p. 320The Statesman

MILTON.

Of politics, in the odious sense given to the word by modern morality, we wish to say nothing; of politicians,—that is, men who trade or gamble in the distribution of public office and patronage,—we have no word to say. Nor would any enlightened reader desire that the priest should soil his robe or busy his pen with concerns which to men of his calling must ever happily remain a mystery,—a land unknown and untrodden.

With men who are intrusted with public office in the State, and have it in their power to serve the best interests of their fellow-citizens and thus advance on earth the cause of justice and right order,—that is, the cause of God,—we have much to say which may be deemed both timely and needful.

We understand by a statesman, one thoroughly trained to the knowledge and administration of public affairs, and thoroughly able to govern the State wisely. The knowledge and management of public business, in any department, requires one to be educated thereto. The science or art of governing large bodies of men,—of governing a whole people, especially,—is of all arts the most difficult, of all sciences that which presupposes the most consummate wisdom and prudence. It requires, therefore, a most careful education, a long and patient training, a mind well stored with the clearest and most varied knowledge of men and things, a judgment well balanced, a will of indomitable firmness, and a virtue superior to all self-seeking.

How a Statesman should be Trained

This much we say of what a statesman is and how he should be formed and endowed,—because of the belief which is daily gaining ground, that in order to govern well one only needs good sense, integrity, and the choice of the people. The choice of an entire people would not enable the most sensible and trustworthy person among your acquaintance to sail a ship round Cape Horn, with a crew of honest and sensible men like himself,—but also, like him, utterly ignorant of the laws of navigation, unacquainted with the ocean, its currents and its winds, and unacquainted, as well, with the simple structure, equipment, and management of any vessel, great or small.

And this much we say, even at the risk of uttering commonplaces,—in order to satisfy the plainest understanding that we are not all fit, at any moment, to take in hand the helm of the ship of State.

The good sense of the most illiterate,—which is nothing more than the instinct of propriety,—tells them that as no calling requires in a man so vast an amount of knowledge and experience as that of the statesman and ruler,—so none should have a more careful apprenticeship. We have seen, in the preceding chapters, that the accomplished lawyer, the accomplished physician, the accomplished clergyman, the accomplished professor of any science, must have,—just like the accomplished artisan and artist,—a long, long course of special study and practice. But the statesman is bound to have,—if he would not continually blunder on the gravest practical matters,—the science of the profoundest jurist, with a thorough knowledge of political economy, of all past history, of the condition and resources of other States; and to this must be added no slight acquaintance with theology and canon law. For to the statesman belongs not only to regulate the enactment of wise and just laws on all public matters, but to superintend and direct their administration.

Hence it is that in all great governments young men destined to serve the State as ambassadors or administrators were trained in a special school at the end of their ordinary college or university course. It has ever been the case in modern Rome,—and it is so, as any one may see, in the great European and Asiatic monarchies. And, be it said here without any other purpose than that of further elucidating our meaning,—such appears to have been the object of the “Civil Service” law recently passed by Congress, and which has not yet had any general or serious application. Just as our Navy and Army form special services under Government, requiring a long and careful education,—even so should the civil service of the Federal Government or of the several State Governments only admit such as have been most carefully prepared and trained for the discharge of their weighty duties. This alone can secure us a succession of enlightened and able statesmen, and of efficient civil servants, such as a great civilized community requires. For, we Americans must not flatter ourselves that we are as naturally born with ability to rule the State and direct the mighty and complex machinery of government, as the duck is to swim as soon as it has broken its shell.

What is the State?

One of the first things the statesman ought to know before entering into the public service, is who and what is the master he has to serve. The word “State” is made use of at the present moment to offset the word “Church.” Indeed, it is the avowed purpose of modern governments to invest the abstraction called State with an omnipotence never at any period of her history claimed by the Church of Christ as one of her attributes. For, whereas the Church expressly disclaims supremacy or even direct power in matters pertaining to civil government, our statesmen of the Bismark and the Cavour school, will have the laws of the State not only supreme but practically infallible, to be set above the laws of the Church, the laws of God, and the dictates of conscience.

Even in other countries, where the constitution and the innate sense of the people, guarantee a real and full liberty of conscience, there is a growing tendency to invest the State with this same odious attribute of omnipotence and infallibility. Under the pretense of effecting a complete separation between the religious or ecclesiastical and the civil or political power, they have gone a step farther and claimed for the latter “absolute independence and supremacy in its own sphere.” This favorite phrase, however, is made to cover a fallacy. The Christian religion, from the beginning, has consistently asserted not only the clear distinction of the spiritual and the temporal authorities, but the independence and supremacy of the civil authority within its own proper domain. It was the will of the divine Author of Christianity that men should render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s while giving to God what exclusively belongs to Him. It was the injunction of His Apostles that all who bore the name of Christian should obey the civil power in all things that were not manifestly in opposition to the law of God and to the dictates of conscience; and this full and conscientious obedience to the constituted authorities, has ever been understood by Christians as a real though indirect compliance with the Divine Will itself. For God’s majesty is seen by the eye of faith behind the temporal ruler; and in fulfilling the lawful ordinances of the latter we only submit to the divine ordinance itself.

