during which we have grown used to absolute self-seeking as the normal
state of man, could so have glazed the eyes of men that they could not
see thrift even in a public official as a crime, or self-sacrifice even
in a public official except as a folly. And yet so sound is the heart
of man that in spite of this corruption and debauchery, the American
people, the masses of them, are the most promising people extant. We
have a special disease. It is our minds which have been injured. We
are cross-eyed with business selfishness and open to the heavens on
all other sides. For this openness we must thank Democracy. Here are
no warped beings, but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary
spell. The American citizen, by escaping the superstitions studded over
Europe since the days of the Roman empire, has a directer view of life
(when he shall open his eyes) than any people since the Elizabethans.
He will have no prejudices. He will be empirical. But he must forswear
thrift, and the calculating of interest in his sleep. No religious
revival will help us. We are religious enough already. It is our
relaxation. Only the painful unwinding of that intellectual knot into
which our minds are tied,--that state of intense selfishness during
which we see business advancement as our first duty, taught us at the
cradle, enforced by example, inculcated like a religion,--can make us
begin to operate our institutions upon the lines on which they alone
can run freely, and we ourselves develop normally. This unwinding will
come through a simple inspection of our condition. Let no one worry
about the forms and particular measures of betterment. They will flow
naturally from the public acknowledgment by the individual of facts
which he privately knows and has always known and always denied.
This goes on hourly. Those people who do not see it, look for it in
the wrong places. You cannot expect it to show itself in the public
offices. They are the strongholds of the enemy. You cannot expect it to
appear very often in the children of captivity, the upper bourgeoisie.
These men are easily put to sleep and will take the promise of a
politician any day as an excuse for non-activity. They give consent.
What we want is assertion, and it is coming like a murmur from the
poorer classes who desire the right and who need only leadership to
make them honest.
It is the recurrent tragedy in reform movements that the merchants put
forward something that the laboring man instantly nails for a lie. It
is not the loss of the election which does the harm, but this insult to
the souls of men.
Let no one expect the millennium, but let us play fair. We can see that
our standards, particularly among the well-to-do, are so low that mere
inspection of them causes indignant protest. But we must also know that
when we accepted democracy as our form of government we ranked the
political education of the individual as more important than the expert
administration of government. This last can come only as a result, not
as a precurser of the other.
The example of a whole people, mad with one passion, living under a
system which implies the abnegation of that passion, has laid bare
the heart of a community, has shown the interrelations between the
organs and functions of a society, in a way never before visible in
the history of the world. Everything is disturbed, but everything is
visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, yet betraying all things;
Architecture, still submerged in commerce but showing every year some
vital change; Social Life, the mere creature of abuses, like a child
covered with scars, but growing healthy; the Drama, a drudge to thrift
every way and yet palpably alive. By the light of these things and
their relation to each other we may view history.
The American is a typical being. He is a creature of a single passion.
In so far as Tyre was commercial she was American. You can reconstruct
much of Venetian politics from a town caucus. In so far as London is
commercial it is American. You can trace the thing in the shape of a
handbill in Moscow. Or to take the matter up from the other side: you
can, by taking up these correlated ganglia of American society, which
do nevertheless simply represent the heart of man, and are always
present in every society--by imagining the enlargement of one function,
and the disuse of the next, you can reconstruct the Greek period and
re-imagine Athens.
No wonder the sociologists study America. It seems as if the key and
cause of human progress might be clutched from her entrails.
GOVERNMENT
V
GOVERNMENT
When two men are fighting and agree that they will stop at sundown,
we have government. Their consent is government. Their memory of that
consent is an institution. There never was a government of any kind or
for any purpose that did not rest upon the consent of the governed; but
the means by which the consent is obtained have varied. The consent
records the extent to which the individuals are alike. It is only by
virtue of similarity in the governed that government exists. On a
ship, all men are alike in their danger of being drowned, and they
consent to dictation from the captain for the welfare of all. The aim
of the despot is to keep the population alike in their need of him
or their fear of him. After the French Revolution, the entire French
people were alike both in their desire for order and in their lack of
training in self-government. A dictator was inevitable. Gouverneur
Morris, whose experience in America qualified him to judge, saw the
matter clearly as early as 1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by the
two opposite means of giving them social order and foreign war. Henry
V. kept himself on top in England by waging war in France. Seward in
1861 thought to unite the people of the United States by declaring war
against everybody in Europe. The German Emperor is sustained to-day
by the popular fear of France and Russia. It makes no difference what
foolishness he commits; so long as that fear predominates he will be
absolute.
