Almost everywhere, in obedience to the now so active law that carries us
to extremes, men are hurrying along at full speed the sooner to reach
what appears to be the last political ideal of the nations, universal
suffrage. Since this ideal still completely masks the better ideal that
probably lies hidden behind it and since it does not appear what it
perhaps is, a provisional solution, it will, until we have exhausted all
the illusions which it contains, hold the gaze and wishes of humanity.
It is the necessary goal, good or bad, towards which the nations are
advancing. It is indispensable to the instinctive justice of the mass
that the evolution should be accomplished. Anything that trammels it is
but an ephemeral obstacle. Anything that pretends to improve that ideal
before it has been attained drives it back towards the error of the
past. Like every universal and imperious ideal, like every ideal formed
in the depth of anonymous life, it has first of all the right to see
itself realized. If, after its realization, it should become apparent
that the ideal does not fulfil its promise, it will then be meet that we
should think of perfecting or replacing it. In the meantime, this fact
is inscribed in the instinct of the mass, as indestructibly as in
bronze, that all nations have the natural right to pass through this
phase of the political evolution of the human polypier and, each in its
turn, each in its own language, with its particular virtues and faults,
to interrogate the possibilities of happiness which it brings.
That is why, full of the duty of living, this ideal is most justly
jealous, intolerant and unreasonable. Like every youthful organism, it
violently eliminates all that can impair the purity of its blood. It is
possible that the elements borrowed from monarchy and aristocracy which
men endeavour to introduce into its adolescent veins are excellent in
themselves; but they are injurious to it because they inoculate it with
the ill of which it has first to be cured. Before the government of all
can be made wiser, more limpid and more harmonious by the admixture of
other systems, it must have purified itself by its own fermentation.
After it has rid itself of every trace, of every memory of the past,
after it has reigned in the certainty and integrity of its force, then
will be the time to invite it to choose in the past that which concerns
its future. It will take of this according to its natural appetite,
which, like the natural appetite of every living being, knows with a
sure knowledge what is indispensable to the mystery of life.
V
The nations are right therefore in provisionally rejecting that which
is, perhaps, better than universal suffrage. It is possible that the
crowd will eventually admit that the more highly intelligent discern and
govern the common weal better than the others. It will then grant them a
lawful preponderance. For the moment, it does not give them a thought.
It has not had time to learn to know itself. It has not had time to
exhaust experiments which appear absurd, but which are necessary because
they clear the place in which the last truths without doubt lie hidden.
It is with nations as with individuals: that which tells is what they
learn by themselves, at their own cost; and their mistakes form the
heritage of the future. It serves no purpose to say to a man in his
childhood or in his youth:
"Do not lie, do not deceive, cause no suffering."
Those precepts of wisdom, which are at the same time precepts of
happiness, do not impress him, do not feed his thoughts, do not become
beneficent realities until after the moment when life has revealed them
to him as new and magnificent truths which no one ever suspected. In the
same way, it is useless to repeat to a nation that is seeking out its
destiny:
"Do not believe that the multitude is right, that a lie stated by a
hundred mouths ceases to be a lie, that an error proclaimed by a band of
blind men becomes a truth which nature will sanction. Do not believe,
either, that, by setting yourselves to the number of ten thousand who do
not know against one who knows, you will come to know anything, or that
you will compel the humblest of the eternal laws to follow you, to
abandon him who recognized it. No, the law will remain in its place,
with the wise man who discovered it, and so much the worse for you if
you go away without accepting it! You will one day come across it on
your road, and all that you have done while you thought that you were
avoiding it will turn and rise up against you."
Such words as these, addressed to the crowd, are very true; but it is no
less true that all this becomes efficacious only after it has been
experienced and lived through. In those problems in which all life's
enigmas converge, the crowd which is wrong is almost always justified as
against the wise man who is right. It refuses to believe him on his
word. It feels dimly that behind the most evident abstract truths there
are numberless living truths which no brain can foresee, for they need
time, reality and men's passions to develop their work. That is why,
whatever warning we may give it, whatever prediction we may make to it,
the crowd insists before all that the experiment shall be tried. Can we
say that, in cases where the crowd has obtained the experiment, it was
wrong to insist upon it?
A special study would be needed to examine all that universal suffrage
has added to the general intelligence, to the civic conscience, dignity
and solidarity of the nations that have practised it; but, even if it
had done no more than to create, as in America and France, that sense of
real equality which is there breathed as a more human and purer
atmosphere and which seems new and almost prodigious to those who come
from elsewhere, that in itself would be a boon that would cause its
gravest errors to be forgiven. In any case, it is the best preparation
for that which must inevitably come.