I
IT IS a commonplace that the persistence of an
institution is due solely to the state of mind that prevails towards it,
the set of terms in which men
habitually think about it. So long, and
only so long, as those terms are favourable, the institution lives and
maintains its power; and when for any reason men generally cease
thinking in those terms, it weakens and becomes inert. At one time, a
certain set of terms regarding man's place in nature gave organized
Christianity the power largely to control men's consciences and direct
their conduct; and this power has dwindled to the point of
disappearance, for no other reason than that men generally stopped
thinking in those terms. The persistence of our unstable and iniquitous
economic system is not due to the power of accumulated capital, the
force of propaganda, or to any force or
combination of forces commonly alleged as its cause. It is due solely to
a certain set of terms in which men think of the opportunity to work;
they regard this opportunity as something to be given.
Nowhere is there any other idea about it than that the opportunity to
apply labour and capital to natural resources for the production of
wealth is not in any sense a right, but a concession.[1] This is all that keeps our system alive. When men cease to think in those terms, the system will disappear, and not before.
It seems pretty clear that changes in the terms of thought affecting an
institution are but little advanced by direct means. They are brought
about in obscure and circuitous ways, and assisted by trains of
circumstance which before the fact would appear quite unrelated, and
their erosive or solvent action is therefore quite unpredictable. A
direct drive at effecting these changes comes as a rule to nothing, or
more often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely the
work of those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for which
Prince de Bismarck had such vast respect - he called them the imponderabilia
- that any effort which disregards them, or thrusts them violently
aside, will in the long-run find them stepping in to abort its fruit.
Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of the
historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of an
attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone
thinks of the State; and then to consider the conclusions towards which
this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points. Instead of recognizing
the State as "the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,"
the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a
final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent.
The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and
intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is
willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery,
mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will.
Instead of looking upon the State's progressive absorption of social
power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel
towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization,
he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is
somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to
its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a
share - he is, pro tanto,
aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of
mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting the phenomenon
of the State,
"sees it, admires it, knows that there it is.
. . . Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power,
and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is
something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some
difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will
tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a
solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. . . .
When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong
appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of
obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely
by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion."
It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and the
conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance, that we are
attempting to get at through our present survey. These conclusions may
perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order that the reader who is for
any reason indisposed to entertain them may take warning of them at this
point, and close the book.
The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the
attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is
obviously the life and strength of the State; and obviously too, it is
now so inveterate and so widespread - one may freely call it universal -
that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it, and
least of all hope to enlighten it. This attitude can only be sapped and
mined by uncountable generations of experience, in a course marked by
recurrent calamity of a most appalling character. When once the
predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become
inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of America,
all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its
appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself with
pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as Professor
Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no more that
one can do.
"The result of this tendency," he says,
"will
be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over
again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify.[2] Society will have to live for the State, man for
the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose
existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it,[3] the
State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left
bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more
gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable
fate of ancient civilization."
II
The revolution of 1776-1781 converted thirteen provinces, practically as
they stood, into thirteen autonomous political units, completely
independent, and they so continued until 1789, formally held together as
a sort of league, by the
Articles of Confederation.
For our purposes, the point to be remarked about this eight-year
period, 1781- 1789, is that administration of the political means was
not centralized in the federation, but in the several units of which the
federation was composed. The federal assembly, or congress, was hardly
more than a deliberative body of delegates appointed by the autonomous
units. It had no taxing-power, and no coercive power. It could not
command funds for any enterprise common to the federation, even for war;
all it could do was to apportion the sum needed, in the hope that each
unit would meet its quota. There was no coercive federal authority over
these matters, or over any matters; the sovereignty of each of the
thirteen federated units was complete.
Thus the central body of this loose association of sovereignties had
nothing to say about the distribution of the political means. This
authority was vested in the several component units. Each unit had
absolute jurisdiction over its territorial basis, and could partition it
as it saw fit, and could maintain any system of land-tenure that it
chose to establish.
[4]
Each unit set up its own trade-regulations. Each unit levied its own
tariffs, one against another, in behalf of its own chosen beneficiaries.
