Part 19 (1/2)
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 a.s.sumes that, unless all those concerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business and frequently p.r.o.nounce 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.
[Sidenote: 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 const.i.tute excellence, but merely extravagance or notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, or feeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for many diffuse const.i.tuents 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.
[Sidenote: 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 circ.u.mstances it is a happy thing if the people possess enough initiative to a.s.sert themselves and, after clearing the ground in a more or less summary fas.h.i.+on, allow some new organisation, more representative of actual interests, to replace the old enc.u.mbrances and tyrannies.
[Sidenote: Ancient citizens.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p and fame, closely a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.s. 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.
[Sidenote: 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 a.s.signed 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 cla.s.s as all the others.
[Sidenote: Dangers to current civilisation.]
Under such circ.u.mstances 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 ma.s.ses. 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 const.i.tuting those higher organs that make up an aristocratic society. Civilisation has. .h.i.therto 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 pa.s.sed for demi-G.o.ds 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 leaders.h.i.+p and imitation, on masters.h.i.+p 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. .h.i.therto flowed.
[Sidenote: 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 spa.r.s.ely settled country, and among these necessaries might be counted not only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fas.h.i.+on even in our society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellows.h.i.+p which the civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy should triumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminis.h.i.+ng 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 antic.i.p.ations 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?
[Sidenote: 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 cla.s.s 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, superst.i.tious, 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 G.o.ds, 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.
[Sidenote: Timocracy or socialistic democracy.]