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Reforms and Reformers

Art. II.—Next Those of Civil Progress. New York: Dutton & Co. 1874. 8vo, pp. 43.

We hope the next phase of civilization will mark a return to the correct use of our mother-tongue. Nothing is more characteristic of the present

phase than the improper use of terms. Every change, though for the worse, is termed a progress. Even the term civilization, hardly a century old,

and which at first was applied only to manners, and meant pretty much what was expressed by the "inland bred" of Shakespeare, is, if not

absolutely misused, used in a low and mean sense to designate something, which, in its effects, is at war with civil society and the development

and growth of intelligence and morality. The word science is used to designate what is not science, that is, theories, hypotheses, conjectures,

guesses, as we have seen in a foregoing article, which are not only not verified, but which it is impossible for the most scientific to verify, for they

lie outside of the field of science. Liberty is another term that is abused. With the Freethinker, liberty means freedom from the divine sovereignty,

and is the right to live as one lists; with the Protestant, liberty means freedom from the authority of pope and councils, and to follow one's own

private judgment in religion and morals; with the statesman, it means the supremacy of the state and the subjection of the spiritual order, that is,

civil despotism, as we see in Bismarck and Gladstone, and the Methodist journals passim; with the Democrat, it means freedom from kings and

nobles, and the supremacy, that is, the despotism of the people, while religious liberty means freedom riot of but from religion.

This misuse, or rather this perversion, of terms is something more than mere want of verbal precision or propriety; it is in effect downright

deception and lying, and enlists multitudes in support of causes which they would repudiate with horror, if called by their proper English names.

The mass of the people in all nations have honest instincts, think, perhaps, justly, but it is only the few who think and express themselves with

exactness and precision. Hence the designing few, by an adroit selection of terms, are able to impose on the multitude, and, by a skilful use of

popular or wellsounding words, to make them accept and enthusiastically support principles and measures in both Church and state, the reverse

of* what they are led to believe they are supporting. All errors in religion and politics, causing heresies, seditions, rebellions, and revolutions,

originate with the few, never with the many, and with the educated, never with the unlettered multitude. It is in fact a study with the leaders of

heretical and unpopular causes how to express their theuries in orthodox and consecrated terms, so as not to alarm, but so as to gain the

confidence of the people. We did so ourselves before we became a Christian, when we were a rationalist and a radical. It is only Catholics who do

not act on the maxim, "The end sanctifies the means."

The writer of the pamphlet before us is a believer in the modern doctrine of progress; for he inquires, not what will be the next phase of our civil

system, but what is to be the "next phase of civil progress," as if a change of any sort is necessarily progress. Now we wish people to understand

that all change is not progress, and that there are changes for the worse as well as for the better. We have no belief in the modern theory, that the

race is gradually but steadily advancing through the ages from the imperfect to or toward the perfect. We could much more easily believe the

doctrine of the Neapolitan Vico in his "Nuova Scienza," that the human race moves in circles, and constantly returns to the point from which it

started. We have never found any historical evidence of this continual progressiveness of the race, which we ourselves once called "the Evangel

of the nineteenth century." We did so on the faith of our advanced thinkers, certainly not as the result of our own investigations; but we hear in

these days many things honored as progress, and as proofs of advanced and advancing civilization, which are to us very plain indications of

deterioration, or a return to the barbarism, ignorance, and superstition from which the Church had rescued the ancient world.

The pamphlet seems to contemplate a reform in our civil institutions and governmental administration, and we make it a point to give a wide berth

to all reformers, and their plans of reforms, whether in religion or politics, in Church or state, from Luther down to Joe Smith or Brigham Young.

We have seen much evil, never any good, come from them. We will pass over in this article "the Glorious Reformation" of the sixteenth century,

which even some Protestants have pronounced a blunder—and in which every day is proving more and more conclusively that they are right—

and might go farther and call it a fatal blunder, not to say, a piece of downright deviltry, and not be far wrong. But we come to smaller matters,

and more within the comprehension of ordinary minds. Ever since we were old enough to take notice of such things, we have heard the party in

power, or at least the party in place, accused of extravagance and gross corruption, of violating the constitution, wasting the people's money, and

placing the country on the very verge of ruin. The honest and patriotic party everywhere demanded in thunder tones, which, when we were

young, almost made our blood curdle and our hair stand on end, "Retrenchment and Reform." "Retrenchment," "Dismiss the traitors, the

corruptionists, and give us an honest and economical government," was the cry. Well, we have observed that when the people took them at their

word, turned out the party in place, and put in the champions of "Retrenchment and Reform," the retrenchment and reform did not take place, the

expenses of the government were nearly doubled, and the fraud and corruption charged upon their predecessors were trebled, if not quadrupled.

We thought in 1860 there could not be a more corrupt party than the old Democratic party, but the Republican party has surpassed them; and if

we are to believe what the journals say, the party was honest and pure under Lincoln and Seward in comparison with what it is under President

Grant and his staff.

A great demand for reform in our city government was made a few years since: a committee of seventy Regulators to take the management of our

affairs, to break up the "Ring," and to turn out and prosecute the thieves, was formed. It was done. The Regulators got themselves or their

candidates elected to office, and the reformed government proved worse than its predecessor. It not only did far less for the improvement of the

city, has far less to show than had Tweed, Connolly and Co., but it has increased the taxes, and expended or pocketed more money. We have long

since made it a rule to trust no professed Reform party, and to avoid the man that claims to be a Reformer, for we have found by experience that

reforms only make matters worse.

Should the Democratic party come into power, as seems now not unlikely, they may correct some of the blunders of the Grant party in the

Southern States, or leave the real people of those States to manage their own affairs, as the other States are left, without the intervention of

Federal bayonets, which would be something; but in other respects we have no reason to believe the Democrats will prove a whit more honest or

less corrupt than the Republicans. Besides, they have been debarred the public crib so long, that they will be much hungrier and more ravenous

than those who are already well gorged with public plunder. The Democrats do not appear to have any recognized leader, or any well-defined line

of public policy.

"The civil system of the United States is vitiated," says the pamphlet in its opening sentences, "by the trust that confides high civil functions to the

needy, by the political ignorance of the working class, and by inordinate liberty. The object of this pamphlet is to submit to the political

philosopher a scheme of civil reform corrective of these defects. It consists of three measures: 1st. The limitation of high civil function to rich

graduates of universities; 2d. A political education of the working class sufficient to exclude subversive ideas, and to qualify them, at least rudely,

for the exercise of the franchise; and 3d. Such an increase of civil power as will serve, without needless encroachment on individual liberty, to

exclude unsafe liberty."

We know not who is the author of the pamphlet, but he is stupid enough and ignorant enough of the practical workings of civil government in

modern society to be himself a rich graduate of a university. His three measures are impracticable, and would accomplish nothing if they were not.

But the author misapprehends the real vice of our civil system, which is not in the system itself, but in human nature, and the lack of the Christian

faith and moral discipline in the people; and this lack is as great, if not even greater, in the educated and wealthy as in the working class and the

poor. The writer is a Protestant, and holds the Protestant, that is, the heathen maxim, that poverty and crime go together. Hence our New York

Legislature, always an admirable exponent of the principles and tendencies of the age, places the public charities and corrections under one and

the same Board of Commissioners. No doubt there are criminals among the poor, but there are virtues among them fur which you will look in vain

among the so-called respectable classes, that is, the rich and well-to-do. The blessed apostle St. James, in his Epistle, has a passage which our

pamphleteer would do well to read, though it is not likely he would profit much by it:—

"Go to now, ye rich men; weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are putrified, and your garments are moth-eaten.

Your gold and silver are rusted: and the rust of them shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. You have stored up to

yourselves wrath against the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers, who have reaped your fields, of which you have defrauded them, crieth

out; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have feasted upon earth; and in luxuries have nourished your

hearts in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and put to death the just one; and he resisted you not." (St. James, v, 1-6.)

Yet the rich are honored and the poor despised. For, as St. James had already said, "If there come into your assembly a man having a gold ring, in

fine apparel, and there come also a poor man in mean attire, and you cast your eyes on him that is clothed in fine apparel, and say to him, Sit thou

here in a good place; and say to the poor man, Stand thou there, or sit under my footstool: do you not judge within yourselves and are become

judges of unjust thoughts? Hearken, my dearest brethren: hath not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which

God hath promised to them that love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Do not the rich oppress you by might, and do they not draw you

before the judgmentseats? Do they not blaspheme the good name that is invoked on you? If then you fulfil the royal law, according to the

Scriptures, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, you do well. But if you have respect of persons, you commit sin, being reproved by the law as

transgressors." (lb. ii, 2—9.)

