Chapter V: Part 5

It is not my purpose, and it would swell this paper beyond all reasonable limits, to sketch here, even in outline, the political annals of the quarter of a century which stretches now between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the election of Governor Cleveland in 1884. I may assume my readers to have a general knowledge of the main features of this period of American history. No intelligent man can be familiar even with the distorted and partial presentation of those features which has hitherto passed current on both sides of the Atlantic, without asking himself what the magic virtue can be which has carried the great Democratic party of the United States steadily onward through so many years of exclusion from executive power and such storms of systematic obloquy, enabling it amid the passions of a fierce sectional conflict to retain such a popular support throughout the North and West as has persistently threatened the tenure of the Federal authority by its all-powerful and never over-scrupulous opponents, giving it again and again control of the popular branch of the Federal Congress, and commanding for it, as soon as the restoration of the Union became in truth an accomplished fact, an unquestioned majority of the suffrages of the American people.

My object has been to indicate the true answer to this question by setting forth the foundations on which the Democratic party of the United States was planted by its great leaders in the very dawn of our national history.

No man ever learned by practical experience of the responsibilities of power to appreciate the solidity of these foundations more thoroughly than President Lincoln. A “Whig” by his early political affiliations and an active and successful politician in times of high party excitement, President Lincoln was not a partisan by temperament, and nothing is more certain than that he came during his practical war-dictatorship to very sound conclusions as to the essentially ephemeral character of the political organisation which had lifted him into that trying and dangerous post. He had no respect at all for professional “philanthropists,” and not much for loudly “philanthropic” politicians. The abolitionist agitators of the North instinctively disliked and distrusted him. The ablest of their number, Mr. Wendell Phillips, sneered at him as being not “honest exactly, but Kentucky honest.” It was no confidence in President Lincoln, but the political necessity of the moment, which compelled the extreme Anti-Democratic leaders of the Republican party to acquiesce in his renomination in November 1864, with a Democratic ex-Senator from the South, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, as his associate on the Presidential ticket. Of this fact President Lincoln himself was well aware. Nor was he blind to the popular and political significance of that Presidential election of 1864. In spite of all that could be done by an army of Federal office-holders larger than the armed force which Mr. Seward at the outset of the civil war had imagined would be adequate to “suppress the rebellion;” in spite of the combined influence of the “Republican” local governments in the Northern and Western States; in spite of military force brought to bear openly upon the polls in regions undisturbed by war; in spite of the overshadowing fact that the issues of the great civil war were still being fought out in the field, the Democratic party of the North and West confronted the Republican President at the polls in November 1864 with a popular vote of nearly two millions out of four millions cast in those sections of the Republic! The exact figures show that General M’Clellan, whose popularity with the Democratic party was based upon his fame as the creator of the Union army of the Potomac and upon his expressed loyalty to the principles of the Constitution as the Democratic party holds them, received, in November 1864, 1,802,237 votes in the North and West, or within a few thousands of the 1,866,452 votes which were cast for Mr. Lincoln himself in November 1860!

President Lincoln had shrewd sense enough to see that as the maintenance of the authority of the Union had only been made possible to him by the unswerving determination of the Northern and Western Democratic party that the authority of the Union should be maintained under the Constitution, so the restoration of peace within the Union could only be achieved by accepting the Democratic construction of the position and the rights of all the States in the Union under the Constitution, of the seceded as well as of the unseceded States; and he had patriotism enough to resolve that peace should be restored within the Union, no matter what became of the ephemeral “Republican” party which had been called into existence and carried into power chiefly by the force of the sectional passions which had found final expression in the civil war. He had gone beyond the Constitution under the war power in abolishing slavery, and he knew that in abolishing slavery he had abolished the vital impulse to which the “Republican” party owed its existence. He knew too that the extreme “Republican” partisans by whom he was surrounded knew this as well as he, and he was thoroughly aware that there were among them men like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who were prepared and determined if possible to keep the sectional passions which slavery had evoked alive and burning after slavery itself should have disappeared, and to organise for themselves a new lease of power at the expense of the peace of the country and of the happiness and prosperity of millions of their fellow-countrymen.

At the beginning of the war President Lincoln had met the challenge thrown down to him by the Confederate War Department on the lines indicated by a great Democratic jurist, the late Judge Black of Pennsylvania, in his “Opinion upon the Powers of the President,” prepared at the request of President Buchanan, in whose Cabinet Judge Black had successively held the posts of Attorney-General and of Secretary of State.

If one of the States (wrote Judge Black) should
declare her independence, your action cannot depend
upon the rightfulness of the cause upon which such
declaration is based. Whether the retirement of a
State from the Union be the exercise of a right
reserved in the Constitution, or a revolutionary
movement, it is certain that you have not in either
case the authority to recognise her independence or
to absolve her from her Federal obligations. Congress
or the other States in Convention assembled must take
such measures as may be necessary and proper. In
such an event I can see no course for you but to go
straight onward in the path which you have hitherto
trodden—that is, execute the laws to the extent
of the defensive means placed in your hands, and
act generally upon the assumption that the present
constitutional relations between the States and the
Federal Government continue to exist until a new
order of things shall be established either by law or
by force.

