This is perfectly true. The people in question are fortunately few in England, nor have they ever climbed to the highest posts. But as they do exist among us an American may say that the picture in the novel is unfair in the same way as an English novel would be unfair which presented only such persons as figuring in English political life. Although, therefore, the American picture may be less misleading than a similar English picture would be, still it is misleading. The author of the novel is not to be blamed for this, for he wrote for his own countrymen, who would understand and allow for those exaggerations which we permit to a writer of fiction. It is only the English reader who is in danger of being misled. He may formay forget what the American reader knows, that there are plenty of public men at Washington who are just as upright, fair-minded, and high-minded as most of our leading politicians are in England. To determine the extent to which black sheep are to be found among members of Congress (taking them as a sample of the more successful politicians), and how far such persons have found their way into the front rank, would be hard even for an American, and is much harder for an Englishman. No doubt there are more who can be got at," whose vote can be influenced by lobbying, than would be found in the English Parliament. So the Americans say themselves, and a stranger may therefore say it without offence. But there are very few indeed who would take a bribe in a naked form, and there are not more who have given bribes to their constitutents, or been privy to giving, than were to be found in the English Parliament twenty years ago. "Lobbying," that is to say the working of a bill through the legislature, usually becomes personal solicitation, backed up by offers of some personal advantage. It is certainly far more rife than in England, and has thrown discredit on the profession of the lobbyist. The protective tariff, with the alterations which are sometimes made and constantly threatened in it, alterations affecting enormous commercial interests, is a fertile source of this evil. In general, however, it affects only what we should call private bill legislation. NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXVII., No. 1

There is also great laxity in the matter of giving pledges and making promises to catch the votes of particular sections. Members of Congress who in private will speak in harsh terms of Ireland and her people, and tell you that England is too lenient in her dealings with Irish conspiracy or obstruction, allow themselves to make speeches and give votes in support of Irish agitators and against England which excite the disgust of all sensible Americans.

It must further be admitted that the men who do or have done these things, and who maintain their position by jobbing appointments in a way to be explained presently, are sometimes conspicuous men, influential in the councils of their party, talked of for the highest offices, and occasionally rewarded by a judgeship, or a lucrative post, or a foreign mission. They are often powerful stump orators, draw crowds when they make an electioneering tour, and show great skill in manipulating those assemblies of the party that are called nominating conventions. Any one who should take his idea of American politics exclusively from the newspapers in which the doings of these politicians are chronicled and their characters reviled or defended, might suppose that they were the leading persons in the State, and would be alarmed at the prospect of their getting complete control of it. He would indeed perceive that there are also honest and patriotic men engaged in politics, but hearing less of these latter, he would think that they were always being jostled out of the game, and that the bad men were going to have it all their own way. The remarkable fact is that these bad men, though always on the point of getting the great places and doing terrible mischief there, never do get them. The wind lifts the apples just out of their reach, as it did from Tantalus in the Odyssey. They intrigue for nominations to the Presidency or some other exalted position, but at the last moment, when success seems almost assured, public opinion comes in to balk their hopes. The nominating convention which has to choose the candidate of the party feels that it cannot go before the nation with a man of tarnished character, a man who has not what the Americans 3

call a good record." Or if the place is one in the President's gift, he rarely ventures to outrage popular sentiment and injure his own position by making a really bad appointment. To be known as incorruptible is as helpful to a public man in America as in England or in any other country. Indeed, simple honesty and sincerity often raise to the highest places persons of quite ordinary capacity. Out of the whole list of Presidents of the United States there is not one on whose character for personal probity a stain rests, while some, of whom Lincoln and Garfield are the most recent conspicuous examples, have been singularly conscientious and patriotic. So, too, among those who have of late years filled the great Cabinet offices, and the not less important places of President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives, there are very few of tarnished reputation. This is more than can be said of minor officials, but the minor officials, for reasons to be explained presently, can do much less mischief than corresponding officials would do in England. Even as regards them there is probably more smoke than fire. People are much less reticent than in England; charges which are only whispered here are made openly there, and made so frequently and so groundlessly that the accused person, even when innocent, does not care to refute them. Scandals that in Europe would be hushed up obtain the widest currency. No doubt they are frequent. I am far from defending the present state of things, which the wisest Americans deplore. All I mean to say is that it is much less alarming than Englishmen would suppose from reading American newspapers, or from the picture the novel presents. And on the whole the public business of the United States goes on fairly well. Grave offenders are punished by the moral sentiment of the people; mischievous enterprises are checked before much harm has been done; and though as regards foreign affairs there is some gasconading, and sometimes a want of international courtesy, one might point, were it not desirable to avoid controversies of English politics, to English ministers who have rivalled or surpassed the most offensive performances of American Secretaries

of State. There is a want of dignity in politics generally; there is a want of efficiency in some departments of administration, and serious loss to the public by jobbing; but in comparison with the general prosperity of the country, and especially the extraordinary elasticity of its finance, these failings attract little notice.

