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 , or of .was a fair average of the wisdom, the talent, and the virtue of the country, and not inferior to that of , or that of l; and the Executive during the rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as it was during the war of , 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.
