Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
Now in considering the situation that confronts us, we find certain
respects in which either the methods are bad, or the results, or both.
There is no unanimity in this criticism, indeed I doubt if any two of us
would agree on all the items in the indictment, though we all might
unite on one or two. I can only give my own list for what it is worth.
In the first place we, in common with all the nations, have drifted into
imperialism of a gross scale and illiberal, even tyrannical working. We
could hardly do otherwise for such has been the universal tendency for
more than an hundred years. By constant progression municipal
governments have absorbed into themselves matters that in decency, and
with any regard for liberty, belong to the individual. Simultaneously
our state governments have followed the same course, infringing even on
the just prerogatives of the towns and cities, while, more than all, the
national government has robbed the states, the cities and the citizens
of what should belong to them, until at last we have an imperial,
autocratic, inquisitorial, and largely irresponsible government at
Washington that is the one supreme political fact; we are no longer a
Federal Republic but an Imperialism, in which is centralized all the
authority inherent in the one hundred and ten millions of our population
and from which a constantly diminishing stream of what is practically
devolved authority, trickles down through state and city to the
individual in the last instance--if it gets there at all! This I believe
to be absolutely and fatally wrong. In the first place, human society
cannot function at this abnormal scale, it is outside the human scale,
for in spite of our pride and insolence there are limits on every hand
to what man can do. In the second place, I conceive it to be absolutely
at variance with any principle of republicanism or democracy or even of
free monarchy. It is at one only with the imperialism of Egypt, Babylon,
Rome and the late Empire of Germany. In a free monarchy, a republic, or
a democracy, the pyramid of political organism stands, not on its point
but broad-based and four-square, tapering upward to its final apex. A
sane and wholesome society begins with the family--natural or
artificial--which has original jurisdiction over a far greater series of
rights and privileges than it now commands. From the family certain
powers are delegated to the next higher social unit, the village or
communal group, which in its turn concedes certain of its inherent
rights to the organic group of communities, or states, and finally the
states commit to the last and general authority, the national
government, some of the elements of authority that have been delegated
to them. The principle of this delegation from one organism to another,
is common interest and welfare; only those functions which can be
performed with more even justice and with greater effectiveness, by the
community for example, than by the family, are so delegated. In the same
way the several groups commit to their common government only so much as
they cannot perform with due justice and equity to the others in the
same group. In the end the national government exists only that it may
provide for a limited number of national necessities, as for example,
defence against extra-national aggression, the conduct of diplomatic
relations with foreign powers, the maintaining of a national currency
and a national postal service, the provision of courts of last resort,
and the raising of revenue for the support of these few and explicit
functions.
The first step, it seems to me, towards governmental reform, is
decentralization, with a return to the States, the civic communities and
the individual citizens of nine-tenths of the powers and the
prerogatives that have been taken from them in defiance of abstract
justice, of the principles of free government and of the theory of the
workable unit of human scale. In a word we must abandon imperialism and
all its works and go back to the Federal Republic.
The second cause of our troubles lies, I believe, in the institution of
universal suffrage founded on the theory (or dogma) that the electoral
franchise is an inalienable right. This doctrine is of recent invention,
only coming into force during the "reconstruction period" following the
War between the States, when it was brought forward by certain leaders
of the Republican party to justify their enfranchisement of the negroes
in the hope that by this act they could fix their party in power to
perpetuity. In any case, the plan itself has worked badly, both for the
community and for many of the voters. It is of course impossible for me
to argue the case in detail; I can do hardly more than state my own
personal belief, and this is that the question is wholly one of
expediency, and that the question of abstract justice and the rights of
man does not enter into the consideration. I submit that the electoral
franchise should again be accepted as a privilege involving a duty, and
not as a right inherent in every adult person of twenty-one years or
over and not lunatic or in jail. This privilege, which in itself should
confer honour, should be granted to those who demonstrate their capacity
to use it honestly and intelligently, and taken away for cause.
