The Presidency and Mr. Olney

THERE is a more radical difference between the Republican party and the Democratic party than appears at first sight. Their political opinions, indeed, are not sharply discriminated. In each party we find some protectionists and some free-traders, gold men and silver men, civil service reformers and adherents of the spoils doctrine. Upon foreign affairs, as we have learned by recent experience, political opinion does not run in anything like strict accordance with party lines. The real distinction between the two parties lies in, or perhaps we should say, rather, springs from, the elements of which they are composed. The average or typical Democrat is a very different kind of man from the average or typical Republican; and this difference is recognized by everybody in a general way. Thus, if a person at all familiar with American politics were walking down Broadway, in the city of New York, he would certainly assume that the laborer digging up the street with a pickaxe was a Democrat; and so of the policeman at the crossing, of the fireman rushing past on his engine, of the ’bus driver, of the motor-man on the electric car. But as to the shopkeepers along the street, both Jew and Gentile, both wholesaler and retailer, he would set them down as Republicans. When he reached the lower part of Broadway, where lawyers and bankers abound, there would be more uncertainty in his calculations ; still, by far the greater number of lawyers and bankers would be Republicans. And what is true of New York, in this matter, is true, though of course with many variations and exceptions, of the whole country, saving the Southern States. It is a frequent saying among Republicans that the great body of uneducated voters are found in the ranks of their opponents ; the Democrats, they declare, represent the ignorance of the country. The Democrat has a strong feeling for what he regards as his personal rights, the Republican a greater regard for institutions and for the strength of the government. The Republican has more money, and he occupies a position which is thought to be higher in the social scale. There is a corresponding difference between the Democratic and the Republican ideals of a public man ; and these ideals are usually realized. Politicians may pull and haul as they will, but in the long run, so far as the highest elective offices are concerned, the voters get their own way ; they elect the kind of man that they like.

Now, if it be inquired what kind of a candidate the Democratic masses naturally choose, we could hardly give a better or more definite answer than is furnished by the name of Richard Olney. Democrats prefer a man of the masterful, commanding, straightforward type. They have no desire to dictate to their leaders, they want to be dictated to; they want to be led, not to drive. We need not now inquire very curiously into the origin and nature of this Democratic submission to authority. Some people call it subservience; others call it loyalty ; others, again, attribute it to the simple fact that the Democratic voters have nothing to gain from legislation. Not being predominantly engaged in trade, in manufactures, or in mining, they are not applicants for protection, or for bounties, or for any other form of paternal assistance. Consequently, they arc willing to leave questions of policy and of legislation to be settled by their leaders. But whatever the explanation, the fact is perfectly obvious that the Democratic voter has an instinctive liking for a real leader, for a dominating person. He elects a man of that kind, and, having put him in office, gives him a free rein. Mr. Cleveland is notoriously of this nature, and Mr. Olney resembles him in this respect. The two men are of similar origin, for they both come of sturdy New England fighting and preaching stock.

Mr. Olney is in the direct line of descent from Thomas Olney, who emigrated from England in 1635, and settled in Salem. Being a Baptist, he was excommunicated and expelled from Massachusetts, two years after his arrival in this country, along with Roger Williams, whom he assisted in founding Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. His descendants have been among the inhabitants of Rhode Island ever since. Richard Olney’s father was Wilson Olney, who moved from Providence to Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1819, and there became a woolen manufacturer and a banker. He was a man of perfect integrity and of great energy. He died in 1874, leaving three sons, of whom Richard was the oldest. Wilson Olney’s wife was the daughter of Peter Butler, of Oxford, and granddaughter of Mary Sigourney, who was descended from Andrew Sigourney, a Huguenot, and the leader of a small band of Huguenots who settled at Oxford in 1687. Mr. Olney, therefore, in addition to his good AngloSaxon descent, has a strain of that Huguenot blood which, as we are informed by the researches of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, has contributed a greater proportionate number of distinguished men to American life than any other except the native stock.

Richard Olney was born September 15, 1835, at Oxford. He was educated at the academy in Leicester, near Oxford, and at Brown University in Providence, where he was graduated with high honors in 1856. In the autumn of that year he entered the Harvard Law School, and in 1859 he was admitted to the Boston bar. He immediately became associated with the late Judge Thomas, whose daughter he married in 1861, and he continued to be the friend and partner of Judge Thomas until the death of the latter, which occurred in 1879. When he was admitted to the bar, and indeed for twenty years afterward, the practice of the law was not specialized, as it has since become. In those days, a lawyer in good practice would be found now in the criminal court, now in the court of law or of equity; he might act as a conveyancer to - day, and as a counselor in the Admiralty Court to-morrow. This variety of employment probably tended to develop a more practical and wellrounded man than is produced under the present system of specialization. It is on record that Mr. Olney once defended a man accused of murder, and obtained his acquittal. From an early period in his career, however, he has been concerned chiefly with trust estates and with corporations. In fact, his long employment as counsel for railroad corporations doubtless tends to diminish what is called his “ availability ” as a candidate for the presidency.

From the beginning of his apprenticeship to the law, Mr. Olney has labored at it with such industry as only a robust physique could have enabled him to support. He is noted for deep and accurate knowledge of the law, and for the logic, skill, and pertinacity with which that knowledge has been applied. The only political offices which he has ever held are those of selectman in the town of West Roxbury, where he used to live, and of representative in the Massachusetts legislature, of which he was a member in 1874. It will be seen, therefore, that the story of his life, with the exception of the past two or three years, is that of a lawyer, pure and simple. He was known in Boston merely as a very able, honest, accurate, well-read member of the bar. He had, to be sure, a rather unusual reputation for firmness and pugnacity. So little, indeed, had he been considered as a figure in public life or as a possible subject of political honors that he was not even thought of by those leading Democrats in Massachusetts who, at Mr. Cleveland’s invitation, suggested the names of persons whom they thought suitable for a place in his Cabinet. The names thus suggested were passed over, and the President offered the post of Attorney-General to Mr. Olney. The office was directly in the line of his profession, and he accepted it. It was thus purely as a lawyer that he entered political life, and we may add that it is entirely from the manner in which he has dealt with certain questions of national and of international law that he has become a prominent figure in the country, and a possible candidate for the presidency. He is known to the general public only by the part which he played in suppressing the Chicago railroad riots of 1894, and by his conduct of the Venezuelan controversy.

It will be remembered that in the latter part of June, 1894, a general railroad strike was in progress at the West, the centre of the disturbance being at Chicago. Very great injury had already been inflicted upon the business of the country : passengers were detained in uninhabited places without food ; cattle and sheep in course of transportation were dying of thirst and hunger; whole communities were cut off from their ordinary supplies of food and fuel. The state authorities made but feeble efforts to cope with the difficulty, and matters were hourly going from bad to worse. Had the United States courts any authority to interfere ? It was a very doubtful question ; there was no precedent for it whatever. Such a jurisdiction never had been exercised by any court in England or in America. There was no time to consult authorities or to ponder the nice legal questions involved ; and the responsibility of moving or not moving in the matter rested wholly upon a single person, — Richard Olney, Attorney-General of the United States. He promptly decided that he had authority to act. He applied to the United States Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois for an injunction to restrain the leaders of the strike from interfering, and from inciting others to interfere, with the transportation of United States mails or with interstate commerce ; that is, with the movement of freight en route from one State to another. The injunction was granted, and the strike came to an end. As one of the defendants testified afterward : “ The strike was broken up, . . . not by the army and not by any other power, but simply and solely by the action of the United States courts in restraining us from discharging our duties as officers and representatives of the workmen.”

The strike was ended, but not the concern of Mr. Olney with it; that remained to be passed upon by the Supreme Court, to which the defendants (who were subsequently imprisoned for contempt of court in violating the injunction) had appealed.

A strong argument was made in their behalf. “ No case can be cited,” was said, and said truly, by counsel for the defendants, — “ no case can be cited where such a bill in behalf of the sovereign has been entertained against riot and mob violence, though occurring on the highway. . . . The strong hand of executive power is required to deal with such lawless demonstrations. The courts should stand aloof from them, and not invade executive prerogative, nor even at the behest or request of the executive travel out of the beaten path of well-settled judicial authority.” The Supreme Court, however, after great deliberation, and with the assistance of the elaborate briefs filed upon each side, arrived at the same conclusion readied by Mr. Olney in those few hours, one might almost say minutes, in which he was obliged to decide whether or not he should take action. This decision must be accepted as a vindication of his action. The precedent which he thus had a hand in establishing is one of the utmost importance, and its results will be felt for many years to come. In fact, it is quite conceivable that the very existence of the government of the United States might depend upon or might be destroyed by the power of the United States courts to interfere in every strike which involves the stoppage of the mails or of interstate commerce. Certainly no railroad strike upon a great scale can ever be carried out so long as this power is exercised. Thus a great safeguard is thrown about the business of the country.

