factors of the great moneyed and business corporations; and the great railroad interests, combined with the manufacturing and banking interests, are not only stronger than the state governments, but stronger even than the general government. Nevertheless, it is the duty of the government to aim at the recovery of its independence, and to do all it can to prevent the evil from extending further.

The grand error of the general government, or of the people in relation to it, is in forgetting that it is created only for general, as distinguished from particular or private, interests, and that it is a government of express and limited powers, not a supreme national government with all the powers of government not expressly denied it by the constitution. It may impose taxes and lay imposts for revenue and to pay the national debts, but has no authority to impose a tariff for protection; for such a tariff is for the promotion of private and particular, not general, interests, and therefore does not come within the clause concerning the "general welfare." It has no authority to legislate for particular interests, on the subject of private rights, on religion or morality, on education, or to grant charters of incorporation to any private companies for any purpose whatever, that are to be operative beyond the District of Columbia. Indeed, nine-tenths of the business before congress since the war, is business which the general government has not and never has had any right to act on or to take cognizance of. All these matters are reserved to the several state governments, and, in regard to which, they are as absolutely independent of the general government as they would be if foreign states. The general government, which is clothed with only so much of the national sovereignty as relates to foreign powers, the national defence, and the general welfare, or rights and interests of all the states in common, has, under the control of the Republican party, acted as if it was clothed with the entire national sovereignty, or with all the functions of a supreme and only national government, a practical nullification of the rights and powers, independent of it, held under the constitution by the several states.

Your so-called Republican, who is always a fanatic or wedded to the moneyed and business corporation interests of the country, usually both together, is incapable of understanding, or, if not of understanding, of respecting the division of the powers of government under our system between a general government and several state governments. Sover

eignty with us vests in the several states united, and has its organ in the convention of all the states. The exercise of this sovereignty is divided by the convention between a general government and particular state governments. To the general government is given the charge of all matters that affect by their nature alike all the states in common; to the state governments, all particular and local matters, or which bear on the private relations of citizens and individual members of society. Both governments hold from the convention of states, or from the people organized as states, and neither from the people as unorganized individuals, or as an inorganic mass. The American political system knows no sovereignty of the people in this latter sense, or of the inorganic people, and, therefore, is no more democratic than it is aristocratic or monarchical; and the attempt to give it a democratic interpretation, is neither more nor less than an attempt to change its essential nature and character.

But this unique and original system of government suits neither fanatics, whether puritanic or humanitarian demagogues, nor the worshippers of Mammon; and the tendency of the Republican party, under the influence of such journals as the Liberator, formerly, the Anti-slavery Standard, the Independent, the New York Tribune, the New York Herald, has been to ignore this fact, and to pervert the American system into a vulgar democracy.

We do not know how the general government can undo the evils its fatal error, in usurping all the powers of government for itself, has generated; nor do we know how the republic, without a moral change in the people themselves, which no political or legislative action can effect, is to be saved. Things have gone so far that no human power seems adequate to amend or arrest them. But it will be of some service to comprehend our danger and its source. We have elsewhere* pointed out the only real and efficient remedy, but that is a remedy the government cannot apply. All that we can see that it can do is, to stop short, and absolutely refuse to go any further in the fatal direction it has hitherto taken. We trust it has power enough left to do so much, and doing so much, it must look to other influences to do the rest and save the republic. The government is off the constitutional track, and the classes that threw it off, will, it must be expected, do all they can to keep it off; but

*The Papacy and the Republic, Brownson's Works, Vol. XIII,

p. 326.

if the people of the South are restored to their independence under their natural leaders before it is too late, they will be able to help us to get it back. We need their assistance, and if we are mad enough to reject it, there is, so far as we can see, no help for us in man.

We have no disposition to dissemble, that, in our judgment, the evils to be remedied come from the natural and inevitable developments of the democratic principle, against which the convention of 1787, that framed the federal constitution, aimed to guard the republic, but did not provide sufficient safeguards, especially in case of a people recognizing no divinely constituted spiritual authority capable of commanding their reverence, and disciplining them into submission to the law of God. We ask for no king, no kaiser, no titled aristocracy, but we do want the people to understand that they are nothing without leaders, and that the mass of them are born to follow, not to lead, and that nothing is worse for them than to be led by fanatics, hypocrites, traders, business men, and unscrupulous demagogues. Yet in a community like ours, under a pure or a representative democracy, such are sure to be our leaders, and equally sure to lead us to political destruction, as all would see and admit if they were not blinded by their unfounded conviction, that a democratic government is the best of all possible governments; or if they had the courage to look the facts, daily occurring before their eyes, full in the face, and draw from them their strictly logical conclusions. Democracy is the best of all possible governments to make the many tax themselves for the benefit of the few, or to build up a burgher aristocracy, or, in our day, an aristocracy founded not on capital, but on paper, or the paper evidences of debt. The journalists tell us the country is rich, and we count our millionnaires by thousands, if not by hundreds of thousands; and yet, if called upon suddenly to pay its debts or to redeem its bonds of every sort, it would be found to be hopelessly insolvent, and the reputed wealth of the millionnaires would vanish in smoke. Our present wealth is chiefly in evidences of debt, that is, created by mortgages on the future.

