are as a whole more
coherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals and
Conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the
connecting link between the different items in the old British party
programmes. I have never been able to understand why being in favour of
Protection should have anything to do with being opposed to Home Rule;
especially as most of the people who were to receive Home Rule were
themselves in favour of Protection. I could never see what giving people
cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the party
which sympathises with Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannot
see why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conservatives
conserve crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which the
causes were selected on both sides; and I incline to think that it was
with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both
sides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too;
towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But when
all is said, I incline to think that there was more spiritual and
atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party than
in those of the English party; and I think this unity was all the more
real because it was more difficult to define. The Republican party
originally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood for
the nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercial
expansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit and
progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, its
industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic party
stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this
development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to
Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth
century, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopia
founded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at all
unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the Southern squires,
who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison
romantic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions and the
pathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is a
religion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition.
Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should
favour local liberti