The acute critic will not be slow to remind me that this proposition is
somewhat beside the case and that it possesses but an academic interest,
since we are dealing with a _fait accompli._ This is of course perfectly
true. The electoral franchise could be so restricted only by the
suffrages of the present electorate, and it is inconceivable that any
large number, and far less, a majority, of voters would even consider
the proposition for a moment. For good or ill we have unrestricted adult
suffrage, and there is not the faintest chance of any other basis being
established by constitutional means. Something however can be done, and
this is a thing of great value and importance. What I suggest is
concerted effort towards a measured purification of the electorate
through the penalizing of law-breakers by temporary disfranchisement. It
is hardly too much to assume that a man who deliberately breaks the law
is constructively unfit to vote or to hold office, at all events,
conviction for any crime or misdemeanour gives a reasonable ground for
depriving the offender of these privileges, at least for a time. The
law-breaking element, whether it is millionaire or proletarian, is one
of the dangerous factors in society, which would lose nothing if from
time to time these gentry were removed from active participation in
public affairs. If, for example, any one convicted of minor offenses
punishable by fine or imprisonment were disfranchised for a year, if of
major offenses, for varying and increasing periods, from five years
upwards, and if a second offense during the period of disfranchisement
worked an automatic doubling of the time prescribed for a first offense,
I conceive that the electorate would be measurably purified and that
regard for the law would be stimulated. In one instance I am persuaded
that disfranchisement should be for life, and that is in the case of
giving or accepting a bribe or otherwise committing a crime against the
ballot; this, together with treason against the state, should be
sufficient cause for eliminating the offender from all further
participation in public affairs. If the electorate could be purified
after this fashion, and if more stringent laws could be passed in the
matter of naturalization of aliens, together with iron-clad requirements
that every voter should be able to speak, read and write the English
language, we should have achieved something towards the safeguarding of
the suffrage.
The third weakness in our system, and in some respect the most
dangerous, as it is in all respects the most pestiferous, is the
insanity of law-making. All parliamentary governments suffer from this
malady, but that of the United States most grievously, and this is true
of the national government, the states and the municipalities. It has
become the conviction of legislative bodies that they must justify their
existence by making laws, and the more laws they pass the better they
have discharged their duties. The thing has become a scandal and an
oppression, for the liberties of American citizens and the just
prerogatives of the states and the cities, as vital human groups, have
been more infringed upon, reduced, and degraded by free legislation than
ever happened in similar communities by the action of absolute monarchs.
It is a folly that works its insidious injury in two ways; first by
confusing life by innumerable laws ill-advised, ill-drawn, mutually
contradictory, ephemeral in their nature, inquisitorial in their
workings; second, by creating a condition where any personal or factious
interest can be served by due process of law, until at last we have
reached a point where liberty itself has largely ceased to exist and we
find ourselves crushed under a tyranny of popular government no less
oppressive than the tyranny of absolutism. Nor is this all; the mania
for making laws has bred a complete and ingenious and singularly
effective system of getting laws made by methods familiar to the members
of all legislative bodies whether they are city councils, state
legislatures or the national congress, and this means opportunities for
corruption, and methods of corruption, that are fast degrading
government in the United States to a point where there is none so poor
as to do it reverence. The whole system is preposterous and absurd,
breeding not only bad laws, but a widespread contempt of law, while the
personal freedom for which democracy once fought, is fast becoming a
memory.
The trouble began as a result of one of the elements in the American
Constitution which was the product not of the sound common sense and the
lofty judgment of the framers, but of a weak yielding to one of the
doctrinaire fads of the time that had no relationship to life but was
the invention of political theorists, and that was the unnatural
separation of the executive, legislative and judicial functions of
government. The error has worked far and the superstition still holds.
What is needed is an initiative in legislation, centred in one
responsible head or group, that, while functioning in all normal and
necessary legislative directions, still allows individual initiative on
the part of the legislators, as a supplementary, or corrective, or
protective agency. No government functions well in fiscal matters
without a budget: what we need in legislative matters is a legislative
budget, and by this phrase, I mean that the primary agency for the
proposing of laws should be the chief executive of a city, or state or
the nation, with the advice and consent of his heads of departments who
would form his cabinet or council.
Under this plan the Governor and Council, for example, would at the
opening of each legislative session present a programme or agenda of
such laws as they believed the conditions to demand, and in the shape of
bills accurately drawn by the proper law officer of the government. No
such "government" bill could be referred to committee but must be
discussed in open session, and until the bills so offered had been
passed or refused, no private bill could be introduced. A procedure such
as this would certainly reduce the flood of private bills to reasonable
dimensions while it would insure a degree of responsibility now utterly
lacking. There is now no way in which the author of a foolish or
dangerous bill which has been enacted into law by a majority of the
legislature, can be held to account and due responsibility imposed upon
him, but the case would be very different if a mayor, a governor or the
President of the United States made himself responsible for a law or a
series of laws, by offering them for action in his own name. Certainly
if this method were followed we should be preserved in great measure
from the hasty, confused and frivolous legislation that at present makes
up the major part of the output of our various legislative bodies. One
of the greatest gains would be the reduction of the annual grist to a
size where each act could be considered and debated at sufficient length
to guarantee as reasonable a conclusion as would be possible to the
members of the legislative body. The deplorable device of instituting
committees, to each of which certain bunches of bills are referred
before they are permitted to come before the house, would be no longer
necessary. This system, which became necessary in order to deal with the
enormous mass of undigested matter which has overwhelmed every
legislature as a result of the present chaotic and irresponsible
procedure, is perhaps both the most undemocratic device ever put in
practice by a democracy, and the most fruitful of venality, corruption
and injustice. It is unnecessary to labour this point for everyone knows
its grave evils, but there seems no way to get rid of it unless some
curb is placed on the number of bills introduced in any session. The
British Parliament is not necessarily a model of intelligent or capable
procedure, but where in one session at Westminster no more than four
hundred bills were introduced, at Washington, for the same period, the
count ran well over twelve thousand! Manifestly some committee system is
inevitable under conditions such as this, but under the committee system
free government and honest legislation are difficult of attainment.
