Modern political institutions
Baldwin, Simeon Eben, 1840-1927
. -v ^^ c * ^ . ^ . ,^ ,0- „ ■> '■• 0 , Oo. ^0• C 0' 0 o. ■V ' V ' _»«. ,0 o. x*^ * 8 1 ^ ,'^-' z r >^ ss-., -/>£"'/ %f -\-»^ '"^ <?/ a"^ c° '« c>. %-,'Xi s^^ ^^. ,0o^ Modern Political Institutions Modern Political Institutions By Simeon E.' Baldwin, LL.D, President of the American Social Science Association formerly President of the American Bar Association and of the New Haven Colony Historical Society Boston Little, Brown, and Company 1898 ^ Copyright, 1898, By Simeon E. Baldwin. All rights reserved. ' X .1-5 5 TWO COPIES RECEIVFO. Hittbetsttg i^wss: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. ^898. TO WILLIAM KNEELAND TOWNSEND, D.C.L. DISTRICT JUDGE FOR THE DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT, PHELPS PROFESSOR OF LAW IN THE YALE LAW SCHOOL, ONCE MY PUPIL, LONG MY ASSOCIATE, ALWAYS MY FRIEND, THIS WORK IS DEDICATED. V CONTENTS. Political institutions rest on popular assent. They must have been tested by long use, and not found wanting. They must seem part of the natural order of things to those whom they affect; and nothing seems natural to any man into which, as part of his earliest surroundings, he was not born and bred. Such there are, native to the nineteenth century. It came into existence when they were already estab- lished, and it accepted them, if not without a question, yet at least with the presumption in their favor. It has added to them others, akin in character, and to the second and third generation of men which it has produced, these too have been familiar and cherished from earliest childhood. It is of institutions of our own time, institutions which became such by the recognition and approval of our own century, or are contending for that of the twentieth, that this volume is designed to speak. And what, taking the term in this sense, are the chief among modern political institutions? Any answer that can be given must be largely a matter of individual opinion. I shall venture to state them, as they appear to me, in the order of their importance. INTRODUCTION 3 The foundation of all government on the consent of a majority of the people. Religious liberty. The written constitution as the supreme law. The protection by law of the individual against the State. The protection by law of the individual against himself. The combination of political absolutism with democracy. The secret ballot. Simpler and surer methods of legal procedure. Freedom of incorporation under general laws. Minority representation in office. The regulation of succession to the dead in the interest of the State. International arbitration. To these I would add, for the United States, the Monroe Doctrine. Political institutions come unheralded and unnamed. They defy close classification. It is hard even to de- fine what manner of thing they are.^ A law may 1 One may be warned against the attempt by the definition of a legal institution recently essayed by a scholarly writer on the law of Corporations, in the following words : — " The term legal institutions connotes a body of legal rules in their manifestation in legal relations between persons of whom certain correlated conditions of fact are predicable." (Taylor on Corpora- tions, § 24.) The hardest things to define are, happily, those which are so well understood that definition is unnecessary, except as a scholastic exer- cise. I once spent towards half a day with two friends in discussing the proper definition of " a stone." We failed to frame any that could pretend to exactitude, but nevertheless, in common with everybody 4 INTRODUCTION serve as their starting-point, but it can be nothing more. That only can be called an institution which has fastened itself upon the community, and sunk its hold deep into the heart and life of the people. No institution can be called great which has not thus be- come a part of the political conceptions and existence of more lands than one. In the brief list which has been given, there may be some which have less right to recognition than others that will occur to the thoughtful reader. There are some which loom up more boldly before the American than they may be- fore the European. I believe, however, none have been included which do not fairly belong to the do- main of the universal in modern state-craft. Each but the last has already been transplanted far, and each is of a kind to root in any soil. Of the dozen which have been named, there are several of which little will be said. These are the best and most famihar. They speak for themselves ; and more consideration has seemed due to those which appear open to just criticism, or are the growth of comparatively recent years. Several of the chapters which follow treat of insti- tutions which I had made, in previous years, the sub- ject of public addresses, and my views are often expressed in the language employed on those occa- sions. I am sensible that such words may have a warmth of tone that seems less suited to the printed page than to the platform, but my apology must be that I feel warmly, now, as I