CHAPTER V

The word democracy may stand for a natural social equality in the body politic or for a constitutional form of government in which power lies more or less directly in the people’s hands. The former may be called social democracy and the latter democratic government. The two differ widely, both in origin and in moral principle. Genetically considered, social democracy is something primitive, unintended, proper to communities where there is general competence and no marked personal eminence. It is the democracy of Arcadia, Switzerland, and the American pioneers. Such a community might be said to have also a democratic government, for everything in it is naturally democratic. There will be no aristocracy, no prestige; but instead an intelligent readiness to lend a hand and to do in unison whatever is done, not so much under leaders as by a kind of conspiring instinct and contagious sympathy. In other words, there will be that most democratic of governments—no government at all. But when pressure of circumstances, danger, or in ward strife makes recognised and prolonged guidance necessary to a social democracy, the form its government takes is that of a rudimentary monarchy, established by election or general consent. A natural leader presents himself and he is instinctively obeyed. He may indeed be freely criticised and will not be screened by any pomp or traditional mystery; he will be easy to replace and every citizen will feel himself radically his equal. Yet such a state is at the beginnings of monarchy and aristocracy, close to the stage depicted in Homer, where pre-eminences are still obviously natural, although already over-emphasised by the force of custom and wealth, and by the fission of society into divergent classes.

Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.

Political democracy, on the other hand, is a late and artificial product. It arises by a gradual extension of aristocratic privileges, through rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on the people’s part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but the discovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine and representative. It is compatible with a very complex government, great empire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably in England and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and less democratic institutions. For under democratic governments the people have not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicions and jealousies are quieted by assigning to them a voice, perhaps only a veto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigious self-created historical engine. Popular votes never established the family, private property, religious practices, or international frontiers. Institutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such as the popular classes could never have produced; but these products of natural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgent protest is raised against them. The people’s liberty consists not in their original responsibility for what exists—for they are guiltless of it—but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolishing any detail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure, which, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itself from time to time to their instinct and mind.

Ideals and expedients.

If we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social and political democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a general ethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, and inconsistent, in its radical form, with such institutions as the family and hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, is merely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoother government of certain states at certain junctures. It involves no special ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether the general interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhaps all women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arising in great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy, and the questions actually submitted to the people can be only very large rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders.

We may now add a few reflections about each kind of democracy, regarding democratic government chiefly in its origin and phases (for its function is that of all government) and social democracy chiefly as an ideal, since its origin is simply that of society itself.

Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational, would serve common interests.

The possibility of intelligent selfishness and the prevalence of a selfishness far from intelligent unite to make men wary in intrusting their interests to one another’s keeping. If passion never overcame prudence, and if private prudence always counselled what was profitable also to others, no objection could arise to an aristocratic policy. For if we assume a certain variety in endowments and functions among men, it would evidently conduce to the general convenience that each man should exercise his powers uncontrolled by the public voice. The government, having facilities for information and ready resources, might be left to determine all matters of policy; for its members’ private interests would coincide with those of the public, and even if prejudices and irrational habits prevented them from pursuing their own advantage, they would surely not err more frequently or more egregiously in that respect than would the private individual, to whose ignorant fancy every decision would otherwise have to be referred.

Thus in monarchy every expedient is seized upon to render the king’s and the country’s interests coincident; public prosperity fills his treasury, the arts adorn his court, justice rendered confirms his authority. If reason were efficacious kings might well be left to govern alone. Theologians, under the same hypothesis, might be trusted to draw up creeds and codes of morals; and, in fact, everyone with a gift for management or creation might be authorised to execute his plans. It is in this way, perhaps, that some social animals manage their affairs, for they seem to co-operate without external control. That their instinctive system is far from perfect we may safely take for granted; but government, too, is not always adequate or wise. What spoils such a spontaneous harmony is that people neither understand their own interests nor have the constancy to pursue them systematically; and further, that their personal or animal interests may actually clash, in so far as they have not been harmonised by reason.

To rationalise an interest is simply to correlate it with every other interest which it at all affects. In proportion as rational interests predominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above all others, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by his action, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worse and more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds in justice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he should be doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, conscious effort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform: only selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtue which would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, in expressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is a condition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, and hates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted to secure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt to think him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knows that it was the force of circumstances and a certain pathetic helplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors.

People jealous of eminence.

These errors, when they are committed by a weak and passionate ruler, are not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligence he probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is very likely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see in every calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests are radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so. Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they clamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it. Democratic government is founded on the decay of representative eminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely because they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous action would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control. Men of talent may be needed and used in a democratic state; they may be occasionally hired; but they will be closely watched and directed by the people, who fear otherwise to suffer the penalty of foolishly intrusting their affairs to other men’s hands.

A fool, says a Spanish proverb, knows more at home than a wise man at his neighbour’s. So democratic instinct assumes that, unless all those concerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business and frequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to the fact that they have been ignored and enslaved. The implication is that each man is the best judge of his own interests and of the means to advance them; or at least that by making himself his own guide he can in the end gain the requisite insight and thus not only attain his practical aims, but also some political and intellectual dignity.

It is representative.

All just government pursues the general good; the choice between aristocratic and democratic forms touches only the means to that end. One arrangement may well be better fitted to one place and time, and another to another. Everything depends on the existence or non-existence of available practical eminence. The democratic theory is clearly wrong if it imagines that eminence is not naturally representative. Eminence is synthetic and represents what it synthesises. An eminence not representative would not constitute excellence, but merely extravagance or notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, or feeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for many diffuse constituents reduced to harmony, so that the wise moment is filled with an activity in which the upshot of the experience concerned is mirrored and regarded, an activity just to all extant interests and speaking in their total behalf. But anything approaching such true excellence is as rare as it is great, and a democratic society, naturally jealous of greatness, may be excused for not expecting true greatness and for not even understanding what it is. A government is not made representative or just by the mechanical expedient of electing its members by universal suffrage. It becomes representative only by embodying in its policy, whether by instinct or high intelligence, the people’s conscious and unconscious interests.

But subject to decay.

Democratic theory seems to be right, however, about the actual failure of theocracies, monarchies, and oligarchies to remain representative and to secure the general good. The true eminence which natural leaders may have possessed in the beginning usually declines into a conventional and baseless authority. The guiding powers which came to save and express humanity fatten in office and end by reversing their function. The government reverts to the primeval robber; the church stands in the way of all wisdom. Under such circumstances it is a happy thing if the people possess enough initiative to assert themselves and, after clearing the ground in a more or less summary fashion, allow some new organisation, more representative of actual interests, to replace the old encumbrances and tyrannies.

Ancient citizenship a privilege.

In the heroic ages of Greece and Rome patriotism was stimulated in manifold ways. The city was a fatherland, a church, an army, and almost a family. It had its own school of art, its own dialect, its own feasts, its own fables. Every possible social interest was either embodied in the love of country or, like friendship and fame, closely associated with it. Patriotism could then be expected to sway every mind at all capable of moral enthusiasm. Furthermore, only the flower of the population were citizens. In rural districts the farmer might be a freeman; but he probably had slaves whose work he merely superintended. The meaner and more debasing offices, mining, sea-faring, domestic service, and the more laborious part of all industries, were relegated to slaves. The citizens were a privileged class. Military discipline and the street life natural in Mediterranean countries, kept public events and public men always under everybody’s eyes: the state was a bodily presence. Democracy, when it arose in such communities, was still aristocratic; it imposed few new duties upon the common citizens, while it diffused many privileges and exemptions among them.

Modern democracy industrial.

The social democracy which is the ideal of many in modern times, on the other hand, excludes slavery, unites whole nations and even all mankind into a society of equals, and admits no local or racial privileges by which the sense of fellowship may be stimulated. Public spirit could not be sustained in such a community by exemptions, rivalries, or ambitions. No one, indeed, would be a slave, everyone would have an elementary education and a chance to demonstrate his capacity; but he would be probably condemned to those occupations which in ancient republics were assigned to slaves. At least at the opening of his career he would find himself on the lowest subsisting plane of humanity, and he would probably remain on it throughout his life. In other words, the citizens of a social democracy would be all labourers; for even those who rose to be leaders would, in a genuine democracy, rise from the ranks and belong in education and habits to the same class as all the others.

Dangers to current civilisation.

Under such circumstances the first virtue which a democratic society would have to possess would be enthusiastic diligence. The motives for work which have hitherto prevailed in the world have been want, ambition, and love of occupation: in a social democracy, after the first was eliminated, the last alone would remain efficacious. Love of occupation, although it occasionally accompanies and cheers every sort of labour, could never induce men originally to undertake arduous and uninteresting tasks, nor to persevere in them if by chance or waywardness such tasks had been once undertaken. Inclination can never be the general motive for the work now imposed on the masses. Before labour can be its own reward it must become less continuous, more varied, more responsive to individual temperament and capacity. Otherwise it would not cease to repress and warp human faculties.

A state composed exclusively of such workmen and peasants as make up the bulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Every liberal tradition would perish in it; and the rational and historic essence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt, would endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. They possess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for in gathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make up an aristocratic society. Civilisation has hitherto consisted in diffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centres. It has not sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variation from them, and it has afterward imposed itself on them from above. All its founders in antiquity passed for demi-gods or were at least inspired by an oracle or a nymph. The vital genius thus bursting forth and speaking with authority gained a certain ascendency in the world; it mitigated barbarism without removing it. This is one fault, among others, which current civilisation has; it is artificial. If social democracy could breed a new civilisation out of the people, this new civilisation would be profounder than ours and more pervasive. But it doubtless cannot. What we have rests on conquest and conversion, on leadership and imitation, on mastership and service. To abolish aristocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authority would be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto flowed.

Is current civilisation a good?

Civilisation, however, although we are wont to speak the word with a certain unction, is a thing whose value may be questioned. One way of defending the democratic ideal is to deny that civilisation is a good. In one sense, indeed, social democracy is essentially a reversion to a more simple life, more Arcadian and idyllic than that which aristocracy has fostered. Equality is more easily attained in a patriarchal age than in an age of concentrated and intense activities. Possessions, ideal and material, may be fewer in a simple community, but they are more easily shared and bind men together in moral and imaginative bonds instead of dividing them, as do all highly elaborate ways of living or thinking. The necessaries of life can be enjoyed by a rural people, living in a sparsely settled country, and among these necessaries might be counted not only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fashion even in our society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellowship which the civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy should triumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminishing the amount of labour performed in the world. All instruments of luxury, many instruments of vain knowledge and art, would no longer be produced. We might see the means of communication, lately so marvellously developed, again disused; the hulks of great steamers rusting in harbours, the railway bridges collapsing and the tunnels choked; while a rural population, with a few necessary and perfected manufactures, would spread over the land and abandon the great cities to ruin, calling them seats of Babylonian servitude and folly.

Such anticipations may seem fantastic, and of course there is no probability that a reaction against material progress should set in in the near future, since as yet the tide of commercialism and population continues everywhere to rise; but does any thoughtful man suppose that these tendencies will be eternal and that the present experiment in civilisation is the last the world will see?

Horrors of materialistic democracy.

If social democracy, however, refused to diminish labour and wealth and proposed rather to accelerate material progress and keep every furnace at full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By whom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort of pleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time and energy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort of religion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how they spend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic tradition and the presence of a rich class still profoundly influence popular ideals. Imagine those aristocratic influences removed, and would any head be lifted above a dead level of infinite dulness and vulgarity? Would mankind be anything but a trivial, sensuous, superstitious, custom-ridden herd? There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon. Anyone would be a hero who should quell the monster. A foreign invader or domestic despot would at least have steps to his throne, possible standing-places for art and intelligence; his supercilious indifference would discountenance the popular gods, and allow some courageous hand at last to shatter them. Social democracy at high pressure would leave no room for liberty. The only freeman in it would be one whose whole ideal was to be an average man.

Timocracy or socialistic democracy.

Perhaps, however, social democracy might take a more liberal form. It might allow the benefits of civilisation to be integrated in eminent men, whose influence in turn should direct and temper the general life. This would be timocracy—a government by men of merit. The same abilities which raised these men to eminence would enable them to apprehend ideal things and to employ material resources for the common advantage. They would formulate religion, cultivate the arts and sciences, provide for government and all public conveniences, and inspire patriotism by their discourse and example. At the same time a new motive would be added to common labour, I mean ambition. For there would be not only a possibility of greater reward but a possibility of greater service. The competitive motive which socialism is supposed to destroy would be restored in timocracy, and an incentive offered to excellence and industry. The country’s resources would increase for the very reason that somebody might conceivably profit by them; and everyone would have at least an ideal interest in ministering to that complete life which he or his children, or whoever was most capable of appreciation, was actually to enjoy.

Such a timocracy (of which the Roman Church is a good example) would differ from the social aristocracy that now exists only by the removal of hereditary advantages. People would be born equal, but they would grow unequal, and the only equality subsisting would be equality of opportunity. If power remained in the people’s hands, the government would be democratic; but a full development of timocracy would allow the proved leader to gain great ascendancy. The better security the law offered that the men at the top should be excellent, the less restraint would it need to put upon them when once in their places. Their eminence would indeed have been factitious and their station undeserved if they were not able to see and do what was requisite better than the community at large. An assembly has only the lights common to the majority of its members, far less, therefore, than its members have when added together and less even than the wiser part of them.

A timocracy would therefore seem to unite the advantages of all forms of government and to avoid their respective abuses. It would promote freedom scientifically. It might be a monarchy, if men existed fit to be kings; but they would have to give signs of their fitness and their honours would probably not be hereditary. Like aristocracy, it would display a great diversity of institutions and superposed classes, a stimulating variety in ways of living; it would be favourable to art and science and to noble idiosyncrasies. Among its activities the culminating and most conspicuous ones would be liberal. Yet there would be no isolation of the aristocratic body; its blood would be drawn from the people, and only its traditions from itself. Like social democracy, finally, it would be just and open to every man, but it would not depress humanity nor wish to cast everybody in a common mould.

The difficulty the same as in all Socialism.

There are immense difficulties, however, in the way of such a Utopia, some physical and others moral. Timocracy would have to begin by uprooting the individual from his present natural soil and transplanting him to that in which his spirit might flourish best. This proposed transfer is what makes the system ideally excellent, since nature is a means only; but it makes it also almost impossible to establish, since nature is the only efficacious power. Timocracy can arise only in the few fortunate cases where material and social forces have driven men to that situation in which their souls can profit most, and where they find no influences more persuasive than those which are most liberating. It is clear, for instance, that timocracy would exclude the family or greatly weaken it. Soul and body would be wholly transferred to that medium where lay the creature’s spiritual affinities; his origins would be disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecast his disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate, conventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning, nor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We have seen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution in that ideal direction.

Even less perfect polities, that leave more to chance, would require a moral transformation in mankind if they were to be truly successful.

