A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY.
CHAPTER XIII. POLITICAL PARTIES. 1
ORIGINAL institutions are those which existed undifferentiated in society previous to the emergence of the state. The rise of the latter, collecting to itself the coercive factors of the several institutions, permitted first the free action of individuals within them. But this free action, leading to immense increase of wealth and population, and therefore becoming essentially com- petitive, tended necessarily to association and then to subordina- tion to a single will. Thus the freedom of labor prepared the way for industrial corporations, and the extension of the right of suffrage prepared the way for the rise of political parties. These have reached their highest development in the United States, because here labor has been earliest freed and suffrage widest extended. Political parties are now generally recognized as essential to popular government. But our federal and state constitutions were originally framed under the conviction that parties were the deadliest rocks in the path of freedom. Parties were identified with factions. Washington's farewell address stated this conviction. Instead, therefore, of incorporating parties into the constitutional framework of government, the constitution-makers did all they could to suppress them. It was natural for a people which had just emerged from a life-struggle with a foreign foe, where unanimity was required for success, to look with anxiety on the personal, factional, and sectional strug- gles that followed. Washington himself could hardly see that the differences in his cabinet between Hamilton and Jefferson were anything more than the personal differences between an energetic business-man and a phlegmatic theorist. But history shows that each stood for deep and lasting principles, which
1 This chapter is an adaptation of a paper read at the National Conference on Practical Reform of Primary Elections, in January, 1898, and published in the pro- ceedings of the conference, pp. 18-23 (C. Hollister & Bro., Chicago, 1898).
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