did then, what to else we all knew very well when to use the word, and what was the appearance of its subject. INTRODUCTION 5 Americans is the national importance of the theme. Unity of social policy, uniformity of statute law and judicial procedure, solidarity of national beliefs, — these are what the people of the United States must put before themselves as the ideals to be striven for. Their ultimate fulfilment has been made possible by the civil war that swept away forever what had made till then the great difference between the Northern and the Southern States, and brought in the new nation. It is hard not to be declamatory when one speaks in earnest, with such aims in view. CHAPTER II THE CENTENARY OF MODERN GOVERNMENT^ 1789-1889 THE closing quarter of the nineteenth century came crowded with great anniversaries. A long series of American centennials ended with that of the voyage which first really added the new world to the old. England in 1888 commemorated the peaceful revolution which set William of Orange on her throne, and France a year later was on fire with the recollections of the fiercer struggle that re-created her institutions. But among all these centennial years that of 1889 stood out the first, because it had more than a na- tional significance. It closed the centenary of mod- ern government. Modern languages, modern literature, with its spirit of free inquiry, modern civilization and discovery, bringing in powers and necessities unknown before, had all given their new life to society before Europe began to demand political freedom. It was the in- capacity of a highly civilized society, merely as such, to satisfy the human soul, that drove men to a new 1 In preparing this chapter, free use lias been made of the annual address before the American Bar Association delivered by the author at its meeting in Chicago, August 29, 1889. MODERN GOVERNMENT 7 opening for their energies in public life and in the public good. James Wilson, in the Convention by which Pennsylvania ratified our national Constitution, declared that the science of government seemed yet to be almost in its state of infancy. It was not be- cause mankind were unfamiliar with the different forms governments may assume, or the different ends they may serve. It was known that they might be constituted simply for the good of the governed and by their consent. We had had free constitutional commonwealths on our own soil since the days of the Puritans, the sturdy outgrowth of the life of a liberty-loving people. But those colonial republics, such as Connecticut and Rhode Island, had nothing in them of the nation. If, for a few years, they claimed a kind of autonomy, it was soon gladly ex- changed for a chartered dependence on the British crown. In Europe there had been democracies and repub- lics through half the history of the human race, but which of them deserved the name or earned the place of a constitutional government? England, if any. England had tried and executed one king, and had driven another from her throne a hundred years before the Federal Constitution was adopted; but England was still a monarchy, supported by an hereditary aristocracy and a corruptible and cor- rupted Commons, and limited by nothing stronger than traditions, as they might be interpreted by judges appointed by the crown. Frederick Robertson said, fifty years ago, that he would close his Bible forever if he did not look for 8 THE CENTENARY OF better times for England — times when merit should find its level ; when worth should be interpreted by what a man is, and not by what he has, nor by what his relations have been. The Declaration of Independence brought in such times to America. If for the next quarter of a cen- tury there lingered too much deference for distinc- tions of birth, if for the last quarter of a century there has been growing up a new power of property to give the rich too much of public consideration, these tendencies, at most, have been too slight to affect the main current of American life. It has swept on towards a true liberty, equality, fraternity; truer than has ever yet come to the great nation where first those words were linked together, — because she sought them by the path of destruction. She was driven by a sad history to seek them there. But to American soil they had been borne by friendly hands a century before. "The Mayflower" brought with her more than her company of Pilgrims. " Laws, Freedom, Truth, and Faith in God Came with those exiles o'er the waves." And the spirit of Puritanism was nobler than Puri- tanism. They " builded better than they knew." It may be that the spirit of New England Puritanism was nobler than the spirit of Puritanism in the land they left. It looks so, as we review the history of their century, and see England turn so sharply from the austere simplicity of the Commonwealth to the gay license that came in with Charles the Second. No such revulsion of pubhc feeling marked the return of the Stuarts in the American colonies. No man MODERN GOVERNMENT 9 here had been acting a part. Institutions had been founded