To-day, alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known;
My palace is the people's hall,
The ballot-box my throne!"
This is a very splendid sort of a ballot-box, and he is a very fine sort of an American who sings about it; but what are the facts? There are a good many chances that the box stands in a corner grocery, and that the poor voter is led up to deposit his priceless ballot so drunk that he cannot walk without help. Mr. Whittier would have us believe that the poor voter sings:
"To-day shall simple manhood try
The strength of gold and land;
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand."
The truth is that gold and land try the very "simple manhood" as a rule, and very much less than the wide world is sufficient to buy the power in a great multitude of poor voters' hands. The poet sees what the ballot-box may be, ought to be, and, in some rare instances, really is. He unerringly seizes upon the dignity and majesty of self-government, the equal rights and privileges of manhood, and the dissipation of all distinctions in the exercise of the political franchise among freemen. The great truth of human equality inspires him, and he uses the ideal and possible ballot-box to illustrate it, and thus furnishes the standard by which the real ballot-box is to be judged.
The poetical view of our American system of government is that all men have a voice in the government; that we choose our own rulers and make our own laws; that no man has a hereditary right to rule, and that men are selected for the service of the people, in the construction and the execution of the laws, because of their fitness for office. Outside of this view, the American system of government has no beauty and no foundation in truth and justice. If we undertake to argue with a monarchist, we never bring forward any other. It has in it the essential element of poetry, because it does justice to the nature and character of man, and describes a perfect political society. The poetical view of the American system of government, is, then, the highest view. It covers the sovereignty of the citizen, and the wisdom of the popular voice. Around this idea the poets have woven their noblest songs; but again we ask what are the facts? The people are led by the nose by politicians; and not one officer of the government in one hundred is chosen to his place because of his fitness for it. The people do not nominate those who shall rule them, or those who shall make laws for them. Those whom the politicians do not nominate for office, nominate themselves. The political machinery of America practically takes the choice of rulers and officers out of the hands of the people, and puts it into the hands of a set of self-appointed leaders, whose patriotism is partisanship, and whose principal aim is to serve themselves and their friends, and use the people for accomplishing their purposes. No greater fiction was ever conceived than the pleasant one that the people of America govern America. The people of America, except in certain political revolutions, have always been governed by a company of self-appointed and irresponsible men, whose principal work was to grind axes for themselves. The poetry of American politics is then the severest standard by which to judge the reality of American politics.
Religious freedom is another poetical idea in which the American glories. It is essentially a poetical thought that every man is free to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience—that there is no Church to domineer over the State, and no State to domineer over the Church, that the Bible is free, and that each individual soul is responsible only to its Maker. This great and beautiful liberty stirs us when we think of it as music would stir us, breathed from heaven itself. It is grand, God-begotten, belonging in the eternal system of things, full of inspiration. This religious freedom we claim as Americans. Some of us enjoy it; but the number is not large. The freedom of the sect is not greatly circumscribed, but the freedom of the individual is hardly greater in America than it is in those countries where an established church lays its finger upon every man. I would as soon be the slave of the Pope or the Archbishop as the slave of a sect. I would as readily put my neck under the yoke of a national church as under the yoke of a sect. It does not mend the matter that the multitude are willing slaves, and it certainly mars the matter that the sects themselves do what they can, in too many instances, to circumscribe each the other's liberty. Sects are religiously and socially proscribed by sects. Take any town in America that contains half a dozen churches, representing the same number of religious denominations, and it will be found that, with one, and that probably the dominant sect, it will be all that a man's reputation and position are worth to belong to another sect. Perfect religious freedom in America there undoubtedly is; but it is the possession of only here and there an individual. Prevalent uncharitableness and bigotry are incompatible with the existence of religious liberty anywhere.
It is thus that the poetic instinct grasps at truth and beauty, and fitness and harmony, wherever it sees it, and it is thus that it furnishes us (subordinate only to special, divine revelation) with the most delicate tests of human institutions, customs, and actions. Litmus-paper does not more faithfully detect the presence of an acid than the poetic instinct detects the false and foul in all that makes up human life. All that is grand and good, all that is heroic and unselfish, all that is pure and true, all that is firm and strong, all that is beautiful and harmonious, is essentially poetical, and the opposite of all these is at once rejected by the unsophisticated poetic instinct.
Verily the poets of the world are the prophets of humanity! They forever reach after and foresee the ultimate good. They are evermore building the paradise that is to be, painting the millennium that is to come, restoring the lost image of God in the human soul. When the world shall reach the poet's ideal, it will arrive at perfection; and much good will it do the world to measure itself by this ideal, and struggle to lift the real to its lofty level.