Part 15 (1/2)

That system, whenever it was competent and honest, had to a.s.sume that no man could have more than a very partial experience of public affairs. In the sense that he can give only a little time to them, that a.s.sumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But ancient theory was compelled to a.s.sume, not only that men could give little attention to public questions, but that the attention available would have to be confined to matters close at hand. It would have been visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and complicated events could conceivably be reported, a.n.a.lyzed, and presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made by an amateur. That time is now in sight. There is no longer any doubt that the continuous reporting of an unseen environment is feasible. It is often done badly, but the fact that it is done at all shows that it can be done, and the fact that we begin to know how badly it is often done, shows that it can be done better. With varying degrees of skill and honesty distant complexities are reported every day by engineers and accountants for business men, by secretaries and civil servants for officials, by intelligence officers for the General Staff, by some journalists for some readers. These are crude beginnings but radical, far more radical in the literal meaning of that word than the repet.i.tion of wars, revolutions, abdications and restorations; as radical as the change in the scale of human life which has made it possible for Mr. Lloyd George to discuss Welsh coal mining after breakfast in London, and the fate of the Arabs before dinner in Paris.

For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political ideas. There have, of course, been plenty of men who did not realize that the range of attention was the main premise of political science.

They have built on sand. They have demonstrated in their own persons the effects of a very limited and self-centered knowledge of the world. But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists, speculation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY

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THAT groups of self-centered people would engage in a struggle for existence if they rubbed against each other has always been evident.

This much truth there is at any rate in that famous pa.s.sage in the Leviathan where Hobbes says that ”though there had never been any time wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another, yet at all times kings and _persons_ of _sovereign authority because_ of their _independency_, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another...” [Footnote: _Leviathan_, Ch. XIII. Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery.]

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To circ.u.mvent this conclusion one great branch of human thought, which had and has many schools, proceeded in this fas.h.i.+on: it conceived an ideally just pattern of human relations in which each person had well defined functions and rights. If he conscientiously filled the role allotted to him, it did not matter whether his opinions were right or wrong. He did his duty, the next man did his, and all the dutiful people together made a harmonious world. Every caste system ill.u.s.trates this principle; you find it in Plato's Republic and in Aristotle, in the feudal ideal, in the circles of Dante's Paradise, in the bureaucratic type of socialism, and in laissez-faire, to an amazing degree in syndicalism, guild socialism, anarchism, and in the system of international law idealized by Mr. Robert Lansing. All of them a.s.sume a pre-established harmony, inspired, imposed, or innate, by which the self-opinionated person, cla.s.s, or community is orchestrated with the rest of mankind. The more authoritarian imagine a conductor for the symphony who sees to it that each man plays his part; the anarchistic are inclined to think that a more divine concord would be heard if each player improvised as he went along.

But there have also been philosophers who were bored by these schemes of rights and duties, took conflict for granted, and tried to see how their side might come out on top. They have always seemed more realistic, even when they seemed alarming, because all they had to do was to generalize the experience that n.o.body could escape. Machiavelli is the cla.s.sic of this school, a man most mercilessly maligned, because he happened to be the first naturalist who used plain language in a field hitherto preempted by supernaturalists. [Footnote: F. S.

Oliver in his _Alexander Hamilton_, says of Machiavelli (p. 174): ”a.s.suming the conditions which exist--the nature of man and of things--to be unchangeable, he proceeds in a calm, unmoral way, like a lecturer on frogs, to show how a valiant and sagacious ruler can best turn events to his own advantage and the security of his dynasty.”] He has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who ever lived. He truly described the technic of existence for the self-contained state. That is why he has the disciples. He has the bad name chiefly because he c.o.c.ked his eye at the Medici family, dreamed in his study at night where he wore his ”n.o.ble court dress” that Machiavelli was himself the Prince, and turned a pungent description of the way things are done into an eulogy on that way of doing them.

In his most infamous chapter [Footnote: _The Prince_, Ch. XVIII.

”Concerning the way in which Princes should keep faith.” Translation by W. K. Marriott.] he wrote that ”a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who hears and sees him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.... One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and kingdom many a time.”

That is cynical. But it is the cynicism of a man who saw truly without knowing quite why he saw what he saw. Machiavelli is thinking of the run of men and princes ”who judge generally more by the eye than by the hand,” which is his way of saying that their judgments are subjective. He was too close to earth to pretend that the Italians of his day saw the world steadily and saw it whole. He would not indulge in fantasies, and he had not the materials for imagining a race of men that had learned how to correct their vision.

