Sir Robert Peel, shortly before his death, said that what he had seen and heard in public life had left upon his mind a prevailing impression of gloom and grief. What impressed the mind of the English statesman so painfully in reference to his own country must be felt correspondingly by Americans who contemplate the South; for its present condition awakens the anxious solicitude of every thoughtful patriot. A brief mention of some of the evils that afflict her may help toward the ascertainment and application of adequate remedies. Let it be premised that this discussion proceeds in no degree from disloyalty to the Government, nor from unwillingness to accept the legitimate consequences of the war.
Betwixt the North and the South there lingers much estrangement. One serious cause of irritation at the South, which seems irremediable, is the distrust with which those who sustained the Confederate States are regarded by a large number of Northern people. Our motives are habitually misrepresented, our purposes misunderstood, our actions perverted, our character maligned. On our conduct have been placed constructions which seem to spring from direst hate or malice. By representative men Southern States are spoken of as outside the Union; and "a solid South" has been the party appeal most efficacious for arousing sectional and vindictive passion. Every Southern citizen who followed his convictions, and affiliated with the 1,640,000 Democrats of the North, is suspected of disloyalty or treason. No protestations of men or parties, no avowals of governors or legislatures, are accepted as sincere unless accompanied by a support of the Republican party. Party platforms, the support of an Abolitionist like Mr. Greeley, organic laws, are regarded as deceptive because the shibboleth of disloyalty and patriotism is "Republicanism." These persistent efforts to brand us as inferiors, to make us unequals as citizens, to coerce the support of an administration and a party, are based upon our unfitness, morally or intellectually, to decide for ourselves what is best for the country's welfare and perpetuity. We are loyal, and patriotic, and honest only when we sing pæans to the Administration and its favorites. Practically the war has been prolonged, and this policy of disunion alienates, embitters, and prohibits the growth of fraternal sentiments. To prevent a complete and durable reconciliation seems the settled policy of a large party. This proscription and ostracism have helped to create a hopelessness as to the future. A nightmare paralyzes our energies.
The South, if conquered, and honestly accepting the results of the war, needed encouragement and material help instead of discriminating injuries. Her condition was deplorable. All wars are destructive of property and production. To the South the war between the States was exhausting to the utmost degree. Its destructiveness is not computable by figures. The numerical inferiority of the army made it necessary to put into the effective military force every available boy and man; and these were thus withdrawn from productive labor. Much of the labor that remained was applied, not to the production of wealth, but to such manufactures as were needful only in war. For four dreadful years, like the triste noche described by Prescott, with ports closed, and under the imperious necessity of evoking and utilizing every possible warlike agency, this cessation of wealth-producing industry, this drain upon material resources, this decimation of our best men, this waste of capital and exhaustion of the country from the Rio Grande to the Chesapeake bay, continued remorselessly. Superadd the emancipation of 4,000,000 slaves, the sudden extinction of $1,600,000,000 of property, the disorganization of the labor system, the upheaval of society, the "stupendous innovation" upon habits, modes of thought, allegiance, amounting almost to a change of civilization, and it will be easy to see that the South started upon her new career with nothing but genial climate, fertile soil, and brave hearts. Absence of capital, of concentrated wealth, made it necessary to begin de novo. Slavery and profitableness of crops had prevented diversity of pursuits. Agriculture, applied to a few products, was almost our sole occupation. Former habits had disinclined to mechanical pursuits or manual labor, and our towns, since 1865, have been crowded with young men, who have sought in clerkships, agencies, and professions the means of support. These employments, if furnishing remunerative wages, are not wealth-producing, add nothing to capital, and have aggravated the general impoverishment.
These evils have been intensified by vicious legislation and bad government. Federal legislation has been much in the interest of stock-jobbers, speculators, monopolists, so that "corners" have been fostered, and labor has paid heavy and depressing tribute to fatten greedy cormorants. The present system of banking violates the established principles of currency, and is in utter contradiction to what, for a decade, by consent of all parties and financiers, was the policy of the Government. Bad as the system is inherently by injurious legislation, its benefits are secured to a favored class, and by combination with other corporations, notably railroad companies, the business of the country is largely in the control of a few monopolists, who rule and grow rich in spite of the laws of political economy. Promissory notes, printed with pictures on fine paper, have been substituted for the money of the Constitution, and our young people are growing up with the notion that this rag currency is a legitimate measure of value and a legal solvent of debts.
So marked has been this class legislation in the interest of capital, that a Senator of the United States, Mr. Wallace of Pennsylvania, says, "From the beginning of the present Administration down to the adjournment of Congress in August, 1876, every financial statute has had but one purpose, and that purpose to increase the value of the bonded indebtedness of the Government." Statistics show how insecure is business, on what vicious principles it is transacted, and how rapidly property is concentrating in the hands of a few. In 1874 there were 5,830 failures for a total of $155,000,000, and in 1875 the failures increased to 7,740, aggregating a loss of $201,000,000. In both North and South there has been a frightful increase of indebtedness by towns and cities, counties and States—thirty-eight States owe an aggregate of $382,000,000—so that taxpayers groan in purse and spirit, and are deeply concerned to find a way of honest payment.
Taxation has been and is a potent instrument of wrong and corruption. To pay the national debt increased taxation was, of course, necessary and proper, but taxation should have been adjusted to the rights of honest creditors and the lessened pecuniary ability of taxpayers. The Federal and local taxes of the last eleven years, according to high authority, amount to not less than $7,500,000,000. Never in modern times was revenue collected in such a complicated and ruinous manner. Mr. Curtis tells us one-fourth of the revenue is lost in the collection. If the collection and expenditure of revenue be the tests for determining the wisdom of a government, then ours is not "the best the world ever saw."
Extravagant expenditure is closely connected with enormous revenues. Economy of administration is a lost art. Federal expenditure in 1860, exclusive of payment of public debt, was $1.94 per head. In 1870 it was $3.52 per head, and in 1875 $3.38. The $4,500,000,000 of Federal taxes[7 ] of the last eleven years have not been exclusively appropriated to reduction of debt and defraying necessary expenditures. Officials have been needlessly multiplied, jobs have been created, peculation is common, and millions have been squandered on contracts made with hungry partisans. Such an exhaustion of national resources is governmental robbery. In the purer days it was a political maxim that no more money was to be taken from the people than was necessary for the constitutional and economical wants of the Government. Large revenues and large expenditures are mutually recreative. Mr. Calhoun, the most sagacious and philosophical statesman of this century, said, in 1839, "I am disposed to regard it as a political maxim in free States, that an impoverished treasury, once in a generation at least, is almost indispensable to the preservation of their institutions and liberty." All experience shows that excessive revenue and large expenditures increase the patronage of the government and corrupt public and private morals. Some palliation may be found in the fact that wars are demoralizing, necessitate much assumption of power, and that our conflict was gigantic; but after all due allowances the corruptions in America must find a parallel in that period of English history when the sovereign was the pensioner of a foreign potentate. The centennial anniversary of our republic finds a record so scandalous that all honest men blush, and the Fourth of July eulogists have to make the humiliating confession of much of vice and shame in our national life, of a decline from the former high standard of political and moral purity, and of the blister of corruption in high places, upon Executive and judiciary, upon laws, and on the acts of prominent officials. (See speeches of Dr. Storrs and Hon. C. F. Adams.)
As cause and consequence of oppressive taxes, and wasteful and corrupt extravagance, I may instance the centripetal tendencies of the Federal Government. The patriot must deprecate the rapid strides toward consolidation. Our government was designed as a government of clearly-defined limitations upon power. It is now practically absolute. In its complex character, a division of powers mutually exclusive betwixt Federal and State governments, "divisibility of sovereignty," as some phrase it, was contemplated. Now the States are provinces dependent on, submissive to, the central head, just as the Colonies were looked upon, prior to our independence, as a species of feudatories for the benefit of the mother country. By popular vote, by elastic constructions or palpable violations of the Constitution, by unprecedented assumptions, our Federal system has been revolutionized. It is the height of absurdity to talk of the restrictions of a written Constitution, when a dominant majority interprets finally that instrument, and there are no remedies to protect against invasion or encroachment.[8 ] It is a mere glittering generality to boast of a constitutional republic, if a President can violate the organic law with impunity, or if Congress is restrained in its assumptions only by its own sense of justice. Much recent executive, legislative, and judicial action has tended to absorb State rights and prerogatives. Mr. Boutwell's proposition to remand a State to territorial pupilage would be but the legal enactment and the logical sequence of what has had the enthusiastic approval of a large number of citizens. Encroachments have been so numerous and violent, submission has been so tame, that governors are coolly set aside on the demand of a petty marshal, and legislatures on the bidding of Mr. Jones. Once States were supposed to have the right of eminent domain; to have exclusive control of education, of litigation among its own citizens; to determine the elective franchise; to regulate the relations of parent and child, husband and wife, guardian and ward; but that was in the purer days of the republic, when States were not mere counties, but political communities, with, a large residuum of undelegated powers. The earlier amendments to the Constitution imposed checks and limitations upon the general Government, because of the watchful jealousy on the part of the States of their sovereignty and independence. Following the tendency to centralize, to despotize, the late amendments are in the direction of consolidation, and take away from the States what was once universally regarded as their exclusive prerogative in reference to the elective franchise. Now, under amendments and "appropriate legislation for carrying them into effect," the national Government can control voting, make a registration of voters, and very soon, if there be no arrest of tyranny, the ballot box will be under the guardianship of Presidential appointees. Federal election laws thus degrade States into petty municipalities and subvert liberty.
Passing from these grievances, applicable to the whole Union, I approach what is to my apprehension the most unmatchable outrage ever inflicted by a civilized people. Some acts, like the partition of Poland, stand out on the pages of history as disgraceful national crimes; but most of them shade into minor offences compared with the crime-breeding, race-endangering, liberty-imperiling savagery of conferring the right of suffrage upon the negroes en masse. In other countries liberty has been not so much a creation as a growth. In conservative England, suffrage has been slowly, temperately enlarged, always preserving restrictions so as not to commit the destinies of the kingdom to an ignorant mob. Giving the elective franchise to the suddenly emancipated negroes, placing the government of States in the hands of such a class, wholly unprepared by education or experience, if not such a repeating crime, would be a farce for the ages. Every person of the least intelligence knows that generally the voting of the negroes is a mere sham. He votes as a machine. He is the tool of the demagogue, the pawn of a political party. That men with no intelligent understanding of rights and duties, unable to read, untrained in political affairs, wholly ignorant of the commonest matters pertaining to government, superstitious, credulous, victims of impostors, paying no capitation tax, should decide upon grave questions of organic or statute law, upon the financial or foreign policy of the country, should control counties, cities, States, is an offence that will stink in the nostrils of coming centuries. What has occurred since the Presidential election is demonstration that both parties at the North regard unlimited negro suffrage as subversive of the principle of reliance upon moral worth and clear intelligence. The presence of the military in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the hurrying to and fro of partisans, the secret conclaves and cabalistic telegrams, the jealous superintendence of the counting of votes, the criminations and recriminations in reference to fraud and intimidation, are the legitimate results of the attempt to sustain a party by such extreme medicine. Our novel experiment of free government cannot endure many more such tests. Prof. Huxley, speaking to Americans during his late visit, said: "You and your descendants have to ascertain whether the great mass of people will hold together under the forms of a republic and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether centralization will get the better without the actual or disguised monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy." It need not take long to work out the problem if the ballot box is to be controlled by ignorance. Sometimes we are lectured to be grateful to the North for its magnanimity toward the South. Legislation does not sustain the self-eulogy. It is alleged that mercy was shown to "rebels and traitors." Passing over the petitio principii in the phraseology, a thousand times better it would have been to have hung President, and Cabinet, and every Congressman, and every general, than to have fastened upon us this incurable cancer, eating up the life-blood of the Union.
In the South, the administration of government in some instances has been marked by oppressive tyranny and open corruption. Incompetent and dishonest men have been appointed to positions, and with full knowledge of their wrong doings have been retained to accomplish party ends. This injustice and tyranny have demoralized somewhat our own people. Tyranny always corrupts. A lower standard of morality is first tolerated, and then becomes popular. Lax motives of honor are taking the place of chivalrous integrity. Payment of honest debts is evaded. Grinding poverty has made some unduly covetous of riches. Enormous taxation, selfish and immoral legislation, have partially undermined the foundations of private virtue. The ease and frequency with which the rewards of honest toil are filched away give insecurity to property and take away much of the stimulus to diligent toil. Some have sunk into despair, while others, with more of unsubdued energy, are willing for almost anything to turn up which gives promise or possibility of change.