For the converse proposition is also true, that in so far as people
are like-minded, they must be ruled by a single mind. A hundred Malays
cannot establish a representative government. They must have a boss.
The population of Russia can only be ruled by a Czar. So also whenever
under any form of government all the people want one thing, one man
does it. The reasons for it are invented afterwards, and “war powers”
are found to justify the proclamation setting the slaves free.
The extent to which people are similar to each other will be recorded
in their institutions; in fact, those institutions are nothing but
dials of similarity. For this reason any popular national institution
gives you the nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, any consent has
a tendency to modify the future because he or it is advertised and
established. It is a factor in the consciousness of every individual.
It is the conservative. It tends to affect the conduct and mind of
every one, for any one coming in contact with it must conform or
resist. It is a challenge to the individual. It impinges upon him.
The thing changes daily in his mind, and occupies now more, now less,
of his activities. In cases where his whole external conduct has
been absorbed by one such power we have absolute rule, religious or
military, and a uniform population. If there be a single predominating
power which has not yet completely conquered, we have in some form or
another a record of its growth by a tendency toward absolutism.
The American people have been growing strikingly uniform, owing to
their one occupation,--business, their one passion,--a desire for
money. They are divided by their system of politics into two great
categories, and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, little nodes of
power representing this identity of consciousness in each of the two
great categories of the population, Republicans and Democrats. If you
could cut open the consciousness of one thousand Americans and examine
it with a microscope, you could set up our government with great ease.
Let us concede for the sake of argument that the full development of
individual character and intellect is the aim of life.
Now in so far as individuals are developed, they differ from each
other. We ought then to be distressed by any identity whatever found in
the heads of individuals examined; and greatly distressed by the reign
of the same passion manifested in the one thousand American organisms.
You would say, ‘If this thing goes on, a dictator is absolutely
certain,’ and then you would remember that you had heard a business man
remark at the Club the evening before, that he would welcome a dictator
as a cheap practical way out of it.
Let us now suppose you to examine one thousand English heads. The first
thing you would notice would be that the number was not large enough
to give reliable results. Certain types would be manifest, but the
special variations would be so striking as to cloud your conclusions.
In all these heads there would be spots of a density nowhere found in
America, but the spontaneous variations outside and round about them
would be magnificent. You would say, “These spots represent different
kinds of conservatism. This one is reverence for the church, that one
for the army, a third for the judiciary. They represent prejudice, but
they also represent stability, a stability that is the resultant of a
thousand positive and various forces. These spots hold England together
and give scope to free government. The world never has done and never
can do better than this. These individuals are developed. The line of
force of one man passes through one institution, that of the next man
through the next. No force, no passion, can make them all alike at any
one time. They are anchored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid and free
in the present. The only hope for freedom in the individual lies in the
existence of different sorts of institutions.”
It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one
of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at
the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights
of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college of Jesuits is a
protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not
money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of
man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that
to have free government you must encourage institutions--and you will
be wrong.
The fundamental reason why you are wrong is that these beneficent
institutions are what is left of the activity of people who believed in
them for their own sake. You can no more imitate one of them, or catch
the power of one of them, than you can set up a king here to repel an
invasion. You yourself believe in individualism. Go straight for that,
and leave it to erect its bulwarks in what form it may.
A multiplication of institutions then serves two contradictory
purposes. It limits the individual, creates black spots of prejudice
and unreason in him; but on the other hand it encourages a free
development of the individual outside of those spots. It creates types,
and types are mutually protective. This is only another way of saying
that free government results from a segregation of the government into
provinces, which cannot all be captured, at one time, by one force.
The highly intelligent and artificial separation of our government
into the branches of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial was in a
sense an attempt to get free government by the erection of independent
institutions. But these were never strong enough to create types (we
have hardly the type of judge among us); and certainly no attachment to
any part, but the sacredness of the entire system, has preserved it. It
was the sentiment attaching to the single idea of a central government.
It is to institutions that the consent to be governed is given. The
consent is always a highly complex affair. It implies a civilization.