The seceding States attempted to establish “a new order of things by force,” and maintained that attempt for four years with such resolution, pertinacity, and courage as more than once brought them within what an eminent English statesman would perhaps call such a “measurable distance” of success as may well explain the conviction expressed in England at one period of the struggle, that Jefferson Davis had “established a nation.”

Upon the failure of the Confederate experiment, President Lincoln, in spite of the bitter and threatening hostility to him of a number of the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party in and out of Congress, wisely and consistently determined to adhere to the position involved in Judge Black’s opinion that the constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government could not be and had not been shaken by the contest. After the Confederate Government had abandoned Richmond, he visited that capital as President of the United States, and in words made pathetic and historical by the deplorable and senseless crime which was so soon to shock the country and the civilised world, proclaimed his intention to administer the Government “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” In his last public speech, delivered on the 11th of April, 1865, two days only before his assassination, he spoke of the seceded States as already restored to their places in the Union, and said of them in his quaint and homely fashion that, “finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had been abroad.” Mr. Gideon Welles of Connecticut, to whom the portfolio of the Navy had been given by President Lincoln in his first Cabinet, as a representative of the Democratic wing of the then newly-organized “Republican” party, tells us that at a Cabinet meeting held on the last day of President Lincoln’s life, April 13, 1865, the President urged all the members of the Cabinet to exert their influence to get all the State Governments of the lately seceded States of the South “going again before the annual meeting of Congress in December.” This meant, of course, that President Lincoln intended and expected the lately seceded States to send to Washington their proper and constitutional quota of senators and representatives freely elected under the local franchise in each of those States. His purpose was to secure the ratification by the seceded States of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery formally, and then to accept them as in all respects States within the Union. In the Emancipation Proclamation of the 22nd of September, 1862, which President Lincoln had issued avowedly as a war measure, he had taken pains to declare that his object in prosecuting the war as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy” of the United States, was, had been, and would be, “practically to restore the constitutional relation between the United States and each of the States and the people thereof in which that relation was or might be suspended.”

This was not at all the object of the unscrupulous and reckless leaders who took command of the “Republican” party upon the death of President Lincoln, and under whom Mr. Blaine first made a figure upon the field of Federal politics.

A clear line will be drawn by the historian between the war administration of the President who upheld the Union and the dismal epoch of Southern reconstruction which followed—an epoch of unconstitutional Congressional despotism, mitigated only from time to time by the personal authority of General Grant. The story of the relations of General Grant as President of the United States with the party which found itself compelled to take advantage of his unbounded popularity as the surest means of retaining its grasp upon authority at Washington will one day constitute a most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of government, but it lies outside the scope of this paper. That General Grant would gladly have co-operated with President Lincoln in carrying out his plan of re-establishing the Union on Democratic and constitutional lines may be inferred not only from the fact which he has stated, that the only vote he ever cast before the civil war was for a Democratic President, but from the more significant fact that he was so fully convinced of the readiness of the Southern States to accept the results of the civil war in good faith, that, immediately after the accession of President Johnson in 1865, he urged upon the President the importance of throwing a combined army of Union and of Confederate soldiers into Mexico for the purpose of expelling the French under Bazaine, and compelling Maximilian to abandon the hopeless attempt to found an empire in the land of the Montezumas which eventually cost that gallant but unfortunate prince his life. President Johnson eagerly adopted General Grant’s suggestion, but the Secretary of State Mr. Seward, opposed it, and Mr. Seward’s objection was fatal. “It cost Maximilian his life,” General Grant tells us, “and gave Napoleon the Third five more years of power in France.” He might have added that it cost the people of the Southern States ten years of the most odious and corrupting mal-administration recorded in modern history—mal-administration which, but for the solid political capacity and the traditional common sense and patriotism of the Americans of the Southern States, must have reduced the fairest portion of the North American continent to a social and industrial chaos without precedent in the annals of modern civilisation.

The evil influences of that dark epoch extended themselves in all directions North and South, cropping out in organised official peculations, in shameless political dishonesty, in reckless speculation, in monstrous lobbying, and in incredible excesses of public extravagance, based upon such a system of inordinate and unconstitutional taxation as no American in his senses could have been brought, before the outbreak of the civil war, to believe would ever for a moment be tolerated by the American people.

* * * * *

It was to make an end of all this that the people of the United States in 1876 elected one Democratic Governor of New York to the Presidency. Defeated then of their will by the Republican agents of reconstruction, the people of the United States had now at last in 1884 compelled their voice to be heard and to be respected. With the inauguration of Governor Cleveland in March 1885, the Federal Government of the United States will be once more organised upon the enduring Democratic foundations of respect for Home Rule at the South and at the North, in the East and in the West, and of a strict limitation of the functions of the Federal Government to the powers granted and prescribed to it by the Constitution.

If I have done anything like justice in this necessarily hasty sketch to the origin and development of the Democratic party of the United States, my readers will not need to be told that its advent to power at this time opens a new and most important chapter in the annals of the American Republic. It involves much, very much more than the transfer of executive power from one to another set of administrative officers.