Each manufactured its own currency, and might manipulate it as it
liked, for the
benefit of such individuals or economic groups as were able to get
effective access to the local legislature. Each managed its own system
of bounties, concessions, subsidies, franchises, and exercised it with a
view to whatever private interest its legislature might be influenced
to promote. In short, the whole mechanism of the political means was
non-national.
The federation was not in any sense a State; the State was not one, but
thirteen. Within each unit, therefore, as soon as the war was over,
there began at once a general scramble for access to the political
means. It must
never be forgotten that in each unit society was fluid; this access was
available to anyone gifted with the peculiar sagacity and resolution
necessary to get at it. Hence one economic interest after another
brought pressure of influence to bear on the local legislatures, until
the economic hand of every unit was against every other, and the hand of
every other was against itself.
The principle of "protection," which
as we have seen was already well understood, was carried to lengths
precisely comparable with those to which it is carried in international
commerce today, and for precisely the same primary purpose - the
exploitation, or in plain terms the robbery,
of the domestic consumer. Mr. Beard remarks that the legislature of New
York, for example, pressed the principle which governs tariff-making to
the point of levying duties on firewood brought in from Connecticut and
on cabbages from New Jersey - a fairly close parallel with the octroi that one still encounters at the gates of French towns.
The primary monopoly, fundamental to all others - the monopoly of economic rent - was sought with redoubled eagerness.
[5]
The territorial basis of each unit now included the vast holdings
confiscated from British owners, and the bar erected by the British
State's proclamation of 1763 against the appropriation of Western lands
was now removed. Professor Sakolski observes drily that
"the
early land-lust which the colonists inherited from their European
forebears was not diminished by the democratic spirit of the
revolutionary fathers." Indeed not! Land-grants were
sought as assiduously from local legislatures as they had been in
earlier days from the Stuart dynasty and from colonial governors, and
the mania of land-jobbing ran apace with the mania of land-grabbing.
[6]
Among the men most actively interested in these pursuits were those
whom we have already seen identified with them in pre-revolutionary
days, such as the two Morrises, Knox, Pickering, James Wilson and
Patrick Henry; and with their names appear those of Duer, Bingham,
McKean, Willing, Greenleaf, Nicholson, Aaron Burr, Low, Macomb,
Wadsworth, Remsen, Constable, Pierrepont, and others which now are less
well remembered.
There is probably no need to follow out the rather repulsive trail of
effort after other modes of the political means. What we have said about
the foregoing two modes - tariffs and rental-value monopoly - is
doubtless enough to illustrate satisfactorily the spirit and attitude of
mind towards the State during the eight years immediately following the
revolution. The whole story of insensate scuffle for State-created
economic advantage is not especially animating, nor is it essential to
our purposes. Such as it is, it may be read
in detail elsewhere. All that interests us is to observe that during the
eight years of federation, the principles of government set forth by
Paine and by the
Declaration continued in utter abeyance. Not only did the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty
[7]
remain as completely out of consideration as when Mr. Jefferson first
lamented its disappearance, but the idea of government as a social
institution based on this philosophy was likewise unconsidered. No one
thought of a political organization as instituted
"to secure these rights" by processes of purely negative intervention - instituted, that is, with no other end in view than the maintenance of
"freedom and security."
The history of the eight-year period of federation shows no trace
whatever of any idea of political organization other than the
State-idea. No one regarded this organization otherwise than as the
organization of the political means, an all-powerful engine which should
stand permanently ready and available for the
irresistible promotion of this-or-that set of economic interests, and the
irremediable disservice of others; according as whichever set, by whatever course of strategy,
might succeed in obtaining command of its machinery.
III
It may be repeated that while State power was well centralized under the
federation, it was not centralized in the federation, but in the
federated unit. For various reasons, some of them plausible, many
leading citizens, especially in the more northerly units, found this
distribution of power unsatisfactory; and a considerable compact group
of economic interests which stood to profit by a redistribution
naturally made the most of these reasons. It is quite certain that
dissatisfaction with the existing arrangement was not general, for when
the redistribution took place in 1789, it was effected with great
difficulty and only through a coup d'+tat,
organized by methods which if employed in any other field than that of
politics, would be put down at once as not only daring, but unscrupulous and dishonourable.
