idle, and indifferent workman. A common 
 benefit of property and a common standard of ex- 
 ertion are liable to be substituted for all inequali- 
 ties of fortune and achievement. After many 
 centuries of struggle for the right of equality there 
 is some reason to think that mankind is now en- 
 tering upon a struggle for the right of inequality. 
 It remains to be seen how democracy will work 
 under these new conditions. 
 
 One thing we have learned during the experi- 
 ence of popular government is that the progress of 
 the world has carried civilized people to a point 
 where we are not now voluntarily trying the ex- 
 periment of government by self-control, but where 
 society must rely upon that and caimot possibly 
 go back to the old method of keeping peace by 
 
18 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 force or the threat of force. The complication and 
 interdependence of life puts the power of doing 
 incalculahle harm in the hands of so many men 
 and combinations of men in different occupations 
 that a realization of common interest is absolutely 
 essential to the working of the vast machine. The 
 mere forcible enforcement of law is quite inade- 
 quate. It is not fear of the policeman or the 
 sheriff that keeps the peace in our many cities ; it 
 is the self-control of the millions of inhabitants 
 enabling them to conform their lives to the rules 
 of conduct necessary to the common interest ; it is 
 only against the exceptional lawbreaker, and crim- 
 inals who are comparatively few in number, that 
 the policeman and sheriff are effective. 
 
 Another thing we have learned is that it is pos- 
 sible for men to set up abstract and impersonal 
 standards of right conduct, such as the great rules 
 of right embodied in our constitutions, and that, 
 although each man in his own personal affairs 
 tends to depart from the standard and struggle 
 against its application to himself, the general 
 agreement of all who do not at the time happen to 
 have any adverse interest is competent to maintain 
 the standard in force and effect; so that all men 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 19 
 
 maj_gve their adherence and suppoit^ta standards 
 of conduct ethically superior to the course which 
 the vast majority of them desire to take in their 
 own affairs. ~"' 
 
 Another lesson the experience of popular gov- \ 
 ernment has already made plain is that the art of 
 self-government does not come to men by nature. 
 It has to be learned; facility in it has to be ac- 
 quired by practice. The process is long and labo- 
 rious ; for it is not merely a matter of intellectual ^ 
 appreciation, but chiefly of development of char- 
 acter. At the base of all popular government lies ^ 
 individual self-control; and that requires both in- 
 telligence, so that the true relation of things may 
 be perceived, and also the moral qualities which 
 make possible patience, kindly consideration for 
 others, a willingness to do justice, a sense of hon- 
 orable obligation, and capacity for loyalty to cer- 
 tain ideals. Men must be willing to sacrifice 
 something of their own apparent individual inter- 
 ests for the larger interests of city. State, country ; 
 and without that willingness successful popular 
 government is impossible. This loyalty to an 
 abstract conception is a matter of growth. It is 
 easy to trace its development in our own country 
 
20 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 from the time when local allegiance was predomi- 
 nant to the time when national allegiance has be- 
 come predominant. Intense devotion to the State 
 is one of the great elements of strength in the 
 Japanese nation now ; it was one of the chief ele- 
 ments in the growth of Roman power. It cannot 
 be produced except by a long-continued habit of 
 effort and sacrifice in a common interest. It is 
 J this gradually acquired loyalty to country more 
 than anything else that enables men to exercise 
 the self-control necessary to the subordination of 
 the narrower personal interests to broader general 
 interests, upon which self-government depends. 
 The individual selfishness which fills men with a 
 controlling desire for personal aggrandizement, to 
 the exclusion of any consideration for the general 
 good, marks a low stage in the political develop- 
 ment of every country that has a history ; and the 
 bitterness of internal dissension which leads the 
 adherents of particular opinions or interests to 
 insist upon them at the cost of ruin and death to 
 adherents of opposing views in the same country 
 must in its turn give way to the conception of the 
 higher loyalty before there can be really success- 
 ful popular government. There must be both the 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 21 
 
 habit of self-control and the dominating influence of ' 
 the common ideal to enable men so to act together, 
 subordinating minor differences of interest and 
 opinion, as to make popular government possible. 
 The countries in which the people are continu- 
 ally engaged in internal quarrels never progress. 
 History is full of such examples. Some races ap- 
 pear to be incapable of combining in the support 
 of a common political ideal beyond a certain point. 
 The races that have this capacity to the highest J 
 degree persist and rule the world; the peoples that 
 have it to a low degree lose their national entity 
 and cease to govern. There are many countries 
 now where controversy regarding matters of in- 
 ferior importance is a present bar to progress. In 
 every living nation the question always remains. 
 How far has it capacity to go in that kind of com- 
 bined action which subordinates individual in- 
 terests, the interests of groups and localities and 
 classes, to the general good of the country ? That 
 limit must be found in the capacity for develop- 
 ment of the individual characters that make up 
 the nation. The Greeks appeared to be unable to 
 maintain any effective combination beyond the 
 individual city; the idea of a Hellenic country 
 
22 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 acquired no control over their lives. When the 
 supreme moments were passed in which they 
 united to repel the Persian invasions, they imme- 
 diately fell apart and resumed their quarrelling 
 with each other. The Pelopoimesian and Delian 
 Confederacies, which might as well have been the 
 foundations of a common country as the Confed- 
 eration of the American colonies, served merely as 
 opportunities for the selfish advantage of Sparta 
 and of Athens. So Greece, with all its glories of 
 art and literature and oratory, went down before 
 nations of inferior intellectual capacity — ^first the 
 Macedonians and then the Romans. The long 
 period during which internal strife has prevailed 
 in the Latin- American countries has been an illus- 
 tration of the struggle between the capacity for 
 self-control in a common national interest and the 
 forces of selfish individualism and factionalism. 
 The major part of those countries are now happily 
 emerging from the stage of militarism and the 
 condition of continual revolution into the stage of 
 industrialism and stable government ; but in some 
 of them on the borders of the Caribbean the strug- 
 gle is still waged and the result is in doubt. The 
 discord between the thirteen American States and 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 23 
 
 the practical paralysis of the Continental Govern- 
 ment before the Constitution of 1787 illustrates 
 the failure to attain this necessary condition ; and 
 the union of the same States under the Constitu- 
 tion illustrates success. The doASTifall of the once 
 powerful Kingdom of Poland illustrates the tri- 
 umph of those discordant motives which make suc- 
 cessful government impossible. United Italy and 
 Germany ; the stability which the French Republic 
 has maintained for a third of a century after so 
 long a period of tumult and discord ; the unbroken 
 bonds that unite Great Britain with her colonies ; 
 and the permanence of the American Union, mark 
 the great advances of which civilized men gener- 
 ally have proved themselves capable, in applying 
 the principles of combination for a common na- 
 tional interest. No one can tell, however, when --^ 
 or where the great new forces which are being de- 
 veloped in the course of government by the people, 
 and especially in the relations between industrial 
 and social changes and the political constitution of 
 government, will overcome the power of common 
 and patriotic purpose that makes possible com- 
 bined national action. 
 
 Our country is not safe in leaving unused any 
 
24 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 possible influence and effort toward the mainte- 
 i nance and growth of patriotic idealiam and practi- 
 cal loyalty. 
 
 There are probably few readers of history who 
 do not ask themselves the question whether the 
 civilization of our time is to pass through its 
 cycle of development and decay, yield to the dis- 
 integrating passions of human nature, and leave 
 the world to begin the process again as it has so 
 often done. Is the New Zealander indeed to stand 
 on the ruins of London Bridge? The question 
 J that Macaulay asks still remains to be answered: 
 
 Is it possible that in the bosom of civilization itself 
 may be engendered the malady which shall destroy it? 
 Is it possible that institutions may be established 
 which, without the help of earthquake, of famine, of 
 pestilence, or of the foreign sword, may undo the work 
 of so many ages of wisdom and glory, and gradually 
 sweep away taste, literature, science, commerce, manu- 
 factures, everything but the rude arts necessary to the 
 support of animal life? Is it possible that, in two or 
 three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fish- 
 ermen may divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the 
 greatest European cities — may wash their nets amidst 
 the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts 
 out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals? 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 25 
 
 Is some future poet to sing of us that " the lion 
 and the lizard keep the courts where Jamshyd 
 gloried and drank deep " ? If not, I think the dif- ^ 
 ference must be found in the fact that popular 
 government carries our civilization down to the 
 foundations of society and spreads it so widely 
 over the surface of the earth. Former civiliza- 
 tions were but islands surroimded by vast regions 
 where savagery ruled ; and they were but civiliza- 
 tions at the top, underlaid by the ignorance and 
 prejudice of a multitude who had no interest in 
 preserving what such civilization had gained, no 
 capacity to appreciate its merits, and but little 
 contribution to make toward its increase. They 
 were the civilizations of privileged classes, which 
 always tend toward degeneration. The hope for '^ 
 the permanence of modem civilization is that it 
 is being built up from the bottom through the par- 
 ticipation of the whole people in that universal, 
 combined action for the common good which we 
 call popular government. 
 
 It may seem that I have ascribed a part to gov- 
 ernment which properly belongs to the develop- 
 ment of morals and the spread of education ; but 
 I think a little reflection will show that this is 
 
26 THE CITIZEN'S PAKT IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 [not so. Morals do not develop in the abstract, 
 but in the gradual adaptation of conduct to rules 
 already intellectually accepted. The conduct to be 
 adapted is conduct toward other real living beings. 
 Even in the purely personal relations government 
 plays a leading part in directing conduct, as in 
 the changing rules of law regarding the rights and 
 duties of owner and slave, master and servant, 
 employer and laborer, parent and child, guardian 
 and ward ; but in the great field of the relations of 
 men to each other in the mass the whole develop- 
 ment of morals practically is governmental. The 
 
 ^ words liberty, justice, order, peace, protection of 
 the weak, public purity, public spirit, denote the 
 application of certain moral ideas to the conduct 
 
 I of men in mass toward their fellow-men. The 
 tremendous power of a people become sovereign 
 and the helpless dependence of modem men upon 
 each other make this phase of development of mor- 
 
 i als of primary and vital importance. It is the 
 conversion of moral rules into political conduct 
 that concerns government, and that is a process 
 of practical experimental life working out results 
 acceptable to a majority and then enforced by 
 them upon the minority. This process is not 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 27 
 
 much furthered by mere insistence upon the rules, 
 or by academic discussion of them, for in succes- 
 sive generations the same accepted moral rules are 
 translated into entirely different conduct, and it 
 is the translation which is of vital importance. 
 
 If we turn to education, we find that instead 
 of this being a thing apart, the education which 
 enables the great body of democracy to work out 
 the problems I have described — the primary edu- 
 cation, which opens the door of knowledge to the 
 mass and the door of unlimited opportunity to 
 the exceptional intelligence — ^is almost universally 
 supplied by government as a part of the political 
 qualification for citizenship. On the other hand, 
 it is very doubtful whether the higher academic 
 education contributes much to capacity for politi- 
 cal usefulness. As a rule,„ politieal jgiadam, ia. the, 
 best sense, comes in life and not in study, and the 
 tendency of highly educated men to neglect all 
 political duties is unfortunately too general. It is - 
 the process of government that educates for gov- 
 ernment. It is experience and observation of the 
 working of laws and political practices and injuri- 
 ous customs that point the way to intelligent legis- 
 lation. The factory inspectors in the State of 
 
28 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 New York inspected over thirty-eight thousand 
 separate factories last year. Those inspections 
 and the reports and the discussions on them are 
 education through which the thirty-eight thousand 
 employers and the million and odd employees and 
 the community which controls them both, may 
 come to a sense of just how the balance ought to 
 be held between the employer's rights of property 
 and free contract, on one hand, and the employee's 
 freedom from the slavery of circumstance, and the 
 State's right to have normal, healthy citizens, on 
 the other. n 
 
 \ The greatest, most useful educational process 
 ever known in the world occurs every four years 
 in the United States when, during a Presidential 
 election, some fifteen million voters are engaged 
 for months in reading and hearing about great 
 and difficult questions of government, in studying 
 them, in considering, and discussing, and forming 
 matured opinions about them. We sometimes hear 
 complaints that elections interfere with business 
 and come too frequently. On the contrary, noth- 
 ing else is. so valuable and important for business, 
 because it is this educational process that is laying 
 the solid foundation of sound judgment, sober 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 29 
 
 self-restraint, and familiarity with political ques- 
 tions among the governing mass, upon which the 
 security of all business depends. 
 
 Doubtless there have been abuses in raising and 
 applying campaign funds ; but, in the main, there 
 is no more useful expenditure of money from the 
 public point of view than this, which in the last 
 Presidential election, according to official state- 
 ments, amounted to only about three and a half 
 cents per capita^ for._tlia-.people of the IJnited 
 States, on one side, and probably somewhat less 
 on the other ; for the great bulk of it is applied to 
 the political education of voters. 
 