It closes definitely an era of such political disease and corruption in the United States as I have preferred rather to indicate than to dwell upon here. Work of that sort, in my judgment, may as well be confined to the domestic laundry. Quite enough of it has been done for the edification of mankind at large by certain of my countrymen who have hitherto found it more convenient to bewail the political profligacy of those to whom “respectable Republicans” chose to surrender the control of the Republican party after the murder of President Lincoln “cried havoc and let slip the dogs of faction” than to co-operate resolutely with the great Democratic party in making the Union once more solid, and settling it upon its only possible foundations—Home Rule and a strict construction of the Constitution.

It is easy to draw dramatic pictures of the demoralisation of American politics; but there is more significance surely for thoughtful men in the returns, which show that the candidacy of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Logan has cut down the plurality of the Republican party in “moral” Massachusetts from more than fifty thousand to ten thousand votes; in Illinois, from over forty thousand to fifteen thousand; in Michigan, from more than fifty thousand to barely two thousand; in Ohio, from more than thirty thousand to eleven thousand. It has made the Democratic Governor of New York President by an electoral majority of 37 votes and a popular plurality of about 400,000 votes. Less is to be learned of the deep and lasting currents of popular thought and feeling in the United States from an elaborate study of the absurd abominations of Republican “Reconstruction” at the South than from the handwriting of fire on the polling-places of the Empire State which illuminated the Belshazzar’s Feast of Mr. Blaine’s “millionaires” on the eve of the Presidential Election of 1884!

* * * * *

In a certain sense, President Cleveland will occupy a position not unlike that of President Lincoln at the outset of his first Presidency. But the task of the Democratic chief magistrate who goes to Washington with a great historical party at his back, to restore the well-understood metes and bounds of the Federal authority over thirty-eight free and independent States will be a less troublesome and in its immediate results ought to be an infinitely more benign and grateful task, than that of the reluctant war dictator who found himself, against all his expectations, driven by angry sections, with a mixed and undisciplined mob of placemen, of monopolists, and of philanthropists behind him, into cutting with the sword the Gordian knot of slavery, at the risk of severing with it forever the golden bands of the Union, and those “mystic chords of memory” of which he spoke with such a wistful pathos in his inaugural address. Some points of resemblance may be found, too, between the personal histories of Lincoln and of Cleveland. Like Mr. Lincoln, Governor Cleveland comes of an old American stock. His family name smacks of Yorkshire, and his direct ancestors established themselves in Massachusetts nearly two hundred years ago. One of the family, a Cambridge man, and a clergyman of the Anglican Church, died at Philadelphia under the roof of his friend Benjamin Franklin twenty years before the American Revolution. Another, who sat in the Legislature of Connecticut, and who was a minister of the Independents, is remembered as an early advocate in that “land of steady habits” of the abolition of African slavery, and this at a time when the worthy citizens of Massachusetts thought it expedient to keep the Bay State clear of negro blood by ordaining in their organic law that any African “not a subject of our faithful ally the Emperor of Morocco” who ventured twice across the Massachusetts border should be on each occasion whipped, imprisoned and sent away, and that if this did not restrain his ardor, he should upon his third advent be so dealt with as to put an effectual stop to his travels.

Richard Cleveland, a grandson of the Connecticut abolitionist, married the daughter of an Irish bookseller in Philadelphia, Miss Neale, and was the father of the new President of the United States. He was settled as a Presbyterian minister in the New Jersey village of Caldwell, and there on the 18th of March, 1838, Grover Cleveland was born. His father left New Jersey when he was but a child, and went in the service of the religious body to which he belonged to live in New York. The circumstances of the family were much better, I need not say, than those amid which the youth of Lincoln, the son of an emigrant Virginian, was passed in the wilds of Kentucky and Southern Illinois. But Grover Cleveland, like Lincoln, was early thrown upon his own resources. When he was a lad of sixteen his father died, and he was left to conquer for himself the education he was determined to have, and to make his own way in the world with such small help as a brother and an uncle could afford him, both of them battling with life, and both of them counting, not in vain, upon the young student’s aid in the maintenance of his widowed mother and her young family.

His twenty-first year found the future President admitted to the Bar in Buffalo, the chief city of Western New York. He distinguished himself from the outset of his professional career by his indomitable industry and his devotion to duty. These qualities soon secured for him the honorable but laborious post of Assistant District Attorney. He was not blinded by the glamor and glitter of the “great Civil War” to the rascalities of Reconstruction, but adopted the Democratic faith in politics, though living in a strongly Republican city. In 1870 he was elected Sheriff of Buffalo, and twelve years afterwards, having returned meanwhile to a successful practice at the Bar, the best citizens of Buffalo of all parties rallied to his support as the Democratic candidate for the Mayoralty, in a contest which curiously prefigured, on a smaller arena, the Presidential campaign of 1884. The taxpayers of Buffalo had been systematically plundered by a Republican “municipal ring,” just as the taxpayers of New York many years ago were plundered by the Democratic municipal ring of Tweed and Sweeney, of which so much and such unscrupulous use has been made by Republican writers and speakers to vilify the Democratic party. It has not usually occurred to these ingenious party trumpeters to insist upon the fact that the “Tweed ring” was broken and that its members were brought to chastisement mainly through the persistent efforts of two distinguished Democrats.