on ideas, not on military successes or politi- cal triumphs. Those ideas, no doubt, fell short of the ideals of the Americans of those days, as they fall short of ours; but their direction was right. They heralded the approach of modern government. For the first beginnings of its actual, its acted life, we look to America; for the first beginnings of its philosophy, we look to France. France was to the statesmen of our Revolution what Greece in her days of greatness was to early Rome, the source of intellectual and political inspiration. They looked to England for precedents, to France for principles. The same year ^ had given to the world the studies of Pothier and DAguesseau in Roman law, and of Montesquieu on the spirit of laws in general. In the youth of Jefferson and Adams, of Madison and Hamilton, Montesquieu's definitions of jurisprudence, his rule for the threefold division of power, his limitation of republican government to small States, were the talk of the day. France and America were both preparing, though they hardly knew it, to put these philosophies to a test. The two countries had before them, each, a very difterent task. Both were to reform their political institutions. But France had also to reform, to re- adjust, to re-constitute, the relations of her people to each other. The States General was a gathering of classes around a sovereign. King, nobles, clergy, commons 1 1748. lo THE CENTENARY OF met to work some unknown, yet inevitable change in their mutual attitude. The law might thenceforth make all commons, all sovereigns; but generations must pass before such a law could be a living thing. When a society is re-constructed from turret to foundation-stone, by some fiat of legislation, make it what you will, and it remains still but a castle in the air, till long years have made men used to their new conditions. Then first will liberty, if it was gained, become a real possession, because then only will it be known for what it is. No such issue lay before the American people when our States General — the representatives of their thirteen free commonwealths — met at Phila- delphia in 1787. There were no hereditary privileges to attack, no absolute power to check, no classes to harmonize. It was two years later that the people of France, represented in a National Assembly, published their memorable Declaration of the Rights of Man. The States General, out of which that Assembly sprang, had been convoked for the first time for a century and a half. There is something majestic in the gathering of such a body, to be called into exist- ence only at vast and unknown intervals, on some great emergency of State. So men felt, whatever their religious faith, when the Church of Rome brought together, in 1870, at the Vatican, the first council of her prelates throughout the world that had met since that assembled at Trent three hundred years before, to stay the progress of the Protestant Reformation. So it was when the dele- MODERN GOVERNMENT ii gates of the American people, for the first and last time met in convention in 1787, to frame a Constitu- tion that would perpetuate their union. Such an assembly, with its far-reaching powers, untried by use, may precipitate or it may prevent a revolution. When President Harrison, in 1889, stood in New York, on the spot where, under his great predecessor, the first true government of the United States began, to celebrate the close of its first century, no memories were recalled but those of peace. But when, a week later. President Carnot, at Versailles, met the legis- lature of the French Republic to commemorate the anniversary of the opening of the States General, no one could forget the reign of terror that had so soon followed the reign of despotism. The States General had met in the beginning of the seventeenth century. They met next at the end of the eighteenth. During that long stretch of time France had had no government but the king. While Virginia was form- ing her House of Burgesses that brought representa- tive government into America; while the Puritans were constituting Christian commonwealths in New England ; while all the English colonies on this conti- nent were alike learning the true maxims of civil liberty; while the leaders of our Revolution were growing into statesmen by slow experience, — French- men could know the principles of politics only by study of books, or by observation in foreign lands. We cannot wonder, then, that France, in 1789, felt that as for her civil institutions she had nothing to pre- serve ; that all were bad, and that to abolish all was her first duty. 12 THE CENTENARY OF In his commemorative address, on the occasion I have just named, President Carnot declared that this meeting of the States General created a new era in history, and founded modern society. It is a bold claim for any people to make that by one national event they have changed the current of human history. It has been made by Americans for the social compact signed upon the " Mayflower ; " for the early Constitution of Connecticut; for the Decla- ration of