Growth of American Theories of Popular Government

Abstract

Next to the conception of a visible church, no abstraction has had such an effect upon the minds of men as the idea of the State as an organization. The Roman Imperium has been a regnant principle in Europe for twenty centuries, against which the church in the Middle Ages made head with its doctrine of “The Two Swords”—church and empire. To the French mind “L'Etat” is something different from the body of Frenchmen or the French nation; and the old fashioned English idea of “God and the King” expressed a conception of an abstract sovereign power. It is strange that the people who have done most to alter the world's acceptance as to what government ought to be, have furnished no political creative mind, formulated no accepted philosophical basis for their government, and justify Bryce's dictum that the Americans have had no theory of the State, and have felt no need for one. “Even the dignity of the State has vanished. It seems actually less than the individuals who live under it—the nation is nothing but so many individuals. The government is nothing but certain representatives and officials.” Or as Tocqueville puts it: “As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding.” It is true that the Americans are people who would speak disrespectfully of the equator if they knew of its existence; yet no people is more profoundly influenced by a body of political doctrine, only their point of view is that they practice freedom, equality and self-government, and therefore suppose that there must be definite principles behind those usages. While the French with their national acuteness in analysis and generalization deduce the principles of liberty from the nature of man and then strive to work them out in practice, the American theory of government is to be sought, not in treatises on political ethics or the disquisitions of American statesmen, but in the acts of assemblies, votes of conventions, proclamations of presidents and governors, and the thousand instances of exercise of an accepted authority.