POLITICAL MOVEMENT OF THE NINETEENTH

THE

CENTURY.

HE fashion in kings has changed. In former times the sovereign power was in a few or in one person crowned supreme. The nineteenth century has crowned the people. In other days, by right of birth or conquest, a privileged few possessed the government as their private property. Now the public owns the government in theory and to a large extent in practise. Democracy has won upon the field of battle and in the halls of legislation, and government has been deeded to the people in vigorous compacts and solemn constitutions. The laws of selection and survival, which apply to principles and institutions as well as to individuals and races, have given their powerful sanction to popular government. The divine right of kings is extinct with the theories of ghosts and witches and other intellectual monstrosities of the past found fossil in our histories. The sovereignty of the people has become the fundamental thought of modern politics.

The new kings, like the old, are sometimes feeble-minded or inert, and their advisers or even their clowns may exercise for a time the actual power; but the right of kingship and sovereign power is in the people, and if the bosses rule it is in the name of the people and by their acknowledged right, and the people may take to themselves the real power and perfect the machinery of popular government whenever they have the mind to do so.

The white light of civilized democracy is a new thing on this planet.* Throughout the past, in varying depths and com

*The so-called "democracies" or "republics" of former times were not democracies or republics at all, except perhaps in the case of some primitive uncivilized communities. In Athens at its best four-fifths of the people were slaves. The governing power was not in the mass of the people, but in a small part of the people. Five out of every six men had no vote or civic right, being either slaves or unenfranchised metics (aliens)—20,000 enfranchised Athenians in a population of half a mil

binations, the clouds of despotism and barbarism have shadowed the continents. Til near the end of the eighteenth century, the world clear round was dark, with only a half light here and there to tinge the gloom with gray, or a meteor's flash to fade and die in the undiminished night. But just before our century, as the dawn before the day, the light of liberty in broad and deepening flood poured on the peoples through the gates of revolution. Then began the giant move

lion. The entire working classes and many traders and artificers who would be reckoned now as belonging to the middle classes were without political rights. The internal organization of the ruling class was democratic, but there was no government by the people, no democracy, only a democratic-aristocracy. Yet this Athens in the time of Pericles, of which we have been speaking, is lauded by historians as a pure democracy. And in fact it was the nearest approach to popular government to be found in any ancient civilization, though but one man in six had a vote. Sparta never advanced beyond a close oligarchy of hard and narrow-minded landowners and oppressed helots who tilled the soil.

"In all the Greek 'democracies' the slaves, who formed the entire working classes, were denied any share of political power." (May on Democracy, 55, 64.)

When Rome drove out her Tarquin kings, 509 B. C., and established what the historians call "The Republic," all power was in the patricians -all laws were made and all offices held by them. The plebeians constituting the masses of the people had no political rights. They began a struggle for political equality, but long before they won their civic rights (completed 286 B. C. by the Hortensian laws giving force to the decrees of the popular assembly) conquest and the law of debt had filled the city with a mass of slaves. With a powerful nobility at the top and a multitude of slaves at the bottom there was no real republic in Rome. How loosely the word is used in our histories may be judged by the fact that the "Republic" is said to have continued until 30 B. C., though eighteen years before that date Cæsar had crossed the Rubicon and established an imperial despotism, though under the forms of republican government. He seized the government by force and ruled with absolute power, until his assassination by Brutus for the very reason that he had "overturned the Republic," which, translated into fact, means that he had swallowed into his one person all the powers which had formerly belonged to the citizen classes or compound aristocracy of which Brutus was a member. It was literally true, as Shakespeare's Antony says, "but yesterday the word of Cæsar might have stood against the world." He was the imperial ruler of the known world. Historians have classified governments mainly by their outward forms and pretenses, and not by their actual nature and substance. Even in the days of her nearest approach to democracy Rome was despotic in her attitude to conquered territory. The people of Italy even were not accorded Roman citizenship till after Augustus, when citizenship had ceased to carry political power.

The "free cities" of Italy, France, and Germany, so famous for their freedom in the Middle Ages, were not democracies, but like Athens were merely democratic-aristocracies-oligarchies with a democratic organization on the inside, but despotic on the outside. The agricultural workers and the masses of the laboring classes generally had no share in the government. The cities were "free" because they were not sub

ment that has scattered the forces of the night, and with everincreasing power has pushed, and is still pushing, the nations up the slope of democracy toward the sovereignty of all, and an organization that shall make that sovereignty wise, continuous, and effective.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

In 1800, the United States had just thrown off the English

ject to the prevailing feudal obligations-their citizens were not serfs or vassals of the local nobility; but they were not free in the modern sense, for they did not have government by and for the people, but government by and for a body of nobles, or a commercial aristocracy.

The agricultural laborers of Europe had no share in the government of the Middle Ages, and, "with insignificant exceptions outside of America, it was reserved for the nineteenth century to make this advance." (Adams: Civilization in the Middle Ages, pp. 306, 307.) "Even within the self-governing cities the governments were not democratic, and the distinctions between patricians and common people were as clearly drawn as outside their walls." (Ibid., 306.) The tillers of the soil always, and city laborers for the most part, were excluded from the exercise of political rights, which were monopolized by a privileged order. (Lavisse, Histoire Generale, 452.)

