SUFFRAGE AS AN EDUCATOR.
Fno[ OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]
The Narrows, Long Island. 'I'nn recent extension of the Suffrage in Great Britain, and the attempt to extend it here until its only limits are infancy and crime, have led me to read with care a book of Mr. John Stuart Mill's, with which I have hitherto been entirely unacquainted, his Considerations on Representative Government. I opened the volume with expectations raised high by the pleasure and instruction I had received from other works of his ; and if I did not find this book quite equal to the Essay on Liberty, it may be my own fault, or possibly, because it is not given to any one man to produce two works having the perfection of that masterly essay which is, in my judgment, the wisest, the most thorough, and the most symmetrical monograph in the literature of politics. In that essay Mr. Mill does not confound liberty, freedom, with political power ; and in the sustained firmness with which he draws and constantly. keeps before the reader this delicate but essential distinction —a distinction imperceptible to the thick vision and undescribable in the coarse vocabulary of most advocates of democracy—he has given noteworthy evidence of his right to speak as a political teacher. Other evidence is given in the apprehension and comprehension he always shows of the design of the political institutions of this country and of their working. He understands them better than the best of our political writers ; or I should rather say that, understanding them as well as any of those writers, his calm and candid nature and his unbiassed position enable him to express his opinions with an absence of reserve and a judicial impartiality not to be expected of political students in this Republic. The understanding of which I speak is an understanding of elements and of principles, and implies no sagacity as to the polities of the day. Indeed, a cunning, low-minded, political wire-puller, or a bright boy born and bred in the country, is a more trustworthy prophet, is better able to guess how our political cat will jump, than the wisest and profoundest student of our institutions in Europe, if he has not livid here long enough to become sensitive to currents of public
feeling the spring of which is quite beyond his knowledge. •
In his work on "Representative Government" Mr. Mill appears to me to have lost occasionally that clear sight of the distinction between freedom and the possession of political power, which is so marked a feature of his essay on "Liberty," and occasionally also to have failed to apprehend the significance of facts in this country the bearing of which upon the subject before him was of great importance. There is no point on which he insists more strongly in the former work than on the value, the supreme value of the exercise of political power as an educator,—au educator of the highest order, which does not merely sharpen the wits and impart instruction, but which develops and elevates the whole man, morally and intellectually. In his chapter on the extension of the suffrage he says, "Among the foremost benefits of free government is that education of the intelligence and the senti- ments, which is carried down to the very lowest ranks of the people when they are called to take a part in acts which directly affect the great interests of their country." Elsewhere he says, "Hardly any language is strong enough to express the strength of my conviction on the importance of that portion of the operation of free institutions which may be called the public education of the citizens." Now, the only way in which the population of a country can take a part in acts which directly affect its great interests in the time of peace, is by the exercise of political power through the suffrage. The possession and exercise of this political power are therefore set down by Mr. Mill as among the foremost benefits of free government, if not as necessary to freedom. It is not strange that any of Mr. Mill's opinions should be adopted by many intelligent persona; and it is perhaps presuming in me to dispute an opinion so strongly insisted upon by him as this has been, and the truth of which has been so generally admitted. But my observation has not led me to this conclusion. I need hardly say that I am neither prepared nor inclined to deny that wide diffusion of the ideas, tastes, and senti- ments of educated minds, that great intelligence of the whole people which Mr. Mill, M. de Tocqueville, and other intelligent observers have pointed out as the chief distinctive trait of society in this Republic. But, although I believe that a constitutional, representative, democratic government is the best and most enduring government that can be framed by man, I do not connect, as Mr. Mill and M. de Tocqueville do, the diffusion of intelligence in this country with its democratic institutions and the almost constant exercise of political power by the great mass of its population. The two, however, do co-exist here in a manner so striking and apparently so significant that it is not sur- prising that even a Mill and a De Tocqueville should have concluded that there must be a direct connection between them. Go into the remotest rural districts of New England, New York, Ohio, and even Illinois, and you will find among the poorest and hardest working people, those who live on pork and Indian corn, and who go coatless and shoeless in summer, except on Sundays, an intelli- gent knowledge of the public affairs, not only of their own country, their own State, and the Union, but of the civilized world. Their views may not be very profound, and their knowledge of European politics will quite surely not be thorough or accurate ; but a man in a tattered straw hat, his patched trousers held up by one home- made brace, with a hoe in his hand, will understand you if you talk to him about Reform in the British Parliament, or French inter- vention in Italy. Rise but one step higher, and you find men who have read books like Ecce Homo, and who can talk to you intelligently about them. Every one of these men is a voter, and has at the least decided party attach- ments and prejudices, if not political views. Every one of them feels, and has felt from his boyhood up, that he counts one in the country, and that he has a right to have his voice heard with the voices of all his neighbours and his countrymen upon questions in the decision of which they have a common concern. Every one of them knows, and knows so well that he does not think about it, that he is eligible to any office, from constable to President, and that to get it he has only to persuade enough other men like himself that it is to their interest to give him their votes. The humblest of them do sometimes perform very important pub- lic functions. I have seen on one side of the door of a little village cobbler's shop, not seventy-five miles from New York, "John Smith, Shoemaker," and on the other, "John Smith, Justice of the Peace ;" and to tell the truth, if I must have to do with Mr. Smith in one capacity or the other, I should be much more unwilling to go to his honour for shoes than to the cobbler for justice.
Have I been arguing the case of the other side? Not so ; for that the general intelligence and independent self-respect of these men is a consequence of, or in any way dependent upon, the exercise of political power or the consciousness of its possession, is the point to be established, and if we can find an equally great and equally frequent exercise of political power with even more self-conscious- ness in its possession among people who are without either intel- ligence or self-respect, it seems to me that the case for the suffrage as an educator of the intelligence and the sentiments fails. Millions of such people exist in this country ; they are the mean whites of the South. These people are called upon just as often as the farmers and farm labourers and mechanics of the North are, "to take part in acts which directly affect the great interests of the country." Like them they each count one in that country, and have a right to a voice upon all public questions, and of this they have a greater consciousness than the Northern man. Like him they have inherited this right, it has come to them through gene- rations, and they regard its possession as among the foremost benefits conferred upon them by the free Government under which they live, and of which they are a part. They are eligible and know their eligibility to any office of trust or honour. And this is not an empty right. Individuals among them have often attained such positions. One of Ahem, having been Senator of the United States and Governor of a State, is now President of the Union, and the son of one of them was his predecessor. Yet the readers of the Spectator hardly need to be told that these people, although of English blood, are very different from their kinsmen and countrymen of the North, and very far inferior to them. But it may not be so generally known that these Anglo-Saxons, who have possessed and used for generations that political power which is talked of as the great educator, are sunk to the lowest point of mental and moral degradation possible in a country that can be called civilized. A Russian serf or a Spanish peasant could not be more ignorant. They cannot read, and most of them are so uninformed that they do not know the quarter of the earth in which they live. They are dishonest, debauched, indecent, brutal in conduct, foul in person, and filthy in habits, to a degree hardly surpassed by the lowest barbarians. Public provision has not left them entirely without the means of education, and they do not lack time for it, being idlers and vagabonds ; but they seem to be beyond
the reach of education ; they feel no call thereto. And these people exist in millions, are voters to a man, and all exercise their right of suffrage from their first manhood up. Nor are they left to perform this function without enlightenment upon political questions, and especially upon the merits and the principles of the men for whom they vote. For them political meet- ings, for them stump speeches. They form the Buncombe to which honourable gentlemen address themselves on the floor Of the House of Representatives. Over their heads, especially before the war, the star-spangled banner was triumphantly waved by the unwearying hands of officeholders ; and for them, above all others, the American Eagle was ever screaming defiance to the British Lion. And yet there they are, the meanest, most degraded of civilized men, having as a class only one good quality, and that a low one, physical courage. The German emigrant who lands upon our shores without ever having exercised any political function, or having had even a political existence, becomes in the course of five years a better citizen than this born and bred "American freeman," who has sucked in politics with his mother's milk and his father's whisky, and who from the time of his coming of age would no sooner miss an election than a cock fight.
If it be replied that the position of these people is not like that of the Northern men, and that other things are not equal, and that they are impoverished and degraded by the reflex action of slavery, this concedes the very point at issue ; it admits that the possession and exercise of political power is not in itself an educator. We find also at the North that those who are most thoughtful of and most constant in the exercise of their political power are not those who show the best evidence of education of the intelligence and the sentiments; but that, on the contrary, those who are most interested in party politics and surest to go to the polls,. are the least intelligent and the lowest-minded of our people. From this remark the leaders and professed politicians of high grade are of course excepted. The Irish emigrant, who is made a citizen with a drove of his countrymen by a political committee that pays his fees and "puts him through," never fails to vote at least once- at every election thereafter ; but we have not yet observed that his intelligence and his sentiments rise with the frequency .of his exercise of his newly acquired political power. The truth seems to be that instead of the patriotism and the cultivated intelligence of the " American " of the North being the product of his demo- cratic institutions, those institutions are the product of his patriot- ism, and his education, and his race. Our forefathers came here neither peasants nor nobles, but yeomen and gentlemen-, with some education and some property. They at once set up constitutional self-government, and in their plans for the good of the commonwealth, they made the education of the whole people second only to religion. This, with Yankee thrift and Yankee independence, has produced the character which Mr. Mill and De Tocqueville have attributed to the influence of democratic institutions. But let Government be as democratic as that of a New England village, unless that thrift, that independence, and that general education, which are not the fruits of democracy, are found with it, political power will fail, as we have seen, to produce either patriotism or cultivated intelligence in the mass of the
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