The only apparently weak point in the system is in the particular States themselves.Feudalism protected the feudal aristocracy effectively for a time against both the king and the people, but left the king and the, people without protection against the aristocracy, and hence it fell.It was not adequate to the wants of civil society, did not harmonize all social elements, and protect all social and individual rights and interests, and therefore could not but fail.The General government takes care of public authority and rights; the State protects private rights and personal freedom as against the General government: but what protects the citizens in their private rights, their personal freedom and independence, against the particular State government? Universal suffrage, answers the democrat.Armed with the ballot, more powerful than the sword, each citizen is able to protect himself.But this is theory, not reality.If it were true, the division of the powers of government between two co-ordinate, governments would be of no practical importance.Experience does not sustain the theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the individual may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party.Experience proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is commonly pretended.The ballot of an isolated individual counts for nothing.The individual, though armed with the ballot, is as powerless, if he stands alone, as if he had it not.To render it of any avail he must associate himself with a party, and look for his success in the success of his party; and to secure the success of his party, he must give up to it his own private convictions and free will.In practice, individuals are nothing individually, and parties are every thing.Even the suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the Administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the government found the leaders of the party opposed to the Republican party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount than the chiefs of the armies of the so-called Confederate States.
Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one knows by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some private or personal purposes, for which they wish, through party to use the government.Parties have no conscience, no responsibility, and their very reason of being is, the usurpation and concentration of power.The real practical tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic, instead of an imperial, centralism.
What is to guard against this centralism?
Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it;, and if the government is left to it, the government becomes practically the will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority.Is the remedy in written or paper constitutions? Party can break through them, and by making the judges elective by party, for short terms, and re-eligible, can do so with impunity.In several of the States, the dominant majority have gained the power to govern at will, without any let or hindrance.Besides, constitutions can be altered, and have been altered, very nearly at the will of the majority.No mere paper constitutions are any protection against the usurpations of party, for party will always grasp all the power it can.
Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the States the principle of division of powers is carried into the bosom of the State itself; in some States further than in others, but in all it obtains to some extent.In what are called the New England States, the best governed portion of the Union, each town is a corporation, having important powers and the charge of all purely local matters--chooses its own officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its own children.Between these corporations and the State government are the counties, that take charge of another class of interests, more general than those under the charge of the town, but less general than those of the State.In the great central and Northwestern States the same system obtains, though less completely carried out.In the Southern and Southwestern States, the town corporations hardly exist, and the rights and interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less well protected in them than in the Northern and Eastern States.But with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the influence of the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of peace and the revival of agricultural, industrial, and commercial prosperity, the New England system, in its main features, is pretty sure to be gradually introduced, or developed, and the division of powers in the State to be as effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between the General government and the particular or State governments.
So, though universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not alone sufficient, the division of powers affords with it a not inadequate protection.
No government, whose workings are intrusted to men, ever is or can be practically perfect--secure all good, and guard against all evil.In all human governments there will be defects and abuses, and he is no wise man who expects perfection from imperfection.But the American constitution, taken as a whole, and in all its parts, is the least imperfect that has ever existed, and under it individual rights, personal freedom and independence, as well as public authority or society, are better protected than under any other; and as the few barbaric elements retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the standard of education elevated, and the whole population Americanized, moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to effect all the good, with as little of the evil, as can be reasonably expected from any possible civil government or political constitution of society.
