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They could not consider in their calculations the possibility of such
an organization of knowledge that separate communities would act
simultaneously on the same version of the facts. We just begin to
conceive this possibility for certain parts of the world where there
is free circulation of news and a common language, and then only for
certain aspects of life. The whole idea of a voluntary federalism in
industry and world politics is still so rudimentary, that, as we see
in our own experience, it enters only a little, and only very
modestly, into practical politics. What we, more than a century later,
can only conceive as an incentive to generations of intellectual
effort, the authors of the Constitution had no reason to conceive at
all. In order to set up national government, Hamilton and his
colleagues had to make plans, not on the theory that men would
cooperate because they had a sense of common interest, but on the
theory that men could be governed, if special interests were kept in
equilibrium by a balance of power. "Ambition," Madison said,
[Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 51, cited by Ford, _op. cit._,
p. 60.] "must be made to counteract ambition."

They did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance every
interest so that the government would be in a perpetual deadlock. They
intended to deadlock local and class interest to prevent these from
obstructing government. "In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men," wrote Madison, [Footnote: _Id_.]
"the great difficulty lies in this: _you must first enable the
government to control the governed_, and in the next place, oblige
it to control itself." In one very important sense, then, the doctrine
of checks and balances was the remedy of the federalist leaders for
the problem of public opinion. They saw no other way to substitute
"the mild influence of the magistracy" for the "sanguinary agency of
the sword" [Footnote: _Federalist, No. 15.] except by devising an
ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion. They did not understand
how to manipulate a large electorate, any more than they saw the
possibility of common consent upon the basis of common information. It
is true that Aaron Burr taught Hamilton a lesson which impressed him a
good deal when he seized control of New York City in 1800 by the aid
of Tammany Hall. But Hamilton was killed before he was able to take
account of this new discovery, and, as Mr. Ford says, [Footnote: Ford,
_op. cit._, p. 119.] Burr's pistol blew the brains out of the
Federal party.

2

When the constitution was written, "politics could still be managed by
conference and agreement among gentlemen" [Footnote: _Op. cit._,
p. 144] and it was to the gentry that Hamilton turned for a
government. It was intended that they should manage national affairs
when local prejudice had been brought into equilibrium by the
constitutional checks and balances. No doubt Hamilton, who belonged to
this class by adoption, had a human prejudice in their favor. But that
by itself is a thin explanation of his statecraft. Certainly there can
be no question of his consuming passion for union, and it is, I think,
an inversion of the truth to argue that he made the Union to protect
class privileges, instead of saying that he used class privileges to
make the Union. "We must take man as we find him," Hamilton said, "and
if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his passions in
doing so." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 47] He needed men to govern,
whose passions could be most quickly attached to a national interest.
These were the gentry, the public creditors, manufacturers, shippers,
and traders, [Footnote: Beard, _Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution, passim._] and there is probably no better instance in
history of the adaptation of shrewd means to clear ends, than in the
series of fiscal measures, by which Hamilton attached the provincial
notables to the new government.

Although the constitutional convention worked behind closed doors, and
although ratification was engineered by "a vote of probably not more
than one-sixth of the adult males," [Footnote: Beard, _op. cit._,
p. 325.] there was little or no pretence. The Federalists argued for
union, not for democracy, and even the word republic had an unpleasant
sound to George Washington when he had been for more than two years a
republican president. The constitution was a candid attempt to limit
the sphere of popular rule; the only democratic organ it was intended
the government should possess was the House, based on a suffrage
highly limited by property qualifications. And even at that, the
House, it was believed, would be so licentious a part of the
government, that it was carefully checked and balanced by the Senate,
the electoral college, the Presidential veto, and by judicial
interpretation.

Thus at the moment when the French Revolution was kindling popular
feeling the world over, the American revolutionists of 1776 came under
a constitution which went back, as far as it was expedient, to the
British Monarchy for a model. This conservative reaction could not
endure. The men who had made it were a minority, their motives were
under suspicion, and when Washington went into retirement, the
position of the gentry was not strong enough to survive the inevitable
struggle for the succession. The anomaly between the original plan of
the Fathers and the moral feeling of the age was too wide not to be
capitalized by a good politician.

3

Jefferson referred to his election as "the great revolution of 1800,"
but more than anything else it was a revolution in the mind. No great
policy was altered, but a new tradition was established. For it was
Jefferson who first taught the American people to regard the
Constitution as an instrument of democracy, and he stereotyped the
images, the ideas, and even many of the phrases, in which Americans
ever since have described politics to each other. So complete was the
mental victory, that twenty-five years later de Tocqueville, who was
received in Federalist homes, noted that even those who were "galled
by its continuance"--were not uncommonly heard to "laud the delights
of a republican government, and the advantages of democratic
institutions when they are in public." [Footnote: _Democracy in
America_, Vol. I, Ch. X (Third Edition, 1838), p. 216.]

The Constitutional Fathers with all their sagacity had failed to see
that a frankly undemocratic constitution would not long be tolerated.
The bold denial of popular rule was bound to offer an easy point of
attack to a man, like Jefferson, who so far as his constitutional
opinions ran, was not a bit more ready than Hamilton to turn over
government to the "unrefined" will of the people. [Footnote:
_Cf._ his plan for the Constitution of Virginia, his ideas for a
senate of property holders, and his views on the judicial veto. Beard,
_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, pp. 450 _et
seq._] The Federalist leaders had been men of definite convictions
who stated them bluntly. There was little real discrepancy between
their public and their private views. But Jefferson's mind was a mass
of ambiguities, not solely because of its defects, as Hamilton and his
biographers have thought, but because he believed in a union and he
believed in spontaneous democracies, and in the political science of
his age there was no satisfactory way to reconcile the two. Jefferson
was confused in thought and action because he had a vision of a new
and tremendous idea that no one had thought out in all its bearings.
But though popular sovereignty was not clearly understood by anybody,
it seemed to imply so great an enhancement of human life, that no
constitution could stand which frankly denied it. The frank denials
were therefore expunged from consciousness, and the document, which is
on its face an honest example of limited constitutional democracy, was
talked and thought about as an instrument for direct popular rule.
Jefferson actually reached the point of believing that the Federalists
had perverted the Constitution, of which in his fancy they were no
longer the authors. And so the Constitution was, in spirit, rewritten.
Partly by actual amendment, partly by practice, as in the case of the
electoral college, but chiefly by looking at it through another set of
stereotypes, the facade was no longer permitted to look oligarchic.

The American people came to believe that their Constitution was a
democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe that fiction
to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction
it has been. It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded
the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have
been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and
loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. Jefferson
resolved that paradox by teaching the American people to read the
Constitution as an expression of democracy. He himself stopped there.
But in the course of twenty-five years or so social conditions had
changed so radically, that Andrew Jackson carried out the political
revolution for which Jefferson had prepared the tradition. [Footnote:
The reader who has any doubts as to the extent of the revolution that
separated Hamilton's opinions from Jackson's practice should turn to
Mr. Henry Jones Ford's _Rise and Growth of American Politics_.]

4

The political center of that revolution was the question of patronage.
By the men who founded the government public office was regarded as a
species of property, not lightly to be disturbed, and it was
undoubtedly their hope that the offices would remain in the hands of
their social class. But the democratic theory had as one of its main
principles the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen. Therefore, when
people began to look at the Constitution as a democratic instrument,
it was certain that permanence in office would seem undemocratic. The
natural ambitions of men coincided here with the great moral impulse
of their age. Jefferson had popularized the idea without carrying it
ruthlessly into practice, and removals on party grounds were
comparatively few under the Virginian Presidents. It was Jackson who
founded the practice of turning public office into patronage.

Curious as it sounds to us, the principle of rotation in office with
short terms was regarded as a great reform. Not only did it
acknowledge the new dignity of the average man by treating him as fit
for any office, not only did it destroy the monopoly of a small social
class and appear to open careers to talent, but "it had been advocated
for centuries as a sovereign remedy for political corruption," and as
the one way to prevent the creation of a bureaucracy. [Footnote: Ford,
_op. cit._, p. 169.] The practice of rapid change in public
office was the application to a great territory of the image of
democracy derived from the self-contained village.

Naturally it did not have the same results in the nation that it had
in the ideal community on which the democratic theory was based. It
produced quite unexpected results, for it founded a new governing
class to take the place of the submerged federalists. Unintentionally,
patronage did for a large electorate what Hamilton's fiscal measures
had done for the upper classes. We often fail to realize how much of
the stability of our government we owe to patronage. For it was
patronage that weaned natural leaders from too much attachment to the
self-centered community, it was patronage that weakened the local
spirit and brought together in some kind of peaceful cooperation, the
very men who, as provincial celebrities, would, in the absence of a
sense of common interest, have torn the union apart.