The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests had
fallen into two grand divisions, the special interests in each having
made common cause
with a view to capturing control of the political means. One division
comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor interests,
with their natural allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press.
The other comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor
class generally. From the first, these two grand divisions were
colliding briskly here and there in the several units, the most serious
collision occurring over the terms of the Massachusetts constitution of
1780.
[8]
The State in each of the thirteen units was a class-State, as every
State known to history has been; and the work of manœuvring it in its
function of enabling the economic exploitation of one class by another
went steadily on.
General conditions under the Articles of Confederation were pretty good.
The people had made a creditable recovery from the dislocations and
disturbances due to the revolution, and there was a very decent prospect
that Mr. Jefferson's idea of a political organization, which should be
national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic affairs might
be found continuously practicable. Some tinkering with the Articles
seemed necessary - in fact, it was expected -
but nothing that would transform or seriously impair the general scheme.
The chief trouble was with the federation's weakness in view of the
chance of war, and in respect of debts due to foreign creditors. The
Articles, however, carried provision for their own amendment, and for
anything one can see, such amendment
as the general scheme made necessary was quite feasible. In fact, when
suggestions of revision arose, as they did almost immediately, nothing
else appears to have been contemplated.
But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the
interests grouped in the first grand division. The grounds of their
dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind the vast
prospect
of the continent, one need use but little imagination to perceive that
the national scheme was by far the more congenial to those interests,
because it enabled an ever-closer centralization of control over the
political means. For instance, leaving aside the advantage of having but
one central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve, any
industrialist could see the great primary advantage of being able to
extend his exploiting operations over a nation-wide free-trade area
walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the centralization, the larger
the exploitable area. Any speculator in rental-values would be quick to
see the advantage of bringing this form of opportunity under
unified control.
[9]
Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be strongly for a
system that could offer him the use of the political means to bring
back their face-value.
[10]
Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his bread
was buttered on the side of a national State which, if properly
approached, might lend him the use of the political means by way of a
subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but dubious
freebooting enterprise with
"diplomatic
representations" or with reprisals.
The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other hand, were not
interested in these considerations, but were strongly for letting
things stay, for the most part, as they stood. Preponderance in the
local legislatures gave them satisfactory control of the political
means, which they could and did use to the prejudice of the creditor
class, and they did not care to be disturbed in their preponderance.
They were agreeable to such modification of the Articles as should work
out short of this, but not to setting up a national
[11]
replica of the British merchant-State, which they perceived was
precisely what the classes grouped in the opposing grand division wished
to do. These classes aimed at bringing in the British system of
economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale; and
the interests grouped in the second division saw that what this would
really come to was a shifting of the incidence of economic exploitation
upon themselves. They had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate
shift that took place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John
Adams's local constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see
this sort of thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and they
therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put forth for
amending the Articles out of existence. When Hamilton, in 1780, objected
to the Articles in the form in which they were proposed for adoption,
and proposed the calling of a
constitutional convention instead, they turned the cold shoulder; as
they did again to Washington's letter to the local governors three years
later, in which he adverted to the need of a strong coercive central
authority.
Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled, on the
distinct understanding that it should do no more than revise the
Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to make them
"adequate to the exigencies of the nation,"
and on the further understanding that all the thirteen units should
assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in
short, that the method of amendment provided by the Articles themselves
should be followed. Neither understanding was fulfilled. The convention
was made up wholly of men representing the economic interests of the
first division. The great majority of them, possibly as many as
four-fifths, were public creditors; one-third were land-speculators;
some were money-lenders; one-fifth were industrialists, traders,
shippers; and many of them were lawyers. They planned and executed a
coup d'+tat, simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket, and drafting a constitution
de novo,
with the audacious provision that it should go into effect when
ratified by nine units instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like
audacity, they provided that the document should not be submitted either
to the Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go
direct to a popular vote!
[12]
The unscrupulous methods employed in securing ratification need not be dwelt on here.
[13] We are not indeed concerned with the moral quality of any of the proceedings by which the
constitution
was brought into being, but only with showing their instrumentality in
encouraging a definite general idea of the State and its functions, and a
consequent general attitude towards the State. We therefore go on to
observe that in order to secure ratification by even the nine necessary
units, the document had to conform to certain very exacting and
difficult requirements. The political structure which it contemplated
had to be republican in form, yet capable of resisting what Gerry
unctuously called
"the excess of democracy," and what Randolph termed its
"turbulence and follies."
The task of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the
earlier architects who had designed the structure of the British
merchant-State, with its system of economics, politics and judicial
control; they had to contrive something that could pass muster as
showing a good semblance of popular sovereignty, without the reality.
Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention's
purpose was
"to secure the public good and
private rights against
the danger of such a faction [i.e., a democratic faction], and at the
same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government."
Under the circumstances, this was a tremendously large order; and the
constitution emerged, as it was bound to do, as a compromise- document,
or as Mr. Beard puts it very precisely, "a mosaic of second choices,"
which really satisfied neither of the two opposing sets of interests.
It was not strong and definite enough in either direction to please
anybody. In particular, the interests composing the first division, led
by Alexander Hamilton, saw that it was not sufficient of itself to fix
them in anything like a permanent impregnable position to exploit
continuously the groups composing the second
division. To do this - to establish the degree of centralization
requisite to their purposes - certain lines of administrative management
must be laid down,
which, once established, would be permanent. The further task therefore,
in Madison's phrase, was to "administration" the constitution into such absolutist
modes as would secure economic supremacy, by a free use of the political means, to the groups which made up the first division.
This was accordingly done. For the first ten years of its existence the
constitution remained in the hands of its makers for administration in
directions most favourable to their interests. For an accurate
understanding of the newly-erected system's economic tendencies, too
much stress can not be laid on the fact that for these ten critical
years
"the machinery of economic and political power was mainly directed by the men who had conceived and established it."[14]
Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected
President. Nearly half the Senate was made up of
men who had been delegates, and the House of Representatives was largely
made up of men who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of the
constitution. Hamilton, Randolph and Knox, who were active in promoting
the document, filled three of the four positions in the Cabinet; and all
the federal judgeships, without a single exception, were filled by men
who had a hand in the business of drafting, or of ratification, or both.
Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new
constitution, the one best calculated to ensure a rapid and steady
progress in the centralization of political power was the judiciary Act
of 1789.
[15]
This measure created a federal supreme court of six members
(subsequently enlarged to nine), and a federal district court in each
state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete apparatus for
enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal oversight of state
legislation by the familiar device of
"interpretation",
whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or judicial
action which for any reason
it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional. One feature of the Act which
for our purposes is most noteworthy is that it made the tenure of all
these federal judgeships appointive, not elective, and for life; thus
marking almost the farthest conceivable departure from the doctrine of
popular sovereignty.
The first chief justice was John Jay,
"the learned and gentle Jay,"
as Beveridge calls him in his excellent biography of Marshall. A man of
superb integrity, he was far above doing anything whatever in behalf of
the accepted principle that
est boni judicis ampliare jurisdictionem.
Ellsworth, who followed him, also did nothing. The succession, however,
after Jay had declined a reappointment, then fell to John Marshall,
who, in addition to the control established by the judiciary Act over
the state legislative and judicial authority, arbitrarily extended
judicial control over both the legislative and executive branches of the
federal authority;
[16]
thus effecting as complete and convenient a centralization of power as
the various interests concerned in framing the constitution could
reasonably have contemplated.
[17]
We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which anyone may
amplify and particularize at his pleasure, what the circumstances were
which rooted a certain definite idea of the State still deeper in the
general consciousness. That idea was precisely the same in the
constitutional period as that which we have seen prevailing in the two
periods already examined - the
colonial period, and the eight-year period following the revolution.
Nowhere in the history of the constitutional period do we find the
faintest suggestion of the Declaration's doctrine of natural rights; and
we find its doctrine of popular sovereignty not only continuing in
abeyance, but constitutionally estopped from ever reappearing. Nowhere
do we find a trace of the Declaration's theory of government; on the
contrary, we find it expressly repudiated. The new political mechanism
was a faithful replica of the old disestablished British model, but so
far improved and strengthened as to be incomparably more close-working
and efficient, and hence presenting incomparably more attractive
possibilities of capture and control. By consequence, therefore, we find
more firmly implanted than ever the same general idea of the State that
we have
observed as prevailing hitherto - the idea of an organization of the
political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful agency standing
always ready to be put into use for the service of one set of economic
interests as against another.
IV
Out of this idea proceeded what we know as the
"party system"
of political management, which has been in effect ever since. Our
purposes do not require that we examine its history in close detail for
evidence that it has been from the beginning a purely bipartisan system,
since this is now a matter of fairly common acceptance. In his second
term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards bipartisanship,
[18] and was both dismayed and
puzzled by it. I have elsewhere
[19] remarked his curious inability to understand how the
cohesive power of public plunder
works straight towards political bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some
who called themselves Republicans favouring the Federalist policy of
centralization, he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as
"pseudo-Republicans, but real Federalists."
But most naturally any Republican who saw a chance of profiting by the
political means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any
tendency within the party to impair the general system which held out
such a prospect.
[20]
In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely
nominal, and the stated issues between parties become progressively
trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up with no other object
than to cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both
parties.
Thus the party system at once became in effect an elaborate system of
fetiches, which, in order to be made as impressive as possible, were
chiefly moulded up around the constitution, and were put on show as
"constitutional
principles." The history of the whole post-constitutional
period, from 1789 to the present day, is an instructive and cynical
exhibit of the fate of these
fetiches when they encounter the one only actual principle of party
action - the principle of keeping open the channels of access to the
political means. When the fetich of
"strict construction,"
for example, has collided with this principle, it has invariably gone
by the board, the party that maintained it simply changing sides. The
anti- Federalist party took office in 1800 as the party of strict
construction; yet, once in office, it played ducks and drakes with the
constitution, in behalf of the special economic interests that it
represented.
[21]
The Federalists were nominally for loose construction, yet they fought
bitterly every one of the opposing party's loose-constructionist
measures - the embargo, the protective tariff and the national bank.
They were constitutional nationalists of the deepest dye, as we have
seen; yet in their centre and stronghold, New England, they held the
threat of secession over the country throughout the period of what they
harshly called
"Mr. Madison's war," the War of
18l2, which was in fact a purely imperialistic adventure after
annexation of Floridan and Canadian territory, in behalf of stiffening
agrarian control of the political means; but when the planting interests
of the South made the same threat in 1861, they became fervid
nationalists again. Such exhibitions of pure fetichism, always cynical
in their
transparent candour, make up the history of the party system. Their
reductio ad absurdum
is now seen as perhaps complete - one can not see how it could go
further - in the attitude of the Democratic party towards its historical
principles of state sovereignty and strict construction. A fair match
for this, however, is found in a speech made the other day to a group of
exporting and importing interests by the mayor of New York - always
known as a Republican in politics - advocating the hoary Democratic
doctrine of a low
tariff!
Throughout our post-constitutional period there is not on record, as far
as I know, a single instance of party adherence to a fixed principle,
qua principle, or to a political theory,
qua
theory. Indeed, the very cartoons on the subject show how widely it has
come to be accepted that party platforms, with their cant of
"issues," are so much
sheer
Quackery, and that campaign-promises are merely another name for
thimblerigging.
The workaday practice of politics has been invariably opportunist, or
in other words, invariably conformable to the primary function of the
State; and it is largely for this reason that the State's service exerts
its most powerful attraction upon an
extremely low and sharp-set type of individual.[22]
The maintenance of this system of fetiches, however, gives great
enhancement to the prevailing general view of the State. In that view,
the State is made to appear as somehow deeply and disinterestedly
concerned with great principles of action; and hence, in addition to its
prestige as a pseudo-social institution, it takes on the prestige of a
kind of moral authority, thus disposing of the last vestige of the
doctrine of natural rights by overspreading it heavily with the
quicklime of legalism; whatever is State-sanctioned is right.
