In the preceding four chapters there has been developed, in a clumsy
laborious way, a smudgy, imperfect picture of the generalized civilized
state of the coming century. In terms, vague enough at times, but never
absolutely indefinite, the general distribution of the population in
this state has been discussed, and its natural development into four
great--but in practice intimately interfused--classes. It has been
shown--I know not how convincingly--that as the result of forces that
are practically irresistible, a world-wide process of social and moral
deliquescence is in progress, and that a really functional social body
of engineering, managing men, scientifically trained, and having common
ideals and interests, is likely to segregate and disentangle itself from
our present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. It has been
pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing
variety of morals, _ménages_, occupations and types, at present so
mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the
promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness
into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted
colours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In the course
of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take a few concrete
glimpses of households, costumes, conveyances, and conveniences of the
coming time, but only as incidental realizations of points in this
general thesis. And now, assuming, as we must necessarily do, the
soundness of these earlier speculations, we have arrived at a stage when
we may consider how the existing arrangements for the ostensible
government of the State are likely to develop through their own inherent
forces, and how they are likely to be affected by the processes we have
forecast.
So far, this has been a speculation upon the probable development of a
civilized society _in vacuo_. Attention has been almost exclusively
given to the forces of development, and not to the forces of conflict
and restraint. We have ignored the boundaries of language that are flung
athwart the great lines of modern communication, we have disregarded the
friction of tariffs, the peculiar groups of prejudices and irrational
instincts that inspire one miscellany of shareholders, workers,
financiers, and superfluous poor such as the English, to hate,
exasperate, lie about, and injure another such miscellany as the French
or the Germans. Moreover, we have taken very little account of the fact
that, quite apart from nationality, each individual case of the new
social order is developing within the form of a legal government based
on conceptions of a society that has been superseded by the advent of
mechanism. It is this last matter that we are about to take into
consideration.
Now, this age is being constantly described as a "Democratic" age;
"Democracy" is alleged to have affected art, literature, trade and
religion alike in the most remarkable ways. It is not only tacitly
present in the great bulk of contemporary thought that this "Democracy"
is now dominant, but that it is becoming more and more overwhelmingly
predominant as the years pass. Allusions to Democracy are so abundant,
deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is
worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases
really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded
associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just
exactly what the original implications and present realities of
"Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different
conception of the nature and future of this sort of political
arrangement from that generally assumed. We have already seen in the
discussion of the growth of great cities, that an analytical process may
absolutely invert the expectation based on the gross results up-to-date,
and I believe it will be equally possible to show cause for believing
that the development of Democracy also is, after all, not the opening
phase of a world-wide movement going on unbendingly in its present
direction, but the first impulse of forces that will finally sweep round
into a quite different path. Flying off at a tangent is probably one of
the gravest dangers and certainly the one most constantly present, in
this enterprise of prophecy.
One may, I suppose, take the Rights of Man as they are embodied in the
French Declaration as the ostentations of Democracy; our present
Democratic state may be regarded as a practical realization of these
claims. As far as the individual goes, the realization takes the form of
an untrammelled liberty in matters that have heretofore been considered
a part of social procedure, in the lifting of positive religious and
moral compulsions, in the recognition of absolute property, and in the
abolition of special privileges and special restrictions. Politically
modern Democracy takes the form of denying that any specific person or
persons shall act as a matter of intrinsic right or capacity on behalf
of the community as a whole. Its root idea is representation. Government
is based primarily on election, and every ruler is, in theory at least,
a delegate and servant of the popular will. It is implicit in the
Democratic theory that there _is_ such a thing as a popular will, and
this is supposed to be the net sum of the wills of all the citizens in
the State, so far as public affairs are concerned. In its less perfect
and more usual state the Democratic theory is advanced either as an
ethical theory which postulates an absence of formal acquiescence on the
part of the governed as injustice, or else as a convenient political
compromise, the least objectionable of all possible methods of public
control, because it will permit only the minimum of general
unhappiness.... I know of no case for the elective Democratic government
of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It is
manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no
collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank
indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands
of the most skilful electioneers; that neither men nor their rights are
identically equal, but vary with every individual, and, above all, that
the minimum or maximum of general happiness is related only so
indirectly to the public control that people will suffer great miseries
from their governments unresistingly, and, on the other hand, change
their rulers on account of the most trivial irritations. The case
against all the prolusions of ostensible Democracy is indeed so strong
that it is impossible to consider the present wide establishment of
Democratic institutions as being the outcome of any process of
intellectual conviction; it arouses suspicion even whether ostensible
Democracy may not be a mere rhetorical garment for essentially
different facts, and upon that suspicion we will now inquire.
Democracy of the modern type, manhood suffrage and so forth, became a
conspicuous phenomenon in the world only in the closing decades of the
eighteenth century. Its genesis is so intimately connected with the
first expansion of the productive element in the State, through
mechanism and a co-operative organization, as to point at once to a
causative connection. The more closely one looks into the social and
political life of the eighteenth century the more plausible becomes this
view. New and potentially influential social factors had begun to
appear--the organizing manufacturer, the intelligent worker, the skilled
tenant, and the urban abyss, and the traditions of the old land-owning
non-progressive aristocratic monarchy that prevailed in Christendom,
rendered it incapable--without some destructive shock or convulsion--of
any re-organization to incorporate or control these new factors. In the
case of the British Empire an additional stress was created by the
incapacity of the formal government to assimilate the developing
civilization of the American colonies. Everywhere there were new
elements, not as yet clearly analyzed or defined, arising as mechanism
arose; everywhere the old traditional government and social system,
defined and analyzed all too well, appeared increasingly obstructive,
irrational, and feeble in its attempts to include and direct these new
powers. But now comes a point to which I am inclined to attach very
great importance. The new powers were as yet shapeless. It was not the
conflict of a new organization with the old. It was the preliminary
dwarfing and deliquescence of the mature old beside the embryonic mass
of the new. It was impossible then--it is, I believe, only beginning to
be possible now--to estimate the proportions, possibilities, and
inter-relations of the new social orders out of which a social
organization has still to be built in the coming years. No formula of
definite re-construction had been evolved, or has even been evolved yet,
after a hundred years. And these swelling inchoate new powers, whose
very birth condition was the crippling, modification, or destruction of
the old order, were almost forced to formulate their proceedings for a
time, therefore, in general affirmative propositions that were really in
effect not affirmative propositions at all, but propositions of
repudiation and denial. "These kings and nobles and people privileged in
relation to obsolescent functions cannot manage our affairs"--that was
evident enough, that was the really essential question at that time, and
since no other effectual substitute appeared ready made, the working
doctrine of the infallible judgment of humanity in the gross, as
distinguished from the quite indisputable incapacity of sample
individuals, became, in spite of its inherent absurdity, a convenient
and acceptable working hypothesis.
Modern Democracy thus came into being, not, as eloquent persons have
pretended, by the sovereign people consciously and definitely assuming
power--I imagine the sovereign people in France during the first
Revolution, for example, quite amazed and muddle-headed with it all--but
by the decline of old ruling classes in the face of the _quasi_-natural
growth of mechanism and industrialism, and by the unpreparedness and
want of organization in the new intelligent elements in the State. I
have compared the human beings in society to a great and increasing
variety of colours tumultuously smashed up together, and giving at
present a general and quite illusory effect of grey, and I have
attempted to show that there is a process in progress that will amount
at last to the segregation of these mingled tints into recognizable
distinct masses again. It is not a monotony, but an utterly disorderly
and confusing variety that makes this grey, but Democracy, for practical
purposes, does really assume such a monotony. Like 'infinity', the
Democratic formula is a concrete-looking and negotiable symbol for a
negation. It is the aspect in political disputes and contrivances of
that social and moral deliquescence the nature and possibilities of
which have been discussed in the preceding chapters of this volume.
Modern Democracy first asserted itself in the ancient kingdoms of
France and Great Britain (counting the former British colonies in
America as a part of the latter), and it is in the French and
English-speaking communities that Democracy has developed itself most
completely. Upon the supposition we have made, Democracy broke out first
in these States because they were leading the way in material progress,
because they were the first States to develop industrialism, wholesale
mechanisms, and great masses of insubordinate activity outside the
recognized political scheme, and the nature and time and violence of the
outbreak was determined by the nature of the superseded government, and
the amount of stress between it and the new elements. But the detachment
of a great section of the new middle-class from the aristocratic order
of England to form the United States of America, and the sudden
rejuvenescence of France by the swift and thorough sloughing of its
outworn aristocratic monarchy, the consequent wars and the Napoleonic
adventure, checked and modified the parallel development that might
otherwise have happened in country after country over all Europe west of
the Carpathians. The monarchies that would probably have collapsed
through internal forces and given place to modern democratic states were
smashed from the outside, and a process of political re-construction,
that has probably missed out the complete formal Democratic phase
altogether--and which has been enormously complicated through
religious, national, and dynastic traditions--set in. Throughout
America, in England, and, after extraordinary experiments, in France,
political democracy has in effect legally established itself--most
completely in the United States--and the reflection and influence of its
methods upon the methods of all the other countries in intellectual
contact with it, have been so considerable as practically to make their
monarchies as new in their kind, almost, as democratic republics. In
Germany, Austria, and Italy, for example, there is a press nearly as
audible as in the more frankly democratic countries, and measurably akin
in influence; there are constitutionally established legislative
assemblies, and there is the same unofficial development of powerful
financial and industrial powers with which the ostensible Government
must make terms. In a vast amount of the public discussion of these
States, the postulates of Democracy are clearly implicit. Quite as much
in reality as the democratic republics of America, are they based not on
classes but upon a confusion; they are, in their various degrees and
with their various individual differences, just as truly governments of
the grey.
It has been argued that the grey is illusory and must sooner or later
pass, and that the colour that will emerge to predominance will take its
shape as a scientifically trained middle-class of an unprecedented
sort, not arising out of the older middle-classes, but replacing them.
This class will become, I believe, at last consciously _the_ State,
controlling and restricting very greatly the three non-functional masses
with which it is as yet almost indistinguishably mingled. The general
nature of its formation within the existing confusion and its emergence
may, I think, with a certain degree of confidence, be already forecast,
albeit at present its beginnings are singularly unpromising and faint.
At present the class of specially trained and capable people--doctors,
engineers, scientific men of all sorts--is quite disproportionally
absent from political life, it does not exist as a factor in that life,
it is growing up outside that life, and has still to develop, much more
to display, a collective intention to come specifically in. But the
forces are in active operation to drag it into the centre of the stage
for all that.
The modern democracy or democratic quasi-monarchy conducts its affairs
as though there was no such thing as special knowledge or practical
education. The utmost recognition it affords to the man who has taken
the pains to know, and specifically to do, is occasionally to consult
him upon specific points and override his counsels in its ampler wisdom,
or to entrust to him some otherwise impossible duty under circumstances
of extreme limitation. The man of special equipment is treated always as
if he were some sort of curious performing animal. The gunnery
specialist, for example, may move and let off guns, but he may not say
where they are to be let off--some one a little ignorant of range and
trajectory does that; the engineer may move the ship and fire the
battery, but only with some man, who does not perfectly understand,
shouting instructions down a tube at him. If the cycle is to be adapted
to military requirements, the thing is entrusted to Lieutenant-Colonel
Balfour. If horses are to be bought for the British Army in India, no
specialist goes, but Lord Edward Cecil. These people of the governing
class do not understand there is such a thing as special knowledge or an
inexorable fact in the world; they have been educated at schools
conducted by amateur schoolmasters, whose real aim in life--if such
people can be described as having a real aim in life--is the episcopal
bench, and they have learnt little or nothing but the extraordinary
power of appearances in these democratic times. To look right and to be
of good report is to succeed. What else is there? The primarily
functional men are ignored in the ostensible political scheme, it
operates as though they did not exist, as though nothing, in fact,
existed but the irresponsible wealthy, and the manipulators of
irresponsible wealth, on the one hand, and a great, grey, politically
indifferent community on the other. Having regard only to the present
condition of political life, it would seem as though this state of
affairs must continue indefinitely, and develop only in accordance with
the laws of inter-action between our charlatan governing class on the
one hand, and the grey mass of governed on the other. There is no way
apparent in the existing political and social order, whereby the class
of really educated persons that the continually more complicated
mechanical fabric of social life is developing may be expected to come
in. And in a very great amount of current political speculation, the
development and final emergence of this class is ignored, and attention
is concentrated entirely upon the inherent process of development of the
political machine. And even in that it is very easy to exaggerate the
preponderance of one or other of what are really very evenly balanced
forces in the machine of democratic government.
There are two chief sets of parts in the machine that have a certain
antagonistic relation, that play against each other, and one's
conception of coming developments is necessarily determined by the
relative value one gives to these opposing elements. One may compare
these two groups to the Power and the Work, respectively, at the two
ends of a lever.[33] On the one hand there is that which pays for the
machine, which distributes salaries and rewards, subsidizes newspapers
and so forth--the central influence.[34] On the other hand, there is
the collectively grey voting mass, with certain prejudices and
traditions, and certain laws and limitations of thought upon which the
newspapers work, and which, within the confines of its inherent laws,
they direct. If one dwell chiefly on the possibilities of the former
element, one may conjure up a practical end to democracy in the vision
of a State "run" entirely by a group of highly forcible and intellectual
persons--usually the dream takes the shape of financiers and their
associates, their perfected mechanism of party control working the
elections boldly and capably, and their public policy being directed
towards financial ends. One of the common prophecies of the future of
the United States is such a domination by a group of trust organizers
and political bosses. But a man, or a group of men, so strong and
intelligent as would be needed to hold an entire party machine within
the confines of his--or their collective--mind and will, could, at the
most, be but a very transitory and incidental phenomenon in the history
of the world. Either such an exploitation of the central control will
have to be covert and subtle beyond any precedent in human
disingenuousness, or else its domination will have to be very amply
modified indeed, by the requirements of the second factor, and its
proceedings made very largely the resultant of that second factor's
forces. Moreover, very subtle men do not aim at things of this sort, or
aiming, fail, because subtlety of intelligence involves subtlety of
character, a certain fastidiousness and a certain weakness. Now that the
garrulous period, when a flow of language and a certain effectiveness of
manner was a necessary condition to political pre-eminence, is passing
away, political control falls more and more entirely into the hands of a
barristerish intriguing sort of person with a tough-wearing, leathery,
practical mind. The sort of people who will work the machine are people
with "faith," as the popular preachers say, meaning, in fact, people who
do not analyze, people who will take the machine as it is,
unquestioningly, shape their ambitions to it, and--saving their
vanity--work it as it wants to go. The man who will be boss will be the
man who wants to be boss, who finds, in being boss, a complete and final
satisfaction, and not the man who complicates things by wanting to be
boss in order to be, or do, something else. The machines are governed
to-day, and there is every reason to believe that they will continue to
be governed, by masterful-looking resultants, masters of nothing but
compromise, and that little fancy of an inner conspiracy of control
within the machine and behind ostensible politics is really on all fours
with the wonderful Rodin (of the Juif Errant) and as probable as
anything else in the romances of Eugene Sue.
If, on the other hand, we direct attention to the antagonistic element
in the machine, to Public Opinion, to the alleged collective mind of the
grey mass, and consider how it is brought to believe in itself and its
possession of certain opinions by the concrete evidence of daily
newspapers and eloquent persons saying as much, we may also very readily
conjure up a contrasted vision of extraordinary demagogues or newspaper
syndicates working the political machine from that direction. So far as
the demagogue goes, the increase of population, the multiplication of
amusements and interests, the differentiation of social habits, the
diffusion of great towns, all militate against that sufficient gathering
of masses of voters in meeting-houses which gave him his power in the
recent past. It is improbable that ever again will any flushed
undignified man with a vast voice, a muscular face in incessant
operation, collar crumpled, hair disordered, and arms in wild activity,
talking, talking, talking, talking copiously out of the windows of
railway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotel
balconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits--tireless and
undammable--rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic state
in the world. Continually the individual vocal demagogue dwindles, and
the element of bands and buttons, the organization of the press and
procession, the share of the machine, grows.
Mr. Harmsworth, of the London _Daily Mail_, in a very interesting
article has glanced at certain possibilities of power that may vest in
the owners of a great system of world-wide "simultaneous" newspapers,
but he does not analyze the nature of the influence exercised by
newspapers during the successive phases of the nineteenth century, nor
the probable modifications of that influence in the years to come, and I
think, on the whole, he inclines very naturally to over estimate the
amount of intentional direction that may be given by the owner of a
paper to the minds and acts of his readers, and to exceed the very
definite limits within which that influence is confined. In the earlier
Victorian period, the more limited, partly educated, and still very
homogeneous enfranchised class, had a certain habit of thinking; its
tranquil assurance upon most theological and all moral and æsthetic
points left political questions as the chief field of exercise for such
thinking as it did, and, as a consequence, the dignified newspapers of
that time were able to discuss, and indeed were required to discuss not
only specific situations but general principles. That indeed was their
principal function, and it fell rather to the eloquent men to misapply
these principles according to the necessity of the occasion. The papers
did then very much more than they do now to mould opinion, though they
did not direct affairs to anything like the extent of their modern
successors. They made roads upon which events presently travelled in
unexpected fashions. But the often cheaper and always more vivid
newspapers that have come with the New Democracy do nothing to mould
opinion. Indeed, there is no longer upon most public questions--and as I
have tried to make clear in my previous paper, there is not likely to be
any longer--a collective opinion to be moulded. Protectionists, for
example, are a mere band, Free Traders are a mere band; on all these
details we are in chaos. And these modern newspapers simply endeavour to
sustain a large circulation and so merit advertisements by being as
miscellaneously and vividly interesting as possible, by firing where the
crowd seems thickest, by seeking perpetually and without any attempt at
consistency, the greatest excitement of the greatest number. It is upon
the cultivation and rapid succession of inflammatory topics that the
modern newspaper expends its capital and trusts to recover its reward.
Its general news sinks steadily to a subordinate position; criticism,
discussion, and high responsibility pass out of journalism, and the
power of the press comes more and more to be a dramatic and emotional
power, the power to cry "Fire!" in the theatre, the power to give
enormous value for a limited time to some personality, some event, some
aspect, true or false, without any power of giving a specific direction
to the forces this distortion may set going. Directly the press of
to-day passes from that sort of thing to some specific proposal, some
implication of principles and beliefs, directly it chooses and selects,
then it passes from the miscellaneous to the sectarian, and out of touch
with the grey indefiniteness of the general mind. It gives offence here,
it perplexes and bores there; no more than the boss politician can the
paper of great circulation afford to work consistently for any ulterior
aim.
This is the limit of the power of the modern newspaper of large
circulation, the newspaper that appeals to the grey element, to the
average democratic man, the newspaper of the deliquescence, and if our
previous conclusion that human society has ceased to be homogeneous and
will presently display new masses segregating from a great confusion,
holds good, that will be the limit of its power in the future. It may
undergo many remarkable developments and modifications,[35] but none of
these tend to give it any greater political importance than it has now.
And so, after all, our considerations of the probable developments of
the party machine give us only negative results, so long as the grey
social confusion continues. Subject to that continuance the party
machine will probably continue as it is at present, and Democratic
States and governments follow the lines upon which they run at the
present time.
Now, how will the emergent class of capable men presently begin to
modify the existing form of government in the ostensibly democratic
countries and democratic monarchies? There will be very many variations
and modifications of the methods of this arrival, an infinite
complication of detailed incidents, but a general proposition will be
found to hold good. The suppression of the party machine in the purely
democratic countries and of the official choice of the rich and
privileged rulers in the more monarchical ones, by capable operative and
administrative men inspired by the belief in a common theory of social
order, will come about--peacefully and gradually as a process of change,
or violently as a revolution--but inevitably as the outcome either of
the imminence or else of the disasters of war.
That all these governments of confusion will drift towards war, with a
spacious impulse and a final vehemence quite out of comparison greater
than the warlike impulses of former times, is a remarkable but by no
means inexplicable thing. A tone of public expression, jealous and
patriotic to the danger-point, is an unavoidable condition under which
democratic governments exist. To be patriotically quarrelsome is
imperative upon the party machines that will come to dominate the
democratic countries. They will not possess detailed and definite
policies and creeds because there are no longer any detailed and
definite public opinions, but they will for all that require some
ostensible purpose to explain their cohesion, some hold upon the common
man that will ensure his appearance in numbers at the polling place
sufficient to save the government from the raids of small but determined
sects. That hold can be only of one sort. Without moral or religious
uniformity, with material interests as involved and confused as a heap
of spelicans, there remains only one generality for the politician's
purpose, the ampler aspect of a man's egotism, his pride in what he
imagines to be his particular kind--his patriotism. In every country
amenable to democratic influences there emerges, or will emerge, a party
machine, vividly and simply patriotic--and indefinite upon the score of
any other possible consideration between man and man. This will hold
true, not only of the ostensibly democratic states, but also of such
reconstituted modern monarchies as Italy and Germany, for they, too, for
all their legal difference, rest also on the grey. The party conflicts
of the future will turn very largely on the discovery of the true
patriot, on the suspicion that the crown or the machine in possession is
in some more or less occult way traitorous, and almost all other matters
of contention will be shelved and allowed to stagnate, for fear of
breaking the unity of the national mechanism.
Now, patriotism is not a thing that flourishes in the void,--one needs a
foreigner. A national and patriotic party is an anti-foreign party; the
altar of the modern god, Democracy, will cry aloud for the stranger men.
