The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

“The distinguished gentleman [Mr. Shellabarger] who introduced the bill from the committee, very appropriately said that it requires us to enter upon unexplored territory. That territory, Mr. Speaker, is the neutral ground of all political philosophy; the neutral ground for which rival theories have been struggling in all ages. There are two ideas so utterly antagonistic that, when in any nation, either has gained absolute and complete possession of that neutral ground, the ruin of that nation has invariably followed. The one is that despotism which swallows and absorbs all power in a single-central government; the other is that extreme doctrine of local sovereignty which makes nationality impossible, and resolves a general government into anarchy and chaos. It makes but little difference, as to the final result, which of these ideas drives the other from the field; in either case ruin follows.

“The result exhibited by the one was seen in the Amphictyonic and Achæan leagues of ancient Greece, of which Madison, in the twentieth number of the Federalist, says:

“‘The inevitable result of all was imbecility in the government, discord among the provinces, foreign influences and indignities, a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities in war.’

“This is a fitting description of all nations which have carried the doctrine of local self-government so far as to exclude the doctrine of nationality. They were not nations, but mere leagues, bound together by common consent, ready to fall to pieces at the demand of any refractory member. The opposing idea was never better illustrated than when Louis XIV. entered the French Assembly, booted and spurred, and girded with the sword of ancestral kings, and said to the Deputies of France: ‘The State! I am the State!’

“Between these opposite and extreme theories of government, the people have been tossed from century to century; and it has been only when these ideas have been in reasonable equipoise, when this neutral ground has been held in joint occupancy, and usurped by neither, that popular liberty and national life have been possible. How many striking illustrations of this do we see in the history of France! The deposition of Louis XIV., followed by the Reign of Terror, when liberty had run mad and France was a vast scene of blood and ruin! We see it again in our day. Only a few years ago, the theory of personal government had placed in the hands of Napoleon III., absolute and irresponsible power. The communes of France were crushed, and local liberty existed no longer. Then followed Sedan and the rest. On the first day of last month, when France was trying to rebuild her ruined Government, when the Prussian cannon had scarcely ceased thundering against the walls of Paris, a deputy of France rose in the National Assembly and moved, as the first step toward the safety of his country, that a committee of thirty should be chosen, to be called the Committee of Decentralization. But it was too late to save France from the fearful reaction from despotism. The news comes to us, under the sea, that on Saturday last, the cry was ringing through France: ‘Death to the Priests!’ and ‘Death to the Rich!’ and the swords of the citizens of that new republic are now wet with each other’s blood.

EQUIPOISE OF OUR GOVERNMENT.

“The records of time show no nobler or wiser work done by human hands than that of our fathers when they framed this Republic. Beginning in a wilderness world, they wrought unfettered by precedent, untrammeled by custom, unawed by kings or dynasties. With the history of other nations before them, they surveyed the new field. In the progress of their work they encountered these antagonistic ideas to which I have referred. They attempted to trace through that neutral ground the boundary line across which neither force should pass. The result of their labors is our Constitution and frame of government. I never contemplate the result without feeling that there was more than mortal wisdom in the men who produced it. It has seemed to me that they borrowed their thought from Him who constructed the universe and put it in motion. For nothing more aptly describes the character of our Republic than the solar system, launched into space by the hand of the Creator, where the central sun is the great power around which revolve all the planets in their appointed orbits. But while the sun holds in the grasp of its attractive power the whole system, and imparts its light and heat to all, yet each individual planet is under the sway of laws peculiar to itself.

“Under the sway of terrestrial laws, winds blow, waters flow, and all the tenantries of the planet live and move. So, sir, the States move on in their orbits of duty and obedience, bound to the central Government by this Constitution, which is their supreme law, while each State is making laws and regulations of its own, developing its own energies, maintaining its own industries, managing its local affairs in its own way, subject only to the supreme but beneficent control of the Union. When States Rights ran mad, put on the form of secession, and attempted to drag the States out of Union, we saw the grand lessons taught, in all the battles of the late war, that a State could no more be hurled from the Union, without ruin to the Nation, than could a planet be thrown from its orbit without dragging after it, to chaos and ruin, the whole solar universe.

“Sir, the great war for the Union has vindicated the centripetal power of the Nation, and has exploded, forever I trust, the disorganizing theory of State Sovereignty, which slavery attempted to impose upon this country. But we should never forget that there is danger in the opposite direction. The destruction, or serious crippling of the principle of local government, would be as fatal to liberty as secession would have been fatal to the Union.

“The first experiment which our fathers tried in government-making after the War of Independence was a failure, because the central power conferred in the Articles of Confederation was not strong enough. The second, though nobly conceived, became almost a failure, because slavery attempted so to interpret the Constitution as to reduce the nation again to a confederacy, a mere league between sovereign States. But we have now vindicated and secured the centripetal power; let us see that the centrifugal force is not destroyed, but that the grand and beautiful equipoise may be maintained.