A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The American Republic

b >> by O. A. Brownson >> The American Republic




The naturalization question is one of great national importance.
The migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the
national population, and to the national wealth and resources,
but less, perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity
of elections, or the wisdom and integrity of the government. It
is impossible that there should be perfect harmony between the
national territorial democracy and individuals born, brought up,
and formed under a political order in many respects widely
different from it; and there is no doubt that the democracy, in
its objectionable sense, has been greatly strengthened by the
large infusion of naturalized citizens. There can be no question
that, if the laboring classes, in whom the national sentiment is
usually the strongest, had been composed almost wholly of native
Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in the
cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of
persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less
difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies. But
to leave so large a portion of the actual population as the
foreign born residing in the country without the rights of
citizens, would have been a far graver evil, and would, in the
late struggle, have given the victory to secession. There are
great national advantages derived from the migration hither of
foreign labor, and if the migration be encouraged or permitted,
naturalization on easy and liberal terms is the wisest, the best,
and only safe policy. The children of foreign-born parents are
real Americans.

Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent
powers of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually
more active, more energetic than the children of the older
inhabitants of the country among whom they settle. Some of our
first men in civil life have been sons of foreign-born parents,
and so are not a few of our greatest and most successful
generals. The most successful of our merchants have been
foreign-born. The same thing has been noticed elsewhere,
especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to Holland,
Germany, England, and Ireland. The immigration of so many
millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American
people much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character,
and made them a superior people on the whole to what they would
otherwise have been. This has nothing to do with superiority or
inferiority of race or blood, but is a natural effect of breaking
men away from routine, and throwing them back on their own
individual energies and personal resources.

Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to
freedom; but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward
progress of American democracy, which asserts equal rights for
all, and not for a race or class only. Some would confine
suffrage to landholders, or, at least, to property-holders; but
that is inconsistent with the American idea, and is a relic of
the barbaric constitution which founds power on private instead
of public wealth. Nor are property-owners a whit more likely to
vote for the public good than are those who own no property but
their own labor. The men of wealth, the business men,
manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who
exert the worst influence on government in every country, for
they always strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their
own private interests. They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let
government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of
the poor," instead of the far safer maxim, "Let government take
care of the weak, the strong can take care of themselves."
Universal suffrage is better than restricted suffrage, but even
universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private property from
having an undue political influence.

The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable
from it, and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an
inferior class to those elevated by restricted suffrage. The
Congress of 1860, or of 1862. was a fair average of the wisdom,
the talent, and the virtue of the country, and not inferior to
that of 1776, or that of l789; and the Executive during the
rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as it was during
the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain, and not
inferior to that of France during the Crimean war. The Crimean
war developed and placed in high command, either with the English
or the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman,
to say nothing of others. The more aristocratic South proved
itself, in both statesmanship and generalship, in no respect
superior to the territorial democracy of the North and West.

The great evil the country experiences is not from universal
suffrage, but from what may be called rotation in office. The
number of political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern
and Western States especially, the representatives in Congress
are changed every two or four years, and a member, as soon as he
has acquired the experience necessary to qualify him for his
position, is dropped, not through the fickleness of his
constituency, but to give place to another whose aid had been
necessary to his first or second election. Employes are
"rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful, but
because there are others who want their places. This is all bad,
but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong
public opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which
is mainly formed by it. There is, no doubt, a due share of
official corruption, but not more than elsewhere, and that would
be much diminished by increasing the salaries of the public
servants, especially in the higher offices of the government,
both General and State. The pay to the lower officers and
employes of the government, and to the privates and
non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in
general, too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both
the civil and military service is too low, and relatively far
lower than it was when the government was first organized.

The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at
all by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility
to the military spirit and a standing army. The depreciation of
the military spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental
democracy, which, like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and
brings about the very evils it seeks to avoid. The hostility to
standing armies is inherited from England, and originated in the
quarrels between king and parliament, and is a striking evidence
of the folly of that bundle of antagonistic forces called the
British constitution. In feudal times most of the land was held
by military service, and the reliance of government was on the
feudal militia; but no real progress was made in eliminating
barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at its
command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies.
It is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the
whole, lost more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary
for royal supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.

No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the
military spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not
held in honor and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size
is public economy. It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who
are worth more there than anywhere else; it creates honorable
places for gentlemen or the sons of gentlemen without wealth, in
which they can serve both themselves and their country. Under a
democratic government the most serious embarrassment to the state
is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or not fitted to
support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in a
democratic government than in any other. The civil service,
divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science,
and art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class,
and the army and navy would be an economy and a real service to
the state were they maintained only for the sake of the rank and
position they give to their officers, and the wholesome influence
these officers would exert on society and the politics of the
country--this even in case there were no wars or apprehension of
wars. They supply an element needed in all society, to sustain
in it the chivalric and heroic spirit, perpetually endangered by
the mercantile and political spirit, which has in it always
something low and sordid.