One would not of course prevent the proposal of a bill by any member of
the legislature, indeed this free action would be absolutely necessary
as a measure of protection against executive oppression, but this should
be prohibited until after the government programme had been disposed of.
After that task was accomplished the legislature might sit indefinitely,
or as long as the public would stand it, for the purpose of considering
private bills, and these could be referred to committees as at present.
The chances are, however, that the government programme would cover the
most essential matters and what would remain would be the edifying
spectacle of Solons solemnly considering such questions as the minimum
length of sheets on hotel beds, the limitation in inches and fractions,
of the heels of women's shoes, the amount of flesh that could be legally
exposed by a bathing suit, or the pensioning of a Swedish Assistant
Janitor,--all of which are the substance of actual bills introduced in
various State legislatures during the session last closed.
Another grave weakness in our system is the election by popular vote of
many judicial and administrative officers, coupled with the vigorous
remnants of the old and degrading "spoils system" whereby many thousands
of strictly non-political offices are almost automatically vacated after
any partisan victory. I cannot trust myself to speak of the infamy of an
elective judiciary; fortunately I live in a state where this worst abuse
of democratic practice does not exist, and so it touches me only in so
far as it offends the sense of decency and justice. In the other cases
it is only a question of efficient and intelligent administration. There
is an argument for electing the chief executive of a city, a state or
the nation, by popular vote, and the same holds in the case of the lower
house of the legislature where a bi-cameral system exists, but there is
no argument for the popular election of the administrative officers of a
state. There is even less,--if there can be less than nothing--for the
changes in personnel that take place after every election. Civil service
reform has done a world of good, but as yet it has not gone far enough
in some directions, while its mechanism of examinations is defective in
principle in that it leaves out the personal equation and establishes
its tests only along a very few of the many lines that actually exist. I
would offer it as a proposition that no election should in itself affect
the status of any man except the man elected, and, in the case of a
mayor or governor or the President, those who are directly responsible
to him and to his administration for carrying out his policies; and
further, that the voter, when he votes, should vote once and for one man
in his city, once and for one man in his state, and once and for one man
in the nation, and that man, in each case, should be his representative
in the lower branch of the legislative body. Choosing administrative
officials by majority vote, and the election of judges for short terms
by the same method, are absurdities of a system fast falling into chaos.
The maintenance of a bi-cameral legislative organization, with the
choosing of the members of both houses by the same electorate is in the
same class, a perfectly irrational anomaly which violates the first
principles of logic and leads only to legislative incompetence, and
worse. The referendum is of precisely the same nature, but this already
has become a _reductio ad absurdum,_ and can hardly survive the
discredit into which it has fallen. In any reorganization of government
looking towards better results, these elements must disappear.
As a matter of fact, government has come to occupy altogether too large
a place in our consciousness; naturally, for it has come to a point
where it pursues us--and overtakes us--at every turn. Democracies always
govern too much, that is one of their great weaknesses. Elections,
law-making, and getting and holding office, have become an obsession and
they shadow our days. So insistent and incessant are the demands, so
artificial and unreal the issues, so barren of vital results all this
pandemonium of partisanship and change, the more intelligent and
scrupulous are losing interest in the whole affair, and while they
increasingly withdraw to matters of a greater degree of reality those
who subsist on the proceeds gain the power, and hold it. At the very
moment when the women of the United States have been given the vote,
there are many men (and women also) who begin to think that the vote is
a very empty institution and in itself practically void of power to
effect anything of really vital moment. I am not now defending this
position, I only assert that it exists, and I believe it is due to the
degradation of government through the very modifications and
transformations that have been effected, since the time of Andrew
Jackson, in a perfectly honest attempt at improvement.