But there is another side to the matter. Railroad employees deprived, practically, of the right to strike are deprived of their only weapon of self - defense. Unless they are protected by some new legislation from the possible rapacity and injustice of their employers, this power of interference by the Federal courts, now settled by the decision of the Supreme Court, may give rise to evils far worse than those which it was designed to prevent. That Mr. Olney himself is not blind to such considerations, that he aims at justice to the workman as well as protection to the public, is plain from one of his subsequent acts, not as Attorney-General, but as a private individual. The case was as follows : The receivers of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad issued an edict that none of their employees should join the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, and that those who had joined it should leave the Brotherhood on pain of immediate dismissal from the service of the company. Some of the employees who were members of the Brotherhood petitioned the United States Circuit Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to restrain the receivers (who, as such, are officers of the court) from carrying out this policy of injustice and oppression. Mr. Olney had no connection with this case, one way or the other. The receivers were represented by their counsel, and the employees by theirs, and neither the Attorney-General nor his assistants were engaged on either side. But the action of the receivers was a gross interference with the liberty of the individual; and Mr. Olney, of his own motion and by special leave of the court, filed a brief upon the side of the petitioners. From this brief we quote the following passage : “ Whatever else may remain for the future to determine, it must now be regarded as substantially settled that the mass of wage-earners can no longer be dealt with by capital as so many isolated units. The time has passed when the individual workman is called upon to pit his feeble strength against the might of organized capital. Organized labor now confronts organized capital. They are the best off when friends, but are inevitably often at variance. As antagonists, neither can afford to despise the other ; and the burning question of modern times is, How shall the ever-recunring controversies between them be adjusted and terminated ? ” It remains only to add that the circuit judge refused the petition, leaving the receivers at liberty to pursue the course upon which they had entered. This decision was perfectly honest, but it is doubtful if one more unjust was ever made by any tribunal in a civilized country.

By his public acts, therefore, Mr. Olney has proved himself not only an able lawyer, with a capacity for original action, but a courageous man ; and not only a courageous man, but a just one. The same fortune — one hardly knows whether to call it good or bad — which attended him as Attorney-General has followed him as Secretary of State ; he has been called upon to decide questions of far greater difficulty and importance than fall ordinarily to the lot of a Cabinet officer. It would be impossible, as well as out of place, to attempt here an analysis of the Venezuelan controversy ; but Mr. Olney’s famous letter upon the subject may be examined briefly, so far as it throws light upon his character as a man and as a possible President.

It is now generally understood that the dispute between England and Venezuela had lasted for half a century, and that various Secretaries of State for the United States had addressed the English government on the subject, in one way and another, but always upon the ground that we had an interest in the matter. That is, the intervention of the United States was based upon the Monroe doctrine. Chiefly, this intervention had taken the form of repeated requests to Great Britain to submit the dispute to arbitration. These requests had always been refused, and meantime the boundary line, as the British Foreign Office understood it, was creeping further and further over the disputed territory. In the two years between 1885 and 1887 it advanced so far as to include thirty-three thousand square miles which had not previously been claimed by Great Britain. Such was the situation when Mr. Olney became Secretary of State. He took up the matter with the promptness and thoroughness which have always marked his career as a lawyer. It may be that he misunderstood and misapplied the Monroe doctrine ; some of his critics have concluded that he did, and he has fallen in their estimation accordingly. But whether he was historically correct or not has ceased to be a matter of practical importance. The American people, with a few but notable exceptions, have accepted and approved his understanding of the doctrine. It is the Monroe doctrine now, whether it was so before or not: and it is hardly conceivable that it should ever be repudiated by any future Secretaries of State or Presidents of the republic. That doctrine, so far as it applies to the Venezuelan case, is this: no foreign power shall acquire new territory in South America, without the consent of the United States, either by actual conquest, or by pushing forward its boundary line against the will of the state whose territory is thus invaded. This practical exposition of the Monroe doctrine will preserve Mr. Olney’s name in American history, even if no other act of his shall be remembered.

The terms of his letter to Mr. Bayard, for the information of Lord Salisbury, have been criticised severely. It is said that he might have put the matter more diplomatically, and that a request, instead of a peremptory demand, would have done better. But it must be remembered that the resources of diplomacy had been exhausted by former Secretaries of State without producing the slightest effect. The English are not, like the French (and perhaps like ourselves), unduly sensitive about either giving or taking a hint. The elder Mr. Osborne was a typical Englishman, and there is no dispute about his peculiarities. “ When he gave what he called a 4 hint,’ ” his biographer relates, “ there was no possibility for the most obtuse to mistake his meaning. He called kicking a footman downstairs a hint to the latter to leave his service.”

