CHAPTER II.

THE DEMOCRACY IN HISTORY

The history of the Democracy is the history of the Republic. It had its origin as soon after the formation of the thirteen colonies as the people came to a realization of their rights as individuals. Mr. Jefferson, the founder of the party, came from aristocratic surroundings, but his sympathies from the beginning were with the "common people." His brain conceived and his hand wrote the Declaration of Independence, altogether the most notable document of its kind that ever came from human hands. Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, who has made the most careful examination of the literature of that period, says in his History of American Literature that this product from the pen of the first great Democrat has been more extensively quoted in all languages and in all races than any other. It has been the universal voice for all peoples asserting their independence against the oppression of an alien race. In South America, in Greece, in the far East, it has been quoted word for word. Americans accustomed to the cheap oratory of "patriot" declaimers are apt to forget the significance of this fact, which, however, remains as the most splendid instance of American patriotic literature, never to be forgotten; never to be belittled.

It has been remarked of Mr. Jefferson, and truly, that while other charters of liberty proclaim the liberties of a single people, his great pronouncement deals with the liberties of the human race. We find an explanation of this in the fact that for several years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence Mr. Jefferson lived in Paris, in the immediate vortex of the great events which constituted the French Revolution. There he was an immediate witness of those facts which Thomas Carlyle has made immortal in his History. Other patriots have dealt with the rights of their own people. "We declare," says Mr. Jefferson, "the equality of all mankind.” That was his theme. It was that which alienated him from the people of his own class and placed him upon the pedestal belonging exclusively to the great champions of human liberty the world over. De Tocqueville said, thirty years after

Mr. Jefferson's death: "The people of this Republic will maintain the full dignity of their institutions so long as they preserve the ideals which their founders have established." The French statesman, like the Virginian, was an aristocrat by birth, but he had learned by the study of human history, as Jefferson had learned, that all men were created equal. He was quick to perceive that this was the basic fact of the then new republic.

Jefferson was the champion of the Democracy.

The fact and the

word come down to us in these times as truisms, but as it has been remarked the truths of one age become the truisms of the next. Thomas Jefferson belonged to the race of men which creates truism. Democracy, etymologically as well as historically, means the government of the people demos and krateo. Such a meaning necessarily implies a division of society into classes, each with a sort of stability. The sovereignty originally resided in one of these classes, which naturally was a select class of the rich and favored. Jefferson was one of the first to grasp the fact that this sovereignty which had been arrogated to the few belonged of right to the many. He was and always will be remembered as the champion of the people. His favorite maxim was, "I trust the common people; their judgment is never in error in respect of principles involving their own rights." It is well in the light of recent events to remember that this great statement of human rights was in all cases and at all stages of his momentous career recalled with pleasure by the President who assisted at the foundation of the Republican party but from whose tenets the party has so far departed-Abraham Lincoln.

The Democracy of modern times has not and could not have the same meaning as that of antiquity. But it is none the less true that the very notion of Democracy differs profoundly from' that which the ancients formed of it and that it no longer responds to the same ideas or expresses exactly the same facts. It may be said without irreverence that the Christ was the first democrat of history. Modern nations were formed under the influence of his teachings and man, according to the conception which has prevailed for nearly twenty centuries, has been following, blindly it may be, but none the less implicitly, the doctrines which He pronounced as the foundation of the new era. According to Christianity, it is man as such that has the greatest value.

This is the fundamental of the democratic doctrine. All the children

of God, the entire brotherhood of man, belong to the same family and have equal rights. These doctrines which we now accept as truisms were considered anarchical, heretical one hundred years ago. It required the moral courage of a Montesquieu or a Voltaire, or a Paine or a Jefferson to declare them in the fervid light which was evoked by the events of the last century.

These general principles found full scope for their application to the immediate affairs of human kind amidst the events that signalized the foundation of the republic. There was no differentiation of parties, as we know them, until after the thirteen colonies had separated themselves from the parent monarchy. It was then that the wise hand and great brain of the founder of the Democratic party came to the front to shape the Declaration of the new republic. The distinction between Whig and Tory had previously been well defined in the Old Country. On this side of the Atlantic it soon took shape as a line of demarcation between those who adhered to the old theory of monarchical gov ernment and the new doctrine of popular rights and popular government. Mr. Jefferson, whom it is the happy heritage of the democracy to have followed in all his pronouncements upon this great subject, was one of the first to outline the principles of the democracy. One says "new democracy" with something like reverence for the daring, the mental audacity of the man who in that environment was strong enough to stand forth and proclaim the rights of the "common people." According to the pronouncements of Lord North and the Tories of King George III, who at that time represented the consensus of aristocratic opinion, the common people had no rights and it remained for Jefferson and his associates to assert them; at what a cost to their social and political position we can only imagine.

It is perhaps sufficient for this purpose to record that Mr. Jefferson's most notable pronouncement in 1776 was the occasion of a universal reversion from the accepted ideas of that time to those which we now receive as the fundamentals of our liberties. The Tory party has be come a historical reminiscence. It was abolished at the close of the War of the Revolution when the triumphant Whigs confiscated the estates of its more active members and compelled them to leave the boundaries of the colonies. Some of them found refuge in Europe, but not a few crossed the northern line into the loyal Dominion of Canada and there some of their descendants are to be found to this day foment

ing the cause of monarchy and with the assistance of Mr. McKinley's Secretary of State maintaining even at this late date the rights of the select few as against the rights of the democracy. These are among the sequences of history to which the philosopher turns with instruction and sometimes with amusement.

Mr. Jefferson was in Europe when the confederacy was formed between the thirteen colonies. As has been said, he was at this critical period of his life associated with the great champions of human liberty who have given to the world the immortal document of that period. The value of these lessons is to be seen in his later works.

But before the end of the year 1776 most of the colonies, now the states, had settled their forms of individual government. It is one of the truisms of American constitutional history, which, however, can not be too often reiterated, that the fundamental principle of this confederation consisted in this single fact: that such rights as are expressly given to the Federal Government are its own and that all others belong as a matter of course to the individual states. The Supreme Court has now and again reasserted this important principle, but Americans, especially in the present tide of federalistic tendencies, are too apt to forget it, and to arrogate to the central power at Washington functions which the founders of the Republic expressly reserve to themselves as members of the constitutional colonies or states. If the Governor of Idaho had recalled this fact; if he and his associates in the mad rush of federalistic assertion which he maintained during the affairs at the Coeur d'Alene had remembered the fundamentals of American liberty as they were asserted by the founders of the Republic it is scarcely to be believed that such outrages as have been recently perpetrated in that far-away Western State could have found the justification which he has since had the temerity to put forward in the name of law and the constitution. It is scarcely possible to believe that if the President of the United States had been mindful of those precepts of liberty upon which his office was based, he would have given the name and authority of his great office to these same outrages. It is always safe, but it is seldom convenient, for the apostles of the new imperialism to hark back to the familiar but always true doctrines upon which the Republic was founded.

This is not a history of the Democracy. That chapter in the record of our liberty is to be found only upon the pages which record the peren

nial, the unceasing and the undaunted struggle of the common people against those who from the beginning have sought to abridge their liberty and restrain their powers. It is perhaps enough even to glance at the period during which these high principles were established upon their present high pedestal. Americans of this generation look back with amazement to the time when such respectable and respected leaders as Hamilton and Quincy Adams asserted their distrust in the wisdom and discretion of the common people. That was the basis of the Federalistic policy. Hamilton did not hesitate to assert it. Himself of doubtful foreign origin, born and perhaps bred in the atmosphere of monarchy, he was bold and unreserved in his assertions that no safety was to be found in the consensus of public opinion. Like Jefferson he had studied the Revolution of France. But unlike the founder of the Democracy, he had failed to derive therefrom the principles upon which we have since reared the fabric of our liberty. There arose, and especially in the select colonies upon the James river, and in New England, a coterie of men undoubtedly honest, though as we see them now, undoubtedly wrong, who felt and said that government was a function belonging to the few, the educated, the rich, the aristocratic, the conservative, the select.

It was against this class that Jefferson, himself a member, fought the great battles of his life. He never doubted and he never permitted others to doubt the supreme wisdom and the supreme authority of the "common people."

This doctrine was bequeathed in its entirety upon his death to that other great champion of the Democracy, Andrew Jackson, who came into his heritage as the leader of the people in the first quarter of the present century.

Mr. Jackson was maligned with the same fervor of hatred and the same indiscriminating denunciation that has more recently been visited upon a more recent champion of the Democracy who is now placed before the people as their champion against the assertions of the aristocratic class. Mr. Jackson, like Mr. Bryan, was a child of the people. He came of respectable but not of aristocratic parentage. The traditions of his family, like those of "Old Hickory" himself, were pious but not puritanical. Early in his life he found himself arraigned against the select few. His sympathies were on the other side. He was and is forever remembered as the friend of the people.