THE AMERICAN PARTY CONVENTION.

AMERICAN political development has been marked by many characteristic features, but perhaps the one which seems to a foreign observer most peculiar is that of the American system of party conventions. It is not the easiest of tasks to comprehend the American system of government, combining in one so many phases of government, Federal, State, and local, each with its own sphere of operations and its own basis of existence. The task is not made easier by the existence and influence of parallel unofficial party organizations, consisting of national, State, and local conventions, which, though unknown to the law and to the political system of the country, do in effect control the action of the individual voter by practically restricting his choice to the candidates of some one of the party conventions. The election of an "independent " candidate at a Presidential election has now probably become quite impossible. The development of a third political organization has become but a shade less difficult, through the increased number of voters; and the most practicable road of a third party to success is by penetrating one of the two great national organizations, as the petrifying liquid penetrates wood, in order to change its composition gradually, and finally to supplant the old by the appearance of the new. The battle of a third party must really be fought out within the ranks of, or openly against, one of the two great national parties before it can have any recognizable effect upon national politics; and the same rule holds good, in decreasing degree, as we go down the scale of elections to the town or village election. The choice of the individual citizen, at least in national elections, must now be between the two great parties, with the possible alternative of "voting in the air." And yet the conventions, which have so seriously modified the original theory of our government, have no legal place in our system. A foreign reader might study any of our treatises on constitutional law with due diligence, and yet never receive an intimation that, in addition to the paper constitution which he is studying, a subsidiary system has been developed by silent popular action, controlling and often modifying the nominally supreme law of the land.

Party organization in the smaller units of government still retains all the forms, at least, of a pure democracy. The Democratic or the Republican caucus, or “primary," meets and nominates its candidates for the offices to be filled at the coming local election; and the individual citizen must choose between them or “scratch,” though an "independent" nomination has its best chances in this field. For other elections, county, State, or national, the system of representation is followed, the town caucus sending delegates to the county and State conventions, and the districts sending delegates to the national convention, either directly or through the formal action of the State convention. There is even a system of representation once removed, for the State conventions often choose a part, and have sometimes chosen all, of the State's delegates to the party's national convention. The whole organization of the party is often spoken of as the party "machine," but improperly. In the technical language of politics this word has been transferred from the real machinery to its motive power. The party "machine" consists of that small percentage of men in each township who, through wealth, natural taste for politics, or skill in noting or guiding the shifting currents of popular feeling, have become essential to party success: cases have even been known in which women, debarred from participation either in government or in party conventions, have, nevertheless, been efficient members of the party machine. The reward of such service is sometimes, of course, money or money's worth, particularly in large cities; but it is more often purely honorary, consisting in the natural satisfaction of leadership among one's fellows, in the chief places at local meetings and caucuses or on delegations to larger conventions, or in the temporary prominence due to one who has, or is supposed to have, "influence" upon appointments to State or Federal offices in the immediate neighborhood.

The last-named reward was of much more weight in the days when the Senate's field of control or influence over Federal appointments was wider than now. By judicious management, by overt consultation with members of his State machine in every fitting case of the filling of a vacancy, by carefully cultivating in them a sense of his watchful leadership and of the necessity of loyalty to him, the senator from his place in Washington could so influence the general expression of his party's feeling throughout the State as to convince the Administration of his importance, and thus gain a continual renewal of his lease of power by his control of appointments to

Federal offices within his State. But such appointments did not go necessarily to members of the party machine, many of whom were richer men than the senator, and altogether disinclined to accept the trouble and responsibility of an office; all that they cared for was the reflected glory of control over the appointments. Each State has two senators, and, when both were on good terms with the Adminis tration, and both were ambitious men, the efforts of one to supplant the other in the affections of the State machine gave rise to political struggles whose history will never be written.

