Government is simply a method of controlling society as a whole for the benefit of all its parts, and all its parts for the benefit of the whole, by some power superior to any which can be opposed to it. Government has existed, and it must exist, chiefly in three general forms: Despotism, in which the one-man power is supreme over all, and monarchy, where one man governs under limitations of established laws; aristocracy, or the government of the many by the few for the benefit of the few primarily, and secondarily for the benefit of the many, in so far as their good will promote that of the few in still greater degree; and the republican form, or government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Under these three forms, the despotism, the aristocracy, and the democracy or republicanism, or their variations, all human government necessarily exists.

It will be observed that the primary object of all these forms of government is the same: The subjection of society to some general rule of conduct, which, however imperfect in its operations, is yet a curb to universal license, and a rescue from the intolerable evils of anarchy. In all government there must be, necessarily, three elements: The law itself, which implies a law-giver; the construction of the law and its application to instances as they arise in society, which is the function of the judge, and the execution of the law, which is the work of executive power. These three functions, then, constitute government-the legislative, judicial, and executive; and whether these departments are vested in a single will as in a despotism; in a combination of few wills, acting harmoniously, as in the aristocracy; or in the people at large, that is to say, in the republic-they are the same in nature.

These three different forms are each at different periods of the development of society more excellent than either of the others-the despotism appertaining to the lowest, as the aristocracy does to the medium, and the republic to the highest degree of civilization known among men. A moment's reflection will reveal the truth of Montesquieu's observation, for it is apparent that the one-man power as a form of government is inconsistent with either of the other two, and therefore to combine it with them, or with either of them, of necessity must lead to antagonism and conflict and failure. And what is true of the effort to combine absolutism with democracy is necessarily true of the effort to intermingle all these three forms of government with each other. There may be transitions from the one to the other as society changes from the lowest to the highest; from the highest downward, as society retrogrades.

But these diverse principles cannot permanently operate harmoniously together. They are attended with conflict of necessity. If society has passed, and if the masses of men have arisen from the condition of abject servitude, which is their condition under a despotism or an aristocracy, to that high plane of intelligence and capacity which enables them to govern themselves in the republican form, it is manifest that they must abide by that form completely if they would wholly maintain their liberties, their governmental standard of excellence, and the prosperity and happiness and perpetuity of their nation as a whole. These propositions are commonplaces in political philosophy. Their repetition may seem to be the unnecessary consumption of time. Certainly one would not expect to see these fundamental and manifest principles directly violated by the great Republic in the most conspicuous and flagrant manner, in the heart of its institutions and on the very theater where its laws are made, construed, and executed.

It would be supposed that the Government of the United States would be administered in the republican form; that the capital of the foremost Republic on the face of the earth, that one spot exclusively under its control, would itself be a model republic, without the trace of despotism or aristocracy; that in such locality as might contain the seat and creative arena of governmental activity the people themselves would be free; that such a community would illustrate in the highest possible form the practical workings and the superior blessings of a democratic and representative form of government; that in such a specific locality, if nowhere else, government of the people would be by the people and for the people; that it would be founded upon the consent of the governed; that life, liberty, and property would be protected and secured by laws founded upon the principles of that Constitution which applies to the country generally; that there would be no taxation without representation; that the executive power would be derived, if not immediately, at least remotely, from those upon whom the law is executed, and that an enthusiastic admirer of free institutions from lands ridden by tyranny might come to the capital of free America to behold the

great object-lesson of liberty in its practical operation among the masses of the people.

It would hardly be believed that the great Republic had set up a despotism in its own heart and built therein a nest for faction, intrigue, and corruption, and had ordained a complete subversion of the rights, interests, and will of the masses of the people and their complete subjection to an extraneous system sometimes inimical to their good, and over the creation and direction of which the people concerned have no control whatever save only that which may be had by prayer and supplication addressed to their earthly masters. It can but be a matter of surprise that such a place should be selected as a safe depository for the original Declaration of Independence and for the archives of a free government.

The District of Columbia, originally 10 miles square, has been diminished by the retrocession of that portion lying south of the Potomac River and in the State of Virginia, which took place in the year 1846, and now consists of 64 square miles located on the north side of the Potomac River, with a population at the present time of 230,000 souls.

The population has grown from the trifling numbers who lived here in the year 1791, when the District was made the seat of Government, to a mass greater than the population of not less than three of the States now in the Union, and larger than that of most of the States which have been admitted to the Union since the organization of the Government at the time of their admission. There is every reason to believe that within another century these will be more than two million of people in this District, and that the growth of the District will keep at least equal pace with that tremendous expansion of population and power in the nation at large which is as inevitable as futurity itself. Destruction is the only escape from this terrible growth and the responsibilities which are thereby imposed.

Our fathers who declared their independence, who achieved it by arms, who established the Government upon the principles which they had vindicated in battle and consecrated in blood, never dreamed that by the establishment of the Federal District, in order that the National Government might have a secure, unfettered field for its operations, they were laying the foundation for a vast community of political slaves. They understood that the people of the District of Columbia would possess all the rights and liberties which belonged to other American citizens, and that residence here would be a political blessing, not a political curse.

In advocating the adoption of the Constitution, Madison and Hamilton asserted that the people of the District would, as a matter of course, be entitled to the functions and advantages of local self-government; and, as a matter of fact, until the year 1871, the District of Columbia possessed a republican form of government in all local affairs. It was the home to that extent of a free people. They were substantially in a Territorial condition; not, to be sure, participating in the enactment of the general laws of the land, and in the transfer of the executive power, but still in possession of local laws enacted by themselves and the administration of their local affairs; and a portion of the time enjoying the right to be heard by a delegate duly chosen to represent them upon the floor of the House of Representatives. There is now existing a large volume of laws enacted by the local authority. So far their condition was superior to that of a Territory.

If, in the origin of this community, resulting, as it did, from the location of the General Government in this then almost vacant District, there had been failure to establish the forms of free government for the benefit of the inhabiants by reason of the absorption of Congress in the great affairs of the nation at large, a long period should have elapsed before attention was turned to their deprivation of the benefits of self-government, it would not have seemed so very strange, since the influences of free government surrounding them, and the very habit of liberty, if I may so speak, would have prevented the infliction of serious personal wrongs, although there might have been no positive law for the locality to which appeal could have been made for their vindication.

But, as the community grew larger and more and more formidable, one would have expected that inevitably the Congress would have hastened to establish a model school of republicanism in this District; and it seems to me incomprehensible that after nearly a century of actual local self-government, such as it was, that the American Congress as late as the year 1878 should have proceeded to subvert whatsoever there was of republicanism and democracy actually ex

isting in a community which then had attained to the number of at least 160,000 souls-more than that of many of the States at the time of their admission into the Union-and to remand the whole community for its present, and apparently for its entire future, to a condition of political vassalage.

I venture to say that no act of more stupendous and dangerous inconsistency has ever been perpetrated by the legislative power of any free people in violation of the principle of their own form of government since the foundation of the world; that, considering the political enlightenment of the age in which this was done, no such example of incomprehensible and fatal violation of the first truth of governmental theory laid down by Montesquieu as of universal application has ever been known. If heedlessness led to it, it should be remedied. The slightest thought should be adequate to induce its reversal and provide for its remedy. If it be indicative of something worse of a lapse of fealty, and of sensitive adherence to the principles of free government on the part of those who are intrusted with their administration, or indeed of indifference to those principles on the part of the people themselves-then, indeed, is there cause for alarm, for no slave community can grow up around and be a part of the administration and heart-movements of this great Government without the sure derangement of the circulation of the very life-blood of its liberties to the extremities of the nation.

If this state of things has been protracted, lo, now these twelve years, against the unheard and, to a great extent, the suppressed remonstrances of the masses of the people in this city, and if daily the control of this community is becoming more and more absolute in the possession of leaders of factions and combinations and rings and syndicates which derive their strength from unholy or indifferent relations to and with the representatives of national power who are intrusted with the government of the District, or if there is danger that this may now be or may become so, then it is high time, indeed, at once to call a halt, to seek the hospital and attack this cancerous growth at once with medicines, or, they failing, with the knife.

If these 230,000 people are satisfied with their condition, that is the worst indication of all, and it can only be accounted for upon the same principle that the fat dog in the fable was willing to wear his collar. If they prefer fat to liberty, and lazily acquiesce in a condition which, as population increases, will inevitably develop a proletariat of helots and sycophants not superior to those of ancient times, who, in the turbulent days and nights which are sure to attend the history of our nation (as turbulent periods have attended the history of all nations), will be specially dangerous in the Capital City, the cause for alarm can not be exaggerated.

These silent, irresponsible, untrained, and dangerous masses will sometime constitute a mob as untamable and destructive as that of Paris or old Rome. The fact that this is a community of schools is no source of ultimate safety, for an educated people will be free or they will be anarchists, and there is no mob so dangerous as an educated mob. Witness Chicago. To play with principles is more dangerous than to play with fire; and it is particularly dangerous for a free government to violate the principles of freedom, of which qualification for self-government and the practice of self-government by the individual citizen are the most necessary of all.

It is true that in the local affairs of the District present order prevails, and that the principles of good government rooted in the administration of the States surrounding the District and operating in the country at large are still prevalent in this viceroyalty, and that time has not yet sufficed to produce serious insecurity of life, liberty, or property, although the great fundamental right of all, which is the right to be politically free, and from the absence of which all other political evil will ultimately result, has been utterly subverted and destroyed; but these recent years, so full of material growth, have been sufficient to develop a marked difference between the rising population of this city and the corresponding population in any like community within the States.

No citizen of the United States, resident in a State and familiar with the practical working of free institutions, on becoming familiar with the settled population of the District of Columbia, can fail to observe the marked difference between them and the rest of the American people. This is especially noticeable when the young men born and reared in the District are compared with the great body of the young manhood of the country. Patriotic as they are and proud of their country, yet these splendid young men impress me that naturalization is the one thing needful to make them Americans.

The contrast between the father born and reared in one of the States, where from childhood he daily witnessed and participated in the political life which surrounded him, and grew up subject to the impressions of such an environment, of which in subsequent years he himself became a sovereign part, and that same father who in later years has come to reside and rear his family in this District, and his own boys who have grown up in the capital of their country, but untouched by the transforming atmosphere of free local self-government, enveloping and penetrating every-day life, is very marked and startling.

It is not too much to say that if the political conditions under which 230,000 American citizens who live in the city of Washington prevailed throughout the country the people of the United States would become incapable of self-government within a brief period of time. A young man who never has passed through an election, who never saw a vote cast or counted, and who never expects to cast one himself, unless he goes away from home, who simply grows up in his father's place of business upon Pennsylvania avenue, or on F street, reading of political movements in the States as he does of those in a foreign country, or who is even the Washington city-bred son of a soldier who fought to preserve the Union, does not seem, as a rule, to care any more about the general course of political affairs, or, as I have observed him, to be any better fitted to control the future of his country than the mass of intelligent foreigners, or than the girls by whom he is surrounded and perhaps in prospective usefulness as citizens is surpassed.

This would be a comparison unfavorable to the general girl of the country who has received the training which comes from association with fathers and brothers constantly engaged in the discussion of public questions and the performance of the duties of self-government. It would be far better to surrender the future of the States and of the nation into the hands of the girls of the country at large than into the hands of men reared as, through no fault of their own, but of necessity, are the young men of this District under existing laws.

I have alluded to the manifestations of the increasing subjection of the affairs of the District to the control of syndicates and combinations of wealth for the advantage of the few and the disadvantage of the many.

This subordination becomes, even for the most common and honorable enterprise, almost a matter of compulsion, and, in fact, is an evil born of necessity, for the general good, because there is no way in which the general will can manifest itself. And so all activities of enterprising capital which look to its own aggrandizement and to the aggrandizement of the city, and to the development of this vast and magnificent capital, are compelled to resort to such means as are left open to them through manipulation and careful management of men under whose control the present system of government has placed them, because there is by law no way in which their purposes can be honorably effected by methods which will bear the light, and which are based on broad and generous devotion to the interests of the whole community and a just regard to the rights of the several parts.

Nor is it possible to conceive of a system of government better calculated to invite the employment of methods which allure, if they do not corrupt, the general legislative power of the land to acts of questionable propriety on the part of some and a general indifferentism on the part of the whole to the individual rights of a great community; and it is a dangerous thing when those who legislate for 65,000,000 people come to regard lightly or fail to exercise vigilantly their power and obligation to administer faithfully the principles of individual liberty when the law has charged them with that responsibility.

Yet such is the pressure upon every Representative and Senator of the affairs of the community which sent him here that it is impossible for even the committees of the two Houses, specially charged with the legislative interests of those people, almost as perplexing and entangling and extensive as those of a whole State with its local Legislature, to find time to comprehend, much less to legislate properly for, even as committees, the interests of the people here; and could the committees perform their full duty, the Congress at large is able to enact but a small part of the legislation required for the general good of the whole country; and consequently the affairs of the District are liable to be almost absolutely abandoned to such fate as may happen to befall them in covert manipulation and in the practically irresponsible action of the triumvirate, however honest, who constitute whatever of formal government Congress has condescended to give the people since the subversion of the political liberty in the year 1871, made complete, and, apparently, perpetual in the year 1878.

This is no trifling matter, and I verily believe that it constitues a drop of poison in the heart of the Republic, which, if left without its antidote, will spread virus through that circulation which is the life of our liberties.

The District of Columbia has deserved well of the Republic. The balance of monetary obligations as between the General Government and the people of this city is very largely against the General Government. I shall produce some statistics to demonstrate this and to remove the impression which has been so generally made to the contrary. The District contributed its full quota of men and money to the common defense in the war of 1812, and suffered more largely from its disasters than almost any other community in the whole country. When the war was over the enterprising people of this District contributed at once and very largely to the reparation of the ravages of the great struggle for the benefit of the nation at large, as well as of themselves.

They paid their full share of taxation specially for the prosecution of the war for the preservation of the Union, and gave their sons and their blood to the same end and to their full proportion, and 18 percent beyond the quota which the law required of them for the active service.

There is now a valuation of property of the District, exclusive of that of the Government of nearly $150,000,000; and including that of the Government itself, from $250,000,000 to $300,000,000, an amount in excess of the valuation of the following States: Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In this connection I call attention to the following table, prepared by one of the leading citizens of the District for my use:

Comparative statement--New States Territories, and District of Columbia

This is the property and taxes of private citizens. The United States Government owns property to nearly an equal amount.

NOTE. The figures for the new States and Territories are in nearly all cases estimated by their advocates, and no doubt are excessive; but I have given them as they estimated them all they claimed. Ours are official.

The population of the District of Columbia is a trifle under 230,000; the exact amount I have not by me. W. C. DODGE. JULY 23, 1890.

For internal-revenue tax paid, see memorial, page 10, inclosed.

Population is rapidly increasing, and it must continue to increase, probably for centuries. I do not believe it to be possible for the existing order of things to continue. It is already so bad as to be unsupportable, and the principles of government I should rather say of misgovernment-and of administration, which have made things what they are and they are, in my belief, far worse than appears upon the surface-will inevitably operate in the same evil direction with acceleration as time goes on. One of the most hopeful indications of the situation is the fact that the masses of the people are themselves exceedingly restive under the conditions imposed upon them. I do not believe that existing matters can go on as they are many years without popular outbreaks in the District. Certainly nothing can suppress their manifestation but the presence of armed power, such as keeps peace in Warsaw. Sooner or later the public safety will require that the principles of popular liberty be applied in this city, and they should be applied immediately.

64876-60- -6