Mr. Olney, in his letter to Mr. Bayard, gave the British government a strong hint, but a hint no stronger than was required. The same critics who condemned the terms of that letter also derided Mr. Olney’s proposed commission as being an additional insult to Great Britain. Lord Salisbury, they declared, would ignore it. And yet, as these lines are written, news comes that the case of the British government, prepared by the most competent man in England, and duly illustrated by elaborate maps and diagrams, will be presented at Washington. This, of course, will not be done officially. The book will not he sent by Lord Salisbury, with his compliments ; but it will arrive ; it will be laid upon the table of the commission, and there will be no doubt as to its authenticity. If the commission, constituted as it is, and having been furnished with all the evidence at the disposal of the British government, should decide against England, it is reasonably certain that public opinion in England would not sustain Lord Salisbury in maintaining his case by actual war against the United States. It seems, therefore, not premature to conclude that Mr. Olney’s diplomacy has succeeded ; and it is hardly fair to attribute this success entirely to good luck and “ pugnacity.” He is a pugnacious man, no doubt; even the carriage of his head suggests that trait in his character. His head does not hang like the head of a dreamy man, nor droop like the head of a scholar; it is lowered, like the head of a bull.

But this pugnacity is held in check by a very cool and logical intellect, by a lawyer’s respect for the law, by the conscience of a man who in his whole life has never done a single thing for display. There was nothing rash, or reckless, or unpremeditated in the famous letter to Mr. Bayard: and yet that letter had certain defects which correspond with a defect in Mr. Olney’s character considered as a President. It showed a want of tact: there were sentences in it which, without adding to the strength of the Secretary’s position, were of such a nature as to wound the pride and provoke the resentment of the person to whom it was addressed. It must be admitted that Mr. Olney is not a politic man. He would not be successful in winning over disaffected persons, in harmonizing differences of opinion, in arranging compromises, in opposing people without offending them. As President, he would probably make many enemies.

Mr. Olney’s election would be, in one respect, almost unique. He would be the first President since Washington — with the single exception of Grant — who had not been a politician. He would take office absolutely untrammeled by previous alliances or associations; he would be under obligations to nobody, and he would have nobody to reward or to punish. His want of experience as an executive officer (except during the past few years) is not important. The chief functions of a President are to select men and to choose policies; and nobody has a better knowledge of men, or is more fitted to decide questions of policy, than a naturally acute and well-educated lawyer, who has been trained by many years of hard and responsible labor at the bar. Nor is Mr. Olney merely a lawyer, in the sense that his interests are confined to his office. He is not the kind of man who goes home late, with a green bag full of papers under his arm. Instead, he leaves his office at a seasonable hour, and takes a long walk, or plays tennis, at which he is an adept. He has been seen upon the baseball grounds ; and best of all, he has a keen sense of humor. He is not an orator, and as a writer he has no distinction of style; but the justness of his ideas and the cultivation of his mind are shown in the few occasional addresses which he has been obliged to make since he became a member of the Cabinet. As Attorney-General, it was his part to present to the court the resolutions of the bar upon the death of the late Mr. Justice Blatchford, and in the course of his remarks he said : —

“ It is not given to every man to be instinct with true genius, to exult in acknowledged intellectual superiority, to be chief among the chiefs of his chosen calling. Such men are rare, and their examples as often provoke despair as excite to emulation. But to every man it is given to make the most of the faculties that he has; to cultivate them with unflagging diligence ; to make sure that they deteriorate neither from misuse nor disuse, but continue in ever-growing strength and efficiency, until the inevitable access of years and infirmities bars all further progress. By such means alone, without the aid of any transcendent powers, it is astonishing to what heights men have climbed, what conquests they have made, and what laurels they have won.”

No man spends three years at Washington in an official position without some change in his character or habits, either for better or for worse; and this is especially true when the transition to Washington is made from the country or from a provincial city like Boston. For a weak man the experience is apt to be depraving; in some cases it has proved disastrous. But Mr. Olney, in the course of his residence at Washington, has visibly brightened and expanded. He has the air of one who, having suddenly been put in a new and difficult place, yet finds the ground firm under his feet, and himself the master of the situation. We began by saying that he was of that type which is most admired by the typical Democrat, by the great mass of Democratic voters, and we believe that this will appear the more clearly the more his character becomes known. Notwithstanding his dignity and reserve, in spite of the conventional surroundings of his life and his forty years of office work, the primitive man survives in him. His long association with corporations has bred in him not a trace of the timidity or selfishness of wealth. Though a man of education and refinement, he has never been touched by that academic frost under the blighting influence of which the natural promptings of the heart are so often replaced by the feeble conclusions of the intellect. Mr. Olney has retained what may be called the natural impulses of human nature, — the impulses of love and hatred, the impulse of pity, and the impulse of pugnacity; and it is this naturalness and spontaneity which make his character attractive as well as strong.