One of these was the late Charles O’Conor, in his time the acknowledged leader of the American Bar, and a Democratic candidate for the Presidency in opposition to the headlong and absurd nomination of Horace Greeley, a life-long Whig Protectionist, into which a Democratic Convention allowed itself to be cajoled, despite the manly protest of such true Democratic leaders as Senator Bayard at Baltimore in 1872. The other was Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, whose services against the Tweed ring led first to his election by the Democratic party as Governor of New York in 1874, and then to his election as President of the United States in 1876, the year of the great electoral fraud.

The task which these distinguished Democrats assumed in New York Mr. Cleveland took up in Buffalo, and carried through with such impartial energy and courage that before the expiration of the first year of his term of office as Mayor, he was invited by the Democrats of New York to enter upon the larger stewardship of the State executive. He had been chosen mayor of Buffalo in 1881, by a majority of 3,500 votes. He was chosen Governor of New York in 1882 by a majority of nearly 200,000 in a total poll of 893,000 votes. His opponent was Mr. Folger, a leading Republican, who had sat with distinction on the bench of the highest State Tribunal in New York, and who died the other day as Secretary of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President Arthur; and it is an open secret that the tremendous overthrow of the Republican candidate was partially due to the machinations of the friends of Mr. Blaine who had been dropped for cause from the Cabinet of President Arthur with some emphasis in December of the preceding year. It was the calculation of Mr. Blaine that the defeat of the President’s candidate in the President’s own State of New York in 1882 would materially damage Mr. Arthur’s chances and strengthen his own of securing a Republican Presidential nomination at Chicago in 1884. It was a good calculation, but whether the retrospect of the gubernatorial campaign of 1882 in New York is as gratifying now to Mr. Blaine as it was two years ago may perhaps be doubted.

As Governor of New York, Mr. Cleveland has shown himself what he was as Mayor of Buffalo—rigidly honest, indefatigable, simple in his personal tastes and habits, disdainful of the silly state, and the petty parade of official importance into which too many public servants of the United States have suffered themselves to be seduced during the reign of King Mammon at Washington. It has been his custom to walk every morning from the Executive Mansion to the Governor’s Rooms in the Capitol at Albany, and to spend the day there, incessantly occupied, but always visible to those who have had any real occasion to see him. It will be a wholesome thing to see the Presidential office once more administered in this unostentatious fashion. Mr. Cleveland may be called a representative of the Young Democracy, since he will go into the White House a bachelor, like the last Democratic President, Mr. Buchanan, but a young bachelor, the youngest President indeed yet elected. In his fidelity to the traditions of Jefferson, who rode up to the Capitol on horseback to be inaugurated, “hitched his horse to a post,” took the oath and went about his business, Mr. Cleveland will be supported by the new Vice-President—ex-Governor Hendricks of Indiana, who represents the stanch and experienced Democratic leaders who have borne the brunt of the intense political warfare of the last quarter of a century with unwavering courage and signal ability. As a representative in Congress, as a senator of the United States, as Governor of the great Western State of Indiana, and as the Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Tilden in 1876, Mr. Hendricks has linked his name with the best traditions, and drawn to himself the general confidence of his party. On the 6th of February, 1869, what is called a “concurrent resolution” (which may be passed without requiring the assent of the President) was introduced into the Senate under the “Reconstruction” legislation of 1868, directing the President of the Senate to deal in a particular manner with the vote of Georgia as “a State lately in rebellion” and to allow that electoral vote to be alluded to only if the counting or omitting to count it would not effect the decision of the election in favor of either candidate. The candidates were General Grant and Governor Seymour of New York. Mr. Hendricks, then a Senator from Indiana, sustained with memorable force and conviction the right of Georgia to her proper and unqualified voice in the election. One Republican Senator alone voted against the “concurrent resolution,” and that Senator, Mr. Trumbull of Illinois, is now a recognised leader of the Democratic party in the State which gave Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. At the second election of Grant—Horace Greeley having died immediately after the choice of the electors—most of the votes given against General Grant were given to Mr. Hendricks; and in the Democratic Convention of 1876 Mr. Hendricks who was the second choice of a majority of the Convention after Governor Tilden, was eventually nominated, almost against his will, for the Vice-Presidency. He is a man of fine presence and dignified manners, who will preside with ability and tact over that Upper House of the national Legislature which stands as the fortress of Home Rule and State Rights, founded upon the ideal constituency of State sovereignty, and set more safely beyond the reach of the gusts of popular passion than the hereditary principle in Europe.

The first duty of the President Elect will be the selection of his Cabinet officers. Under the American system these officers do not sit in Congress, and, with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, they are simply agents of the Executive. But it is customary to select them from the most prominent and influential men of the party, and with reference to the party strength in different sections of the country. To recite the names of the men, any one of whom would be accepted by public opinion in the United States as a fitting Cabinet Minister of the new President, would really be almost to call the roll of the Democratic Senators, now thirty-six in number out of a Senate of Seventy-six members, and of the Democratic Chairmen of Committees in the House, which as newly elected will be Democratic by a majority of between thirty and forty votes. The names of Mr. Bayard of Delaware, the leading candidate after Governor Cleveland at Chicago; Mr. Thurman of Ohio, long the leading Democratic, with Senator Edmunds as the Republican, “law lord” of the Senate, and the author of an Act enforcing upon the great Pacific railway corporations their obligations to the Government, which it has been left for a Democratic Executive to carry into effect; General McClellan; Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, to whom the country chiefly owes whatever measure of reasonable Civil Service reform it enjoys; Mr. McDonald of Indiana, Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Kernan of New York, Mr. Garland of Arkansas, Mr. Beck of Kentucky, Mr. Palmer of Illinois, have been already discussed in the open councils of the party, and intelligent Americans of all opinions will admit that a Cabinet framed of such materials would deserve and command universal confidence. There are many other active and experienced party men whom it might be troublesome to replace in one or the other House of Congress, but there need be no fear that the new President will be at a loss to find able counsellors to aid him in discharging his great trust.