This double prestige is assiduously inflated by many agencies; by a
State-controlled system of education, by a State-dazzled pulpit, by a
meretricious press, by a continuous kaleidoscopic display of State pomp,
panoply and circumstance, and by all the innumerable devices of
electioneering. These last invariably take their stand on the foundation
of some imposing principle, as witness the agonized cry now going up
here and there in the land, for a "return to the constitution." All this is simply "the interested clamours and sophistry,"
which means no more and no less than it meant when the constitution was
not yet five years old, and Fisher Ames was observing contemptuously
that of all the legislative measures and proposals which were on the
carpet at the time, he scarce knew one that had not raised this same
cry, "not excepting a motion for adjournment."
In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are uniformly and
notoriously what Jeremy Bentham called impostor-terms, and their use
invariably marks one thing and one only; it marks a state of
apprehension, either fearful or expectant, as the case may be,
concerning access to the political means. As we are seeing at the
moment, once let this access come under threat of straitening or
stoppage, the menaced interests immediately trot out the spavined,
glandered hobby of
"state rights" or
"a return to the constitution,"
and put it through its galvanic movements. Let the incidence of
exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear at once from
one source of
"interested clamours and sophistry" that
"democracy" is in danger, and that the
unparalleled excellences of our civilization have come about solely through a policy of
"rugged individualism," carried out under terms of
"free competition"; while from another source we hear that the enormities of
laissez-faire have ground the faces of the poor, and obstructed entrance into the More Abundant Life.
[23]
The general upshot of all this is that we see politicians of all schools
and stripes behaving with the obscene depravity of degenerate children;
like the
loose-footed gangs that infest the railway-yards and purlieus of
gas-houses, each group tries to circumvent another with respect to the
fruit accruing to acts of public mischief. In other words, we see them
behaving in a strictly historical manner. Professor Laski's elaborate
moral distinction between the State and officialdom is devoid of
foundation. The State is not, as he would have it, a social institution
administered in an anti-social way. It is an anti-social institution,
administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be
administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is
best adapted to such service.
[1] Consider, for example, the present situation. Our natural resources,
while much depleted, are still great; our population is very thin,
running something like twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and
some millions of this population are at the moment
"unemployed," and likely to remain so because no one will or can
"give them work."
The point is not that men generally submit to this state of things, or
that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing irregular
or anomalous about it because of their fixed idea that work is something
to be
given.
[2] The present paralysis of production, for example, is due solely to
State intervention, and uncertainty concerning further intervention.
[3] It seems to be very imperfectly understood that the cost of State
intervention must be paid out of production, this being the only source
from which any payment for anything can be derived. Intervention retards
production; then the resulting stringency and inconvenience enable
further intervention, which in turn still further retards production;
and this process goes on until, as in Rome, in the third century,
production ceases entirely, and the source of payment dries up.
[4] As a matter of fact, all thirteen units merely continued the system
that had existed throughout the colonial period - the system which gave
the beneficiary a
monopoly of rental-values as well as a monopoly of use-values. No other
system was ever known in America, except in the short-lived state of
Deseret, under the
Mormon polity.
[5] For a brilliant summary of post-revolutionary land-speculation, cf. Sakolski,
op. cit., ch. 11.
[6] Mr. Sakolski very justly remarks that the mania for land-jobbing was
stimulated by the action of the new units in offering lands by way of
settlement of their public debts, which led to extensive gambling in the
various issues of
"land-warrants."
The list of eminent names involved in this enterprise includes Wilson C.
Nicholas, who later became governor of Virginia; "Light Horse Harry"
Lee, father of the great Confederate commander; General John Preston, of
Smithfield; and George Taylor, brother-in-law of Chief Justice
Marshall. Lee, Preston and Nicholas were prosecuted at the instance of
some Connecticut speculators, for a transaction alleged as fraudulent;
Lee was arrested in Boston, on the eve of embarking for the West Indies.
They had deeded a tract, said to be of 300,000 acres, at ten cents an
acre, but on being surveyed, the tract did not come to half that size.
Frauds of this order were extremely
common.
[7] The new political units continued the colonial practice of
restricting the suffrage to taxpayers and owners of property, and none
but men of considerable wealth were eligible to public office. Thus the
exercise of sovereignty was a matter of economic right, not natural
right.
