The Twentieth Century American / Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great Anglo-Saxon Nations

by Harry Perry Robinson

Thus we see how the national party when in power is able to fatten and strengthen the hands of the party organisations within the several Counties; and strengthen them it must, for if they lose control of the voters within their territory then is the national party itself ruined and dethroned.

And below the County party organisations, the County governments, are the organisations and governments in the cities, which again are split on precisely the same lines of cleavage. The City Council of Petersfield or Midhurst is divided into Conservatives and Liberals precisely as the Hampshire Legislature or the Parliament at Westminster. Jealousies often arise between the County organisations and those in the cities. The influence of Birmingham might well become overpowering in the Warwickshire Legislature, whereby it would be difficult for any but a resident of Birmingham to become Governor of the County or to be elected to the House of Lords. If the Birmingham municipal organisation chanced to be controlled by a strong hand, it is not difficult to see how he might impose his will upon the County Legislature and the County party organisation, how he might claim more than his share of the sweets and spoils of office for his immediate friends and colleagues in the city, to the disgust of the other parts of the County. For the most part, however, such quarrels, between the city and County organisations of the same party, when they arise, are but lovers' quarrels, rarely pushed to the point of endangering the unity of the party in the State at election time.

But now if we remember what was said at first, that no candidates for Parliament or other elected functionaries are "sent down" by a central organisation, but all are "sent up" from the bottom, the impulse starting from small meetings in public-house parlours and the like (in the case of cities, meetings being held by "precincts" to elect delegates to a meeting of the "ward," which meeting again elects delegates to the meeting of the city), when we see how the city can coerce the County and the County sway the nation, then we have also no difficulty in seeing how it is, as has been said already, that the same power that appoints a janitor in a town-hall may dictate the nomination of a President. Even more than the County organisation is to the national party, is the city organisation to the County. The party, both as a national and as a County organisation, must fatten and strengthen the hands of the city machine. Thus comes it that such an alderman as the Delectable One is unassailable. His power reaches far beyond the city. The party organisation in the city cannot dispense with him, because he can be relied upon always to carry his ward, and that ward may be necessary, not to the city machine only, but to the County and the nation.

It is hardly necessary to explain that in a general election in England the party which is returned to power need not necessarily have a majority of the votes throughout the country. A party may win ten seats by majorities of less than a hundred in each and lose one, being therein in a minority of a thousand; with the result that, with fewer votes than were cast for its opponents, it will have a clear majority of nine in the eleven seats. This is of course well understood.

But in an American general or presidential election, this anomaly is immensely aggravated by the fact that the electoral unit is not a city or a borough but a whole County or State. The various States have a voice in proportion to their population, but that vote is cast as a unit. A majority of ten votes in New York carries the entire thirty-seven votes of that State, while a majority of one thousand in Montana only counts three. There are forty-six States in the Republic, but the thirteen most populous possess more than half the votes, and a presidential candidate who received the votes of those thirteen, though each was won by only the narrowest majority, would be elected over an antagonist who carried the other thirty-three States, though in each of the thirty-three his majority might be overwhelming. Bearing this in mind, we see at once what immense importance may, in a doubtful election, attach to the control of a single populous State.

If in an English election, similarly conducted, the country was known to be so equally divided that the vote of Warwickshire, with, perhaps, twenty votes, would certainly decide the issue, the man who could control Warwickshire would practically control the country. We have seen further, however, that the man who controls Warwickshire will probably be the man who controls Birmingham. He may be the Mayor of Birmingham, or, more likely, the chairman (or "boss") of the municipal machine who nominated and elected the Mayor and whose puppet the Mayor practically is. It then becomes evident that the man who can sway the politics of the nation is not merely the man who controls the single County of Warwickshire, but the man who, inside that County, controls the single city.

To go a step below that again, the control of the city may depend entirely on the control of a given ward in the city. That ward may contain a very large labouring vote, by reason of the existence of a number of big factories within its limits. Unless that labouring vote can be polled for the Liberal party, the ward will not go Liberal, and without it the city will be lost. The loss of the city involves the loss of the County, and the loss of the County means the loss of the nation. The man therefore who by his personal influence, or by his leadership in a perfectly organised party machine in one ward of Birmingham, can be relied on to call out the full Liberal strength in that one ward of a single city may be absolutely indispensable to the success of the party in the country as a whole. And it is even conceivable that that man again may be dependent on one of his own henchmen, the "Captain" of a single precinct in the ward or the man who has the ear and confidence of the hands in the largest of the factories.

Let me not be understood as saying that the personal influence of an individual may not be extremely powerful in an English election; and that power may rest, similarly, on his popularity in, and consequent ability to carry with him into the party fold, one particular district. But there is not the same established form of County government on avowedly national lines, nor the same city government, as in America, through which that influence can make itself definitely and continuously felt.