The policy of the new Administration is involved and indicated in the traditions of the party. In our foreign relations the United States under a Democratic President will ask nothing of Europe except a cordial maintenance of treaties, an extension of commercial relations under equitable conditions, a full recognition of the accepted rules of international law, a sedulous exemption everywhere of the persons and property of American citizens from unnecessary annoyance by arbitrary power. The State Department under President Cleveland may be expected to be administered, not in the swash-bucklering and speculative fashion which the Republican supporters of Mr. Blaine extolled during the late canvass as brilliant and enterprising, but in the self-respecting, self-contained, and dignified spirit which controlled our foreign relations under ex-Governor Marcy of New York thirty years ago, and which so honorably distinguished the administration of the same department under ex-Governor Fish of New York from that of sundry other high officers of State in the time of President Grant.

Upon the Treasury Department will fall the responsibility of dealing wisely and firmly with the most important domestic issue inherent in the resumption of executive power by the party of the Constitution. This can hardly be more authoritatively stated than it was a fortnight ago by the Vice-President Elect, Mr. Hendricks, in a speech delivered by him to the people at Indianapolis after the election:—

The watchword of the party in this contest,
as in the contest of eight years ago, has been
reform—executive, administrative, and revenue
reform; an honest construction of the laws, and
an honest administration of them. The revenue
now collected exceeds the wants of an economical
administration by $85,000,000. Because of this the
Democrats say: “Let there be revenue reform; let
that reform consist in part in the reduction of
taxation.” Is it not patent to every man that there
ought to be a reform here? The Democratic party
this year came before the country with a clear
and straightforward statement of the reform they
intended to accomplish. In the national platform they
declared that reform they would have. It was, first,
that the taxation shall not exceed the wants of the
Government economically administered; second, that
taxation shall be for public purposes alone, and not
for private gain or advantage; third, that in the
adjustment care shall be taken to neither hurt labor
nor harm capital; and fourth, that taxation shall
be heaviest on articles of luxury and lightest on
articles of necessity.

For now a quarter of a century the “Party of Protection and Monopoly” has persistently transgressed the limits set to the Federal authority by the Constitution, and used the earnings of labor and of capital, in the form of excessive taxes, to fertilise and fatten private enterprises.

This must stop. And when this stops, the manufacturers of England and of Europe may make up their minds to meet the competing exports of the United States in all those markets of the world from which American exports have been excluded by American legislation ever since the Whig-Republicans of 1861 laid their grasp upon our fiscal policy. It cannot stop too soon. The official returns of the exports of the United States show that during the fiscal year which ended on the 30th of June 1884, the exports of domestic merchandise from the United States to all parts of the world fell off in value $79,258,780, as compared with the exports for the year ending the 30th of June, 1883. Our exports of machinery fell off nearly a million dollars; of general manufactures of iron and steel more than a million and a quarter of dollars. There was a good deal of gunpowder burned in the year 1883-4, but the value of our exports of it fell off a quarter of a million of dollars. The value of our exports of flax and hemp fell from $547,111 in 1882-3 to $67,725 in 1883-4; our exports of agricultural implements declined during the last year more than a million of dollars in value; our exports of cotton goods, colored and uncolored, more than twelve hundred thousand dollars. Clearly Protection does not develop the manufactures of the United States. It “protects” the manufacturers (which is quite a different thing) against and at the expense of the consumers of the United States, and gives point to the Duke of Somerset’s assertion that “in no country has the power of capital been more invidiously exerted” than in the United States. If our foreign manufacturing friends had any money to spend on American politics, they would have done well to throw it into one pool with the contributions of Mr. Blaine’s two hundred millionaires!

Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, was the first apostle of Protection in America, but in approaching the subject he “walked delicately,” like Agag. The Americans of 1789 established absolute free trade between all the sovereign States of the new Republic; nay more, during the negotiations for peace at Versailles in 1783, the American Commissioners offered Great Britain absolute free trade between the new States “and all parts of the British dominions, saving only the rights of the British chartered companies.” David Hartley, the philosophic writer on “Man,” one of the British Commissioners, had wisdom enough to see the immense importance of this offer, and urged the British Government to close with it. Lord Shelburne, I believe, agreed with him. But the king peremptorily refused to entertain a proposition which, had it been accepted, must have changed the whole subsequent course of the history of the two countries.

