Archives for July 2026

Nicholas Murray Butler: Why Should We Change Our Form of Government? New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912.

 

President of Columbia University for more than four decades, President Taft’s running mate during the electoral debacle of 1912, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler ranked among the most distinguished Americans of the first half of the twentieth century. He is almost entirely forgotten, partly because he gave his legacy a self-inflicted wound by lauding Mussolini throughout the 1920s and well into the Thirties, seeming to take the strutting mountebank as an Italian version of Teddy Roosevelt. And he only came around to condemning the Nazis in 1938, in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom. While it is true that many of his most acidulous critics (including the socialist scribbler, Upton Sinclair, a Soviet apologist in the same year) entertained similarly benign impressions of Communism, their folly was no excuse for his. At least, unlike so many of them, he eventually corrected his error, if belatedly. As far as can be determined, he remained an anti-Semitic snob for the rest of his life, as seen in his imposition of quotas on Jewish applicants to Columbia. Imposed in the 1920s, the quotas were only removed when federal law required their removal in 1947, two years after Butler’s retirement.

His friendship with Roosevelt did not prevent him from breaking with the former president, once TR became the candidate of the Progressive Party, on the grounds that both Roosevelt and the eventual victor, Woodrow Wilson, had departed from the principles of the American regime, including the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of the unalienable rights of individuals and the United States Constitution’s republican, as distinguished from democratic, institutions. The short answer to his question, “Why should we change our form of government?” is, ‘We shouldn’t.’ His book is essentially an unusually trenchant political campaign document, published the same year as his futile run for high office. As Americans careened toward regime change, Butler stood astride the Model-T, yelling ‘Stop!’ And honorably so, his subsequent political tergiversations notwithstanding.

Butler regretted that “in the United States the words politics and politician have association that are chiefly of evil omen.” “In the true and broad sense of the word, politics is one of man’s highest concerns, and nowhere should the word have loftier and nobler associations than in a twentieth century democracy.” The fact that it doesn’t proceeds from the “mediocre and second-rate” character of contemporary politicians, who are not fit successors of Publius or Calhoun, Lincoln or Douglas. Their unimpressive character proceeds from the “sadly commercialized” condition of contemporary politics. By this, Butler doesn’t mean the prevalence of political advertising but the fact that “a large proportion of the population is trying to get the government to spend some part of its money taken in taxes upon them, upon their own localities, or upon their special interests.” Where “individuals and communities are leaning upon government,” the “sense of manly independence is being supplanted by a desire to be taken care of” under a regime of “socialism or of what may perhaps be called semi-socialism,” Progressivism. A ‘politics of compassion,” a politics of “unreflecting sentimentality,” can finally cause only “stagnation, paralysis, and death” in the body politic or, alternatively, “disorder, anarchy, and the eventual rule of brute force.” Not slavery, the supposed cornerstone of American constitutionalism as claimed by the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stevens, but its opposite, civil liberty “is the cornerstone upon which our American constitutional system has been built.” 

“The curious notion seems widespread that there exists somewhere and somehow an all-wise and beneficent State or People—something different and apart from individual human beings and not subject to their limitations and defects—which all-wise and beneficent State or People will take care of us better than we can care for ourselves, if only we will give it the opportunity.” Dismissing this as “crude nonsense,” Butler identifies genuine “human progress” not with this progressivist ‘State and People’ formula—which nicely conveys the contradiction between administrative management and democracy—but with the need for “each individual” to raise “his own standard of intelligence and of conduct.” As Butler puts it, “we are now told that the people are either incompetent or unable to choose representatives who will really serve their highest interest,” while at the same time being offered as a “remedy” the “appeal over the heads of the people’s chosen representatives to the people themselves,” in the form of such devices as popular initiative and referendum. But both mass democracy and elitist bureaucracy, somehow combined, conceals that fact that “human society is not and can never be anything more than the sum total of the individuals who compose it,” with “no excellences of its own which are not their excellences,” excellences that need protection by “fundamental law against the attacks and invasions of temporary majorities.” This being so, “the representative republic erected on the American Continent under the Constitution of the United States is a more advanced, a more just, and a wiser form of government than the socialistic and direct democracy which it is now proposed to substitute for it.” Republicanism, not socialism or semi-socialism, an oxymoronic “socialistic democracy,” remains “the chief glory of our American system of government and its most original contribution to political science,” the “true path of progress” for Americans. 

A new regime of socialistic democracy will amount to a revolution “in our political beliefs,” in “our accustomed forms of political action,” and in “our point of view, in our ambitions, and in our aspirations”—that is, in the purpose, the institutional shape, and in the way of life of Americans. Progressives charge that “the representative republic fails really and readily to reflect public opinion” because “these representative institutions easily become the prey of the self-seeker, of the special interest, of the wire-puller” and that “therefore, they must be uprooted, overturned and destroyed.” But “a really progressive movement” would advance “toward differentiation, toward complexity, toward specialization of structure and function,” not toward centralization and simplification. Progressivism “is reactionary”; if implemented, it will erode “those guarantees of civil and political liberty which underlie our whole organized society,” especially the separation of powers. Indeed, the idea of constitutionalism itself erodes, as seen in the state ‘constitutions’ Progressives have enacted, which consist of “an odd and curious medley of genuine constitutional principles and a host of statutes”—where the state university will be located; the salary of the state auditor, and “hundreds of merely incidental details of government that it is now fashionable to put upon the same plane with vitally important expressions of fundamental political principle.” Thus, obscurantism veils the gathering of detailed, administrative rule in state capitals, a strategy Progressives will duplicate at the federal level, if permitted. “Under the influence of” the European revolutions of 1848 instead of our own revolution,” America’s new states in the West “began to turn the fundamental law of our various commonwealths into a huge collection of statutory details.” In those new states also, “we reduced the representative to the position of a mere delegate,” giving him instructions “as to what he is to do when elected,” thereby “reduc[ing] the representative from the high, splendid, and dignified status of a real representative chosen by his constituency to give it his experience, his brains, his conscience and his best service, and made him a mere registering machine for the opinion of the [current] movement” of public opinion, “whatever it might happen to be.” Bureaucratism on the one hand, democratization on the other, all at the expense of the ruin of the republican regime. Legislation by voter initiative and referendum has further undercut republicanism, since “legislation so initiated “cannot be examined in committee, its sponsors cannot be cross-questioned” but “must be taken or left precisely as they project it into the political arena.” All of this takes away what Publius regarded as the sine qua non of republicanism: the responsibility of each representative for his actions. In its stead, “the initiative will result in registering in more or less rapid succession the consecutive emotions of a small proportion of the electorate” who sign petitions to get things on the ballot. Contra Publius, the passions, not the reasons, of the public will prevail.

“Those who believe that nothing in this world is fixed, or definite, or a matter of principle”—historicists—will applaud. Butler dissents, remarking that “the fundamental guarantees of the British and American Constitutions…are beyond the legitimate reach of any majority, because they are established in the fundamental laws of human nature upon which all govern and civilization and [indeed] progress rest.” “Aristotle pointed out that democracy has many points of resemblance with tyranny,” including the “likeness between the demagogue in a democracy and the court favorite in a tyranny.” What Tocqueville calls “a democratic despotism may be malevolent.” Under these circumstances, “the majority will take direct and responsible control of your life, your liberty and your property” and “all that constitutes individuality will have gone by the board,” having “been poured into the great boiling pot of the social whole.” Unlike the executive veto seen in genuinely republican constitutions, referendum does not compel reconsideration of legislation; in fact, it prevents it by promoting “decision without discussion.” 

Along with voter initiative and referendum, Progressives advocate provision for voter recall of elected officials. Although this does not violate “the fundamental principles of representative government”—it does not evade the deliberative practices of elected or appointed officials—it does foment “restless meddlesomeness” rather than “statesmanship.” And “when applied to the judiciary,” recall “is much more than a piece of stupid folly,” falling to the level of “an outrage of the first magnitude.” To those who say that judges should serve the people,” Butler answers with a firm “No!” “The judges are primarily the servants not of the people but of the law,” with the “duty to interpret the law as it is” and not “to express their own personal opinions on matters of public policy” or to express the majority opinion of the moment. Cases before the courts, and especially constitutional cases, “must be decided under the guidance of a fearless and independent judiciary,” a judiciary unintimidated by an impassioned citizenry. Butler cites the leading American socialist of the day, Eugene V. Debs, who asked, rhetorically in his unfortunately titled tract, Appeal to Reason, “Don’t you see, comrades to have in the hands of an intelligent, militant working class the political power to recall the present capitalist judges and put on the bench of our own men?”

