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Title: The State
Author: Randolph Bourne
Date: 1919
Language: en
Topics: nationalism, the State, United States, war
Source: Retrieved on November 18, 2010 from http://fair-use.org/randolph-bourne/the-state/
Notes: From Untimely Papers (1919) Randolph Bourne left an unfinished, unpaginated draft of The State when he died during the flu pandemic of 1918. The draft was published posthumously, with some material incorrectly ordered, in Untimely Papers (1919). This edition follows the corrected ordering used in most printed editions of Bourne’s work.

Randolph Bourne

The State

I.

To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant

the war brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had

had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising

alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually

ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or

personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is

the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded

are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to

consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday.

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is

thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own

party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but

if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the

State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you

think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very

practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted.

When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are

less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the

institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of

men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are

indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest

personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even

if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction

to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed

grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it.

If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you

glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a

king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity

and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not

in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king,

nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when

he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to

the common man’s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an

unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even

military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of

the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The

Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the

people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the

menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some

other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into

war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with

a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by

the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has

a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve;

for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a

bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in

those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in

the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been

known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all

foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the

nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial

difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress

declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class

declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is

not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most

tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations

which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the

Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check

whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through

some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and

executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few

malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,

deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid

manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the

appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s

disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to

Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his

military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august

presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the

dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless

confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should

bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation,

and government. In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the

basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population spreading

over a certain geographical portion of the earth’s surface, speaking a

common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization. Our idea of

Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of a people, its

ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, its

characteristic attitudes toward life. We are Americans because we live

in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors have carried on a

great enterprise of pioneering and colonization, because we live in

certain kinds of communities which have a certain look and express their

aspirations in certain ways. We can see that our civilization is

different from contiguous civilizations like the Indian and Mexican. The

institutions of our country form a certain network which affects us

vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way that these other

civilizations do not. We are a part of Country, for better or for worse.

We have arrived in it through the operation of physiological laws, and

not in any way through our own choice. By the time we have reached what

are called years of discretion, its influences have molded our habits,

our values, our ways of thinking, so that however aware we may become,

we never really lose the stamp of our civilization, or could be mistaken

for the child of any other country. Our feeling for our fellow

countrymen is one of similarity or of mere acquaintance. We may be

intensely proud of and congenial to our particular network of

civilization, or we may detest most of its qualities and rage at its

defects. This does not alter the fact that we are inextricably bound up

in it. The Country, as an inescapable group into which we are born, and

which makes us its particular kind of a citizen of the world, seems to

be a fundamental fact of our consciousness, an irreducible minimum of

social feeling.

Now this feeling for country is essentially noncompetitive; we think of

our own people merely as living on the earth’s surface along with other

groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but fundamentally as

sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception of country there

is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than there is in our

feeling for our family. Our interest turns within rather than without,

is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and our imaginations

gradually stake out the world we live in, they need no greater conscious

satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than this sense of a great

mass of people to whom we are more or less attuned, and in whose

institutions we are functioning. The feeling for country would be an

uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State and Government

which are associated with it. Country is a concept of peace, of

tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a

concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive

aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a

country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two

feelings into a hopeless confusion.

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group

acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice.

International politics is a “power politics” because it is a relation of

States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are, huge

aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled against

each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation to another

country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in coercing or

punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting as a State. The

history of America as a country is quite different from that of America

as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering conquest of

the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was used, of

the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals,

of the struggle of economic classes. But as a State, its history is that

of playing a part in the world, making war, obstructing international

trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing those

citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay

for all.

Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor

Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State,

carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the

administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force.

Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the

hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the

invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the

limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in

which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with

it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never

be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the

framework of Government and direct its activities.

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and

reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the

sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war

is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that

within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the

Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is

thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a

rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is

precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the

necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the

organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against

another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for

defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive

the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends the current of

purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest levels of the herd, and

to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked

together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a

military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in

peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become — the inexorable arbiter

and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions. The

slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves

lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration,

towards the great end, towards that “peacefulness of being at war,” of

which L. P. Jacks has spoken so unforgettably.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive

role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity

and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine, many of

them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques must be

learnt. Wearing home times are broken and women who would have remained

attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast

sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new

importance in the world. Old national ideals are taken out, re-adapted

to the purpose and used as the universal touchstones, or molds into

which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in peacetimes

had no living fragment of hte State becomes an active amateur agent of

the Government in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising

Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered

necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace was

only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was

conjoined with actual crime, becomes with the outbreak of war, a case

for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm

opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are

made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding [in] severity those

affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the

newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block.

“Loyalty,” or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all

professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the

sphere of the intellectual life. There the smallest taint is held to

spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto

disqualified to teach physics or hold honorable place in a university —

the republic of learning — if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere

association with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a

teacher. Anything pertaining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are

suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic

products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints

of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy

music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken against

those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such an act of

self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and

often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional

conformities or ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown

at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for

taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and

Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years for distributing

tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion

throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for

passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience

the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.

The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties. The

minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around

by subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be

converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect

uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur

work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their

agitation, instead of converting merely serves to stiffen their

resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual

opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime

attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at

the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be

produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as

artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life,

are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant

classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State,

are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in

coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

War — or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a

powerful enemy — seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most

inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer

indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is

brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full

realization of that collective community in which each individual

somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every

citizen identifies himself with the whole and feels immensely

strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the

collective community live in each person who throws himself

whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between

society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual

becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb

self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and

emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is

invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective

community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved

almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American

nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice

and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal

education or the subjugation of nature, would it have poured forth its

treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive

measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its

men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense, undertaken to

support a difficult cause to the slogan of “democracy,” it would reach

the highest level ever known of collective effort.

For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the

education of men and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and

beauty in the nation’s communal living, are alien to our traditional

ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for it

is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a

political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group

has meant, throughout all history — war.

There is nothing invidious in the use of the term, “herd,” in connection

with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer to first

principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of which we all

live, move and have our being. Ethnologists are generally agreed that

human society made its first appearance as the human pack and not as a

collection of individuals or couples. The herd is in fact the original

unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal individuality

develop. All the most primitive tribes of men are shown to live in very

complex but very rigid social organization where opportunity for

individuation is scarcely given. These tribes remain strictly organized

herds, and the difference between them and the modern State is one of

degree of sophistication and variety of organization, and not of kind.

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest

primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species

of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary

history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious

impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform to coalesce together, and

is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack.

Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of

their collectivity at the threat of war. Consciousness of collectivity

brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, which in turn

arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized man, the gregarious

impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defense, but also

to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behavior, the

gregarious impulse floods up into its realms and demands that sense of

uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And it is in

this flooding of the conscious life of society that gregariousness works

its havoc.

For just as in modern societies the sex-instinct is enormously

over-supplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the

gregarious impulse is enormously over-supplied for the work of

protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite enough

if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of others, to be

able to cooperate with them, and to feel a slight malaise at solitude.

Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not content with those

reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that like mindedness shall

prevail everywhere, in all departments of life, so that all human

progress, all novelty, and nonconformity must be carried against the

resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which drives the individual

into obedience and conformity with the majority. Even in the most modern

and enlightened societies this impulse shows little sign of abating. As

it is driven by inexorable economic demand out of the sphere of utility,

it seems to fasten itself ever more fiercely in the realm of feeling and

opinion, so that conformity comes to be a thing aggressively desired and

demanded.

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because

when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this

feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly

feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual

organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and you

feel forlorn and hopeless if you are out of the crowd. While even if you

do not get any access to power by thinking and feeling just as everybody

else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of obedience,

the soothing irresponsibility of protection.

Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual —

the pleasure in power and the pleasure of obedience — this gregarious

impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it to the

highest possible degree, sending the influence of its mysterious

herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to the farthest

reaches of the society, to every individual and little group that can

possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the State — the

organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity — is founded on

and makes use of.

There is, of course, in the feeling towards the State a large element of

pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for

protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom

is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing

that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one’s

relation towards it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war

has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive

childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this

country as anywhere. If we have not the intense Father-sense of the

German who worships his Vaterland, at least in Uncle Sam we have a

symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters

of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war

service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people

at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful,

trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and

all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but

necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and

anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort,

and a certain influx of power. On most people the strain of being an

independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members

of the significant classes who have bequeathed to them or have assumed

the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest

of symbols under which those classes can retain all the actual pragmatic

satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden

of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and all

the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own

conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned

from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants of

society, or something greater than they — the State. The man who moves

from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in the war

management industrial service in Washington does not apparently alter

very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically,

what a transformation has occurred! He is not now only the power but the

glory! And his sense of satisfaction is proportional not to the genuine

amount of personal sacrifice that may be involved in the change but to

the extent to which he retains the industrial prerogatives and sense of

command.

From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if

the change from private enterprise to State service involves any real

loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be any pragmatic

sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honor, in the

traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide, as

Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this

very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for

this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined

attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer

to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you act

together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly

filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol

of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your

definite action and ideas.

The members of the working-classes, that portion at least which does not

identify itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate it and

rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of the State,

or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant classes. For

theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in wartime does not

offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never having acquired social

adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been drilled and

regimented, as by the industrial regime of the last century, they go out

docilely enough to do battle for their State, but they are almost

entirely without that filial sense and even without that herd-intellect

sense which operates so powerfully among their “betters.” They live

habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which though nominally free,

they are in practice as a class bound to a system of a

machine-production, the implements of which they do not own, and in the

distribution of whose product they have not the slightest voice, except

what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation which draws

slightly more of the product in their direction. From such serfdom,

military conscription is not so great a change. But into the military

enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant classes

whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same apathy with

which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.

From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class sport.

the novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations of

power, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human impulses

— gregariousness and parent-regression — endow it with all the qualities

of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely just in

proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in the

class-division of society. A country at war — particularly our own

country at war — does not act as a purely homogeneous herd. The

significant classes have all the herd-feeling in all its primitive

intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without impediment

throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents a long

historical and social process of disaggregation of the herd. The nation

at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads of groups

representing the cooperation and similar feeling of men on all sorts of

planes and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises. In every

modern industrial country, there are parallel planes of economic classes

with divergent attitudes and institutions and interests — bourgeois and

proletariat — with their many subdivisions according to power and

function, and even their interweaving, such as those more highly skilled

workers who habitually identify themselves with the owning and

significant classes and strive to raise themselves to the bourgeois

level, imitating their cultural standards and manners. Then there are

religious groups with a certain definite, though weakening sense of

kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost as

cultural colonies in the New World, clinging tenaciously to language and

historical tradition, though their herdishness is usually founded on

cultural rather than State symbols. There are certain vague sectional

groups. All these small sects, political parties, classes, levels,

interests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They intersect and

interweave, and the same person may be a member of several different

groups lying at different planes. Different occasions will set off his

herd-feeling in one direction or another. In a religious crisis he will

be intensely conscious of the necessity that his sect — or sub-herd —

may prevail; in a political campaign, that his party shall triumph.

To the spread of herd-feeling, therefore, all these smaller herds offer

resistance. To the spread of that herd-feeling which arises from the

threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation, the

only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course, which

continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which they or

their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all practical

purposes citizens of their new country. They keep alive their ethnic

traditions more as a luxury than anything. Indeed these traditions tend

rapidly to die out except where they connect with some still unresolved

nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle for freedom, or some

irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by a too invidious policy

of Americanism, they tend to be strengthened. And in time of war, these

ethnic elements which have any traditional connection with the enemy,

even though most of the individuals may have little real sympathy with

the enemy’s cause, are naturally lukewarm to the herd-feeling of the

nation which goes back to State traditions in which they have no share.

But to the natives imbued with State-feeling, any such resistance or

apathy is intolerable. This herd-feeling, this newly awakened

consciousness of the State, demands universality. The leaders of the

significant classes, who feel most intensely this State-compulsion,

demand a one hundred per cent Americanism, among one hundred per cent of

the population. The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its

sovereignty must pervade everyone and all feeling must be run into the

stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the

traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.

Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport

between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within

outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without.

The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against the

heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white

terrorism is carried on by the Government against all pacifists,

Socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against

all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the

enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the

bourgeois elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The

revolutionary proletariat that shows more resistance to this unification

is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard as the

I.W.W. is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that it is a

symptom, not a cause, and its prosecution increases the disaffection of

labor and intensifies the friction instead of lessening it.

But the emotions that play around the defense of the State do not take

into consideration the pragmatic results. A nation at war, led by its

significant classes, is engaged in liberating certain of its impulses

which have had all too little exercise in the past. It is getting

certain satisfactions and the actual conduct of the war or the condition

of the country are really incidental to the enjoyment of new forms of

virtue and power and aggressiveness. If it could be shown conclusively

that the persecution of slightly disaffected elements actually increased

enormously the difficulties of production and the organization of the

war technique, it would be found that public policy would scarcely

change. The significant classes must have their pleasure in hunting down

and chastising everything that they feel instinctively to be not imbued

with the current State-enthusiasm, though the State itself be actually

impeded in its efforts to carry out those objects for which they are

passionately contending. The best proof of this is that with a pursuit

of plotters that has continued with ceaseless vigilance ever since the

beginning of the war in Europe, the concrete crimes unearthed and

punished have been fewer than those prosecutions for the mere crime of

opinion or the expression of sentiments critical of the State or the

national policy. The punishment for opinion has been far more ferocious

and unintermittent than the punishment of pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable

Anglo-Saxon-Americans who were freer of pacifist or socialist utterance

than the State-obsessed ruling public opinion, received heavier

penalties, and even greater opprobrium, in many instances, than the

definitely hostile German plotter. A public opinion which, almost

without protest, accepts as just, adequate, beautiful, deserved, and in

fitting harmony with ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, a sentence

of twenty years in prison for mere utterances, no matter what they may

be, shows itself to be suffering from a kind of social derangement of

values, a sort of social neurosis, that deserves analysis and

comprehension. On our entrance into the war there were many persons who

predicted exactly this derangement of values, who feared lest democracy

suffer more at home from an America at war than could be gained for

democracy abroad. That fear has been amply justified. The question

whether the American nation would act like an enlightened democracy

going to war for the sake of high ideals, or like a State-obsessed herd,

has been decisively answered. The record is written and cannot be

erased. History will decide whether the terrorization of opinion, and

the regimentation of life was justified under the most idealistic of

democratic administrations. It will see that when the American nation

had ostensibly a chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous regard

to the safety of democratic values at home, it chose rather to adopt all

the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the enemy and of the other

countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and ferocity of

punishment the worst governmental systems of the age. For its former

unconsciousness and disrespect of the State ideal, the nation apparently

paid the penalty in a violent swing to the other extreme. It acted so

exactly like a herd in its irrational coercion of minorities that there

is no artificiality in interpreting the progress of the war in terms of

herd psychology. It unwittingly brought out into the strongest relief

the true characteristics of the State and its intimate alliance with

war. It provided for the enemies of war and the critics of the State the

most telling arguments possible. The new passion for the State ideal

unwittingly set in motion and encouraged forces that threaten very

materially to reform the State. It has shown those who are really

determined to end war that the problem is not the mere simple one of

finishing a war that will end war.

For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so out

of a spiritual compulsion which pushes it on perhaps against all its

interests, all its real desires, and all its real sense of values. It is

States that make wars and not nations, and the very thought and almost

necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of the State. Not for

centuries have nations made war; in fact the only historical example of

nations making war is the great barbarian invasions into Southern

Europe, invasions of Russia from the East, and perhaps the sweep of

Islam through Northern Africa into Europe after Mohammed’s death. And

the motivations for such wars were either the restless expansion of

migratory tribes or the flame of religious fanaticism. Perhaps these

great movements could scarcely be called wars at all, for war implies an

organized people drilled and led; in fact, it necessitates the State.

Ever since Europe has had any such organization, such huge conflicts

between nations — nations, that is, as cultural groups — have been

unthinkable. It is preposterous to assume that for centuries in Europe

there would have been any possibility of a people en masse — with their

own leaders, and not with the leaders of their duly constituted State —

rising up and overflowing their borders in a war raid upon a neighboring

people. The wars of the Revolutionary armies of France were clearly in

defense of an imperiled freedom, and moreover, they were clearly

directed not against other peoples, but against the autocratic

governments that were combining to crush the Revolution. Three is no

instance in history of genuinely national war. There are instances of

national defenses, among primitive civilizations such as the Balkan

peoples, against intolerable invasion by neighboring despots or

oppression. But war, as such, cannot occur except in a system of

competing States, which have relations with each other through the

channels of diplomacy.

War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except

in such a system. Nations organized for internal administration, nations

organized as a federation of free communities, nations organized in any

way except that of a political centralization of a dynasty or the

reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly make war upon each

other. They would not only have no motive for conflict, but they would

be unable to muster the concentrated force to make war effective. There

might be all sorts of amateur marauding, there might be guerrilla

expeditions of group against group, but there could not be that terrible

war en masse of the national state, that exploitation of the nation in

the interests of the State, that abuse of the national life and resource

in the frenzied mutual suicide which is modern war.

It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and

not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a

very artificial thing. It is not the naive spontaneous outburst of herd

pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot

exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment

cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial

tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and

heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot

crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And

we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to

end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in

its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be

modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the

nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State,

the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If

the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the

nation a large part of its energy for purely sterile purposes of defense

and aggression. It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as

it can of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a

vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the

State’s chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with

coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for

destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential

destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the

very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation

lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of

energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and

life-enhancing process of the national life.

All this organizing of death-dealing energy and technique is not a

natural but a very sophisticated process. Particularly in modern

nations, but also all through the course of modern European history, it

could never exist without the State. For it meets the demands of no

other institution, it follows the desires of no religious, industrial,

political group. If the demand for military organization and a military

establishment seems to come not from the officers of the State but from

the public, it is only that it comes from the State-obsessed portion of

the public, those groups which feel most keenly the State ideal. And in

this country we have had evidence all too indubitable about how

powerless the pacifically minded officers of the State may be in the

face of a State-obsession of the significant classes. If a powerful

section of the significant classes feels more intensely the attitudes of

the State, then they will most infallibly mold the Government in time to

their wishes, bring it back to act as the embodiment of the State which

it pretends to be. In every country we have seen groups that were more

loyal than the King — more patriotic than the Government — the

Ulsterites in Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l’Action Francaise

in France, our patrioteers in America. These groups exist to keep the

steering wheel of the State straight, and they prevent the nation from

ever veering very far from the State ideal.

Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the major impulse only of

this class. The other classes, left to themselves, have too many

necessities and interests and ambitions, to concern themselves with so

expensive and destructive a game. But the State-obsessed group is either

able to get control of the machinery of the State or to intimidate those

in control, so that it is able through the use of the collective force

to regiment the other grudging and reluctant classes into a military

programme. State idealism percolates down through the strata of society,

capturing groups and individuals just in proportion to the prestige of

this dominant class. So that we have the herd actually strung along

between two extremes, the militaristic patriots at one end, who are

scarcely distinguishable in attitude and animus from the most

reactionary Bourbons of an Empire, and unskilled labor groups, which

entirely lack the State sense. But the State acts as a whole, and the

class that controls governmental machinery can swing the effective

action of the herd as a whole. The herd is not actually a whole,

emotionally. But by an ingenious mixture of cajolery, agitation,

intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into an effective

mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole. Men are told

simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of their

own volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their country’s welfare,

and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and punished with

the most horrid penalties; and under a most indescribable confusion of

democratic pride and personal fear they submit to the destruction of

their livelihood if not their lives, in a way that would formerly have

seemed to them so obnoxious as to be incredible.

In this great herd-machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The

State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push towards military

unity. Any interference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse

towards crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and the Government,

backed by the significant classes and those who in every locality,

however small, identify themselves with them, proceeds against the

outlaws, regardless of their value to other institutions of the nation,

or of the effect that their persecution may have on public opinion. The

herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and war-enterprise

becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.

It must never be forgotten that nations do not declare war on each

other, nor in the strictest sense is it nations that fight each other.

Much has been said to the effect that modern wars are wars of whole

peoples and not of dynasties. Because the entire nation is regimented

and the whole resources of the country are levied on for war, this does

not mean that it is the country, our country which is fighting, and only

as a State would it possibly fight. So, literally, it is States which

make war on each other and not peoples. Governments are the agents of

States, and it is Governments which declare war on each other, acting

truest to form in the interests of the great State ideal which they

represent. There is no case known in modern times of the people being

consulted in the initiation of a war. The present demand for democratic

control of foreign policy indicates how completely, even in the most

democratic of modern nations, foreign policy has been the secret private

possession of the executive branch of Government.

However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may be

in all that concerns the internal administration of a country’s

political affairs, in international relations it has never been possible

to maintain that the popular body acted except as a wholly mechanical

ratifier of the Executive’s will. The formality by which Parliaments and

Congresses declare war is the merest technicality. Before such a

declaration can take place, the country will have been brought to the

very brink of war by the foreign policy of the Executive. A long series

of steps on the downward path, each one more fatally committing the

unsuspecting country to a warlike course of action will have been taken

without either the people or its representatives being consulted or

expressing its feeling. When the declaration of war is finally demanded

by the Executive, the Parliament or Congress could not refuse it without

reversing the course of history, without repudiating what has been

representing itself in the eyes of the other states as the symbol and

interpreter of the nation’s will and animus. To repudiate an Executive

at that time would be to publish to the entire world the evidence that

the country had been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the

country with an almost criminal carelessness had allowed its Government

to commit it to gigantic national enterprises in which it had no heart.

In such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most democratic States

represents the common man and not the significant classes who most

strongly cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the foreign

policy which it understands even less than it would care for if it

understood, and will vote almost unanimously for an incalculable war, in

which the nation may be brought well nigh to ruin. That is why the

referendum which was advocated by some people as a test of American

sentiment in entering the war was considered even by thoughtful

democrats to be something subtly improper. The die had been cast.

Popular whim could derange and bungle monstrously the majestic march of

State policy in its new crusade for the peace of the world. The

irresistible State ideal got hold of the bowels of men. Whereas up to

this time, it had been irreproachable to be neutral in word and deed,

for the foreign policy of the State had so decided it, henceforth it

became the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The Middle West, which

had been soddenly pacifistic in our days of neutrality, became in a few

months just as soddenly bellicose, and in its zeal for witch-burning and

its scent for enemies within gave precedence to no section of the

country. The herd-mind followed faithfully the State-mind and, the

agitation for a referendum being soon forgotten, the country fell into

the universal conclusion that, since its Congress had formally declared

the war, the nation itself had in the most solemn and universal way

devised and brought on the entire affair.

Oppression of minorities became justified on the plea that the latter

were perversely resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly

declared will of a majority of the nation. The herd coalescence of

opinion which became inevitable the moment the State had set flowing the

war attitudes became interpreted as a prewar popular decision, and

disinclination to bow to the herd was treated as a monstrously

antisocial act. So that the State, which had vigorously resisted the

idea of a referendum and clung tenaciously and, of course, with entire

success to its autocratic and absolute control of foreign policy, had

the pleasure of seeing the country, within a few months, given over to

the retrospective impression that a genuine referendum had taken place.

When once a country has lapped up these State attitudes, its memory

fades; it conceives itself not as merely accepting, but of having itself

willed, the whole policy and technique of war. The significant classes,

with their trailing satellites, identify themselves with the State, so

that what the State, through the agency of the Government, has willed,

this majority conceives itself to have willed.

All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic,

arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a

sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern free

creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war

does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple

uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have

always been the ideal of the State lover. With the ravages of democratic

ideas, however, the modern republic cannot go to war under the old

conceptions of autocracy and death-dealing belligerency. If a successful

animus for war requires a renaissance of State ideals, they can only

come back under democratic forms, under this retrospective conviction of

democratic control of foreign policy, democratic desire for war, and

particularly of this identification of the democracy with the State. How

unregenerate the ancient State may be, however, is indicated by the laws

against sedition, and by the Government’s unreformed attitude on foreign

policy. One of the first demands of the more farseeing democrats in the

democracies of the Alliance was that secret diplomacy must go. The war

was seen to have been made possible by a web of secret agreements

between States, alliances that were made by Governments without the

shadow of popular support or even popular knowledge, and vague,

half-understood commitments that scarcely reached the stage of a treaty

or agreement, but which proved binding in the event. Certainly, said

these democratic thinkers, war can scarcely be avoided unless this

poisonous underground system of secret diplomacy is destroyed, this

system by which a nation’s power, wealth, and manhood may be signed away

like a blank check to an allied nation to be cashed in at some future

crisis. Agreements which are to affect the lives of whole peoples must

be made between peoples and not by Governments, or at least by their

representatives in the full glare of publicity and criticism.

Such a demand for “democratic control of foreign policy” seemed

axiomatic. Even if the country had been swung into war by steps taken

secretly and announced to the public only after they had been

consummated, it was felt that the attitude of the American State toward

foreign policy was only a relic of the bad old days and must be

superseded in the new order. The American President himself, the liberal

hope of the world, had demanded, in the eyes of the world, open

diplomacy, agreements freely and openly arrived at. Did this mean a

genuine transference of power in this most crucial of State functions

from Government to people? Not at all. When the question recently came

to a challenge in Congress, and the implications of open discussion were

somewhat specifically discussed, and the desirabilities frankly

commended, the President let his disapproval be known in no uncertain

way. No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being a State idealist, and

whenever democratic aspirations swung ideals too far out of the State

orbit, he could be counted on to react vigorously. Here was a clear case

of conflict between democratic idealism and the very crux of the concept

of the State. However unthinkingly he might have been led on to

encourage open diplomacy in his liberalizing program, when its

implication was made vivid to him, he betrayed how mere a tool the idea

had been in his mind to accentuate America’s redeeming role. Not in any

sense as a serious pragmatic technique had he thought of a genuinely

open diplomacy. And how could he? For the last stronghold of State power

is foreign policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts most

concentratedly as the organized herd, acts with fullest sense of

aggressive-power, acts with freest arbitrariness. In foreign policy, the

State is most itself. States, with reference to each other, may be said

to be in a continual state of latent war. The “armed truce,” a phrase so

familiar before 1914, was an accurate description of the normal relation

of States when they are not at war. Indeed, it is not too much to say

that the normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is a disguised war,

in which States seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness

of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by

means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are recuperating from

conflicts in which they have exhausted themselves. It is the wheedling

and the bargaining of the worn-out bullies as they rise from the ground

and slowly restore their strength to begin fighting again. If diplomacy

had been a moral equivalent for war, a higher stage in human progress,

an inestimable means of making words prevail instead of blows,

militarism would have broken down and given place to it. But since it is

a mere temporary substitute, a mere appearance of war’s energy under

another form, a surrogate effect is almost exactly proportioned to the

armed force behind it. When it fails, the recourse is immediate to the

military technique whose thinly veiled arm it has been. A diplomacy that

was the agency of popular democratic forces in their non-State

manifestations would be no diplomacy at all. It would be no better than

the Railway or Education commissions that are sent from one country to

another with rational constructive purpose. The State, acting as a

diplomatic-military ideal, is eternally at war. Just as it must act

arbitrarily and autocratically in time of war, it must act in time of

peace in this particular role where it acts as a unit. Unified control

is necessarily autocratic control.

Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore a contradiction in

terms. Open discussion destroys swiftness and certainty of action. The

giant State is paralyzed. Mr. Wilson retains his full ideal of the State

at the same time that he desires to eliminate war. He wishes to make the

world safe for democracy as well as safe for diplomacy. When the two are

in conflict, his clear political insight, his idealism of the State,

tells him that it is the naïver democratic values that must be

sacrificed. The world must primarily be made safe for diplomacy. The

State must not be diminished.

What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more

mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a

definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean

something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain

organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and

law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political

functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State

stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it

Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of

life. Even the nation, especially in times of war — or at least, its

significant classes — considers that it derives its authority and its

purpose from the idea of the State. Nation and State are scarcely

differentiated, and the concrete, practical, apparent facts are sunk in

the symbol. We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize

ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at

our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men’s heart beat

high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious

hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation.

It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the

flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American

flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of the

country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but

solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige

and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military

achievement, military memory. It represents the country not in its

intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the world. The flag is

primarily the banner of war; it is allied with patriotic anthem and

holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation’s patriotic history

is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health

and glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag, we

are responding to the appeal of the State, to the symbol of the herd

organized as an offensive and defensive body, conscious of its prowess

and its mystical herd strength.

Even those authorities in the present Administration, to whom has been

granted autocratic control over opinion, feel, though they are scarcely

able to philosophize over, this distinction. It has been authoritatively

declared that the horrid penalties against seditious opinion must not be

construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is, partisan criticism of the

Administration. A distinction is made between the Administration and the

Government. It is quite accurately suggested by this attitude that the

Administration is a temporary band of partisan politicians in charge of

the machinery of Government, carrying out the mystical policies of

State. The manner in which they operate this machinery may be freely

discussed and objected to by their political opponents. The Governmental

machinery may also be legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What

may not be discussed or criticized is the mystical policy itself or the

motives of the State in inaugurating such a policy. The President, it is

true, has made certain partisan distinctions between candidates for

office on the ground of support or nonsupport of the Administration, but

what he means was really support or nonsupport of the State policy as

faithfully carried out by the Administration. Certain of the

Administration measures were devised directly to increase the health of

the State, such as the Conscription and the Espionage laws. Others were

concerned merely with the machinery. To oppose the first was to oppose

the State and was therefore not tolerable. To oppose the second was to

oppose fallible human judgment, and was therefore, though to be

depreciated, not to be wholly interpreted as political suicide.

The distinction between Government and State, however, has not been so

carefully observed. In time of war it is natural that Government as the

seat of authority should be confused with the State or the mystic source

of authority. You cannot very well injure a mystical idea which is the

State, but you can very well interfere with the processes of Government.

So that the two become identified in the public mind, and any contempt

for or opposition to the workings of the machinery of Government is

considered equivalent to contempt for the sacred State. The State, it is

felt, is being injured in its faithful surrogate, and public emotion

rallies passionately to defend it. It even makes any criticism of the

form of Government a crime.

The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully shown

by those laws which emphasize interference with the Army and Navy as the

most culpable of seditious crimes. Pragmatically, a case of capitalistic

sabotage, or a strike in war industry would seem to be far more

dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than the isolated and

ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent recruiting. But in the

tradition of the State ideal, such industrial interference with national

policy is not identified as a crime against the State. It may be

grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally as an impediment of

the utmost gravity. But it is not felt in those obscure seats of the

herd mind which dictate the identity of crime and fix their proportional

punishments. Army and Navy, however, are the very arms of the State; in

them flows its most precious lifeblood. To paralyze them is to touch the

very State itself. And the majesty of the State is so sacred that even

to attempt such a paralysis is a crime equal to a successful strike. The

will is deemed sufficient. Even though the individual in his effort to

impede recruiting should utterly and lamentably fail, he shall be in no

wise spared. Let the wrath of the State descend upon him for his

impiety! Even if he does not try any overt action, but merely utters

sentiments that may incidentally in the most indirect way cause someone

to refrain from enlisting, he is guilty. The guardians of the State do

not ask whether any pragmatic effect flowed out of this evil will or

desire. It is enough that the will is present. Fifteen or twenty years

in prison is not deemed too much for such sacrilege.

Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human

reason, are no accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by

the war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful by all the classes

which have the State ideal, and they express only an extreme of health

and vigor in the reaction of the State to its non-friends.

Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the State.

For the State is a personal as well as a mystical symbol, and it can

only be understood by tracing its historical origin. The modern State is

not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live

harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It

is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a

desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed

to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations. What

it does for us in the way of security and benefit of life, it does

incidentally as a by-product and development of its original functions,

and not because at any time men or classes in the full possession of

their insight and intelligence have desired that it be so. It is very

important that we should occasionally lift the incorrigible veil of that

ex post facto idealism by which we throw a glamour of rationalization

over what is, and pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit that we

have personally invented and set up for the glory of God and man the

hoary institutions which we see around us. Things are what they are, and

come down to us with all their thick encrustations of error and

malevolence. Political philosophy can delight us with fantasy and

convince us who need illusion to live that the actual is a fair and

approximate copy — full of failings, of course, but approximately sound

and sincere — of that ideal society which we can imagine ourselves as

creating. From this it is a step to the tacit assumption that we have

somehow had a hand in its creation and are responsible for its

maintenance and sanctity.

Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into

society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest

hand. We have not even the advantage of consciousness before we take up

our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught

in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our

desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we

have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we

might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social

institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class

we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between

ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment.

We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society

approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own

passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the

adventure of beauty.

Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is

given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society

and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as much

naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is, therefore, no

natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We

may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and

moon, but it is only because something in us unregenerate finds

satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there is anything

inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the State has

begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its

expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may

compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes

an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the

benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence

which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general

resistance toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the

State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class, and the

latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in

obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the

nation, the great collectivity of all of us.

II.

An analysis of the State would take us back to the beginnings of

society, to the complex of religious and personal and herd-impulses

which has found expression in so many forms. What we are interested in

is the American State as it behaves and as Americans behave towards it

in this twentieth century, and to understand that we have to go no

further back than the early English monarchy of which our American

republic is the direct descendant. How straight and true is that line of

descent almost nobody realizes. Those persons who believe in the

sharpest distinction between democracy and monarchy can scarcely

appreciate how a political institution may go through so many

transformations and yet remain the same. Yet a swift glance must show us

that in all the evolution of the English monarchy, with all its

broadenings and its revolutions, and even with its jump across the sea

into a colony which became an independent nation and then a powerful

State, the same State functions and attitudes have been preserved

essentially unchanged. The changes have been changes of form and not of

inner spirit, and the boasted extension of democracy has been not a

process by which the State was essentially altered to meet the shifting

of classes, the extension of knowledge, the needs of social

organization, but a mere elastic expansion by which the old spirit of

the State easily absorbed the new and adjusted itself successfully to

its exigencies. Never once has it been seriously shaken. Only once or

twice has it been seriously challenged, and each time it has speedily

recovered its equilibrium and proceeded with all its attitudes and

faiths reinforced by the disturbance.

The modern democratic state, in this light, is therefore no bright and

rational creation of a new day, the political form under which great

peoples are to live healthfully and freely in a modern world, but the

last decrepit scion of an ancient and hoary stock, which has become so

exhausted that it scarcely recognizes its own ancestor, does, in fact,

repudiate him while it clings tenaciously to the archaic and irrelevant

spirit that made that ancestor powerful, and resists the new bottles for

the new wine that its health as a modern society so desperately needs.

So sweeping a conclusion might have been doubted concerning the American

State had it not been for the war, which has provided a long and

beautiful series of examples of the tenacity of the State ideal and its

hold on the significant classes of the American nation. War is the

health of the State and it is during war that one best understands the

nature of that institution. If the American democracy during wartime has

acted with an almost incredible trueness to form, if it has resurrected

with an almost joyful fury the somnolent State, we can only conclude

that the tradition from the past has been unbroken, and that the

American republic is the direct descendant of the English State.

And what was the nature of this early English State? It was first of all

a medieval absolute monarchy, arising out of the feudal chaos, which had

represented the first effort at order after the turbulent assimilation

of the invading barbarians by the Christianizing Roman civilization. The

feudal lord evolved out of the invading warrior who had seized or been

granted land and held it, souls and usufruct thereof, as fief to some

higher lord whom he aided in war. His own serfs and vassals were

exchanging faithful service for the protection which the warrior with

his organized band could give them. Where an invading chieftain retained

his power over his lesser lieutenants a petty kingdom would arise, as in

England, and a restless and ambitious king might extend his power over

his neighbors and consolidate the petty kingdoms only to fall before the

armed power of an invader like William the Conqueror, who would bring

the whole realm under his heel. The modern State begins when a prince

secures almost undisputed sway over fairly homogeneous territory and

people and strives to fortify his power and maintain the order that will

conduce to the safety and influence of his heirs. The State in its

inception is pure and undiluted monarchy; it is armed power, culminating

in a single head, bent on one primary object, the reducing to

subjection, to unconditional and unqualified loyalty of all the people

of a certain territory. This is the primary striving of the State, and

it is a striving that the State never loses, through all its myriad

transformations.

When the subjugation was once acquired, the modern State had begun. In

the King, the subjects found their protection and their sense of unity.

From his side, he was a redoubtable, ambitious, and stiff-necked

warrior, getting the supreme mastery which he craved. But from theirs,

he was a symbol of the herd, the visible emblem of that security which

they needed and for which they drew gregariously together. Serfs and

villains, whose safety under their petty lords had been rudely shattered

in the constant conflicts for supremacy, now drew a new breath under the

supremacy that wiped out this local anarchy. King and people agreed in

the thirst for order, and order became the first healing function of the

State. But in the maintenance of order, the King needed officers of

justice; the old crude group-rules for dispensing justice had to be

codified, a system of formal law worked out. The King needed ministers,

who would carry out his will, extensions of his own power, as a machine

extends the power of a man’s hand. So the State grew as a gradual

differentiation of the King’s absolute power, founded on the devotion of

his subjects and his control of a military band, swift and sure to

smite. Gratitude for protection and fear of the strong arm sufficed to

produce the loyalty of the country to the State.

The history of the State, then, is the effort to maintain these personal

prerogatives of power, the effort to convert more and more into stable

law the rules of order, the conditions of public vengeance, the

distinction between classes, the possession of privilege. It was an

effort to convert what was at first arbitrary usurpation, a perfectly

apparent use of unjustified force, into the taken for granted and the

divinely established. The State moves inevitably along the line from

military dictatorship to the divine right of Kings. What had to be at

first rawly imposed becomes through social habit to seem the necessary,

the inevitable. The modern unquestioning acceptance of the State comes

out of long and turbulent centuries when the State was challenged and

had to fight its way to prevail. The King’s establishment of personal

power — which was the early State — had to contend with the impudence of

hostile barons, who saw too clearly the adventitious origin of the

monarchy and felt no reason why they should not themselves reign. Feuds

between the King and his relatives, quarrels over inheritance, quarrels

over the devolution of property, threatened constantly the existence of

the new monarchial State. The King’s will to power necessitated for its

absolute satisfaction universality of political control in his

dominions, just as the Roman Church claimed universality of spiritual

control over the whole world. And just as rival popes were the

inevitable product of such a pretension of sovereignty, rival kings and

princes contended for that dazzling jewel of undisputed power.

Not until the Tudor regime was there in England an irresponsible

personal monarchy on the lines of the early State ideal, governing a

fairly well organized and prosperous nation. The Stuarts were not only

too weak-minded to inherit the fruition of William the Conqueror’s

labors, but they made the fatal mistake of bringing out to public view

and philosophy the idea of Divine Right implicit in the State, and this

at a time when a new class of country gentry and burghers were attaining

wealth and self-consciousness backed by the zeal of a theocratic and

individualistic religion. Cromwell might certainly, if he had continued

in power, revised the ideal of the State, perhaps utterly transformed

it, destroying the concepts of personal power and universal sovereignty,

substituting a sort of Government of Presbyterian Soviets under the

tutelage of a celestial Czar. But the Restoration brought back the old

State under a peculiarly frivolous form. The Revolution was the merest

change of monarchs at the behest of a Protestant majority which insisted

on guarantees against religious relapse. The intrinsic nature of the

monarchy as the symbol of the State was not in the least altered. In

place of the inept monarch who could not lead the State in person or

concentrate in himself the royal prerogatives, a coterie of courtiers

managed the State. But their direction was consistently in the interest

of the monarch and of the traditional ideal, so that the current of the

English State was not broken.

The boasted English Parliament of Lords and commoners possessed at no

time any vitality which weakened or threatened to weaken the State

ideal. Its original purpose was merely to facilitate the raising of the

King’s revenues. The nobles responded better when they seemed to be

giving their consent. Their share in actual government was subjective,

but the existence of Parliament served to appease any restiveness at the

autocracy of the King. The significant classes could scarcely rebel when

they had the privilege of giving consent to the King’s measures. There

was always outlet for the rebellious spirit of a powerful lord in

private revolt against the King. The only Parliament that seriously

tried to govern outside of and against the King’s will precipitated a

civil war that ended with the effectual submission of Parliament to a

more careless and corrupt autocracy than had yet been known. By the time

of George III Parliament was moribund, utterly unrepresentative either

of the new bourgeois classes or of peasants and laborers, a mere

frivolous parody of a legislature, despised both by King and people. The

King was most effectively the State and his ministers the Government,

which was run in terms of his personal whim, by men whose only interest

was personal intrigue. Government had been for long what it has never

ceased to be — a series of berths and emoluments in Army, Navy and the

different departments of State, for the representatives of the

privileged classes.

The State of George III was an example of the most archaic ideal of the

English State, the pure, personal monarchy. The great mass of the people

had fallen into the age-long tradition of loyalty to the crown. The

classes that might have been restive for political power were placated

by a show of representative government and the lucrative supply of

offices. Discontent showed itself only in those few enlightened elements

which could not refrain from irony at the sheer irrationality of a State

managed on the old heroic lines for so grotesque a sovereign and by so

grotesque a succession of courtier-ministers. Such discontent could by

no means muster sufficient force for a revolution, but the Revolution

which was due came in America where even the very obviously shadowy

pigment of Parliamentary representation was denied the colonists. All

that was vital in the political thought of England supported the

American colonists in their resistance to the obnoxious government of

George III.

The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might

turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of

Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only

with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also

with the Divine Right of the State. If all governments derive their

authority from the consent of the governed, and if a people is entitled,

at any time that it becomes oppressive, to overthrow it and institute

one more nearly conformable to their interests and ideals, the old idea

of the sovereignty of the State is destroyed. The State is reduced to

the homely work of an instrument for carrying out popular policies. If

revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in

resisting its own extinction. The sovereignty of the people is no mere

phrase. It is a direct challenge to the historic tradition of the State.

For it implies that the ultimate sanctity resides not in the State at

all or in its agent, the government, but in the nation, that is, in the

country viewed as a cultural group and not specifically as a

king-dominated herd. The State then becomes a mere instrument, the

servant of this popular will, or of the constructive needs of the

cultural group. The Revolution had in it, therefore, the makings of a

very daring modern experiment — the founding of a free nation which

should use the State to effect its vast purposes of subduing a continent

just as the colonists’ armies had used arms to detach their society from

the irresponsible rule of an overseas king and his frivolous ministers.

The history of the State might have ended in 1776 as far as the American

colonies were concerned, and the modern nation which is still striving

to materialize itself have been born.

For awhile it seemed almost as if the State was dead. But men who are

freed rarely know what to do with their liberty. In each colony that

fatal seed of the State had been sown; it could not disappear. Rival

prestige and interests began to make themselves felt. Fear of foreign

States, economic distress, discord between classes, the inevitable

physical exhaustion and prostration of idealism which follows a

protracted war — all combined to put the responsible classes of the new

States into the mood for a regression to the State ideal. Ostensibly

there is no reason why the mere lack of a centralized State should have

destroyed the possibility of progress in the new liberated America,

provided the inter-state jealousy and rivalry could have been destroyed.

But there were no leaders for this anti-State nationalism. The

sentiments of the Declaration remained mere sentiments. No constructive

political scheme was built on them. The State ideal, on the other hand,

had ambitious leaders of the financial classes, who saw in the excessive

decentralization of the Confederation too much opportunity for the

control of society by the democratic lower-class elements. They were

menaced by imperialistic powers without and by democracy within. Through

their fear of the former they tended to exaggerate the impossibility of

the latter. There was no inclination to make the State a school where

democratic experiments could be worked out as they should be. They were

unwilling to give reconstruction the term that might have been necessary

to build up this truly democratic nationalism. Six short years is a

short time to reconstruct an agricultural country devastated by a six

years’ war. The popular elements in the new States had only to show

their turbulence; they were given no time to grow. The ambitious leaders

of the financial classes got a convention called to discuss the

controversies and maladjustments of the States, which were making them

clamor for a revision of the Articles of Confederation, and then, by one

of the most successful coups d’etat in history, turned their assembly

into the manufacture of a new government on the strongest lines of the

old State ideal.

This new constitution, manufactured in secret session by the leaders of

the propertied and ruling classes, was then submitted to an approval of

the electors which only by the most expert manipulation was obtained,

but which was sufficient to override the indignant undercurrent of

protest from those popular elements who saw the fruits of the Revolution

slipping away from them. Universal suffrage would have killed it

forever. Had the liberated colonies had the advantage of the French

experience before them, the promulgation of the Constitution would

undoubtedly have been followed by a new revolution, as very nearly

happened later against Washington and the Federalists. But the ironical

ineptitude of Fate put the machinery of the new Federalist

constitutional government in operation just at the moment that the

French Revolution began, and by the time those great waves of Jacobin

feeling reached North America, the new Federalist State was firmly

enough on its course to weather the gale and the turmoil.

The new State was therefore not the happy political symbol of a united

people, who in order to form a more perfect union, etc., but the

imposition of a State on a loose and growing nationalism, which was in a

condition of unstable equilibrium and needed perhaps only to be

fertilized from abroad to develop a genuine political experiment in

democracy. The preamble to the Constitution, as was soon shown in the

hostile popular vote and later in the revolt against the Federalists,

was a pious hope rather than actuality, a blessedness to be realized

when by the force of government pressure, the creation of idealism, and

mere social habit, the population should be welded and kneaded into a

State. That this is what has actually happened, is seen in the fact that

the somewhat shockingly undemocratic origins of the American State have

been almost completely glossed over and the unveiling is bitterly

resented, by none so bitterly as the significant classes who have been

most industrious in cultivating patriotic myth and legend. American

history, as far as it has entered into the general popular emotion, runs

along this line. The Colonies are freed by the Revolution from a

tyrannous King and become free and independent States; there follow six

years of impotent peace, during which the Colonies quarrel among

themselves and reveal the hopeless weakness of the principle under which

they are working together; in desperation the people then create a new

instrument, and launch a free and democratic republic, which was and

remains — especially since it withstood the shock of civil war — the

most perfect form of democratic government known to man, perfectly

adequate to be promulgated as an example in the twentieth century to all

people, and to be spread by propaganda, and, if necessary, the sword, in

all unregenerately Imperial regions. Modern historians reveal the

avowedly undemocratic personnel and opinions of the Convention. They

show that the members not only had an unconscious economic interest but

a frank political interest in founding a State which should protect the

propertied classes against the hostility of the people. They show how,

from one point of view, the new government became almost a mechanism for

overcoming the repudiation of debts, for putting back into their place a

farmer and small trader class whom the unsettled times of reconstruction

had threatened to liberate, for reestablishing on the securest basis of

the sanctity of property and the State, their class-supremacy menaced by

a democracy that had drunk too deeply at the fount of Revolution. But

all this makes little impression on the other legend of the popular

mind, because it disturbs the sense of the sanctity of the State and it

is this rock to which the herd-wish must cling.

Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and

inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. It is taken as

axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy and

was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention. These hapless

Articles have had to bear the infamy cast upon the untried by the

radiantly successful. The nation had to be strong to repel invasion,

strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of the propertied

and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied and improvident

from ever using the government to secure their own prosperity at the

expense of moneyed capital. Under the Articles the new States were

obviously trying to reconstruct themselves in an alarming tenderness for

the common man impoverished by the war. No one suggests that the anxiety

of the leaders of the heretofore unquestioned ruling classes desired the

revision of the Articles and labored so weightily over a new instrument

not because the nation was failing under the Articles, but because it

was succeeding only too well. Without intervention from the leaders,

reconstruction threatened in time to turn the new nation into an

agrarian and proletarian democracy. It is impossible to predict what

would have materialized into a form of society very much modified from

the ancient State. All we know is that at a time when the current of

political progress was in the direction of agrarian and proletarian

democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation and imposed upon it

a powerful form against which it was never to succeed in doing more than

blindly struggle. The liberating virus of the Revolution was definitely

expunged, and henceforth if it worked at all it had to work against the

State, in opposition to the armed and respectable power of the nation.

The propertied classes, seated firmly in the saddle by their

Constitutional coup d’etat have, of course, never lost their ascendancy.

The particular group of Federalists who engineered the new machinery and

enjoyed the privilege of setting it in motion were turned out in a dozen

years by the “Jeffersonian democracy” whom their manner had so deeply

offended. But the Jeffersonian democracy never meant in practice any

more than the substitution of the rule of the country gentlemen for the

rule of the town capitalist. The true hostility between their interests

was small as compared with the hostility of both towards the common man.

When both were swept away by the irruption of the Western democracy

under Andrew Jackson and the rule of the common man appeared for a while

in its least desirable forms, it was comparatively easy for the two

propertied classes to form a tacit coalition against them. The new West

achieved an extension of suffrage and a jovial sense of having come

politically into its own, but the rule of the ancient classes was not

seriously challenged. Their squabbles over a tariff were family affairs,

for the tariff could not materially affect the common man of either East

or West. The Eastern and Northern capitalists soon saw the advantage of

supporting Southern country gentleman slave-power as against the

free-soil pioneer. Bad generalship on the part of this coalition allowed

a Western free-soil minority President to slip into office and brought

on the Civil War, which smashed the slave power and left Northern

capital in undisputed possession of a field against which the pioneer

could make only sporadic and ineffective revolts.

From the Civil War to the death of Mark Hanna, the propertied capitalist

industrial classes ran a triumphal career in possession of the State. At

various times, as in 1896, the country had to be saved for them from

disillusioned, rebellious hordes of small farmers and traders and

democratic idealists, who had in the overflow of prosperity been

squeezed down into the small end of the horn. But except for these

occasional menaces, business, that is to say, aggressive expansionist

capitalism, had nearly forty years in which to direct the American

republic as a private preserve, or laboratory, experimenting,

developing, wasting, subjugating, to its heart’s content, in the midst

of a vast somnolence of complacency such as has never been seen and

contrast strangely with the spiritual dissent and constructive

revolutionary thought which went on at the same time in England and the

Continent.

That era ended in 1904 like the crack of doom, which woke a whole people

into a modern day which they had overslept, and for which they had

become acutely and painfully aware of the evils of the society in which

they had slumbered and they snatched at one after the other idea,

programme, movement, ideal, to uplift them out of the slough in which

they had slept. The glory of those shining figures — captains of

industry — went out in a sulphuric gloom. The head of the State, who

made up in dogmatism what he lacked in philosophy, increased the

confusion by reviving the Ten Commandments for political purposes, and

belaboring the wicked with them. The American world tossed in a state of

doubt, of reawakened social conscience, of pragmatic effort for the

salvation of society. The ruling classes — annoyed, bewildered, harassed

— pretended with much bemoaning that they were losing their grip on the

State. Their inspired prophets uttered solemn warnings against political

novelty and the abandonment of the tried and tested fruits of

experience.

These classes actually had little to fear. A political system which had

been founded in the interests of property by their own spiritual and

economic ancestors, which had become ingrained in the country’s life

through a function of 120 years, which was buttressed by a legal system

which went back without a break to the early English monarchy was not

likely to crumble before the anger of a few muck-rakers, the

disillusionment of a few radical sociologists, or the assaults of

proletarian minorities. Those who bided their time through the Taft

interregnum, which merely continued the Presidency until there could be

found a statesman to fill it, were rewarded by the appearance of the

exigency of the war, in which business organization was imperatively

needed. They were thus able to make a neat and almost noiseless

coalition with the Government. The mass of the worried middle classes,

riddled by the campaign against American failings, which at times

extended almost to a skepticism of the American State itself, were only

too glad to sink back to a glorification of the State ideal, to feel

about them in war, the old protecting arms, to return to the old

primitive robust sense of the omnipotence of the State, its matchless

virtue, honor and beauty, driving away all the foul old doubts and

dismays.

That the same class which imposed its constitution on the nascent

proletarian and agrarian democracy has maintained itself to this day

indicates how slight was the real effect of the Revolution. When that

political change was consolidated in the new government, it was found

that there had been a mere transfer of ruling-class power across the

seas, or rather that a ruling commercial class in the colonies had been

able to remove through a war fought largely by the masses a vexatious

overlordship of the irresponsible coteries of ministers that surrounded

George III. The colonies merely exchanged a system run in the interest

of the overseas trade of English wealth for a system run in the interest

of New England and Philadelphia merchanthood, and later of Southern

slavocracy. The daring innovation of getting rid of a king and setting

up a kingless State did not apparently impress the hard headed farmers

and small traders with as much force as it has their patriotic

defenders. The animus of the Convention was so obviously monarchial that

any executive they devised could be only a very thinly disguised king.

The compromise by which the presidency was created proved but to be the

means by which very nearly the whole mass of traditional royal

prerogatives was brought over and lodged in the new state.

The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has

proved to be of far less significance in the course of political

evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king. It was the

intention of the founders of the Constitution that he be elected by a

small body of notables, representing the ruling propertied classes, who

could check him up every four years in a new election. This was no

innovation. Kings have often been selected this way in European history,

and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election. That the

American President’s term was limited merely shows the confidence which

the founders felt in the buttressing force of their instrument. His

election would never pass out of the hands of the notables, and so the

office would be guaranteed to be held by a faithful representative of

upper-class demands. What he was most obviously to represent was the

interests of that body which elected him, and not the mass of the people

who were still disenfranchised. For the new State started with no

Quixotic belief in universal suffrage. The property qualifications which

were in effect in every colony were continued. Government was frankly a

function of those who held a concrete interest in the public weal, in

the shape of visible property. The responsibility for the security of

property rights could safely lie only with those who had something to

secure. The “stake” in the commonwealth which those who held office most

possess was obviously larger.

One of the larger errors of political insight which the sage founders of

the Constitution committed was to assume that the enfranchised watchdogs

of property and the public order would remain a homogeneous class.

Washington, acting strictly as the mouthpiece of the unified State

ideal, deprecated the growth of parties and factions which horridly keep

the State in turbulence or threaten to render it asunder. But the

monarchial and repressive policies of Washington’s own friends promptly

generated an opposition democratic party representing the landed

interests of the ruling classes, and the party system was fastened on

the country. By the time the electorate had succeeded in reducing the

electoral college to a mere recorder of the popular vote, or in other

words, had broadened the class of notables to the whole property-holding

electorate, the parties were firmly established to carry on the

selective and refining and securing work of the electoral college. The

party leadership then became, and has remained ever since, the nucleus

of notables who determine the presidency. The electorate having won an

apparently democratic victory in the destruction of the notables, finds

itself reduced to the role of mere ratification or selection between two

or three candidates, in whose choice they have only a nominal share. The

electoral college which stood between even the propertied electorate and

the executive with the prerogatives of a king, gave place to a body

which was just as genuinely a bar to democratic expression, and far less

responsible for its acts. The nucleus of party councils which became,

after the reduction of the Electoral College, the real choosers of the

Presidents, were unofficial, quasi-anonymous, utterly unchecked by the

populace whose rulers they chose. More or less self-chosen, or chosen by

local groups whom they dominated, they provided a far more secure

guarantee that the State should remain in the hands of the ruling

classes than the old electoral college. The party councils could be

loosely organized entirely outside of the governmental organization,

without oversight by the State or check from the electorate. They could

be composed of the leaders of the propertied classes themselves or their

lieutenants, who could retain their power indefinitely, or at least

until they were unseated by rivals within the same charmed domain. They

were at least entirely safe from attack by the officially constituted

electorate, who, as the party system became mor and more firmly

established, found they could vote only on slates set up for them by

unknown councils behind an imposing and all-powerful “Party.”

As soon as this system was organized into a hierarchy extending from

national down to state and county politics, it became perfectly safe to

broaden the electorate. The clamors of the unpropertied or the less

propertied to share in the selection of their democratic republican

government could be graciously acceded to without endangering in the

least the supremacy of those classes which the founders had meant to be

supreme. The minority were now even more effectually protected from the

majority than under the old system, however indirect the election might

be. The electorate was now reduced to a ratifier of slates, both of

which were pledged to upper-class domination; the electorate could have

the freest, most universal suffrage, for any mass-desire for political

change, any determined will to shift the class balance, would be obliged

to register itself through the party machinery. It could make no frontal

attack on the Government. And the party machinery was directly devised

to absorb and neutralize this popular shock, handing out to the

disgruntled electorate a disguised stone when it asked for political

bread, and effectually smashing any third party which ever avariciously

tried to reach government except through the regular two-party system.

The party system succeeded, of course, beyond the wildest dreams of its

creators. It relegated the founders of the Constitution to the role of

doctrinaire theorists, political amateurs. Just because it grew up

slowly to meet the needs of ambitious politicians and was not imposed by

ruling-class fiat, as was the Constitution, did it have a chance to

become assimilated, worked into the political intelligence and instinct

of the people, and be adopted gladly and universally as a genuine

political form, expressive both of popular need and ruling-class demand.

It satisfied the popular demand for democracy. The enormous sense of

victory which followed the sweeping away of property qualifications of

suffrage, the tangible evidence that now every citizen was participating

in public affairs, and that the entire manhood democracy was now

self-governing, created a mood of political complacency that lasted

uninterruptedly into the twentieth century. The party system was thus

the means of removing political grievance from the greater part of the

populace, and of giving to the ruling classes the hidden but genuine

permanence of control which the Constitution had tried openly to give

them. It supplemented and repaired the ineptitudes of the Constitution.

It became the unofficial but real government, the instrument which used

the Constitution as its instrument.

Only in two cases did the party system seem to lose its grip, was it

thrown off base by the inception of a new party from without — in the

elections of Jackson and Lincoln. Jackson came in as the representative

of a new democratic West which had no tradition of suffrage

qualifications, and Lincoln as a minority candidate in a time of

factional sectional strife. But the discomfiture of the party

politicians was short. The party system proved perfectly capable of

assimilating both of these new movements. Jackson’s insurrection was

soon captured by the old machinery and fed the slavocracy, and Lincoln’s

party became the property of the new bonanza capitalism. Neither Jackson

nor Lincoln made the slightest deflection in the triumphal march of the

party-system. In practically no other contests has the electorate had

for all practical purposes a choice except between two candidates,

identical as far as their political role would be as representatives of

the significant classes in the State. Campaigns such as Bryan’s, where

one of the parties is captured by an element which seeks a real

transference of power from the significant to the less significant

classes, split the party, and sporadic third party attacks merely throw

the scale one way or the other between the big parties, or, if

threatening enough, produce a virtual coalition against them.