M. Claudio Jannet has recently sent forth from the little town of Aix, in Provence, a work on the United States of the present day which may be both interesting and profitable to American readers. It does not appear that M. Jannet has visited the country whose moral, social, and political condition he sets himself to describe. His information has been gathered from books, pamphlets, and periodicals; his conclusions are the result of deliberation rather than the hasty observations of a tourist, and they are all the more valuable because they are not distorted by the usual blunders and prejudices which obstruct the vision of the average Frenchman in America. The European traveller, particularly the French traveller, finds many things in our country to shock his prejudices and offend his tastes. The discomforts of the journey, the harshness of the climate, the extravagance of living, the imperfections of our domestic economy, the general crudeness of our new and incomplete civilization, the press and hurry of business, the lack of æsthetic culture, the vulgarity of popular amusements—all these things put him out of the humor to be just. He dislikes the surface aspects of American life, and, with the best disposition in the world, he commonly fails to see what lies underneath. He fills his note-book with dyspeptic comments, and when he goes home he writes a volume of blunders, and all the Americans who read it laugh at it. Take, however, a conscientious Frenchman of sober and reflective turn of mind, shut him up in his own study, supply him with an abundance of the right kind of American books and newspapers, let him ponder over his subject at leisure in the midst of his accustomed comforts, and the chances are that he will write a very good essay on the condition of this country, and tell a great many wholesome truths which we ourselves hardly suspect.
M. Jannet’s book has been evolved in this way. His industry in the collection of materials seems to have been remarkable; and if his judgment has not always kept pace with it, the instances in which he has been misled are fewer than we should have expected. For most of his mistakes he can show the excuse of an American authority. It does not become us, therefore, to find too much fault with him. We are rather disposed to overlook errors in the statement of particular facts, and consider the really valuable and novel points in his essay, with the moral which he wishes us to draw from it. We shall find in what he says abundant food for reflection, even when we believe him to be wrong.
He sets out with an attempt to show that the spirit of revolution has been waging incessant war for nearly a hundred years upon “the work of Washington,” and that the Constitution, as it was devised by the wise and conservative party represented by our first President, has been almost torn to shreds, and is destined to destruction by the aggressions of radicalism. M. Jannet’s references to “the school of Washington” seem rather odd to an American reader. We doubt whether there ever was a distinct political school to which that name could be properly applied; and it is not at all clear that there have been two well-defined and antagonistic political principles in conflict since the very foundation of the government, as Ormuzd and Ahriman, the spirit of good and the spirit of evil, waged perpetual warfare, in the Zoroastrian system, for the dominion of the world. The philosophical historian is fond of tracing in the revolutions of states and the development of political theories the steady growth of some fixed principle of action. But it is a specious philosophy which takes no account of accidents. M. Jannet has made the mistake of going too deep, and overlooking what lies right on the surface. He sees the spirit of radicalism, fostered by the influx of communistic and infidel immigrants from Europe, attacking the conservative safeguards originally established in our federal and State constitutions, assailing the rights of the States, extending the suffrage, sweeping the country into the vortex of uncontrolled democracy. “Popular sovereignty” is the watchword of this radical movement. “The doctrine of popular sovereignty,” says M. Jannet, “is based upon the idea that man is independent, and that consequently there can be no authority over him except with his own consent. This principle established, there can no longer be any question of limiting the suffrage by conditions of capacity, of fitness, or of the representation of interests, since sovereignty is an attribute of the voter in his quality as a man. The exclusion of women and minors from the polls is only an abuse, a relic of old prejudices. Thus the most advanced party already places female suffrage at the head of its programme, and perhaps it will some day be established in the United States. The people, being sovereign by nature, cannot be checked in its will by any custom, any tradition, any respect for acquired rights. Whatever it wills is just and reasonable by the mere fact that it so wills. There can be no permanent constitution for the country; the constitution can be only what the people wills, or is thought to will, for the time being.” About the year 1850, according to our author, the heresy of “popular sovereignty,” otherwise the religion of revolution, obtained full headway, and the radical party, making skilful use of the anti-slavery sentiment which had hitherto been cultivated only by a small band of eccentric philanthropists, captured the masses of well-meaning, unreflecting voters. Liberty and emancipation were their watchwords; but their real purpose was only the supremacy of the mob. Slavery was the abuse which they pretended to attack, but they only feigned a horror for it in order to win over the small but zealous party of sincere abolitionists; their actual object was to abolish the federal Union with its limited powers, and set up a unitary democracy based upon the despotism of universal suffrage. “From the day when this party came into power by the election of Lincoln,” says M. Jannet, “nothing remained for the South but to take up arms to protect its rights against the projects already disclosed.” And he adds that the radical movement towards pure democracy “alone can explain the unheard-of ferocity with which the Northern armies fought, and the odious persecution which followed their triumph, and which still lasts, ten years afterwards.”
