substantial accordance with the Senate report of 1881. If that condition had been annexed to the office in the first place, Mr. Alger would never have been there. No man would dare to take such a place, or could possibly hold it, who was not fully competent not only to administer but to defend and give reasons for his administration. Mr. McKinley, again, would never have dared to make such an appointment for such reasons in face of the criticism of a vigilant opposition before the country. Instead of an investigating committee sitting for months and then making a report to be settled in Congress by a pure party vote, a short and sharp personal encounter would very quickly decide whether the Secretary must go or remain, and that with a clear understanding on the part of the country which would go very far towards keeping such matters straight in the future. No details of administration or even of policy can be of any importance for the country to be compared at all || with such a principle of government as this. IN CHAPTER XXXV CONCLUSION N the Edinburgh Review of October, 1840, Mr. John Stuart Mill published an article upon De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," in which he thus sums up that author's conclusions: That democracy in the modern world is inevitable, and that it is on the whole desirable; but desirable only under certain conditions, and those conditions capable by human care and foresight of being realized, but capable also of being missed. He thinks it an inevitable result of the tendencies of a progressive civilization; by which he by no means intends to imply either praise or censure. No human effort, no accident, unless one which should throw back civilization itself, can avail, in his opinion, to defeat or even very considerably to retard this progress. But though the fact itself appears to him removed from human control, its salutary or baneful consequences do not. Like other great powers of nature, the tendency, though it cannot be counteracted, may be guided to good. Man cannot turn back the rivers to their source; but it rests with himself whether they shall fertilize or lay waste his fields. Left to its spontaneous course, with nothing done to prepare before it that set of circumstances under which it can exist with safety, and to fight against its worse by an apt employment of its better peculiarities, the probable effects of democracy upon well-being, and upon whatever is best and noblest in human character, appear to M. de Tocqueville extremely formidable. But with such use made of wise effort devoted to the purpose as it is not irrational to hope for, most of what is most mischievous in its tendency may, in his opinion, be corrected, and its natural capacities of good so far strengthened and made use of as to leave no cause for regret in the old state of society, and enable the new one to be contemplated with calm contentment, if without exultation. Mr. Mill then states De Tocqueville's historical argument that in seven centuries aristocracy and class privilege have been steadily dissolving; the development of riches and of material change has been tending to equality. "The noble has gone down on the social ladder, and the commoner has gone up. Every half-century brings them nearer to each other. "The Christian nations of our age seem to me to present a most alarming spectacle. The impulse which is bearing them along is so strong that it cannot be stopped, but it is not yet so rapid that it cannot be guided. Their fate is in their hands; yet a little while and it may be so no longer." Certainly the force of these passages has not been diminished in the sixty years which have since elapsed. In our opening chapter has been described the advance, during that period, of universal suffrage. When De Tocqueville wrote there were practically no railroads, no telegraphs, and no ocean steamships, while perhaps the greatest marvel and the greatest leveller of all, the modern banking system, was in its infancy. The vast increase of facilities for travel and commerce and consequent international intercourse; the immense development of wealth and still more of its fluctuation and instability; the intermarriage of the proudest houses with the children of enriched day-laborers, all are tending powerfully to bring humanity to a level, and to convert artificial distinctions of birth and rank into objects of contempt for all but their possessors. - Yet the problems described by De Tocqueville are looming up more portentously then ever. It is useless to consider whether aristocracy and a limited upper class produce the best results. Those things are gone and can never be replaced; at least till after convulsions which would destroy the present civilization. Can democracy be guided and controlled for its own good and that of the world? Or is it to be a devastating flood ever renewed and ever carrying desolation in its course? It seems a simple proposition that this is a question of government, of some power strong enough to repress evil forces and bring forward good ones, and that success in this depends upon organization just as much as in any private enterprise. It is somewhat curious that many of those who sneer most at any idea of bringing out the best and repressing the worst results of public opinion by means of improved organization are the most devoted to exaltation of our institutions as established by our fathers and to the practices which have grown up under them. They seem to forget that these institutions were themselves empirical methods of organization to be tested by results; and to overlook the fact that their most characteristic feature, a single executive head in president, governor, and mayor, has been neutralized and stripped of its real force and meaning. The principles of organization of government involved in democracy in its modern form are two: the concentration and the diffusion of power; and its history is in the conflict of these. Starting with the most salient feature of this government, a representative body, the first tendency in all cases is to regard this body as being itself the government and to intrust all effective power to it, or, speaking more correctly, to tolerate its assumption of such power. We have shown the reasons why this never has worked or can work successfully. The next step is to try to improve government by improving the quality of this representative body, through different modes of election, lengthened terms of office, less frequency or length of sessions, constitutional restrictions, etc.; all of which end in failure from the fundamental defect of intrusting the conduct of government to a more or less numerous body, with vacillating policy and want of steadiness in action and of personal responsibility. Then comes the attempt at improvement by increased diffusion of power through introducing the direct force of the popular will and the referendum as to particular measures, with VOL. II- -2 M the effect of rendering confusion worse confounded; not of doing away with the intrigue and bargaining of the legislature but of consecrating their results by popular sanction. The limit of diffusion of power having been thus reached is followed by a rebound to the other extreme of concentration of power, either in the hands of a military ruler as happened in Great Britain and France, or in the intermediate stage of boss rule, as illustrated in many States and notably in New York and Pennsylvania, not to speak of that other expedient for which Massachusetts is especially distinguished, the concentration of power in numerous commissions, perhaps the most effective method of training the people to unquestioning submission to an invisible and irresistible force over which they have no control. The problem which we have endeavored to present as involving the future of democracy is whether some mean term may not be found between that diffusion of power which, in a greater or less degree, results in anarchy, and that concentration of power which is popularly supposed, as in practice it for the most part has done, to lead to despotism. The first step to this end is to take care that the concentration of power is accompanied by a corresponding enforcement of responsibility, and the main question is to and by whom shall this responsibility be enforced. It will not do to intrust this to the legislature alone as in France and Italy, because this simply means the taking possession of the government by the legislature, that is, leads to the diffusion of power, which means anarchy. We have seen how even in Switzerland the evil is averted only by the peculiar circumstances of the country and the people; and how there also it has led to the popular referendum as to measures, which we have regarded as the extreme expression of anarchy. Nor will it do to have the responsibility of the working |