As for the executive branch, the power to recall elected officials would be equally pernicious. At the height of Genêt’s agitation, Washington would have been recalled, as would Madison have been, “during the agitation which led to the War of 1812 with England,” as would Lincoln have been, “in the dark days of 1862 and 1863, as would Cleveland in 1893, when he was making his fight for a sound financial policy and system” in the midst of a stock market panic. “Yet, when we get far enough away from the public deeds of these strong men, we see that the particular things which at the time most excited the animosity and roused the passions of large numbers of people, were the very things that made them immortal in American history.” “Every one of them might have been dashed from his high place if the passions of the moment would have gotten at them when those passions were at their height.” The Progressives’ mixture of administrative statism and direct democracy will remove “the desire and interest of public-spirited men to hold office,” “driv[ing] them away from it as with a scourge.” Progressivist policies will lock in the already-existing mediocrity of American politicians.

With respect to America’s political economy, Butler advocates neither laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism, preferring to “lay the collective hand so heavily upon business activity that the individual’s self-interest,” along with his “individual initiative” “shall, if it be possible, be held always subordinate to the common good.” Butler regards “laissez-faire” as a thing whose time “is now passed,” given population growth, the concentration of that population in cities, “the annihilation of distance and time by steam and electricity,” the factory system and the modern corporation—all of which tend “to bring about a real, though invisible, business partnership between the individual and the community,” a partnership all too prone to “the easily demonstrated moral evils of unrestricted and unsupervised competition.” Given these realities, “the era of unrestricted individual competition is gone forever,” having “been taken up into a new and larger principle of [corporate] cooperation.” In contrast, the cooperation seen in socialism does not so much conflict with contemporary social conditions as it conflicts with the even more fundamental fact of “human nature,” which “is not going to change because a new form of economic organization is hit upon.” Under socialism “the natural law which selects an individual for a given task by proved fitness” will be removed and replaced, with “selection by the collective mind” substituted for it. This will “dry up at their source the well-springs of progress,” just as the revolution against republicanism will do. On the contrary, Americans “must have a care that the individual is given the freest possible scope for the exercise of his talents, and that he is protected in the just and honest gains which come to him.” If we “build up a great army of public employees and bureaucrats,” neither economic nor political liberty will survive. 

Given the financial and industrial conflicts of the era (labor violence, for example, had never been as bad, and has never been as bad in the decades since), Progressives agitated for reform in that area, as well. “One trouble with politics and business is the amount of talk about it”; “these torrents of words flow from the serene seclusion of an empty mind,” but meanwhile America suffers in “an industrial civil war” in which “government is at war with the economic forces of the body politic.” Butler identifies three political-economic problems that need to be settled: banking and currency, transportation systems, and large corporations. Hamilton built the first American banking system, which Jackson and Benton destroyed. “The financial troubles and difficulties of the United States began when the principles of Hamilton were forgotten, and the nation started out on the uncharted sea of reckless financial experiment.” President Cleveland upheld those principles, under assault from William Jennings Bryan and the Populists. Although that threat has dissipated, Progressivism has taken up many of its follies. In the field of transportation, railroad networks obviously require some sort of governmental supervision; Butler favors the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, so long as some of its members are railway men, who actually understand the business. As to the corporations or “trusts,” Butler judges that “every attempt to lay down a general rule or a definition of combinations that, by their very existence, are in restraint of trade, has been, and I think will always be, futile” because “economic conditions change almost while we are talking about them, and no nation can carry on a successful and profitable domestic and foreign trade which attempts to draw hard and fast lines and limits, based on present conditions, for the business activity of the future.” So long as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is interpreted as Senator Sherman intended, as an application of “the old and well-regulate principles of the common law to cases arising within the jurisdiction of the federal courts,” the Act will mean “flexibility, adaptability, reasonableness, public benefit.”

Butler does not want to see the abolition of the “limited liability corporation,” which he deems “the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial, or, in the long run—after we understand it and know how to use it—by its political effects.” He defines this kind of corporation as “a device by which a large number of individuals may share in an undertaking without risking in that undertaking more than they voluntarily and individually assume.” That is, if the company goes bankrupt, I, as a stockholder, lose my investment but I cannot be sued as an individual for the recovery of any debts the corporation has incurred. Such corporations also achieve “huge economy of scale in production and in trading” while steadying the “employment of labor at an increased wage” and far superior ‘benefits’—disability and old age insurance, pensions for widows. Crucially, the corporation is “the only possible engine for carrying on international trade on a scale commensurate with modern needs and opportunities.” These advantages notwithstanding, corporations also pose threats, namely, control of prices and unfair business practices owing to monopoly or near-monopoly of a given market. Such abuses occur not because corporations are bad in themselves but because “troubles of this kind always arise from individual delinquents”; for this reason, “we need no more law than we now have to get at individuals who commit immoral offenses, dishonorable acts, whether in trade or out of it.” Again, the principles of the common law will do. The criticisms of corporations today are identical to those leveled at co-partnerships in England when they were invented, five hundred years ago; one of the main lessons of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was the futility of attempting to interfere with market forces in order to prevent abuses. What is needed is “an effective campaign of education that will make clear to the great masses of the people what are fundamental economic laws and what is the relation of those laws to the possibilities of statute-making; and then to demand that in the highest public interests constructive statesmanship be substituted for the everlasting antics of political demagoguery.” That is, economic strength may wane if ‘democracy’ impedes the commercial dimension of the democratic and commercial republic.