There is no people in the world so heavily taxed as the American people, and none who derive so little benefit from the taxes they pay. Were it not so, should we see the vast, the appalling amount of poverty we do in our cities and large towns, the movements of the laboring classes for higher

wages, or hear the perpetual clamor for an adjustment of the relations of capital and labor? There is no country in the world where industry is more general, labor more intense, and the workingmen, in proportion to what they produce, are more poorly paid,-especially if we take into the account the additional expense imposed on the laboring classes by our miserable democratic doctrine of equality. Do our statesmen ever consider what it costs, and the terrible suffering it occasions, to maintain the doctrine, "I am as good as you"? The working men and women cannot, as a rule, escape the public opinion or the fashion of their country; and since by the democracy which asserts their equality, you elevate them, at least in their own estimation, in the social scale, you make it a moral necessity for them to maintain a higher or more expensive style of living, which demands in turn a higher rate of wages, and a rate beyond the ability of the average employer to pay. Hence, the most thriving class, if not the only thriving class, of simple laborers in the country, is composed of emigrants from countries where democracy, if it affects the dreams, has not yet formed the habits of the working classes, and has not yet taught the peasant to despise the state in which he was born, or to aspire to be the social equal of his lord. Consequently, they are less af fected by the fashion, the tone, and sentiment of the country, and are contented with a more simple and less expensive style of living, and can live and thrive on a lower rate of wages. If it were not for the migration hither of foreign labor, our industry, our vast enterprises, and internal improvements would come to a standstill. But it is only the generation that migrates hither that are more economical, more frugal, and contented to live plainer; their children, born here and brought up under the democratic influences of the country, are as extravagant, as aspiring, and as averse, to labor at a reasonable rate of wages, to say the least, as the children of old American families; and hence the children of foreign-born parents form an undue proportion of the dangerous classes of our cities and towns. The democratic tone and sentiment of the country, to a fearful extent, more than neutralize the influence of the example, instructions, and admonitions of their parents, who are regarded as old fogies or behind the age, by children hardly in their teens, or so-called "Young America."

Everybody sees the evil, complains of it, is inquiring for some "Morrison pill," as Carlyle would say, to cure it, but

hardly anybody has the courage to look for its cause in the democratic doctrine and sentiment of equality of the country, which creates a universal discontent on the one hand, with. one's actual condition, and on the other, a universal striving or longing to rise in the social scale till one reaches the topmost round; for democratic equality cannot exist where one is higher than another, and nobody regards himself as his neighbor's equal unless his acknowledged superior. Satan never sent from his region of smoke and darkness a grosser delusion than this ignis fatuus of democratic equality, for which the nations of the Old World are so foolishly and wickedly struggling, as a means of elevating or ameliorating the condition of the poorer and more numerous classes. It is for the people the greatest curse that could befall them. What is just is equal, but what is equal is not always just. It is the reign of justice, not of equality, that modern society needs, and which governments and nations should seek to introduce and sustain.

A great objection in the minds of many who are not blind to the evil tendencies of democracy to our view is, that they see not how, if we reject democracy, we are to escape monarchy or an hereditary aristocracy, either of which is held to be worse than democracy. Without undertaking to decide which is the best or the worst form of government, we think there is another alternative, and that we can reject the doctrine of democratic equality, which is neither practicable nor desirable, without favoring either monarchy or a political hereditary aristocracy. We have no confidence in either. We opposed in 1851 the reëstablishment of the empire in France, and opposed Napoleon III., when to oppose him was to incur the displeasure of nearly the whole Catholic public at home and abroad. We have shown in our article on European Politics, how we regard the new-fangled German cæsarism, which we detest not less under a political than an ecclesiastical point of view. We have always held that every nation should have, subject only to the law of God, the government of itself.

But in every people there is the pars sanior, what Jefferson calls "the natural aristocracy" of the nation, and what we term the natural leaders of the people. The condemnation of the democratic doctrine of equality is, that it deprives these natural leaders of their legitimate position and influence, and gives the lead to the pars insanior. We have no quarrel with the political constitution of our country,

VOL. XVIII-34