Independence; for the formation of the Federal Constitution. But the real, unsolved problem of government, in 1789, was to make and keep a great people free ; not any infant colony of Plymouth or Connecticut; nor any petty republic of Attica or San Marino; not even any cluster of States, bound together while fighting for independence ; but a great people, spread over a great territory. The United States of 1789 rested on a Constitution framed two years before, subversive and destructive of an earlier Constitution agreed to as perpetual ; and of our thirteen States two had deliberately refused to ac- cept the second. To the National Assembly of France, as to the ministry of Great Britain, it seemed, in 1789, that the American experiment had already failed. But modern government was not to be compassed in a day. For one thing it needed a revival of that spirit of national patriotism that had been dead or sleeping since the days of the Roman republic. Patriotism had been the keystone of virtue to the ancient world. It had glorified with immortality the pass of Thermopylae, and made men deem a few sprigs of laurel or a street procession the most pre- MODERN GOVERNMENT 13 cious thing in life. But from the day that Brutus trampled on human love, for love of country, to the day when the dagger of political assassination re- appeared in Europe, in the hands of a woman, and Charlotte Corday slew one of the new Caesars of new- born France, the very word " patriotism " had gone out of the speech of men, and almost out of the thought of poets. Loyalty had usurped its place: the bond to law, not to country; to your king, your feudal lord, not to your fellow-citizens ; to the Church universal,, perhaps, not to the altars of your own community. " Patriotism," said Johnson, after the American Revolution had done its work, " is the last refuge of a scoundrel." " Patriotism," wrote Lessing a few years before, " is, at the highest, a heroic weakness which I am very glad to be without." The world had been without it since the first century of the Christian era. It fell at Rome when free government fell. It found no help in the Christian Church. That had for its purpose the submission of all nations to a common faith, and it strove for a thousand years to achieve it by subordinating civil to ecclesiastical authority. The spirit of individualism arose in pro- test, and put manhood before citizenship. The middle ages rolled away; the Renaissance was followed by the Reformation ; the Stuarts yielded to the Com- monwealth, the Commonwealth to the Stuarts ; the new world was peopled with European colonies ; and still the life of modern society was unconceived. The light broke when French philosophers asserted that correlation of forces in political power by which a true socialism complements a true individualism; 14 THE CENTENARY OF by which the authority, which must always be admin- istered by a few, shall be constituted and controlled by the many; by which, as Mill has said, "the im- portance of the masses becomes constantly greater; that of individuals, less." France has made the " Ideas of Eighty-nine " a familiar phrase, but they were only the acted expres- sion of ideas struck out on the same soil a generation before. And modern government has risen out of them but slowly into form. The key with which the spirit of our time unlocks all mysteries, the law of evolution, life-giving and life-lifting, has done its work. In institutions, as in animated nature, there is the struggle for existence, and the survival of those fittest to survive. And what, as we review the century, has been achieved, what retained, and what discarded? How has socialism been blended with individualism? What new ends have been proposed for legislation; what new immunities secured ; what new chapter of liberty opened? We must answer, first, that modern government does not concern itself only with the material well- being of the community. Magna Charta is no more its measure than is the Decalogue the measure of Christianity. The right to personal security, to prop- erty, to trial by one's peers, to tax one's self, — to establish these was the ultimate end of ancient government. Modern government retains them all, but adds : the right of equality before the law, and in the law ; the duty in civil matters to ignore dis- tinctions of religion; the duty of spreading educa- MODERN GOVERNMENT 15 tion, information, intelligence at public cost; the right of labor to protection, at the expense of capi- tal, and in the interest of humanity. If I were to say which of these things was in the highest sense the fruit of our own century, I should name religious liberty. Nowhere, until the last part of the eighteenth cen- tury, had the State been kept totally separate from the institutions of religion. The original beginning of human society, in the family, the clan, the tribe, made the patriarch also the priest. The household gods were peculiar to the household; the national gods to the nation. Religion was a part of patriot- ism. Rulers might change; kings might give place to republican