The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891Various
General
The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891
Various
American literature -- Periodicals
Successful parties in the United States, as in England, have generic
rather than specific names. Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Whig,
Democratic, and Republican; all represent popular triumphs and
administrations of the government. Anti-Masonic, Liberty, American,
Free Soil, Greenback, Prohibition, Labor,--these party names represent
no partisan victories. In the Cabinet of the first President of the
Republic, Thomas Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Alexander
Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. To each of them Washington
submitted the question whether Congress had power to incorporate a
bank. Jefferson, believing popular liberty safe only in a strict
construction of the Constitution, denied the power to create a bank
because no such power is expressed, or is strictly necessary to the
exercise of any power expressly granted. Hamilton, believing that a
liberal construction of the Constitution was essential to the
development of America, answered that Congress had the power, that the
power was incidental to the national character of the government. He
construed the grant of "necessary" powers in these words: "It is a
common mode of expression to say that it was necessary for a
government or a person to do this or that thing, when nothing more is
intended or understood than that interests of the government or person
require or may be promoted by the doing of this or that thing. The
imagination can be at no loss for exemplifications on the use of the
word in this sense. And it is the true one, in which it is to be
understood as used in the Constitution." The Supreme Court, quoting
these very words with approval, has adopted Hamilton's construction.
With the writing of those two opinions in the Cabinet of Washington,
the enduring lines of party division in America were drawn. There
ought to be early recognition of the fact, that in case a new party of
the people shall be formed, a party determined upon reform of existing
abuses and oppressions, upon the suppression of the liquor traffic as
we know it, upon the overthrow of every semblance of plutocracy, upon
opening to every child of the American democracy an equality of
opportunity as yet unknown, resort must be had to those broad,
liberal, and constructive constitutional doctrines which the existing
Democratic party steadily opposes, and which the Republican party does
not sufficiently apply for the benefit of the masses. It is the duty
and opportunity of the prohibitionists to make such a party. A party
going to Thomas Jefferson for a baptism of Democratic feeling, and
content with no sprinkling, and to the school of Hamilton for its
constitutionalism, can supplant the Republicans, and only such a party
can meet the case of labor. The woollen manufacturers of Massachusetts
have just remonstrated against further reduction of the hours of labor
unless the reduction be uniform in all the manufacturing States, and
they made the significant suggestion that Congress has power to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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