But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding
nations to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself.
When it can have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war;
for the human animal, like all animals, must work off in some way
its fighting humor, and the only sure way of maintaining peace is
always to be prepared for war. A regular standing army of forty
thousand men would have prevented the Mexican war, and an army of
fifty thousand well-disciplined and efficient troops at the
command of the President on his inauguration in March, 1861,
would have prevented the rebellion, or have instantly suppressed
it. The cost of maintaining a land army of even a hundred
thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would have been,
in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion has
cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as
those on the side of the government, are equally to be counted.
The actual losses to the country have been not less than six or
eight thousand millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the
assessed value of the whole property of the United States
according to the census returns of 1860, and which has only been
partially cancelled by actual increase of property since. To
meet the interest on the debt incurred will require a heavier sum
to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been
necessary to maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection
of peace and the prevention of the rebellion.

The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not
blunder much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it
did in its military operations, before 1868 things will settle
down into their normal order; but a regular army--not militia or
volunteers, who are too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand
men of all arms, and a navy nearly as large as that of England or
France, will be needed as a peace establishment. The army of a
hundred thousand men must form a cadre of an army of three times
that number, which will be necessary to place the army on a war
footing. Less will answer neither for peace nor war, for the
nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain henceforth the rank
of a first-class military and maritime power, and take a leading
part in political movements of the civilized world, and, to a
great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.

Canning boasted that be had raised up the New World to redress
the balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened
Spain and gave the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the
Emperor of the French is trying, by strengthening Italy and
Spain, and by a French protectorate in Mexico, to secure to
France, both in the Old World and the New--a magnificent dream,
but not to be realized. His uncle judged more wisely when he
sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought only to
secure to France the hegemony of the Old. But the hegemony of
the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she
will have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even
in Europe. To maintain this position, which is imperative on
her, she must always have a large armed force, either on foot or
in reserve, which she can call out and put on a war footing at
short notice. The United States must henceforth be a great
military and naval power, and the old hostility to a standing
army and the old attempt to bring the military into disrepute
must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.

Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency,
egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race
and socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the
race, is the most dangerous. The egoistical form is checked,
sufficiently weakened by the defeat of the rebels; but the social
form believes that it has triumphed, and that individuals are
effaced in society, and the States in the Union. Against this,
more especially should public opinion and American statesmanship
be now directed, and territorial democracy and the division of
the powers of government be asserted and vigorously maintained.
The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy is
conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet
arrived, as the Germans say, at self
consciousness--selbsbewusstseyn--and operates only instinctively.
All the dominant theories and sentimentalities are against it,
and it is only Providence that can sustain it.




CHAPTER XV.

DESTINY-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.


It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every
living nation receives from Providence a special work or mission
in the progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny,
or the end for which it exists; and that the special mission of
the United States is to continue and complete in the political
order the Graeco-Roman civilization.

Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American
Republic alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to
the civilization of the race. Canada and the other British
Provinces, Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and
the rest of the South American States, might be absorbed in the
United States without being missed by the civilized world. They
represent no idea, and the work of civilization could go on
without them as well as with them. If they keep up with the
progress of civilization, it is all that can be expected of them.
France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the rest of
Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single
laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race;
and it is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or
jointly advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman
Empire, except in abolishing slavery and including in the
political people the whole territorial people. They can only
develop and give a general application to the fundamental
principles of the Roman constitution. That indeed is much, but
it adds no new element nor new combination of preexisting
elements. But nothing of this can be said of the United States.

In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and
the great principle of the territorial constitution of power,
instead of the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or
the monarchical; and yet with true civil or political principles
it mixed up nearly all the elements of the barbaric constitution.
The gentile system of Rome recalls the patriarchal, and the
relation that subsisted between the patron and his clients has a
striking resemblance to that which subsists between the feudal
lord and his retainers, and may have had the same origin. The
three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into which the Roman
people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may have been,
as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their origin,
but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not
local, but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical.
No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens
were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of
adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with
all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained
with the Romans. The adopted member was considered a child of
the house, and took its name and inherited its goods. Whether,
as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes
were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of
the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the
curies was by houses, not by individuals en masse. After all,
practically the Roman senate was hardly less an estate than the
English house of lords, for no one could sit in it unless a
landed proprietor and of noble blood. The plebs, though outside
of the political people proper, as not being included in the
three tribes, when they came to be a power in the republic under
the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and patricians was
forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or territorial people.

