France and the Republic / A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889

by William Henry Hurlbert

What indeed! That is a pregnant query, not hastily to be dealt with by genial after-dinner oratory about the self-governing capacity of the Anglo-Norman race—still less by Fourth of July declamations over what the leader of the Massachusetts Bar used to call the 'glittering generalities' of the American Declaration of Independence!

The experience of the Latin states of the New World throws useful side-lights upon it. Of all these states between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn, only one began and has lived out its round half-century of independence without serious civil convulsions. This is—or rather was—the Empire of Brazil, of which Dom Pedro I., of the Portuguese reigning house of Braganza, on March 25, 1824, swore to maintain the integrity and indivisibility, and to observe, and cause to be observed, the political Constitution. That oath the Emperor and his son and successor, Dom Pedro II., who took it after him in due course, seem to have conscientiously kept. It does not appear to have impressed itself as deeply upon the consciences of the military and naval officers of the present day in Brazil, all of whom, of course, must have taken it substantially on receiving their commission from the chief of the State, and it now remains to be seen what will become hereafter of the Empire.

The authors of the Brazilian Constitution fully recognised the impossibility of maintaining a constitutional government without some guarantee of the independence of the Executive. They found this guarantee not by applying checks and balances to the elective principle, but simply in the hereditary principle, just as they found the guarantee of the independence of the judiciary in the life-tenure of the magistrates, and they introduced into their Constitution what they called a 'moderating power.' This power was lodged, by the 98th article of the Brazilian Constitution, with the Emperor—and the article thus runs: 'The moderating power is the key of the whole political organisation, and it is delegated exclusively to the Emperor, as the supreme chief of the nation and its first representative, that he may incessantly watch over the maintenance of the independence, equilibrium, and harmony of the other political powers.'

The key of the 'political organisation' of Brazil seems to have worked very well for fifty years. Now that it has been thrown away, it will be interesting to watch the results.

The question, with us in the United States, from the beginning has been whether the carefully devised provisions of oar organic Constitution of 1787 would or would not be found in practice to protect the sentiment of loyalty to a National Union as effectually against popular caprice and political intrigues as the sentiment of loyalty to a National Crown has been protected in England by the hereditary principle. The American Revolution of 1776, and the foundation of the American Republic of 1787, can never be understood without a thorough appreciation of the fact that the issues involved in the English Revolution which placed the daughter of James II. on the English throne, and in the establishment subsequently of the House of Hanover, because it was an offshoot of the dethroned House of Stuart, were quite as intelligently discussed, and quite as thoroughly worked out, among the English in America as among the English in England. Without a thorough appreciation of this fact it is impossible to understand the conservative value to liberty in the United States, of the personal position and the personal influence of the first American President. Washington was, in truth, the uncrowned king of the new nation—'first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.' What more and what less than this is there in the history of Alfred the Great?

Washington founded no dynasty, but he made the American Presidency possible, and the American President is a king with a veto, elected, not by the people directly, but by special electors, for four years, and re-eligible. We celebrate the birthday of Washington like the birthday of a king. The same instinct gave his name to the capital of his nation, and that name was found a name to conjure with when the great stress came of the Civil War in 1861. The sentiment of loyalty, developed and twined about that name and about the Union which Washington had founded, was not only the glow at the core of the Northern resistance to secession: it was the secret and the explanation of that sudden revival of the spirit of national loyalty at the South after the war was over and an end was put to the villanies of 'Reconstruction,' by which European observers of American affairs have been and still are so much puzzled. For it must be remembered that the Father of his Country was a son of the South, and that his native state, Virginia, is the oldest of the American Commonwealths, and is known as 'the Mother of Presidents.' The historic Union is as much Southern as Northern. Its existence was put in peril in 1812 by the States of the extreme North. Its integrity was shattered for a time in 1861 by the States of the South. Before it was founded, in 1787, there was no such thing as an American nation. There were thirteen independent American States which for certain purposes only had formed what was described as a 'perpetual union,' under certain Articles of Confederation. These Articles were drawn up in 1778, at a time when the event of the war with the mother country was still most uncertain, and they were never finally ratified by all the States until 1781, two years before the Peace of Versailles. Under these Articles the national affairs of the Confederacy were controlled by the Congress of the States. No national Executive existed, not even such a nominal Executive as now exists in France. National affairs were managed during the recess of the Congress by a Committee, and this Committee could only confide the Presidency to any one member of the Committee for one year at a time out of three years. This was even worse than the elective kingship without a veto of the English Republicans of 1649. But how were the people of these thirteen independent States, each with a history, with interests, with prejudices, with sympathies of its own, to be brought together and induced to form, through a more perfect union, a nation, in the only way in which a nation can be formed, by the establishment of an independent national Executive?

This was the question which was met and answered only after long debates, and with infinite difficulty, by the American Constitutional Convention of 1787. It is more than probable that this convention could never have been held without the influence and the presence of George Washington, who presided over its deliberations; and it is as certain as anything human can be, that the constitution which it framed would never have been accepted by the people of the States if they had not known that the executive office created by it would be filled by him.

The political safeguards put about the American Executive by the constitution may or may not always resist such a strain as has already more than once been put upon them. The seceding States, in their constitution adopted at Montgomery in 1861, tried to strengthen these safeguards by extending the presidential term to six years, and making the President re-eligible only after an interval of six years more. But all our national experience goes to show that the more difficult it is for a mere majority of the people to make or unmake the authority which sets a final sanction upon the execution of the laws, the greater will be the safety of the public liberty and of private rights.

So true is this that every American who witnessed, at London in 1887, the Jubilee of the Queen, felt, and was glad to feel, with a natural and instinctive sympathy, the honest contagion of that magnificent outburst of the loyalty of a great and free people to the hereditary representative of their historic liberties and of their historic law. I am sure that no intelligent Englishman can have witnessed the tremendous outpouring of the American people into New York on April 30, 1889, to do honour there to the hundredth anniversary of the first inauguration of George Washington, without a kindred emotion.

To compare with the significance of either of these scenes that of the gigantic cosmopolitan fair dedicated at Paris in 1889 by President Carnot to the 'principles of 1789' is to exhaust the resources of the ridiculous.