But of course, the democratic theory was not supposed to produce a new
governing class, and it has never accommodated itself to the fact.
When the democrat wanted to abolish monopoly of offices, to have
rotation and short terms, he was thinking of the township where anyone
could do a public service, and return humbly to his own farm. The idea
of a special class of politicians was just what the democrat did not
like. But he could not have what he did like, because his theory was
derived from an ideal environment, and he was living in a real one.
The more deeply he felt the moral impulse of democracy, the less ready
he was to see the profound truth of Hamilton's statement that
communities deliberating at a distance and under different impressions
could not long coöperate in the same views and pursuits. For that
truth postpones anything like the full realization of democracy in
public affairs until the art of obtaining common consent has been
radically improved. And so while the revolution under Jefferson and
Jackson produced the patronage which made the two party system, which
created a substitute for the rule of the gentry, and a discipline for
governing the deadlock of the checks and balances, all that happened,
as it were, invisibly.

Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice
the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might not be a
permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was permanent.
Government might be, as President Harding once said, a simple thing,
but winning elections was a sophisticated performance. The salaries in
office might be as ostentatiously frugal as Jefferson's home-spun, but
the expenses of party organization and the fruits of victory were in
the grand manner. The stereotype of democracy controlled the visible
government; the corrections, the exceptions and adaptations of the
American people to the real facts of their environment have had to be
invisible, even when everybody knew all about them. It was only the
words of the law, the speeches of politicians, the platforms, and the
formal machinery of administration that have had to conform to the
pristine image of democracy.

5

If one had asked a philosophical democrat how these self-contained
communities were to cooperate, when their public opinions were so
self-centered, he would have pointed to representative government
embodied in the Congress. And nothing would surprise him more than the
discovery of how steadily the prestige of representative government
has declined, while the power of the Presidency has grown.

Some critics have traced this to the custom of sending only local
celebrities to Washington. They have thought that if Congress could
consist of the nationally eminent men, the life of the capital would
be more brilliant. It would be, of course, and it would be a very good
thing if retiring Presidents and Cabinet officers followed the example
of John Quincy Adams. But the absence of these men does not explain
the plight of Congress, for its decline began when it was relatively
the most eminent branch of the government. Indeed it is more probable
that the reverse is true, and that Congress ceased to attract the
eminent as it lost direct influence on the shaping of national policy.

The main reason for the discredit, which is world wide, is, I think,
to be found in the fact that a congress of representatives is
essentially a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world. With some
exceptions, the only method recognized in the Constitution or in the
theory of representative government, by which Congress can inform
itself, is to exchange opinions from the districts. There is no
systematic, adequate, and authorized way for Congress to know what is
going on in the world. The theory is that the best man of each
district brings the best wisdom of his constituents to a central
place, and that all these wisdoms combined are all the wisdom that
Congress needs. Now there is no need to question the value of
expressing local opinions and exchanging them. Congress has great
value as the market-place of a continental nation. In the coatrooms,
the hotel lobbies, the boarding houses of Capitol Hill, at the
tea-parties of the Congressional matrons, and from occasional entries
into the drawing rooms of cosmopolitan Washington, new vistas are
opened, and wider horizons. But even if the theory were applied, and
the districts always sent their wisest men, the sum or a combination
of local impressions is not a wide enough base for national policy,
and no base at all for the control of foreign policy. Since the real
effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they cannot be understood
by filtering local experiences through local states of mind. They can
be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis. And just
as the head of a large factory cannot know how efficient it is by
talking to the foreman, but must examine cost sheets and data that
only an accountant can dig out for him, so the lawmaker does not
arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together
a mosaic of local pictures. He needs to know the local pictures, but
unless he possesses instruments for calibrating them, one picture is
as good as the next, and a great deal better.

The President does come to the assistance of Congress by delivering
messages on the state of the Union. He is in a position to do that
because he presides over a vast collection of bureaus and their
agents, which report as well as act. But he tells Congress what he
chooses to tell it. He cannot be heckled, and the censorship as to
what is compatible with the public interest is in his hands. It is a
wholly one-sided and tricky relationship, which sometimes reaches such
heights of absurdity, that Congress, in order to secure an important
document has to thank the enterprise of a Chicago newspaper, or the
calculated indiscretion of a subordinate official. So bad is the
contact of legislators with necessary facts that they are forced to
rely either on private tips or on that legalized atrocity, the
Congressional investigation, where Congressmen, starved of their
legitimate food for thought, go on a wild and feverish man-hunt, and
do not stop at cannibalism.

Except for the little that these investigations yield, the occasional
communications from the executive departments, interested and
disinterested data collected by private persons, such newspapers,
periodicals, and books as Congressmen read, and a new and excellent
practice of calling for help from expert bodies like the Interstate
Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Tariff
Commission, the creation of Congressional opinion is incestuous. From
this it follows either that legislation of a national character is
prepared by a few informed insiders, and put through by partisan
force; or that the legislation is broken up into a collection of local
items, each of which is enacted for a local reason. Tariff schedules,
navy yards, army posts, rivers and harbors, post offices and federal
buildings, pensions and patronage: these are fed out to concave
communities as tangible evidence of the benefits of national life.
Being concave, they can see the white marble building which rises out
of federal funds to raise local realty values and employ local
contractors more readily than they can judge the cumulative cost of
the pork barrel. It is fair to say that in a large assembly of men,
each of whom has practical knowledge only of his own district, laws
dealing with translocal affairs are rejected or accepted by the mass
of Congressmen without creative participation of any kind. They
participate only in making those laws that can be treated as a bundle
of local issues. For a legislature without effective means of
information and analysis must oscillate between blind regularity,
tempered by occasional insurgency, and logrolling. And it is the
logrolling which makes the regularity palatable, because it is by
logrolling that a Congressman proves to his more active constituents
that he is watching their interests as they conceive them.

This is no fault of the individual Congressman's, except when he is
complacent about it. The cleverest and most industrious representative
cannot hope to understand a fraction of the bills on which he votes.
The best he can do is to specialize on a few bills, and take
somebody's word about the rest. I have known Congressmen, when they
were boning up on a subject, to study as they had not studied since
they passed their final examinations, many large cups of black coffee,
wet towels and all. They had to dig for information, sweat over
arranging and verifying facts, which, in any consciously organized
government, should have been easily available in a form suitable for
decision. And even when they really knew a subject, their anxieties
had only begun. For back home the editors, the board of trade, the
central federated union, and the women's clubs had spared themselves
these labors, and were prepared to view the Congressman's performance
through local spectacles.

6

What patronage did to attach political chieftains to the national
government, the infinite variety of local subsidies and privileges do
for self-centered communities. Patronage and pork amalgamate and
stabilize thousands of special opinions, local discontents, private
ambitions. There are but two other alternatives. One is government by
terror and obedience, the other is government based on such a highly
developed system of information, analysis, and self-consciousness that
"the knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state" is
evident to all men. The autocratic system is in decay, the voluntary
system is in its very earliest development; and so, in calculating the
prospects of association among large groups of people, a League of
Nations, industrial government, or a federal union of states, the
degree to which the material for a common consciousness exists,
determines how far cooperation will depend upon force, or upon the
milder alternative to force, which is patronage and privilege. The
secret of great state-builders, like Alexander Hamilton, is that they
know how to calculate these principles.

CHAPTER XIX

THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM.

Whenever the quarrels of self-centered groups become unbearable,
reformers in the past found themselves forced to choose between two
great alternatives. They could take the path to Rome and impose a
Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to
isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost always they chose
that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried
out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other
things the simple freedom of their own community. But if they had seen
this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealousies they longed for
the spacious order of a great and powerful state.

Whichever choice they made, the essential difficulty was the same. If
decisions were decentralized they soon floundered in a chaos of local
opinions. If they were centralized, the policy of the state was based
on the opinions of a small social set at the capital. In any case
force was necessary to defend one local right against another, or to
impose law and order on the localities, or to resist class government
at the center, or to defend the whole society, centralized or
decentralized, against the outer barbarian.

Modern democracy and the industrial system were both born in a time of
reaction against kings, crown government, and a regime of detailed
economic regulation. In the industrial sphere this reaction took the
form of extreme devolution, known as laissez-faire individualism. Each
economic decision was to be made by the man who had title to the
property involved. Since almost everything was owned by somebody,
there would be somebody to manage everything. This was plural
sovereignty with a vengeance.

It was economic government by anybody's economic philosophy, though it
was supposed to be controlled by immutable laws of political economy
that must in the end produce harmony. It produced many splendid
things, but enough sordid and terrible ones to start counter-currents.
One of these was the trust, which established a kind of Roman peace
within industry, and a Roman predatory imperialism outside. People
turned to the legislature for relief. They invoked representative
government, founded on the image of the township farmer, to regulate
the semi-sovereign corporations. The working class turned to labor
organization. There followed a period of increasing centralization and
a sort of race of armaments. The trusts interlocked, the craft unions
federated and combined into a labor movement, the political system
grew stronger at Washington and weaker in the states, as the reformers
tried to match its strength against big business.

In this period practically all the schools of socialist thought from
the Marxian left to the New Nationalists around Theodore Roosevelt,
looked upon centralization as the first stage of an evolution which
would end in the absorption of all the semi-sovereign powers of
business by the political state. The evolution never took place,
except for a few months during the war. That was enough, and there was
a turn of the wheel against the omnivorous state in favor of several
new forms of pluralism. But this time society was to swing back not to
the atomic individualism of Adam Smith's economic man and Thomas
Jefferson's farmer, but to a sort of molecular individualism of
voluntary groups.

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