The due to the peculiarities of the Constitution. The want of concentration of power in the legal government is reflected in the structure of the party system. separation of the legislative from the executive department lowers the importance of leadership in parties, as it weakens both these departments. The President, who is presumably among the leading men, cannot properly direct the policy of his party, still less speak for it in public, because he represents the whole nation. His ministers cannot speak to the people through Congress. In neither House of Congress is there necessarily any person recognized as the leader on either side. As neither House has the power over legislation and administration possessed by such an assembly as the French or Italian Chamber, or the English House of Commons, speeches delivered or strategy displayed in it do not tell upon the country with equal force and directness. There remains the stump, and it is more by the stump than in any other way that an American statesman speaks to the people. But what distances to be traversed, what fatigues to be encountered before he can be a living and attractive personality to the electing masses! An English statesman leaves London at three o'clock, and speaks in Birmingham, or Leeds, or Manchester, the same evening. In a few years, every great town knows him like its own mayor, while the active local politicians who frequently run up from their homes to London hear him from the galleries of the House of Commons, wait on him in deputations, are invited to the receptions which his wife gives during the season. Even railways and telegraphs cannot make America a compact country in the same sense that Britain is. Since the Civil War ended, neither Republicans nor Democrats have leaned on and followed any one man as Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield, as before them Lords Derby, John Russell, and Palmerston, as still earlier Sir Robert Peel and Lord Melbourne, were followed in England. No one since Mr. Seward has exercised even so much authority as Mr. Bright has done when out of office, or as Gambetta did in France, or as Mr. Parnell does in Ireland, over the sections of opinion which each of these eminent men has represented. How then are the parties led in Congress and the country? Who directs their policy? Who selects their candidates for the chief posts? These are questions which cannot be adequately answered till the nature of the party machinery has been described. For the moment I must be content to suggest the following as provisional answers : The most important thing is the selection of candidates. This is done in party meetings called conventions. When a party has any policy, it is settled in such a convention and declared in a document called a platform. When it has none, the platform is issued none the less. Party tactics in Congress are decided on by meetings of the party in each House of Congress called caucuses. Leaders have of course much to do with all three processes. But they often efface themselves out of respect to the sentiment of equality, and because power concealed excites less envy. How do the parties affect social life? At present not very much, at least in the northern and middle States, because it is a slack time in politics. Your dining acquaintances, even your intimate friends, are not necessarily of the same way of voting as yourself, and though of course political views tend to become hereditary, there is nothing to surprise any one in finding sons belonging to different parties from their fathers. In the South, where the recollections of the great struggle are kept alive by the presence of a negro voting power which has to be controlled, things are different: and they were different in the North till the passions of civil strife had abated. So far, I have spoken of the parties only as national organizations, struggling for and acting on or through the Federal government. But it has already been observed (Chapter XLVI.) that they exist also as State and city organizations, contending for the places which States and cities have to give, seeking to control State legislatures and municipal councils. Every circumscription of State and local government, from the State of New York with its six millions of inhabitants down to the "city" that has just sprung up round a railway junction in the West, has a regular Republican party organization, confronted by a similar Democratic organization, each running its own ticket (i.e. list of candidates) at every election, for any office pertaining to its own circumscription, and each federated, so to speak, to the larger organizations above it, represented in them and working for them in drilling and "energizing" the party within the area which is the sphere of its action. What have the tenets of such national parties as the Republicans and Democrats to do with the politics of States and cities? Very little with those of States, because a matter for Federal legislation is seldom also a matter for State legislation. Still less with those of cities or counties. Cities and counties have not strictly speaking any political questions to deal with; their business is to pave and light, to keep the streets clean, maintain an efficient police and well-barred prisons, administer the poor law and charitable institutions with integrity, judgment, and economy. The laws regulating these matters have been already made by the State, and the city or county authority has nothing to do but administer them. Hence at city and county elections the main objects ought to be to choose honest and careful men of business. The opinions of candidates as to free trade, or the respective rights of the Union and the States do not signify, because they cannot apply these opinions to the questions which will come before them officially. It need make no difference to the action. of a mayor or school trustee in any concrete question whether he holds Democratic or Republican views. However, the habit of party warfare has been so strong as to draw all elections into its vortex; nor would either party feel safe if it neglected the means of rallying and drilling its supporters, which State and local contests supply. There is this advantage in the system, that it stimulates the political interest of the people, which is kept alive by this perpetual agitation. But the multiplicity of contests has the effect of making politics too absorbing an occupation for the ordinary citizen who has his profession or business to attend to; while the result claimed by those who in England defend the practice of fighting municipal elections on party lines, viz. that good men are induced to stand for local office for the sake of their party, is the last result desired by the politicians, or expected by any one. It is this constant labour which the business of politics involves, this ramification of party into all the nooks and corners of local government, that has produced the class of professional politicians, of whom it is now time to speak. VOL. II 2 c. CHAPTER LVII THE POLITICIANS INSTITUTIONS are said to form men, but it is no less true that men give to institutions their colour and tendency. It profits little to know the legal rules and methods and observances of government, unless one also knows something of the human beings who tend and direct this machinery, and who, by the spirit in which they work it, may render it the potent instrument of good or evil to the people. These men are the politicans. What is one to include under this term? In England it usually denotes those who are actively occupied in administering or legislating, or discussing administration and legislation. That is to say, it includes ministers of the Crown, members of Parliament (though some in the House of Commons and the majority in the House of Lords care little about politics), a few leading journalists, and a small number of miscellaneous persons, writers, lecturers, organizers, agitators, who occupy themselves with trying to influence the public. Sometimes the term is given a wider sweep, being taken to include all who labour for their political party in the constituencies, as e.g. the chairmen and secretaries of local party associations, and the more active committee men of the same bodies. The former, whom we may call the Inner Circle 1 In America (Canada as well as the United States) people do not |