Thus the anti-slavery agitation was only an incident—and, indeed, M. Jannet seems not to regard it as a very important one—in the long, uninterrupted, deplorable decline of America from a moderately conservative federal republic to the despotism of an ignorant, centralized democracy. It can hardly be necessary to point out to American readers the serious mistake in M. Jannet’s theory. It is useless to look beyond slavery for an explanation of the changes wrought within the past fifteen years in the character of the American government. Mr. Seward was right when he declared that there was an irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom. It had been gathering force for years when it broke into war in 1861; it had been the original cause of nearly all the encroachments upon the rights of the States which preceded the Rebellion, and it had made the very words “State rights” odious to a vast majority of the Northern people. The plain truth is that the only State right which the conservative and aristocratic party cared about maintaining was the right to hold human beings in bondage, and buy and sell them like cattle. They chose to identify a political theory with a hateful social institution, and it was only natural that, when the end came, theory and institution should go down together. The evil influence of slavery, however, has survived the extinction of slavery itself. We must not forget that the active men of 1876 were boys in the exciting period just before the war, and their political creed took shape at a time when the doctrine of State rights was the defence of the slave-driver and the secessionist, and the federal power was the safeguard of freedom and union. The ideas impressed upon them during the years of conflict have remained during the years of peace, and have affected in a most serious manner the fortunes of the country during the period of reconstruction. For four years, so crowded with great historical changes that they may be counted as equivalent to nearly a whole generation of uneventful peace, the nation was taught by the necessity of war to believe that the reserved rights of the States must yield to the paramount necessity of preserving the Union, and ultimately of destroying slavery for the sake of union. It would be unfair to say that the letter of the Constitution fell into contempt, but there was a general agreement that constitutions, to be worth anything, must be elastic instruments, stretched to cover unforeseen emergencies. Naturally, when the war was over we did not return at once to the old ideas. In the provisions for saving the fruits of the contest, guarding against fresh attempts at disunion, and protecting the emancipated race in its newly-acquired liberties, the despotic and absolute spirit of the war still prevailed. The federal government which had put down the rebellion was called upon to secure its victory. So for the next ten years we saw a constant assumption at Washington of powers which no Congress or President would have dreamed of asserting a generation ago. The “reconstructed States” became little more than vassal provinces, practically ruled at the seat of the federal government. In some cases, even after the military governors had disappeared and the States had been restored to representation in Congress, and nominally to their full powers of self-administration, we have seen soldiers sent from Washington to decide local election contests, legislatures dispersed at the point of the federal bayonet, and the verdict of the ballot rudely set aside by the President’s despotic order. The general course of legislation for the Southern States at Washington was inspired by the belief that the whole Confederacy was a hot-bed of insurrection and crime. Special laws were enacted to prevent the “rebel element” from acquiring that predominance in the Southern communities which naturally belonged to it, and to lift up the negroes to a political power to which they were not entitled by their numbers, and for which they were not qualified by character or education. The control of elections was taken away from the States by the Enforcement laws, and the ordinary police duties of preserving the peace were usurped by federal appointees under a strained interpretation of the statutes. An incident reported in Alabama during the political campaign of 1874 illustrates the extreme length to which federal interference was carried, and the ingenuity with which it was employed for merely partisan purposes. A Republican politician had been murdered in August of that year, and the perpetrators of the deed had not been discovered. The guilt was charged, however, upon several active Democrats, and just before the election they were arrested by a federal marshal and committed for trial. Of course there was no law which gave the federal authorities cognizance of murder, and no indictment for that offence could be found in a federal court; but it was desirable that the arrests should be made for political effect, and the accused were consequently indicted under a clause of the Enforcement law for “conspiracy to prevent a citizen from voting “—a conspiracy to prevent his voting in November by killing him in August! The arrest served its purpose, and it is hardly necessary to say that the case never was tried.