 Everything that I have said about the relations 
 of government to our modern life — the character 
 of popular government, its difficulties, its dangers, 
 its possibilities, its mode of life and growth — car-w 
 ries, as a necessary corollary, the existence of a 
 universal duty of citizenship to take part in it. 
 It is not rightly a matter of choice whether a man 
 shall trouble himself about affairs of government 
 in his community, or confine himself to his busi- 
 ness, his profession, or his pleasures, and leave 
 others to govern; it is a matter of peremptory 
 obligation which cannot be avoided by any intelli- 
 
30 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 gent man who has any understanding of the con- 
 ditions under which he lives. A French nobleman 
 could attend the Court of Louis XIV, or retire 
 to his castle, as he chose, without discredit; for 
 under that system of government the question was 
 whether certain men or certain other men con- 
 ducted the government. The essential feature of 
 
 ■^the present condition is that the burden and duty 
 of government rest upon all men, and no man can 
 retire to his business or his pleasures and ignore 
 his right to share in government without shirking 
 a duty. The experiment of popular government 
 cannot be successful unless the citizens of a coun- 
 try generally take part in the government. There 
 is no man free from the responsibility; that re- 
 
 ■i sponsibility is exactly proportioned to each man's 
 capacity — to his education, to his experience in 
 life, to his disinterestedness, to his capacity for 
 leadership — in brief, to his equipment for effec- 
 tive action in the great struggle that is continually 
 going on to determine the preponderance of good 
 and bad forces in government, and upon the issue 
 of which depend results so momentous to himself, 
 his family, his children, his country, and man- 
 ■^ kind. The selfish men who have special interests 
 
THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED 31 
 
 to subserve are going to take part; the bitter and 
 malevolent and prejudiced men wbose hearts are 
 filled vyith hatred are going to take part; the cor- 
 rupt men who want to make something out of gov- 
 ernment are going to take part; the demagogues 
 who wish to attain place and power through pan- 
 dering to the prejudices of their fellows are going 
 to take part. The forces of unselfishness, of self- 
 control, of justice, of public spirit, public honesty, 
 love of country, are set over against them; and 
 those forces need every possible contribution of 
 personality and power among men, or they will go 
 down in the irrepressible conflict. The scheme of 
 popular government upon which so much depends 
 cannot be worked successfully unless the great 
 body of such men as are now in this room do their 
 share ; and no one of us can fail to do his share " 
 without forfeiting something of his title to self- 
 respect. 
 
II 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES AS 
 AGENCIES OF THE GOVERNING BODY 
 
 We have now reached a point where the quea- 
 /tion is naturally suggested: How should the citi- 
 zen take part in the government of his country? 
 Given a young American who has just completed 
 his academic training and is about to begin his 
 active life, and who wishes to do his full duty as 
 a citizen in maintaining and improving his Gov- 
 ernment: where is he to begin and what is he 
 to do? 
 
 On the threshold of the answer to this question 
 >J we must determine that the duty wiU not be ful- 
 filled merely by playing the role of a critical ob- 
 server of what others do. It is indeed important 
 that there should be criticism; no public officer 
 can afford to be relieved from it. Every man in 
 the performance of public duty tends to lose his 
 
 sense of proportion by seeing things from only one 
 
 32 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 33 
 
 point of view, and tends to devote himseK unduly 
 to some phases of his work, which preoccupy his 
 mind, so that he neglects other things which ought 
 to have his attention. Every one makes mistakes, 
 and the sooner he is told of them the hetter; and 
 every one who is ohliged to withstand the pressure 
 which conflicting interests bring to bear upon the 
 performance of his duty finds in the certainty of 
 criticism a powerful incentive to be sure that his 
 action is such that he can defend it afterward 
 according to his own convictions of right. Criti-,, 
 cism tests and corrects the opinions and the prac- 
 tices of the men who are doing the work of the 
 world. 
 
 [Nevertheless, to criticise is not to do the work-^* 
 The preservation and development of civilization 
 require affirmative forces ; the real work of life is 
 constructive ; criticism is destructive. 
 
 It is, moreover, true that the most valuable ^ 
 criticism comes from the men who are also under- 
 taking to do things themselves. Criticism always 
 involves comparison with some standard assumed 
 in the critic's mind ; and the value of the criticism 
 depends largely on the conformity of that stand- " 
 ard to the real conditions under which the work 
 
34 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 criticised is done. The critic of government who 
 is himself trying to do his share of the affirmative 
 work of government is in the way of learning 
 something of the evils against which other men 
 engaged in government are struggling, the difficul- 
 ties they have to overcome, the means they have 
 at their command with which to overcome those 
 difficulties, and the real as distinguished from the 
 apparent value of what they do. Criticism from 
 such a source is a real benefit. The mere critic 
 
 "*of government, however, who does not himself 
 attend to his share in the affirmative work of gov- 
 ernment, ordinarily adopts standards of compari- 
 son which ignore the most important elements of 
 truth, and he is quite likely to do more harm than 
 good; he gradually assumes an attitude purely 
 destructive and acquires a habit of simple fault- 
 finding. Such a man is generally a hindrance 
 rather than a help to the work of good government. 
 It is equally plain that for most men preaching 
 to others about what they ought to do is not a very 
 effective way of helping along the work of govern- 
 
 Iment. Mankind does not pay much attention to 
 people who talk dovm at them from without about 
 their duties, unless the instruction comes from 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 35 
 
 some one who is already recognized by his own per- 
 formance as having acquired the right to he con- 
 sidered a teacher. Occasionally a man has some 
 message to deliver of such weight and cogency as 
 to impress itself upon many other minds ; but such 
 men are very rare and very far removed from the 
 ordinary run of men. If any one can express as 
 much wisdom as President Eliot has put into some 
 of his addresses, or can write such a book as Presi- 
 dent Hadley's " Freedom and Kesponsibility," or 
 such a book as James Bryce's " American Com- 
 monwealth," or John Morley's " Life of Glad- 
 stone," or can compose such orations as Edmund 
 Burke's, he can make a real contribution to the sci- 
 ence, and therefore to the practice, of government. 
 But for the generality of us whose knowledge and^ 
 insight are not much, if any, superior to those of 
 the great body of our fellows, it is wise to wait 
 until we have at least greater experience than they 
 have in the things we undertake to talk about, 
 before we try to play the schoolmaster to them. 
 
 There are many people whose idea of duty is to 
 assign duties to others, but for the most part their 
 efforts are a mere waste of words. Mr. Murat 
 Halstead once told me how, being a young news- 
 
36 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 paper correspondent during the civil war, he had 
 felt moved to write a long letter to Secretary Stan- 
 ton, giving his view about the matters in which 
 the Secretary was engaged, and how, many years 
 afterward, this letter was found on the files of 
 the War Department indorsed, in Stanton's own 
 handwriting, " M. Halstead — Tells how the war 
 ought to be carried on." At the time of our con- 
 versation, a long and ripe experience had taught 
 the veteran journalist the true character of his 
 youthful undertaking; and he remarked that this 
 indorsement was the only evidence he had ever 
 known that Stanton possessed real humor. The 
 world is full of men ready to tell how the war 
 ought to be carried on by others ; but the war goes 
 on just the same, and the men who bear the bur- 
 den and heat of the struggle in actual service ac- 
 complish the results, and their self -constituted and 
 little-qualified advisers have really no substantial 
 part in the business. 
 
 J It is plain that the true way to begin an active 
 part in the affairs of government is not by being 
 elected or appointed to office; that should always 
 be a result rather than a beginning of interest, 
 activity, experience, and proved capacity in the 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 37 
 
 affairs of govermnent. This is especially true of 
 the greater offices. As to the smaller offices, espe-v 
 eially those which occupy the entire time of the 
 officer, it is often very undesirable for a young 
 man of education and good parts to abandon his 
 profession or business or whatever calling he would 
 naturally follow to fill one of them. There are 
 very few public offices in comparison with the 
 number of citizens, and at the best only a very 
 small part of the young men of the country could 
 enter into active governmental work by holding 
 them. 
 
 Of course, voting is a fundamental and essential '^ 
 part of the qualified citizen's duty to the govern- 
 ment of his country. The man who does not think 
 it worth while to exercise his right to vote for 
 public officers, and on such public questions as are 
 submitted to the voters, is strangely ignorant of 
 the real basis of all the prosperity that he has or 
 hopes for and of the real duty which rests upon 
 him as a matter of elementary morals; while the 
 man who will not take the trouble to vote is a 
 poor-spirited fellow, willing to live on the labors 
 of others and to shirk the honorable obligation to 
 do his share in return. 
 
38 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 J Merely voting, however, is a very small part of 
 the political activity necessary to popular govern- 
 ment. An election is only the final step of a 
 long process by which the character of government 
 is determined. The election records the result of 
 s/ the process ; the real work of goverimient is in the 
 process. 
 
 The voter ordinarily has merely a choice be- 
 tween two or three candidates for an office, no one 
 of whom may be the man whom he would prefer 
 for the office ; or he has the opportunity to say yes 
 or no to some question framed in advance, and 
 very likely framed in such a way that neither yes 
 nor no would represent his real opinion upon the 
 subject or lead to what he would regard as a satis- 
 factory result. Of course our election laws pre- 
 serve the theoretical right of each voter to cast his 
 vote for any one whom he chooses; but we all 
 know that if the voter exercises that right for some 
 one other than a foreordained candidate his ballot 
 goes into the category of scattering votes and is 
 practically thrown away. The same thing which 
 is true as to the limitation of the voter to par- 
 ticular candidates is true also of the issues or 
 opinions those candidates are supposed to repre- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 39 
 
 sent. The issues are all made up before the voter 
 goes to the polls. You and I may feel a desire to 
 express an opinion by our ballots on the revision 
 of the tariff, or on free trade and protection, or on 
 the regulation of railroads, or on the prevention of 
 trusts, or on the method of taxation, or on econ- 
 omy and honesty of administration, or on the cur- 
 rency and banking system, or on the control of 
 insurance companies, or on the powers of corpora- 
 tions, or on the open shop, or on the foreign policy 
 of the country ; but when we go to the polls merely 
 as voters we are entirely helpless as to determin- 
 ing upon what question our votes will count, and 
 ordinarily as to which way they will count upon 
 many of the questions in which we are interested. 
 The questions on one side or the other of which 
 our votes will weigh, have all been selected and 
 brought into prominence long before the election. 
 The result of this is to limit the effect of our votes 
 to certain narrow channels. The issues as finally 
 framed may not be those we think most important, 
 and the relation of the candidates to them may be 
 such that we cannot help one cause by our vote 
 without hurting another in which we are equally 
 interested. The men who are elected to office give 
 
40 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 practical effect when in office to the results of 
 that previous process recorded in the canvass of 
 votes. Thus, the chief work of popular govern- 
 ment is to be found in the process which results 
 in the vote. 
 
 Under our present political system in the United 
 States and at our present stage of political devel- 
 opment, that process is mainly carried on through 
 the organizations knovsoi as political parties. 
 
 Manifestly, there must be organization; there 
 must be some means by which the vast number of 
 questions which arise in relation to government in 
 our complicated modern life shall be simplified; 
 by which the questions that are vital shall be 
 separated from the comparatively unimportant 
 questions and the people who tend to think alike 
 upon the vital questions may have an opportunity 
 to make their votes effective by voting alike; by 
 which, from the vast number of men who are 
 available for selection to administer the powers of 
 -government, some may be indicated as the prob- 
 able choice of a sufficient number of voters to give 
 some chance of success in voting for them. 
 
 If you can imagine all the sixteen hundred 
 thousand voters of the State of New York, for 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 41 
 
 example, going to the polls on an election day -with 
 no previous concert of action, but each determined 
 to vote for the best man — that is, each determined 
 to vote for the man who of all his acquaintance 
 seems to him the best to fill the position, or for the 
 man whose opinion most closely agrees with his 
 upon some subject which happens to be uppermost 
 in his mind — ^what would be the result ! what thou- 
 sands of names would be found upon the ballots 
 when they came to be counted ! If a majority of 
 votes were required to elect, of course there would 
 never be an election. If only a plurality of votes 
 were necessary to elect, the largest number of 
 votes cast for any one man would inevitably be a 
 very small proportion of the total of votes cast. It 
 is highly probable that the great majority of the 
 voters would have preferred that the man with the 
 plurality should not be elected, and would have 
 been quite ready to agree on some one else whom 
 they all preferred to him and considered but little 
 less desirable than the various persons for whom 
 they had cast their scattering ballots. The men 
 elected in such a way would have no guide as to 
 the principles, or policies, or rules of conduct 
 which the majority of the voters wished them 
 
42 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 to follow in tlie offices to which they were 
 elected. 
 
 Such a method of conducting popular govern- 
 ment, however, is not merely futile, it is impos- 
 sible; for human nature is such that long before 
 such an election could be reached some men who 
 wished for the offices would have taken steps to 
 secure in advance the support of voters ; some men 
 who had business or property interests which they 
 desired to have protected or promoted through the 
 operation of government would have taken steps to 
 secure support for candidates in their interest; 
 and some men who were anxious to advance prin- 
 ciples or policies that they considered to be for 
 the good of the commonwealth would have taken 
 steps to secure support for candidates representing 
 those principles and policies. All of these would 
 have got their friends and supporters to help them, 
 and in each group a temporary organization would 
 have grown up for effective work in securing sup- 
 port. Under these circiunstances, when the votes 
 came to be cast, the candidates of some of these 
 extempore organizations would inevitably have a 
 plurality of votes, and the great mass of voters 
 who did not follow any organized leadership would 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 43 
 
 find that their ballots were practically thrown 
 away by reason of being scattered about among a 
 great number of candidates instead of being con- 
 centrated so as to be eflfective. 
 
 Under very simple social conditions, especially \/ 
 in the smaller governmental subdivisions such as 
 towns and counties, and in some parts of the coun- 
 try where there are few important questions in- 
 volved in the local government and almost every 
 one in the community is well known, so that elec- 
 tions are largely a matter of personal choice, this 
 kind of purely personal organization and effort 
 often answers the purpose of enabling voters to 
 concentrate their ballots effectively. Several well- 
 known men may offer themselves publicly as can- 
 didates and each of them carry on, through a per- 
 sonal organization, a campaign for the suffrages of 
 his fellow-citizens. In the governmental affairs of </ 
 the country at large, however, and for the most 
 part in the governmental affairs of the States, the 
 opportunity for personal choice is very limited ; it 
 is impossible that any man should be really per- 
 sonally known to a very large proportion of the 
 people in the United States, or even in any State. 
 There are questions of government upon one side 
 
44 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 or the other of which the voters hold strong opin- 
 ions; and men are known and are commended to 
 the voters as candidates by the positions they have 
 taken upon those questions, and, if they have al- 
 ready held office, by public report of the way in 
 which they have performed their duties in, carry- 
 ing out certain policies or applying certain rules 
 of conduct. Candidates, therefore, in these larger 
 fields are regarded chiefly as the representatives 
 of principles and policies, and so far as they are 
 affected by personal popularity, that is chiefly 
 based upon the effectiveness with which they have 
 already represented those principles and policies. 
 These great governmental questions are not tem- 
 porary and special to particular elections. There 
 iare some questions of policy which are never settled 
 permanently, because new conditions are always 
 arising to serve as occasions for their reconsidera- 
 tion. For example, the subject of a protective 
 tariff has furnished questions upon which the peo- 
 ple of the United States have divided for a cen- 
 tury, and probably will divide for an indeflnite 
 time to come. These tariff questions reappear in 
 one form or another at every national election 
 when they do not happen to be for the moment 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 45 
 
 thrust aside by some other special and absorhing 
 issue. The fact that the people have decided in 
 favor of a high tariff at one time, or for a low 
 tariff at another time, has no effect v^hatever to 
 prevent the same old battle being fought over and 
 over' again. 
 
