mind and distorts his vision. His eye, accustomed to the obscurity of committee-rooms, cannot range over the wide landscape of national questions. Habits of argument formed on the stump seldom fit a man to guide a legislature. In none of the greatest public men that have adorned America do we discern the features of the type just sketched. Hamilton was no intriguer, though he once executed a brilliant piece of strategy.' Neither was Clay or Webster. Jefferson, who added an eminent talent for party organization and management to his powers as a thinker and writer, was no speaker; and one might go through the whole list without finding one man of the first historic rank in whom the art of handling committees and nominating conventions was developed to that pitch of excellence to which far inferior men have now brought it. National conventions offer the best field for the display of the peculiar kind of talent which this type of statesman exhibits. To rouse eight hundred delegates and ten thousand spectators needs powerful lungs, a striking presence, address, and courage. A man capable enough in Congress may fail in this arena. But less than half the work of a convention is done on the public stage. Delegates have to be seen in private, combinations arranged, mines laid and those of the opponent discovered and countermined, a distribution of the good things in the gift of the party settled with swarms of hungry aspirants. Easy manners, tact, and suppleness, a reputation for remembering and requiting good turns and ill turns-in fact, many of the qualities which make a courtier are the qualities which the intrigues of a convention require, develop, and perfect.

1 In agreeing that the national capital should be placed in the South in return for the support of two Southern men to his plan for the settlement of the public debt.

Besides such causes inherent in the present party system as check the growth of first-class statesmen in America, there are two springing from her constitutional arrangements which must not be forgotten. One is the disconnection of Congress from the executive. How this works to prevent true leadership has been already explained.1 Another is the existence of States, each of which has a political life and distinct party organization of its own. Men often rise to eminence in a State without making their mark in national politics. They may become virtual masters of the State either in a legitimate way by good service to it or in an illegitimate way as its bosses. In either case they have to be reckoned with when a presidential election comes round, and are able, if the State be a doubtful one, to dictate their terms. Thus they push their way to the front without having ever shown the qualities needed for guiding the nation; they crowd out better men, and they make party leadership and management even more of a game than under the spoils system and the convention system it naturally becomes. The State vote comes to be in national politics what the ward vote is in city politics, a commodity which a boss or ring can dispose of; the power of a man who can influence it is greater than his personal merits entitle him to; and the kind of skill which can make friends of these State bosses and bring them into a pool" or working combination becomes valuable, if not essential, to a national party leader. In fact, the condition of things is not wholly unlike that of England in the middle of last century, when a great borough-monger like the Duke of Newcastle was a power in the country, who must be not only consulted and propitiated at every crisis, but even admitted to a ministry if it was to secure 1 See Chapters XXI. XXV. and XXVI. in Vol. I.

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a parliamentary majority. When a crisis rouses the nation, the power of these organization-mongers or voteowners vanishes, just as that of the English boroughowning magnate was checked on like occasions, because it is only when the people of a State are listless that their Boss is potent. Unable to oppose a real wish of the masses, he can use their vote only by professing obedience while guiding it in the direction of the men or the schemes he favours.

This remark suggests another. I have remarked that among statesmen of the first of the two types described there are always ability and integrity sufficient for carrying on the regular business of the country. Men with those still higher gifts which European nations look for in their prime ministers (though they do not always find them) have of late years been rare. The Americans admit the fact, but explain it by arguing that there has been no crisis needing those gifts. Whether this is true may be doubted. Men of constructive statesmanship were surely needed in the period after the Civil War: and it is possible that a higher statesmanship might have averted the war itself. However, I am giving the view the Americans take. When the hour comes, they say, it will bring the man. It brought Abraham Lincoln. When he was nominated by the famous convention of 1860 his name had been little heard of beyond his own State. But he rose at once to the level of the situation, and that not merely by virtue of strong clear sense, but by his patriotic steadfastness and noble simplicity of character. If this was luck, it was just the kind of luck which makes a nation hopeful of its future, and inclined to overlook the faults of the methods by which it finds its leaders.

CHAPTER LXXV

WHAT THE PEOPLE THINK OF IT

THE European reader who has followed thus far the description I have attempted to give of the working of party politics, of the nominating machine, of the spoils system, of elections and their methods, of venality in some legislative and municipal bodies, may have been struck by its dark lines. He sees in this new country evils which savour of Old World corruption, even of Old World despotism. He is reminded sometimes of England under Sir Robert Walpole, sometimes of Russia under the Czar Nicholas. Assuming, as a European is apt to do, that the working of political machinery fairly reflects the temper, ideas, and moral standard of the governing class, and knowing that America is governed by the whole people, he may form a low opinion of the people. Perhaps he leaps to the conclusion that they are corrupt. Perhaps he more cautiously infers that they are heedless. Perhaps he conceives that the better men despair of politics and wash their hands of it, while the mass of the people, besotted with a self-confidence born of their rapid material progress, are blind to the consequences which the degradation of public life must involve. these views one may hear expressed by persons who have visited America, and of course more confidently

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by persons who have not. It is at any rate a plausible view that whatever public opinion there may be in America upon religion, or morality, or literature, there can be little public opinion about politics, and that the leading minds, which in all countries shape and direct opinion, have in America abdicated that function, and left the politicians to go their own way.

So far is this from being the truth that there is no country where public opinion is stronger or more active than in the United States, none where it has the field so completely to itself, because aristocracies like those of Europe do not exist, and because the legislative bodies are relatively less powerful and less independent. It may seem a paradox to add that public opinion is on the whole wholesome and upright. Nevertheless, this

also is true.

Here we are brought face to face with the cardinal problem of American politics. Where political life is all-pervading, can practical politics be on a lower level than public opinion? How can a free people which tolerates gross evils be a pure people? To explain this is the hardest task which one who describes the United States sees confronting him. Experience has taught me, as it teaches every traveller who seeks to justify when he returns to Europe his faith in the American people, that it is impossible to get Englishmen at any rate to realize the co-existence of phenomena so unlike those of their own country, and to draw the inferences which those phenomena suggest to one who has seen them with his own eyes. Most English admirers of popular government, when pressed with the facts, deny them. But I have already admitted them.

To present a just picture of American public opinion one must cut deeper than the last few chapters