The principle of the rights of man was unknown in the free cities of the Middle Ages. "The idea [of government by the people] would have been impossible to the Middle Ages. It would have been foreign to all its notions." (Adams: Civilization in the Middle Ages, 306.) "The Italian Republics consisted of a small body of burghers, who alone had the privilege of government, together with a large population, who, though they paid taxes and shared the commercial and social advantages of the city, had no voice in its administration." (Symonds: The Republics in "The Renaissance," 128.) Venice, one of the "independent republics" of Italy, was ruled by her patricians in the early period, and later by a close oligarchy brought to a focus in the despotic Council of Ten. In 1581 Venice had a population of 134,800, of which only 1,843 were adult patricians, and by no means all of those had a share in the government, for in 1297 the Great Council was made a close hereditary chamber, and in 1311 the Council of Ten was established with power substantially absolute.

Of all the free cities, Florence was the "foremost in freedom," yet she was ruled first by her nobles, then by her commercial aristocracy, and finally by one leading family of her plutocracy. Aside from evanescent forms of revolution, her freest government left the actual power of the State in a mercantile aristocracy consisting of the 7 Greater Guilds. The 14 Lesser Guilds were also citizens, but could elect only one-fourth of the signory or other group of officers, the Greater Guilds electing the rest. Below these groups of citizens was a large body who had no civic rights, although they paid taxes. Below these was the great bulk of manual workers who did not pay taxes, and had nothing to do with the government except in times of revolution. (Varchi, Storia Florentina, lib. III., cap. 22.)

In the free cities of Northern Europe also the Greater Guilds (composed of burghers, usually employers of labor) generally held the municipal government in their grasp. "The working classes could gain admittance to the greater trades by giving up manual labor for a year and a day," a condition practically prohibitive to the mass of artificers

yoke and established a great Republic in the New World; but, to leave some adequate work for future reformers, the slavery that existed throughout the greater part of the Republic was recognized and protected by the Constitution. The ordinance of 1787 prevented the importation of slaves into the northwest territory, but slaves already there before the bound to the lower trades (May, 17). In some cases the lower or "craft-guilds" attained a share in the government, as in the Italian cities, but except in spasms the dominant power remained with the wealthy burghers, and a mass of manual laborers besides the agricultural workers were outside the guilds altogether and had no civic rights at all. "The people" in the Middle Ages meant the nobles and commercial aristocracy. There was no effort to secure the rights of citizenship to the whole body of the people; there was simply a struggle of classes each seeking to capture the government for itself.

Holland is described as free in the Middle Ages, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the latter part of the sixteenth century, when the "Republic" was proclaimed. But the country was full of feudal nobles and their peasant subjects, the cities were oligarchies, and "the States General, which exercised supreme power in the republic, consisted of delegates from the provincial assemblies, which were chosen by the municipal magistrates of the different cities, who were themselves self-elected. Nowhere was there popular election; the representation was municipal throughout." (May, 65.) And the municipalities were aristocracies. The country people and for the most part the working classes in the cities had no part in the government—the mass of the population was out of power. In 1795, upon the invasion of a French revolutionary army, a free constitution was established proclaiming the sovereignty of the people and the rights of man, abolishing feudal customs and titles of nobility, overthrowing the ancient municipal constitution of the provinces, and providing for a representative assembly to be chosen by universal suffrage. The Dutch were free on paper, but instead of attaining self-government they found they had merely changed masters. They were treated as a subject province of France and remained under French domination till the fall of Napoleon.

The forest cantons of Switzerland have been for ages the freest spots in Europe the freest spots on earth, perhaps, before American liberty was born. But these communities, however free, were primitive--no cities and towns with commerce and manufactures and the complex organization of society, nothing but little townships of mountain farms, with a convent here and there-mere patches of primeval liberty walled in by the white-capped Alps. In the more developed cantons the governments were oligarchies. In Berne, for example, out of 360 burgher families, 80 (and in 1776 only 18) formed the ruling oligarchy in a population of 250,000 to 300,000 people. Such aristocracies continued until the nineteenth century, one of the provisions of the constitution of 1848 being for the overthrow of the oligarchies.

Passing from local government to Switzerland as a whole, we find that when she shook off the Austrian yoke and freed herself from the Empire she passed under the domination of France and so remained till 1814. In the sixteenth century the French king was a controlling factor in Swiss affairs, and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the confederation was practically a dependency of France. In the national sphere, self-government was not attained till the nineteenth century.

Among some primitive peoples, such as our Saxon ancestors and the

ordinance took effect were not emancipated. New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had provided for gradual abolition by prohibiting importation and enacting that children should be free at birth or on attaining a given age, etc. Only in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts

ancient Jews, democracies existed more or less like those of the primitive forest cantons of Switzerland. But such governments are not entitled to be called civilized democracies. A little, undeveloped, homogeneous social group may form a democracy, but the union of civilization and democracy is a very different thing. Division of labor, separation of manufactures, commerce, and agriculture, development of cities and towns, organization of military force, complex judicial and administrative functions, and large industrial interests-these are the things that create inequality and put the strain upon democracy. Organization usually overwhelms the primitive democracy, and establishes monarchic or aristocratic institutions. Only the civilized democracy, that thoroughly understands the value of free government, founds itself on constitutional guaranties and popular education and controls organization for the benefit of all,-only such a democracy can be relied upon to endure the strain of civilization. Of all the civilized communities of the world (so far as we have knowledge) down to 1800, there was only one in which the government from top to bottom was in the control of the great body of the people, and that one was our own United States.

(Caricature of Louis XIV, by Thackeray.)

"You see at once that majesty is made out of the wig, the highheeled shoes and cloak, all fleurs-de-lis bespangled.... Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship."- Thackeray.