 Series of questions relating to the extension of 
 slavery, merging into the questions relating to the 
 continuance of the war for the Union, and these 
 merging again into the questions relating to the 
 results of the war and the political and economic 
 status of former slaves, have continued from the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century to the begin- 
 ning of the twentieth. In the same way a long 
 dividing line may be seen separating people of dif- 
 ferent ways of thinking upon questions relating to 
 the currency. In one form or another, for a long 
 series of years, the controversy has been waged be- 
 tween the advocates of currency based upon a gold 
 value, on the one hand, and the advocates of a cur- 
 rency based upon the idea that the Government 
 can give it value in the form of greenbacks or de- 
 preciated silver, on the other. 
 
 There are certain distinct and fundamentally op- 
 posed schools of thought and opinion which range 
 
46 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 portions of the people on diflFerent sides of many 
 questions through long series of years. For ex- 
 ample, the people of the United States during most 
 of our national existence have been divided be- 
 tween the advocates of a strict construction and 
 the advocates of a liberal construction of the Con- 
 stitution. One would confine the powers of the 
 National Government withia the narrowest pos- 
 sible limits; the other would find ia the Constitu- 
 tion all the powers that any nation can have ex- 
 cept as they are expressly limited by the terms of 
 the Constitution. One tends to carry the inde- 
 pendence of local self-government to an extreme; 
 the other tends to carry the centralization of na- 
 tional government to an extreme. This funda- 
 mental difference of view has divided the people 
 of the country in a long series of successive elec- 
 tions upon many specific and important questions; 
 upon the power of the National Government to 
 carry on internal improvements; to restrict the 
 extension of slavery; to establish a national bank; 
 to charter Pacific railroads; to maintain a tariff 
 for protection as distinguished from a tariff for 
 revenue only; to acquire and incorporate in the 
 United States additional territory; to acquire and 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 47 
 
 govern so-called colonial possessions; upon the ex- 
 tent of the power to regulate commerce, of the 
 taxing power, of the police power, of the treaty- 
 making power. 
 
 It is true that ia recent years some professed 
 disciples of Jefferson have advocated measures of 
 national control which would have led that apostle 
 of the least government possible to regard Hamil- 
 ton as a strict constructionist; but these are prob- 
 ably temporary aberrations. The same division 
 between the two schools of interpretation of the 
 Constitution still exists and in the nature of things 
 must contiQue. 
 
 With these continuing questions and perma- 
 nently divided schools of opinion the association of 
 the advocates of each opposing view is bound to be 
 repeated in many successive political campaigns. 
 This association is not occasional and fortuitous; 
 it is, to a great extent, predetermined and custom- 
 ary. The men who entertain positive views upon 
 one side or the other of the great political ques- 
 tions become known; they acquire the habit of 
 working together; they rely upon each other's co- 
 operation. The association is practically continu- 
 ous, because the process in which the advocates of 
 
48 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 these diflfering views are engaged is continuous. 
 Our people are so constituted that no sooner is an 
 election over and the result declared than the sup- 
 porters of the defeated candidates and the advo- 
 cates of the rejected views immediately begin their 
 efforts to secure a reversal of the result at the next 
 ^ election. The ever-present consciousness that in 
 a year, or two years, or four years there will be 
 an opportunity to substitute victory for defeat is 
 a great element ia the peaceable and good-natured 
 acceptance of the results of our elections by those 
 who are defeated. The very intensity of the mi- 
 nority's belief that its candidates and its policies 
 are better than those which for the time being 
 have a majority of the votes creates an expectation 
 that when the test of performance is applied to the 
 successful candidates and the test of application is 
 applied to the accepted policies their inferiority 
 will be demonstrated, so that the public verdict 
 will be reversed. 
 
 This continuous association and effort on the 
 part of a great number of men for the accomplish- 
 ment of a common purpose through a continuous 
 series of political struggles of course involves con- 
 tinuous organization, for the work of a great num- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 49 
 
 ber of men for a common purpose through a long 
 period of time cannot be carried on at all without 
 organization. These continuous, voluntary organ- ^ 
 ized associations to secure the adoption of policies 
 upon which their members agree and the choice of 
 officers who will represent those policies are what 
 we call political parties. 
 
 As new issues arise under the changing needs 
 and difficulties and desires which time brings to 
 every community they find these organizations al- 
 ready in existence, and if the new issues are such 
 as to demand settlement or excite great interest 
 among the voters it becomes immediately neces- 
 sary for the existing political organizations to de- 
 termine what positions they will assume upon the 
 new questions. This determination is naturally v 
 based either upon the application of the general 
 principles of government and the general ideas of 
 policy which have controlled the respective parties, 
 or upon an estimate of the support which one po- 
 sition or another will receive from the voters of 
 the country, or upon a combination of the two. 
 Sometimes the lines which separate the voters of 
 the country upon one side or the other of a new 
 question run across lines of cleavage between the 
 
50 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 old parties, and the comparative importance of the 
 new question is such that great bodies of voters 
 dissolve their association with an old party and 
 form a new association with another party; as, for 
 example, the positions taken by the Democratic 
 and Eepublican parties on the subject of the cur- 
 rency a few years ago led many gold Democrats 
 to go over to the Eepublican party and many free- 
 silver Republicans to go over to the Democratic 
 I party. Occasionally, the attitude of all existing 
 parties is so unsatisfactory to the people much iq- 
 terested in a new question that they undertake to 
 form a new party for the furtherance of their 
 views on that particular question. Generally, 
 these attempts show that the people who are in- 
 terested by a particular new issue overestimate its 
 importance and their attempts to form a new party 
 fail; but we have had one signal example the other 
 way — in the formation of the Republican party in 
 1856 by the men who were not satisfied with the 
 attitude of either the Democratic or the Whig 
 party in regard to the extension of slavery. As a 
 rule, however, each old political party adds to the 
 list of principles and policies which it advocates a 
 view upon each great new question in accordance 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 51 
 
 ■with, the opinions of a majority of its members, 
 and, with some slight changes and realignment of 
 dissatisfied members, old parties go on represent- 
 ing their membership upon the new questions as 
 well as upon the old questions in reference to 
 which their parties were organized. In time, as 
 the original questions which led to the formation 
 of a party disappear, the party continues with an 
 organization representing its members no longer 
 for the specific purposes which brought them to- 
 gether, but for the new purposes which they have 
 agreed upon through the processes of their party 
 organization and activity. 
 
 Many very good and public-spirited men havev 
 deplored the existence of parties, and some of ^ 
 them prefer to stand altogether aloof from polit- 
 ical parties and to exercise their right to express 
 their opinions by voice or pen or print, and to vote 
 with entire personal independence and without be- 
 ing either trammelled or helped by the cooperation ^ 
 of others. 
 
 As I have tried to point out, however, political v 
 parties are the natural product of evolution in the 
 process of popular government; they are not 
 merely the best and most practical way iu which 
 
52 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 the operations of popular government can be car- 
 ried on, but they furnish the only way to carry on 
 those operations so far as we can judge from the 
 experience of the world up to this time. In no 
 large country has any real popular government 
 ever existed for any considerable time without 
 them. They exist in England, France, Germany, 
 Austria-Hungary, Italy, in all the constitutional 
 governments of Europe, and in the Latin- Ameri- 
 can states, with variations depending upon the 
 characters of the different peoples; and in every 
 case they assume more definite form and more 
 clearly recognized functions as the coimtry pro- 
 gresses from the status of personal government to 
 government of principle and policy.- As popular 
 government develops, in every case political par- 
 ties develop, and in every case the longer the 
 operations of popular government have continued 
 and the more perfect is the expression of public 
 opinion and will, the more highly developed in the 
 true sense is political party organization. 
 
 It is, of course, highly important that the voters 
 of a country should hold themselves at liberty to 
 condemn by their votes any party with whose pol- 
 icy they do not agree, or which is false to its pro- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 53 
 
 fessions, or whose candidates for office are found 
 to be unfit to truly represent the principles pro- 
 fessed; nevertheless, the great mass of the people 
 of the United States at every election go with one 
 of the great parties or the other, and the great 
 mass of the voters of each party stay with their 
 party election after election. They approach^ 
 every election with a presumption in favor of the 
 policies advocated by the party to which they have 
 adhered in the past. As to the majo rity of them ^/ 
 that presumption is never overcome. Their minds 
 are most receptive to arguments and persuasion 
 coming from their own party associates and in ■ 
 favor of their own predilections. The habit of re- 
 liance upon party leaders; instinctive loyalty to 
 old comrades in former political struggles; the nat- 
 ural reluctance to break old associations and form 
 new ones; and often the predisposing effect of in- 
 herited opinions and youthful training — all com- 
 bine to make men vote ordinarily with their party. 
 This settled tendency makes the determinations \J 
 reached in the councils of the great political par- 
 ties the most important and dominating factors in 
 determining the course of popular government, 
 and renders participation in party action the most n/ 
 
54 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 effective way to reach the mind and influence the 
 \ action of the mass of voters. The great work of 
 {popular government is done in the associations and 
 primaries and caucuses and conventions, in the 
 conferences and discussions and canvassing and 
 personal association, in the private meetings and 
 public meetings, in the convention committees, in 
 the draughting of platforms, in the struggles be- 
 tween candidates for nomination, in the efforts to 
 educate and convince and persuade voters, and in 
 all the great and complicated process which goes 
 on incessantly within each party in every village 
 and town and city and State, culminating in the 
 subniission of the work of the national convention 
 to the voters of the country at large, and, upon 
 one side or the other, determining the legislative 
 and executive policies of the country. 
 y I have no doubt that the American who feels 
 Ihe responsibilities of his citizenship can do his 
 (duty as a part of the governing people better by 
 |entering into the organization of one of the great 
 'political parties than in any other way. The bet- 
 ter educated, more intelligent and more active he 
 is, the greater is the reason why he should seek 
 for his powers the immense increase of effective- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 55 
 
 ness which comes from association, combination, 
 and organization. There are many abuses of party -^ 
 power and in party management in the United 
 States; but the American who stands apart and 
 criticises or condemns the conduct of political par- 
 ties may well be answered, " Yours was the re-v/ 
 sponsibility and you have wholly failed to dis- 
 charge it." 
 
 We sometimes hear it said by intelligent and,^ 
 educated men that there is no opportunity for 
 them to do anything in party politics because the 
 machine controls everything, and no one who is 
 not in the machine has any chance — that is to say, 
 that the men who for the time being hold the party 
 offices will control the party action, and the voice 
 of an individual new recruit in the party ranks 
 would not exercise any control. This is wholly \/ 
 f aUaeious. There never is a party organization or 
 a so-called machine which cannot at any time be 
 turned out of power if the rank and file of the 
 party choose to turn them out; and there never is 
 a time when a man of character and ability en- 
 tering into the active work of a party cannot gain 
 in full measure the influence and power to which 
 his ability entitles him, or cannot contribute ma- 
 
56 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 terially to a change of control, provided lie is will- 
 ing to take the pains and give the time and effort 
 necessary to the creation and exercise of iafluence 
 among the members of the party. Of course a 
 new recruit cannot step into a new association 
 with a great number of people and immediately 
 dictate what they are to do. Time and long-con- 
 tinued effort and long association, through which 
 come confidence in a man's sincerity and respect 
 for a man's opinions and a desire to comply with 
 a man's wishes, are necessary to the exercise of 
 that kind of power; but the same things are neces- 
 sary to the exercise of influence and power in any 
 of the affairs of life which involve the conduct of 
 J others. If any American citizen is willing to make 
 J the same sacrifice of personal comfort and con- 
 ^ venience and employ the same ordinary means to 
 make himself an active force in politics which he 
 would employ to make himseK an active force in 
 business, or in the church, or among the members 
 of any profession, or in any kind of enterprise 
 which involves the action of a large number of 
 i men, no party machine can prevent and ordinarily 
 no party machine wishes to prevent him. 
 
 We often hear remarks made which indicate an 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 57 
 
 impression that politicians are rather a low set of v 
 fellows, with selfish aims and corrupt practices, 
 who manipulate party politics for their own ad- 
 vantage, and that the less self-respecting gentle- 
 men have to do with them the better. If that is 
 ever the case, and it undoubtedly is the case at 
 some times and in some places, it is always because \ 
 at such times and in such places political control 
 is allowed to go by default. Such a condition of 
 political affairs is always due to the fact that 
 the citizens who are honest, upright, and public- 
 spirited, who would not prostitute party power to 
 personal advantage, who would not make a party 
 organization a corrupt combination to secure place 
 and profit, fail in the performance of their public 
 duty and permit the party organization which 
 limits and restrains the exercise of their political 
 powers to remain in the hands of unworthy and 
 self-seeking men. There is no party in which the v 
 great body of the voters desire that kind of con- 
 trol, and it cannot exist unless the voters of the 
 party, and the citizens who ought to be active in 
 exercising the powers of the party, fail through 
 indifference and unwillingness to spend the neces- 
 sary time and take the necessary trouble to exer- 
 
58 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 cise the powers that lie within their reach. I have 
 said that there are serious evils incident to the 
 management of our political parties, and some of 
 these I shall presently mention; but they are all 
 evils which would be readily remedied if the citi- 
 zens generally who are in agreement upon the 
 principles of the respective parties would recog- 
 nize their responsibility and perform the political 
 •i duties which rest upon them as citizens. The fact 
 that such evils exist, instead of being a reason for 
 not engaging in party activity, is a reason for en- 
 gaging in it. Such a fact presents a clear and im- 
 perative duty to remedy the evil; and that duty 
 rests not merely upon the men who already have 
 membership in the party, but upon all men who 
 agree in general with the principles of the party, 
 and who therefore ought to look upon the party 
 officials and managers as their agents and to hold 
 themselves responsible for their agents' character 
 and conduct. 
 