But of late the progress of the country towards centralization has been sensibly checked. The abuses of the past few years have been followed by a popular reaction. The temper of the South is better understood. The North begins to see the dangers of the course it has been following, and at the same time to feel ashamed of its injustice. And more than all else, the Supreme Court of the United States, in two able decisions, sweeps away a great mass of the most mischievous Enforcement legislation, and redefines the almost obliterated boundaries of State and federal authority. The judgment of the court in the Grant Parish and Kentucky cases marks an era in our constitutional history. It neutralizes a great deal of the evil consequences of the war period, and can hardly fail of a most salutary effect upon future legislation. When he has read it, even M. Jannet, perhaps, will take a more cheerful view of our condition.
But let us leave the historical part of M. Jannet’s book, and look at the picture which he draws of our actual condition. We do not purpose to criticise it. We shall let our readers correct errors for themselves, as they can easily do, while we content ourselves with showing them how the political and social aspects of our country impress an intelligent foreign student. M. Jannet is deceived sometimes; he takes too seriously the satire of “the American humorist Edgar Poë,” and the mixture of sarcasm and burlesque which he cites from “The gilded age by Mark Twain and Dudley”; but upon the whole he tells the sober truth. He gives a pretty exact account of our electoral system, and especially of our system of nominations, which practically prevents the people from voting for anybody except the favorites of a little knot of professional politicians assembled in a committee or ward meeting. As political struggles in the United States, he says, are not for the triumph of principles, but only for the possession of power, politics has naturally become debased, high-minded citizens have insensibly become disgusted with it, and at the same time the rising flood of universal suffrage has driven the wealthy classes out of political life. Between 1824 and 1840 the party organizations were definitively settled, and since then politics has been the exclusive appanage of politicians by profession. M. Jannet gives a very unpleasant sketch of this class of persons, and describes the machinery of manipulating conventions and setting up candidates with considerable minuteness and accuracy. Nor is it possible for us to read without mortification his account of the manner in which the professional politicians carry on the government:
“Such institutions leave the nation completely disarmed against corruption. No one, either in the executive or the legislative branch, has any interest in stopping it. We shall even see that, under the political customs of the country, the representatives of power in every grade have a manifest interest in tolerating it.… Before the presidential election the politicians who manage the conventions of the party make careful bargains with their candidate for the distribution of the offices. The President, when he desires a re-election, has here in the same manner a powerful motive of action; all the federal employees fight for him with ardor and by every possible means, for the retention of their places depends upon his triumph. It is easy to see how party spirit is inflamed by the prospect of so much booty in case of success. The evils of this system have become more striking as the number of federal employees has increased. Given the prevalence of dishonesty and love of money, it is evident that office-holders who can retain their places only a few years must make use of the time to enrich themselves.… But corruption is not confined to the employees, properly speaking; it extends in a large measure even to the representatives of the nation. The President nominates his cabinet, subject to the confirmation of the Senate. But in the party conventions the President’s choice is fixed in advance. Arrangements of the same kind are made with the senators; for their approval is necessary for a thousand federal appointments, and naturally for the most important. The result of this state of things is that the Senate which, by the Constitution is a directing political body without whose co-operation it is impossible for the President to carry on the government, becomes a theatre of incessant intrigue and corruption.”
