This personal interest which we all feel in the sayings and doings of Johnson is founded so firmly on his broad humanity that we need not have the slightest fear of its cessation or diminution. The habits of thought and expression which were in vogue in the eighteenth century may repeat themselves, as some of us expect, in the twentieth, or our children may become more captious, more violent, more ungraceful in their tastes than we are ourselves. The close of the preface to the Dictionary may cease to seem pathetic, or may win more tributes of tears than ever. The reputation of Johnson does not stand or fall by the appetite of modern readers for the Life of Savage or even for the Letter to Lord Chesterfield. It depends on the impossibility of human beings ever ceasing to watch with curiosity “the very pulse of the machine” when it is displayed as Johnson displayed it through the fortunate indiscretions of his friends, and when it is on the whole so manly, wholesome, brave, honest, and tender as it was in his. There will always be readers and admirers of what Johnson wrote. Let us welcome them; but let us not imagine that Johnson, as a great figure in letters, depends upon their suffrages. The mighty Samuel Johnson, the anniversary of whose death both hemispheres of the English-speaking race will solemnise on the 13th of this month, is not the author of this or that laborious contribution to prose or verse, but the convulsive invalid who “see-sawed” over the Grotius, the courageous old Londoner who trusted his bones among the stormy Hebrides, the autocrat of the Literary Club, the lover of all the company of blue-stockings, the unequalled talker, the sweet and formidable friend, the truculent boon-companion, the child-like Christian, who, for all his ghostly terrors, contrived at last “to die contented, trusting in the mercy of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ.” If the completed century finds us with any change at all of our feelings regarding him, it is surely merely this, that the passage of time is steadily making his faults seem more superficial and accidental, and his merits more striking, more essential, more pathetical and pleasing.—Fortnightly Review.
THE DEMOCRATIC VICTORY IN AMERICA.
BY WILLIAM HENRY HURLBURT.
The United States being, and having been from the outset of their history, a Democratic Republic, it may well puzzle a European reader to understand why American “Republicans” should bewail a “Democratic” triumph, or American “Democrats” exult in the overthrow of a “Republican” party.
Yet it may not be impertinent to suggest that in no country are the names of political parties or factions commonly selected by a committee of philologists with an eye to making the national politics intelligible. What notions of English history are conveyed by the mere names of “Whig” and “Tory” or even of “Liberal” and “Conservative” to a person unfamiliar with the political history of England? What light is thrown on the history of Byzantium by talking of the “Blues” and the “Greens,” or on the history of Florence by casual references to the “Bianchi” and the “Neri”?
When one asks for the origin of such names, history is apt to give him no better answer than that of the small African child who was invited by a sympathetic lady to explain how she came to have six toes on one of her feet—“they growed so!”
This is so emphatically true of American political parties that my readers must pardon me if I take them back to the “beginnings of things” for an accurate perspective of the recent Presidential election in the United States, and of its significance.
The existing Constitution of the American Union was adopted in 1789 by the citizens of thirteen new-born Republics who had grown up to manhood in the then anomalous condition of subjects of the British Crown enjoying all the privileges and immunities of local self-government in thirteen distinct and independent colonies which differed among themselves in origin, in social traditions and habits, and in religion, almost as widely as Wales differs from Ireland, or Ireland from Scotland. These colonies had co-operated from time to time with the mother country for the common defence against a common enemy, colonial France. And they had been united under a temporary political bond in the great revolutionary war of 1776, by a common spirit of resistance to that Parliamentary despotism, tempered by corruption, which after the English Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of the House of Hanover assumed to itself the place originally held by the British Crown in the allegiance of these stalwart “Home-Rulers” beyond the Atlantic.
At the peace of Versailles in 1783 Great Britain found herself compelled to recognize the independence of all and of each of these colonies, which thenceforth took their places in the family of nations as separate and sovereign states. They were recognized in this capacity not in block, but severally and individually, each by its own territorial designation; and from the moment of such recognition each of them felt that it was absolutely free, and “of right ought to be free,” saving so far as it had bound itself to the then existing confederacy of 1778, to adopt any form of government which might suit the humor of its citizens, and to form any alliances advantageous to its own interests. The States were, indeed, at that moment bound together for certain specified purposes by a federal compact formed during the war in 1778; but this compact sate so lightly upon them that it was not only impossible to compel the several States into an exact fulfilment of confederate obligations, but very difficult even to induce them to get themselves properly represented under it for legislative and executive purposes at the then federal capital of Annapolis in Maryland. A striking illustration of this is given in a private letter, now in my possession, written by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, the author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and eventually the founder of that great Democratic party under the Union of 1789, which now once more, after a quarter of a century of extra constitutional experiments in government, has been commissioned by the voters of the United States, in the election to the Presidency of Governor Cleveland of New York, to restore in all its parts, and re-establish on its original and enduring foundations, the sway of the Federal Constitution of 1789. Writing from Annapolis to a friend in Virginia in regard to the negotiations at Paris which had secured the recognition of American Independence, Mr. Jefferson, in December 1783, complains bitterly of the indifference of the States to this momentous event. Under the ninth article of the then existing confederate compact of 1778, the assent of nine States represented in the Congress at Annapolis assembled was necessary to the ratification of any treaty with a foreign power. The time fixed for the ratification by Congress of the Treaty of Versailles was rapidly running out at the date of the letter to which I refer, and the Congress had been long in session. “We had yesterday, for the first time, seven States,” exclaims Mr. Jefferson; and he goes on to express his concern lest the necessary quorum of nine States should not be assembled before the expiration of the term fixed for ratification in the treaty by which, after seven years of an exhausting war, their independence was to be established!
I dwell on this point in order to emphasise the truth, vital to any intelligent appreciation of the great change now impending in the administration of public affairs in the United States, that the commonwealths by which the American Union was established were, from the first, in the opinion of their inhabitants, sufficient each unto itself; and this because each of these commonwealths was indeed a well-organised body politic, the members of which had long managed their domestic affairs under one or another form of chartered authority, after their own fashion; and, for the protection within their own borders of life and of property, had adjusted to their several situations and necessities the maxims and principles of English liberty defined and guarded by law. These States were the creators, not the creatures of that “more perfect Union” which (the Confederacy of 1778 failing) was finally formed by them after all its features had been discussed, debated, and redebated, not only in a Convention of the States assembled for that purpose in 1787, but in the several States subsequently, with a fulness, vigor of thought, and intelligence which, in the opinion of others than my own countrymen, make the volumes of Elliott’s Debates on the Constitution the most valuable treasury of constitutional politics in existence.