It is qualified, limited, infinitely diversified, and is in every case
regulated by historic fact. For instance, under a limited monarchy,
it is a consent to be governed by a particular dynasty after special
ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, subject to such and such
customs,--each and all existing in the imagination of the subject.
For government is entirely a matter of the imagination, and it is
inconceivable that it should ever be anything else. The English have
spent two centuries in impressing the imagination of India with the
vision of English power. A violation by the government, no matter
how strong, of the popular imagination, an assumption of power in a
field not yet subdued, always brings on riots. The Persians resented
furiously the creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sultan had to rescind
it. The Americans threw the tea into the harbor.
The forms and modes by which government is carried on are the record
of things to which people have consented, and hence become important,
become symbols so identified with power that almost all historical
writing deals with them as entities. The power of the symbols in any
case varies inversely to the power of the people for self-government,
that is, to the average differentiation between individuals; or to put
the thing the other way, the extent to which a man will permit another
to rule him depends upon his incapacity to rule himself.
The great unifying forces have always been regarded as dangers to
free government. War makes a nation a unit. It cannot be conducted by
individualism. Religion condenses power. That is the reason why our
ancestors were so afraid of a State church. Commerce has generally
been thought a blessing because commerce gives scope to individualism.
It enriches and educates. Yet commerce itself may bring in tyranny.
Witness Venice. Commerce has centralized our government. Anything that
affects everybody’s mind with the same appeal strengthens government
and makes for unity. A nation only exists by virtue of such general
appeals. It is inside of and subordinate to this general unity of
feeling that individualism must go on. The rulers of mankind are
men who have got control of the symbols, of the institutions, which
stood in the imagination of the people as most important, and who by
manipulating them extended their range over the popular imagination.
Or to put the thing a little differently, the passions of the people
are reflected in ever-changing institutions. The people seize a man
and force him to do their bidding and rule them in such manner as to
assuage their passions. They make a saint out of Lincoln, and a devil
out of Torquemada.
If a man seems to be a great man, and seems to be leading the people,
it is because he knows the people better than they know themselves.
There was never a people yet that did not in this sense govern
themselves, being themselves governed by the resultant of their
dominant passions. The Southern Pacific Railroad has for years owned
the State of California as completely as if it had bought it from
a tyrant who ruled over a population of slaves. It was done by the
purchase of votes. In so far as virtue shall regain predominance in the
breast of the voter and set him free, virtue will replace money in the
voting, and set free the State.
Universal suffrage is a mode and a symbol. Under certain conditions
of education people must have it. Under others they cannot have it.
But whether they have it or not, they will be ruled by their ruling
passion, and if this renders them alike in character, their government
will be a tyranny. If the reign of the passion be tempered, the reign
of the tyrant will be tempered. Express the thing in terms of human
feeling (and what else is there?) and universal suffrage is seen as a
_quantité négligeable_.
It is thus apparent that there is no institution that cannot easily be
made to operate to a contradictory end. The criminal courts here have
been used to collect debt. There is no wickedness to which the enginery
of the Christian Church has not at one time or another been lent. The
passions of a period run its institutions as easily as a stream turns
any sort of a mill. To-day the United States Senate is a millionaires’
club. To-morrow the Stock Exchange may become a church.
Now what is an institution?
It is a custom which receives an assent because it is a custom. Man
has always been ruled by custom. The notion that there was a time when
disputes were settled by fighting, and that arbitration came in as a
matter of convenience, stands on the same sort of footing as Rousseau’s
social contract. It is an academic _jeu d’esprit_. In looking back
over history all we see is custom, and farther back, still custom. All
the fighting of savages is regulated by custom and always has been
regulated by custom. Nay, the bees and the ants are ruled by custom.
The idea of custom is the one idea that the genius of Kipling led him
to see in the jungle.
Now what is at the bottom of all this regard for custom? At the
bottom of custom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is both selfish
and unselfish, but it makes a great difference whether we regard him
_primarily_ as one thing or the other. The scientists, owing
to their study of the lower animals, have tried to explain man on
the selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery of him. They say “He
must eat or die; therefore, he must be primarily egoistic.” And they
attempt to explain progress by the expanding of egoism to include,
first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, and finally mankind.