We cannot remind the men of our day either too seriously or too frequently of the fact, that it is God who commands us to serve our country, and that we only serve it more efficiently and gloriously by looking up to HIM, as to the Almighty Master who gives to such service its dignity, and promises to the faithful servant the only true and abiding reward that devotion and self-sacrifice deserve.

He would take but a low view of his own public functions, who would consider the choice of his constituents as the only source of the high obligations he assumes, their will as the rule by which he is to direct his aims and his policy, and their approval or their blame as the end toward which he must direct his efforts.

Public men who set their hearts on mere popularity,—though the greatest possible and the most lasting,—as their sweetest recompense, are like adventurers in a balloon seeking to soar high and go far, favored by the calm and regular currents of the atmosphere. There are but few who ever arrive at the goal they promised themselves, or who descend to their original level with sound limbs and contented minds.

The public service,—that of the statesman particularly,—is anything but plain sailing. It is troubled by treacherous shoals and storms that no wisdom can forecast, and no skill can control. Supposing the fairest prospect to be yours, and that success beyond your expectations has crowned your every measure,—do not be intoxicated with the applause you receive. The most glorious servants of Republican Rome were conducted through a double line of the most splendid edifices ever erected, to the temple of Jove on the Capitoline Hill, while all Rome strewed their path with flowers, while young men and maidens sang triumphal hymns in their honor, and incense fumed all along the streets to intoxicate the sense even in the intervals of shout and song. But within a few feet of the temple of Jove in which they were crowned and might deem themselves demi-gods,—was the dreadful Tarpeian Rock down which the hands of that same people might dash them on the morrow.

We have seen in our day these terrible alternations of popular enthusiasm and frenzied ingratitude. We have seen mighty monarchs crowned amid the peans of the popular millions, and driven from their capitals like malefactors in disguise fleeing before the hounds of justice; we have witnessed in the midst of modern Rome, the delirious demonstrations of a people’s gratitude and veneration toward the most fatherly of sovereigns, the most single-hearted and generous of benefactors; and, a few months later, that whole people, headed by its own army, besieged that noble Parent and Prince in his own palace, after murdering his servants. Have we not also seen our own statesmen and chief magistrates entering upon their high office amid the loud acclaim of a whole people, and descend from their station unblessed, unloved, uncared for? Are there not, among kindred peoples, contemporary instances of prime ministers who were but yesterday the idols of the worshiping multitude, and whose very residence may be to-night sacked by these same worshipers? “Honors and dignities are benefices which fortune and the world have charged with such great pensions, and the reserve of so many troubles, that in the end men are glad to escape from them.”

Serve God in serving the State

Why do we insist on this? Solely for the purpose of inducing our statesmen and public servants to be high-souled, to have from the beginning of their career these lofty views of duty which shall preserve them, in the inevitable day of disfavor and disappointment, from feeling that their life has been wrecked and wasted, and that they have served only an impotent or an ungrateful master. To Catholics, who understand what “purity of intention,” working for God solely or principally in all that one undertakes and accomplishes,—there will be but little difficulty in understanding how soul-stirring is the Sursum Corda! not only in setting one’s foot on the steep and icy path of public duty, but in the middle way when difficulties crowd upon one, and there is none to cheer by kind word or deed, and above all in the disastrous ending, when cast down by utter defeat and disappointment. Where you labor for His service, and seek His honor and glory, who cherishes only the pure and ardent desire of your sonly heart, and esteems the generosity that no difficulty dispirits and no defeat discourages, as far more praiseworthy than the most glorious success,—you shall never be cast down by adversity nor lifted up into pride or self-laudation by prosperity. So, to the statesman, much more than to the citizen in any walk of private life,—we must say: O brave heart, you have a dangerous road to travel; see to it, then, that God the all-powerful, and the ever-helpful, be first, and middlemost, and last in your aims, in your hopes, in all your labors!

This consideration will enable you to appreciate the wise counsels delivered in the following passage by one who had forgotten conscience for ambition and the fear of God for his sovereign’s favor, at the very crisis of his country’s fate, and winked at a despotic king’s unholy passions, when the latter, to gratify them, was ready to create a schism, and, like Lucifer in Heaven, to break up by rebellion the divine unity established by Christ.