Down to 1809 no import duties were levied in the United States except for purposes of revenue only. High rates of duty were levied in 1816 after the war of 1812, not for “protection,” but in order to meet the exigencies of a most dangerous financial situation. In 1824, Henry Clay, backed by New England and the middle States, carried through a tariff to “protect American industry.” This was followed up by the tariff of 1828, known as the “Bill of Abominations.” But the Democratic sense of the country clearly saw that as the power to levy protective taxes must be derived from the revenue power it is of necessity incidental, and that as the incident cannot go beyond that to which it is incidental, Congress cannot constitutionally levy duties avowedly for Protection; and the Democratic party has never since departed, and never can depart, from this doctrine in its party action. In 1833, under President Jackson, “Protection” went down with Nullification. In 1846, under President Polk, the liberal Democratic tariff of Secretary Walker was framed, under which our exports increased from $99,299,766 in 1845, to $196,689,718 in 1851, and our net imports from $101,907,734 to $194,526,639. In 1856, under Democratic rule, our net imports were $298,261,364, in specie value, and our exports $310,586,330. In that year the Democratic Convention declared “the time has come for the people of the United States to declare themselves in favor of progressive free trade throughout the world.” Under Republican Protection, despite the development of the population, our net imports fell from $572,080,919 in 1874, to $455,407,836 in 1876, and our exports from $704,463,120 (mixed values, gold and inflated currency) to $655,463,969; and in 1876 the Democratic Convention declared, “We demand that all Custom House taxation shall be only for revenue.” Of course trade can never be said to be free excepting where, as in the internal commerce of the United States, no tax is levied on trade; and therefore so long as any revenue is raised by duties it is absurd, as Senator Sherman said in discussing the tariff question in 1867, to talk of a “free trade tariff.” But it cannot be denied that under the Democratic Revenue Tariff of 1846 a revenue of at least $140,000,000 would easily now be raised, and Senator Sherman, in the speech to which I refer, admitted that “the wit of man could not possibly frame a tariff” which should produce that sum “without amply protecting our domestic industry.” If this happens as an incident to raising such a revenue, American manufacturers will do well to be thankful for it. Had the monopolists succeeded in getting Mr. Blaine into the White House to thwart legislative reform of tariff taxation for four years more, a worse thing would have overtaken them. For it is unquestionable that a spirit of resistance to protective monopolies is moving through the country, and especially through that nursery of empire, the great North-West, which will not much longer be denied. The Democratic Convention at Chicago wisely took note of this when it made Mr. Vilas of Wisconsin, one of the most eloquent and popular of North-Western Democrats, permanent chairman of the body; and Mr. Vilas has stated the purposes and the convictions of the North-West with plainness of speech:—

The tariff (he says) is a form of slavery not
less hateful because the whip is not exposed. No
free people can or will bear it. There is but one
course. The plan of protective robbery must be
utterly eradicated from every law for taxation. With
unflinching steadfastness, but moderately, without
destructive haste or violence, the firm demand of
freedom must be persistently pressed, until every
dollar levied in the name of Government goes to the
Treasury, and the vast millions now extorted for a
class are left in the pockets of the people who earn
the money. Resolute to defend the sacred rights of
property, we must be resolute to redress the flagrant
wrongs of property.

These are strong words. But they are only the echo from the land of the Great Lakes in 1884 of the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States in 1789. Those principles are the life of the Democratic party. The Democratic party can only be opposed by opposing those principles. It can only be crushed by crushing them; and it is their inextinguishable vitality which guarantees the permanence of our indissoluble Union of indestructible States.—_Nineteenth Century._

RONSARD: ON THE CHOICE OF HIS TOMB.

“_Antres, et vous fontaines._”

BY J. P. M.

Ye caverns, and ye founts
That from these rocky mounts
Well forth, and fall below
With glassy flow;

Ye forests, and ye waves
Whose stream these meadows laves;
Ye banks and copses gay,
Hear ye my lay.

When Heaven and my last sun
Shall tell my race is run,
Snatched from the dwelling bright
Of common light;

No marble chiselled be,
That boastfulness may see
A grander pomp illume
My lowly tomb.

But may, in marble’s stead,
Some tree with shading head
Uplift its leafy screen,
For ever green.

And from me, grant, O Earth!
An ivy plant its birth,
In close embraces bound
My body round:

And may enwreathing vine
To deck my tomb entwine,
That all around be made
A trellised shade.

Thither shall swains, each year,
On my feast-day draw near,
With lowing herds in view,—
A rustic crew;

Who, hailing first the light
With Eucharistic rite,
Addressing thus the Isle,[5]
Shall sing, the while:—

“_How splendid is thy fame,
O tomb, to own the name
Of one, who fills with verse
The Universe!_

_“Who never burned with fire
Of envious desire
For glorious Fate affords
To mighty lords;_

“_Nor ever taught the use
Of love-compelling juice;
Nor ancient magic art
Did e’er impart;_

“_But gave our meads to see
The Sister Graces three
Dance o’er the swarded plains
To his sweet strains._

“_Because he made his lyre
Such soft accords respire,
As filled us and our place
With his own grace._

“_May gentle manna fall,
For ever, on his pall;
And dews, exhaled in May,
At close of day._

“_Be turf, and murmuring wave,
The fence around his grave:
Wave, ever flowing seen—
Turf, ever green._

“_And we, whose hearts so well
His noble fame can tell,
As unto Pan, will bear
Honors, each year._”

So will that choir strike up;
Pouring from many a cup
A lamb’s devoted blood,
With milky flood,

O’er me, who then shall be
Of that High City free,
Where happy souls possess
Their blissfulness.

