SHALL THE UNITED STATES BE EUROPEAN

IZED?

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

A

T the close of the year let us reflect on what is before. As a nation we have come to the parting of the ways. The American Republic has reached a point in its destiny from which it must diverge in the one direction or the other. The people of the United States can no longer pursue the straight line on which they have travelled for more than a century. There is literally a dividing road with two diverging courses before our feet.

The promotory against which we have come in the midway of our career is the portent of becoming Europeanized. Shall we or shall we not be made again into the likeness of Europe? This rock of menace and interrogation looms up in the middle of the way, and we have to pass it by taking the one route or the other. The time has come when the United States must gravitate rapidly towards Europe or else diverge from Europe as far and as fast as possible.

This is the overwhelming alternative which forces itself on the American people at the close of the nineteenth century; in the twentieth we shall be either Europeanized or democratized the one or the other. There is no place of stable equilibrium between the two. This is true for the reason that there can be no such thing as a democratic monarchy; no such thing as a monarchical republic; no such thing as a popular aristocracy; no such thing as a democracy of nabobs. The twentieth century will bring us either to democracy unequivocal or to Empire absolute. All hybrid combinations of the two are unstable; they break and pass away. Either the one type or the other must be established in our Western hemisphere. The democratic Republic which we thought we had, and which we so greatly prized and fought for, must now sheer off from Europe altogether, or

else sail quietly back to Europe and come to anchor. Shall we or shall we not go thither?

Note the circumstances which have brought us to this alternative. One of these is commerce. We have an international commerce; that is, a transoceanic trade intercourse ; that is, what the Romans called a commercium, with Europe and the world. Commerce, while it civilizes and enriches, tends to make alike. Commerce seeks to integrate mankind, but never to invidualize or make free. Wherever it touches it infects with its spirit. That part of a That part of a people who are engaged in commerce become equalized in conditions and sentiments with those who are of other nations.

There is a tendency of all people to forget their country in their pursuit. A man's pursuit stands between him and his flag, between him and his country. This tendency is emphasized in international trade. Commerce may be good, but it has its drawbacks and its dangers. Commerce does not desire liberty, but it desires stability. It does not want change and progress, but fixedness and conservatism. When the people of two nations trade, the people of the free nation, the progressive nation, the changing nation, get in love with the nation that is not free, that does not progress, that does not change.

For this reason the seaboard interests of America have become interwoven in a plexus of foreign relations. That which we hoped to avoid politically has come to pass commercially. The commercial parts of the United States are already bound in a great web to the corresponding interests of Europe. So far as the threads of this web extend in America, to that limit the preference for Europe and the tolerance of European conditions have extended. Since the rise of the great commercial epoch, the sea-bordering emporia of the United States have been each year bound more and more to the European marts. To this extent interest has supplanted patriotism. As between the ship on the one hand and the Republic on the other well, the Republic may take care of itself! That is, democracy is good enough, but trade is better!

The influences of accumulated wealth are of precisely the

same kind. It is literally true that wealth has no countryand never had! There is not a great estate in the New World that is devoted to the free institutions under which it was accumulated. The stock exchanges and the banks of the world constitute an empire. They are literally imperium in imperio. They have no native land. They know no other kingdom but their own. The bourse has no flag except the oriflamme of Security and Gain. The bourse is not of France, not of Germany, not of England, not of America, not of any nation, not of all nations, not of the world, but of itself. It is for itself. The political and civil institutions under which it exists are, to the bourse, only a means unto an end. The bourse considers government as an instrument, not for the enlargement of human liberty, not for the promotion of man, not for the extension of civilization, not for invention and letters and art, but for the protection of the bourse.

The bourse in all nations is common; it is a unit. It is founded on thrones and dynasties; on kingdoms and empires and republics, and on man! The bourse says that the United States is a part of the European system—or must be; that our institutions in the old democratical form are too weak for safety; that the American Republic must be conformed with all expedient haste to the gainful standards and substantial methods of Europe; that our democratic ship must be drawn up to the harbor and anchored under the guns of the old fort, where the dangerous rights of man may be carefully regulated by the triumphant rights of property.

