Still more; by the side of the power of Cæsar, in political affairs, another regular authority is beginning to show itself, which embraces within its domain the modern institutions and new establishments of public utility, such as the public routes, banks, and elementary schools, that, in the United States, have acquired an unparallelled magnitude. Thus there are Canal Commissioners, Bank Commissioners, School Commissioners. Their power is great and real. The Canal Commissioners establish administrative regulations, which they change at will, without previous notice. They fix and change the rate of tolls; they are surrounded by a large body of agents, entirely dependent upon them and removeable at pleasure; they are charged with the management of large sums of money; the sums that passed through the hands of the Pennsylvania Commissioners amounted to nearly 23,000,000 dollars. They are certainly subjected to a less minute and rigourous control, than is extended to the most trifling affairs of our Board of Public Works or our Engineer Department. If they had had our financial regulations, our system of responsibility, our court of accounts, they would, certainly, have spent ten years more in executing the works entrusted to them, and they would have executed them no better and no cheaper. The Bank Commissioners in the State of New York, by the provisions of the Safety Fund Act, are clothed, by right, if not in fact, with a sort of dictatorship; they have, in certain cases, power of life and death over the banks.
It is in the new States, especially, that one should see the Commissioners exercise their powers. Last summer the Ohio Canal Commissioners, perceiving or thinking that they perceived, a conspiracy among the persons engaged in the transportation of goods on the New York canals to raise the rates of freight, immediately adopted a resolution to this effect; whereas certain persons have shown a disposition to make exorbitant charges, the rates of toll on all articles that may have paid on the New York canal, above a certain rate of freight, shall be double. This was establishing a maximum, not only on their own territory, but on that of a neighbouring State. A director-general of our public routes, who should take such a liberty, would be forthwith denounced as violating the principles of commercial freedom. In the United States, every body agrees that the Ohio Commissioners were right; that the profits of the transportation companies would be somewhat less, but the public would be the gainer, and the former accordingly submitted.
In the United States, then, the general weal is the supreme law; and it immediately raises its head and vindicates its rights, when it feels the encroachments of private interest. The system of government in this country is, therefore, not so much a system of absolute liberty and free will, as a system of equality, or rather it takes the character of a strong rule by the majority. In looking at some of the provisions in the charters of incorporated companies, one is tempted to ask how associations could be formed on such conditions, and how they have been able to procure capital. In Massachusetts, the share-holders are individually responsible for the debts of the company. In Pennsylvania, it is expressly provided, that, if at any time the privileges granted to the corporation shall prove to be contrary to the public good, the legislature may revoke them. This is the germ of despotism; but in the United States, Cæsar is disarmed; the old feudal line has neither fangs nor claws. Industry is prompt to take alarm at the exercise of despotism by Cæsar; but it is only in extreme cases, that it will feel any distrust of a society which lives and flourishes by labour, and all whose ends and aims, public and private, are self-aggrandisement by means of productive labour.
To understand fully the meaning of the word liberty, as it is used in this country, it is necessary to go to the sources of the American population; that is to say, to the origin of the distinction between the Yankee and the Virginian race. They have arrived at their notions of liberty by different avenues, the one by the gate of religion, and the other by that of politics, and have, therefore, understood it very differently.