Hail hurtles not, nor there
Fall snow, in that mild air;
Nor thunder-stroke o’erwhelms
Those hallowed realms:

But evermore is seen
To reign, unfading green;
And, ever blossoming,
The lovely Spring.

Nor there do they endure
The lusts that kings allure
Their ruined neighbors’ State
To dominate:

Like brothers they abide;
And, though on earth they died,
Pursue the tasks they set
While living yet.

There, there, Alcæus’ lyre
I’ll hear, of wrathful fire;
And Sappho’s chords, which fall
Sweeter than all.

How those blest souls, whose ear
Shall strains so chanted hear,
In gladness must abound
At that sweet sound;

When Sisyphus the shock
Forgetteth, of his rock;
And Tantalus by thirst
Is no more curst!

The sole delicious Lyre
Fulfils the heart’s desire;
And charms, with joy intense,
The listening sense.
—_Blackwood’s Magazine._

WÜRZBURG AND VIENNA: SCRAPS FROM A DIARY.

BY EMILE DE LAVELEYE.

II.

I arrive at Vienna at 10 o’clock and alight at the “Münsch” hotel, a very old-established one, and very preferable, in my opinion, to those gigantic and sumptuous “Ring” establishments where one is a mere number. I find awaiting me a letter from the Baron de Neumann, my colleague of the University of Vienna, and a member of the _Institut de Droit International_. He informs me that the Minister Taaffe will await me at 11 o’clock, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, M. de Kálnoky, at 3 P. M. It is always well to make the acquaintance of Ministers when visiting foreign countries. It is the means of obtaining the key to doors generally closed, to consulting documents otherwise inaccessible, and to getting out of prison if by mistake you happen to be one day thrown therein.

The Home Office is a sombre-looking palace, situated in the Judenplatz, a dark and narrow street in old Vienna; the apartments are spacious, correct but bare; the furniture severe, simple but pure eighteenth century style. It resembles the abode of an ancient family who must live carefully to keep out of debt. How different to the Government Offices in Paris, where luxury is displayed everywhere in gilt panellings, Lyons velvets, painted ceilings and magnificent staircases—as, for instance, at the Financial and Foreign Offices. I prefer the simplicity of the official buildings of Vienna and Berlin. The State ought not to set an example of prodigality. The Comte Taaffe is in evening dress, as he is going to a conference with the Emperor. He, nevertheless, receives my letter of introduction from one of his cousins most amiably, and also the little note I bring him from my friend Neumann, who was his professor of public law. The present policy of the Prime Minister, which gives satisfaction to the Tscheks and irritates the Germans so much, is not unjustifiable. He reasons thus:—What is the best means to ensure the comfort and contentment of several persons living together in the same house? Is it not to leave them perfectly free to regulate their lives just as they think well? Force them to live all in the same way to take their meals and amuse themselves together, and they will be certain, very shortly, to quarrel and separate. How is it that the Italians of the Canton of Tesino never think of uniting with Italy? Because they are perfectly satisfied to belong to Switzerland. Remember that Austria’s motto is _Viribus unitis_. True union would be born of general contentment. The sure way to satisfy all is to sacrifice the rights of none. “Yes,” I said, “if unity could be made to spring from liberty and autonomy it would be indestructible.”

Count Taaffe has long been in favor of federalism. Under the Taaffe-Potoçki Ministry, in 1869, he had sketched a plan of reforms with the object of extending the sway of provincial governments.[6] In some articles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, in 1868-9 I tried to show that this was the best solution of the question. Count Taaffe is still young; he was born in 1833, Feb. 24. He is descended from an Irish family and is a peer of that country, with the title of Viscount Taaffe of Correw and Baron of Ballymote; but his ancestors left their home and lost their Irish estates on account of their attachment to the Stuarts. They took service, then, under the Dukes of Lorraine, and one of them distinguished himself at the siege of Vienna in 1683. Count Edward, the present Minister, was born at Prague. His father was President of the Supreme Court of Justice. He himself commenced his career in the Hungarian Administration under the Baron Bach, who, seeing his great aptitudes and his perseverance, procured him rapid advancement. Taaffe became successively Vice-Governor of Bohemia, Governor of Salzburg, and finally Governor of Upper Austria. Called to the Ministry of the Interior in 1867, he signed the famous “Ausgleich” of December 21, which forms the basis of the present Dual Empire. After the fall of the Ministry, he was appointed Governor of the Tyrol, and held that post to general satisfaction for a space of seven years. On his return to power he again took up the portfolio of the Interior, and was also appointed President of the Council. He continued to pursue his federalist policy, but with more success than in 1869. The concessions he makes to the Tscheks are a subject of both grief and wonder in Vienna. It is said that he does it to secure their votes for the revision of the law of primary education in favor of reactionary clericalism. Those who are of this opinion must forget that he has clearly shown his leaning to federalism for more than sixteen years.

