Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/357

Rh human life which is the same whether it is seen in the character of an individual striving to control his wayward impulses by general principles, or in the political history of a great democratic republic seeking to obtain dignity, stability, and imperial majesty by binding the swaying wishes of the hour under broad and sacred constitutional provisions. It was the opening of that issue which is vital to this republican issue which cleaves down through our entire political and social fabric, the issue to which parties must ever return and about which they will always form so long as this experiment lasts — the issue, namely, of constitutionalism versus democracy, of law versus self-will; the question whether we are a constitutional republic whose ultimate bond is the loyalty of the individual citizen to the Constitution and the laws or a democracy in which at any time the laws and the Constitution may give way to what shall seem, although not constitutionally expressed, to be the will of the people. General Jackson was from the time of this election the exponent of the latter theory.

I do not mean to say that the issue was clearly defined at the time, or that the parties ranged themselves upon it with logical consistency. Any student of history knows that political parties never do that. Still less do I mean to say that parties since that time have kept strictly to the position on one side or the other of this issue which their traditions would require. Political history and political tradition have little continuity with us, and the fact has been that the Jacksonian doctrine has permeated our whole community far too deeply. We have had some who merely grubbed in a mole-eyed way in the letter of the Constitution, as indeed Jackson and his fellows did, and we have had others who were and are restive under any invocation of the Constitution. True constitutionalism, however, the grand conception of law, of liberty under law, of the free obedience of intelligent citizens, is what now needs