214 The Hon. Walter Nines Page [June 12, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, June 12, 1914. 



His Grace The Duke of Northumberland, K.G. P.O. D.C.L. 

 F.R.S., President, in the Chair. 



His Excellency The Hon. Walter Hines Page, LL.D., 

 The American Ambassador. 



Some Aspects of the American Democracy. 



I UNDERTAKE a brief discourse on some aspects of the American 

 democracy, not with an idea or hope of giving a comprehensive 

 explanation of its workings, for my task is a far more modest one. 

 I shall try only to answer certain questions that have many times 

 been put to me during my residence here, about which, therefore, I 

 assume that there is some curiosity in the minds of Englishmen. I 

 shall not confuse you with subjects of controversy, nor burden you 

 with my own opinions, but try only to give a cue to the understanding 

 of certain large social and political phenomena —phenomena that 

 have appeared these hundred years since the death of the Americans 

 founder of this Institution, and which, I am sure, would be most 

 interesting to him. 



And by the American democracy I do not mean only a method 

 of government — I mean a scheme of society also. For it is of the 

 first importance to understand that government in the United States 

 grows out of, and is continually modified by, the social aims of the 

 people. Government and social aims are inextricably bound together. 

 They are two aspects of the same subject. 



Furthermore, government in the United States is not the 

 National Government only. Quite as important tasks fall to local 

 governments as fall to the National Government, and many more 

 tasks — to such local governments as the state, the C')unty, and the 

 city. These pay for and direct the vast educational activities of the 

 nation. The state governments control the suffrage ; they create 

 and conduct the courts of justice for all local causes ; they levy 

 and collect taxes for all local needs ; and in these and in many 

 more important activities each of the forty -eight States is sovereign 

 and supreme. When, for instance, the state of Cahfornia, or the 

 state of Illinois, decided to give the ballot to every woman who had 

 reached her twenty-first year, no other state nor the National 

 Government could raise objection : this is a subject wholly within 

 each state's control. 



The chief political activities reported in the foreign press, and 

 the chief political phenomena observed by most foreign visitors, are 



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