The Promise of American Life - Herbert David Croly

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democrats and were suspicious of any efficient political authority, the Federalists came, justly or unjustly, to identify both anti-Federalism and democracy with political disorder and social instability. They came, that is, to have much the same opinion of radical democracy as an English peer might have had at the time of the French Revolution; and this prejudice, which was unjust but not unnatural, was very influential in determining the character of the Federal Constitution. That instrument was framed, not as the expression of a democratic creed, but partly as a legal fortress against the possible errors and failings of democracy. The federalist point of view resembled that of the later constitutional liberals in France. The political ideal and benefit which they prized most highly was that of liberty, and the Constitution was framed chiefly for the purpose of securing liberty from any possible dangers. Popular liberty must be protected against possible administrative or executive tyranny by free representative institutions. Individual liberty must be protected against the action of an unjust majority by the strongest possible legal guarantees. And above all the general liberties of the community must not be endangered by any inefficiency of the government as a whole. The only method whereby these complicated and, in a measure, conflicting ends could be attained was by a system of checks and balances, which would make the executive, legislative, and judicial departments of the government independent of one another, while at the same time endowing each department with all the essentials of efficient action within its own sphere. But such a method of political organization was calculated to thwart the popular will, just in so far as that will did not conform to what the Federalists believed to be the essentials of a stable political and social order. It was antagonistic to democracy as that word was then, and is still to a large extent, understood.

      The extent of this antagonism to democracy, if not in intention at least in effect, is frequently over-rated. The antagonism depends upon the identification of democracy with a political organization for expressing immediately and completely the will of the majority—whatever that will may be; and such a conception of democracy contains only part of the truth. Nevertheless the founders of the Constitution did succeed in giving some effect to their distrust of the democratic principle, no matter how conservatively defined; and this was at once a grave error on their part and a grave misfortune for the American state. Founded as the national government is, partly on a distrust of the American democracy, it has always tended to make the democracy somewhat suspicious of the national government. This mutual suspicion, while it has been limited in scope and diminished by the action of time, constitutes a manifest impediment to the efficient action of the American political system. The great lesson of American political experience, as we shall see, is rather that of interdependence than of incompatibility between an efficient national organization and a group of radical democratic institutions and ideals; and the meaning of this lesson has been obscured, because the Federal organization has not been constituted in a sufficiently democratic spirit, and because, consequently, it has tended to provoke distrust on the part of good democrats. At every stage in the history of American political ideas and practice we shall meet with the unfortunate effects of this partial antagonism.

      The error of the Federalists can, however, be excused by many extenuating circumstances. Democracy as an ideal was misunderstood in 1786, and it was possessed of little or no standing in theory or tradition. Moreover, the radical American democrats were doing much to deserve the misgivings of the Federalists. Their ideas were narrow, impracticable, and hazardous; and they were opposed to the essential political need of the time—viz. the constitution of an efficient Federal government. The Federalists may have misinterpreted and perverted the proper purpose of American national organization, but they could have avoided such misinterpretation only by an extraordinary display of political insight and a heroic superiority to natural prejudice. Their error sinks into insignificance compared with the enormous service which they rendered to the American people and the American cause. Without their help there might not have been any American nation at all, or it might have been born under a far darker cloud of political suspicion and animosity. The instrument which they created, with all its faults, proved capable of becoming both the organ of an efficient national government and the fundamental law of a potentially democratic state. It has proved capable of flexible development both in function and in purpose, and it has been developed in both these directions without any sacrifice of integrity.

      Its success has been due to the fact that its makers, with all their apprehensions about democracy, were possessed of a wise and positive political faith. They believed in liberty. They believed that the essential condition of fruitful liberty was an efficient central government. They knew that no government could be efficient unless its powers equaled its responsibilities. They were willing to trust to such a government the security and the welfare of the American people. The Constitution has proved capable of development chiefly as the instrument of these positive political ideas. Thanks to the theory of implied powers, to the liberal construction of the Supreme Court during the first forty years of its existence, and to the results of the Civil War the Federal government has, on the whole, become more rather than less efficient as the national political organ of the American people. Almost from the start American life has grown more and more national in substance, in such wise that a rigid constitution which could not have been developed in a national direction would have been an increasing source of irritation and protest. But this reënforcement of the substance of American national life has, until recently, found an adequate expression in the increasing scope and efficiency of the Federal government. The Federalists had the insight to anticipate the kind of government which their country needed; and this was a great and a rare achievement—all the more so because they were obliged in a measure to impose it on their fellow-countrymen.

      There is, however, another face to the shield. The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears. It was wrought both as the organ of the national interest and as the bulwark of certain individual and local rights. The Federalists sought to surround private property, freedom of contract, and personal liberty with an impregnable legal fortress; and they were forced by their opponents to amend the original draft of the Constitution in order to include a still more stringent bill of individual and state rights. Now I am far from pretending that these legal restrictions have not had their value in American national history, and were not the expression of an essential element in the composition and the ideal of the American nation. The security of private property and personal liberty, and a proper distribution of activity between the local and the central governments, demanded at that time, and within limits still demand, adequate legal guarantees. It remains none the less true, however, that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare. Such is not the case with the government organized under the Federal Constitution. In respect to certain fundamental provisions, which necessarily receive the most rigid interpretation on the part of the courts, it is practically unmodifiable. A very small percentage of the American people can in this respect permanently thwart the will of an enormous majority, and there can be no justification for such a condition on any possible theory of popular Sovereignty. This defect has not hitherto had very many practical inconveniences, but it is an absolute violation of the theory and the spirit of American democratic institutions. The time may come when the fulfillment of a justifiable democratic purpose may demand the limitation of certain rights, to which the Constitution affords such absolute guarantees; and in that case the American democracy might be forced to seek by revolutionary means the accomplishment of a result which should be attainable under the law.

      It was, none the less, a great good thing that the Union under the new Constitution triumphed. Americans have more reason to be proud of its triumph than of any other event in their national history. The formation of an effective nation out of the thirteen original colonies was a political achievement for which there was no historical precedent. Up to that time large countries had been brought, if not held, together by military force or by a long process of gradually closer historical association. Small and partly independent communities had combined one with another only on compulsion. The necessities of joint defense might occasionally drive them into temporary union, but they would not stay united. They preferred a precarious and tumultuous independence to a combination with neighboring communities, which brought security at the price of partial subordination and loyal coöperation. Even the provinces which composed

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