GEORGE BANCROFT 35 to which we look forward as the security for the future peace of the world. All of the free assemblies now to be found governing the great nations of the earth have been modeled either upon your practice or upon ours or upon both combined. We all, I think, feel instinctively that this is one of the great moments in the history of the world, and that what is happening on both sides of the Atlantic represents the drawing together of great and free peoples for mutual protection against the aggression of military despotism. I am not one of those who are such bad democrats as to say that democracies make no mistakes. All free assemblies have made blunders; sometimes they have committed crimes. And yet, may we not look forward with confidence to the spirit of free institutions as one of the greatest guarantees of the future peace of the world? QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. How does the British House of Commons differ from our House of Representatives as to time of choosing its members? 2. Does England, as is sometimes claimed, have a more democratic government than America? THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE GEORGE BANCROFT The sovereignty of the people is the basis of our system. With the people the power resides both theoretically and practically. The government is a determined, uncompromising democracy, administered immediately by the people, or by the people's responsible agents. In all the European treatises on political economy, and even in the state papers of the Holy Alliance, the welfare of the people is acknowledged to be the object of government. We believe so too; but as each man's interests are safest in his own keeping, so, in like manner, the interests of the people can be best guarded by themselves. If the institution of monarchy were neither tyrannical nor oppressive, it should at least be dispensed with as a costly superfluity. We believe the sovereign power should reside equally among the people. We acknowledge no hereditary distinctions, and we confer on no man prerogatives of peculiar privileges. Even the best services rendered the state cannot destroy this original and essential equality. Legislation and justice are not hereditary offices; no one is born to power, no one handed into political greatOur government, as it rests for support on reason and our interests, needs no protection from a nobility; and the strength and ornament of the land consist in its industry and morality, its justice and intelligence. ness. The states of Europe are all intimately allied with the church and fortified by religious sanctions. We approve of the influence of the religious principle on public not less than on private life; but we hold religion to be an affair between each individual conscience and God, superior to all political institutions and independent of them. Christianity was neither introduced nor reformed by the civil power; and with us the modes of worship are in no wise prescribed by the state. Thus, then, the people govern, and solely; it does not divide its power with an hierarchy, a nobility, or a king. The popular voice is all-powerful with us; this is our oracle, and this, we acknowledge, is the voice of God. Invention is solitary, but who shall judge its results? Inquiry may pursue truth apart, but who shall decide if truth be overtaken? There is no safe criterion of MARY L. BRADY 37 opinion but the careful exercise of the public judgment; and in the science of government, as elsewhere, the deliberate convictions of mankind, reasoning on the cause of their own happiness, their own wants and interests, are the surest revelations of political truth. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. What was the Holy Alliance? 2. What is an hierarchy? AMERICAN LIBERTY* MARY L. BRADY Principal, East Side Evening High School for Women Should you analyze the American ideal you would consider liberty an important ingredient of it, wouldn't you? Our country's heroes from Patrick Henry onward glorified it. It enlivens every patriotic song of ours, it speaks in mottoes of American states and cities, it gives meanings to emblems in coats of arms and decorations, our beautiful allegorical figure is the Goddess of Liberty. There are keen-minded souls, mostly young and often born abroad, interesting members of our classes, who repeat “America is no land of liberty." For a year or more, reports from Russia record that this is spoken of America over and over. I have heard it from street orators here, many a time. Evening-school teachers have asked how to meet it. Would it not be well to ask what the questioner's idea of liberty is? Why not show him that liberty in American history, has, from the beginning, had an American meaning, possibly different from the definition he wants to give? American Liberty has meant freedom to worship according to your own. religion, freedom from the rule of hereditary monarchs *From Night Message, New York Evening Schools. who claimed divine right to power, freedom to vote as you choose, to change the national government every four years, the state and municipal governments more frequently; freedom from attainder and entail, from imprisonment for many acts still punishable in other countries, freedom from trial without a right to be heard or without the decision of a jury. But American liberty has not only always meant freedom of the people to govern themselves by representatives of their own choosing, it has always meant that there shall be government. It has always meant order and respect for the will of the majority. If religious freedom was used as a cloak for polygamy, a practice revolting to the proprieties respected by the majority, religious freedom was restricted. Tell the story of the Mormons. If freedom of speech threatened the peace of the Nation, freedom of speech was curtailed. Tell the story of the pestiferous Citizen Genet and the Alien and Sedition Laws. If freedom of action meant resistance to the law, freedom was refused. Tell the story of Washington, a father of liberty, and what he thought of the Whiskey Rebellion. If the idea of liberty led states to attempt to dissolve the nation, other states prevented it by force. Tell the story of Andrew Jackson and South Carolina, of Lincoln and the great lesson of the civil war. Show that liberty has always been, in America, indissolubly linked with union. "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable," has been an American watchword for more than half a century. Absolute, unrestrained liberty was never an American aim. On the contrary the dangers of unorganized liberty, liberty which meant disorder, anarchy, personal selfishness, lack of consideration for the common good, were apprehended immediately after the war of libera HENRY W. GRADY 39 tion was ended and led the men who had done the most for liberty to set regular and constitutional bounds to it. Show how our original and fundamental instrument, the law of our being, the enactment that made us a Nation, put union first: in order to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, to insure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defence, to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, we, the people of the United States, do ordain and establish this constitution. Every one of these phrases is worth a heart-to-heart talk on separate nights with every class in school until by persuasion, by reasonableness, by conviction, a teacher leaves no doubt that the soap-box rantings against present-day America are answerable by the history of American political thought. THE FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLIC* HENRY W. GRADY Not long since I made a trip to Washington, and as I stood on Capitol Hill my heart beat quick as I looked at the towering marble of my country's Capitol, and the mist gathered in my eyes as I thought of its tremendous significance, and the armies, and the Treasury, and the courts, and congress and the president, and all that was gathered there. And I felt that the sun in all its course could not look down upon a better sight than that majestic home of the Republic that had taught the world its best lessons in liberty. Two days afterward I went to visit a friend in the country, a modest man, with a quiet country home. It *From The Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady, by E. D. Shurter. Used by permission. |