What is more astonishing is the contradiction between Austria’s home and foreign policy. At home the Slav movement is encouraged. All is conceded to it, with the exception of the re-establishment of the realm of St. Wenceslas, the road to which is, however, being prepared. Abroad, on the contrary, and especially beyond the Danube, this movement is opposed and suppressed as much as possible, even at the risk of dangerously increasing Russia’s influence and popularity. This contradiction may be explained after this wise. The “Common” Ministry of the Empire is entirely independent of the Ministry of Cis-Leithania. This “Common” Ministry, presided over by the Chancellor, is composed of three Ministers—viz., those of Foreign Affairs, Finances, and War; it alone settles foreign policy, and the Hungarian element is dominant here. Count Taaffe’s principal residence is at Ellisham in Bohemia. “Bailli” of the Order of Malta, he possesses the Golden Fleece. He is, in fact, in every respect, an important personage. In 1860 he married the Countess Irma de Czaky of Keresztszegk, by whom he has had a son and five daughters. He has, thus, one foot in Bohemia and the other in Hungary. All unanimously admit his extraordinary aptitudes, his indefatigable energy, and his clever administration; but in Vienna they complain that he is too aristocratic, and has too great a weakness for the clergy. Probably a statue as high as the Hradsin Cathedral will be raised in his honor at Prague, if he persuades the Emperor to be crowned there.

At three o’clock I proceeded to see Count Kálnoky at the Foreign Office in the Ballplatz. It is very well situated, near to the Imperial residence, in a wide street, and in sight of the Ring. Large reception rooms, solemn-looking and cold; gilded chairs and white and gold panellings, red curtains, polished floorings, and no carpets. On the walls, portraits of the Imperial family. While waiting to be announced, I think of Metternich. It was here he resided. In 1812 Austria decided the fall of Napoleon. Now, again, she holds in her hands the destinies of Europe; for the balance changes as she moves towards the north, the east, or the west; and I am about to see the Minister who directs her foreign policy. I expected to find myself in the presence of an imposing-looking person, with white hair, and very stiff; so I was agreeably surprised on being most affably received by a man of about forty, dressed in a brown morning suit, with a blue cravat. An open and very pleasing expression, and eyes brimming over with wit. All the Kálnoky family have this particularity, it appears. He possesses the quiet, refined, yet simple and modest distinction of manner of an English nobleman. Like many Austrians of the upper class, he speaks French like a Parisian. I think this is due to their speaking six or seven languages equally well, so that the particular accent of each becomes neutralized. The English and the Germans, even when they know French thoroughly, have still a foreign accent when speaking it; not so the Austrians. Count Kálnoky asks what are my plans for my journey. When he hears that I intend studying the question of the Eastern railways, he says:

“That is our great preoccupation at the present moment. In the West they pretend that we are anxious for conquest. This is absurd. It would be very difficult for us to make any which would satisfy the two parties in the Empire, and it is in fact greatly to our interest that peace should be maintained. But we are dreaming of different sorts of conquests, which, as an economist, you can but approve. I speak of conquests we are desirous of making for our industries, trade, and civilization. For this to be possible, we want railways in Servia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Macedonia; and, above all, a connection with the Ottoman lines. Engineers and diplomatists are already at work, and will soon succeed, I hope. I do not think any one will complain or throw blame on us when a Pullman car takes him comfortably from Paris to Constantinople in three days. We are working for the benefit of the Western world.”

It has been said that speech was given to diplomatists to conceal their thoughts. I believe, though, that when Austrian statesmen deny any ideas of conquest and annexation in the East, they are expressing the true intentions of the Imperial Government. The late Chancellor de Haymerlé expressed similar opinions when I saw him in Rome in 1879, and in a letter which I received from him shortly before his death. Baron Haymerlé was better acquainted with the East and the Balkan Peninsula than any one. He had lived there many years, first as dragoman of the Austrian Embassy, and afterwards as a Government envoy, and he was a perfect master of all the different languages of the East.

The present Chancellor, Count Kálnoky, of Körospatak, is of Hungarian origin, as his name indicates; but he was born at Littowitz, in Moravia, December 29, 1832. Most of his landed estates are in that province, amongst others Prödlitz, Ottaslawitz and Szabatta. He has several brothers, and a very lovely sister who has been twice married, first to Count Jean Waldstein, the widower of a Zichy, who was already 62 years of age, and, secondly, to the Duke of Sabran. Chancellor Kálnoky’s career has been very extraordinary. He left the army in 1879, with the grade of Colonel, and took up diplomacy. He obtained a post at Copenhagen, where he appeared destined to play a very insignificant part in political affairs. Shortly after, however, he was appointed to St. Petersburg, the most important of all diplomatic posts, and, on the death of Haymerlé, he was called to Vienna as Foreign Minister, and thus in three years he advanced from the position of a cavalry officer, brilliant and elegant it is true, but with no political influence, to be the arbiter of the destinies of the Austrian Empire, and consequently of those of Europe. How may this marvellously rapid advancement, reminding one of the tales of the Grand Viziers in the “Arabian Nights,” be accounted for? It is generally considered to be due to Andrassy’s friendship. But the real truth is very little known. Count Kálnoky is even cleverer as a writer than as speaker. His despatches from foreign Courts were really finished models. The Emperor, a most indefatigable and conscientious worker, reads all the despatches from the Ambassadors, and was much struck with those from St. Petersburg, noting Kálnoky as destined to fill high functions in the State. At St. Petersburg he charmed every one by his wit and amiability, and in spite of the distrust felt for his country became _persona grata_ at the Court there. When he became Chancellor, the Emperor gave him the rank of Major-General.