The best government is that which does the least, which leaves local
matters in the hands of localities, and personal matters in the hands of
persons, and which is modestly inconspicuous. Good government
establishes, or recognizes, conditions which are stable, reliable, and
that may be counted on for more than two years, or four years, at a
time. It has continuity, it preserves tradition, and it follows custom
and common law. Such a government is neither hectic in its vicissitudes
nor inquisitorial in its enactments. It is cautious in its expenditures,
efficient in its administration, proud in maintaining its standards of
honour, justice and "noblesse oblige." Good government is august and
handsome; it surrounds itself with dignity and ceremony, even at times
with splendour and pageantry, for these things are signs of self-respect
and the outward showing of high ideals--or may be made so; that is what
good manners and ceremony and beauty are for. Finally, good government
is where the laws of Christian morals and courtesy and charity that are
supposed to hold between Christian men hold equally, even more
forcefully, in public relations both domestic and foreign. Where
government of this nature exists, whether the form is monarchical,
republican or democratic, there is liberty; where these conditions do
not obtain the form matters not at all, for there is a servile state.
At the risk of being tedious I will try to sketch the rough outlines of
what, in substance, I believe to be that form of civil polity which,
based on what now exists, changes only along lines that would perhaps
tend towards establishing and maintaining those ideals of liberty, order
and justice which have always been the common aim of those who have
striven to reform a condition of things where they were attained
indifferently or not at all.
The primary and effective social and political unit is the "vill" or
commune; that is to say, a group of families and individuals living in
one neighbourhood, and of a size that would permit all the members to
know one another if they wished to do so, and also the coming together
of all those holding the electoral franchise, for common discussion and
action. The average American country town, uninvaded by industrialism,
is the natural type, for here the "town meeting" of our forefathers is
practicable, and this remains the everlasting frame and model of
self-government. In the case of a city the primary unit would be of
approximately the same size, and the entire municipality would be
divided into wards each containing, say, about five hundred voters.
These primary units would possess a real unity and a very large measure
of autonomy, but they would be federated for certain common purposes
which would vary in number and importance in proportion to the closeness
of their common interests, from the county, made up of a number of small
villages, to the city which would comprise as many wards as might be
numerically necessary, and whose central government would administer a
great many more affairs than would the county. The city would be in
effect a federation of the wards or boroughs.
The individual voter would exercise his electoral franchise and perform
his political duties only within the primary unit (the township or ward)
where he had legal residence. At an annual "town meeting" he would vote
for the "selectmen" or the ward council who would have in charge the
local interests of the primary unit, which would be comprehensive in the
case of a township, necessarily more limited in the case of a ward.
These local boards would elect their own chairmen who would also form
the legislative body of the county or the municipality. At the same town
meeting the voter would cast his ballot for a representative in the
lower legislative body of the state. In the smaller commonwealths each
township or ward would elect its own representative, but in states of
excessive population representation would have to be on the basis of
counties and municipalities, for no legislative body should contain more
than a very few hundred members. Nominations in the town meeting should
be _viva voce,_ elections by secret ballot. Legislation should be
primarily on the initiative of the selectmen or ward council, and voting
should be _viva voce._ With the exercise of his privilege of speaking
and voting at the meetings of his primary unit, the direct political
action of the citizen would cease.
The secondary unit would be the county or the city. Here the legislative
body would consist of the presiding officers of the township or ward
governments. The sheriff of a county or the mayor of a city would be
chosen by these legislative bodies from their own number and should hold
office for a term of several years, while the local governments, and
therefore the legislative bodies of the county or the city, would be
chosen annually. The chief executive of a county or city would appoint
all heads of departments who would form his advisory council, and he
would also frame and submit annually both a fiscal and a legislative
budget.
The tertiary unit is the state, which is a federation of the counties
and cities forming some one of the historic divisions of the United
States. The legislature would as now be composed of two chambers, one
made up of representatives of the primary units, holding office for a
brief term, and a second representing the secondary units and chosen by
their governing bodies for a long term. The logic of a bi-cameral system
demands that the lower house should represent the changing will of the
people, the upper, in so far as possible, its cumulative wisdom and the
continuity of tradition, while, as already stated, the whole principle
is vitiated if both houses are chosen by the same electorate. The chief
executive should be chosen by the legislative chambers in joint session,
from a panel made up of their own membership and the heads of the county
and city governments. He should hold office for a long term, preferably
for an indeterminate period contingent on "good behaviour." In this case
his cabinet, or council of the heads of departments, would of course be
responsible to the legislature and would resign on a formal vote of
censure or "lack of confidence." The Governor would have the same power
of appointment, and the same authority to present fiscal and legislative
budgets as, already specified in the case of a mayor of a city. No
"commissions," unpaid or otherwise, should be permitted, all the
administrative functions of government being performed by the various
departments and their subordinate bureaux.