Another circumstance that tends strongly to Europeanize America is society. Society, that is the sham of society, is getting interlocked across the Atlantic. More and more with each year the threads are carried back and forth, and fastened on each side to the unbreakable rings of the social anchors. Society in this respect is much like wealth. Society, as soon as it emancipates itself from the conditions of production and finds the means of independent support in revenues drawn from funds, takes refuge, not under the flag of the Nation, but under the flag of Power. Wherever power flourishes, there "society" in the fictitious sense

flourishes also. Society knows the sunshine of the boulevard, but not the sunshine of the fields. Society likes the rattle of swords, but not the rattle of tools. Society loves the prince and avoids the democrat. Society considers the opera-house and the arsenal more attractive than the schoolhouse and the fair.

American society on its eastern selvage strives to get itself interwoven more and more with those aristocratic forms and fictions which are the peculiar social products of Europe. On both sides of the sea society tends to a common form and substance. The intervention of the Atlantic, shrunken to a pond, is no longer an obstacle to social intercourse. Along a great part of the American seaboard the motive of a foreign connection is to-day stronger than any remaining motive of public liberty. The social influence of the whole United States west of the Alleghanies is not as strong in New York City as the single influence of the Prince of Wales ! Under such conditions the notion of Europeanizing America is not only entertained, but is regarded with complacency and undisguised favor.

The great fact called Government, as well as commerce and wealth and society, drifts strongly towards the European side. It is a tendency in all government to make itself great and glorious. Government is never modest, never humble. It always encroaches, and enlarges itself at the expense of those interests which it is designed to conserve. Government does not look affectionately towards man, but always affectionately towards the organic form and splendor of things.

The American Republic is under this law. As a result, it has drifted towards the very condition which was renounced by our fathers. This Republic is not any longer Jeffersonian. There is hardly a trace of the Jeffersonian philosophy and intent left in it. The name of Jefferson is still used to conjure with, but it is used by those who are innocent of Jeffersonian principles. Each succeeding administration approximates the European style. Strange paradox this, but true, that the Republican Lincoln was the last Jeffersonian to occupy the presidential chair; he who recently claimed

to wear the panoply of Jefferson was furthest of all from the type which he falsified.

The fact is that the democratical moorings in our national life are sprung, and the ship sails east. The very nomenclature of government has come into conformity with that of monarchy. In the political jargon our Secretary of State is a "Premier;" the office of our Attorney-General is the "Department of Justice; "a resolution to end debate in the House of Representatives is a "cloture; " our representatives at foreign courts are no longer ministers, that is, plain spokesmen of the Republic, but ambassadors - "ambassador" signifying in the language of diplomacy the representative of a crowned head! To this extreme has the aping stretched itself; nothing is any longer American that can find the garb of a European phrase.

Meanwhile, the prerogatives of the President have become greater than those of any king west of the Vistula; and the power of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, circling like a whip and falling sharp on the backs of the representatives of the people, exceeds the authority of any like officer in the world; as to the arrogance involved in its exercise ask the Czar! Let no one think that the government of the Republic does not bear off easily and gayly, with wealth and commerce and power and organization, to be anchored fast on the European side.

Not all the forces of American life, however, drift in this direction. There is one great fact that holds back and does not willingly follow in the wake. This fact is the people. It is the great majority constituting the body and life of the American nation. Probably four citizens out of five in this Republic are at heart still sincerely devoted to free institutions. Four out of five believe with might and soul in the righteousness of our Colonial Rebellion against Great Britain, and the goodness of absolute independence. Four out of five think human liberty something, and not nothing. Four out of five consider our democratic institutions to be as they are the most advanced and satisfactory forms of civil society ever created by man. Four out of five regard the government of the United States as a simple agent for the