The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave
the right to participate in political power, was the domain of
the state, and the tenant held it from the state. The domain was
vested in the state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was
therefore respublica, not private property--the first grand leap
of the human race from barbarism. In all other respects the
Roman constitution was no more republican than the feudal.
Athens went farther than Rome, and introduced the principle of
territorial democracy. The division into demes or wards, whence
comes the word democracy, was a real territorial division, not
personal nor genealogical. And if the equality of all men was
not recognized, all who were included in the political class
stood on the same footing. Athens and other Greek cities, though
conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful
influence on Roman civilization, which became far more democratic
under the emperors than it had been under the patrician senate,
which the assassins of Julius Caesar, and the superannuated
conservative party they represented, tried so hard to preserve.
The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives
of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed
with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were
established throughout the empire.

The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity
of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its
including in the state only a particular class of the territorial
people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different
degrees of servitude. It recognized and sustained a privileged
class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian
aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order,
it held all outside of it to be less than men and without
political rights. Practically, power was an attribute of birth
and of private wealth. Suffrage was almost universal among
freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by
orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the
order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election
over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in
the hands of the rich and noble few.

The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the
sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts
the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to
defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality.
It represents it as a commutation of the punishment of death,
which the emperor has the right to inflict on captives taken in
war, to perpetual servitude; and as servitude is less severe than
death, slavery was really a proof of imperial clemency. But it
has never yet been proved that the emperor has the right under
the natural law to put captives taken even in a just war to
death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the proud, but
spare the submissive." In a just war the emperor may kill on the
battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as
now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation,
does not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased
resistance, have thrown down their arms, and surrendered. But
even if it did, it gives him a right only over the persons
captured, not over their innocent children, and therefore no
right to establish hereditary slavery, for the child is not
punishable for the offences of the parent. The law, indeed,
assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a person and treated
him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror, and being
property, he could beget only property, which would accrue only
to his owner. But there is no power in heaven or earth that can
make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is
only by a clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the
law denies the slave his personality and treats him as a thing.
I the unity of all men had been clearly seen and vividly felt,
the law would never have attempted to justify perpetual slavery
on the ground of its penal character, or indeed on any ground
whatever. All men are born under the law of nature with equal
rights, and the civil law can justly deprive no man of his
liberty, but for a crime, committed by him personally, that
justly forfeits his liberty to society.

These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European
nations have in part remedied, and may completely remedy. They
can carry out practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the
human race, abolish slavery in every form, make all men equal
before the law, and the political people commensurate with the
territorial people. Indeed, France has already done it. She has
abolished slavery, villenage, serfage, political aristocracy,
asserted the equality of all men before the law, vindicated the
sovereignty of the people, and established universal suffrage,
complete social and territorial democracy. The other nations may
do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or advance
farther. Yet in France, territorial democracy the most complete
results only in establishing the most complete imperial
centralism, usually called Caesarism.

The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor
reigns "by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and
therefore, that by the grace of God and the will of the nation he
may cease to reign; but while he reigns he is supreme, and his
will is law. The constitution imposes no real or effective
restraint on his power: while he sits upon the throne he is
practically France, and the ministers are his clerks; the council
of state, the senate, and the legislative body are merely his
agents in governing the nation. This may, indeed, be changed,
but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic
centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the
system of antagonisms, checks and balances, called
constitutionalism, or parliamentary government, of which Great
Britain is the model, and which were a return toward barbarism,
or mediaeval feudalism.

The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all
orders the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the
principle of all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all
opposites or extremes. Mankind will be logical; and the worst of
all tyrannies is that which forbids them to draw from their
principles their last logical consequences, or that prohibits
them the free explication and application of the Divine Idea, in
which consists their life, their progress. Such tyranny strikes
at the very existence of society, and wars against the reality of
things. It is supremely sophistical, and its success is death;
for the universe in its constitution is supremely logical, and
man, individually and socially, is rational. God is the author
and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its
order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end. The Son
or Word is the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God
is living God a real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not
abstract or dead unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes,
Plotinus, and Proclus. In the Holy Trinity is the principle and
prototype of all society, and what is called the solidarity of
the race is only the outward expression, or copy in the external
order, of what theologians term the circumsession of the three
Divine Persons of the Godhead.

Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature
either in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity
alone, is sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and
reality. It sins against God. and must fail of its end. The
English system, which is based on antagonistic elements, on
opposites, without the middle term that conciliates them, unites
them, and makes them dialectically one, copies the Divine model
in its distinctions alone, which, considered alone, are opposites
or contraries. It denies, if Englishmen could but see it, the
unity of God. The French, or imperial system, which excludes the
extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites, instead
of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and
copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called
pantheism. The English constitution has no middle term, and the
French no extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine
Trinity, the original basis and type of the syllogism. The human
race can be contented with neither, for neither allows it free
scope for its inherent life and activity. The English system
tends to pure individualism; the French to pure socialism or
despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element of the one
living and indissoluble TRUTH.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.