We prefer not to follow M. Jannet in his brief recital of the Crédit Mobilier scandal, the Fremont affair, the Pacific Mail bribery, the operations of the Tweed and Erie Rings, the boldness of the lobby, the power of the railway corporations in politics, the pressure of enormous debts and taxes as the inevitable consequence of legislative venality, and the degradation of the judicial office. It is a horrible account, but it is not exaggerated. For all his statements—save, of course, some mistakes of secondary importance—M. Jannet can show good American authority.
In the face of all this disorder and corruption the best citizens, disgusted with political life, hold themselves every year more and more strictly aloof from it.
“Men of property, merchants, and manufacturers are injured by the mismanagement of affairs, and deplore it; but each one finds it for his individual advantage not to lose his time in trying to correct public evils. The country is still rich enough to bear the waste and rascality of a government which calls itself popular.… Even in these days there are certain influences of religion, race, or locality which sometimes bring honest and capable men into the local political assemblies; but the ruling trait of American democracy is nevertheless the ostracism of the upper classes and of eminent men. The consequence is that these classes become more and more dissatisfied with democratic institutions, and cast wistful eyes towards the constitutional government, in reality more free than theirs, which Great Britain and her colonies enjoy. From De Tocqueville and Ampère to Duvergier de Hauranne and Hepworth Dixon, all observers have been struck by this sentiment, not in general openly expressed, but sufficiently shown by the considerable number of distinguished Americans who pass the greater part of their lives out of the country.”
In this there is just a modicum of truth—less now, perhaps, than there was when it was written; for there is to-day an unmistakable tendency among our best citizens to resume that share in the management of public affairs from which they have too long suffered themselves to be excluded. But M. Jannet follows Hepworth Dixon in his stupendously absurd remarks on the “moral emigration” of the best men of America, and finds it a proof of distaste for democratic institutions that Washington Irving should have rambled about the Alhambra, Bancroft accepted the mission to England, and Hawthorne the consulate at Liverpool; that Motley should have read the archives of the Dutch Republic at the Hague, Power and Story studied among the monuments of Italy, and Longfellow amused himself with the “Golden Legend” when he might have found so many heroic subjects at home! We are astonished that M. Jannet, who has certainly read a great many American books, should not have perceived the dense ignorance which distinguishes this particular portion of Dixon’s New America perhaps above the rest of the book. M. Jannet has only to pause and reflect for a moment, and he will not accuse Diedrich Knickerbocker and the author of the Life of Washington and Rip van Winkle of neglecting his own country to lounge in Granada, nor blame the poet of Cambridge because he rhymed the “Golden Legend” as well as the story of Evangeline and Miles Standish. Hawthorne too, the most thoroughly national of American romancers, and Bancroft, who has spent a lifetime in the study of American history! Is it also to Mr. Hepworth Dixon that M. Jannet is indebted for the discovery stated in the following passage?
“Americans, even those who at heart are most disgusted with democracy, have a passionate love of their country, and look upon themselves as the first nation of the world. This patriotism, despite its exaggerations, is a great power for the country. Without precisely desiring the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, many enlightened Americans aspire to a stronger and more stable government under a republican form. I have been struck, in the intercourse that I have had with many of them, by the secret admiration with which the rule of Napoleon III. in its day inspired them. This rule, democratic in its origin, revolutionary in its principle, but favorable to the preservation of material order and the acquisition of wealth, agreed very well with their desire for additional security, and at the same time with their lack of principles. Sentiments of this kind—and they are wide-spread—are one of the greatest dangers that threaten American society.”
Of course the corruption which disgraces politics appears likewise in the private life of the people. The constant aim of the Yankee, says M. Jannet, is to make money.