magistrates ; but the national deities, the national worship, would remain the same. Pro aris et pro focis was the watchword of war. Christianity came, and found the world subject to this law. But the spirit of Christianity was universal, catholic, not national. Its kingdom was not of this world. As, however, its doctrines spread, and as some of them began to be but half understood by those who taught them, government turned to it for aid. It became a part of the imperial system. When that fell, it conquered the conquerors, and for fourteen hundred years was the stay of every civilized govern- ment in Europe and America. The religious liberty for which the Puritans crossed the sea was simply liberty to make their form of religion the law of a new community. Rhode Island, with her utmost toleration, allowed no Roman 1 6 THE CENTENARY OF Catholic in public office until long after the Declara- tion of Independence.^ In Protestant Europe, as in Catholic Europe, the union of Church and State remained unbroken. Men had risen up against the tyranny of ecclesiastical power; men had pulled kings from their thrones and set up others, or set up none. The same struggle against unjust government had sometimes been shared by those who attacked the Church and those who attacked the State. The same leaders might indeed attack both, but they seldom attacked or questioned the union of both. In England the Puritans fought against episcopal, the Republicans against royal tyranny; but both were ready to bind the Commonwealth to another form of national religion. A State church had, no doubt, been long the scorn of atheists and indififerentists ; but it endured until religion itself rose to the level of rejecting it; until Christianity came to see and teach that there are two worlds about us : the world we live in knowingly, — the world of time, the world of the body and the mind; and the world we live in unknowingly, — the world of eternity, the world of the spirit ; that gov- ernments belong only to the world of the present, with no larger life than it can give ; that they are less than the men they govern, and when they have sought to give laws to the human spirit have opposed them- selves to the order of the universe. Modern government began when the State with- drew from its long alliance with Christianity. 11783- MODERN GOVERNMENT 17 It was a natural epoch in the history of individual- ism. Family, patriarchal, tribal governments, had rested on a family, patriarchal, tribal religion. The teachers of Christianity had sought to make one family of all nations, under the Church of Rome, and had failed in the attempt. The Protestant Reforma- tion had — so far as governments were concerned — done little except to put the power of the Church into the hands of the civil magistracy. But, so far as in- dividual men were concerned, it had declared a new right of private judgment in matters of religion. And, however kings and legislators may have en- deavored to reconcile this right with religious estab- lishments at the common cost, the struggle has been a hopeless one. Nor need I say that religion has nowhere suffered by being left to itself. In Leipsic, for instance, where a certain form of religious establishment exists, with a population of nearly 200,000, there are now but six churches in which Sunday services are regularly held. In no American city of that size would there be found less than a hundred ; and it is on American soil that disestablishment had its earliest and has struck its deepest roots. Virginia, in 1786, in a statute drafted by Jefferson, proclaimed it " to be a natural right of mankind that religious opinions shall never affect civil capacities, and that no man can be compelled to support any re- ligious worship." This declaration, soon translated into French and Italian, was circulated widely in southern Europe. Madison had defended it in the legislature with his accustomed vigor. The question, I 8 THE CENTENARY OF he said, had been stated by the opponents of the bill, as if it were, " Is religion necessary? " But the true question was, " Are establishments necessary for religion? " Next came the Ordinance of 1787, to lay the foun- dations of government for the vast territory out of which sprang the commonwealths surrounding the great lakes. It has not the ring, upon this point, of the statute of Virginia, but it does declare that no person shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments, so long as he keeps the public peace. That same summer the convention that framed our Constitution was sitting with closed doors in Phila- delphia. Its work was, no doubt, in the main, a re- arrangement of existing materials. It took American institutions and put them in a new order and combi- nation. But it did more. Every delegate came from a State where some civil distinctions had always flowed from religious distinc- tions. There was probably not more than one who would not have considered himself an adherent of the Christian faith. The leaders were familiar with the political philosophy of antiquity, and with that of their