This view is not speculative. It is derived from the study of revolutions. Near 250 years ago the English people began a revolution which presently beheaded the king, and disestablished the church. But monarchal superstition was not beheaded; religious superstition was not disestablished. In place of Charles I. was set up a monarch of unlimited power, whose little finger was heavier than Charles's whole body,—that same Cromwell whose massacres of people in Ireland is represented to-day in the one-sided feud that makes the curse of England. The disestablishment of a church, at least scholarly and picturesque, was followed by the inauguration of a primitive God of wrath, whose prophet was Calvin, and Cromwell his destroying angel. Bonfires were made of the most beautiful works of art in England. The finest statues and monuments were destroyed because a barbarian said, "Thou shalt not make a graven image." The revolution provided a fresh stronghold for the grossest prejudices and superstitions; and, despite the weakness of Charles I. and the faults of the clergy, the last state of England was so much worse than the first, that the revolution was reversed, the old monarchy restored, the church re-established, and the future of that country given to the forces of evolution.
The French revolution beheaded a weak king, and raised a monster in his place. Robespierre concentrated in his year or two all crimes spread through the history of tyranny. The masses threw down the Virgin Mary, and raised on her chief altar a goddess of Reason. Much pious horror has been expressed about that worship of a beautiful Woman instead of an image; but the real evil was the superstition, which, as it had beheaded a helpless king now shattered a helpless image, but without beheading itself—that is, superstition itself. The worship of the goddess Reason was entirely too reasonable; so she was set aside, and the revolution established a ceremonial worship of Nature, which consecrated all that was natural,—the passions, the revolutionary wrath, the natural desire to guillotine a Count, take possession of his house, drink his wine, and imitate his revelries. Robespierre presently turned to butchering revolutionists too, if not submissive to him, so he was put out of the way. But the whole revolution naturally led to the destructive imperialism of the first Napoleon,—the enemy of mankind. He so paralysed the forces of progress that, even in 1848, the French had not learned the lesson of their first revolution. They tried another, and history repeated itself. They formed a revolutionary democracy,—that is, a disguised imperialism,—as they were soon shown. Their president proved to be an emperor, who destroyed liberty in France and Italy for twenty years, and nearly destroyed his country.
But what of America? It was from the romantic success of the American revolution,—a handful of colonists throwing off the yoke of England,—that France caught fire; and the revolutionary spirit in Europe has been kept alive by the magnificent material development of America. All these fruits of the century of independence are ascribed to our revolution; although the more astonishing growth of Australia, which had no white settler fifty years ago, might as justly be ascribed to the English throne. It is due to a false patriotism that Americans competent to do so have not exposed the superstitions about their country. To love one's native land more than humanity, is no better than to love a king more than our country. There appears to me nothing more important than that the world should be undeceived about America, whose political history is, really, the great warning against revolution,—a handwriting on the walls of the world, the misunderstanding of which is a peril to mankind.
The independence of America was a necessary thing, but it came in the worst way possible. The colonies resisted taxation, imposed by a parliament 3000 miles away,—in those days fifteen times that distance in time,—in which parliament they had no voice. The quarrel came to blows; but the colonists had no idea of separation from England, until Thomas Paine persuaded them that independence alone could end such quarrels. That was true, but it was a heavy misfortune, from which we still suffer, that independence was secured by war. The colonies had exhausted their resources in their success; but they had not exhausted England. The British government, sore and humiliated, still held the north and northwest of America, commanded the force of the great aboriginal tribes, controlled the whole American coast with its ships. The Colonies, still confronted by the powerful enemy they had made, were compelled to unite for common defence. These colonies had radical differences, political, religious, commercial; some were free, some held slaves. But in presence of the common foe they had to unite at once, and sink their differences. When they met to frame a constitution for their union the majority had no notion of any constitution save that of England, and little accurate knowledge of that. What they framed was a crude imitation of the undeveloped English constitution of a hundred years ago. They made two legislatures because England seemed to have two; but made them equal, not knowing that in England the two were not equal. They supposed England was really governed by the king; so, having knocked down George III. they set up a monarch much more powerful, who to-day under the name of president possesses more power than any throne on earth. They formed a Senate, able to defeat the popular House.
The Senate is a peerage of states, in which New York has no more power than states hardly larger than some of its counties. This anomaly was advocated on the ground that in England boroughs of a few hundred voters had equal representation with others of many thousands. The old monstrosity, now the extinct "rotten borough" system, was here actually raised into a constitutional principle. Command of the Army and Navy, there nominally lodged in the crown, was really lodged with the American monarch, so that he may slip from his civil to his military throne, and rule by martial law. This powerful monarch is not elected by the people of the United States, but of the states separately, through electors proportioned to their members of Congress. Consequently, as New York has the greatest number of electors, the monarch in nine cases out of ten, is chosen by one state. The present President got a trifling majority in New York, and was elected. Mr. Cleveland received some 100,000 majority of votes in the nation, and was defeated. A popular superstition calls that the Great Republic. Since the electors ceased to be real electors, as the constitution intended, and became mere messenger-boys carrying votes they never cast, this government is not so republican as is now that its revolution overthrew a hundred years ago. Even at its best our hasty constitution gave new lease to an England discredited at home, and a new lease to slavery, which had been decaying. Slavery entered its new stronghold, and ruled America for generations; had it not lost its head and assailed its own stronghold, it might be ruling still. Our much eulogised constitution, by its compromise with slavery, cost America a million lives, and a billion of money. And all of those evils, involving a steady degradation of our politics, are due to the fact that America got its independence not by evolution,—which would have surely secured it, leaving England its friend,—but by revolution, which made England its enemy; necessitating a premature, crude, military union; preventing the mature discussion and development which could have made the constitution an advance in political civilisation instead of a retrogression. When our fathers had swept English authority out of the country, they had not swept political superstitions, monarchal notions, out of it; so they re-enthroned in their garnished habitation the defects of the system they had fought. When Washington was presently both reigning and governing in America, when he was the idol of monarchs, with a petted courtier representing him in every European Court, poor Thomas Paine, who made the revolution, was a prisoner in Paris for trying to moderate the gory giant he had evoked; and pleading for something like the ministerial government of England, which was steadily adopting his principles of toleration, and the rights of man, by sure forces of evolution. By such forces,—by argument, petition, parliamentary influence,—England has secured something like republican government under its mask of monarchy.
When people are suffering, it is natural for them to attribute their sufferings to this or that institution which has an appearance of anachronism and injustice. But it is precisely when institutions are thus antiquated and anomalous that evolution is able to utilise them for an advance. The United States monarch is able to transfer office from his opponents to his supporters. He is powerful because he is removed every four years. He can claim that the nation has freshly given him all that power. The English sovereign has no political power at all. The nation is governed by responsible ministers. The president may snap his fingers at a parliamentary majority; the English executive may be dismissed in a night. Why has the English monarch been thus deprived of power? The cause is traceable to its hereditary character,—that same hereditary character which seems so anomalous. It was found of old that the throne, because it was hereditary, sometimes fell to a baby, who could not rule. Grown up people had to act for the child. To escape interruptions of government, when the monarch might be incapable, ministers became essential; and thus ministerial government and responsibility were developed out of the antiquated hereditary anomaly. Popular government, in its development, was able to act through this elected ministry, and the monarch, though an adult, could not claim that he had the national authority behind him, except by accordance with an elected ministry. Moreover in a monarchy all classes are interested to reduce a power which only one family can enjoy; but under a presidency all are anxious to enhance the power of an office to which all may aspire,—especially where it is renewed every four years by an electoral revolution.
In England other antiquated things have subserved progress. For the very reason that hereditary legislation is anomalous, antiquated, the peers became weak; the "upper" house became "under," by an evolution that had been impossible had it been elective. But in this very irresponsibility to the popular vote lay that independence of popularity which gives their House weight as a debating and revising body. A further step in evolution, which should determine the exact number of times that the Lords might reject a measure, after which its passage through the Commons would make it law, might make the peers a useful body in checking popular passion and haste. Their independence causes the Lords to pass bills for opening Museums and Art Galleries on Sunday, which are killed by the Commoners for fear of the Sabbatarians among their constituents. This independence of the popular breath makes the House of Lords the source of a Supreme Court whose justice was lately shown by the redress it gave Bradlaugh at the very moment when the Commons were inflicting wrongs on him, in fear of their sectarian constituents. The like may be said of another antiquated institution in England—the Church. By reason of its anomalous establishment in a nation of various creeds and a hundred and fifty sects, that Church is theologically disestablished. Subjected to the forces of political and ethical evolution, it is now preserving the vast property bequeathed by England's superstitious Past to its free-thinking Future, keeping it from being divided up among the sects, before the religious thought of the country has come of age to claim its endowment. The Church cannot spend this wealth for sectarian ends, precisely because that Church is antiquated, and without authority to represent spiritually the nation of to-day.
We might thus go through one after another anachronistic institution and show each subservient to agencies of evolution, whereas, if destroyed by revolution, they could only be succeeded by new institutions embodying, in stronger forms, the snobbery, the superstition, the sectarianism, still remaining in the country. It being certain, at the same time, that no revolution can possibly reach the troubles which alone could cause one. In England the troubles of labor are due to the fact that the birth rate is double the death rate. So long as paupers are multiplied twice as fast as they are removed, pauperism must increase. The more charity and medical care lower the death rate, the more they intensify the struggle for existence. In other swarming countries of Europe overpopulation once led to brigandage, but they are now largely relieved by emigration. This involves a steady flood of paupers to America, in addition to those spawned by native animalism. That evil may be checked when in welcoming the sound world, we shall quarantine the unsound world,—the diseased, the criminal, the ignorant. An immigrant without a dollar may be more safely admitted than one who cannot write his name.
We have a right to evolutionary legislation. We should prevent the congestion of our cities with paupers while millions of our fields are waiting to be tilled. New York will not be comforted, weeping for her children because they are not counted in the census. Rather should she weep for a multitude of those that are counted,—immigrants from its own slums as well as from the slums of Europe. Evolutionary legislation would prevent early marriage, and forbid marriage where there is no means of supporting offspring. Such unions are just as illicit as if there were no ceremony at all, and the children more cruelly illegitimate.
Until there is a high moral standard which shall restrain such cruelty to the unborn, Pauperism, prolific parent of both vices and crimes, can only be mitigated by a development of communal life. A hundred people, dining at a common table, can get the same dinner for ten cents each, that, separately would cost each twenty-five cents. That is, so far as food is concerned, communal life more than doubles every man's wages. There is no more reason why a poor family should support a kitchen of its own than that it should support a carriage of its own, instead of going in the omnibus. Gentlemen in their clubs get the advantage of wholesale prices, while the poor do not. The principle of combination is more largely applicable to lodgings also than is now the case. It costs far less to procure and keep clean one large tenement than a number of separate houses, to say nothing of the humanising influence, on manners and morals, of communal interests, and the social spirit so engendered. The home brute would be checked, the drunkard sobered, by amenability to the larger social censorship, and to a standard of communal conduct. When the working people have learned to utilise in normal life such combination as they occasionally use for strikes, they will find their means increasing enough even to strike, when necessary, with less recoil on themselves. They will also find that where institutions of that kind once take root, endowments and bequests seek them out, and make them centres of happiness and culture.