It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all before them without a check; but though one Conservative reaction may follow another, although time after time the Democrats may return victorious from the fall elections, in the end Radicalism must inevitably win the day. A party which takes for its watch-word, “The national good,” will always beat the Constitutionalists.
Except during some great crisis, the questions which come most home at election times in a democratic country are minor points, in which the party not in power has always the advantage over the office-holders: it is on these petty matters that a cry of jobbery and corruption can be got up, and nothing in American politics is more taking than such a cry. “We are a liberal people, sir,” said a Californian to me, “but among ourselves we don‘t care to see some men get more than their share of Uncle Sam‘s money. It doesn‘t go down at election time to say that the Democrats are spoiling the country; but it‘s a mighty strong plank that you‘ve got if you prove that Hank Andrews has made a million of dollars by the last Congressional job. We say, ‘Smart boy, Hank Andrews;’ but we generally vote for the other man.” It is these small questions, or “side issues,” as they are termed, which cause the position of parties to fluctuate frequently in certain States.
The first reaction against the now triumphant Radicals will probably be based upon the indignation excited by the extension of Maine liquor laws throughout the whole of the States in which the New Englanders have the mastery. Prohibitive laws are not supported in America by the arguments with which all of us in Britain are familiar. The New England Radicals concede that, so far as the effects of the use of alcohol are strictly personal, there is no ground for the interference of society. They go even further, and say that no ground for general and indiscriminate interference with the sale of liquor is to be found in the fact that drink maddens certain men, and causes them to commit crime. They are willing to admit that, were the evils confined to individuals, it would be their own affair; but they attempt to show that the use of alcohol affects the condition, moral and physical, of the drinker‘s offspring, and that this is a matter so bound up with the general weal that public interference may be necessary. It is the belief of a majority of the thinkers of New England that the taint of alcoholic poison is hereditary; that the children of drunkards will furnish more than the ordinary proportion of great criminals; that the descendants of habitual tipplers will be found to lack vital force, and will fall into the ranks of pauperism and dependence: not only are the results of morbid appetites, they say, transmitted to the children, but the appetites themselves descend to the offspring with the blood. If this be true, the New England Radicals urge, the use of alcohol becomes a moral wrong, a crime even, of which the law might well take cognizance.
We are often told that party organization has become so dictatorial, so despotic, in America, that no one not chosen by the preliminary convention, no one, in short, whose name is not upon the party ticket, has any chance of election to an office. To those who reflect upon the matter, it would seem as though this is but a consequence of the existence of party and of the system of local representation: in England itself the like abuse is not unknown. Where neither party possesses overwhelming strength, division is failure; and some knot or other of pushing men must be permitted to make the selection of a candidate, to which, when made, the party must adhere, or suffer a defeat. As to the composition of the nominating conventions, the grossest misstatements have been made to us in England, for we have been gravely assured that a nation which is admitted to present the greatest mass of education and intelligence with the smallest intermixture of ignorance and vice of which the world has knowledge, allows itself to be dictated to in the matter of the choice of its rulers by caucuses and conventions composed of the idlest and most worthless of its population. Bribery, we have been told, reigns supreme in these assemblies; the nation‘s interest is but a phrase; individual selfishness the true dictator of each choice; the name of party is but a cloak for private ends, and the wire-pullers are equaled in rascality only by their nominees.
It need hardly be shown that, were these stories true, a people so full of patriotic sentiment as that which lately furnished a million and a half of volunteers for a national war, would without doubt be led to see its safety in the destruction of conventions and their wire-pullers—of party government itself, if necessary. It cannot be conceived that the American people would allow its institutions to be stultified and law itself insulted to secure the temporary triumph of this party or of that, on any mere question of the day.
The secret of the power of caucus and convention is, general want of time on the part of the community. Your honest and shrewd Western farmer, not having himself the leisure to select his candidate, is fain to let caucus or convention choose for him. In practice, however, the evil is far from great: the party caucus, for its own interest, will, on the whole, select the fittest candidate available, and, in any case, dares not, except perhaps in New York City, fix its choice upon a man of known bad character. Even where party is most despotic, a serious mistake committed by one of the nominating conventions will seldom fail to lose its side so many votes as to secure a triumph for the opponents.
King Caucus is a great monarch, however; it would be a mistake to despise him, and conventions are dear to the American people—at least it would seem so, to judge from their number. Since I have been in America there have been sitting, besides doubtless a hundred others, the names of which I have not noticed, the Philadelphia “Copper Johnson Wigwam,” or assembly of the Presidential party (of which the Radicals say that it is but “the Copperhead organization with a fresh snout”), a dentists’ convention, a phrenological convention, a pomological congress, a school-teachers’ convention, a Fenian convention, an eight-hour convention, an insurance companies’ convention, and a loyal soldiers’ convention. One is tempted to think of the assemblies of ’48 in Paris, and of the caricatures representing the young bloods of the Paris Jockey Club being addressed by their President as “Citoyens Vicomtes,” whereas, when the café waiters met in their congress, it was “Messieurs les Garçons-limonadiers.”
The pomological convention was an extremely jovial one, all the horticulturists being whisky-growers themselves, and having a proper wish to compare their own with their neighbors’ “Bourbon” or “old Rye.” Caucuses (or cauci: which is it?) of this kind suggest a derivation of this name for what many consider a low American proceeding, from an equally low Latin word of similar sound and spelling. In spite of the phrase “a dry caucus” being not unknown in the temperance State of Maine, many might be inclined to think that caucuses, if not exactly vessels of grace, were decidedly “drinking vessels;” but Americans tell you that the word is derived from the phrase a “caulker‘s meeting,” caulkers being peculiarly given to noise.
The cry against conventions is only a branch of that against “politicians,” which is continually being raised by the adherents of the side which happens at the moment to be the weaker, and which evidently helps to create the evils against which its authors are protesting. It is now the New York Democrats who tell such stories as that of the Columbia District census-taker going to the Washington house of a wealthy Boston man to find out his religious tenets. The door was opened by a black boy, to whom the white man began: “What‘s your name?” “Sambo, sah, am my Christian name.” “Wall, Sambo, is your master a Christian?” To which Sambo‘s indignant answer was: “No, sah! Mass member ob Congress, sah!” When the Democrats were in power, it was the Republicans of Boston and the Cambridge professors who threw out sly hints, and violent invectives too, against the whole tribe of “politicians.” Such unreasoning outcries are to be met only by bare facts; but were a jury of readers of the debates in Parliament and in Congress to be impaneled to decide whether political immorality were not more rife in England than in America, I should, for my part, look forward with anxiety to the result.
The organization of the Republican party is hugely powerful; it has its branches in every township and district in the Union; but it is strong, not in the wiles of crafty plotters, not in the devices of unknown politicians, but in the hearts of the loyal people of the country. If there were nothing else to be said to Englishmen on the state of parties in America, it should be sufficient to point out that, while the “Democracy” claim the Mozart faction of New York and the shoddy aristocracy, the pious New Englanders and their sons in the Northwest are, by a vast majority, Republicans; and no “side issues” should be allowed to disguise the fact that the Democratic is the party of New York, the Republican the party of America.