The Rise of the Democracy

by Joseph Clayton

The American Constitution was the work of men who believed in democratic government as Locke had defined it, and America has been the biggest experiment in democracy the world has seen. The fact that the President and his Cabinet are not members of Congress makes the great distinction between the British and American Constitution. The College of Electors is elected only to elect the President; that done, its work is over. Congress, consisting of members elected from each state, and the Senate, consisting of representatives from each state, need not contain a majority of the President's party, and the President is in no way responsible to Congress as the British Prime Minister is to the House of Commons. The relation of the State Governments to the Federal Government has presented the chief difficulty to democracy in America.

The Whigs, or Republicans, as they came to be called, stood for a strong Federal Government; the Democrats were jealous for the rights of State Governments. The issue was not decided till the Civil War of 1861-1865, when the southern slave-holding States, seeing slavery threatened, announced their secession from the United States. Abraham Lincoln, the newly-elected President, declared that the Government could not allow secession, and insisted that the war was to save the union. Slavery was abolished and the Union saved by the defeat of the Secessionists; but for a time the fortunes of the Union were more desperate than they had been at any time since the Declaration of Independence.

Hamilton was the real founder of the Republican party, as Jefferson was of the Democrats. Both these men were prominent in the making of the American Constitution in 1787, and Jefferson was the responsible author of the Declaration of Independence. But Franklin and Paine made large contributions to the democratic independence of America.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Edmund Randolph, the first Attorney-General of the United States, was on Washington's staff at the beginning of the War, and he ascribed independence in the first place to George III., but next to "Thomas Paine, an Englishman by birth."[^[75]]

Paine's later controversies with theological opponents have obscured his very considerable services to American Independence, to political democracy in England, and to constitutional government in the French Revolution; and as mankind is generally, and naturally, more interested in religion than in politics, Paine is remembered rather as an "infidel"—though he was a strong theist—than as a gifted writer on behalf of democracy and a political reformer of original powers.

Paine—who came of a Suffolk Quaker family—reached America in 1774, on the very threshold of the war. His Quaker principles made him attack negro slavery on his arrival, and he endeavoured, without success, to get an anti-slavery clause inserted in the "Declaration of Independence." He served in the American ranks during the war, and was the friend of Washington, who recognised the value of his writings. For Paine's "Common Sense" pamphlet and his publication, "The Crisis," had enormous circulation, and were of the greatest value in keeping the spirit of independence alive in the dark years of the war. They were fiercely Republican; and though they were not entirely free from contemporary notions of government established on the ruins of a lost innocence, they struck a valiant note of self-reliance, and emphasised the importance of the average honest man. "Time makes more converts than reason," wrote Paine. Of monarchy he could say, "The fate of Charles I. hath only made kings more subtle—not more just"; and, "Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived."

Paine was in England in 1787, busy with scientific inventions, popular in Whig circles and respected. The fall of the Bastille won his applause, as it did the applause of Fox and the Whigs, but it was not till the publication of Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," in 1790, that Paine again took up his pen on behalf of democracy.

Burke had been the hero of Paine and the Americans in the War of Independence, and his speeches and writings had justified the republic. And now it was the political philosophy of Hobbes that Burke seemed to be contending for when he insisted that the English people were bound for ever to royalty by the act of allegiance to William III.

Paine replied to Burke the following year with the "Rights of Man" which he wrote in a country inn, the "Angel," at Islington. It was not so much to demolish Burke as to give the English nation a constitution that Paine desired; for it seemed to the author of "Common Sense" that, America having renounced monarchy and set up a republican form of government, safely guarded by a written constitution, England must be anxious to do the same thing, and was only in need of a constitution.