Governments for the People, not for the Governing Class

The great mistake of statesmen is either to fancy that the service of their country has nothing to do with the service of their God, or to make of the acquisition of place and power the sole end of their efforts, or to sacrifice conscience, justice, truth, and religion to policy and party. The theories of government that would tend to make of the people a flock of sheep to be shorn for the sole benefit of their rulers has found no countenance from the pontiffs and doctors of Holy Church. Again and again have her most eloquent and most authorized writers proclaimed that God deposited with the body of the people the authority necessary for all the ends of social life, and that it is from the people that magistrates and rulers derive their legitimate powers. But the exercise of that authority, in God’s design and in accordance with the nature of things, should ever be for the benefit of the people, and regulated according to the express will of the divine Creator and Governor of the moral world, so as to secure to the members of the community peace, plenty, and prosperity,—all the ends of order and justice.

Moreover,—as revealed religion is a fact admitted by peoples and governments still calling themselves Christian, they are bound, if they would be consistent in their belief and profession, to square their own lives as well as the principles of their polity,—their laws, their administration, and intercourses with other peoples,—in conformity with the Divine Will as revealed by Christ. Hence, there should be nothing in their legislation or their policy to contradict the sublime doctrine of the unity and brotherhood of the race, of their common reciprocal duties here and their common destiny hereafter. The charity that binds brother to brother, under the law of love of the One Almighty Father, should be at the bottom of all public duties and obligations, as at the bottom of all private virtues and neighborly offices.

Every form of selfishness both in the public magistrate and in the private citizen conflicts with that divine charity which is the very life-breath of Christian society, and which ought to be the animating spirit of all nations who claim to be the offspring of Christian civilization. Indeed, the true Christian statesman, acting up to the principles of his faith, must look upon himself as a public servant,—doing service to God while serving the interests of the commonwealth.

The Christian Statesman is Gloriously Singular

These principles and practical rules of conduct may not be, indeed we know are not,—those which guide the generality of public men. Perhaps it might be said, that to be guided by such supernatural truths would only render one singular, or expose one to be excluded altogether from public life. We do not think that the Christian spirit of Alfred the Great hindered him in overcoming his enemies, or in pacifying his kingdom and giving to it these very laws which are to-day the vital principles of the American Constitution. We do not think that the child-like innocence, the constant desire of seeking the divine pleasure and glory in every measure of his government, in every law that he passed, in the wise and impartial judgments he rendered, and in his successful efforts to reconcile the rights of his civil government with those of the Church within his kingdom,—rendered St. Louis pusillanimous, or lowered him in the esteem of his contemporaries or the admiration of posterity. And so with his great kinsman St. Ferdinand III., King of Castile, the wise legislator, the brave and heroic soldier, the model man and Christian in every relation of life.

These true statesmen were, to be sure, SINGULAR; that is, they stand out alone before the mind’s eye, amid the multitude of really good and great men who lived in the same age, like those Round Towers of Ireland rising above the ruins of the past and the desolation of the present, a wonder and a mystery to the artist as well as to the historian. St. Bernard says somewhere nihil sanctum nisi singulare,—“every true saint is a something singular,”—in the perfection which raises him above the multitude. Be not afraid to be singular and surpassing in your uprightness, your integrity, your firmness in resisting the torrent of custom and the degrading influences of the surrounding atmosphere.

And this brings us back to the extract which heads this chapter. He surely was singular, that Seraph Abdiel, who, amid the countless host of angels who followed Lucifer in his revolt, was

This glorious singularity was never more needed than amid the universal disposition toward social change, and the consequent general confusion of ideas, which mark our times.

Even the best statesmen of the epoch, in the wish to conciliate the antichristian principles which tend more and more to prevail in the policy of modern governments, with the august and venerable notions and maxims that were once accepted by all Christendom,—resemble not a little the astute leader described by the poet in the heading of this chapter.

The masterpieces of the Creator, even when fallen and degraded by rebellion against Him, preserve the outlines of their primitive grandeur. God does not take away from His worst enemies either native wisdom, or superior knowledge, either the genius to plan great things or the fortitude necessary to their execution. The minister of state who enlists whole senates in the unholy crusade which he undertakes against liberty and religion, will not be deprived either of his gift of “princely counsel,” or of the ruined majesty of presence which still awes the vulgar, or of the golden flow of eloquence and the fascinating look, which can hold an audience spell-bound, and command

We are contemplating here the statesman, minister, ruler, who is a man “according to God’s own heart,” like the great poet and warrior-king of Israel; a man who seeks to make the interests of the Eternal Majesty first, middlemost, and last in all his policy. Such a man, though he may not perhaps ever be the popular idol of the hour, will be sure to draw the attention and to deserve the respect of the solid men of principle and conscience, of the enlightened and far-seeing who are not dazzled by newborn and brilliant theories, but who are ever anxious that the present of nations should be made up of all the elements of greatness of the past, so that the growth of national prosperity shall be like that of the giant trees of California,—increase of strength, vitality, and beauty in every portion of the mighty frame, from the earth-roots that buttress up the towering trunk to the extremity of the wide-spread arms, and the topmost bud of this year,—the latest addition to the height of the lordly tree. Not so, with most of the statesmen whom erratic public opinion so loudly bepraises. The to-day of the constitutions they create or patch up hastily is not the legitimate growth of the national life of yesterday. It is fictitious, not natural; it is not the production of nature, and is therefore doomed to have neither duration, nor salutary influence.