It is no wonder that the founder of Protestantism had a mean opinion of the epistle of St. James, and that Luther called it an "epistle of straw," for

Protestantism, as heathenism, honors the rich and despises the poor. The American people, or the ruling portion of them, are eminently Protestant,

and count the wealthy and well-to-do people the respectable classes; brand the poor as the lower class, and treat poverty as a vice, as a crime,

always something disreputable. Here, in this fact, is the vice of the American civil system. As long as wealth is held to be the title to honor, and

poverty is held to be disreputable, and punished as a crime, no constitutional changes can improve the system, or prevent the evils our

pamphleteer thinks flow from it. Till we have a religion prevalent in the nation that makes a man prefer justice to riches, and that honors instead of

despising the poor, things will only go on from bad to worse. It needs no profound political philosophy, or extraordinary insight into the springs of

human action, to say with assurance so much.

The civil system of the United States may have its defects, but, as far as we can judge, it is as perfect as the civil system of any other country, or

as the wit of man can make it: any tampering with it will only mar jts symmetry, and impair its efficiency. There are under it, no doubt, evils, great

evils, much inept and even mischievous legislation as well as ignorant and corrupt administration, but these are not faults of the civil system, but

of the people, and no constitutional changes or provisions can prevent or lessen them. Governments, whatever their constitution or form, can do

little to make a people virtuous, for they are, even the most absolute, powerless when they do not represent in some sense the public. As a rule, we

believe the people's representatives in Congress and in the several State Legislatures are above the average of the people in both intelligence and

virtue. We have never much admired President Grant; we have never regarded him as a high-toned gentleman, as a man with an acute and lively

moral sense, •who cares much one way or another for the public weal. He seems to look upon his office as held for the benefit of himself and

relatives and personal friends, and we presume he is determined to make the most of it, let the politicians clamor as they may! And yet we much

doubt, were we president, if we could perform the duties of the office much better than he does. We did not vote for his reelection in 1872, and

we certainly shall not vote for a third term in 1876; but if we had the naming of his successor, we should not know whom to name. The

Republican majority in Congress are for the most part small men, if you will, and not overstocked with honesty or public spirit, but they are

faithful representatives of their constituents, that is, the banks, railroad corporations, manufacturing companies, and the business men who employ

credit instead of capital; and it is very doubtful, if a Democratic Congress would not find itself obliged to do the bidding of the same constituents,

for their interests rule the country. It is only in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, where he can employ the army,

that the president is much more than a figurehead.

It was a saying of John C. Calhoun, that the government of a country follows always the stronger interest. Old Harrington, in his " Oceana," says

that it follows always the balance of property; and as that is on the side of the land, power goes always with the landed interest. Modern ingenuity

has modified this by the creation of huge business corporations, and making credit, that is, debt, stand for property. It has thus created a stronger

interest than that of land, and an interest that is sure to control, through its factors, the lawyers, the government, whatever party may be in power.

It is of little consequence how the people vote; this stronger interest is sure to triumph in the Executive chair, in the halls of legislation, perhaps

not yet on the judicial bench.

1. The first measure the pamphleteer recommends is based on a false assumption that rich graduates of universities are the most intelligent and

moral members of the community, and, therefore, the best fitted to be trusted with high civil functions. As a rule, to which there may be now and

then an exception, rich students are the least studious and the dullest of the members of our universities. Feeling that they will be under no

necessity to struggle to gain a living or a social position, already secured to them, they make but feeble efforts, and rarely carry off the honors of

the university. We find them outstripped by the sons of poor men, by students who feel that their future depends on themselves, on their own

exertions. Then the rich students, having plenty of money at their command, are usually the wildest and most dissolute members of the university

family. Moreover, our universities, as we have known them, do very little toward training their students for high civil functions; and those

graduates of universities who have risen to eminence as statesmen, have depended on knowledge not acquired in the university. Men, also, may

graduate from universities and be great rascals. The monster Robespierre graduated from a university, and with its highest honors. The organizer

of the Internationale was a university graduate, and so are most of the foreign originators of "subversive ideas," and leaders of seditions,

rebellions, and revolutions. The people, if not stirred up and misled by well-born, well-to-do, and well educated demagogues and conspirators, are

Conservative, disposed to be quiet, and obedient to "the powers that be." We have not observed that rich members of Congress, university-

educated or not, are more honest or less corruptible than others. They were not the ignorant and needy members who originated the American

Credit Mobilier and shared its plunder.

2. We have anticipated in great part Jhe reply to the second measure proposed. The pamphleteer evidently proposes it on the assumption that the

elections decide the character and policy of the government. Nothing, as a rule, is farther from the fact. Not the popular vote, but the stronger

interests of the community decide the governmental action and policy. You may by your popular vote turn out one set of functionaries, and put in

another set, no better, and most likely, worse, because less experienced and more greedy of power. You exchange Boss Tweed for Boss Green.

The policy and action of power follows the stronger, or the more active and energetic interest. Then, again, it is not the working class from

whence the danger comes. If individuals among them now and then exact or accept pay for their votes, it is the non-laboring classes, in whose

interests the votes are given, that pay for them, and the bribers are worse and more dangerous than the bribed.

We have some knowledge of the laboring classes: we have always sympathized with them, and we aided in organizing the original workingmen's

party, the first organized in this country, and we edited two journals, and assisted in editing a third at the same time in three different cities,

devoted to the cause of the workingmen, as we then understood it. Our views have since very much changed. Yet our interest in them has never

abated, or our respect for them lessened. We have found as much moral honesty among the laboring classes and the poor as we have ever found

among the so-called respectable classes; more disinterestedness, more power of self-sacrifice, and more and deeper love of country. The class

which we are led by our experience to regard as the lowest in the moral scale, are the so-called middle class. They surpass all others that we know

anything of, in griping avarice, hard-heartedness, and selfishness. They are devoured by envy of those above them, and wring all they can out of

those below them in social position. They are of the earth, earthy, indifferent to religion and wedded to the world. They were the first in the

nations that apostatized, to take Protestantism to their heart, and they will be the last to give it up and return to Christianity. Few of them

volunteered to fight the battles of their country. They left the defence of their country, as they always do, to the gentlemen and workingmen,

while they sought to swindle both, and too often succeeded in doing it.

The working classes may not be highly educated, but, as far as our experience in elections for fifty years, since we could vote, has enabled us to

judge them, they as a rule vote as honestly, as intelligently, and with as much devotion to the public good as any other class of our community.

Even the freedmen at the South would for the most part prove themselves honest, peaceful, and industrious citizens, if let alone by scalawags and

carpet-baggers, or Northern adventurers and demagogues. A near relative of ours connected at the close of the war with the Freedmen's Bureau at

Atlanta, Georgia, an officer of the regular army, and highly educated, assured us that the most sensible and honest, as well as the most temperate

and industrious- people he met with in the large district subjected to his inspection, were the negroes and colored people.

We do not object to the education of the laboring classes, providing they receive an education suitable to laboring men and women, that does not

unfit them for their state in life, that does not create vague and vain longings in them, render them discontented, uneasy, restless, and thus prepare

them for sedition and rebellion. Subversive ideas never originate with the uneducated workingmen, but with the miscreants of another class, to

which our wise pamphleteer would restrict all high civil functions. There are, as the French say, education and education; and the clamorers for

the education of the working classes do not distinguish the one from the other. To be able to read, write, and cipher, is a convenience, sometimes a

necessity, but it is not to be educated. Knowledge is not necessarily virtue, nor is acquaintance with the inventions of science, or skill in the

practice of the arts; for we find both possessed, in eminent degree, by forgers, counterfeiters, and other professional rogues. There is no advantage

in that education which renders the poor discontented with their lot, creates an aversion to honest labor, and engenders envy, jealousy, bitterness,

and wrath toward those who more abound in this world's goods. Such an education disqualifies rather than qualifies the laboring classes for the

exercise of the franchise. The only education that can qualify them in any degree for the honest exercise of the franchise is that which trains them

to act always, and in all cases, in view of the end for which God creates them: to restrain their passions, to moderate their desires, to be loyal,

honest, and faithful in the discharge of the various duties of their state in life.

The pamphleteer must give up the false notion that the working classes are the dangerous clashes. They may be misled, and under certain

circumstances become turbulent, hut they are as a rule the most loyal and honest portion of , the community. The dangerous classes, from whom

the public has, most to apprehend, are those who are in a position to influence the government, to dictate its policy, and to make it an agent for

promoting private interests instead of the public good. The danger to our Republic comes precisely from the non-working classes, from bankers,

brokers, speculators, stockholders, and jobbers, the great industrial chiefs, and railroad kings, and against this danger there is and can be no legal

or constitutional protection, indeed t# protection at all, ao long as wealth is the passport to distinction or the mark of respectability, and poverty is

treated as disreputable and criminal. We can guard against it, not simply by doling out an alms to the destitute, but by honoring the poor. 3. The

third and last measure is not merely impracticable or inefficient, but is positively unjust. The end of government is not to restrain liberty, but to

protect it. It is instituted and clothed with authority for the very purpose of protecting society and the individual in all its and his natural rights. We

say natural rights, for we recognize no state of nature as prior to civil society. Such a state is a pure abstraction, and never had any real existence.

