“‘But what?’ sais I.
“‘Why,’ says he, ‘but it don’t do to say so, you know.’
“Jist then some of the neighbours came in, when he burst out wuss than before, and groaned like a thousand sinners at a camp-meetin’.
“Most likely the radical father of the strangled Reform Bill comforted himself with the same reflection, only he thought it wouldn’t do to say so. Crocodiles can cry when they are hungry, but when they do it’s time to vamose the poke-loken,1 that’s a fact. Yes, yes, they understand these things to England as well as we do, you may depend. They warn’t born yesterday. But I won’t follow it out. Liberalism is playing the devil both with us and the British. Change is going on with railroad haste in America, but in England, though it travels not so fast, it never stops, and like a steam-packet that has no freight, it daily increases its rate of speed as it advances towards the end of the voyage. Now you have my explanation, Doctor, why I am a conservative on principle, both at home and abroad.”
1 Poke-loken, a marshy place, or stagnant pool, connected with a river.
“Well,” said the doctor,” that is true enough as far as England is concerned, but still I don’t quite understand how it is, as a republican, you are so much of a conservative at home, for your reasons appear to me to be more applicable to Britain than to the United States.”
“Why,” sais I, “my good friend, liberalism is the same thing in both countries, though its work and tactics may be different. It is destructive but not creative. It tampers with the checks and balances of our constitution. It flatters the people by removing the restraints they so wisely placed on themselves to curb their own impetuosity. It has shaken the stability of the judiciary by making the experiment of electing the judges. It has abolished equity, in name, but infused it so strongly in the administration of the law, that the distinctive boundaries are destroyed, and the will of the court is now substituted for both. In proportion as the independence of these high officers is diminished, their integrity may be doubted. Elected, and subsequently sustained by a faction, they become its tools, and decide upon party and not legal grounds. In like manner, wherever the franchise was limited, the limit is attempted to be removed. We are, in fact, fast merging into a mere pure democracy,1 for the first blow on the point of the wedge that secures the franchise, weakens it so that it is sure to come out at last. Our liberals know this as well your British Gerrymanderers do.”
1 De Tocqueville, who has written incomparably the best work that has ever appeared on the United States, makes the following judicious remarks on this subject: “Where a nation modifies the elective qualification, it may easily be foreseen, that sooner or later that qualification will be abolished. There is no more invariable rule in the history of society. The further electoral rights are extended, the more is felt the need of extending them; for after each concession, the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength. The ambition of those who are below the appointed rate is irritated, in exact proportion of the number of those who are above it. The exception at last becomes the rule, concession follows concession, and no step can be made, short of universal suffrage.”
“Genymanderers,”1 he said, “who in the world are they? I never heard of them before.”
1 This term came into use in the year 1811, in Massachusetts, where, for several years previous, the federal and democratic parties stood nearly equal. In that year, the democratic party, having a majority in the Legislature, determined so to district the State anew, that those sections which gave a large number of federal votes might be brought into one district. The result was, that the democratic party carried everything before them at the following election, and filled every office in the State, although it appeared by the votes returned, that nearly two-thirds of the votes were Federalists. Elridge Gerry, a distinguished politician at that period, was the inventor of that plan, which was called Gerrymandering, after him.—Glossary of Americanisms.