Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

This subjection to Society is a condition of our life. The president is just as much bound by it as the poorest day laborer; it is the result of the growth of population, of public order, of civilization. The business man arising in the morning and going out to his work, is reassured by seeing the policeman at the corner; with a despotic gesture the officer stops the traffic and the man crosses the street in safety. Though he may have enemies, he knows they will not be permitted to insult him in the street, nor to libel him in the morning papers, nor in the private correspondence just then being delivered by the government postal carrier, because happily free speech is not permitted in civilized countries. He enters the government inspected street car, elevated or subway, protected by strict authority from the presence of people with contagious diseases. He encounters the same regulative tendency in his private business life. In the elevator, in his office, in the commerce exchange, in his transactions with banks and merchants, in the restaurants, everywhere and all day long, he is under severe restrictions, without which, as applied to others, he could not transact his business or even live in safety. The lease to his office which fifty years ago contained but a few simple stipulations, now includes a hundred strict requirements formerly unheard of, all giving great power to the landlord but really operating for the protection of the tenant. A similar government is seen in social life; a man’s manners and the tones of his voice, his attitude, gestures and general behaviour are regulated by despotic custom. All this restraint and discipline, though it may seem to curtail liberty, yet in an indirect but perfectly perceptible way it actually enlarges its scope, by giving access to new fields of enjoyment, made available as such by restrictions on their abuse. So that all our satisfactions, all our joys and pleasures, our prosperity, our bodily health, our very lives are derived from and depend not upon liberty but upon protection, and that moral and physical restraint which is incident to protection.

This dependence of man upon law, order and restraint for every good in life, is not a new thing, nor a creation of modern times; it is inherent in the nature of human society; and was as true of the primitive man as of ourselves. This is not always understood. Some visionary writers have pronounced a state of liberty to be the ideal state, and have imagined liberty as a precious boon originally bestowed upon man, and enjoyed in past ages in a higher degree than at present; they regard restrictions as evils, incident to civilization, perhaps, but still evils. They consider liberty to be something positive and beneficial in its character, like a birthright which man has from time to time bargained away like Esau for the pottage of social advantages. This is an utterly false and mischievous conception which has heretofore helped to create trouble, and being interpreted by half-educated leaders to a foolish populace may do so again. Looking back as far as we choose down the vista of the past, we find that then just as to-day law and order made life worth living, and liberty or the absence of restraint meant misery and death. To find a condition of perfect liberty we must go back to a solitary savage; for complete human liberty and solitary savagery are practically identical. From that point on every addition to human society or civilization, whether in the shape of persons or property, carries with it as a necessary incident its own demand for protection and restraint. Assume if you please the existence of the solitary primitive man, imagined by these dreamers as having perfect liberty, yet that supposed liberty did not include any positive or definite rights whatever. It did not for example include the right to interfere with others, because the others did not then exist. When society came in contact with him, he did not surrender to her any previous rights in relation to others because such rights could not be created till those others actually arrived. Nor could he have possessed liberty in the sense of exemption from social rules, because as there was no society, there were no such rules. Society therefore and government came as a clear gain to humanity; they were additions to the imaginary abstract or natural man and to his life; and the restrictions referred to are but part of the gift; they are incidental to it, and constitute its essential condition, and in no way change its character as a clear benefit and gift to man. Thus, if one gives me a horse, it in no way detracts from the character of the gift that I must feed and shelter the animal. If I give a boy a drum, it is none the less a clear gift because he is forbidden to drive a hole in its head. His liberty is not thereby restricted, because before he had the gift he was also unable to punch the hole. The imaginary original solitary man, upon the arrival of a neighbor, gains in companionship, protection, help, division of labor, etc. He loses nothing in being forbidden to kill, to maim or to rob the newcomer. First, because the privilege of wanton destruction does not exist as a human right, nor is it a part of natural human liberty, but is in its nature and effect a curtailment thereof. Second, because, in his former solitary state, there was no one in existence whom he might kill, maim or rob. Coming up then to tribal existence, and observing the very earliest and lowest exhibitions of social life, we find no trace of the mythical liberty the theorists have imagined, but rather the practice of restraint applied by law or custom as far as requisite to protect the individual. One savage is not permitted to assault another, without paying the penalty according to the custom of the tribe, or suffering the vengeance of the assaulted party or his friends. He does not possess the liberty to destroy or appropriate any ornament, weapon or other property that any one of his fellow savages possesses. To the first beginnings of property, is attached as a part thereof, the incident of protective restraint upon its non-owners. When, whether in barbarous or highly civilized communities, the citizen is forbidden to plunder or injure property, he is not thereby deprived of any part of a man’s inherent liberty; the restraint is merely a qualification or condition of the property in question which does not affect third parties or detract from their previous rights. When modern society forbids trespassing on, or plundering cultivated fields or orchards, it does not deprive any one of anything that his ancestors theretofore had, because in their primitive state there was no right of trespass on or plunder of that property; there were no cultivated fields or orchards to rob or on which to trespass.

In short, there is no such condition either natural or acquired as that of human liberty, nor does liberty of any sort exist in this world or even in the whole universe. The very word “liberty” is without concrete signification, it is a mere negation like “anarchy” and “nothingness,” and represents an idea which is incompatible with government of any sort. This truth is fully realized by the best students of civics, and is just as true of American or republican government as of that of any other country or system. “All government,” says Sir William Temple, “is a restraint on liberty, and when men seem to contend for liberty, it is indeed but to have a change of those who rule.” The consent of the governed can be given only to the mere form of government, said Webster, in a speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner, 1847, and further: “Liberty is the creation of law, essentially different from that authorized licentiousness that trespasses on right. It is a legal and refined idea, the offspring of high civilization, which the savage never understood and never can understand. Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have. It is an error to suppose that liberty consists in a paucity of laws—that man is free who is protected from injury.”

In thus showing that what is commonly called “liberty” really consists in restraint, Webster in effect smashed the silly “liberty” legend. And Ruskin voices the same idea (Pol. Economy, Works, Vol. 17, p. 432): “Americans, as a nation, set their trust in Liberty and in Equality, of which I detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other.” And again, (Vol. 8, p. 248):

“How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty; most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the Universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men for the mockery and semblance of it have used heaviest punishment.... If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law.”

“The only liberty,” says Burke, “that is valuable is a liberty connected with order, that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them; it inheres in all good and steady government, is in its substance and vital principle.” The blessings commonly called by the name of liberty are therefore seen to be the result of just and efficient government, and the evidence is overwhelming that of such government in this country manhood suffrage has been a constant enemy.

Sometimes a foolish suggestion may be seen in print that manhood suffrage is needed to safeguard religious liberty in the United States. Religious liberty and political liberty are practically identical. The noted religious struggles and persecutions in Europe were really political affairs; and the framers of our Constitution included therein guarantees for religious freedom as a matter of course. No further safeguard is needed. The English race has everywhere adopted religious liberty as a definite policy ever since 1688, and the right to religious liberty is no longer questioned by anyone, either in this or in any English-speaking country. There are say two hundred different religious sects in the United States, some of which have but very few followers, and are destitute of means or influence to defend themselves against small or great persecutions; yet no one ever hears of their being molested or even seriously criticised for their religious views, and their security and protection are amply guaranteed by the fundamental law and settled opinions of the American people. There is no more need of shaping our suffrage laws so as to guard against religious persecution, than there is of private gentlemen wearing swords, or of our building our dwellings in the shape of castles for defense, as our ancestors did in the England of the Plantagenets. But were it otherwise, and were any tendency to religious intolerance apparent in this country, it is almost certain that it would crop out among the uneducated and the thriftless rabble, and not among the well-to-do, the educated or the middle class. History and experience teach that it is among the lowest class that the strongest prejudices exist, and that it is that class who are the most violent, tyrannical and intolerant in their expression. The great religious persecutions authorized by governments in past times were incited by the clamor of the populace. The upper and more learned classes were always less superstitious, more skeptical, tolerant and merciful. It was the Jewish mob who demanded the death of Christ when the enlightened Roman Governor would have set him free; it was the Roman rabble who roared for the blood of the early Christians; and nearly all subsequent religious persecutions in civilized nations, have either been in accordance with popular opinion, or have been used as weapons in the strife between two factions of the people at large. It was the lower classes of French who slaughtered the Catholics in the time of the French Revolution. In our own time, the brutal and lawless attacks on religious minorities in this and other countries, the pogroms of the Jews in Russia and Poland, and the massacres of Christians in the Turkish dominions were popular performances. So therefore, judging by the past, if religious liberty should ever be threatened in this country, the menace would not come from the educated or middle classes, nor from such thrifty and peaceable workers as may have accumulated a few hundred or a few thousand dollars of property, but from a lawless mob of the unthinking class who degrade our elections.

The reader may now fairly ask, what then was the struggle for liberty of which we have all heard so much as continuing for centuries in Europe and America? It had two aspects, in both of which the sympathy of the element added to the voting list by manhood suffrage has been consciously or unconsciously on the side of tyranny. One aspect was that of the resistance of religious minorities to majority oppression; the other, the resistance of business men to governmental oppression, by way of excessive taxes, imposts and restrictions. The non-propertied classes would probably in the one case have swelled the tyrannical majority, and in the other would have favored as they still do interference with business by the state. In the middle ages the resistance of business men to governmental and baronial exactions was almost continuous, and was displayed by agitations and revolts frequently described as struggles for liberty. Always the real object was the same; the privilege claimed by business men, of conducting honest and peaceful industries, businesses and exchanges without interference and secured from confiscation. There has also been in the past a steady clearing away by merchants, traders, craftsmen and their friends and partisans, of obstacles placed by governmental stupidity, error and prejudice in the way of peaceful labor, business and general betterment. In short it has been a struggle to put business men and business methods in control. These contests continue everywhere; they are still going on in the United States; but the non-propertied classes have never joined in them on the side of liberty; they have been and are prejudicially arrayed against business methods and business men. The business world has always had to win its way and hold its ground despite them.

The other aspect of the so called struggle for liberty in the days gone by, was that already referred to, of the resistance of religious minorities to persecution. This persecution, though governmental in form, was in reality a majority oppression, in which the government merely represented the prevailing opinion. Such were the persecutions of the British Protestant dissenters, the American Quakers and Baptists, and the French Huguenots. Had manhood suffrage then prevailed, the majority demanding the persecutions would probably have been greater and more truculent. We may be sure that the populace would have uttered no word for toleration.

Since manhood suffrage has been established the people have created six amendments to the United States Constitution, of which five were unwise, unjust or arbitrary and one merely formal. The record is not flattering to popular wisdom or justice. Here they are: