THE RELATIVE MERIT OF GOVERNMENTS HAS NO INFLUENCE ON THE LENGTH OF A
NATION’S LIFE
I know the difficulty of my present task. That I should even venture to
touch on it will seem a kind of paradox to many of my readers. People
are convinced, and rightly convinced, that the good administration of
good laws has a direct and powerful influence on the health of a people;
and this conviction is so strong, that they attribute to such
administration the mere fact that a human society goes on living at all.
Here they are wrong.
They would be right, of course, if it were true that nations could exist
only in a state of well-being; but we know that, like individuals, they
can often go on for a long time, carrying within them the seeds of some
fell disease, which may suddenly break out in a virulent form. If
nations invariably died of their sufferings, not one would survive the
first years of its growth; for it is precisely in those years that they
show the worst administration, the worst laws, and the greatest
disorder. But in this respect they are the exact opposite of the human
organism. The greatest enemy that the latter has to fear, especially in
infancy, is a continuous series of illnesses—we know beforehand that
there is no resisting these; to a society, however, such a series does
no harm at all, and history gives us abundant proof that the body
politic is always being cured of the longest, the most terrible and
devastating attacks of disease, of which the worst forms are
ill-conceived laws and an oppressive or negligent administration.[12]
We will first try to make clear in what a “bad government” consists.
It is a malady that seems to take many forms. It would be impossible
even to enumerate them all, for they are multiplied to infinity by the
differences in the constitutions of peoples, and in the place and time
of their existence. But if we group these forms under four main
headings, there are very few varieties that will not be included.
A government is bad when it is set up by a foreign Power. Athens
experienced this kind of government under the Thirty Tyrants; they were
driven out, and the national spirit, far from dying under their
oppressive rule, was tempered by it to a greater hardness.
A government is bad when it is based on conquest, pure and simple. In
the fourteenth century practically the whole of France passed under the
yoke of England. It emerged stronger than before, and entered on a
career of great brilliance. China was overrun and conquered by hordes of
Mongols; it managed to expel them beyond its borders, after sapping
their vitality in a most extraordinary way. Since that time China has
fallen into a new servitude; but although the Manchus have already
enjoyed more than a century of sovereignty, they are on the eve of
suffering the same fate as the Mongols, and have passed through a
similar period of weakness.
A government is especially bad when the principle on which it rests
becomes vitiated, and ceases to operate in the healthy and vigorous way
it did at first. This was the condition of the Spanish monarchy. It was
based on the military spirit and the idea of social freedom; towards the
end of Philip II’s reign it forgot its origin and began to degenerate.
There has never been a country where all theories of conduct had become
more obsolete, where the executive was more feeble and discredited,
where the organization of the church itself was so open to criticism.
Agriculture and industry, like everything else, were struck down and all
but buried in the morass where the nation was decaying.... But is Spain
dead? Not at all. The country of which so many despaired has given
Europe the glorious example of a desperate resistance to the fortune of
our arms; and at the present moment it is perhaps in Spain, of all the
modern States, that the feeling of nationality is most intense.
Finally, a government is bad when, by the very nature of its
institutions, it gives colour to an antagonism between the supreme power
and the mass of the people, or between different classes of society.
Thus, in the Middle Ages, we see the kings of England and France engaged
in a struggle with their great vassals, and the peasants flying at the
throats of their overlords. In Germany, too, the first effects of the
new freedom of thought were the civil wars of the Hussites, the
Anabaptists, and all the other sectaries. A little before that, Italy
was in such distress through the division of the supreme power, and the
quarrel over the fragments between the Emperor, the Pope, the nobles,
and the communes, that the masses, not knowing whom to obey, often ended
by obeying nobody. Did this cause the ruin of the whole society? Not at
all. Its civilization was never more brilliant, its industry more
productive, its influence abroad more incontestable.
I can well believe that sometimes, in the midst of these storms, a wise
and potent law-giver came, like a sunbeam, to shed the light of his
beneficence on the peoples he ruled. The light remained only for a short
space; and just as its absence had not caused death, so its presence did
not bring life. For this, the times of prosperity would have had to be
frequent and of long duration. But upright princes were rare in that
age, and are rare in all ages. Even the best of them have their
detractors, and the happiest pictures are full of shadow. Do all
historians alike regard the time of King William III as an era of
prosperity for England? Do they all admire Louis XIV, the Great, without
reserve? On the contrary; the critics are all at their posts, and their
arrows know where to find their mark. And yet these are, on the whole,
the best regulated and most fruitful periods in the history of ourselves
and our neighbours. Good governments are so thinly sown on the soil of
the ages, and even when they spring up, are so withered by criticism;
political science, the highest and most intricate of all sciences, is so
incommensurate with the weakness of man, that we cannot sincerely claim
that nations perish from being ill-governed. Thank heaven they have the
power of soon becoming accustomed to their sufferings, which, in their
worst forms, are infinitely preferable to anarchy. The most superficial
study of history will be enough to show that however bad may be the
government that is draining away the life-blood of a people, it is often
better than many of the administrations that have gone before.