“The love of money seizes the young man from the time of his adolescence, and does not let the old man allow repose to the evening of his life. Except in the old slave States, there is no class of people of leisure in America. From top to bottom of the ladder, all society is a prey to devouring activity. Its economical results are considerable; the rapid growth of the nation and its prodigious development in all the arts of material well-being are the fruits of this ardent labor which knows no rest. If the Americans love money, it is not for the sake of mere acquisition, but in order that they may give themselves up to the enjoyment of luxuries and launch into new speculations. Harpagon is a type which does not exist among them. Indeed, they generally lack those habits of patient economy which constitute the strength and the virtue of our old races of peasants and bourgeois. Their readiness to spend and their generosity in case of need equal their appetite for gain. One who fails to take account of this characteristic restlessness of American life will get but an imperfect idea of the private habits and public institutions of the people. In no country are ‘honors’ more eagerly sought after or is democratic vanity more freely indulged; but it must be confessed that ‘honor’ is interpreted among Americans, or at least among Yankees, in quite a different sense from that which is accepted in Europe. No man plumes himself upon disinterestedness. Magistrates, generals, statesmen, accept subscriptions of jingling dollars as testimonials of public esteem. It is alike in dollars that they pay, among the Yankees, for injuries and insults. This universal thirst for gold has perhaps the good effect of softening political asperities, at least so long as a boundless field remains open for work and speculation. The unbridled love of money, in fact, lowers all men to the same level, and stifles alike fierce fanaticisms and generous passions. The same ardor in the pursuit of wealth soon scatters the family. Aged parents, home, or the paternal acres, nothing can restrain those who are ruled by this passion alone. There is no attempt, as there is with us, to conceal the love of money. ‘The almighty dollar!’ cry the Americans with admiration. A new-comer is presented to them. ‘How much is this man worth?’ they ask, instead of inquiring, as we should do, about his antecedents and his merit. Everything is overlooked for a rich man, and, except in a few chosen circles, a bankruptcy counts for nothing when fortune smiles again. Nowhere is merit valued without money. Hence the inferiority of American literature and art; hence the commercial customs that prevail in professions which we style liberal. Physicians, counsellors at-law, even ministers of the Gospel (we speak, be it understood, only of the Protestant sects), advertise as freely as the commonest working-man. Poverty is held in contempt to a degree of which our older society, formed in the school of Catholicity and chivalry, can have no idea. In spite of universal suffrage and absolute political equality, there is no country in which so great a gulf has been placed between the rich and the poor. This superficially democratic society would not live in peace two days, if it were not that the poor man can raise himself with a little trouble to comfort, if not to fortune. But when the natural riches of the country become less abundant and the demand for labor abates, will not these hard social customs become a cause of formidable antagonism? Distant as this future may still appear, the question is one which no serious observer can well avoid asking.
“The pursuit of wealth is the main-spring of material progress, but when it is carried to an extreme it misses the very object of its pursuit. The excessive love of money has developed in the United States a financial dishonesty which stains the national character and causes a great loss of the public property. Who has not heard of the great fires which so often destroy entire quarters of the large cities? They are often kindled by individuals who wish to conceal their bankruptcy or to get the amount of their insurance. These crimes affect a multitude of innocent persons and cause an increase in the rates of insurance; in short, it is the nation at large which pays for such frauds by an increase in the cost of all its products. It is the same thing with failures. They entail no dishonor, as they do in France; that is why they are so many.…
“The causes of this perversion of the moral sense are complex. Amid the almost infinite subdivision of Protestant sects there is no longer any religious teaching which addresses itself with authority to the mass of the nation. We do not take sufficient account of what Catholicism is doing in our country to maintain the fundamental ideas of morality even among men who during their lives remain strangers to its practices. The corruption of the public authorities and the inefficient administration of justice have also a great influence.… Moreover, we must take into consideration the very mixed character of the population. Even the native Americans are incessantly in motion. They transfer themselves from one end of the country to the other for the slightest of reasons, and thus they escape the salutary control of local opinion which, among stable populations, is one of the most powerful moral influences. The establishment of joint-stock companies for financial and commercial enterprises—an innovation which dates from about fifty years ago—has done a great deal to weaken the sentiment of responsibility.… If certain companies are honestly administered, a great number are made the occasion of shameless frauds. We see audacious speculators buying up a majority of the stock in order to make secret issues of new shares. This operation is called ‘stock-watering.’ It is estimated that between July 1, 1867, and May 1, 1869, twenty-eight railway companies increased their capital from $287,000,000 to $400,000,000. These shares only serve for stock-gambling, and woe to those who have them left on their hands! ‘It would appear,’ says an American writer, ‘that the railroad speculators have three objects in view: First, to get as much as possible of the public lands; experience has proved that the more they ask the more they will obtain, and that the ease with which Congress is induced to favor their projects is proportioned to the liberality with which they distribute funds for corruption. Secondly, to raise in Europe as large a loan as possible, no matter at what rates. Thirdly, when they have got all the land and all the money they can, and have attracted all the immigration from Germany they can hope for, they sell the railroad, at whatever loss to the bondholders, and make a little ring of members of the company its sole proprietors!’ The great number of these immoral speculations, the adventurous character of commerce, and the senseless luxury in which all business men indulge bring on periodically grave financial crises of which Europe feels only the after effects. Malversation is common even in institutions which have the best reasons to be free from it. Enormous defalcations are daily committed in the administration of charitable works, neutralizing in a great measure the generosity with which the Americans have endowed them.”