Such economic education should be supplemented by civic education. In a speech before the National Education Association in 1909, Butler invokes another of Tocqueville’s themes, the “restlessness” of democratic times. He denies that poverty is its cause. Rather, “old beliefs, old traditions, and old customs are giving way before the corroding tooth of time; and as the time-honored creeds, political social, and religious, lose their hold, others equally controlling and imperative do not come forward to take their place,” leaving “immense masses of men” with “almost boundless opportunities for good or evil, but without guiding principles with which to work.” This is a particular concern for educators, since “the rising generation of Americans is growing up without any proper knowledge of the fundamental principles of American institutions and American government,” leaving them prey to demagogues who bring them “to a state of mind in which envy, greed, and hate are elevated to the lofty place which should be occupied by respect and confidence, as well as by political insight, political knowledge, and political experience,” once instilled by “the stern facts” that faced earlier Americans. “There are those among us, some of them in places of responsibility and great influence”—the former president of Princeton, current governor of New Jersey, and current candidate for the presidency of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, among them?—who “call these principles outworn, antiquated, obstacles to popular government.” But what does historicism do, if not effectively “reestablish the time when might made right”? [1] “The carefully built guards which have been put about individual rights and liberties are denounced as fortresses of privilege by those who seek privileges for themselves at the expense of the rights of others,” within the structures of an administrative state. This isn’t only an American problem. “In all parts of the world there are those” who, confusing individuality with selfishness, “would strike at the roots of human individuality and deprive it of the favoring soil in which alone it can grow.” 

Real progress comes with “the development of liberty under law,” the “two words upon whose true and faithful exposition all training for citizenship must rest.” Liberty “attaches to man as a social and political animal,” contradicting “license just as completely as it contradicts and denies tyranny.” Butler takes “the principles underlying our civil and political liberty” to have been “indelibly written into the Constitution of the United States.” This is inaccurate. The American Founders wrote the institutions of liberty into the Constitution, but the principles of the Constitution are written into its Preamble, which in turn serves as a buckle between the Constitution and the principles of unalienable right enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. [1]

Butler reassumes solid ground in noting the importance of a way of life, what he calls “a habit of will by which the individual instinctively conforms his action in concrete cases to the abstract principles in which he professes belief.” He does not mean that civil society is an ‘organism,’ as Progressives were wont to proclaim. “Society as a whole is nothing more nor less than the sum total of the individuals who compose it.” Such concepts as ‘society’ and ‘the state” have “no separate metaphysical” character. “Individual men and women” compose both society and the state. Therefore, “if men’s standards of action be raised, if their citizenship be real, sincere, and vital, then society is already reformed. Nothing else remains to be done.” To the teachers, Butler recommends Daniel Webster’s December 1820 oration commemorating the English settlement of New England, a “remarkable exposition of the meaning of republican institutions as Americans had framed them.” [2] 

In this early speech, Webster links the American regime to “our Puritan Fathers,” and particularly to their quest for religious freedom. “The principle of toleration” enables men “to look at the sternest despotism in the face.” Their emigration from England “was not a flight of guilt,” an attempt to escape the rule of law in their homeland, “but of virtue.” And while it is true that the empire of Britain was and remains superior to those of pagan Greece and Rome, the colonists became restive under its regime. They were settlers, with no intention of returning to England. They esteemed the principle of the consent of the governed in both government and religion. They resented imperial Britain’s insistence on a monopoly of trade. They upheld property rights, not only in the sense of the right to own private property, protected by the laws, but more broadly in the sense of ‘owning’ the country they had settled. These, Webster contends, inclined them to independence from the beginning. This spirit may be seen in “the nature and constitution of [American] society” today: republicanism, “a free system” of government, with a popular base; property rights, with no primogeniture; the rule of law; and limited military expenditures (unlike France, Webster adds); many small, local governments; bicameralism; free schools; and finally, “morality and religious sentiment” as the foundation of all the rest. Looking ahead, Webster argues, Americans must abolish the slave trade, “this inhuman and disgraceful traffic,” and promote literature, especially a literature that reinforces the features of the American regime he has described. Like Butler, here Webster inclines toward Burkeanism, not so much the ‘abstract’ natural rights of the Declaration of Independence. He prefers a sort of traditionalism that is not inconsistent, however, with natural right, telling his listeners, “I hardly know what should bear with a stronger obligation on a liberal and enlightened mind, than a consciousness of alliance with excellence which is departed.”

With respect to economic freedom, Butler’s exemplar is not Webster but Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton understood that “the independence of the United States was only partially achieved when the political shackles which bound the colonists to King George were broken.” Americans still depended upon Britain for its manufactured goods; “the people must be industrially independent as well, if their nation was to endure.” Although there could be only one national capital, there could be hundreds of industrial capitals, of which Paterson, New Jersey was the first. For his pains, “Hamilton was called alternately a monarchist and a thief, a liar, and a traitor,” but the United States owes its “birth to union” to Washington and Hamilton, even as it owes its “birth to liberty” to Abraham Lincoln. Of America’s “five great builders”—Washington, Hamilton, John Marshall, Webster, and Lincoln—Hamilton “was in some respects the most remarkable.” His “genius was not only amazingly precocious, but it was really genius,” as his reports on public credit and on manufactures illustrate; they “belong to the permanent literature of political science.” “In his forty-seven years, Hamilton lived the life of generations of ordinary men.” Hamilton intended to craft a financial policy that “would bind the Union hard and fast,” an industrial policy “that would make it rich, and, within the bounds of possibility, self-sufficient,” and a foreign policy that would guard “the political and economic independence already provided for.” He has succeeded. And while “no man is indispensable” in the sense that “the universe does not hang on a single [human] personality,” without Hamilton “the nation that stood the strain of the greatest of civil wars,” eventually extending from one ocean to another in prosperity, the nation “that is not afraid of permitting individual citizen to exert their powers to the utmost if only they injure no one of their fellows”—that nation would be “very different without “the labor of his life.” 

Hamilton disproves the historicist evolutionism that underlies Progressivism. This theory, initially derived from “observations on earthworms, on climbing plants, and on brightly colored birds,” has now been applied “blithely to man and his affairs.” Evolutionism claims that the “fittest” species survive—those that best ‘fit’ their environment. When the environment changes, some species become extinct, others flourish. But fitness is not goodness; the fittest are not necessarily the best, inasmuch as fitness “has in it no moral element whatever.” This being so, “moral elements, what we call progress toward an end or ideal, are not found under the operation of the law of natural selection, but have to be discovered elsewhere and added to it.” “You will read the pages of Darwin and of Herbert Spencer in vain for any indication of how the Parthenon was produced, how the Sistine Madonna, how the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, how the Divine Comedy or Hamlet or Faust.” Without the sense that “moral consideration must outweigh the mere blind struggle for existence in human affairs,” nothing will stop “the widespread and ominous revolt of the unfit” from killing off the likes of Iktinos and Callicrates, Raphael, Beethoven, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and yes, Hamilton. The unmoderated struggle for power that evolutionism describes can only result in the confusion of might and right, the inclination to “abolish” God and Mankind. [3] Not the ever-shifting demi-principles of historicism but the enduring principles of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution can and should continue to guide Americans, even as their economic, social, political, and geopolitical circumstances change.

 

Notes

1. It is likely that Theodore Roosevelt, running on the ticket of the recently formed Progressive Party, now counted among these men, as well.
2. For further discussion, see “America’s Declaration of Independence” on this website under the category “American Politics.” See also Daniel Webster: “First Settlement of New England, The Works of Daniel Webster. Six volumes. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851. Volume I, pp. 1-54.
3. Butler here cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s satirical fable, “The Four Reformers”: “Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agree that the world must be changed. “We must abolish poverty,” said one. “We must abolish marriage,” said the second. “We must abolish God,” said the third. “I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth. “Do not let us go beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.” The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.” “The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.” “The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.” “The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.” “The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.” The fourth reformer, the one who wants to abolish work, cannot work up the energy to say anything more.