 -J Another reason or excuse for not taking part 
 in political affairs is the direct reverse of those that 
 I have mentioned: it is that party management is 
 satisfactory; that matters go along very well, and 
 that a man does his duty to his party if he supports 
 
THE FUNCTION OF POLITICAL PARTIES 59 
 
 its ticket with his vote and perhaps contributes 
 his fair share toward the payment of its ejfpenses. 
 This position can never be maintained. It means, 
 in the first place, that the man who takes it is will- 
 ing to have the greater part of his duty as a self- 
 governing citizen done for him by others, and it 
 means also that the power and efficiency of the 
 party in working out the problems of government 
 and in advocating and enforcing the conclusions 
 which it reaches are reduced by the desertion of 
 one of its elements of power — ^that is to say, the 
 ability and force of character of a part of the men 
 who ought to be engaged in its work. 
 
 None of these reasons for not taking part in • 
 party politics is ordinarily the real reason. The-^ 
 real reason is that men are unwilling to spend^the 
 timean^Jhfi,iQoneyj2^_th6^ labor jififieasai^cjEor 
 the due perfpxm5Jnee-of-_theit_dutiea-as citkens; 
 t hat they prefer t o attend to their professions, their 
 business, their pleasures, and allow~othCTS~to govV 
 ern them rather than to take part in governing 
 themselves; that they are willing to permit the 
 great struggle which is continually proceeding for 
 the preservation and protection of their property, 
 their liberty, their opportunities, for sound prin- 
 
60 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 ciples of finance, for the preservation of society, 
 for the correction of social and political and busi- 
 ness evils, for the punishment of wrong-doing, for 
 the furtherance of justice and the maintenance of 
 peace and righteousness, to go on without any 
 help from them. They are willing to let the great 
 ' mass of men upon whose education and clear and 
 reasonable understanding of governmental ques- 
 tions the whole structure of free government de- 
 pends go without any help from their education 
 and intelligence. They are willing to pursue a 
 course which, if shared in by the rest of their 
 countrymen, would bring our constitutional gov- 
 ernment to an immediate end, wreck our pros- 
 perity, and stop our progress. They are willing 
 to depend, for the continuance of everything they 
 have of value in life, upon their confidence that 
 others will be more public-spirited and unseMsh 
 and willing to take trouble in performing their 
 public duties as citizens than they are themselves. 
 
 \ 
 
m 
 
 THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN AS A MEMBER 
 OF A POLITICAL PARTY 
 
 It is quite simple and easy for any intelligent 
 young man to take part in the actiTities of a polit- 
 ical party in the United States. He has only to 
 select the party the ascendency of which he con- 
 siders most desirable, and let the recognized party 
 officials of his o\vn home know that he is willing to 
 work. He will promptly find himself admitted to 
 membership in whatever may be the simplest form 
 of political organization or association in the local- 
 ity, and will find himseK provided with plenty of 
 work to do. He cannot begin by leadership or by 
 dictating party poUcies, and he probably cannot 
 assume in the beginning any such position of supe- 
 riority as he may think his education and intelli- 
 gence entitle him to have. The work in which he 
 wUl be engaged at first may be simply the details 
 of local organizations, which will perhaps seem of 
 
 61 
 
62 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 little consequence; or engaging in struggles be- 
 tween candidates for small offices, in whick he does 
 not take very much interest; or canvassing from 
 house to house to ascertain the political affiliations 
 or preference of the residents. It may be very far 
 from that advocacy of principles and influence 
 upon the policies and direction of government in 
 which he would like to engage. He may, however, 
 be sure that he will ultimately find the exact level 
 and rise to the full height of opportunity and in- 
 fluence and dignity of employment to which his 
 abilities, character, and devotion to his duties en- 
 J title him. If he is able and willing to render effec- 
 tive service, he will gradually find himself moving 
 along until he is at last engaged in the most im- 
 portant duties on the broadest fields of political 
 action. In the meantime, or if he should never 
 rise above mere local activity, let him remember 
 
 ••that the first and chief duty of citizenship is to 
 serve in the ranks — ^not to await some great and 
 glorious occasion to win fame and power. It is 
 
 *the active service of the men in the ranks that 
 makes the difference between popular self-govern- 
 ment and popular submission to an absolute mon- 
 arch. Without the great body of workers who 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 63 
 
 never rise to leadership popular government would 
 be as impossible as a successful army composed 
 entirely of officers. 
 
 In the performance of the simple duties of the 
 political beginner there are certain principles of 
 conduct so indispensable to usefulness that ob- 
 servance of them is a clear duty. 
 
 Men influence the ccinduct of others chiefly 
 through personal association and JntCTgSJirse. 
 There is such a preponderance of good in human v 
 nature that association with men ordinarily begets 
 a liking for them. As men come to know each 
 other each comes to receive from the others the 
 respect and confidence to which he is entitled; his 
 character and his opinions insensibly acquire their 
 due weight and influence. It is not the stranger 
 who says, " Go there," or " Do that," who is 
 obeyed; but it is the old acquaintance who says,R 
 " Come with me," or " Let us do thus and so,"' 
 who is followed. The knowledge of the tendencies 
 and prejudices of men acquired through personal 
 acquaintance makes the suggestion of a wish from 
 a friend often of greater weight than the most 
 eloquent speech or the most profound essay from 
 a stranger. This power of association is the chief 
 
64 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 thing which enables political organizations, even 
 when they are going wrong or in bad hands, to 
 resist attacks from without, even from the best 
 and most highly respected citizens, when these oc- 
 casionally and for the moment are moved to in- 
 struct the men actually engaged in political affairs 
 as to what they should and should not do. 
 
 There is no monopoly of this power of associa- 
 tion. Unselfish and public-spirited men can qual- 
 ify themselves to exercise it if they take the trou- 
 ble, just as well as self-seeking men of low aims. 
 fi To accomplish very much with other men one 
 I must have a considerable degree of sympathy with 
 their feelings and interests. The man who never 
 cares or thinks about anything but himself can- 
 not expect anybody to think or care about him. 
 If he has no interest in the hopes and ambitions of 
 others, no consideration for their sensibilities, they 
 will be equally indifferent so far as he is concerned. 
 Political bodies, especially primary political bod- 
 ies, are made up, to a degree unequalled in any 
 other association, of men of widely varying condi- 
 tions in life, with different opportunities for 
 knowledge and capacity for reflection, with differ- 
 ent prejudices and ways of thinking, differing 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 65 
 
 widely in information, in previous reflection, in 
 breadtli and scope of thought, in motives, in char- 
 acters, in tempers, in ambitions. Each one of 
 them is entitled equally with all the others to have 
 his opinions, his wishes, and his ambitions con- 
 sidered; and the feeling that any_one^giveaJdiidly 
 consideration to them is in itself a great , source 
 of influence. The man who has never had any- 
 thing above a day's wages or a small clerk's salary, 
 or who perhaps has no income but is looking for 
 one, is just as much entitled to aspire to a place 
 in the custom-house, or to a post-office, or to be 
 a letter carrier, as the very successful and able 
 man distinguished in his community is entitled to 
 aspire to be governor or Senator; and the small 
 man is just as much entitled as the big man is to 
 have his aspiration considered and treated as an 
 honorable aspiration. The small trader who hopes 
 that the legislation and administration of govern- 
 ment will be such as to promote the prosperity of 
 his little business is just as much within his rights 
 as the great banker who hopes for currency legis- 
 lation or the great manufacturer who hopes for 
 tariff legislation beneficial to his business. Sym- 
 pathetic recognition of such considerations is a 
 
66 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 natural and necessary basis for influence and lead- 
 ership among political associates. 
 
 J A rightly constituted man brought into associa- 
 tion with a great number of others cannot fail to 
 acquire some degree of proper humility. It mat- 
 
 "* ters not how well educated or intelligent a man 
 may be, the combined experience, knowledge of 
 life, range of thought, fertility of suggestion, thor- 
 oughness of criticism, to be found in any great 
 body of men taken together are so far beyond bim 
 that he is bound gradually to take an attitude of 
 receiving and learning as well as endeavoring to 
 instruct and lead. He will thus escape from the 
 fatal attitude which ruins one's influence with 
 others by giving an impression of assumed supe- 
 riority in wisdom or virtue. 
 
 In order to secure united and successful action 
 for any purpose the members of a political party 
 must learn to subordinate minor differences ia 
 order to combine for the advocacy and promotion 
 of more important matters in which they agree. 
 That is essential to the maintenance of any polit- 
 ical organization, as indeed it is essential to suc- 
 cessful combination ia all human affairs. The con- 
 certed action of many men of different interests, 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 67 
 
 impulses, opinions, and desires is essential to the 
 accomplishment of any result under popular gov- 
 ernment; and that concerted action cannot be^ 
 attained except by continuarmdjmi^HaL.CQmpxo- 
 mises. There is no quality in a people more im- 
 portant for success in popular self-government 
 than that practical, common sense which makes 
 them capable of such practical compromises; and 
 every one engaged in political affairs is under a 
 duty to make such fair concessions from his opin- 
 ions and desires as may reasonably contribute 
 toward bringing out practical and effective results 
 in common action. Of course this does not mean w^ 
 to compromise character. Every man, however, >/ 
 should be careful not to deceive himself into sup- 
 posing that to be a matter of conscience which is 
 really only a matter of pride of opinion, or de- 
 termination to have one's own way. 
 
 In politics, as in everything else, a man ought ^/ 
 to be thinking about his work and not about what i\ 
 he is going to get out of it; to be intent on succeed- 
 ing in his undertakings rather than upon the ap- 
 pearance that he is making or the credit that he is 
 going to receive. That is an essential condition to 
 success in all the arts which deal with human nat- 
 
68 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 Tire as their material. I have often noticed at the 
 bar that the advocate who is thinking about mak- 
 ing a fine speech never makesTa lodgment in the 
 mind of either the court or the jury; they may 
 admire the speech, but tliej are neither convinced 
 nor persuaded.^ This is true at the bar, in the pul- 
 pit, and in the lecture-room. It is equally true of 
 
 1 literary style j_all obtrusively ^CLe_ writing is in- 
 
 _effective. _And this is true in politics. I do not 
 mean to insist upon an impracticable altruism, or 
 to exclude an honorable ambition to succeed and 
 to have the reward of good, effective work, which 
 comes from the favorable opinion of one's fellows 
 
 1 and a general recognition of one's service. Recog- 
 nition and appreciation are properly gratifying to 
 every one; but that should be a secondary object 
 if a man is to do the best type of work. The 
 
 „primary object with every man should be to do 
 
 ■the work that comes to his hands just as well and 
 
 it 
 
 •thoroughly as he possibly can do it; and there is 
 
 one certain reward for work so done — ^in the sat- 
 isfaction that the man himself feels in having done 
 good work. Every man should rely for the appre- 
 ciation and recognition of his service, not upon 
 his own estimate of it, but upon the estimate of 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 69 
 
 others; no man can properly judge of his own 
 merit or the value of his service. It will often hap- 
 pen that particular things a man does may not re- 
 ceive from others the credit to which they are 
 entitled; but it will also happen that he will get 
 more credit than he is entitled to for other things 
 that he does; and, in the long run, every man may 
 be sure that he will receive all the credit to which 
 he is entitled without any attempt on his part to 
 influence the judgment of others or to force upon 
 them his own estimate of himself. The man who \ 
 engages in political work with the primary idea 
 of getting office may succeed in getting the office; 
 but he is likely to lose what is of far greater value 
 than any office — the good opinion of the commu- 
 nity in which he lives — for the people of self-gov- 
 erning communities ordinarily possess a strangely 
 unerring insight which detects the spirit in which 
 ' such a man works and classifies him as a mere poli- 
 tician in the bad sense of the term and stigmatizes 
 him as an office-seeker. 
 
 The career and influence of such. a man, more- 
 over, tend to promote the kind of political activ- 
 ity which is the most injurious and demoralizing 
 in popular government. 
 
70 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 It appears from what I have already said that 
 -^ there are three quite distinct stages in the develop- 
 ment of self-government. The first and lowest is 
 •^that in which the people of a country divide with 
 sole reference to their partisanship for particular 
 persons whom they desire to put into power. In 
 its worst form this kind of partisanship is so com- 
 pletely exclusive of consideration for public good 
 that the contest for personal ascendency often 
 merges into violence and civil war and continuous 
 revolutionary attempts. This condition was once 
 widely characteristic of Latin- American republics, 
 and some of them are still at that low stage of 
 development, although many of them and the most 
 important have happily passed out of that stage 
 and have come to regard the choosing of officers 
 as the means of giving effect to policies rather than 
 as being itseK the object of popular government. 
 Those countries have had one preeminently great 
 and noble example. 
 
 Jose de San Martin was bom in Argentina, 
 served with distinction under the Spanish flag in 
 the Napoleonic wars, and returned to his native 
 land at a critical period of the South American 
 struggle for iridependence. Everywhere except in 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 71 
 
 the United Provinces of the Eiver Plate the early 
 revolutionary efforts had been suppressed by 
 Spain. The old viceroyalty of Peru, strong ia its 
 mountains, in its army, and its command of the 
 sea, was the centre of reactionary power. Im- 
 pregnable there agaiast attack, it seemed that 
 Spain could choose her own time to sweep down 
 over the old trade route by which the precious 
 metals of Peru had found their way to the com- 
 merce of the Plate and to destroy all that was left 
 of South American freedom. San Martin con- 
 ceived the great design of leading an Argentine 
 army across the Andes, conquering the Spaniards 
 in Chile, setting that country free, creating a navy 
 on the Chilean coast, destroying Spanish naval 
 power in the Pacific, and, having acquired com- 
 mand of that ocean, attacking and overcoming the 
 Spaniards in Peru along the same line of approach 
 from the west that had been followed by the old 
 conquistadores. He executed his design with 
 amazing audacity, tenacity of purpose, power over 
 men, organizing skill, and self-devotion. He over- 
 came obstacles apparently insuperable, achieved 
 one of the really great military and political move- 
 ments of history, and ruled in Lima as " Poimder 
 
72 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 of the Liberty of Peru." In the meantime, Boli- 
 var had led successful revolution in Venezuela and 
 Colombia, and the union of the northern and 
 southern patriot forces seemed about to complete 
 the eradication of Spanish rule in the Southern 
 Continent. 
 
 The character and conduct of Bolivar soon made 
 it plain that he regarded San Martin as a rival, that 
 they could not cooperate, and that the continuance 
 of both commands meant strife for personal power 
 between the two leaders — to the destruction of the 
 patriot cause. Then San Martin gave an example 
 of self-sacrifice more admirable than his victories 
 or his strategy. In order that a united patriot 
 army might oppose the forces of Spain, he effaced 
 himself, laid down his command, his titles, his dig- 
 nities, and power. He sent to Bolivar his pistols 
 and his war horse with this note: 
 
 Receive, General, this remembrance from the first of 
 your admirers, with the expression, of my sincere desire 
 that you may have the glory of finishing the war for the 
 independence of South Ajnerica. 
 
 And he left the scene of his great achievements 
 never to return. 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 73 
 
 BartolomS Mitre says truly : 
 
 History records not in her pages an act of self-abne- 
 gation executed with more conscientiousness and with 
 greater modesty. 
 
 San Martin died misunderstood and in exile. 
 To the generals and politicians who were plung- 
 ing the South American republics into continual 
 bloodshed for their own selfish ambitions, and to 
 their adherents, the spirit of self-assertion which 
 demands power and fame seemed admirable and 
 the spirit of self-effacement for a cause seemed 
 weakness. But as the people of those countries 
 have risen to a higher plane of duty and honor, 
 there has come the realization that the great South 
 American — the one worthy to be named with 
 Washington as the example and inspiration of 
 patriotism — was the modest soldier who cared 
 more for his cause than for his office, and who 
 was wiUing not merely to wield power, but to give 
 up power, for his country's good. 
 
 It has always seemed to me that Mr. Tilden 
 pursued a very patriotic and commendable course 
 when the election to the Presidency was in ques- 
 tion between him and Mr. Hayes in 1876. The 
 election was very close and there was no doubt 
 
74 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 that if all the votes actually cast in the Southern 
 States received effect Mr. Tilden would be de- 
 clared elected; but many votes had been thrown 
 out by the State returning boards in the South on 
 account of alleged fraud and intimidation that had 
 prevented the casting of other votes, which, if cast, 
 would probably have caused a different result. 
 There was a question that inevitably would have 
 resulted in civil war in any country where the per- 
 sonal idea was predominant in politics, and there 
 were in this country many men of high character 
 and standing who urged that Mr. Tilden's title to 
 the office should be asserted by armed force; but 
 he was decided and immovable in the position that 
 he would permit no breach of the peace of the 
 country in his behalf, whether he got the Presi- 
 dency or not. The questions were finally sub- 
 mitted to a special court devised for the purpose, 
 and that court by a majority of one decided in 
 favor of Mr. Hayes. So Mr. Tilden lost the 
 Presidency ; but he gained what was of far greater 
 value — a title to the esteem and gratitude of all 
 good citizens. He probably rendered a greater 
 and more permanent public service than by any- 
 thing he could have done as President. 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 75 
 
 The second stage of development in popular 
 government is reached when the people of a coun- 
 try have passed beyond exclusive attachment to 
 
 >/ individual fortunes and, turning their attention to 
 questions of principle or policy or material inter- 
 est, have arrayed themselves in support of their 
 various opinions or desires, but have not yet 
 reached the point where they are able to subordi- 
 nate minor considerations upon which they differ 
 to those of primary and vital importance upon 
 which they agree. In this stage of development 
 
 s]many groups make their appearance, each having 
 some controlling idea which it regards of primary 
 importance. Sometimes those ideas are local; 
 sometimes they are religious; sometimes they re- 
 late to special class or business interests; some- 
 times they relate exclusively to some special po- 
 litical, social, or economic question. The most 
 conspicuous result of such a condition is found in 
 the election of legislative bodies, in which repre- 
 sentatives of all the different groups are found, 
 and in which no party has a majority ; so that no 
 affirmative legislation is possible except by trades 
 and combinations between different groups. One 
 effect of this legislative condition is that in coun- 
 
76 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 tries where the executive is responsible to the leg- 
 islature the executive cannot depend upon steady 
 and constant support from the law-making body 
 in any line of policy, because the combination of 
 groups is continually changing and the executive 
 that has a majority to-day may find itself in the 
 minority to-morrow. There are some countries 
 where this government by groups exists, in which 
 the constant fluctuation of legislative combinations 
 and majorities leads to very frequent changes in 
 the responsible ministry; and in those countries 
 good administration is almost impossible, not only 
 because there can be no continuity of executive 
 policy, but because the heads of the executive de- 
 partments who constitute the ministry are seldom 
 able to do more than to begin to learn their busi- 
 ness before they are turned out to make place for 
 new men, who have again on their own account to 
 begin the same process of learning the business. 
 The most corrupt and unsatisfactory period in the 
 government of Great Britain was when Parliament 
 was divided into groups in this way. 
 
 Great Britain has passed out of that stage into 
 
 ^ the third and higher stage of development, in 
 
 which two great political parties oppose each other 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 77 
 
 upon fundamental differences, the members of each 
 differing in many respects among themselves upon 
 minor questions but not allowing those differences 
 to break up their party. This condition now exists 
 both in England and in the United States. Under 
 it the executive government has the continuous 
 support of its own party, and so long as that party 
 is in the majority there is a united and effective 
 government. When that party ceases to command 
 the support of a majority of the people, it goes 
 out of power and the other party comes into power 
 to receive an equally effective support until an- 
 other change comes. 
 
 The course of evolution in popular government v/ 
 is thus from the formation of an indefinite num- 
 ber of individuals into parties with the idea of 
 putting men into office to the formation of an in- 
 definite number of parties grouped especially with 
 regard to advancing special interests and ideas, and 
 thence to the formation of two great parties rep- 
 resenting fundamental differences in the general 
 principles and policies of government. The de- ^ 
 velopment is from the unmixed preponderance of 
 personal and selfish motives to the predominating 
 motive of common good for the country. 
 
78 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 J Since personal selfishness and desire for per- 
 sonal aggrandizement are by no means eradicated 
 from human nature, there is a constant tendency 
 in political parties to revert to a lower type. 
 Party leaders frequently use for their own per- 
 sonal advantage the power conferred upon them 
 for advocacy of those ideas which the members of 
 the party believe to be for the best interests of the 
 country. This tendency is promoted by every man 
 who takes part in political activity with the pri- 
 mary purpose of getting an office for himself, and 
 it is discouraged and reduced by every man who 
 takes part in political affairs with the primary 
 purpose of doing effective service to advocate the 
 principles that he believes in and to elect officers 
 who will apply those principles, leaving the ques- 
 tion of his own personal reward and advantage to 
 come from such recognition of his service as others 
 may think it deserves. 
 
 The tendency to revert to the lower type of 
 organization which concerns itself solely in the 
 obtaining of office is one of the evils to which I 
 referred in a former lecture when discussing the 
 objections sometimes urged against taking part in 
 politics. This evil has been very prevalent in 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 79 
 
 American politics, and it is still prevalent, al- 
 though to a less extent than formerly. With us 
 it takes the form of grafting upon the great parties "^ 
 of voters organized for the advocacy of certain de- 
 clared principles an organization of active party 
 workers for the distribution of offices. 
 
 The process is a very plain and natural one.^ 
 The object for which the voters have associated in 
 a party is to bring about the application of certain 
 principles and conformity to certain policies in 
 carrying on the government of the country. The 
 only way to secure that is by agreeing upon and 
 voting for candidates for office who, if elected, 
 will observe those principles and follow those poli- 
 cies. There is an immense number of these offices, 
 of varying grades, from the Presidency down; 
 there are national and State, county and city, 
 town and village officers, legislative and executive 
 and judicial officers ; great numbers of clerks and 
 collectors and inspectors and watchmen, agents of 
 different kinds, mechanics, and skilled and im- 
 skilled laborers. Comparatively few of these, and 
 generally the most important, are actually elected 
 by the people; the great mass of them, particu- 
 larly of the minor officers and employees, are 
 
80 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 selected and appointed by the officers who have 
 already been chosen by election, and abont this se- 
 lection and appointment the people have nothing 
 to say except as individuals among them may 
 make requests or recommendations to the appoint- 
 ing powers. 
 
 The proper and necessary operations of a party 
 cover a wide field of activity. They include the 
 selection of candidates for the elective offices. 
 This is done sometimes by means of the direct 
 expression of the wish of the voters of the party, 
 but more frequently by having the voters of the 
 party elect delegates to conventions which meet 
 and select the candidates. The operations of the 
 party also include the consideration, discussion, 
 determination, and statement of the position of 
 the party upon the important public questions of 
 the day. This also is done by the same conven- 
 tions which select the candidates. The operations 
 of the party also include appeals to the people to 
 vote for the candidates which represent the party. 
 These appeals are made by personal canvasses 
 from house to house, by public meetings and 
 speeches, by the circulation of campaign literature 
 through the mails and through the columns of the 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 81 
 
 press. There are also included the general and 
 concerted efforts to get out the vote, to see that 
 the voters of the party do not, through indifier- 
 enee, stay at home and neglect to vote at all ; and 
 also the manning of the polls under concerted and 
 systematic arrangement, for seeing that the voters 
 of the party are not denied their rights at the polls, 
 and that no fraud is perpetrated or undue advan- 
 tage is taken by the members of the other party 
 in the voting or the counting of the vote. All 
 these things require an immense amount of hard 
 work and the participation of a great number of 
 men, and all these workers have to be directed. 
 System, organization, control, leadership, are ab- 
 solutely necessary; leadership of opinion in the 
 framing of platforms and in the selection of proper 
 candidates, and leadership of administration in the 
 carrying on of the work. 
 
 This enormous mass of work preceding and 
 leading up to the exercise of the franchise and, so 
 far as we can judge both from reasoning and ex- 
 perience, essential to make the ballot effective, is 
 done by volunteers, who receive no compensation 
 from the State for the public service they are ren- 
 dering and must be inspired by some other motive. 
 
82 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 So well established is the understanding that these 
 are the processes by which Americans work out 
 the results to be confirmed by the ballot that laws 
 have been made in the larger States, where po- 
 litical affairs are most complicated, to regulate 
 proceedings in the political parties by primary 
 laws designed to prevent fraud in the selection 
 of delegates to conventions and in the choice of 
 candidates. 
 
 ■^ It is not at all unnatural that among the men 
 who do this voluntary work resulting in the selec- 
 tion of candidates and their election to public 
 office there should be many who desire to be ap- 
 pointed to the offices and employments at the dis- 
 j position of the officers so elected. Unfortunately, 
 there has grown up in the United States a practice 
 of considering the service of party workers lead- 
 ing to the selection and election of candidates as 
 a controlling reason for the appointment of those 
 party workers to the places at the disposal of the 
 candidates after their election; and that practice 
 has resulted in the prevalent understanding that 
 there is an implied agreement by every successful 
 candidate for an elective office to reward support 
 by exercising his governmental powers for the 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 83 
 
 appointment and employment of his supporters. 
 The practice originated in the complicated polit- 
 ical activities of the great States of New York 
 and Pennsylvania early in the last century. It 
 was extended to the Federal Government under 
 the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, and the most 
 familiar statement of it was made hy William L. 
 Marcy in the Senate of the United States in the 
 debate on Jackson's nomination of Martin Van 
 Buren to be minister to England. Marcy said : 
 
 It may be, sir, that the politicians of New York are 
 not so fastidious as some gentlemen are as to disclosing 
 the principles on which they act. They boldly preach 
 what they practise. When they are contending for vic- 
 tory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits 
 of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from 
 office; if they are successful, they claim, as a matter 
 of right, the advantages of success. They see nothing 
 wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils 
 of the enemy. 
 
 The application of this principle is not confined s/ 
 to the demand of the individual party worker upon 
 the successful candidate for a recognition of his 
 personal service; it goes a step further back and 
 affects the action of the party worker in the selec- 
 
84 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 tion of party leaders who will support and press 
 the party worker's claim to recognition from the 
 public officer when elected. It determines the se- 
 lection of the party committees and their chairs- 
 men, from the lowest local committee in the assem- 
 bly district or town or village, who are expected 
 to press the claims of the men who elect them 
 for appointment and employment, up through the 
 county and State committees to the national com- 
 mittee and the chairman of the national committee, 
 who directs the vast machinery of the Presidential 
 election. It converts the whole party organization 
 commissioned by the voters of a party to conduct 
 the systematic proceedings which shall enable them 
 to maintain and advance their political principles 
 by their votes, into an organization primarily for 
 the parcelling out of offices, and incidentally for 
 the promotion of party principles so far as may 
 be necessary to keep the voters of the party from 
 repudiating the party organization. 
 
