THE TEACHING OF AMERICA

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume I, Issue 25, 19 December 1861, Page 3

THE TEACHING OF AMERICA

The American disruption will have important results upon many different interests of the family of mankind. It will alter the balance of power the future of slavery, the course of trade, the tendency of emigration. But one of its most curious results, which it is already producing before our eyes, is the revolution which it must effect in political science. There is scarcely any one among us—Tory, Liberal or Radical—whom it has not startled and some of whose political axioms it has not rudely shattered. Let any man carry his recollection back for fifteen or twenty years, or even to the spring of 1860 and try to recal the views which he then took of tendencies of popular government. There was not much difference of opinion as to the outline of the facts, though they were painted in different epithets. A Tory would have told you that democratic Governments were stingy and penny-wise in their public expenditure, that their liberty degenerated into liscense, that their souls were engrossed by the sodid thoughts of commerce, and that they were incapable of rising to the appreciation of national grandeur and military fame. A Radical would have eulogized their value for peace, retrenchment, and reform, and their superiority to the bloody and costly prejudices of the past. Both would have agreed that they were essentially repugnant to large expenditure, and to military armaments, and to any encroachment by the Government upon the citizen’s perfect liberty. And the peculiarities they would have specially predicated of popular Governments sprang from Anglo-Saxon stock. Of recent years, the course of events in France has infused doubts into many minds; but the eccentricities of the French character are so great that it has always been repudiated as a sample of the other races of the world. All these political data must be rubbed out now. We have seen the most popular Government of the earth in one of those crises which Governments are made to meet, and we have seen how she behaves in the storm. Her expenditure has become more reckless than that of Austria; and all the evil spirits which plunge nations into war, and disguise themselves under the tinsel of military fame, have gone into her, and possessed her even more completely than they possess France. But this is not the worst. One by one, all the outward signs which betray absolutism in the Old World are showing themselves in her administration. As soon as real danger touches her, the surface gloss of liberty fades off, and the latent image of despotism develops itself with startling distinctness. One coup d'etat following another—powers seized by the Executive which are unknown to the Constitution—local authorities swept away en masse because their proceedings were distasteful to the central Government—passports rigorously exacted—all securities for the liberty of the citizen utterly set aside —men imprisoned on suspicion—their letters seized and published—newspapers stopped, confiscated, overaw r ed —these are the first results, when it is put to the test, of the vaunted freedom of the model Republic. Surely we have heard this tale before. There is nothing novel in the melancholy catalogue. Warsaw, Pesth, Paris, Naples, could give a very similar list of measures to which their Executive had thought it necessary in moments of public disturbance to resort. Those measures have been freely, and most justly branded as tyrannical. Our sympathy has been moved for the victims of them, and our foreign policy has been influenced by our hatred of their authors. And, following the imperfect political philosophy of our time, we Englishmen have confidently imputed them to the lack of popular iustitutions, and have fancied that, under any form of popular government, they would have been impossible. But now it is clear our political scieuce must be revised. We cannot afford to make light of popular government, for we in England have tasted it, and know how potently it fosters every kind of progress. But it is evidently only one among many ingredients of of that kind of government which brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number. A body of representatives sitting at the seat of government, though elected by the freest and the largest suffrage, are no more guarantees for the freedom of thought and person than a Divan or a Council of State.

Something else, which America does not possess, is required to secure these blessings. We must recast our political classification. It is idle, after the experiences of this year, to range the absolute Governments on one side and the popular Governments on the other. The race of political detenus and martyrs for opinion are now no special growth of a monarchical soil. New Silvio Pellicos, imprisoned by a Republican President in defiance of Republican laws, and with the full acquiescence of a free Assembly elected by universal suffrage, are accumulating a prisoners experiences in Fort La Fayette. The post of the United States is as insecure as the post of France. The press of New' England is gagged and fettered as heavily as the press of Paris, though by a coarser and more inhuman mechanism. The very telegraph offices—nay even the pockets of private messengers are illegally plundered for the purpose of furnishing the Government with pretexts for illegal imprisonments and confiscations. Extension of popular power has been warranted elsewhere as a cure for all these maladies of the body politic; but the nostrum is inapplicable here, where the extension of popular power has gone so far that it can go no further. Clearly, the panacea has broken down. The philosopher’s stone of our political alchemy has turned nothing but cinders out of the crucible. The weary search for a political ideal must be commenced afresh.

In that reconstruction of political philosophy which the American calamities are likely to inaugurate, the value of the popular element will he reduced to its due proportions. Its presence in a constitution will be counted as only one, among many conditions of success. The trueguaranteeoffreedorawillhelooked for more in the equilibrium of classes than in the equality of individuals. The “ Secessionists” who founded the American constitutions started from the assumption that ail the political evils which afflict humanity come from the unchecked dominion of one man over other men. But they never carried their reasoning so far as to perceive the evils which flow from the unchecked dominion of one class over other classes. All their ingenuity was exhausted in devising securities against the independent usurpation of the President or the Congress. It never occurred to them to provide securities against his conspiring with the majority of the citizens to invade the rights of the minority. They lived in an age of philosophical dreaming, in which to suppose that the people could do wrong -was treason against the perfectibility of man. We shared something of the samedreaminEngland. Fortunately, we were provided with a constitution which had grown up under the care of many Venerations of statemen who experience of human life had left them in a more cynicial frame of mind Under the shadow of the institutions they bequeathed, our dreaming has not been hurtful. At least, we are thoroughly awakened now. Experience had gradully disabused us of many .delusions respecting the results of political equality. We had most of us arrived at the conviction that financial probity, commercial freedom, and popular respect for law were not amongst its most conspicuous results. We have now by a rather more sudden process, discovered that personal private property local franchises the freedom of the press, and the supremacy of law over the Executive, are equally alien to its genius. We may hope, at last, that the delusive confusion between freedom and democracy is finally banished from the minds of Englishmen. With the example of America before us, it will not he easy to forget that the tyranny of one, whether it be of an individual or a class, is always alike deadly to a nation’s liberties and peace.