The work and the fame of the workman are also doomed to be short-lived. “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish: Thou hast destroyed all them that are disloyal to Thee.”³3Psalm lxxii. 27.

Not so the good and great name of the statesman, who, convinced that the constitution of a nation, with its laws, its time-honored customs, and its institutions, are its natural, God-given, and God-directed social growth,—only aims at helping and perfecting the work of the all-wise and all-mighty hand. His glory shall be like these stupendous monuments of Egypt, which survive the peoples who witnessed their erection. From amid the undistinguished graves of millions buried beneath the invading desert around, the pyramid stands sublime, as immovable and as durable as the solid earth. The traveler from afar sees it in the morning air like a point scarcely visible on the level rim of the eastern horizon. But as he journeys across the sandy waste, what was only a speck increases in magnitude, growing, growing upon the sense, till a nearer approach lifts up the stupendous mass into the sky, dwarfing into insignificance the other mighty monuments of departed ambition or genius.

The Fruits of True Statesmanship

From a statesman entertaining these sound principles and supernatural views, what should the community expect?

To answer this question we have only to ask ourselves what are the most urgent needs so often set forth in the public press,—not under the influence of political passion, or when pleading for some partisan purpose; but when agreed upon a generally felt want.

We need reforms in legislation, and in the halls of legislation. We need to reconstruct (if that indeed be possible), in this country at least, the very machinery of the ballot-box, and the mode of nomination and election for every public office. We put it to the enlightened men of every political party, who are not office-holders, or candidates for office, whether the constitutional liberty of the American citizen, in its most sacred and important exercise,—that of the suffrage,—is not so shackled by traditional custom, by the tyranny of party, that its exercise is only a mockery of freedom. Neither in the choice of Federal, State, or municipal officers,—are the mass of the citizens consulted about the selection of candidates; nor in the form of voting for them are the electors allowed much more freedom than a regiment in the front rank of battle is given to advance or to retreat. They have to choose from lists made up by two or three men without any regard to their wishes; and they have to choose between candidates imposed upon them,—or to throw their vote away.

Thus are the people not left free to place in the highest and most important offices in the State the men whom they know to be most worthy. The exercise of their sovereignty in its most august function is thus defeated of its purpose, and made a delusion and a mockery.

We pause, and hasten to pass on. For the ground beneath us is like the scarcely cooled lava within the crater of Vesuvius; it is scorching hot, and the hidden fires are heard to mutter and felt to rise and fall threateningly beneath the feet of the venturesome intruder.

We need radical reform in the exercise of our most sacred liberties. We need a remedy against corruption in the very sanctuary where our law-makers meet. We need an immediate preventive against privileged and partisan legislation. For Venality has long been the bane and the shame of more than one legislative assembly; and the question is, “Who will dare to exorcise the Evil Spirit from its usurped and accustomed place of power?”

We need laws to repress rampant crime. Who is safe in his own house, either in the most peaceful country place, or in the most public street of the crowded city? There was a time when the midnight robber fled in haste when discovered in his unholy work; but now every burglar is a murderer, and every murderer can promise himself almost certain or comparative impunity! Why, robberies are committed in our most frequented thoroughfares, in our crowded street-cars, and not a soul will care or dare to interfere! And robbers daily conspire to assail citizens on the open street, and in the full blaze of noonday, plunder them and almost murder them in sight of hundreds, and escape all detection! Ladies, refined, well-born, highly connected, cannot venture to travel in one of our “palace cars,” without being spirited away by villains, while vainly appealing for protection to the descendants of the men who colonized New York and New England, and founded the glorious edifice of American freedom! And with all this,—in a country blessed with such varied wealth and magnificent agricultural and commercial resources, as country never enjoyed since the world was a world, we here in New York are so loaded and borne down by taxation, that property is not worth the holding, and that universal bankruptcy is staring us in the face!

Surely we need reforms,—and need statesmen who will save the State from ruin in the midst of overflowing plenty, save the sacred name of law and justice from the sacrilegious hands of their makers and guardians, save the divine character of authority from the contempt and hatred of the people, and save society,—become like a ship with a drunken, quarreling crew, driven headlong before the storm,—from going to pieces.

Yes, the words of the poet sound like the command of an inspired prophet: