Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

DEMOCRACY

IV
DEMOCRACY

The system of choosing public officials by popular vote is properly enough called Democracy. The terms of tenure and nomenclature, etc., are matters of detail. If we are to seek any test as to what constitutes a Democracy, we may as well take as a test the formal setting up at a particular time of some scheme of government by the popular will. England has been a democracy since the Act of Settlement, and if it be said that universal suffrage was not then known, the answer is that it is not known now, and never can be known. The exclusions of women and non-naturalized residents or even of criminals and lunatics are matters of convenience. It is a question of degree.

Again, it is impossible that all the officials should be elected, and the assignment to the elected officials of the power to appoint the others is a matter of convenience. The very simple expedients adopted by the framers of the United States Constitution were the result of English experience and French theory. The intellect of France had, during the eighteenth century, put into portable form the ideas that had been at work in England’s institutions. The theoretical part of it, the division of government into three departments, had been worked out from European experience going back to Greek times. The written constitution was a mere expansion of the Bill of Rights. Our Framers were men who had had personal experience in governing under the English system in force in the colonies, where the power of practical self-government had been developed by isolation. They received from the French a scientific view of that system. They had learned by experience that a confederacy was not a government, and they proceeded to bind the country together by the grant of that power which defines government, the power to tax. The extension to a large territory of a system which was in practical operation in all its parts, was in one sense a miracle of intelligence, in another sense it was the only conceivable solution of the problem of unity. Philosophers speak of Democracy as if it were the outcome of choice. It has been the outcome of events. No other system would have endured, and every formula of government that did not embody an old usage would have been transformed in ten years by the popular will into something that did.

The reason the Constitution of the United States is the most remarkable document in existence is that it contained so little of novelty. The election of some officers and the appointment of the rest, that was what the people were used to. That is democracy. There is of course no such thing as a pure democracy, or a pure monarchy. Every government is in practice the outcome of forces of which a very small fraction are expressed in its constitution and laws.

A constitution is a profession of faith, a summary written on a bulletin board, and so far good. The United States had this advantage in starting upon her career, that the bulletin was a very accurate summary of existing customs, and was in itself an inspiring proof of the virtue of the people. We are driven into admiring the Colonists as among the most enlightened of their kind. It is true that the revolution was conducted, and the Constitution adopted by the activity of a small minority. But this is true of all revolutions. The point is that the leaders represented sense and virtue. The people followed.

The moment the scheme was launched it became the sport of the elements. In the North a trading bourgeoisie grew up under it. In the South a slave-holding oligarchy, a society so fantastically out of touch with the modern world that it seems like something left over from the times before Christ, found no difficulty in making use of the forms of Democracy. During the half century that followed, these two societies became so hostile to each other that conflict was inevitable, and there ensued a death-grapple in four years of war, a war to extinction. At the end of the war no trace of the oligarchy remained upon the face of the earth. And yet these forms of government survived and began to operate immediately, under new auspices of course, deflected by new passions, showing new shapes of distortion, yet ideally the same. The only common element between the north and the south was the reverence for these forms of government.

Meanwhile civilization had been creeping westward in a margin of frontier life, conducted under these forms. Behind this moved a belt of farming and village life, at war with the backwoods ideals, but using the same forms of government. Then arose the railroad era and tore millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything, ruled everybody—still under these forms.