own day ; with Montesquieu and with Adam Smith, They found an unbroken current of authority in favor of uniting civil and religious institutions, to some extent, in every government. And yet at the call of the youngest of them, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, fresh from his law studies in the Inner Temple, they were ready to take this great step forward, by forever prohibiting all religious tests MODERN GOVERNMENT 19 for office or public trust, under the United States. He made the proposition a month after the enact- ment of the Ordinance of 1787. The committee of detail to which it was referred took no notice of the suggestion in their report; but Pinckney secured its adoption as an amendment, and it stands as the close of the last Article but one. In advocating the ratification of the Constitution in the South Carolina convention, a year later, he in- sisted on this feature as all-important. There was, he said, but one great government in Europe which provided for the security of private rights, and that withheld from part of its subjects the equal enjoy- ment of their religious liberties. Avoiding this error, we were to " be the first perfectly free people the world had ever seen." ^ At this time, we must not forget, and for forty years later, the Test Act and Corporation Act of England excluded all men from office who were not members of the Church of England. Most of our own States retained some religious test as a quali- fication for the higher offices, and religious estab- lishments were not forbidden in any, and expressly provided for in the Constitutions of six.^ This opening of public trusts to all men, on an equal footing, found warm support from the leaders of the clergy, even in New England, where their influence was strongest. Fifteen ministers were mem- bers of the Massachusetts convention, and all but one voted for the ratification of the Constitution. 1 4 Elliott's Debates, 319. 2 Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and South Carolina. 20 THE CENTENARY OF '* Many," said one of them, the Rev. Isaac Backus, with reference to this abolition of religious tests, " appear too much concerned about it, but nothing is more evident, both in reason and the Holy Scrip- tures, than that religion is ever a matter between God and individuals. . . . The imposing of religious tests hath been the greatest engine of tyranny in the world." 1 " God alone," said Rev. Phillips Payson, in the same body, " is the God of the conscience ; and con- sequently attempts to erect human tribunals for the consciences of men are impious encroachments on the prerogatives of God."^ The provision against religious tests for office left Congress still free to set up a religious establishment. One may well fall without the other. Such has been the slow course of English history. But when the sons of New England Puritans, New York Church- men, Pennsylvania Quakers, Maryland Catholics, Vir- ginia Cavaliers, Huguenot Carolinians, came together to join their independent commonwealths in a na- tional life, they could not fail to see that church unity was impossible. The very fact that so many of our States had had a State religion was the strongest argument why the Union should have none. New Hampshire, where Roman Catholics were de- barred from office until 1877, was the first to propose ^ a further guaranty of religious liberty as an amend- ment to the Constitution. Virginia and New York 1 2 Elliott's Debates, 148. 2 /^^-^.^ 120. 3 June 21, 1788. ■ MODERN GOVERNMENT 21 acted promptly in the same direction, and it was for want of this, among other provisions, that North Caro- lina refused to ratify the Constitution at all. At the first session of the first Congress, such an amendment was proposed to the States. It was set third in a list of twelve, preceded by one to regulate the num- ber of representatives in the lower house, and another to prevent Congress from increasing the pay of its members after their election. The States impatiently swept both of these away, and so put at the head of the ten which they ratified the provision against church establishments and church domination, — fitly placed first, because the most important, the most novel of all. The National Assembly of France was also moving towards the same end, and there, too, the mass of the clergy were at first with the reformers. Progress in Europe has been naturally slower than with us, for there was more to surrender. The support of the nation has often been accorded to diff"erent churches, on equal terms. There has been disestablishment in one part of a country, and not in another. But it is safe to say that in no country of Christendom is any church connected with the government in the same close way in which it was throughout the course of ancient society. And this again has thrown new functions on the State. The Church, in former days, had the general charge of education. It collected the scholars, it supplied 2 2 THE CENTENARY OF the teachers, it paid them, it regulated their work, and saw that its own doctrines and discipline were made a part of all instruction. But when it could no longer draw from the public treasury, or when the State went one step further and deprived it of its accumulated possessions, this duty of education be- came a public one. The more ignorant the people, the firmer the government, when that government exists for others' benefit. But give the people real power, and they must be taught how to use it, if you would not have it used to their destruction. I do not forget that public education had been the child of New England from the days of the Puritans. But only in this century has it become national, and, we may say, universal in free governments. It was the French Constitution of 1791 that really introduced it as a feature of modern government on a great scale ; and Germany adopted the principle of compulsory education when it was, even here, but a half-tried experiment. That the ideal State should rest on a basis of pub- lic instruction is indeed no idea of modern times. When Plato sketched his plan of the republic of the future, he set it on that foundation. It was the hope of Harrington, — the early practice of Massa- chusetts and Connecticut. It was for our age to ex- tend it to great nations, at the cost of millions ; to bring it even into Oriental government, so that in Japan to-day there are 30,000 public schools, nearly 200 colleges, and two great universities, all largely supported from the imperial treasury. But this transfer of a great prerogative from the MODERN GOVERNMENT 23 Church to the people has its inevitable dangers. If there is a national peril towards which we are now drifting, it lies in this direction. It is the question of the right and duty of the State as to education in matters of religion. It is the law of many of our States that every child must be educated to a certain point, either at a pub- lic school or under private instruction. The Roman Catholic Church has always believed that religion, and the religion which it holds itself, is a necessary part of all true education. It has, during the last twenty years, taken formal issue with the American public-school system and organized a system of its own, of parochial schools. Whether this policy be right or wrong, there should be, surely, the fullest liberty to pursue it. Laws have been recently pro- posed in more than one of the States to forbid the use of any text-book in a private school not ex- amined and approved by some public authority, and even to make it penal to use influence upon a father to induce him to take his children out of a public school. If such laws ever come to be enacted, it would be indeed a sign that the principles of Ameri- can liberty are losing ground. The State church was never without a State uni- versity, and it was a fitting thing that the hand which drew the Declaration of Independence was also that which sketched the plan for the first great State university in America. The epitaph of Jefferson, written by himself, names but three events in a long life of public service, and they epitomize the his- 24 THE CENTENARY OF tory of American liberty. " Here," say the solemn words, — "HERE LIES BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA." The influence of an established church, also, in literature was always a controlling one. The great libraries, from which all good books grow, were founded and maintained by its revenues. Modern government has inherited this function, and the pub- lic library, free to all, and open to every author, from vast collections like the British Museum to the bookcase in the country schoolhouse, is the great gift of the age towards a larger national life. The State church was a great bureau of registration, tracing out, where it was strongest, by its entries of baptisms, marriages, and funerals, the course of every individual life. The place of this is now everywhere supphed by a system of public record offices. In thus separating from any political union with the Church, the State does not cease to regard it as a natural ally. And, in token of this, an exemption from taxation of property held for religious uses of any kind is almost universally conceded, the equiva- lent, of course, of a large annual grant from the treasury. Government seeks no longer from the Church the aid of any divine sanction for constituted authority, but it still recognizes religion as the best MODERN GOVERNMENT 25 teacher of morals, and therefore the best friend of public order among a free people. The exclusion of the Church, with its paternal authority and paternal bounty, from a voice in gov- ernment, has contributed greatly towards the devel- opment of that State socialism which no civilized country is now wholly without. It begins with giving free schools, free libraries, perhaps free universities ; but it does not stop there. It establishes parks, museums, galleries of art; builds railroads, and controls them ; inspects the tenement house; lays paved sidewalks in every village. It arranges this vast system of national and international mails, by which two cents takes a letter from Boston to San