[8] This was the uprising known as Shays's Rebellion, which took place
in 1786. The creditor division in Massachusetts had gained control of
the political means, and had fortified its control by establishing a
constitution which was made to bear so hardly on the agrarian and debtor
division that an armed insurrection broke out six years later, led by
Daniel Shays, for the purpose of annulling its onerous provisions, and
transferring control of the political means to the latter group. This
incident affords a striking view in miniature of the State's nature and
teleology. The rebellion had a great effect in consolidating the
creditor division and giving plausibility to its contention for the
establishment of a strong coercive national State. Mr. Jefferson spoke
contemptuously of this contention, as
"the interested clamours and sophistry of speculating, shaving and banking institutions";
and of the rebellion itself he observed to Mrs. John Adams, whose
husband had most to do with drafting the Massachusetts constitution,
"I like a little rebellion now and then. . . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable that I wish it to be always
kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." Writing to another correspondent at the same time, he said
earnestly,
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion."
Obiter dicta
of this nature, scattered here and there in Mr. Jefferson's writings,
have the interest of showing how near his instinct led him towards a
clear understanding of the State's character.
[9] Professor Sakolski observes that after the Articles of Confederation
were supplanted by the constitution, schemes of land-speculation
"multiplied
with renewed and intensified energy." Naturally so, for as he says, the
new scheme of a national State got Strong support from this class of
adventurers because they foresaw that rental-values
"must be greatly increased by an efficient federal government."
[10] More than half the delegates to the constitutional convention of
1787 were either investors or speculators in the public funds. Probably
sixty per cent of the values represented by these securities were
fictitious, and were so regarded even by their holders.
[11] It may be observed that at this time the word
"national" was a term of obloquy, carrying somewhat the same implications that the word
"fascist"
carries in some quarters today. Nothing is more interesting than the
history of political terms in their relation to the shifting balance of
economic advantage - except, perhaps, the history of the partisan
movements which they designate, viewed in the same relation.
[12] The obvious reason for this, as the event showed, was that the
interests grouped in the first division had the advantage of being
relatively compact and easily mobilized. Those in the second division,
being chiefly agrarian, were loose and sprawling, communications among
them were slow, and mobilization difficult.
[13] They have been noticed by several recent authorities, and are exhibited fully in Mr. Beard's monumental
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.
[14] Beard,
op. cit., p. 337.
[15] The principal measures bearing directly on the distribution of the
political means were those drafted by Hamilton for funding and
assumption, for a protective tariff, and for a national bank. These gave
practically exclusive use of the political means to the classes grouped
in the first grand division, the only modes left available to others
being patents and copyrights. Mr. Beard discusses these measures with
his invariable lucidity and thoroughness,
op. cit., ch. VIII. Some observations on them which are perhaps worth reading are contained in my
Jefferson, ch. V.
[16] The authority of the Supreme Court was disregarded by Jackson, and
overruled by Lincoln, thus converting the mode of the State temporarily
from an oligarchy into an autocracy. It is interesting to observe that
just such a contingency was foreseen by the framers of the constitution,
in particular by Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the ease
with which, in any period of crisis, a quasi-republican mode of the
State slips off into
executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr.
Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts
by executive action, but did not do so. Lincoln overruled the opinion of
Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the
habeas corpus
was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode of the State was,
until 1865, a monocratic military despotism. In fact, from the date of
his proclamation of blockade, Lincoln ruled unconstitutionally
throughout his term.
The doctrine of
"reserved powers" was knaved up
ex post facto
as a justification of his acts, but as far as the intent of the
constitution is concemed, it was obviously a pure invention. In fact, a
very good case could be made out for the assertion that Lincoln's acts
resulted in a permanent radical change in the entire system of
constitutional
"interpretation" - that since his time
"interpretations" have not been
interpretations of the constitution, but
merely of public policy; or, as our most acute and profound social critic put it,
"th'
Supreme Court follows th' iliction rayturns." A strict
constitutionalist might indeed say that the constitution died in 1861,
and one would have to scratch one's head pretty diligently to refute
him.