Society according to them is a convention of egoism, a compromise,
a joint-stock company. Religion is a matter of ghosts and ancestor
worship, not fully explained yet. Note that this whole view depends
upon a dogma that man _must_ be primarily selfish because he must
eat. It is fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man absolutely selfish
could not survive. Man absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly.
The individuals would support each other.
But let us start square and remember that it is a question of science.
Take the other hypothesis. The horse runs in herds and propagates
his species because he is fond of the species. Incidentally he gets
protected. It is through the illusion that he loves his fellows that
his own welfare is secured. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the
bottom, self-protection the result.
It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse
is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen that Democracy
is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not
profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any
other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so
far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the
men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They
perish.
The regard that every custom receives from the individual who
supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of
savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a
funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral
law, the element is the same. It is reverence. It is respect. It is
self-surrender.
But reverence may become intensified into fear. The imagination of the
worshipper curls over like a wave. It looks back at him and frightens
him, and when this happens we call it Superstition. The pain of it,
like all pain, like the distress of insanity, comes wholly from the
fact that it is a self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man in
every stage of his culture is liable to this disease. Want of food or
tyranny, bad water or bad government, brings on this trouble. Every
country and every age shows forms of it: and very naturally, the savage
who is subject by reason of hardships to many diseases, shows terrible
forms of this disease of superstition. This is the chief fact that the
scientists have seen in the savage. These savants, holding the egoism
of man as their major thought, have through their ignorance of human
nature been led to base their explanation of the religion of mankind
upon a disease of the savage.
The opposite explanation stares them in the face. We all know in a
general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere
cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of
man. Give two men the New Testament--and each man sees himself in it,
and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the
character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual
growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is
the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a
life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious;
the altruistic emotion has not been expended in intercourse with his
fellows, and it accumulates. This book then, by focussing the altruism
in each individual of many generations of men, by being perpetually
rediscovered, by existing as a constant force differentiating
individuals and so undoing the tyranny of institution after institution
founded upon itself, gradually got itself enacted into international
law, into custom, into sentiment, and into municipal rule, and has been
on the whole the controlling force in Western Europe during the last
eighteen centuries. Its symbols express the constant factor in human
nature. It is only in so far as a book does this that it is remembered
at all.
Of course, when a custom arises it is turned on the instant into
something that can be used by egoism, and here comes the pivot of the
matter. Custom renders men similar to each other. The letter killeth.
But the letter does much more than kill. It educates, it trains, it
transmits. Hence the two contradictory functions of an institution
which we found at work in England, the one to educate, the other to
limit.
In studying the effect of institutions upon the individual, the whole
hierarchy of nature must be reviewed at once. We have nothing to guide
us in our study of the animals except our knowledge of man, but we have
much to find in that study which will enlarge and illustrate that
knowledge. Every naturalist and every sociologist should receive his
preliminary training in the political arena, and every politician in
the greenhouse and the menagerie.
Let us look at the social life of the ants.
The ant seems to show a stage of progress in which the individuals
have grown alike through a slavish observance of certain institutions.
It is certain that the ant is a ritualistic being, formal, narrow,
intolerant, incapable of new ideas or private enterprise. He hates any
one differing from himself, whether more or less virtuous. He would
regard any suggested improvement in the arrangement of his house as
a sacrilege. He works constantly for the public with a devotion that
nothing but religious zeal can explain, and is in his own limited way
completely happy. But the tyranny of public opinion, the subserviency
to a State church goes far to make him contemptible.
This is the worst that an institution can do. The individual is
crushed. The primeval reverence for custom seen in the ants has
crystallized without getting developed and specialized into its higher
form of reverence for the individual ant. He is a type of arrested
development.
The natural history of religion is then to be sought in a reverence
for custom that gradually specializes itself into a regard for
the individual. If these things are true, the advancement of any
civilization may be measured by the extent in which the rights of
individuals are held sacred. And this is what we have always been
taught.
Government was in its origin indistinguishable from religion, and down
to the latest day of time, the fluctuating institutions of man will
record this kinship between ritual and law.
The scientists, in trying to explain religion and progress as the
result of an egoism gradually expanding itself to a regard for mankind,
have been pulling at the wrong end of the cocoon. The thread unwound a
bit and then broke; unwound again and again broke. They were puzzling
themselves over a conception fundamentally unscientific and at war with
their own first principles.