When the Yankee came to settle himself in the New World, it was not for the purpose of founding an empire, but to establish a church. He fled from a land, which had shaken off the yoke of the papal Babylon, only to fall under that of the Babylon of episcopacy. He left behind him Satan, his pomp, and his works; he shook from the soles of his feet the dust of the inhospitable land of the Stuarts and the Anglican bishops; he sought a refuge in which he might practise his own mode of worship and obey what he believed to be the law of God. The Pilgrims, landed on Plymouth rock, established a liberty according to their own notion; it was a liberty for their own use exclusively, within whose embrace they felt perfectly at ease themselves, without caring if others were stifled by it. It might have been expected, that, proscribed themselves, they would at least have admitted religious toleration; but they did not grant it the narrowest corner, and even now it is far from having elbow room among them. Originally, the right of citizenship was extended only to Puritans like themselves; the state and the church were confounded; it was not until 1832 that they were definitely and completely separated in Massachusetts. The Jew and the Quaker were forbidden to touch the soil under the severest penalties, and in case of return, under pain of death. At present, if the law tolerates the Roman Catholic, public opinion does not, as the burning of the Ursuline convent in 1834, and the scandalous scenes exhibited at the trials of the incendiaries, testify. Still less mercy is shown to unbelief; witness the trial of Abner Kneeland for blasphemy, on account of his pantheistic writings.[DD]
The Yankee type exhibits little variety; all Yankees seem to be cast in the same mould; it was, therefore, very easy for them to organise a system of liberty for themselves, that is, to construct a frame, within which they should have the necessary freedom of motion. On their arrival they accordingly formed the plan of one, not merely tracing its general outlines and form, but dividing it into numerous compartments controlling all the details of life, with as much minuteness as the Mosaic law did that of the Hebrews. Thus organised, it became impossible for any man not cut to the same pattern, to establish himself among them. Although most of those laws which thus reduced life to rules,[DE] have been abrogated, especially since the Revolution, still their spirit survives. The habits which gave them birth, and to which, by a natural reaction, they gave strength, still exist, and to this day it is observable, that no foreigner settles in New England.
As for us, who resemble each other in nothing, except in differing from every body else, for us, to whom variety is as necessary as the air, to whom a life of rules would be a subject of horrour, the Yankee system would be torture. Their liberty is not the liberty to outrage all that is sacred on earth, to set religion at defiance, to laugh morals to scorn, to undermine the foundations of social order, to mock at all traditions and all received opinions; it is neither the liberty of being a monarchist in a republican country, nor that of sacrificing the honour of the poor man's wife or daughter to one's base passions; it is not even the liberty to enjoy one's wealth by a public display, for public opinion has its sumptuary laws, to which all must conform under pain of moral outlawry; nor even that of living in private different from the rest of the world. The liberty of the Yankee is essentially limited and special like the nature of the race. We should consider it as framed after the model of the liberty of Figaro; but the Yankee is satisfied with it, because it leaves him all the latitude he desires, and because of all the lessons of the Bible, that of the forbidden fruit, which we have not been able to fix in our brain, has made the deepest impression on his.
As the Yankee does not suffer under these restraints, as he is, or what amounts to the same thing, thinks himself, free, a preventive authority is unnecessary for him. This is the reason why there is no appearance of authority in New England, and that an armed force, a police, are even more unknown there than in the rest of the Union. The absence of a visible authority imposes on us, and we think that the American in general, and the Yankee in particular, is more free than we are. I am persuaded, however, that if we measure liberty by the number of actions that are permitted or tolerated in public and private life, the advantage is on our side, not only in comparison with New England, but also with the white population of the South.
The Virginian is more disposed to understand liberty in our manner. His disposition has a greater resemblance to ours; his faculties are much less special, more general than those of the Yankee; his mind is more ardent, his tastes more varied. But it is the Yankee that now rules the Union; it is his liberty which has given its principal features to the model of American liberty. Yet to extend its empire, it has been obliged to borrow some of the characteristic traits of Virginian liberty; or, I might say, of French liberty, for the high-priest of American democracy was a Virginian, who had imbibed in Paris the doctrines of the philosophy of the 18th century. American liberty, as it now is, may be considered the result of a mixture, in unequal proportions, of the theories of Jefferson with the New England usages. From these dissimilar tendencies has resulted a series of contradictory measures, which have become strangely complicated with each other, and which might puzzle and deceive a careless observer. It is in consequence of these opposite influences in the bosom of American society, that such conflicting judgments have been passed upon it; it is because the Yankee type is at present the stronger, whilst the Virginian was superior in the period of the revolution, that the ideas which the sight of America now suggests, are so different from those which she inspired at the epoch of Independence.