The world, as he found it, was composed of people whose vision could rarely be corrected, and Machiavelli knew that such people, since they see all public relations in a private way, are involved in perpetual strife. What they see is their own personal, cla.s.s, dynastic, or munic.i.p.al version of affairs that in reality extend far beyond the boundaries of their vision. They see their aspect. They see it as right. But they cross other people who are similarly self-centered.

Then their very existence is endangered, or at least what they, for unsuspected private reasons, regard as their existence and take to be a danger. The end, which is impregnably based on a real though private experience justifies the means. They will sacrifice any one of these ideals to save all of them,... ”one judges by the result...”

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These elemental truths confronted the democratic philosophers.

Consciously or otherwise, they knew that the range of political knowledge was limited, that the area of self-government would have to be limited, and that self-contained states when they rubbed against each other were in the posture of gladiators. But they knew just as certainly, that there was in men a will to decide their own fate, and to find a peace that was not imposed by force. How could they reconcile the wish and the fact?

They looked about them. In the city states of Greece and Italy they found a chronicle of corruption, intrigue and war. [Footnote: ”Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention...

and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Madison, _Federalist_, No. 10.] In their own cities they saw faction, artificiality, fever. This was no environment in which the democratic ideal could prosper, no place where a group of independent and equally competent people managed their own affairs spontaneously. They looked further, guided somewhat perhaps by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to remote, unspoiled country villages. They saw enough to convince themselves that there the ideal was at home. Jefferson in particular felt this, and Jefferson more than any other man formulated the American image of democracy. From the towns.h.i.+ps had come the power that had carried the American Revolution to victory. From the towns.h.i.+ps were to come the votes that carried Jefferson's party to power. Out there in the farming communities of Ma.s.sachusetts and Virginia, if you wore gla.s.ses that obliterated the slaves, you could see with your mind's eye the image of what democracy was to be.

”The American Revolution broke out,” says de Tocqueville, [Footnote: _Democracy in America,_ Vol. I, p. 51. Third Edition] ”and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the towns.h.i.+ps, took possession of the state.” It certainly took possession of the minds of those men who formulated and popularized the stereotypes of democracy. ”The cherishment of the people was our principle,” wrote Jefferson. [Footnote: Cited in Charles Beard, _Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy._ Ch. XIV. ] But the people he cherished almost exclusively were the small landowning farmers: ”Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of G.o.d, if ever He had a chosen people, whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the ma.s.s of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.”

However much of the romantic return to nature may have entered into this exclamation, there was also an element of solid sense. Jefferson was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory of any form of government that was not centered in the small self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked that ”wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough, in reality, to defend ourselves against every invader, we might enjoy an eternal rusticity and live, forever, thus apathized and vulgar under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference.” [Footnote: _Op. cit_., p. 426.]

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The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisting of an ideal environment and a selected cla.s.s, did not conflict with the political science of his time. It did conflict with the realities. And when the ideal was stated in absolute terms, partly through exuberance and partly for campaign purposes, it was soon forgotten that the theory was originally devised for very special conditions. It became the political gospel, and supplied the stereotypes through which Americans of all parties have looked at politics.

That gospel was fixed by the necessity that in Jefferson's time no one could have conceived public opinions that were not spontaneous and subjective. The democratic tradition is therefore always trying to see a world where people are exclusively concerned with affairs of which the causes and effects all operate within the region they inhabit.

Never has democratic theory been able to conceive itself in the context of a wide and unpredictable environment. The mirror is concave. And although democrats recognize that they are in contact with external affairs, they see quite surely that every contact outside that self-contained group is a threat to democracy as originally conceived. That is a wise fear. If democracy is to be spontaneous, the interests of democracy must remain simple, intelligible, and easily managed. Conditions must approximate those of the isolated rural towns.h.i.+p if the supply of information is to be left to casual experience. The environment must be confined within the range of every man's direct and certain knowledge.

The democrat has understood what an a.n.a.lysis of public opinion seems to demonstrate: that in dealing with an unseen environment decisions ”are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly they ought not to be.” [Footnote: Aristotle, _Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. IV.] So he has always tried in one way or another to minimize the importance of that unseen environment. He feared foreign trade because trade involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real world, he went pa.s.sionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination, Independence. Not one of these ideas carries with it any notion of consent or community beyond the frontiers of the self-governing groups. The field of democratic action is a circ.u.mscribed area. Within protected boundaries the aim has been to achieve self-sufficiency and avoid entanglement. This rule is not confined to foreign policy, but it is plainly evident there, because life outside the national boundaries is more distinctly alien than any life within. And as history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated their ideals. The most successful democracies, in fact, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and America until recently, have had no foreign policy in the European sense of that phrase. Even a rule like the Monroe Doctrine arose from the desire to supplement the two oceans by a glacis of states that were sufficiently republican to have no foreign policy.