It is more important and interesting to inquire how far corruption and vulgarity and ignorance among American politicians mean the same thing and have the same consequences as similar faults would mean and have in England. One may admit that they exist in America, and utterly deny that they cast the same black shadow over the country as they would over England. This is exactly what every one who knows the two countries will deny. But it needs some explanation to Englishmen, who are apt to take their own country as a type, and assume that others must be like it. Where two peoples and forms of government have so many points of likeness as we have to the United States, this tendency is all the greater. The proposition I wish to support is that politics are a totally different thing in America from what they are in England. Here the political life of the country is its main, its central, its highest social life. It is the chief occupation of the men most conspicuous by rank and practical talents. It is the great game which ambitious men seek to join in, the great means of influencing the welfare of the community which patriotic or philanthropic men desire to use. All educated people, and many uneducated, take an interest in it, watch what goes on in Parliament, are familiar with the characters and even the faces of the leading men. Here there are usually, and during the last few years have been constantly, large and grave questions under discussion-constitutional questions respecting the distribution of political power, questions of foreign policy which involve peace or war with neighboring States, domestic questions some one of which affects every class in the community. The central government, though less dominant and less meddlesome than on the Continent of Europe, is nevertheless always near us, touching us at many

points. The badness or goodness of our administration, the wisdom or folly of our foreign policy, the merits or defects of current legislation, make a sensible difference to us. They rightly engage public attention, they naturally attract much of the best talent of the country. In a word, if our central government were to fall into the hands of a corrupt Parliament or incompetent officials, England would decline at once. And if England were to suffer her affairs to be managed by such men, it would only be either because she had none better, or because the tone of public morals and public spirit had already fallen. The decadence of the statesmen would argue the decadence of the people. But in America the political life of the country is not the main or central current of its life, but seems a kind of side channel encumbered by weeds and bushes. Politics is not the career which a young man of talents and ambition naturally turns to or seeks to enter. There are at present, and have been since the pacification of the South, few political questions that rouse any interest. Nobody cares about politics (save at the time of the presidential election) except those professional politicians who are playing the game for their own purposes. There really is nothing to care about. The proceedings of Congress attract little attention, and are very briefly reported. People don't talk about politics as they do in this country. Last autumn, during a stay of four months in America, in which I had constant opportunities of mixing with all sorts of people, I never heard a political subject mentioned unless when I had introduced it myself. In fact, it makes no difference to the ordinary American citizen how the Federal Government is carried on, while as to foreign policy it is happily unnecessary to have any. As a distinguished American thinker once said to me, government in America is a mere survival, a relic of past times which has no longer the importance it still possesses in the Old World. Indeed he went so far as to call it a scab on the body politic, which may in time disappear.

To state fully the causes of this difference would require many pages, so I will only glance at a few of them.

There is, first, the fact that there are now really no great questions to engage men's sympathy and exercise their reason. There is, secondly, the superior attraction which the development of the material resources of America has for its people, the progress of colonization, the making and working of railroads, the founding of new industries; all these are more important to their eyes than to those of any European nation, and cover more of their horizon. Then it must be remembered that government is in America divided between the central or Federal, and local or State authorities. Of these two, the former is the more dignified, and in a sense the more important, because it affects the whole republic; but it touches the citizen infinitely less than the central government does in England, because it has nothing to do with direct taxation and very little with legislation, both these matters belonging to the several States. A good deal of the want of interest which educated Americans show in their government appears due to a separation of politics into two divisions, neither of which covers the whole ground. State politics seem too local, restricted, or, as we should say, municipal, to demand the services of a firstrate man. On the other hand, Federal politics are too remote, and do not include one of the departments most interesting to a jurist or philanthropist, that of the reforms in the civil law or local administrative system. It must further be remembered that there is altogether less government, less interference by the State, in America, and for the matter of that in our colonies also, than in England. The idea that things ought to be left to themselves, that private enterprise is the safest agency for promoting objects of common utility, is more largely embraced and applied there than here. It is sometimes carried to an extent which a faithful adherent of laissez-faire doctrines recoils from. Railroad companies, for instance, and other powerful corporations are subjected to far less control than with us, and sometimes tyrannize over the districts they traverse. There are all sorts of objects which people in England propose to effect by legisla

tion, which in America are assumed to be left to the benevolence of some voluntary society. And, of course, there are fewer ancient rules or institutions which need to be legislated for in order to adapt them to the necessities of modern times. Lastly, the immense area of the country places its political life under conditions totally different from those of the European states. Although the telegraph informs every village next morning of what has happened at Washington the afternoon before, Washington is not, and never can be, what London is to England or Paris to France. Its life is a purely political life, dissociated from that of the great commercial and literary centres. Statesmen who reside in it are personally known only there and at their own homes. They cannot make themselves known.over the rest of the Union. A French or English statesman may in the course of a twenty years' career have visited all the great towns in France or England, and made himself a man of flesh and blood in every part of his country. And in small countries like France and England people are constantly reviving their own interest in politics and that of their friends by visits to headquarters. The chairmen local liberal and Conservative Associations, who come up to London and are taken into the gallery of the House of Commons by the county or borough member, acquire and carry back with them a personal interest in political struggles and a sense of their dramatic aspects which no American can feel who lives in Maine or Minnesota, not to say on the Pacific coast. True, the professional politician, wherever he lives in America, is at least as much interested in politics as any one in England, for politics affects his livelihood, a professional politician being either an officeholder or an office-seeker. But I am speaking of the ordinary intelligent citizen, and he, just because there is a class of professional politicians, cares less about politics, and has less to do with. them than a man of the same position and education would do in England. For these among other reasons politics mean less and politicians count for less in the United States than in any European.country. Their merits are less ben

of

eficial, their faults less mischievous, their whole sphere of action more restricted and less regarded than in England. Instead of being drawn from the highest class, socially and intellectually, and being a sample of what is best in the country, politicians are largely composed of persons of scanty education, small means, and average abilities. Their occupation, the practice of what is called politics in the United States, does not, or need not, for the reasons already stated, involve any study or even any dealing with that large round of difficult qestions which employs the politicians of European countries. A great many, especially in the cities, and in the eastern and central States generally, are lawyers, and the lawyers (there is in America no distinction between barristers and attorneys) are the representatives of a profession no less valuable and influential than in England. But it is not generally the more eminent lawyers who take to politics; it is often the small practitioner in a small town who, when his business does not prosper, becomes an office-seeker. One does not like to make general statements, because they are apt to be misunderstood; and I know many politicians in America who are men of the highest character, as well as the highest ability. But if a general statement has to be made, it must be that the politicians reflect public capacity and thought not of the best but of the mediocre sort. And as the practice of politics does not require, or produce, any familiarity with those large questions which the members of European legislatures have to face, it is not in itself educative. Beside, it is exposed to many temptations. The president of a small Western University one day showed me a list he had made out of the employments to which his graduates had betaken themselves during the last seven years. When he had given the numbers of those who had become doctors, schoolmasters, and so forth, I asked.

And how many have gone into politics?" "I am glad to say, only five was his answer, given without any idea of a joke. This is the ordinary sentiment of the educated American toward the local politicians, and it is of course from their ranks mainly that

However our English alarmist returns to the charge. Admitting the 'truth of your statements, he replies, "see what they involve. You grant that the best men of the country seldom go into politics. Is this not a serious misfortune? Does it not leave the field open to bad men? Even supposing the State Legislatures to correspond (though the area of their power is so vastly larger) to the municipal councils of our great towns or to the county boards which we are promised shortly, is it not important that capable and upright men should form these legislatures? Is it not the duty of a good citizen to serve his neighbors and his country by entering them, as many good citizens in England serve on local bodies? Must there not be something seriously wrong if good citizens hold aloof? And must not grave evils sooner or later follow from leaving the reins of government, local and still more Federal government, in the hands of persons many of whom are unworthy of trust?''

That there is force in such reflections the Americans are themselves the first to admit. For years past the best organs of public opinion in the United States have been preaching their duty to good citizens, calling on them not only to go to the polls, but to see that worthy candidates are run, and themselves come forward as candidates both for the local legislatures and for Congress. One must, therefore, answer the English critic not by denying that the present evils are serious in such great cities as New York and Philadelphia, nor that they may be serious over wider area fifty years hence, when the pressure of population on the means of subsistence has increased, but by insisting that as regards the country at large they are incomparably less serious than

they would be in Europe. Politics in America and the same thing is true of Canada (whose condition is in many respects the same as that of her Southern neighbors)-means the distribution of offices; and the offices have so much less importance than in Europe that it matters far less who are the men that fill them. As regards the causes which keep the best men out of politics, I have only space to indicate one or two. Parliamentary life is less interesting and stimulating than in England, because it has fewer and less vital problems to deal with.

Other careers, such as that of finance or railroad management, are relatively more attractive than they are here. There exists no large leisured class with a hereditary taste for politics, and almost a hereditary claim to high office. The immense area of the American Union, and the fact that the political capital is a comparatively small city, diminishes the action of good society upon politics. No such centre exists, as in France or England, where a great merchant, or financier, or advocate, or journalist, or man of letters, can live and pursue politics along with his own profession. In fact he is in most cases forced to sacrifice his other avocations if he goes into Congress, since he cannot conduct his business from Washington.

All these causes taken together go a good way to explain the disinclination of the of the best people" to enter political life. There is, however, one still more important, which deserves a paragraph or two to itself, because it brings us to consider the capital evil of American politics, and involves also the explanation of what is called rather absurdlyfor the word has in America a different meaning-the Caucus system. That system is a vicious one. But it has very little likeness to what is called the "Birmingham Caucus" in England, an institution which must be judged upon its own merits, and not by false analogies drawn from beyond the Atlantic.

The United States, in taking over a century ago English law and the English political system in its main features (such as the two chambers, and the vesting of executive power and the right of appointment to offices in a single head of the State), took over also that