Francisco, and five cents carries it to Tokio or Australia. It regulates the hours of labor, the age of labor. It throws new duties on the employer. In Germany, where State socialism goes farthest, it forces the laborer to insure himself, out of his wages, against the chance of future want, as we have long compelled our seamen to insure in the same way against sickness or disability, by payments to the Marine Hospital Fund. But while State socialism means more in one country than another, modern government has one universal characteristic, — popular representation in the legislature, based on a wide and constantly widen- ing grant of suffrage. There were hardly any of our American States, a hundred years ago, which did not demand that the 26 THE CENTENARY OF elector should be a tax-payer. There are hardly any now that do require it. England has reached almost the same result. Germany, France, and Greece have gone beyond it, and made suffrage universal. Every citizen is incorporated into the German Empire by taking him, through a public education and military service, up to the ballot-box, on equal terms. The republic is but one form of modern govern- ment, but this republican principle of a broad suffrage is at work in all. Its inevitable tendency is towards the universal abolition of class distinctions, — a tendency stronger, of course, in proportion to the freedom and equality already gained. It was this that forced negro suffrage upon the South at the close of the Civil War. There were weighty reasons against thus pushing the freedman at once into the ranks of the electors. He belonged to a race that has known little of political power, and done nothing to prove its fitness to enjoy it, and he had been reared in ignorance and dependence. But negro suffrage was an American idea. It prevented the formation of a new social class. Laws had already been passed in several of the Southern States — " ap- prentice laws " — which would soon have formed one, had a class of freedmen survived the war. The negro has often used the suffrage ignorantly, selfishly, unwisely. Many another has done the same. But when he received the gift and passed into the great circle of American citizenship, the last class less than citizens was abolished, I hope forever, from American statute-books. Nor was it, as an indication of political development, to be compared in significance to the MODERN GOVERNMENT 27 movements in a similar direction in England, begin- ning with the Reform Bill of 1832, and ending with the vote, in 1889, of the House of Commons, when 160 members declared themselves in favor of abolishing all hereditary seats in the House of Lords, and the government could muster but about 200 to defeat the motion. The grant of suffrage to women is now becoming common in municipal elections. It has been tried in those of a more public character. If I were to forecast the future I should say that whether modern government in Europe is to tend towards republicanism or towards monarchy will depend in no small degree upon its treatment of this question. Goethe has declared that women love order rather than freedom. If the number of voters is doubled by their admission to it, the stability of settled dynasties and the glitter of courts may find a new support against any movement towards the rough changes of republican administration. Modern government makes the ballot more and more the instrument of suffrage, even in legislatures. The change in this has been almost revolutionary. In England, landlords seeking to control their ten- ants, employers seeking to control those in their service, established interests seeking to prevent re- form, and sentimentalists relying on the dignity of manhood, had combined to exclude it from her institu- tions. Even in the Municipal Corporations Act of 28 THE CENTENARY OF 1835, th^ ballot in municipal elections was made an open one, with the name of the voter who cast it written upon each. Our own colonies passed into independence under the influence of the same ideas. Down to 1787 the State of New York had always elected the members of its legislature by acclamation, and its first Constitu- tion permitted a change to election by ballot simply as something worthy of a " fair experiment " ^ and subject to a return to the old system, if the legisla- ture should decide that the experiment was unsuc- cessful. But no free nation has ever adopted the ballot and then discarded it, unless she was ready to discard her freedom. The ends of modern government demand it in its completest form. It was for remote Australia to revive this form, after the lapse of two thousand years, and give the world again the secret ballot as Cicero knew it, when he described it as the vindex tacitcs libertatis. The Roman ballot, under the Ga- binian law, was furnished by the State, and bore the names of all who were in nomination, the elector marking by a point that of the candidate whom he preferred. The interplay of national influences, so characteristic of the age, was never more conspicuous than in the re-introduction of this plan in modern use. 