 Several results follow from the application of 
 this principle. 
 
 ^ It leads to a selection of candidates for office 
 based primarily on their supposed willingness to 
 carry out the implied obligation to use their offi- 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 85 
 
 cial powers, if elected, for the reward of their 
 party supporters, the fitness of the candidates and 
 the henefit which the public will receive from their 
 service being considered only when it is probable 
 that an election will be close and that every vote 
 will be needed. 
 
 It leads to the exercise of the appointing power ^ 
 by the public officers who are elected in this way, 
 not with reference to the public service which the 
 appointees can render, but with reference to the 
 political service which they have already rendered 
 in the selection and election of the officer. It goes v 
 further than this in its effect upon the exercise of 
 official power, for by natural extension it is made 
 to cover an assumed obligation on the part of pub- 
 lic officers in the performance of their other duties 
 to act, not with reference to the public good, or for 
 the promotion of the great policies of a party, but 
 in such a way as to secure the greatest number of 
 offices with the greatest possible emolument to the 
 members of the party organization. This obliga- 
 tion is assumed to rest upon legislators, and some- 
 times even upon judges. 
 
 It demoralizes the public service, by establish- "^ 
 ing a tenure of office which depends not upon 
 
86 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 faithful and efficient service to the country, but 
 upon service in party primaries and caucuses and 
 conventions ; and it tends to make the elected offi- 
 cers feel responsible not so much to the public 
 opinion, which judges of their fidelity and effi- 
 ciency, as to the party managers v?ho are to de- 
 termine "whether they shall be renominated or not. 
 J This cannot fail to result in poor service. It is 
 impossible to have good service in any business, 
 public or private, unless the character of the ser- 
 vice itself is to determine whether it shall con- 
 tinue. This has been very well illustrated in a 
 way in which any one who has been in the habit 
 of frequenting the city of New York during the 
 past twenty years can appreciate. That city for- 
 merly had a street-cleaning department managed 
 by a bi-partisan police board composed of two 
 Democrats and two Republicans. The members 
 of the street-cleaning force were appointed for the 
 political committees of the two parties. The party 
 committees and the party leaders in the different 
 assembly districts in the city were furnished with 
 tickets, which they distributed to their supporters. 
 On the presentation of these tickets the holders 
 were treated as entitled to employment on the 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 87 
 
 force. Their retention on the force depended en- 
 tirely on the favor of the party managers from 
 ■whom they got their tickets — ^not at all upon the 
 way in which they did their work. They were 
 lazy, inefficient, undisciplined, and without effec- 
 tive supervision, because under that system no 
 supervision could have any effect; and the streets 
 of New York were continuously disgracefully 
 filthy. The evil hecame so great that the legis- 
 lature at Albany changed the law and provided 
 for a superintendent of street cleaning; and about 
 that time one of the occasional revolts of the city 
 of l^ew York occurring, a good business man was 
 made mayor and he appointed Colonel George E. 
 Waring, of Newport, a distinguished sanitary en- 
 gineer, superintendent of street cleaning. Colonel 
 Waring threw overboard the whole existing sys- 
 tem, established a rigid system of supervision, 
 paid no attention to so-called political claims, and 
 promptly dismissed every man who was found to 
 be lazy or inefficient. Within a few months he 
 had an active and effective force ; the streets of the 
 city were swept clean and kept clean, and they con- 
 tinued so until Colonel Waring's lamented death 
 and for a long time after, until the system which 
 
88 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 he had inaugurated gradually fell into disuse and 
 the old habit of using the street-cleaning depart- 
 ment as an opportunity for giving employment on 
 the grounds of party service was resumed ; and the 
 city has become again disgracefully unclean. 
 i The application of the principle announced by 
 Senator Marcy tends to weld the official personnel 
 of party organization into a compact body of men, 
 who, depending upon each other for personal ad- 
 vancement, stand by each other at all hazards and 
 oppose the power of organization to every effort 
 on the part of the mere voting members of the 
 party to take any course in party action which 
 may interfere with the regular business of barter- 
 ing offices for support and support for offices. As 
 the men who form such a compact official organ- 
 ization expect to make their living by it, they are 
 able to devote their entire time to the manipula- 
 tion of party afPairs, and in that way have a great 
 advantage over the business and professional men, 
 who must devote themselves to their business and 
 professions and can give but a small part of their 
 time to political activity. 
 
 Another and peculiar result of this system is the 
 creation, in some places where the system is in full 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 89 
 
 force, of double govermnents, one carried on by 
 the executive and legislative and judicial officers 
 provided for by law, the other carried on by the 
 official organization of the party which happens to 
 be in the majority, under the direction of the 
 party leader, who controls the action of the lawful 
 officers. There have been cities in which substan- 
 tially the whole board of aldermen have invariably 
 and without question voted as they were directed 
 by the leader of the majority party in the city, 
 and upon all important questions have waited 
 habitually to get his orders before voting; in 
 which the executive and administrative officers 
 have sought his instructions rather than the in- 
 structions of the mayor, and in which the minor 
 judicial officers have uniformly conformed their 
 judgments to his wish. There have been States 
 in which the party leader has habitually deter- 
 mined what bills should and what bills should not 
 be passed by the legislature, and in which the 
 majority of the legislature have uniformly sought 
 and obeyed his instructions. The lawful officers 
 are thus subservient to the party leader, because 
 they hold their offices at his will by virtue of 
 the compact organization behind him, which will 
 
90 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 control future conventions, nominations, elections, 
 and appointments. 
 n/ a peculiarity of this kind of government is that 
 the real governing power is without legal respon- 
 sibility and is practically free from statutory legal 
 restrictions. The party leader combines legislative 
 and executive functions, and he often trenches 
 upon judicial functions. He acknowledges no ob- 
 ligations to the public; his obligations are sim- 
 ply to secure offices for his followers. To pay a 
 legislator for his vote, or an executive officer for 
 the exercise of his discretion, is a felony, and for 
 an officer to receive a bribe is a felony; but the 
 party leader is under no legal prohibition against 
 receiving any consideration or acting upon any 
 personal interest in the exercise of his power, 
 which controls both the vote of the legislator and 
 the discretion of the executive. The only danger 
 he has to apprehend is that the voters of his party 
 may repudiate his candidates, and against that he 
 is measurably protected by the fact that such ac- 
 tion will be at the cost of putting the government 
 into the hands of those who would administer it 
 upon principles and according to policies which 
 the voters consider unsound and injurious. 
 
THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 91 
 
 Such a system is not essential to effective party v 
 organization. On the contrary, it tends to prevent 
 effective party organization; it tends to keep out 
 of the organization the men whose service would 
 be most effective, and to make more difficult the 
 work of the men who take part in the organization 
 with the real purpose of making it accomplish its 
 legitimate results. It tends to make an organiza- 
 tion which does not really represent the voters of 
 the party, and to leave the voters of the party 
 without any genuine representative organization. 
 It results in elections in which the voters of the 
 country have no opportunity to express by their 
 ballots their real choice of candidates or their real 
 opinions upon public questions. It weakens one 
 of the great agencies for carrying on a popular 
 government, and introduces an injurious imper- 
 fection into the method by which alone public 
 opinion can be made effective through govern- 
 mental machinery. 
 
 The whole system is pernicious and discredit- ^ 
 able to American citizenship. It ought to be done 
 away with and political parties ought to be brought 
 back to the sole performance of their proper f unc- ^ 
 tion as organizations for the promotion of prin- 
 
92 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 ciples and policies, free from the control of mere 
 office-trading combinations. 
 
 / It is, however, mere folly to say that the exist- 
 ence of such an evil furnishes a reason why edu- 
 cated, self-respecting Americans should not take 
 part in the work of the political parties with 
 which they vote. On the contrary, the existence 
 of the evil presents a manifest and urgent duty 
 to the conscience and patriotism of every compe- 
 tent American. 
 
 J The duty is to enter into the work of party ac- 
 tivity and help make the parly organization what 
 it ought to be. The duty rests upon each intel- 
 ligent citizen in his own community to incite the 
 voters of the party he believes in to take charge of 
 their own affairs, and to substitute party organiza- 
 tion and party leadership which is really represen- 
 tative of them in place of the party, organization 
 and the party leadership which are maintained by 
 the distribution of office for the sake of office. 
 
IV 
 
 THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 
 
 The third lecture of this series set forth the evils 
 resulting from the usurpation of party control by 
 ai...pier.a. pffic e^bartering combination which takes 
 the place of organization for legitimate party pur- 
 poses, and the citizen's duty to aid in doing away 
 with such usurpation. 
 
 Such a change is entirely practicable. To doubt ^ 
 that it can be made is to doubt the capacity of 
 our people for self-government, because the change 
 requires only such willingness to perform the du- 
 ties of citizenship as is essential to the successful 
 exercise of popular seK-govemment. It cannot 
 be produced suddenly or without systematic and 
 continuous effort, or by mere exhortation or pro- 
 test. It must come slowly, in the ordinary course ■~ 
 of political development. It cannot be expected 
 that the men who compose party organization will 
 become suddenly altruistic. The evil to be dealt 
 
 93 
 
94 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 with is a strong affirmative assertion of the self- 
 raterest of the old type of party organizers, and 
 it cannot be overcome by a mere negative. It must 
 be met by a stronger assertion of the more power- 
 ful interest of the party voters. Such a system is 
 not necessary to secure the filliug by a member of 
 the dominant party of every office the duties of 
 which bear any relation to the effectiveness of 
 party policy; on the contrary, it tends to the filling 
 of offices by men who are indifferent to party pol- 
 icy, and whose allegiance is solely to their own 
 
 J personal interest. The destruction of the system 
 will not exclude party workers from public office; 
 it will simply deprive them of their claim to pub- 
 lic office when they can not justify it on public 
 grounds. 
 
 -1 The obnoxious system already has been greatly 
 reduced in its scope and power. The modern 
 civil-service method of selection for appointment 
 has withdrawn from the bargain counter a great 
 mass of governmental offices and employments in- 
 dividually of minor importance but in the mass 
 of very great importance. The governments of 
 our insular possessions have been established and 
 maintained without any regard whatever to the 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 95 
 
 payment of political debts. JtsTo attention is paid 
 to party affiliation or service in appointments in 
 the military and naval services. Within the past 
 year the consular service has been brought under 
 new regulations, by which all the higher places 
 are filled by promotion on the basis of efficiency 
 as established in the service, and the lower posi- 
 tions are filled by original appointment upon thor- 
 ough examination. The fourth-class post-offices 
 have been brought under a new rule, which makes 
 the continuance of the office depend upon the 
 merit of the officer rather than upon political fa- 
 vor. Thus, the stock in trade of the office busi- 
 ness is being rapidly reduced. Throughout the 
 Federal service the theory of implied obligation 
 to pay political debts with offices is gradually and 
 very generally weakening and tending to disap- 
 pear. The widespread pressure for direct pri- 
 maries indicates a determination among party 
 voters to secure a real expression of their own will 
 in the selection of candidates. It needs only to 
 continue the process that is now going on in order 
 to free these great agencies of government from 
 the false organizations which have so long op- 
 pressed them, as the Old Man of the Sea on the 
 
96 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 neck of Sinbad; to make our party organizations 
 generally, as they already are in some places, 
 really representative; and to make party leader- 
 ship depend, as it does now in some States, upon 
 leadership of opinion, upon the confidence of the 
 community, upon political wisdom, upon superior 
 ability to assert and maintain the principles and 
 policies of the party. 
 
 V In the whole field of popular government I am 
 convinced that one of the plainest duties of citi- 
 zenship is hopefulness, and that pessimism is crim- 
 inal weakness. 
 
 If one is to judge the world and the conduct of 
 men by comparison with a standard of ideal per- 
 fection, of course everything will be found wrong. 
 If the question we ask is whether the world, or 
 any community in it, is good or bad, right or 
 wrong, we must recognize a painful degree of error 
 and selfishness, and injustice and cruelty, and in- 
 difference and ignorance. 
 
 ^ The true question, however, is not what the 
 world is, but what its tendencies are. Is it moving 
 toward better things, or worse? Is the level ris- 
 ing, or falling? Mark the condition and character 
 of civilized peoples in successive centuries or gen- 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 97 
 
 erations, and see whether liberty and justice and 
 righteousness have been gaining, or losing. See 
 whether education has gained ground, or lost; 
 whether men generally are more, or less intelli- 
 gent; whether they have grown more cruel, or more 
 kind-hearted; more selfish, or more regardful for 
 the rights of others; whether government is more 
 pure, or more corrupt; whether the laws are more, 
 or are less just — more, or less respected. Thus 
 you will learn whether to look to the future with 
 confidence and hope, or with distrust and with 
 forebodings. 
 
 You will find that such an inquiry yields a most 
 cheerful and encouraging response as to the con- 
 dition and probabilities of popular government. 
 
 There is not one element of character, of ca-\/ 
 pacity, or of practice going to make up what gov- 
 ernment ought to be in which there has not been 
 steady and great advance in the progressive devel- 
 opment of government by the people. 
 
 It is impossible to read an account of the life of 
 the people of any civilized country in any past cen- 
 tury without finding an amazing degree of cruelty, 
 of oppression, of immorality, of corruption, and 
 of class privilege regardless of common right, 
 
98 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 which has now been substantially done away 
 with. 
 
 To go no farther back than the early years of 
 the last century in England, the reform of the 
 criminal law, under which more than two hundred 
 offences were punished by death; the struggle for 
 Catholic emancipation; and the revolution in par- 
 liamentary representation, which destroyed the rot- 
 ten borough system and transferred power from 
 the landed aristocracy to the great middle class in 
 England, mark the positions from which popular 
 government has advanced. 
 
 If we go back to the early days of the eighteenth 
 century John Morley says: 
 
 A candid and particular examination of the political 
 history of that time, so far as the circumstances are 
 known to us, leads to the conclusion that Walpole was 
 the least unscrupulous of the men of that time. 
 
 Yet he says : 
 
 * * * That Walpole practised what would now be 
 regarded as parliamentary corruption is undeniable. 
 But political conduct must be judged in the light of 
 political history. Not very many years before Walpole 
 a man was expected to pay some thousands of pounds 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 99 
 
 for being made Secretary of State, just as down to our 
 own time he paid for being made colonel of a regiment. 
 Many years after Walpole, Lord North used to job the 
 loans, and it was not until the younger Pitt set a 
 loftier example that any minister saw the least harm 
 in keeping a portion of a public loan in his own hands 
 for distribution among his private friends. For a 
 minister to buy the vote of a Member of Parliament 
 was not then thought much more shameful than almost 
 down to our own time it has been thought shameful 
 for a Member of Parliament to buy the vote of an 
 elector. 
 
 Lecky says of Walpole and his times: 
 
 He governed by means of an assembly which was sat- 
 urated with corruption, and he fully acquiesced in its 
 conditions and resisted every attempt to improve it. 
 He appears to have cordially accepted the maxim that 
 government must be carried on by corruption or by 
 force, and he deliberately made the former the basis of 
 his rule. * * * The systematic corruption of Members 
 of Parliament is said to have begun under Charles II, 
 in whose reign it was practised to the largest extent. 
 It was continued under his successor, and the number 
 of scandals rather increased than diminished after the 
 Revolution. Sir J. Trevor — a Speaker of the House 
 of Commons — ^had been voted guilty of a high crime 
 and misdemeanor for receiving a bribe of 1,000 guineas 
 
100 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 from the city of London. A Secretary of the Treasury 
 — Mr. Guy — ^had been sent to the Tower for taking a 
 bribe to induce him to pay the arrears due a regiment. 
 Lord Ranelagh, a paymaster of the forces, had been ex- 
 pelled for defalcations in his office. In order to facili- 
 tate the passing of the South Sea Bill, it was proved 
 that large amounts of fictitious stock had been created, 
 distributed among, and accepted by, ministers of the 
 Crown. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was 
 expelled, sent to the Tower, and fined. The yoimger 
 Craggs, who was Secretary of State, probably only 
 escaped by a timely death. His father, the Postmaster- 
 General, avoided inquiry by suicide, and grave suspi- 
 cion rested upon Charles Stanhope, the Secretary of 
 the Treasury, and upon Sunderland, the Prime Min- 
 ister. When such instances could be cited from among 
 the leaders of politics, it is not surprising that among 
 the undistinguished Members corruption was notorious. 
 
 Lecky says, also, of the same period : 
 
 The magistrates were in many cases not only notori- 
 ously ignorant and inefficient, but also what was termed 
 " trading justices," men of whom Fielding said that 
 " they were never indifferent in a cause but when they 
 could get nothing on either side." The daring and the 
 number of robbers increased till London hardly resem- 
 bled a civilized town. " Thieves and robbers," said 
 Smollett, speaking of 1730, "were now become more 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 101 
 
 desperate and savage than they had ever appeared since 
 mankind were civilized." The mayor and aldermen of 
 London in 1744 drew up an address to the King, in 
 which they stated that " divers confederacies of great 
 numbers of evil-disposed persons, armed with blud- 
 geons, pistols, cutlasses, and other dangerous weapons, 
 infest not only the private lanes and passages, but like- 
 wise the public streets and places of usual concourse, 
 and commit most daring outrages upon the persons of 
 Tour Majesty's good subjects whose affairs oblige them 
 to pass through the streets, by robbing and wounding 
 them, and these acts are frequently perpetrated at such 
 times as were heretofore deemed hours of security." 
 * * * The more experienced robbers for a time com- 
 pletely overawed the authorities. " Officers of justice," 
 wrote Fielding, "have owned to me that they have 
 passed by such, with warrants in their pockets against 
 them, without daring to apprehend them; and, indeed, 
 they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves 
 to sure destruction; for it is a melancholy truth that 
 at this very day a rogue no sooner gives the alarm 
 within certain purlieus than twenty or thirty armed 
 villains are found ready to come to his assistance." 
 
 At the same period the country roads of Eng- 
 land were beset by highwaymen. Dick Turpin, 
 Jonathan Wild, and Jack Shepard shared the ad- 
 miration and sympathy of the people with the dar- 
 
102 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 ing smugglers who waged contimial war on all the 
 coasts against the collectors of the Government 
 revenue. The customs of the country permitted, 
 and the laws did not prevent, the plundering of all 
 wrecks upon the coasts. The jails were filthy 
 breeding places of pestilence. There was but lit- 
 tle systematic effort for the relief of the insane, 
 the diseased, the injured, or the helpless through 
 infancy or age; and there was but little effort 
 toward education or enlightenment outside of the 
 fortunate few who made up the landed aristocracy. 
 
 When we reflect that these conditions existed so 
 late as during the lives of the men who signed the 
 American Declaration of Independence, and draw 
 a comparison with the conditions existing to-day 
 through the development of the same political in- 
 stitutions, under the control of the same race, in 
 England, in the United States, in Canada and Aus- 
 tralia, we cannot fail to realize that the evolu- 
 Vtion of self-government has been accompanied by 
 amazing progress, not only in material prosperity, 
 but in honesty, in humanity, and in the capacity to 
 maintain order and do justice that leads to the 
 higher intellectual and spiritual life of mankind. 
 
 In our own country we may take for comparison 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 103 
 
 the shameful breach, of the terms of Burgoyne's 
 surrender, the refusal of the States to give effect 
 to the provisions of the treaty of peace with Eng- 
 land for the protection of the loyalists; the impo- 
 tence of the Continental Congress, which Charles 
 Lee described as " a stable of stupid cattle that 
 stumbled at every step; " the jealousies, the petti- 
 ness, and the narrow prejudice that hampered and 
 almost ruined the work of Washington; the inca- 
 pacity of administration to which, and not to pov- 
 erty, was due the distress at Valley Eorge, where 
 the footsteps of our poor soldiers could be traced 
 by the blood on the snow, not because there were 
 no shoes and stockings, but because shoes and 
 stockings were not delivered where they were 
 needed. 
 
 The humiliating experiences of the second war 
 with England revealed inefficiency and incompe- 
 tency of Federal administration that would be lu- 
 dicrous if it were not lamentable. 
 
 It would not be possible now to elect such a1 
 man as Aaron Burr Vice-President of the United 
 States; or to leave in command of the army a man 
 like Wilkinson, who was known to be in receipt 
 of an annual payment of two thousand dollars 
 
104 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 from Spain while we were in controversy with that 
 country over the possession of Florida, and whose 
 friends defended him by the assertion that while 
 he took the money he did not mean to give Spain 
 any equivalent for it. 
 
 Such a condition of affairs as prevailed in our 
 Congress at the time of the Credit MobUier busi- 
 ness could not exist now. The atmosphere which 
 existed in Washington at that time made it pos- 
 sible for a group of men, most distinguished and 
 powerful among the public servants of the nation, 
 to purchase or accept gifts of securities of corpora- 
 tions upon whose interests they were to vote in 
 one or the other House of Congress. The whole 
 tone of the public service was such that their moral 
 vision was obscured. The same men to-day would 
 find it impossible to do what they did then, because 
 there is a clearer air and a better recognized stand- 
 ard of official morality. The conditions which 
 made it possible for the unfortunate Belknap, as 
 Secretary of War, to sell appointments, and for 
 the trusted official aides of the President to be 
 smirched by the whiskey frauds of Grant's second 
 Administration, happily no longer exist, and no 
 longer can exist. 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 105 
 
 The very nature of the evils which we are now 
 most earnestly calling upon the Government to 
 remedy is an evidence of the advance in govern- 
 mental ethics and efficiency, for those evils con- 
 sist very largely of practices which formerly passed 
 unnoticed, while still greater evils engrossed the 
 efforts for reform. 
 
 A fair illustration of this is to be found in an 
 old statute of the State of New York. It is en- 
 titled " An Act instituting a lottery for the pro- 
 motion of literature and for other purposes," 
 passed April 13, 1814. It begins: 
 
 Whereas, well-regulated seminaries of learning are of 
 immense importance to every country, and tend espe- 
 cially, by the diffusion of science and the promotion of 
 morals, to defend and perpetuate the liberties of a free 
 state: Therefore, 
 
 § 1. Be it enacted by the People of the State of New 
 York, represented in Senate and Assembly, That there 
 shall be raised by lottery, in successive classes, a siun 
 equal in amount to the several appropriations made by 
 this act. 
 
 The act then proceeds to appropriate the sum 
 of one hundred thousand dollars for the benefit of 
 Union College, forty thousand dollars for the 
 
106 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 benefit of Hamilton College, forty thousand dol- 
 lars for the Asbury African Church in the city of 
 'New York for the purpose of enabling them to 
 discharge a debt and to establish a school, and 
 thirty thousand dollars for the College of Physi- 
 cians and Surgeons; and it makes certain provi- 
 sions for the benefit of Columbia College. 
 
 There was a tradition among American college 
 men in my youth that old Doctor Eliphalet Nott — 
 clarum et venerabile nomen — bought out the inter- 
 ests of the other institutions under this statute and 
 made much money for Union College out of the 
 lottery, doubtless greatly to " the diffusion of 
 science and the promotion of morals." 
 
 I have often thought in recent years, when I 
 have seen very good people wringing their hands 
 over the failure of government to wholly suppress 
 gambling in its various forms, that a reference to 
 this standard of the year 1814 showed the diffi- 
 culty to be, not the decadence of government, but 
 the advance of morals; not the failure of govern- 
 ment to perform its duty as well as that duty was 
 once performed, but the greater burden which we 
 are constantly putting upon the Government to 
 make its enforced restrictions upon a minority of 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 107 
 
 the people keep pace with the voluntary self-con- 
 trol of the majority of the people. 
 
 Many illustrations of the same process can be 
 found. The objectionable railroad practices which 
 are now so widely and justly condemned, and 
 which furnish so fertile a source of political 
 discussion, are not new practices; they are old 
 practices which formerly passed sub silencio. The 
 railroad rebates which are now forbidden by law, 
 and for which great corporations are being in- 
 dicted and convicted, are merely a form of the 
 discriminatory rates which once prevailed without 
 objection. Thirty years ago all railroads gave 
 special rates to shippers. That was the existing 
 form of competition, and competition not only was 
 permitted, but it was enjoined by law, and any 
 attempt to restrain it was, aa it now is, unlawful. 
 It was by giving special rates that railroad com- 
 panies iaduced people to build factories and pack- 
 ing houses and elevators and a great variety of 
 other business establishments along the lines of 
 their roads; that was the way they built up their 
 business and built up the country through which 
 the roads ran. In recent years, however, the peo- 
 ple of the country have come to an appreciation of 
 
108 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 the idea that these great public agencies, which 
 have conferred upon them the right of eminent 
 domain and perpetual franchises to enable them to 
 do public service, cannot give special rates to some 
 
 ■^ men without doing injustice to other men; and 
 that the common right of the people demands 
 equality of facility and of cost in the transporta- 
 tion which the railroads are bound to furnish, and 
 condemns special privileges to one as against an- 
 
 I other. The lesson of all this is that the prosecu- 
 tions and convictions for violation of the anti-re- 
 bate law — things which were never heard of thirty 
 years ago — are not evidence that we are growing 
 worse, but evidence that we are growing better; 
 "^ that our Government is applying a higher standard 
 of justice in the control of public utilities. 
 
 The same is true of the management of corpora- 
 tions and the manipulation of securities, to which 
 attention has recently been called sharply by the 
 testimony before the Interstate Commerce Com- 
 mission regarding the reorganization of the Chi- 
 cago and Alton Railroad. Thirty or forty years 
 ago, when the management of the Erie Railroad 
 and the Atlantic and Great Western and the 
 Union Pacific Railroad attracted public attention, 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 109 
 
 the things done by corporate managers were so 
 much worse that the Chicago and Alton affair 
 would not have received any notice at all. The 
 railroad wrecker was a common type of railroad 
 manager. A large part of our people assumed that 
 to be a permissible game to play, and the rules 
 of the game did not go much beyond the exclusion 
 of ordinary forgery, larceny, and fraud at common 
 law. Since then a higher standard is asserting it- 
 self, which recognizes the scrupulous obligation 
 of trusteeship on the part of the railroad manager 
 and promoter, and under that standard much is 
 properly condemned which before would have 
 passed without notice. It is perfectly safe to as- 
 sert that the standard of probity and fidelity 
 among the corporation managers of the country 
 is higher now than it ever has been before; and 
 yet there is more complaint now than there ever 
 has been before, because our people demand that ^ 
 a more rigid rule of morality shall be applied by 
 statute and by the courts and in administrative 
 supervision than they formerly considered nec- 
 essary. 
 
 The prosecutions which the Departments of the 
 Interior and of Justice have been conducting 
 
110 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 against the land thieves in the West — the men 
 who have been appropriating to themselves the 
 public timber lands and grazing lands and coal 
 lands — have awakened intense indignation among 
 the defendants and their friends, because the 
 wrong was so inveterate that they had come to 
 look upon it as a right. For more than a genera- 
 tion it had been regarded as a natural and imob- 
 jectionable thing to get possession of the public 
 land by hook or by crook; and when the officers of 
 the law presented and enforced the novel idea that 
 it was as dishonest to deprive the Government of 
 its land illegally as to deprive an individual of his 
 land illegally, it seemed a cruel injustice. There 
 
 iwas simply a little advance of the moral standard 
 which gave life to laws that had been dead before. 
 The whole system of the Federal Government has 
 been lifted up to a higher plane of clearer moral 
 vision, just as the whole system of British admin- 
 istration has been lifted up since the corrupt days 
 of Walpole. 
 
 ^ The elective franchise has become a more hon- 
 est expression of popular will. Only men who are 
 now growing old can remember, and history has 
 not yet adequately recorded, the gross frauds, the 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT HI 
 
 tricks and devices, and acts of violence which pre- 
 vented fair elections forty-odd years ago, before 
 the Federal election laws of 1870 and 1871 — laws 
 which have passed out of existence, but have left 
 their impress upon the legislation of the States of 
 the Union. In those days, before there was any 
 registration of voters, the wayfaring man could 
 vote the resident out of house and home, and the 
 count of votes was at the mercy of anybody who 
 could succeed in buying a local election officer. 
 The ballots with which to vote were furnished only 
 by the local party organization, and were printed 
 and folded and bunched and distributed by the 
 workers of each party. I have known the voters 
 of a Congressional district to go to the polls on 
 election day and find all the Congressional ballots 
 distributed for one candidate, and none to be ob- 
 tained for the other candidate, because the local 
 leader on one side had been bought by the other 
 side. I have seen a file of men marched out of a 
 tramp lodging-house with their ballots held aloft 
 in one hand continuously in plain sight until they 
 had deposited them in the ballot box, in order to 
 give the necessary evidence that they were voting 
 according to the contract under which they were 
 
112 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 immediately thereafter to be paid. Now, the sys- 
 'l tern of registration and the revision of the registry 
 lists are substantially eflFective to confine voting to 
 the qualified voters. The ballot is furnished by 
 the State; the method of voting upon the Austra- 
 lian ballot ia all its forms, by marking it in secret, 
 makes bribery uncertain and unprofitable, because 
 it is impossible to tell how any one votes, and the 
 man who would take money for his vote cannot be 
 depended upon to vote as he has agreed. Both 
 the voting and the counting are protected by ade- 
 quate supervision and full opportunity for watch- 
 ers in the interest of the candidates and of the 
 different parties. Tbe change from dishonest and 
 unfair elections to honest and fair elections is fun- 
 damental to the successful working of popular gov- 
 ernment and is in the course of ordinary and nat- 
 ural political development. It is the same kind 
 of change which has taken place in England since 
 the days before the Reform Bill of 1832; and that 
 J it is permanently effective we may be sure, because 
 it is the natural course of political development 
 here, as it has been in England. 
 
 I need not describe the growth, the maintenance, 
 the systematic regulation, and efficiency of public 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 113 
 
 and private charities, of public and private institu- 
 tions for education, for the diffusion of knowledge, 
 for the prosecution of scientific research and ex- 
 periment, and for the encouragement of art — ^the 
 enormous sums of money applied to these pur- 
 poses, the active and unwearying efforts of mul- 
 titudes of men and women devoted to them; for 
 these are a part of the daily life of every Ameri- 
 can community. They show an advance in public 
 intelligence and moral qualities working through 
 that associated effort which is essential to govern- 
 ment, and to which government is essential; and 
 they justify the expectation of continued advance- 
 ment in the future. 
 
 The fact that American popular government 
 now has serious and difficult questions to deal with 
 is no just cause for distrust. Government always > 
 has difficult questions to deal with, and we are 
 assured by the advance already made of democ- 
 racy's competency in the future. The great ques-v 
 tions of capital and labor, of concentrated corpor- 
 ate wealth, and of diffused and general well-being, 
 are merely natural incidents to progress. 
 
 The inventions and discoveries of the last cen- 
 tury, the applications of science to useful arts. 
 
114 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 have enormously increased the productive power 
 and therefore the wealth of mankind. By the use 
 of machinery and newly devised processes the 
 same number of men can produce, in manufacture 
 and in agriculture, a far greater quantity and 
 variety of the objects which contribute to the ne- 
 cessities, the comfort, and the pleasures of man 
 than in former years. Unsuspected riches of the 
 earth have been revealed and appropriated. Facil- 
 ities for transportation have given a value to prod- 
 ucts which would once have been worthless be- 
 cause not needed at the point of production and 
 not available for use elsewhere. 
 
 We are now witnessing the natural and inev- 
 itable struggle for a fair division of this new and 
 ^rapidly increasing wealth. The ideal distribution 
 would be that the inventor and discoverer, the or- 
 ganizing and directing intelligence and energy, 
 should have a fair share for their contribution; 
 that the capitalist should have a fair share for the 
 use of his money and the risk which he incurs, 
 measured by the chances of loss which so fre- 
 quently turn against him; that the wageworker 
 should have his fair share in increase of wages and 
 decrease in hours of labor, because he produces 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 115 
 
 so much more by his laboi* than he formerly 
 did; and that the consumers should have their 
 fair share in decrease of price of the objects which 
 are produced with so much less expense and 
 effort. 
 
 It is inevitable that each one of these classes 
 should differ from all the others as to the share to 
 which it is entitled, and that there should be a con- 
 tinual struggle between them in the process of ad- 
 justment leading to a fair division. That process^/ 
 and that struggle will continue so long as wealth 
 continues to increase. 
 
 One inevitable incident of this process is that at 
 the outset some of these classes will get more than 
 their share, and these are usually the organizer and 
 the capitalist, because they have the advantage of 
 initial position in respect of each new increment 
 of wealth; so that the struggle ordinarily takes the 
 form of demands by the wageworkers and the con- 
 sumers to increase their shares of the new wealth 
 at the expense of the capitalists and the organizers. 
 Another incident of the process is that the laws 
 framed to meet one set of conditions are constantly 
 being found to need modification in order to in- 
 sure just distribution of wealth and just rewards 
 
116 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 of intelligence, skill, and industry under the new 
 conditions brought about by industrial progress. 
 We are constantly finding that laws formerly ade- 
 quate, when applied to new conditions permit some 
 men to get lawfully more than is fair, while others 
 cannot get lawfully as much as their fair share 
 out of the industrial activity to which the whole 
 community contributes in varying ways and de- 
 1 grees. For example, the laws relating to corpor- 
 ■^ ate organization, capitalization, consolidation, re- 
 organization, and extension, which formerly served 
 their purpose very well, are now seen to make it 
 possible for some men who get into corporate con- 
 trol to make enormous fortunes without appar- 
 ently violating any law, but for which they render 
 I really no return whatever to the wealth of the com- 
 ^ munity. Morally, the action of these men does not 
 necessarily differ in kind from the action which 
 always has prevailed in the business world, where 
 men determine the price of their commodities 
 rather by what they will bring in the market than 
 by any estimate of the good they will do the pur- 
 chasers. But these great transactions call atten- 
 tion sharply to the fact that the legal rules gov- 
 erning corporate business require to be changed 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 117 
 
 so that unconscionable advantages cannot be law- 
 fully obtained; and moreover such transactions 
 are often accompanied by such suppressions of full 
 information and disregard of fiduciary obligations 
 as to show that the law needs to be strengthened 
 in those directions. 
 
 The facilities of transportation and communica- 
 tion which enable modem business to spread over 
 a great expanse of territory have made it possible 
 for so-called trusts and combinations to be made 
 for the purpose of driving out competitors, restrict- 
 ing production, and increasing prices, for which 
 the old and simple rules designed to prevent en- 
 grossing, forestalling, and regrating in the English 
 rural community are quite inadequate; and new 
 laws and new agencies for their enforcement are 
 necessary to accomplish the same results. 
 
 On the other hand, labor organizations, designed^ 
 for the just purpose of securing fair treatment as 
 to employment, wages, and hours and conditions 
 of work, are on -their part endeavoring to put up 
 prices, restrict production, and drive out competi- 
 tion by stringent rules which prohibit any member 
 from doing more than a specified amount of work 
 each day under penalty of expulsion, and which 
 
118 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 prohibit the employment of any one not a member 
 of the union under penalty of a strike. 
 
 All of these things are but incidents of the 
 process of adjustment in the division of the new 
 wealth; some of them come from attempts to get 
 what is fair and some of them from attempts to 
 get more than is fair. Our popular government is 
 dealing with them assiduously, by awakened public 
 opinion gradually crystallizing into laws adapted 
 to meet the new conditions. This process involves 
 A no new principles, but merely the adaptation of 
 the same old principles of law with which our 
 fathers were familiar. The things which are hap- 
 pening and the necessity for continual reform of 
 law and administration argue no decline in busi- 
 ness morality and no inadequacy of our political 
 system to continue its efficacy and its improvement. 
 
 There is occasionally undue excitement; but it 
 is temporary, and whenever it is seen to approach 
 the verge of destructive action it is promptly 
 calmed and restrained by the sober judgment of 
 the people. 
 
 Some workingmen's associations hold meetings 
 
 c, where violent speeches are made and carry red flags 
 
 in processions ; but so far, whenever a square issue 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 119 
 
 is raised among any great and widespread body 
 of laboring men between anarchy and socialism on 
 one side and the principles which underlie the 
 American social and industrial system on the 
 other, the decision is in favor of good A merican- 
 ism. The Secretary of Commerce and Labor in- 
 forms me that within the last dozen years the 
 percentage of socialists in the labor organizations 
 of the United States has decreased from about 
 thirty-three per cent to about eight per cent. I do 
 not know to what extent this has been by change 
 within the labor organizations, or to what extent 
 by separation of socialists from the organizations. 
 However it has come about it indicates that so far 
 the sober judgment of the great mass of the wage- 
 workers of the United States is in favor of the 
 conditions of their present prosperity as against 
 socialism. 
 
 In considering the efficiency of democratic in- 
 stitutions we must remember the millions of immi- 
 grants who have come to us. Americans acquired 
 habits of self-control and political capacity from 
 several centuries of self-government in the Ameri- 
 can colonies and in the United States down to the 
 middle of the nineteenth century, and from many 
 
120 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 centuries of political growth in England before the 
 colonization of America. The vast mass of our 
 immigrants, however, have come from countries in 
 which there was but little political training or de- 
 velopment among the people.. Since 1850 over 
 twenty-one million immigrants have entered the 
 United States. Most of these have come with the 
 inherited tendencies, the traditions, and the ac- 
 quired habits of hopeless submission to a superior 
 external power, or of violent struggle against it, 
 and with little, if any, preparation either of habit 
 or understanding, for the performance of duties 
 of government themselves; and they have had to 
 be educated in mind and in character for self- 
 government. 
 
 \ By far the greater number of the violent and 
 extreme agitators among the laboring men in the 
 United States are the comparatively newly arrived 
 immigrants, whose habits of thought and emo- 
 tional attitude have been acquired in their former 
 homes. I believe it to be true that, making due 
 allowance for some individuals of the crank va- 
 riety, and for some individuals who are really 
 ordinary criminals with the shrewdness to carry 
 on their war against society under color of philo- 
 
 "* Bophical theories, the tendency of the newcomer 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 121 
 
 to violent socialistic or anarchistic denunciation is 
 in inverse proportion to the amount of liberty he 
 enjoyed before he came to this country; that it 
 decreases in direct proportion to the length of time 
 that he lives here and the extent to which he min- 
 gles with and becomes a part of the community; 
 and that it tends strongly to disappear with the 
 second generation which has had the opportunity 
 to take in the impressions and influences of Ameri- 
 can life and education during the impressionable 
 years of childhood. Few things in history are 
 more impressive and extraordinary than the force 
 and effect of American life and institutions upon 
 aU these millions of people who have come from all 
 parts of the earth, sprung from all races, speaking 
 all languages, believing in all religions, and bring- 
 ing with them all kinds of inherited characteristics 
 and tendencies. 
 
 Underlying our just hopes for the future effi- 
 ciency and progress of our institutions lie the 
 sound and wholesome character of our people as 
 shown in their daily life ; the widely diffused in- 
 terest in the prosperity of the country shown in 
 the comfort of living and the opportunities for 
 advancement among the people of all callings down 
 to the humblest; the widespread interest to main- 
 
122 THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT 
 
 tain the rights of property, among the owners of 
 the farms, which according to the last census 
 numbered 5,739,657, and among the savings-bank 
 depositors, who in the year 1906 numbered 8,027,- 
 192, having an aggregate deposit of $3,482,137,- 
 198 ; the continual process of education under 
 which during the school year ending June, 1906, 
 there were instructed in the schools of the United 
 States 18,434,847 scholars ; the vast influence pro- 
 ceeding from our institutions of higher education 
 — ^the universities and colleges and professional 
 and technological schools — in which during the 
 past year there were 210,333 students; and the 
 freedom of religion under which all churches, 
 separate from the state, prosper according to the 
 measure in which they meet the religious needs 
 of voluntary worship. More than all, our hopes 
 must depend upon the general and active partici- 
 pation of the whole governing body of the Ameri- 
 can democracy in working out the problems and 
 applying the principles of government with wis- 
 dom, with integrity, with just and kindly consid- 
 eration for the rights of others — every citizen 
 doing his full and manly duty for his country. 
 The country's future, with its blessings or its 
 
THE GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 123 
 
 misfortunes, with its happiness or its misery, its 
 progress or its decadence, depends upon all of us, 
 and it depends upon each one of us. 
 
 I commend to you as a guide to your duty 
 of citizenship these words of Lecky, the historian 
 — ^not a rhetorician, but a discriminating and 
 thoughtful student : 
 
 All civic virtue, all the heroism and self-sacrifice of 
 patriotism spring ultimately from the habit men ac- 
 quire of regarding their nation as a great organic 
 whole, identifying themselves with its fortunes in the 
 past as in the present, and looking forward anxiously 
 to its future destinies. When the members of any na- 
 tion have come to regard their country as nothing more 
 than the plot of ground on which they reside, and their 
 government as a mere organization for providing po- 
 lice or contracting treaties; when they have ceased to 
 entertain any warmer feelings for one another than 
 those which private interest, or personal friendship, or 
 a mere general philanthropy, may produce, the moral 
 dissolution of that nation is at hand. Even in the 
 order of material interests the well-being of each gen- 
 eration is in a great degree dependent upon the for- 
 bearance, self-sacrifice, and providence of those who 
 have preceded it, and civic virtues can never flourish 
 in a generation which thinks only of itself.