Man was born in society and, as Cicero says, remains there. His natural state is that of man in society, subject to its conditions; and his natural

rights, therefore, are the natural rights of man in society. The enjoyment of these rights, held from God through nature, is liberty, and to this liberty

every

individual is entitled. Society has from the same source authority, that is, the right and the duty, first to protect itself against the abuses of this

liberty, and, secondly, to protect every individual in the full possession and enjoyment of this liberty, and has no right to infringe upon it in any

respect whatever.

But the question here turns on civil rather than on personal liberty, as affected by constitutional guaranties. Does the constitution fail to recognize

the full authority or natural rights of society? If so, in what respect? If not, what is amiss in it? So far as we can judge, society under our

constitution has ample authority to protect itself, to defend its own rights, and to repress the abuses of individual liberty. What more is needed?

The abuses of liberty are not liberty, any more than the abuses of authority are authority. How, then, pretend that we have an excess of liberty? or

how can we restrain it without violating natural rights, or the natural law, which is what all the world understands by wrong or Injustice?

There is not in our community too much liberty, individual or social, but undoubtedly there is under the administration of our civil system too

much license or lawlessness. But the constitution gives ample power to the government, whether State or Federal, to suppress or to punish this

lawlessness or these abuses, and, if it does not, the fault is not in our civil system, but in the officers of government, who neglect their official

duty, or make themselves accomplices of the criminals. No little of the difficulty in the way of authority is interposed by the lawyers. There are,

we know, honorable and conscientious lawyers, who would use no unfair means to prevent a conviction or to obtain the acquittal of a client; but a

large number of criminal lawyers are little less than a nuisance. They have no regard for justice, and are ready to resort to any means, to any

chicanery, quibbles, technicalities, which they think will secure their client an acquittal. A lawyer may with a good conscience defend a prisoner

whom he knows to be guilty of the offence charged, but must limit his defence to seeing that he has a fair trial, that the law is properly

administered, and that his conviction is strictly legal. But what we most dislike in lawyers is their everlasting quibblings and technicalities, which

confuse a plain man's sense, and render the plainest matter unintelligible. Even Sir George Bowyer, who claims to be a thorough-going papist,"

could not forget his habits as a lawyer, but must quibble on Archbishop Manning's assertion that "the Church is above the state." The expression

he finds is not correct. The Church is not above the state. True, in one sense she is, but in another sense she is not; for the state is supreme in its

own order, in which order the Church has no authority. The Church is above the state only in her own order, that is, in the spiritual order, which

any Gallican might say. Sir George's mind was too legal to understand that the spiritual order represented by the Church is itself above the

temporal order represented by the state. It is by such petty quibbling and over-refinement that truth is obscured, and error introduced.

But the chief cause of the failure of government in our country, in the respect indicated, is public opinion, which, except on extraordinary

occasions, is averse to the legislation and to the execution of laws against license and the abuses of liberty. The fault is chiefly in a vicious public

opinion, which affects the administration of justice, not the constitution or the government; and the remedy is in the correction of public opinion,

which the journals do not and cannot do, because they depend on that very public opinion for their support. Their influence is to corrupt rather

than to correct public opinion. The most dangerous popular errors are precisely those which the so-called independent press propagates. The

correction can be made and a sound public opinion formed only by the ministers of the infallible Church who hold their authority from God, from

a source above the public, and are independent of the congregations they teach and govern.

But while we maintain that we have nothing to hope from the "next phase of the progress of civilization," we do not deny that there are many

evils, even great evils, to be deplored; but they are not greater than those to be found in all nations where the great majority of the people are

Protestants or non-Catholics. But be this as it may, we can attribute none of the evils to be complained of to our civil system, with which we are

perfectly satisfied, if the Protestant mania for reforming everything will leave it as it is. The evils are due to the vices and corruptions of the

people which no constitutional amendments or civil legislation can cure. There needs for that a power above the people, and informing and

directing public and private conscience, which Protestantism rejects as born of the devil, and which even not a few politicians who profess to be

Catholics have hitherto been reluctant to accept and obey. The great fact needs to be acknowledged, that the secular order does not suffice for

itself. It is only through the moral and spiritual influence of the Church that the people can be cured of the evils which are threatening the very

existence of our free Republic. The state may be despotic and practise tyranny, it may neglect justice and the public good, but it is impotent to

maintain wise, efficient, and free government without the cooperation and aid of the Church; for it is only by the aid of the Church, herself free

and independent, that public and private virtue can be generated and sustained, or that the people can be cured of their avarice and selfishness,

and rendered loyal and disinterested, self-denying and detached from the world. Our haughty statesmen and addle-pated politicians, self-conceited

and arrogant journalists, may turn up their noses at this or sneer at it as folly, but it is sober truth, and the nations can disregard it only at their

peril.