I
NATIONALITY AND DEMOCRACY; NATIONAL ORIGINS
Whatever the contemporary or the logical relation between nationality
and democracy as ideas and as political forces, they were in their
origin wholly independent one of the other. The Greek city states
supplied the first examples of democracy; but their democracy brought
with it no specifically national characteristics. In fact, the political
condition and ideal implied by the word nation did not exist in the
ancient world. The actual historical process, which culminated in the
formation of the modern national state, began some time in the Middle
Ages--a period in which democracy was almost an incredible form of
political association. Some of the mediæval communes were not without
traces of democracy; but modern nations do not derive from those
turbulent little states. They derive from the larger political divisions
into which Europe drifted during the Dark Ages; and they have grown with
the gradually prospering attempt to bestow on the government of these
European countries the qualities of efficiency and responsibility.
A complete justification of the foregoing statements would require a
critical account of the political development of Western Europe since
400 B.C.; but within the necessary limits of the present discussion, we
shall have to be satisfied with the barest summary of the way in which
the modern national states originated, and of the relation to democracy
which has gradually resulted from their own proper development. A great
deal of misunderstanding exists as to the fundamental nature of a
national as compared to a city or to an imperial state, because the
meaning of the national idea has been obscured by the controversies
which its militant assertion has involved. It has been identified both
with a revolutionary and a racial political principle, whereas its
revolutionary or racial associations are essentially occasional and
accidental. The modern national state is at bottom the most intelligent
and successful attempt which has yet been made to create a comparatively
stable, efficient, and responsible type of political association.
The primary objects sought in political association are internal order,
security from foreign attack, the authoritative and just adjustment of
domestic differences and grievances, and a certain opportunity for
individual development; and these several objects are really reducible
to two, because internal order cannot be preserved among a vigorous
people, in case no sufficient opportunity is provided for individual
development or for the adjustment of differences and grievances. In
order that a state may be relatively secure from foreign attack, it must
possess a certain considerable area, population, and military
efficiency. The fundamental weakness of the commune or city state has
always been its inability to protect itself from the aggressions of
larger or more warlike neighbors, and its correlative inability to
settle its own domestic differences without foreign interference. On the
other hand, when a state became sufficiently large and well organized to
feel safe against alien aggression, it inevitably became the aggressor
itself; and it inevitably carried the conquest of its neighbors just as
far as it was able. But domestic security, which is reached by constant
foreign aggression, results inevitably in a huge unwieldy form of
imperial political organization which is obliged by the logic of its
situation to seek universal dominion. The Romans made the great attempt
to establish a dominion of this kind; and while their Empire could not
endure, because their military organization destroyed in the end the
very foundation of internal order, they bequeathed to civilization a
political ideal and a legal code of inestimable subsequent value.
As long as men were obliged to choose between a communal or an imperial
type of political organization,--which was equivalent merely to a choice
between anarchy and despotism,--the problem of combining internal order
with external security seemed insoluble. They needed a form of
association strong enough to defend their frontiers, but not
sufficiently strong to attack their neighbors with any chance of
continued success; and such a state could not exist unless its unity
and integrity had some moral basis, and unless the aggressions of
exceptionally efficient states were checked by some effective
inter-state organization. The coexistence of such states demanded in its
turn the general acceptance of certain common moral ties and standards
among a group of neighboring peoples; and such a tie was furnished by
the religious bond with which Catholic Christianity united the peoples
of Western Europe--a bond whereby the disorder and anarchy of the early
Middle Ages was converted into a vehicle of political and social
education. The members of the Christian body had much to fear from their
fellow-Christians, but they also had much to gain. They shared many
interesting and vital subjects of consultation; and even when they
fought, as they usually did, they were likely to fight to some purpose.
But beyond their quarrels Catholic Christians comprised one universe of
discourse. They were somehow responsible one to another; and their
mutual ties and responsibilities were most clearly demonstrated whenever
a peculiarly unscrupulous and insistent attempt was made to violate
them. As new and comparatively strong states began to emerge from the
confusion of the early Middle Ages, it was soon found that under the new
conditions states which were vigorous enough to establish internal peace
and to protect their frontiers were not vigorous enough to conquer their
neighbors. Political efficiency was brought to a much better realization
of its necessary limits and responsibilities, because of the moral and
intellectual education which the adoption of Christianity had imposed
upon the Western peoples.
One of the earliest examples of political efficiency in mediæval Europe
was the England of Edward I, which had begun to exhibit certain
characteristics of a national state. Order was more than usually well
preserved. It was sheltered by the Channel from foreign attack. The
interest both of the nobles and of the people had been considered in its
political organization. A fair balance was maintained among the leading
members of the political body, so that the English kings could invade
France with united national armies which easily defeated the incoherent
rabble of knights and serfs whereby they were opposed. Nevertheless,
when the English, after the manner of other efficient states, tried to
conquer France, they were wholly unable to extinguish French
resistance, as the similar resistance of conquered peoples had so
frequently been extinguished in classic times. The French people rallied
to a king who united them in their resistance to foreign domination; and
the ultimate effect of the prolonged English aggression was merely the
increasing national efficiency and the improving political organization
of the French people.
The English could not extinguish the resistance of the French people,
because their aggression aroused in Frenchmen latent power of effective
association. Notwithstanding the prevalence of a factious minority, and
the lack of any habit or tradition of national association, the power of
united action for a common purpose was stimulated by the threat of alien
domination; and this latent power was unquestionably the result in some
measure of the discipline of Christian ideas to which the French, in
common with the other European peoples, had been subjected. That
discipline had, as has already been observed, increased men's capacity
for fruitful association one with another. It had stimulated a social
relationship much superior to the prevailing political relationship. It
had enabled them to believe in an idea and to fight devotedly on its
behalf. It is no accident, consequently, that the national resistance
took on a religious character, and in Jeanne d'Arc gave birth to one of
the most fragrant figures in human history. Thus the French national
resistance, and the national bond thereby created, was one political
expression of the power of coöperation developed in the people of Europe
by the acceptance of a common religious bond. On the other hand, the use
which the English had made of their precocious national organization
weakened its foundations. The aggressive exercise of military force
abroad for an object which it was incompetent to achieve disturbed the
domestic balance of power on which the national organization of the
English people rested. English political efficiency was dependent partly
upon its responsible exercise; and it could not survive the disregard of
domestic responsibilities entailed by the expense in men and money of
futile external aggression.
The history of Europe as it emerged from the Middle Ages affords a
continuous illustration of the truth that the increasing political
efficiency of the several states was proportioned to the exercise of
their powers in a responsible manner. The national development of the
several states was complicated in the beginning by the religious wars;
but those peoples suffered least from the wars of religion who did not
in the end allow them to interfere with their primary political
responsibilities. Spain, for instance, whose centuries of fighting with
the Moors had enormously developed her military efficiency, used this
military power solely for the purpose of pursuing political and
religious objects antagonistic or irrelevant to the responsibilities of
the Spanish kings towards their own subjects. The Spanish monarchy
proclaimed as its dominant political object the maintenance by force of
the Catholic faith throughout Europe; and for three generations it
wasted the superb military strength and the economic resources of the
Spanish people in an attempt to crush out Protestantism in Holland and
England and to reinforce militant Catholicism in France. Upon Germany,
divided into a number of petty states, partly Protestant, and partly
Catholic, but with the Imperial power exerted on behalf of a Catholic
and anti-national interest, the religious wars laid a heavy hand. Her
lack of political cohesion made her the prey of neighboring countries
whose population was numerically smaller, but which were better
organized; and the end of the Thirty Years' War left her both despoiled
and exhausted, because her political organization was wholly incapable
of realizing a national policy or of meeting the national needs. Great
Britain during all this period was occupied with her domestic problems
and interfered comparatively little in continental affairs; and the
result of this discreet and sensible effort to adapt her national
organization to her peculiar domestic needs was in the eighteenth
century an extraordinary increase of national efficiency. France also
emerged from the religious wars headed by a dynasty which really
represented national aspirations, and which was alive in some respects
to its responsibilities toward the French people. The Bourbon monarchy
consolidated the French national organization, encouraged French
intellectual and religious life, and at times sought in an intelligent
manner to improve the economic conditions of the country. For the first
time in the history of continental Europe something resembling a
genuinely national state was developed. Differences of religious opinion
had been subordinated to the political and social interests of the
French people. The crown, with the aid of a succession of able
ministers, suppressed a factious nobility at home, and gradually made
France the dominant European Power. A condition of the attainment of
both of these objects was the loyal support of the French people, and
the alliance with the monarchy, as the embodiment of French national
life, of Frenchmen of ability and purpose.
The French monarchy, however, after it had become the dominant power in
Europe, followed the bad example of previous states, and aroused the
fear of its neighbors by a policy of excessive aggression. In this
instance French domineering did not stimulate the national development
of any one neighbor, because it was not concentrated upon any one or two
peoples. But it did threaten the common interests of a number of
European states; and it awakened an unprecedented faculty of inter-state
association for the protection of these interests. The doctrine of the
Balance of Power waxed as the result of this experience into a living
principle in European politics; and it imposed an effective check upon
the aggression of any single state. France was unable to retain the
preponderant position which she had earned during the early years of the
reign of Louis XIV; and this mistake of the Bourbon monarchy was the
cause of its eventual downfall. The finances of the country were wrecked
by its military efforts and failures, the industrial development of the
people checked, and their loyalty to the Bourbons undermined. A gulf was
gradually created between the French nation and its official
organization and policy.
England, on the other hand, was successfully pursuing the opposite work
of national improvement and consolidation. She was developing a system
of government which, while preserving the crown as the symbol of social
order, combined aristocratic leadership with some measure of national
representation. For the first time in centuries the different members of
her political body again began to function harmoniously; and she used
the increasing power of aggression thereby secured with unprecedented
discretion and good sense. She had learned that her military power could
not be used with any effect across the Channel, and that under existing
conditions her national interests in relation to the other European
Powers were more negative than positive. Her expansive energy was
concentrated on the task of building up a colonial empire in Asia and
America; and in this task her comparative freedom from continental
entanglements enabled her completely to vanquish France. Her success in
creating a colonial empire anticipated with extraordinary precision the
course during the nineteenth century of European national development.
In contemplating the political situation of Europe towards the end of
the eighteenth century the student of the origin of the power and
principle of nationality will be impressed by its two divergent aspects.
The governments of the several European states had become tolerably
efficient for those purposes in relation to which, during the sixteenth
century and before, efficiency had been most necessary. They could keep
order. Their citizens were protected to some extent in the enjoyment of
their legal rights. The several governments were closely associated
chiefly for the purpose of preventing excessive aggression on the part
of any one state and of preserving the Balance of Power. Unfortunately,
however, these governments had acquired during the turbulent era an
unlimited authority which was indispensable to the fundamental task of
maintaining order, but which, after order had been secured, was
sufficient to encourage abuse. Their power was in theory absolute. It
was an imitation of Roman Imperialism, and made no allowance for those
limitations, both in its domestic and foreign expressions, which existed
as a consequence of national growth and the international system. Their
authority at all times was keyed up to the pitch of a great emergency.
It was supposed to be the immediate expression of the common weal. The
common weal was identified with the security of society and the state.
The security of the state dictated the supreme law. The very authority,
consequently, which was created to preserve order and the Balance of
Power gradually became an effective cause of internal and external
disorder. It became a source not of security, but of individual and
social insecurity, because a properly organized machinery for exercising
such a power and redeeming such a vast responsibility had not as yet
been wrought.
The rulers of the continental states in the eighteenth century explained
and excused every important action they took by what was called "La
Raison d'État"--that is, by reasons connected with the public safety
which justified absolute authority and extreme measures. But as a matter
of fact this absolute authority, instead of being confined in its
exercise to matters in which the public safety was really concerned, was
wasted and compromised chiefly for the benefit of a trivial domestic
policy and a merely dynastic foreign policy. At home the exercise of
absolute authority was not limited to matters and occasions which really
raised questions of public safety. In their foreign policies the
majority of the states had little idea of the necessary and desirable
limits of their own aggressive power. Those limits were imposed from
without; and when several states could combine in support of an act of
international piracy, as in the case of the partition of Poland, Europe
could not be said to have any effective system of public law. The
partition of Poland, which France could and should have prevented, was
at once a convincing exposure of the miserable international position to
which France had been reduced by the Bourbons, and the best possible
testimony to the final moral bankruptcy of the political system of the
eighteenth century.
II
THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In 1789 the bombshell of the French Revolution exploded under this
fabric of semi-national and semi-despotic, but wholly royalist and
aristocratic, European political system. For the first time in the
history of European nations a national organization and tradition was
confronted by a radical democratic purpose and faith. The two ideas have
been face to face ever since; and European history thereafter may, in
its broadest aspect, be considered as an attempt to establish a fruitful
relation between them. In the beginning it looked as if democracy would,
so far as it prevailed, be wholly destructive of national institutions
and the existing international organization. The insurgent democrats
sought to ignore and to eradicate the very substance of French national
achievement. They began by abolishing all social and economic privileges
and by framing a new polity based in general upon the English idea of a
limited monarchy, partial popular representation, and equal civil
rights; but, carried along by the momentum of their ideas and incensed
by the disloyalty of the king and his advisers and the threat of
invasion they ended by abolishing royalty, establishing universal
suffrage and declaring war upon every embodiment, whether at home or
abroad, of the older order. The revolutionary French democracy
proclaimed a creed, not merely subversive of all monarchical and
aristocratic institutions, but inimical to the substance and the spirit
of nationality. Indeed it did not perceive any essential distinction
between the monarchical or legitimist and the national principles; and
the error was under the circumstances not unnatural. In the European
political landscape of 1793 despotic royalty was a much more conspicuous
fact than the centuries of political association in which these
monarchies had been developed. But the eyes of the French democrats had
been partially blinded by their own political interests and theories.
Their democracy was in theory chiefly a matter of abstract political
rights which remitted logically in a sort of revolutionary anarchy. The
actual bonds whereby men were united were ignored. All traditional
authority fell under suspicion. Frenchmen, in their devotion to their
ideas and in their distrust of every institution, idea, or person
associated with the Old Régime, hacked at the roots of their national
cohesion and undermined the foundations of social order.
To a disinterested political philosopher of that day the antagonism
between the principle of political authority and cohesion, as
represented by the legitimate monarchies, and the principle of popular
Sovereignty represented by the French democracy, may well have looked
irretrievable. But events soon proved that such an inference could not
be drawn too quickly. It is true that the French democracy, by breaking
so violently the bonds of national association, perpetuated a division
between their political organization and the substance of their national
life, which was bound in the end to constitute a source of weakness. Yet
the revolutionary democracy succeeded, nevertheless, in releasing
sources of national energy, whose existence had never before been
suspected, and in uniting the great body of the French people for the
performance of a great task. Even though French national cohesion had
been injured in one respect, French national efficiency was temporarily
so increased that the existing organization and power of the other
continental countries proved inadequate to resist it. When the French
democracy was attacked by its monarchical neighbors, the newly aroused
national energy of the French people was placed enthusiastically at the
service of the military authorities. The success of the French armies,
even during the disorders of the Convention and the corruption of the
Directory, indicated that revolutionary France possessed possibilities
of national efficiency far superior to the France of the Old Régime.
Neither the democrats nor Napoleon had, in truth, broken as much as they
themselves and their enemies believed with the French national
tradition; but unfortunately that aspect of the national tradition
perpetuated by them was by no means its best aspect. The policy, the
methods of administration, and the actual power of the Committee of
Public Safety and of Napoleon were all inherited from the Old Régime.