A motive which now generates political democracy, impatience of sacrifice, must, in a good social democracy, be turned into its opposite. Men must be glad to labour unselfishly in the spirit of art or of religious service: for if they labour selfishly, the higher organs of the state would perish, since only a few can profit by them materially; while if they neglect their work, civilisation loses that intensive development which it was proposed to maintain. Each man would need to forget himself and not to chafe under his natural limitations. He must find his happiness in seeing his daily task grow under his hands; and when, in speculative moments, he lifts his eyes from his labour, he must find an ideal satisfaction in patriotism, in love for that complex society to which he is contributing an infinitesimal service. He must learn to be happy without wealth, fame, or power, and with no reward save his modest livelihood and an ideal participation in his country’s greatness. It is a spirit hardly to be maintained without a close organisation and much training; and as military and religious timocracies have depended on discipline and a minute rule of life, so an industrial timocracy would have to depend on guilds and unions, which would make large inroads upon personal freedom.

The masses would have to be plebeian in position and patrician in feeling.

The question here suggests itself whether such a citizen, once having accepted his humble lot, would be in a different position from the plebeians in an aristocracy. The same subordination would be imposed upon him, only the ground assigned for his submission would be no longer self-interest and necessity, but patriotic duty. This patriotism would have to be of an exalted type. Its end would not be, as in industrial society, to secure the private interests of each citizen; its end would be the glory and perfection of the state as imagination or philosophy might conceive them. This glory and perfection would not be a benefit to anyone who was not in some degree a philosopher and a poet. They would seem, then, to be the special interests of an aristocracy, not indeed an aristocracy of wealth or power, but an aristocracy of noble minds. Those whose hearts could prize the state’s ideal perfection would be those in whom its benefits would be integrated. And the common citizen would find in their existence, and in his own participation in their virtue, the sole justification for his loyalty.

Ideal patriotism is not secured when each man, although without natural eminence, pursues his private interests. What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art. All these aims, in a well-knit state, are covered by the single passion of patriotism; and then a conception of one’s country, its history and mission becomes the touchstone of every ideal impulse. Timocracy requires this kind of patriotism in everybody; so that if public duty is not to become a sacrifice imposed on the many for the sake of the few, as in aristocracy, the reason can only be that the many covet, appreciate, and appropriate their country’s ideal glories, quite as much as the favoured class ever could in any aristocracy.

Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism.

Is this possible? What might happen if the human race were immensely improved and exalted there is as yet no saying; but experience has given no example of efficacious devotion to communal ideals except in small cities, held together by close military and religious bonds and having no important relations to anything external. Even this antique virtue was short-lived and sadly thwarted by private and party passion. Where public spirit has held best, as at Sparta or (to take a very different type of communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid for by a notable lack of spontaneity and wisdom; such inhuman devotion to an arbitrary end has made these societies odious. We may say, therefore, that a zeal sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are now constituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes for themselves people benefit their fellows more than in pursuing such narrow and irrational ideals as alone seem to be powerful in the world. To ambition, to the love of wealth and honour, to love of a liberty which meant opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe whatever benefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from Italy and England. It is doubtful whether a society which offered no personal prizes would inspire effort; and it is still more doubtful whether that effort, if actually stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For an indoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanaticism; it imposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some abstract principle or habit once, perhaps, useful; but that convention soon becomes superstitious and ceases to represent general human excellence.

Public spirit the life of democracy.

Now it is in the spirit of social democracy to offer no prizes. Office in it, being the reward of no great distinction, brings no great honour, and being meanly paid it brings no great profit, at least while honestly administered. All wealth in a true democracy would be the fruit of personal exertion and would come too late to be nobly enjoyed or to teach the art of liberal living. It would be either accumulated irrationally or given away outright. And if fortunes could not be transmitted or used to found a great family they would lose their chief imaginative charm. The pleasures a democratic society affords are vulgar and not even by an amiable illusion can they become an aim in life. A life of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interesting or really conceivable. Intellectual and artistic greatness does not need prizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and a propitious environment. Genius, like goodness (which can stand alone), would arise in a democratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be so well fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificial and simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawl unbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance than that which he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsisting would be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, and inwardly rewarded. For such excellence to grow general mankind must be notably transformed. If a noble and civilised democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu’s saying that the principle of democracy is virtue.