[17] Marshall was appointed by John Adams at the end of his Presidential
term, when the interests grouped in the first division were becoming
very anxious about the opposition developing against them among the
exploited interests. A letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames
gives a good idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood;
his reference to military measures is
particularly striking. He says,
"The
steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial department,
and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in
this country to render an army an engine of government; and there is no
way to combat the state opposition but by an efficient and extended
organization of judges, magistrates, and other civil officers."
Marshall's appointment followed, and also the creation of twenty-three
new federal judgeships. Marshall's cardinal decisions were made in the
cases of Marbury, of Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth College, and
of Cohens. It is perhaps not generally understood that as the result of
Marshall's efforts, the Supreme Court became not only the highest
law-interpreting body, but the highest law-making body as well; the
precedents established by its
decisions have the force of constitutional law. Since 1800, therefore,
the actual mode of the State in America is normally that of a
small and irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall quite justly as
"a
crafty chief judge who sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of
his own reasoning," made in 1821 the very remarkable prophecy that
"our
government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it
will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then
corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will
be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and
corrupted instruments." Another prophetic comment on the effect of
centralization was his remark that
"when
we must wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap, we
shall soon want bread." A survey of our present political circumstances
makes comment on these prophecies superfluous.
[18] He had observed it in the British State some years before, and spoke of it with vivacity.
"The
nest of office being too small for all of them to cuddle into at once,
the contest is eternal which shall crowd the other out. For this purpose
they are divided into two parties, the Ins and the Outs." Why he could
not see that the same thing was bound to take place in the American
State as an effect of causes identical with those which brought it about
in the British State, is a puzzle to students. Apparently, however, he
did not see it, notwithstanding the sound instinct that made him suspect
parties, and always kept him free from party alliances. As he wrote
Hopkinson in 1789,
"I never
submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of
men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything
else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is
the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to
heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
[19]
Jefferson, p. 274. The
agrarian-artisan-debtor economic group that elected Mr. Jefferson took
title as the Republican party (subsequently renamed Democratic) and the
opposing group called itself by the old preconstitutional title of
Federalist.
[20] An example, noteworthy only because uncommonly conspicuous, is seen
in the behaviour of the Democratic senators in the matter of the tariff
on sugar, in
Cleveland's second administration. Ever since that incident, one of the
Washington newspapers has used the name
"Senator Sorghum" in its humorous paragraphs, to designate the typical venal jobholder.
[21] Mr. Jefferson was the first to acknowledge that his purchase of the
Louisiana territory was unconstitutional; but it added millions of
acres to the sum of agrarian resource, and added an immense amount of
prospective voting-strength to agrarian control of the political means,
as against control by the financial and commercial interests represented
by the Federalist party. Mr. Jefferson justified himself solely on the
ground of public policy, an interesting anticipation of Lincoln's
self-justification in 1861, for confronting Congress and the country
with a like
fait accompli - this time, however, executed in behalf of financial and commercial interests as against the agrarian interest.
[22] Henry George made some very keen comment upon the almost incredible
degradation that he saw taking place progressively in the personnel of
the State's service. It is perhaps most conspicuous in the
Presidency and the
Senate, though it goes on
pari passu elsewhere and throughout. As for the federal House of Representatives and the state legislative bodies,
they must be seen to be believed.
[23] Of all the impostor-terms in our political glossary these are
perhaps the most flagrantly impudent, and their employment perhaps the
most flagitious. We have already seen that nothing remotely resembling
democracy has ever existed here; nor yet has anything resembling free
competition, for the existence of free competition is obviously
incompatible with any exercise of the political
means, even the feeblest. For the same reason, no policy of rugged
individualism has ever existed; the most that rugged individualism has
done to distinguish itself has been by way of running to the State for
some form of economic advantage. If the reader has any curiosity about
this, let him look up the number of American business enterprises that
have made a success unaided by
the political means, or the number of fortunes accumulated without such
aid. Laissez-faire has become
a term of pure opprobrium; those who use it either do not know what it
means, or else wilfully pervert it. As for the unparalleled excellences
of our civilization, it is perhaps enough to say that the statistics of
our insurance-companies now show that four-fifths of our people who have
reached the age of sixty-five are supported by their relatives or by
some other form of charity.
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