Are elections a failure?
The three great problems of the day are, first, is marriage a failure? second, Is the jury system a failure? third, Are elections a failure?
Judged from the popular point of view, all three are failures. Judged more comprehensively, each can be bombarded and defended with equal success. Divorces galore, separations innumerable, wife-beatings, runaways and flippant comment would seem to indicate a general disbelief in the divine origin of marriage; but a glance at the list of marriages in all our daily papers would show that, felicitous as that state may be, the universal mind turns toward it as certainly as the religious thought tends toward consideration of a future life.
Ergo, it can not be regarded as a failure.
So far as trial by jury goes, there is a widespread conviction that so long as newspapers are permitted to interfere with courts and juries, so long as they are allowed with impunity to print caricature pictures, and to vent their malice and their spite in one-sided arguments, attended by Billingsgate words and questions which no man would be permitted to use to another in ordinary conversation, it is impossible in cases of magnitude to attain a fair result through a jury. What juries might do if they were literally untrammeled, what benefits would accrue to the community if juries were absolutely impartial, it would be impossible to estimate. Trial by jury was once regarded as a bulwark between the people and the autocrat. Now it is regarded as an ingenious door, through which well-manipulated criminals escape, while innocent men are often convicted. Nevertheless, inasmuch as the jury system is firmly seated in the affectionate regard of the peoples of our civilized countries, until some better mode of arriving at honest conclusions is suggested, we cannot call it a failure.
And how about elections?
Well there are two sides to that. There are certain States in this broad land where newly-arrived emigrants vote before as many moons have passed over their heads as years are needed ere native-born sons can cast a ballot. In some States rivalry and corruption, in the very precincts of the polls themselves, are tolerated. In others, vast monopolies control the action of their employees; in others social ostracism is dreaded to such an extent as virtually to compel men to vote in a particular and determined line. Offenses against a free ballot are not only numerous but flagrant everywhere; but in view of the fact that, while third parties now and then crop up, as was the case in the old Know-Nothing times, and is to-day, when Prohibition flaunts her banner by the side of those of the two great parties, as a rule, the country is divided into opposing factions, two in number, and of about equal strength. It is a somewhat remarkable fact in this connection that the President who is declared elected is not always the man who receives the largest popular vote. He is, of course, the choice of the electoral college, but that by no means necessitates the premise of more literal individual preferences.
We think the age in which we live is the best; that the people among whom we move are the flower of creation, that our laws are the best, that our methods are the nearest allied to those of omniscience, that the crisis we face is the most momentous. As matter of fact, crises are as regular in the history of a nation, as the rising of the sun and the going down thereof. Readers who are familiar with the early history of the republic, know with what bitterness men whom we now regard as just this side of saints, purest patriots, were assailed by their political opponents. Readers of contemporaneous literature on the one hand would regard Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Jackson, as the purest, the simplest-minded, the warmest-hearted lovers of their country; the wisest, most sagacious, earnest thinkers, in the interest of their land, that ever lived. On the other hand, no taunt was too bitter, no epithet too scarifying, no charge too base for their opponents to make and hurl against them. It may be doubted if ever man was more bombarded than the great, great Jackson, than Thomas Jefferson, who ranks loftiest among the lofty, and was characterized in terms unfit for publication, lampooned and caricatured far beyond the line of libel.
Ambitious statesmen have ever lived.
About these statesmen, rallied in all times special friends, with cohorts, followers. As long ago as Jackson’s time the spoils office were the great desiderata. To him is ascribed that sentiment which, according to the ethics of to-day, is the meanest and the lowest—”To the victors belong the spoils;” and yet it is mean, or is it low, to say that, in a land where a see-saw, teetering system of change is in vogue, one party in power to-day, another on top to-morrow, the offices should be apportioned among the members of the party temporarily successful, always assuming that a discriminating head determines to whom shall be given the advantage accruing to the victors? Why should not those who fought the battle participate in its fruits? Putting that aside, we recognize the simple fact that the chief end and aim of nineteen-twentieths of the leaders of our respective parties is office for themselves, and patronage for their friends. There have been times, however, when great questions of principle were involved, and mighty issues turned upon the election hinge. Strangely enough the ambitious statesmen of which this land, like all others, has been graced, attached themselves, with apparent conscientiousness, on either side, fighting for and against with fervor, sincerity and zeal. For many years the statesmen of the South—and there were many great and good, wise and able men among them—stood, with all their might, for the right of slavery, the curse of the land. They believed as firmly in the right of the whites to buy and sell the literal flesh of the blacks as they did in divinity. For more than fifty years one great section of this land was covered with a pall whose blackness was that of darkness itself. The law of the land recognized the right, and it was against the equity and the justice of that law that started in the minds of the early anti-slavery agitators the idea of a determined and legal resistance to it. Finding the slave power intrenched behind the bulwarks of the law, the Abolitionists, as they were called, contented themselves at first with an effort to circumscribe the limits beyond which slavery could not go. That brought about first what was known as the Missouri Compromise, ranged on either side of which were the mighty men of the nation. These ambitious statesmen included in their ranks names which must forever be monumental among the leaderships of this country: Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Thomas J. Crittenden, Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, Silas Wright, and their associates. In those days, when science had not as yet grasped the idea of utilizing electric forces, when telegraphs were undreamed of, and railroads were but little used, an election throughout the length and breadth of the continent was unattached with general excitement. There were local disturbances, of course, for men are men, for human passions are as fierce and fervid in the breasts of those who live in sequestered villages as in those who wrangle in the hotbeds of our vicious cities.
