 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
I.
The world has ceased to look to imperial rule
for pure government. Men may at times still
couple the two, but it is only in momentary
resentment of the fact that nowhere yet is there
a people under electoral rule whose government
is entirely pure.
Yet, excepting Russia, there is hardly a people
of European origin on earth that has not secured
in some valuable degree the enjoyment of electoral
representative government; and although
the impurities remaining in such governments lie
mainly in their defective electoral methods, yet
the world refuses to look back to imperial rule
for refuge or remedy. Not the suffocation, but
the purification, of the ballot is recognized as
the key to the purification of government.
But how shall we purify the ballot? We cannot
say only the pure shall vote, and then decide,
on crude generalizations who, or what sorts, are
pure. That would be as if instead of making a
filter work thoroughly, we should forbid that any
party is so pure but its vote needs the filtration
of effective electoral methods; methods so effective
as to bear the whole strain of a genuinely
popular vote. For any class to say, "The pure
shall constitute the State, and we are the pure,"
is itself imperial tyranny. But we can say the
vote shall be pure, and trust ultimately to see a
purified ballot purify the balloters. Not the
banishment of all impure masses from the polls,
but the equal and complete emancipation of all
balloters from all impure temptations or constraints,
is the key to the purification of the ballot.
It stands to reason that most men want good
government. If without constraints they choose
bad government it is by mistake. Society disfranchises
the felon, the idiot, the pauper, the
lunatic, because it is fair to infer, as it is not of
men in general, that they have no clear choice
for good government. The only trouble is that
though most men want good government, they
want it, mostly, for themselves. From these two
truths rise the wisdom and necessity of self-government.
Men can never safely depend upon
others to supply them benevolently with good
government. "No man is good enough to
govern another without his consent;" the only
free government is self-government. But the
scale being electoral and representative, the
purity of the ballot becomes a vital necessity.
For the only true end of self-government is
free government, and of free government, pure
government, as of pure government it is the
purity, no less than the prosperity, of the whole
people. No government or political party has
ever yet attained complete purity, because ends
must wait on means and pure government cannot
be got except through free government, nor
free government except by self-government
Indeed, purity and freedom are so interwoven
and identified with one another that to distinguish
between them scarcely separates them in the
mind. But a pure government is especially one
where all the people are wholly and equally protected
from the possible corruptness of officials;
while a free government is one in which all civil
classes, in office or out of office, and all political
parties, in power or out of power, are fully and
equally protected from each other. Obviously,
there can be no united and effective effort for
such pure government, while an insecurity of
free government keeps classes or parties preoccupied
with one another's actual or possible
aggressions. Probity is the one absolute essential
of society's happiness. An impure government
would be society's transcendent necessity
were it not that to lose free government is to
lose both. The end must wait on the means.
Pure government is pure gold; but to get gold
in continuous supply you must first have iron.
Free government is iron—iron and steel. So
first of all free government, and then pure
government.
Yet we must confront the opposite truth. A
government not free, nor trying to become free,
must become corrupt—cannot become pure; but
even a free government cannot remain corrupt
and continue free. True freedom is liberty with
equity; corruption is liberty without equity; and
no man gets a freedom he ought not to have,
without paying for it some other freedom he
cannot afford to lose. The Reconstruction State
governments in the South after the Civil War
were set up on very broad and commendable
foundations of free government; but not using
free government as an end to pure government,
they fell, owing their fall largely to the corruption
of the ballot, and actually overthrown
by a party whose opposing policy was the impracticable
proposition of pure government first,
free government afterward.
And now, as to these things, where do we,
There is probably not a State in our Union whose
good citizens do not confess and lament corruption
in its elections. What the Governor of New
York writes of his own State is true of the whole
Union. "Bribery and intimidation are not confined
to any locality." How is this?
For one thing, overlooking the degree of
freedom attained by other countries since we
declared ours, we have learned to lay upon our
freedom the false charge of having produced
our political corruption. Many countries have
become almost or quite as free as we, even in
the matter of suffrage, and are pressing forward,
while among us voices are heard repenting our
rashness, as though in manhood suffrage we had
made a mistake which the rest of the world was
condemning. Whether of the French, the Germans,
the Italians, we admit or deny that they
are as free as we, we have to confess that such
freedom as they enjoy is not a gift bestowed
upon them by the purity of "strong" governments.
It is a prize snatched by them from corrupt
governments, and such purification as they
have wrought is the product of freedom. Even
if they have, with less freedom than we, effected
some larger purifications of government—this
of the ballot, for instance—still they have done
pure government the end. They teach us not
that we are too free, but only that we have been
too well pleased with freedom as an ultimate
end.
But our fathers had not only to establish free
States and free institutions without models before
them; they had other great tasks. For instance,
they had to learn State and national banking and
general public financiering; and they learned
them in a series of gigantic blunders in comparison
with whose devastating results those of
the Southern Reconstruction governments of
1868-'77 sink into insignificance. In other
words, they had to learn how to vote wisely;
and no people ever learned how to vote except
by voting.
Moreover, while for over a hundred years we
have had great freedom, for three-fourths of that
time we had also a great slavery, which constantly
threatened the destruction of true freedom.
Not that even the pro-slavery party, whatever
its leaders may have been, wanted government
to be bad, or free men to be less free; they
even looked forward—though with more longing
than hope—to some indefinite day, when their
own slaves might somehow enter into freedom.
Beyond dispute, then, as to-day, a vast majority
wanted both free and pure government; but we
were divided into two opposing hosts; one for
pure government through free government, the
other for pure government before free government.
Out of the resulting strife has come the
nation's declaration for all time, that pure government
cannot come before free government, and
that not even in the name of pure government
shall true freedom be abridged.
Another obvious truth: pure and free governments
advance by alternating steps. Men will
not help others to set up pure government who
refuse them free government. Nor will men
help those to advance free government who
refuse them pure government; and if each school
holds out hostilely against the other, ruin must
follow; but if not, a patriotic and entirely noble
political commerce may spring up between the
two. A nation so doing may have to see itself
outstripped for a moment in the direction of
free government by others less pure, or of pure
government by others less free, or of material
wealth by others neither so pure nor so free;
but it is, nevertheless, on a broader, higher road
to perfect freedom, purity, and prosperity at last,
than any different sort can possibly be.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |