ophy. With light hearts and buoyant spirits the ancient régime pushed out into the stream of vanity and glided down towards the Niagara plunge of revolution. English institutions were still too unsettled after the upheavals of the seventeenth century to permit any false sense of security to arise. In England and America, the spirit of the age was pessimistic. There was an away-with-melancholy struggle in the coarse enjoyments of society. Irreligion was as abounding as in France; but it was not mocking in spirit, for the necessity of making use of every element of social order caused states. men to value even "the authority of superstition." 1 There was a cynic contempt of day dreams and utopist fancies. While doing with Stoic fortitude what it lay in them to do, the men who took the chief part in founding the republic had painful misgivings as to the durability of their work.3

1 The Federalist, No. 38, by Madison.

2 In the Federalist, No. 30, written by Hamilton, there is a characteristic allusion to the enthusiasts "who expect to see the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age realized in America."

3 In a letter written in his old age, John Adams says that Washington was made unhappy in his retirement, after occupying the presidential chair, by fears for his country. Adams' Works, Vol. X., p. 16. Hamilton, towards the close of the great career which was brought to such an untimely end, wrote to a friend, "Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present constitution than myself, and, contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know, from the very beginning, I am still laboring to prop up the frail and worthless fabric." Works, Vol. VII., P. 591.

The democratic tendencies which they dreaded seemed uncontrollable. Despite all their pains in fashioning the machine on the old model, it would not work that way. The trouble was, as Fisher Ames acutely remarked, "Constitutions are but paper; society is the substratum of government." The social conditions were such that the constitution could not escape conversion to democratic uses.

Although the fathers imagined that they were making the government on the old Whig model, they were only copying its external form. In reality, the Whig theory of government was a fiction masking the transfer of administrative authority from the crown to parliament. The attachment of the English people to kingship was such that politicians were bound to defer to it, just as politicians in our day are bound to maintain that their proposals are thoroughly constitutional and realize the true intent of the fathers. The Whigs, in their way, were as sincere in their loyalty to the crown as the Tories, but after the Revolution of 1689 England was really ruled by the landed aristocracy. The personal rule which George III exercised did not proceed so much from the authority of the crown as from its influence. It was the rule, not of a king, but of a political boss, dependent upon corrupt inducements and transient combinations. The crown, lords, and commons were

1"The power of the crown, almost dead and rotten as prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength and far less

not in fact distinct and independent depositaries of authority; for the landed gentry served as a connective tissue, enfolding the branches of government and establishing a centralized control. Seats in Parliament were almost personal property, and were frequently sold as such. Elections, as a rule, were a mere matter of form. Contests were rare. In the first general election held in George III's reign there were contests only in two counties and sixteen boroughs of England, and none at all in Scotland or in Wales. At the beginning of the present century, of 658 members of Parliament, 487 were virtually nominated by peers or wealthy squires.

Whatever unity or efficiency of administration existed in the national government when it was first established was due to the fact that the gentry controlled the government in all its branches. Hence the machine did actually go. The French revolutionary constitution of 1791, which was framed with the same idea of separating the executive and legislative powers, broke down at once for want of such coördinating social influences. Similar failures have attended almost every attempt to imitate the constitution of the United States. The constitutional checks clog the machine. Deadlocks are broken by executive decree, and it odium, under the name of influence." Burke's Present Discontents, 1770.

1 Jephson's The Platform, Vol. I., p.

16.

speedily becomes manifest that the true constitution is a military oligarchy. The history of Central and South American republics affords numerous examples of this process.

The class supremacy dexterously reasserted by the gentry was, however, doomed to destruction. The English gentry had to do with a settled population, trained to habits of deference and unable to escape from landlord control. But the American gentry were very differently situated. During the greater portion of the colonial period, the pressure of the French and Indians upon the English settlements confined the field, so that the prestige of the gentry could not be seriously impaired. But with the expulsion of the European powers, and the driving back of the Indians, a profound change in social conditions ensued. The land was practically illimitable in extent, and coercive social arrangements were impracticable, as the fathers soon discovered. "We need as all nations do," wrote Fisher Ames to Rufus King in 1802, "the compression on the outside of our circle of a formidable neighbor, whose presence shall at all times excite stronger fears than demagogues can inspire the people with towards their government." The actual conditions were such as to favor democratic concessions. The desire to obtain settlers caused inducements, which early took the

1 Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, Vol. IV., p. 106.

shape of offers of political franchises.1 The restrictions upon the suffrage on which the framers of the Constitution had depended, as guaranteeing the political control of the gentry, soon began to loosen. The breach between society and politics, which was sure to occur when political influence ceased to be a class privilege of the gentry, was not long delayed.2 Hamilton lamented the growing indifference of the better class of people to the exercise of their suffrage much in the style so common nowadays. That breach was destined to expand until the honorable title of politician should carry with it a social

1 As early as 1681 William Penn set forth among the attractions which his province of Pennsylvania offered to settlers that "they will have the right of voting, not only for the election of the magistrates of the place in which they live, but also for the members of the provincial council and the general assembly, which two bodies, conjointly with the governor, formed the sovereign power." The desire for settlers in the colonies was so strong that one of the grievances specified in the Declaration of Independence was that the king put obstacles in the way of emigration. The operation of this desire has had marked effects upon American institutions. Fourteen states give foreigners the right to vote on the declaration of an intention to be naturalized.

2 The danger was foreseen by the framers of the Constitution. Dickinson remarked that the freeholders were "the best guardians of liberty, and the restrictions of the right (of suffrage) to them was a necessary defence against the dangerous influence of those multitudes without property and without principle with which our country, like all others, will in time abound." The qualifications in the different states were so various that it was found impossible to agree on any uniform rule, and the constitution therefore simply adopts in every state the voting qualifications prescribed in elections for representatives in the state legislature.