Simply to keep in power, and out of no love of mischief, the government
or the party machine will have to insist upon dangers and national
differences, to keep the voter to the poll by alarms, seeking ever to
taint the possible nucleus of any competing organization with the
scandal of external influence. The party press will play the watch-dog
and allay all internal dissensions with its warning bay at some adjacent
people, and the adjacent peoples, for reasons to be presently expanded,
will be continually more sensitive to such baying. Already one sees
country yelping at country all over the modern world, not only in the
matter of warlike issues, but with a note of quite furious commercial
rivalry--quite furious and, indeed, quite insane, since its ideal of
trading enormously with absolutely ruined and tradeless foreigners,
exporting everything and importing nothing, is obviously outside reason
altogether. The inexorable doom of these governments based on the grey,
is to foster enmity between people and people. Even their alliances are
but sacrifices to intenser antagonisms. And the phases of the democratic
sequence are simple and sure. Forced on by a relentless competition, the
tone of the outcries will become fiercer and fiercer; the occasions of
excitement, the perilous moments, the ingenuities of annoyance, more and
more dramatic,--from the mere emptiness and disorder of the general
mind! Jealousies and anti-foreign enactments, tariff manipulations and
commercial embitterment, destructive, foolish, exasperating obstructions
that benefit no human being, will minister to this craving without
completely allaying it. Nearer, and ever nearer, the politicians of the
coming times will force one another towards the verge, not because they
want to go over it, not because any one wants to go over it, but because
they are, by their very nature, compelled to go that way, because to go
in any other direction is to break up and lose power. And, consequently,
the final development of the democratic system, so far as intrinsic
forces go, will be, not the rule of the boss, nor the rule of the trust,
nor the rule of the newspaper; no rule, indeed, but international
rivalry, international competition, international exasperation and
hostility, and at last--irresistible and overwhelming--the definite
establishment of the rule of that most stern and educational of all
masters--_War_.
At this point there opens a tempting path, and along it historical
precedents, like a forest of notice-boards, urge us to go. At the end of
the vista poses the figure of Napoleon with "Cæsarism" written beneath
it. Disregarding certain alien considerations for a time, assuming the
free working out of democracy to its conclusion, we perceive that, in
the case of our generalized state, the party machine, together with the
nation entrusted to it, must necessarily be forced into passionate
national war. But, having blundered into war, the party machine will
have an air of having accomplished its destiny. A party machine or a
popular government is surely as likely a thing to cause a big disorder
of war and as unlikely a thing to conduct it, as the wit of man, working
solely to that end, could ever have devised. I have already pointed out
why we can never expect an elected government of the modern sort to be
guided by any far-reaching designs, it is constructed to get office and
keep office, not to do anything in office, the conditions of its
survival are to keep appearances up and taxes down,[36] and the care
and management of army and navy is quite outside its possibilities. The
military and naval professions in our typical modern State will subsist
very largely upon tradition, the ostensible government will interfere
with rather than direct them, and there will be no force in the entire
scheme to check the corrupting influence of a long peace, to insist upon
adequate exercises for the fighting organization or ensure an adequate
adaptation to the new and perpetually changing possibilities of untried
apparatus. Incapable but confident and energetic persons, having
political influence, will have been permitted to tamper with the various
arms of the service, the equipment will be largely devised to create an
impression of efficiency in times of peace in the minds of the general
voting public, and the really efficient soldiers will either have
fretted themselves out of the army or have been driven out as political
non-effectives, troublesome, innovating persons anxious to spend money
upon "fads." So armed, the New Democracy will blunder into war, and the
opening stage of the next great war will be the catastrophic breakdown
of the formal armies, shame and disasters, and a disorder of conflict
between more or less equally matched masses of stupefied, scared, and
infuriated people. Just how far the thing may rise from the value of an
alarming and edifying incident to a universal catastrophe, depends upon
the special nature of the conflict, but it does not alter the fact that
any considerable war is bound to be a bitter, appalling, highly
educational and constitution-shaking experience for the modern
democratic state.