Weeks elapsed ere results were known.
How different it is to-day, it isn’t necessary to say beyond a single sentence. Suffice it that on the morning following election day every reader in the land can know not only the final result, but the result in any county of any State throughout the land; while men who live in the cities can know by midnight, or, at the furthest, in the earliest hours of the morning, by reading the electric-flashed bulletins in front of our enterprising newspapers. Although there were many questions that agitated the national breast, such as our relations with England, leading up to the war of 1812; such as our complications with England and France during the war of 1861; such as the severest, earliest, ever debatable scheme of the tariff; after all it will be admitted that the chief, prime seed from which grew a very forest of popular turmoil, turbulence and despair, was the question of slavery. Shall it be extended, or shall it be circumscribed? Shall it be allowed to exist, or shall it be cut down and uprooted from our soil?
Bitter indeed were the debates in Congress.
Fierce indeed were the fights throughout the land, prior to the birth of the Republican party. The first election of which the generation preceding the one which reads and lives to-day knows much, in which there was great, all-pervading excitement, was that which placed in the chair one of Pennsylvania’s most honest sons, James Buchanan. At that election the South, with the exception of Maryland, voted for Buchanan. Not a vote was cast for Fremont. The excitement, though great, was suppressed; but it was very clearly foreshadowed that the next election would see this great country divided into a North and a South, face to face. It can never be said of Mr. Buchanan that he had a positive policy. He did nothing which of itself could be said to have brought about the terrible bloodshed of the ensuing five years. He did all that was in his power, unquestionably, to avert a Civil War, but, fortunately, in this country the President has but little individual power. Without Congress he can do but little; so matters drifted along, excitement following excitement, violence crowding upon violence, until the summer of 1860, when Secession unfurled her flag, and opposing candidates stood before the country, Abraham Lincoln representing the great party of non-extension of slavery into the free territories, while Breckinridge boldly accepted the challenge, and insisted upon it, as the representative of his party, that the South had an equal right in the territories, and that with the South went, in the affirmative, the question of slavery. Although two votes were cast in the South for Mr. Lincoln, as matter of fact he received no support at the polls in any of the States of the South. And, by the way, the history of a point made above, that the fact that any individual citizen is declared President is not conclusive proof that he has received the largest number of votes, it is interesting to note that while Mr. Lincoln received 1,857,610 votes, the combined votes of the other candidates aggregated 2,787,780! In other words, 930,170 more voters preferred another candidate. But for all, according to our system of an electoral college, Mr. Lincoln, having received the necessary votes in that college, was declared to be President of the United States.
It is an absurdity on the face of it.
It is and should be a strong argument against the present mode of election. Prior to the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, State after State declared itself outside of the Union, and fear and apprehension dominated the situation, social, commercial, financial, political, and within a month after the inauguration of the first Republican President hostilities were actually begun, and a war which lasted five long years, costing the nation not alone its billions of money, but its millions of men, was initiated by the firing upon the nation’s flag as it floated over a national fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
Lincoln’s second election was a triumph.
It was a triumph, because malignants who failed to use him, traitors in his own camp who were scoffed if not killed, and a conservative sentiment which was beginning to grow throughout the North, combined to defeat him, but in their overthrow simply made his signal victory the more resplendent. His brief tenure of office, during a second term, followed by the much misunderstood action of Andrew Johnson, in a period which tried not only men’s souls but taxed their brains, led up to the curious contest between Grant and Greeley. That Grant should go conquering on was a foregone certainty; yet Horace Greeley was made to believe, and really did think, that his election was a probability; and when it was found that he would be overwhelmed by the impetuosity of the loyal rush for Grant, he sank beneath the torrent, and, overwhelmed with the vast maelstrom of disappointment, went out forever, blighted in intellect, utterly annihilated, and pushed into the narrow confines of a grave.
The most exciting contest this country has known in a quarter of a century, was that between Tilden and Hayes. It is probable that nineteen-twentieths of the voters of this country believe to-day that although Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated President of the United States, Samuel J. Tilden was the rightful successor. Although the election was held in November, 1876, it was not until the 2d of March, 1877, that Hayes was declared elected. Acrimonious disputes, personal encounters, violent diatribes in newspapers, and open threats were indulged in from one end of the land to the other, both parties claiming to have carried Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. Whatever may have been the facts of the case, it is but fair to say, for a man much maligned, that the attitude of Hayes can not be impeached, for as early as the 27th of November, 1876, he wrote to Senator Sherman: “You feel, I am sure, as I do about this whole business. A fair election would have given us forty electoral votes at the South—at least that many; but we are not to allow our friends to defeat one outrage and fraud by another. There must be nothing crooked on our part. Let Mr. Tilden have the place by violence, intimidation, and fraud rather than undertake to prevent it by means which will not bear the severest scrutiny.” With Hayes in person, however, it is not necessary to deal, because, while the Democrats persisted in charging fraud, and the Republicans were equally pronounced in their counter charge, in order to avoid a deadlock an act was passed by Congress—and by the way the Senate was Republican and the House Democratic—referring all contested cases to a commission of fifteen, five Senators, five Representatives, and five Supreme Court judges. These commissioners, by a vote of eight to seven, declared Hayes elected. It would be difficult to conceive a more embarrassing position than that occupied by the new President, who was regarded with suspicion by a very large majority of his fellow-citizens, and made to bear the odium of what they believed to be an infamy and an outrage. That he conducted his administration to a close without public disturbance, would have been to his credit. That he made a clean and unimpeached record is infinitely to his honor.
Then came Garfield and Hancock.
Garfield had a fight from first to last. He went to Chicago at the head of the Ohio delegation, to nominate, if possible, John Sherman as the Republican candidate for President. Circumstances, no matter by whom brought about, resolved that convention into a compromised body; for, as between the strength manifested by Grant on the one hand and Blaine on the other, Garfield was regarded as a fitting amendment. He was opposed in the canvass campaign by General Hancock, and it is doubtful if there was ever such bitter dissension in a party as that which imperiled the success of Garfield, who was faintheartedly supported by many conspicuous leaders of his own party, and embarrassed in many instances by their literal treachery.
In Indiana the fight was frightfully bitter.
It was then, and is yet, openly charged that distinguished men, names given, captured the State by an outrageous use of money, and that bribery and corruption were as common there as they were in earlier days in Rhode Island, and as is always the case in the great cities of our land. Dying at the hand of an assassin, Garfield was followed by a gallant gentleman, a citizen of New York, Chester A. Arthur. Then there came upon the land a contest the like of which was never known, between a man whose sole public importance was that he was Governor of the great Empire State, on the one hand, and the acknowledged leader of the Republican party, James G. Blaine, on the other. For the first time in many years the fight was personal; and while stories of Cleveland’s “wretched life” in Albany were bruited from one end of the land to the other, the life of the “tattooed man from Maine” was paraded in all its uncanny disclosures in every field, on every flag, throughout the country. Representations, probably as baseless as were ever coined by ingenious malice, were made concerning the character of both candidates, the long-forgotten past was overhauled, its ashes raked in the hope of finding some smoldering scandal, charges affecting not only their public but private relations were freely made from every stump and in every opposition journal. Naturally enough the public mind, already poisoned, became apprehensive and excited, lest the Republicans, unwilling to allow a power they had enjoyed for more than a quarter of a century, to be wrested from them, should resort to fraud, as was, it was alleged, made use of in the South at the election of Mr. Hayes. On the other hand, Republicans dreaded interference with an honest count in the State of New York. Mobs thronged the streets, crowds surrounded the newspaper offices, hoots and yells and screams rose from infuriated men who had thousands bet upon the issues of the hour. Taking up an old-time song, twenty thousand men marched to Jay Gould’s house and surrounded it, shouting in unison “Blood, blood, Jay Gould’s blood.” What effect, if any, that had, it is impossible to say; but the fact remains that on the following day the papers published a telegram from Jay Gould to Grover Cleveland, congratulating him upon his election. It was a bitter pill for the Republicans to swallow, and with many a grimace they bolted it, to be confronted, however, a second time with the same bolts, to avoid which they secured the services of an expert Indian physician, Benjamin Harrison by name, between whom and the Democrats the wages were as fierce a battle as was ever fought.
Well, are popular elections a failure?
We leave the answer to the partisan journals.
So you see opinions will differ.