Alas! it is impossible to deny that these statements are substantially true. The discoveries of corruption in public life which have recently produced so much political excitement surprise nobody who has studied American society. This is a “representative” democracy; and though certain well-understood causes, which it would be out of place to discuss here, have long been at work driving the highest class of our citizens out of public employment, it is undeniable that as a general rule the morality of men in office is about on a level with that of the voters who put them there. When peculation and swindling become common in commerce, and a man who makes money is always treated with respect until he goes to the penitentiary, it is almost inevitable that there should be bribery in the cabinet and conspiracy in the antechambers of the White House. The stream cannot rise higher than its source.
But if we wish to understand the real condition of the American people, we must study it in the nurseries of all public virtue—the home, the school, and the church. With the first of these the woman question has a most intimate connection. De Tocqueville said that Americans did not praise women much, but daily showed their respect for them. Now, says M. Jannet, things have sadly changed. We have ceased to respect women, and we are always talking about their rights. There is a considerable party among us which not only insists upon the right of women to vote and hold office, but would make of them lawyers, physicians, and ministers of the Gospel, and give them the direction of industrial and commercial enterprises precisely as if they were men. M. Jannet confesses that American women, on the whole, show very little eagerness to play the new rôle which the modern social reformers have created for them; but the agitation, if it produces no practical results, has a very unhappy influence upon the female mind, and a bad effect upon female education. How fearfully the family relation has been impaired in America all intelligent observers know. The laxity and confusion of the marriage laws; the shocking frequency of divorce; the publicity given to scandalous and indecent investigations; the prevalence of the crime of infanticide, against which the press, the pulpit, and the medical profession have long exclaimed in horror; the growing inability or unwillingness of American women to bear the burden of maternity; the rapid decay of the American element in the population through the excessive proportion of deaths to births; the breaking up of homes; the license allowed to the young of both sexes—all these things are the appalling symptoms of a deep-seated social disorder. We have been in the habit of making it a reproach to the French that there is no word in their language which expresses the American and English idea of home; but it may be questioned whether, retaining the word, we are not in danger of losing the reality. In the cities, at all events, there has been within the last quarter of a century a lamentable change in domestic life. Fashionable society has broken up the family gatherings around the evening lamp. The mother no longer lives in the midst of her children; she spends her days in shopping, visiting, and receiving, and her nights in the ball-room. Children are educated by hired nurses, and before they are full grown emancipate themselves from the control of parents whom they have never been taught to respect and obey. “At home,” in the jargon of the day, has become a travesty of its original meaning; it designates the exhibition of a domestic interior from which all the characteristics of home life are rigorously excluded. Architects are forgetting the meaning of home, and in the fashionable house of the period the domestic virtues could hardly find a lodgment. The hotel and the boarding-house are driving out of existence those model homes which were once the glory of America. What else could we expect? It is the woman who gives character to the household, and the tendency of our time is to remove woman from the fireside and set her upon the platform.
That there is nothing in the American school system to supply the defects of American home education no Catholic will need to be assured. The whole system rests upon the principle that the school-teacher has nothing to do with the cultivation of the moral nature of his pupil. His duty is limited to the atlas, the copy-book, and the multiplication-table. The pretext upon which this rule has been adopted, says M. Jannet, is respect for all religious beliefs, but its real end is to create a generation without any positive religious belief whatever. Zealous Christians even among Protestants are not deceived by it. A report upon the state of schools in Pennsylvania in 1864 says: “The importance, not to say the absolute necessity, of religious education becomes day by day more apparent. If we wish to maintain our institutions, it is essential to raise the standard of character and to revive among our people the spirit of Christianity. The generation which will soon succeed us should not only be skilful of hand, stout of heart, and enlightened in mind, but it must learn also to love God and man and practise duty.” But unfortunately, continues M. Jannet, such remonstrances have proved unavailing, and the “unsectarian” system is now permanently established—a sad result for which the Protestant clergy is in great part to blame. Nearly all of them approve the system, in the belief that Sunday-schools will be sufficient for religious instruction; but “true Christians point out that this separation of the two branches of education tends to make religion regarded as something foreign to the practical affairs of life.” Our author shows how steadily the godless theory of education has gained acceptance; he perceives the growing disposition to enforce it by the authority of the federal government, and make it obligatory upon the States to provide irreligious schools, and upon the people to use them. In the progress of this destructive tendency he traces the influence of German ideas, political, pseudo-philosophical, socialistic, and atheistic, in which lies one of the greatest dangers of the republic. “Two things strike us in these new currents of opinion: on the one hand, their opposition to the old bases of Anglo-Saxon ideas and liberties under which the United States lived until about 1850; on the other, their identity with the principles disseminated in Europe by the revolutionists. It is impossible for an impartial observer not to recognize here the effect of one and the same cause acting in accordance with a well defined aim. This cause, this agent, let us say at once, is Freemasonry. It is easy to judge of the real purpose which it has in view by studying it in the United States. There the conflicts and passions of the Old World have no place; what Freemasonry seeks to accomplish is the destruction of all positive religion and of every principle of authority in man’s political and social relations.”
Protestantism, far from checking these disastrous tendencies, has allowed itself to increase them; and even if it had the will to constitute itself the defender of the state and the family, it is torn by intestine divisions and driving rapidly towards disintegration. Yet M. Jannet does not quite give us up for lost. “The crisis which is now passing over the country and checking its material prosperity may be the signal for a reform, in forcing honest men to recognize the vices of their institutions and the corruption of their manners.” There are four influences which he hopes may combine to save us. These are, 1, the wisdom and energy of the people of the South, who, after ten years of persevering efforts, have at last begun to recover the direction of their local affairs, and to clear away “the ruins caused by the war and the domination of the Radicals.” 2. The success obtained by the Democrats, or rather the Conservatives, in the elections of November, 1874, and April, 1875—a success that will put an end to the despotism with which the Radicals have cursed the country for fifteen years. We give these two points for what they are worth; of course we do not believe that there is any such fundamental difference between the people of the North and the people of the South, the people who call themselves Republicans and the people who call themselves Democrats, as M. Jannet imagines. 3. The great number of American families who, in the midst of corruption and disorder, have faithfully preserved the virtues and domestic habits which lie at the foundation of all prosperous society. 4. Lastly and chiefly, the marvellous progress of the Catholic Church.
We make no comment upon this portion of his essay, but we end our review with a few lines from his closing paragraph which it will do us Americans, at the beginning of our new century, no harm to take to heart: “In all countries, in all times, under the most diverse historical and economical conditions, the moral laws which govern human society are unchanging and inevitable. Founded upon the decalogue, nay, upon the very nature of God, the distinction between good and evil knows no mutation. Everywhere men are prosperous or unfortunate, according as they keep the divine law or break it.”
[127] Les Etats-Unis Contemporains, ou les Mœurs, les Institutions et les Idées depuis la Guerre de la Sécession. Par Claudio Jannet. Paris: E. Plon et Cie. 1876.