The power of the once famous "Senatorial Group" has faded, and, as the tendency is all toward a still further limitation of senatorial control over appointments to office, it is unlikely that it will have a successor. It has been mentioned for the purpose of emphasizing the exact nature of the doubts which, in the minds of many Americans, have been the strongest obstacles to Civil-Service Reform. There has never been much doubt among men who have thought at all on the subject, that appointments on merit would increase the efficiency of the service, as well as obliterate the standing injustice of the payment of party expenses by general taxation. There has been a doubt whether the system of appointment by merit would not operate to decrease the machine's interest in politics, and thus take the working element out of the political parties. This doubt, however, has very often been so expressed as to leave the American people open to the disgraceful suspicion that the guiding force of their politics consists of mere Hessians, who pay themselves in offices and are in politics for revenue only. Nothing could be more unjust than such a suspicion; outside of the large cities, the desire of the machine is to control appointments, rather than to obtain them; and its existence, so far from being mercenary, is merely a lower type of that human ambition which looks so much grander in Alexanders, Cæsars, and Napoleons. But, even though this interest in appointments has not been altogether a selfish interest, it has hitherto been so much the principal interest as to seem the only one; and we are apt to forget that it has been due to the opportunities afforded by a vicious system of appointment, rather than to anything inherent in the nature of a machine, and that thorough Civil-Service Reform would only bring into greater prominence the less degrading motives, which are still largely in abeyance. Call it by what name we will, a machine of some sort is inseparable from democratic government; and Civil-Service Reform would purify rather than abolish it.

Of course, the machine runs through all gradations of type, from the ordinary case in which it is composed of a few able and sincere men, whose leadership is due to moral influences only, through the cases in which hotel and saloon keepers have attained the position of leaders, down to the cases in the large cities, in which the member of the machine becomes a "boss," and is in politics for revenue only. It is this last type which has given the machine its offensive notoriety. Under it, the caucus becomes a farce; the voters of the party are excluded from it, or are made to see that their attendance is useless; the "bosses" of opposite parties in the same district loan their cohorts of "heelers" to one another in order to secure the control of the caucuses to the regular hands; and the interest of the managers is due to present or prospective appointment to office. As this city type comes most closely under the notice of our ablest writers, and has absolutely no redeeming features, it is natural that it should be so frequently denounced as to give the impression that it is the only type. It ought to be remembered, then, that the field for such a type covers at most but 25 per cent. of the country; that it has not penetrated largely into the remaining 75 per cent. of more peculiarly agricultural territory; and that every restriction of the spoils system has evidently diminished the extent of the old "boss" system, replacing some of its atoms by new men who are not in politics for revenue, but who approach more and more nearly to the naturally evolved type of the machine. It is the latter type, therefore, to which attention should be confined, ignoring the "boss" type as the product of the purely artificial spoils system, and destined to disappear with it.

The natural evolution of the machine, and of the party convention as its correlative, may be followed most clearly in the State of New York, partly because of the characteristics and development of the people of that State, and partly because of the State's good fortune in its political historian, or rather biographer. Hammond* is the Boswell of New York politics. A sincere believer in machine politics, a practical participant in political life, and a thoroughly honest and clear observer, without any affectation of political philosophy, he has left materials which are invaluable to the student. One may follow in his pages the appearance of step after step in the process of evolution, and trace the inevitable tendency to concentration which found its natural outcome in Mr. Tilden's perfectly

* Hammond's Political History of New York.

appointed mechanism, with its thousands of correspondents, scattered all over the State, and serving mainly for the love of it, not for mercenary reward. One may see that the very name "machine' is a misnomer; that it is not a manufactured thing, but a natural growth. And one may see, too, that such a machine, while it will inevitably use a spoils system, if it has one ready to its hand, or will be apt to create one, if it is not prevented by law, is not necessarily bound to the spoils system at all. The spoils system is the machine's temptation, not its life; its parasite, not its core. The belief that the machine will work less effectively when the parasite is removed, however honestly the belief may be held, is one which will not bear the test of the historical evolution of the machine itself.

Mr. Talcott Williams has stated the historical basis of the machine so clearly and exactly that other students of the American convention system must follow his theory. The successive steps in the process of development have had their reason in the increase of population, the widening of the right of suffrage and consequent increase of the percentage of voters, the resulting necessity for a small unofficial class sufficiently interested in politics to give their time and attention to the essential work of polling all the votes, and the increased facility of communication and exchange of views among the members of this class. Given these conditions precedent, the evolution of the machine and the convention system is only a question of time and of the political habits of the people. It is easy to follow the development of the convention system, if one has the clew, and to note the coincidences in its development with the successive increases of population and voters, and with the successive introduction of steamboats, canals, railways, cheaper postage and better postal facilities, and finally of the telegraph, all leading up to the highly organized national party convention of to-day, whose membership may safely dare the test of comparison, in point of reputation and ability, with either house of Congress, or with any other representative American body, short of the Convention of 1787. One can hardly follow the development without the conviction that the machine is not a thing to be condemned, but to be purified by due process of law from the vicious elements which have grown up around it, and more particularly from the spoils system. Various origins and derivations have been assigned for the caucus

*Lalor's Cyclopædia, iii., 112.