country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual changes from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion.

While in the nature of things each generation must assume the task of adapting the working of its government to new conditions of life as they arise, it would be the folly of ignorant conceit for any generation to assume that it can lightly and easily improve upon the work of the founders in those matters which are, by their nature, of universal application to the permanent relations of men in civil society.

Religion, the philosophy of morals, the teaching of history, the experience of every human life, point to the same conclusion that in the practical conduct of life the most difficult and the most necessary virtue is self-restraint. It is the first lesson of childhood; it is the quality for which great monarchs are most highly praised; the man who has it not is feared and shunned; it is needed most where power is greatest; it is needed more by men acting in a mass than by individuals, because men in the mass are more irresponsible and difficult of control than individuals. The makers of our Constitution, wise and earnest students of history and of life, discerned the great truth that self-restraint is the supreme necessity and the supreme virtue of a democracy. The people of the United States have exercised that virtue by the establishment of rules of right action in what we call the limitations of the Constitution, and until this day they have rigidly observed those rules. The general judgment of students of government is that the success and permanency of the American system of government are due to the establishment and observance of such general rules of conduct. Let us change and adapt our laws as the shifting conditions of the times require, but let us never abandon or weaken this fundamental and essential characteristic of our ordered liberty.

THE STRENGTH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 1

JAMES BRYCE

[James Bryce (1838- ) has been prominent in English political and intellectual life since 1864, when he published his brilliant history "The Holy Roman Empire." He is best known in America as British Ambassador from 1907 to 1913 and as the author of "The American Commonwealth" (1888, revised in 1910), generally admitted to be the best exposition of the American system of government, Federal and state, yet written. Since the beginning of the World War, he has headed two important commissions, on Belgian and Armenian atrocities respectively. See page 305 for another selection by the same author.]

Those merits of American government which belong to its Federal Constitution have already been discussed: 2 we have now to consider such as flow from the rule of public opinion, from the temper, habits, and ideas of the people.

The first is that of stability. As one test of a human body's soundness is its capacity for reaching a great age, so it is high praise for a political system that it has stood no more changed than any institution must change in a changing world, and that it now gives every promise of durability. The people are profoundly attached to the form which their national life has taken. The Federal Constitution has been, to their eyes, an almost sacred thing, an Ark of the Covenant, whereon no man may lay rash hands. All over Europe one hears schemes of radical change freely discussed. There is still a monarchical party in France, a republican party in Italy and Spain, a social democratic party everywhere, not to speak of sporadic anarchist groups. Even in England, it is impossible to feel

1 From Chapter CII, "The American Commonwealth." Copyright, 1910, The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission.

2 See Chapters XXVII-XXX in vol. i. [Author's note.]

confident that any one of the existing institutions of the country will be standing fifty years hence. But in the United States the discussion of political problems busies itself with details, so far as the native Americans are concerned, and assumes that the main lines must remain as they are forever. This conservative spirit, jealously watchful even in small matters, sometimes prevents reforms, but it assures to the people an easy mind, and a trust in their future which they feel to be not only a present satisfaction but a reservoir of strength.

The best proof of the well-braced solidity of the system is that it survived the Civil War, changed only in a few points which have not greatly affected the balance of national and state powers. Another must have struck every European traveler who questions American publicists about the institutions of their country. When I first traveled in the United States, I used to ask thoughtful men, superior to the prejudices of custom, whether they did not think the states' system defective in such and such points, whether the legislative authority of Congress might not profitably be extended, whether the suffrage ought not to be restricted as regards negroes or immigrants, and so forth. Whether assenting or dissenting, the persons questioned invariably treated such matters as purely speculative, saying that the present arrangements were too deeply rooted for their alteration to come within the horizon of practical politics. So when serious trouble arises, such as might in Europe threaten revolution, the people face it quietly, and assume that a tolerable solution will be found. At the disputed election of 1876, when each of the two great political parties, heated with conflict, claimed that its candidate had been chosen President, and the Constitution supplied no way out of the difficulty, public tranquillity was scarcely disturbed, and the public funds fell but little. A method was invented of settling the question which both sides acquiesced in, and although the decision was a boundless disappointment to the party which had cast the majority of

the popular vote, that party quietly submitted to lose those spoils of office whereon its eyes had been feasting.

Feeling the law to be their own work, the people are disposed to obey the law. In a preceding chapter I have examined instances of the disregard of the law, and the supersession of its tardy methods by the action of the crowd. Such instances, serious as they are, do not disentitle the nation as a whole to the credit of law-abiding habits. It is the best result that can be ascribed to the direct participation of the people in their government that they have the love of the maker for his work, that every citizen looks upon a statute as a regulation made by himself for his own guidance no less than for that of others, every official as a person he has himself chosen, and whom it is therefore his interest, with no disparagement to his personal independence, to obey. Plato thought that those who felt their own sovereignty would be impatient of all control: nor is it to be denied that the principle of equality may result in lowering the status and dignity of a magistrate. But as regards law and order the gain much exceeds the loss, for every one feels that there is no appeal from the law, behind which there stands the force of the nation. Such a temper can exist and bear fruits only where minorities, however large, have learned to submit patiently to majorities, however small. But that is the one lesson which the American government through every grade and in every department daily teaches, and which it has woven into the texture of every citizen's mind. The habit of living under a rigid constitution superior to ordinary statutes - indeed two rigid constitutions, since the state constitution is a fundamental law within its own sphere, no less than is the Federal-intensifies this legality of view, since it may turn all sorts of questions which have not been determined by a direct vote of the people into questions of legal construction. It even accustoms people to submit to see their direct vote given in the enactment of a state constitution nullified by a decision of a court holding that the Federal Constitution has been contravened. Every page

of American history illustrates the wholesome results. The events of the last few years present an instance of the constraint which the people put on themselves in order to respect every form of law. The Mormons, a community not exceeding 140,000 persons, persistently defied all the efforts of Congress to root out polygamy, a practice eminently repulsive to American notions. If they had inhabited a state, Congress could not have interfered at all, but as Utah was then only a territory, Congress had not only a power of legislating for it which overrides territorial ordinances passed by the local legislature, but the right to apply military force independent of local authorities. Thus the Mormons were really at the mercy of the Federal government, had it chosen to employ violent methods. But by intrenching themselves behind the letter of the Constitution, they continued for many years to maintain their "peculiar institution" by evading the statutes passed against it and challenging a proof which under the common law rules of evidence it was usually impossible to give. Declaimers hounded on Congress to take arbitrary means for the suppression of the practice, but Congress and the Executive submitted to be outwitted rather than depart from the accustomed principles of administration, and succeeded at last only by a statute whose searching but strictly constitutional provisions the recalcitrants failed to evade. The same spirit of legality shows itself in misgoverned cities. Even where it is notorious that officials have been chosen by the grossest fraud and that they are robbing the city, the body of the people, however indignant, recognize the authority, and go on paying the taxes which a Ring levies, because strict legal proof of the frauds and robberies is not forthcoming. Wrongdoing supplies a field for the display of virtue.

There is a broad simplicity about the political ideas of the people, and a courageous consistency in carrying them out in practice. When they have accepted a principle, they do not shrink from applying it "right along," however disagreeable