Revolutionary France merely adapted to new conditions the political
organization and policy to which Frenchmen had been accustomed; and the
most serious indictment to be made against it is that its excesses
prevented it from dispensing with the absolutism which social disorder
and unwarranted foreign aggression always necessitate. The Revolution
made France more of a nation than it had been in the eighteenth century,
because it gave to the French people the civil freedom, the political
experience, and the economic opportunities which they needed, but it did
not heal the breach which the Bourbons had made between the political
organization of France and its legitimate national interests and
aspirations. France in 1815, like France in 1789, remained a nation
divided against itself,--a nation which had perpetuated during a
democratic revolution a part of its national tradition most opposed to
the logic of its new political and social ideas. It remained, that is, a
nation whose political organization and policy had not been adapted to
its domestic needs, and one which occupied on anomalous and suspected
position in the European international system.
On the other hand, French democracy and Imperialism had directly and
indirectly instigated the greater national efficiency of the neighboring
European states. Alliances among European monarchs had not been
sufficient to check the Imperial ambitions of Napoleon, as they had
been sufficient to check the career of Louis XIV, because behind a
greater general was the loyal devotion and the liberated energy of the
French people; but when outrages perpetrated on the national feelings of
Germans and Spaniards added an enthusiastic popular support to the
hatred which the European monarchs cherished towards a domineering
upstart, the fall of Napoleon became only a question of time. The excess
and the abuse of French national efficiency and energy, consequent upon
its sudden liberation and its perpetuation of an illogical but natural
policy of national aggression, had the same effect upon Europe as
English aggression had upon the national development of France. Napoleon
was crushed under a popular uprising, comparable to that of the French
people, which had been the condition of his own aggrandizement. Thus, in
spite of the partial antagonism between the ideas of the French
Revolutionary democracy and the principle of nationality the ultimate
effect of the Revolution both in France and in Europe was to increase
the force and to enlarge the area of the national movement. English
national sentiment was enormously stimulated by the strenuous wars of
the Revolutionary epoch. The embers of Spanish national feeling were
blown into spasmodic life. The peoples of Italy and Germany had been
possessed by the momentum of a common political purpose, and had been
stirred by promises of national representation. Even France, unstable
though its political condition was, had lost none of the results of the
Revolution for which it had fought in the beginning; and if the Bourbons
were restored, it was only on the implicit condition that the monarchy
should be nationalized. The Revolutionary democracy, subversive as were
its ideas, had started a new era for the European peoples of national
and international construction.
Of course, it was by no means obvious in 1815 that a constructive
national and international principle had come to dominate the European
political system. The Treaty of Vienna was an unprincipled compromise
among the divergent interests and claims of the dominant Powers, and the
triumphant monarchs ignored their promises of national reform or
representation. For one whole generation they resolutely suppressed, so
far as they were able, every symptom of an insurgent democratic or
national idea. They sought persistently and ingeniously to identify in
Europe the principle of political integrity and order with the principle
of the legitimate monarchy. But obscurantist as were the ideas and the
policy of the Holy Alliance, the political system it established was an
enormous improvement upon that of the eighteenth century. Not only was
the sense of responsibility of the governing classes very much
quickened, but the international system was based on a comparatively
moral and rational idea. For the first time in European history a group
of rulers, possessing in theory absolute authority and forming an
apparently irresistible combination, exercised this power with
moderation. They did not combine, as in the case of the partition of
Poland, to break the peace and prey upon a defenseless neighbor, but to
keep the peace; and if to keep the peace meant the suppression wherever
possible of liberal political ideas, it meant also the renunciation of
aggressive foreign policies. In this way Europe obtained the rest which
was necessary after the havoc of the Revolutionary wars, while at the
same time the principle on which the Holy Alliance was based was being
put to the test of experience. Such a test it could not stand. The
people of Europe were not content to identify the principle of political
order, whether in domestic or foreign affairs, with that of legitimate
monarchy and with the arbitrary political alignments of the Treaty of
Vienna. Such a settlement ignored the political forces and ideas which,
while originating in Revolutionary France, had none the less saved
Europe from the consequences of French Revolutionary and Imperial
aggression.
Beginning in 1848, Europe entered upon another period of revolutionary
disturbance, which completely destroyed the political system of the Holy
Alliance. At the outset these revolutions were no more respectful of
national traditions than was the French Revolution; and as long as they
remained chiefly subversive in idea and purpose, they accomplished
little. But after some unsuccessful experimentation, the new
revolutionary movement gradually adopted a national programme; and
thereafter, its triumphs were many and varied. For the first time in
political history the meaning of the national principle began to be
understood; and it became in the most explicit manner a substantial and
a formative political idea.
The revolutionary period taught European statesmen and political
thinkers that political efficiency and responsibility both implied some
degree of popular representation. Such representation did not
necessarily go as far as thorough-going democrats would like. It did not
necessarily transfer the source of political authority from the crown to
the people. It did not necessarily bring with it, as in France, the
overthrow of those political and social institutions which constituted
the traditional structure of the national life. But it did imply that
the government should make itself expressly responsible to public
opinion, and should consult public opinion about all important questions
of public policy. A certain amount of political freedom was shown to be
indispensable to the making of a nation, and the granting of this amount
of political freedom was no more than a fulfillment of the historical
process in which the nations of Europe had originated.
The people of Europe had drifted into groups, the members of which, for
one reason or another, were capable of effective political association.
This association was not based at bottom on physical conditions. It was
not dependent on a blood bond, because as a matter of fact the racial
composition of the European peoples is exceedingly mixed. It was partly
conditioned on geographical continuity without being necessarily caused
thereby, and was wholly independent of any uniformity of climate. The
association was in the beginning largely a matter of convenience or a
matter of habit. Those associations endured which proved under stress of
historical vicissitudes to be worthy of endurance. The longer any
particular association endured, the more firm it became in political
structure and the more definite in policy. Its citizens became
accustomed to association one with another, and they became accustomed
to those political and social forms which supplied the machinery of
joint action. Certain institutions and ideas were selected by the
pressure of historical events and were capitalized into the effective
local political and social traditions. These traditions constituted the
substance of the political and social bond. They provided the forms
which enabled the people of any group to realize a joint purpose or, if
necessary, to discuss serious differences. In their absence the very
foundation of permanent political cohesion was lacking. For a while the
protection of these groups against domestic and foreign enemies
demanded, as we have seen, the exercise of an absolute political
authority and the severe suppression of any but time-honored individual
or class interests; but when comparative order had been secured, a
higher standard of association gradually came to prevail. Differences of
conviction and interest among individuals and classes, which formerly
were suppressed or ignored, could no longer be considered either as so
dangerous to public safety as to demand suppression or as so
insignificant as to justify indifference. Effective association began to
demand, that is, a new adjustment among the individual and class
interests, traditions, and convictions which constituted the substance
of any particular state; and such an adjustment could be secured only by
an adequate machinery of consultation and discussion. Cohesion could no
longer be imposed upon a people, because they no longer had any
sufficient reason to submit to the discipline of such an imposition. It
had to be reached by an enlarged area of political association, by the
full expression of individual and class differences, and finally by the
proper adjustment of those differences in relation to the general
interest of the whole community.
As soon as any European state attained, by whatever means, a
representative government, it began to be more of a nation, and to
obtain the advantages of a more nationalized political organization.
England's comparative domestic security enabled her to become more of a
nation sooner than any of her continental neighbors; and her national
efficiency forced the French to cultivate their latent power of national
association. In France the government finally succeeded in becoming
nationally representative without much assistance from any regular
machinery of representation; but under such conditions it could not
remain representative. One of its defects as a nation to-day is its lack
of representative institutions to which Frenchmen have been long
accustomed and which command some instinctive loyalty. Stimulated by
French and English example, the other European states finally understood
that some form or degree of popular representation was essential to
national cohesion; and little by little they have been grafting
representative institutions upon their traditional political structures.
Thus the need of political and social cohesion was converted into a
principle of constructive national reform. A nation is more or less of a
nation according as its members are more or less capable of effective
association; and the great object of a genuinely national domestic
policy is that of making such association candid, loyal, and fruitful.
Loyal and fruitful association is far from demanding mere uniformity of
purpose and conviction on the part of those associated. On the contrary
it gains enormously from a wide variety of individual differences,--but
with the essential condition that such differences do not become
factious in spirit and hostile to the utmost freedom of intercourse. But
the only way of mitigating factiousness and misunderstanding is by means
of some machinery of mutual consultation, which may help to remedy
grievances and whose decision shall determine the political action taken
in the name of the whole community. The national principle, that is,
which is precisely the principle of loyal and fruitful political
association, depends for its vitality upon the establishment and
maintenance of a constructive relation between the official political
organization and policy and the interests, the ideas, and the traditions
of the people as a whole. The nations of Europe, much as they suffered
from the French Revolution and disliked it, owe to the insurgent French
democracy their effective instruction in this political truth.
It follows, however, that there is no universal and perfect machinery
whereby loyal and fruitful national association can be secured. The
nations of Europe originated in local political groups, each of which
possessed its own peculiar interests, institutions, and traditions.
Their power of fruitful national association depended more upon loyalty
to their particular local political tradition and habits than upon any
ideal perfection in their new and experimental machinery for
distributing political responsibility and securing popular
representation. A national policy and organization is, consequently,
essentially particular; and, what is equally important, its particular
character is partly determined by the similarly special character of the
policy and organization of the surrounding states. The historical
process in which each of the European nations originated included, as
an essential element, the action and reaction of these particular states
one upon the other. Each nation was formed, that is, as part of a
political system which included other nations. As any particular state
became more of a nation, its increasing power of effective association
forced its neighbors either into submission or into an equally efficient
exercise of national resistance. Little by little it has been discovered
that any increase in the loyalty and fertility of a country's domestic
life was contingent upon the attainment of a more definite position in
the general European system; and that, on the other hand, any attempt to
escape from the limitations imposed upon a particular state by the
general system was followed by a diminished efficiency in its machinery
of national association.
The full meaning of these general principles can, perhaps, be best
explained by the consideration in relation thereto of the existing
political condition of the foremost European nations--Great Britain,
France, and Germany. Each of these special cases will afford an
opportunity of exhibiting a new and a significant variation of the
relation between the principles of nationality and the principles of
democracy; and together they should enable us to reach a fairly complete
definition of the extent to which, in contemporary Europe, any fruitful
relation can be established between them. What has already been said
sufficiently indicates that the effective realization of a national
principle, even in Europe, demands a certain infusion of democracy; but
it also indicates that this democratic infusion cannot at any one time
be carried very far without impairing the national integrity. How far,
then, in these three decisive cases has the democratic infusion been
carried and what are the consequences, the promise, and the dangers of
each experiment?
