I. Fraternal Government.
The disposition to give due attention to the spirit of American institutions is one which needs cultivation. Government, looked upon only as machinery, may easily become a means for the accomplishment of ends very different from those intended by its designers. In this connection some recent utterances by Dr. Lyman Abbott are worthy of serious thought:
It is sometimes said that the majority rules in America, and it would be unfortunate if it were true. The French Revolution shows that no despotism of the individual is so cruel as the despotism of the majority. When the decisions of the majority or minority are supported by the whole people that is Americanism. Our democracy is not founded on the idea that our people make mistakes, but that the decision of all the people is better than that of one class, and that all the men are better judges than priests and kings and their instruments. Fraternal government is what we are trying to establish, and whoever strikes against the spirit of fraternalism strikes against the foundation of our government. We can get along with anything bad in our laws and correct it in our progress, but we can never live and prosper with the East arrayed against the West, the North against the South, rich against the poor, and labor against capital.
II. True Americanism.
Whatever other meaning may attach to the word Americanism, Dr. Abbott points to its best definition. But what he has in mind cannot be expected in the absence of a spirit which is made manifest in real fraternalism conjoined with faithful devotion to intelligent convictions of duty. This spirit will take patriotism out of the realm of mere sentiment into that of noble passion. It will give to citizenship so high a meaning that failures in civic duty will take on—as they clearly ought to do—the character of sins against one’s own manhood and against the brotherhood of which the citizen is a member. If this spirit be underneath our laws and manifest in their administration, we need have little anxiety as to their statutory form. Political as well as scriptural wisdom expresses itself in the statement that the “letter” of the law kills, the “spirit” alone gives life.
III. The Right Spirit in Citizenship.
How the spirit of genuine citizenship is to be made ascendant is a question of increasing concern. It may nevertheless be doubted whether organized forces for its suppression do not, in the matter of painstaking and persistent energy and adroit management, excel the organized elements specially devoted to its cultivation. Citizenship activities, politically considered, for the most part are merged in the machinery of parties; and this machinery, instead of representing in its tenets the will of great bodies of independent and well-intentioned suffragists, is too often so manipulated by a few skilful and unprincipled political machinists as to represent their will instead. It is obvious that in so far as these clever machinists are able to run our politics to suit themselves, the very machinery through which the right spirit in citizenship must come to power, if at all, is turned into a means for its own suppression. It thus comes to pass that we have the pitiable spectacle of great party organizations through which masses of honest and patriotic citizens farcically—nay, tragically—coöperate for the accomplishment of results, which, while secured through their votes and in their name, are in reality results of the clandestine and sinister work of a few men.
IV. Reform in Primary Elections.
Plainly, if the right spirit in citizenship is to be ascendant, it must find some means of doing away with the boss system in politics. This system is made possible only by the ease with which primary elections are controlled by coteries of designing men. Here is a battlefield where the best and worst elements in our politics need to be brought into immediate and conclusive conflict. A system which foists upon the people as its candidates for office those whom they have had no real voice in choosing, and who are not worthy, represents an actual subversion of popular government, and calls for such a manifestation of the spirit of true Americanism as shall overthrow it once for all. This question is an overshadowing one. Pollution at the fountain means pollution everywhere. Men elected to office through shameful methods may sometimes be better than the methods by which they have profited, but they are not to be trusted. Their responsibility is to the “bosses,” not to the citizens whose machine-directed votes elected them. The only sentiment to which they bow is that expressed by the leader whose favor bestowed, and whose hostility will deprive them of, official position and emoluments. The immediate outlook is not, however, without hope. Independent movements in several States are in progress looking to the complete uprooting of the boss system. In parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California, and in some of the Southern States “the Crawford County method,” which takes the choice of candidates out of the hands of the few and places it in the hands of the majority of voters, is already being tried. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota similar methods have been the subject of legislative action, and satisfactory results are anticipated. This is a reform which should not be left to the advocacy of a few individuals, or to the members of a few organizations like the American Institute of Civics and local civic reform bodies. Members of these bodies have done much and will do more to promote it, but its final success depends upon the manifestation everywhere of an aroused public spirit whose demands cannot be denied.