Now, foreseeing this possibility, it is easy to step into the trap of
the Napoleonic precedent. One hastens to foretell that either with the
pressure of coming war, or in the hour of defeat, there will arise the
Man. He will be strong in action, epigrammatic in manner, personally
handsome and continually victorious. He will sweep aside parliaments and
demagogues, carry the nation to glory, reconstruct it as an empire, and
hold it together by circulating his profile and organizing further
successes. He will--I gather this from chance lights upon contemporary
anticipations--codify everything, rejuvenate the papacy, or, at any
rate, galvanize Christianity, organize learning in meek intriguing
academies of little men, and prescribe a wonderful educational system.
The grateful nations will once more deify a lucky and aggressive
egotism.... And there the vision loses breath.
Nothing of the sort is going to happen, or, at any rate, if it happens,
it will happen as an interlude, as no necessary part in the general
progress of the human drama. The world is no more to be recast by chance
individuals than a city is to be lit by sky rockets. The purpose of
things emerges upon spacious issues, and the day of individual leaders
is past. The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast the
coming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodies
of Cæsar's career as that misapplied, and speedily futile chess
champion, Napoleon I. contrived, are false. They are false because they
ignore two correlated things; first, the steady development of a new and
quite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of the
expansion of science and mechanism, and secondly, the absolute
revolution in the art of war that science and mechanism are bringing
about. This latter consideration the next chapter will expand, but here,
in the interests of this discussion, we may in general terms anticipate
its gist. War in the past has been a thing entirely different in its
nature from what war, with the apparatus of the future, will be--it has
been showy, dramatic, emotional, and restricted; war in the future will
be none of these things. War in the past was a thing of days and
heroisms; battles and campaigns rested in the hand of the great
commander, he stood out against the sky, picturesquely on horseback,
visibly controlling it all. War in the future will be a question of
preparation, of long years of foresight and disciplined imagination,
there will be no decisive victory, but a vast diffusion of conflict--it
will depend less and less on controlling personalities and driving
emotions, and more and more upon the intelligence and personal quality
of a great number of skilled men. All this the next chapter will expand.
And either before or after, but, at any rate, in the shadow of war, it
will become apparent, perhaps even suddenly, that the whole apparatus of
power in the country is in the hands of a new class of intelligent and
scientifically-educated men. They will probably, under the development
of warlike stresses, be discovered--they will discover
themselves--almost surprisingly with roads and railways, carts and
cities, drains, food supply, electrical supply, and water supply, and
with guns and such implements of destruction and intimidation as men
scarcely dream of yet, gathered in their hands. And they will be
discovered, too, with a growing common consciousness of themselves as
distinguished from the grey confusion, a common purpose and implication
that the fearless analysis of science is already bringing to light.
They will find themselves with bloodshed and horrible disasters ahead,
and the material apparatus of control entirely within their power.
"Suppose, after all," they will say, "we ignore these very eloquent and
showy governing persons above, and this very confused and ineffectual
multitude below. Suppose now we put on the brakes and try something a
little more stable and orderly. These people in possession have, of
course, all sorts of established rights and prescriptions; they have
squared the law to their purpose, and the constitution does not know us;
they can get at the judges, they can get at the newspapers, they can do
all sorts of things except avoid a smash--but, for our part, we have
these really most ingenious and subtle guns. Suppose instead of our
turning them and our valuable selves in a fool's quarrel against the
ingenious and subtle guns of other men akin to ourselves, we use them in
the cause of the higher sanity, and clear that jabbering war tumult out
of the streets."... There may be no dramatic moment for the expression
of this idea, no moment when the new Cromwellism and the new Ironsides
will come visibly face to face with talk and baubles, flags and
patriotic dinner bells; but, with or without dramatic moments, the idea
will be expressed and acted upon. It will be made quite evident then,
what is now indeed only a pious opinion, namely, that wealth is, after
all, no ultimate Power at all, but only an influence among aimless,
police-guarded men. So long as there is peace the class of capable men
may be mitigated and gagged and controlled, and the ostensible present
order may flourish still in the hands of that other class of men which
deals with the appearances of things. But as some supersaturated
solution will crystallize out with the mere shaking of its beaker, so
must the new order of men come into visibly organized existence through
the concussions of war. The charlatans can escape everything except war,
but to the cant and violence of nationality, to the sustaining force of
international hostility, they are ruthlessly compelled to cling, and
what is now their chief support must become at last their destruction.
And so it is I infer that, whether violently as a revolution or quietly
and slowly, this grey confusion that is Democracy must pass away
inevitably by its own inherent conditions, as the twilight passes, as
the embryonic confusion of the cocoon creature passes, into the higher
stage, into the higher organism, the world-state of the coming years.