III
NATIONALITY AND DEMOCRACY IN ENGLAND
It has already been observed that England was the first European state
both in mediæval and modern times to reach a high degree of national
efficiency. At a period when the foreign policies of the continental
states were exclusively but timidly dynastic, and when their domestic
organizations illustrated the disadvantages of a tepid autocracy, Great
Britain had entered upon a foreign policy of national colonial expansion
and was building up a representative national domestic organization.
After several centuries of revolutionary disturbance the English had
regained their national balance, without sacrificing any of the
time-honored elements in their national life. The monarchy was
reconstituted as the symbol of the national integrity and as the crown
of the social system. The hereditary aristocracy, which was kept in
touch with the commoners because its younger sons were not noble and
which was national, if not liberal, in spirit, became the real rulers of
England; but its role was supplemented by an effective though limited
measure of general representation. This organization was perfected in
the nineteenth century. Little by little the area of popular
representation was enlarged, until it included almost the whole adult
male population; and the government became more and more effectively
controlled by national public opinion. As a result of this slowly
gathering but comprehensive plan of national organization, the English
have become more completely united in spirit and purpose than are the
people of any other country. The crown and the aristocracy recognize the
limitations of their positions and their inherited responsibilities to
the gentry and the people. The commoners on their side are proud of
their lords and of the monarchy and grant them full confidence. It is a
unique instance of mutual loyalty and well-distributed responsibility
among social classes, differing widely in station, occupations, and
wealth; and it is founded upon habit of joint consultation, coupled, as
the result of the long persistence of this habit, with an unusual
similarity of intellectual and moral outlook.
The result, until recently, was an exceptional degree of national
efficiency; and in scrutinizing this national efficiency the fact must
be faced that the political success of Great Britain has apparently been
due, not merely to her adoption of the practice of national
representation, but to her abhorrence of any more subversive democratic
ideas. On the one hand, the British have organized a political system
which is probably more sensitively and completely responsive to a
nationalized public opinion than is the political system of the
American democracy. On the other hand, this same nationalized political
organization is aristocratic to the core--aristocratic without scruple
or qualification. What is the effect of this aristocratic organization
upon the efficiently and fertility of the English political system? Has
it contributed in the past to such efficiency? Does it still contribute?
And if so, how far?
The power of the English aristocracy is no doubt to be justified, in
part, by the admirable service which has been rendered to the country by
the nobility and the gentry. During the eighteenth and a part of the
nineteenth centuries the political leadership of the English people was
on the whole both efficient and edifying. During all this period their
continental competitors were either burdened with autocratic
obscurantism or else were weakened by civil struggles and the fatal
consequences of military aggression. In the meantime Great Britain
pursued a comparatively tranquil course of domestic reform and colonial
and industrial expansion. She was the European Power whose political and
industrial energies were most completely liberated and most successfully
used; and as a consequence she naturally drifted into an extremely
self-satisfied state of mind in respect to her political and economic
organization and policy. But during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century political and economic conditions both began to change. The more
important competing nations had by that time overcome their internal
disorders, and by virtue of their domestic reforms had released new
springs of national energy. Great Britain had to face much severer
competition in the fields both of industrial and colonial expansion; and
during all of these years she has been losing ground. Her expansion has
not entirely ceased; but industrially she is being left behind by
Germany and by the United States, and her recent colonial acquisitions
have been attained only at an excessive cost. Inasmuch as she has
succeeded in retaining her relative superiority on the sea, she has
maintained her special position in the European political system; but
the relatively greater responsibilities of the future coupled with her
relatively smaller resources make her future international standing
dubious. It looks as if there might be something lacking in the national
organization and policy with which Great Britain has been so completely
content.
Many Englishmen recognize that their national organization has
diminished in efficiency, and they are considering various methods of
meeting the emergency. But to an outsider it does not look as if any
remedy, as yet seriously proposed, was really adequate. The truth is,
that the existing political, social, and economic organization of Great
Britain both impairs and misleads the energy of the people. It was
adequate to the economic and political conditions of two generations
ago, but it is at the present time becoming more and more inadequate. It
is inferior in certain essential respects to the economic and political
organization of Great Britain's two leading competitors--Germany and the
United States. It is lacking in purpose. It is lacking in brains. It is
lacking in faith.
Just as Great Britain benefited enormously during a century and a half
from her political precocity, so she is now suffering from the
consequences thereof. The political temperament of her people, their
method of organization, and their national ideals all took form at a
time when international competition for colonies and trade was not very
sharp, and when democracy had no philosophic or moral standing. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century the country was longing for domestic
peace, and it was willing to secure peace at any price save that of
liberty. The leadership of the landed aristocracy and gentry secured to
the British people domestic peace and civil liberty, and in return for
these very great blessings they sold themselves to the privileged
classes. These privileged classes have probably deserved their
privileges more completely than has the aristocracy of any other
country. They have been patriotic; they have shed their blood and spent
their money on what they believed to be the national welfare; they
introduced an honorable and an admirable _esprit de corps_ into the
English public service; and they have been loyal to the great formative
English political idea--the idea of liberty. They have granted to the
people from time to time as much liberty as public opinion demanded, and
have in this way maintained to the present day their political and
social prestige. But although they have been, on the whole, individually
disinterested, they have not been and they could not be disinterested as
a class. Owning as they did much of the land, they had as a class
certain economic interests. Possessing as they did certain special
privileges, they had as a class certain political interests. These
interests have been scrupulously preserved, no matter whether they did
or did not conflict with the national interest. Their landed
proprietorship has resulted in certain radical inequalities of taxation
and certain grave economic drawbacks. Their position as a privileged
class made them hospitable only to those reforms which spared their
privileges. But their privileges could not be spared, provided
Englishmen allowed rational ideas any decisive influence in their
political life; and the consequence of this abstention from ideas was
the gradual cultivation of a contempt for intelligence, an excessive
worship of tradition, and a deep-rooted faith in the value of
compromise. In the interest of domestic harmony they have identified
complacent social subserviency with the virtue of loyalty, and have
erected compromise into an ultimate principle of political action.
The landed aristocracy and gentry of England have been obliged to face
only one serious crisis--the prolonged crisis occasioned by the
transformation of Great Britain from an agricultural to an industrial
community. The way the English privileged classes preserved their
political leadership during a period, in which land was ceasing to be
the source of Great Britain's economic prosperity, is an extraordinary
illustration of their political tact and social prestige. But it must be
added that their leadership has been preserved more in name than in
substance. The aristocracy managed to keep its prestige and its apparent
power during the course of the industrial revolution, but only on
condition of the abandonment of the substance thereof. The nobility and
the gentry became the privileged servants of the rising middle class.
They bought off their commercial and industrial conquerors with the
concession of free trade, because at the time such a concession did not
seem to injure their own interests; and they agreed to let the English
business man practically dictate the national policy. In this way they
preserved their political and social privileges and have gradually so
identified the interests of the well-to-do middle class with their
interest that the two have become scarcely distinguishable. The
aristocracy of privilege and the aristocracy of wealth are absolutely
united in their devotion to the existing political organization and
policy of the United Kingdom.
This bargain appeared to work very well for a while; but indications are
accumulating that a let-alone economic policy has not preserved the
vitality of the British economic system. The English farmer has lost
ambition, and has been sacrificed to the industrial growth of the
nation, while the industrial growth itself no longer shows its former
power of expansion. The nation passed the responsibility for its
economic welfare on to the individual; and the individual with all his
energy and initiative seems unable to hold his own against better
organized competition. Its competitors have profited by the very
qualities which Great Britain renounced when she accepted the
anti-national liberalism of the Manchester school. They have shown under
widely different conditions the power of nationalizing their economic
organization; and in spite of the commission of many errors,
particularly in this country, a system of national economy appears to
make for a higher level of economic vitality than a system of
international economy. "At the present time," says Mr. O. Elzbacher in
his "Modern Germany," "when other nations are no longer divided against
themselves, but have become homogeneous unified nations in fact and
nations in organization, and when the most progressive nations have
become gigantic institutions for self-improvement and gigantic business
concerns on coöperative principles, the spasmodic individual efforts of
patriotic and energetic Englishmen and their unorganized individual
action prove less efficient for the good of their country than they were
formerly." The political leaders of England abandoned, that is, all
leadership in economic affairs and allowed a merely individualistic
liberalism complete control of the fiscal and economic policy of the
country. The government resigned economic responsibility at the very
time when English economic interests began to need vigilant protection
and promotion; and as a consequence of this resignation the English
governing class practically surrendered its primary function. What
seemed to be an easy transferal to more competent shoulders of the
national responsibility for the economic welfare of the country has
proved to be a betrayal of the national interest.
Fiscal reform alone will, however, never enable Great Britain to compete
more vigorously with either the United States or Germany. The diminished
economic vitality of England must be partly traced to her tradition of
political and social subserviency, which serves to rob both the ordinary
and the exceptional Englishmen of energy and efficiency. American
energy, so far as it is applied to economic tasks, is liberated not
merely by the abundance of its opportunities, but by the prevailing idea
that every man should make as much of himself as he can; and in
obedience to this idea the average American works with all his might
towards some special personal goal. The energy of the average
Englishman, on the other hand, is impaired by his complacent acceptance
of positions of social inferiority and by his worship of degrading
social distinctions; and even successful Englishmen suffer from a
similar handicap. The latter rarely push their business successes home,
because they themselves immediately begin to covet a place in the social
hierarchy, and to that end are content with a certain established
income. The pleasure which the average Englishman seems to feel in
looking up to the "upper classes" is only surpassed by the pleasure
which the exceptional Englishman seems to feel in looking down on the
"lower classes." Englishmen have always congratulated themselves because
their nobility was not a caste; but the facts that the younger sons of
the peers are commoners, and that a distinguished commoner may earn a
peerage, only makes the poison of these arbitrary social discriminations
the more deadly. An Englishman always has a chance of winning an
irrelevant but very gratifying social and political privilege. He may by
acceptable services of the ordinary kind become as good as a lord. Some
such ambition is nearly always the end to which the energy of the
successful Englishman is directed, and its particular nature hinders him
from realizing the special purpose of his own life with an unimpeded
will.
The net result of the English system is to infect English social,
political, military, and industrial life with social favoritism, and the
poison of the infection is only mitigated by the condition that the
"favorites" must deserve their selection by the maintenance of a certain
standard. This standard was formed a good many years ago when the
conditions of efficiency were not so exacting as they are to-day. At
that time it was a sufficiently high standard and made, on the whole,
for successful achievement. It demanded of the "favorite" that he be
honest, patriotic, well-educated, gentlemanly, courageous, and a "good
sort," but it wholly failed to demand high special training, intense
application, unremitting energy, or any exclusive devotion to one's
peculiar work. If an Englishman comes up to the regular standard, he can
usually obtain his share of the good things of English life; but if he
goes beyond, he falls under the social disqualification of being
abnormal and peculiar. The standard, consequently, is not now an
efficient standard; and it is frequently applied with some laxity to the
members of the privileged classes. A tacit conspiracy naturally exists
among people in such a position to make it easy for their associates,
friends, and relatives. The props and chances offered to a boy born into
this class make the very most of his probably moderate deserts and
abilities, and in occupying a position of responsibility he inevitably
displaces a more competent substitute. In our own country the enjoyment
of such political favors is known as a "pull," and is a popular but
disreputable method of political advancement, whereas in England the
whole social, and a large part of the political, structure is
constituted on the basis of a systematic and hereditary "pull." The
spirit thereof is highly honored in the most sacred precincts of English
life. It is supported heartily and unscrupulously by English public
opinion, and its critics are few and insignificant.
When Englishmen come to understand the need of dissociating their
national idea from its existing encumbrances of political privilege and
social favoritism, they will be confronted by a reconstructive task of
peculiar difficulty. The balance of the national life, which has been so
slowly and painfully recovered, will be endangered by the weakening of
any of its present supports. For centuries the existing system has been
wrought with the utmost patience and patriotism; and an Englishman may
well shudder at the notion of any essential modification. The good of
the system is so mixed with the evil that it seems impossible to
extricate and eradicate the latter without endangering English national
cohesion. Their traditional faith in compromise, their traditional dread
of ideas, their traditional habit of acting first and reasoning
afterwards, has made the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of
semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency--just as it has made the best
English social type a gentleman, but a gentleman absolutely conditioned,
tempered, and supplemented by a flunky.
While the process of becoming more of a democracy may very well
injure--at any rate for a while--English national consistency, England's
future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy. She has
built her national organization on the idea that the national welfare is
better promoted by a popular loyalty which entails popular immobility,
than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and
less subservient intellectual and moral energy. In so doing she has for
the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national
political and social organization--the advantage of combining great
popular energy with loyalty and fertility of association. No doubt
certain nations, because of their perilous international situation, may
be obliged to sacrifice the moral and economic individuality of the
people to the demands of political security and efficiency. But Great
Britain suffered from no such necessity. After the fall of Napoleon, she
was more secure from foreign interference than ever before in her
history; and she could have afforded, with far less risk than France, to
identify her national principle with the work of popular liberation and
amelioration. As a matter of fact, the logic of the reform movement
which began in England soon after the Treaty of Vienna, required the
adoption by England either of more democracy or of less. The privileged
classes should either have fought to preserve their peculiar
responsibility for the national welfare, or else, if they were obliged
to surrender their inherited leadership, they should have also
surrendered their political and social privileges. But Englishmen,
terrified by the disasters which French democratic nationalism had
wrought upon France, preferred domestic harmony to the perils of any
radical readjustment of the balance of their national life. The
aristocracy and the middle classes compromised their differences; and in
the compromise each of them sacrificed the principle upon which the
vitality of its action as a class depended, while both of them combined
to impose subordination on the mass of the people.
Englishmen have, it is true, always remained faithful to their dominant
political idea--the idea of freedom, and the English political and
economic system is precisely the example of the ultimate disadvantage of
basing national cohesion upon the application of such a limited
principle. This principle, as we have seen in the preceding chapter,
always operates for the benefit of a minority, whose whole object, after
they have once won certain peculiar advantages, is to secure their
perpetuation. The wealthy middle class, which at one time was the
backbone of the Liberal party, has for the most part gone over to the
Conservatives, because its interest has become as much opposed to
political and economic egalitarianism as is that of the aristocracy: and
the mass of the English people, whose liberation can never be
accomplished under the existing régime of political and economic
privilege, looks with complacency and awe upon the good time enjoyed by
their betters. Popular bondage is the price of national consistency. A
century of industrial expansion and over half a century of free trade
has left the English people miserably poor and contentedly hopeless; and
in the future the people cannot depend upon any increase even of the
small share of the benefits of industrial expansion, which they have
hitherto obtained, because the national expansion is itself proceeding
at a much slower rate. The dole, which is now being accorded in the
shape of old-age pensions, may fairly be compared to the free
transportation to their homes with which the Bank of Monte Carlo
assuages the feelings of its destitute victims. The national
organization and policy is so arranged that the majority must lose. The
result will be inevitably a diminution of the ability of the United
Kingdom to hold its own in competition with its economic and political
rivals; and in all probability this pressure from the outside will
eventually force the English nation to reconsider the basis of its
political and economic organization and policy.
IV
DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY IN FRANCE