The political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially
in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as
fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.
It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to
sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its
existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal
authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its
magistracy, but from itself.
But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses
_corporate initiative_; that is, unless the mass of its component units
are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are
conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the
whole sovereign indeed.
It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding
corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case no such thing as
a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case “patriotism,”
“public opinion,” “the genius of a people,” are terms without meaning.
But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such
terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live,
order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of
man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a
part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human
life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a
part of it than anything which attaches to the body.
This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless
degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who
pretends to regard the conduct of the State as a business affecting the
conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and
every denunciation of foreign aggression.
He that is most enamoured of some set machinery for the government of
men, and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch
(as in Russia), the organic character of a native oligarchy (as in
England), the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even
in a crisis the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity
and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the State, will
invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of
what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an
ultimately sovereign community. He will complain that though an
election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true
national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a
native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an
explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly
national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of
opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the
mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticising or restraining an
hereditary monarch the adherent of that monarch will blame them upon the
ground that their action is anti-national, that is anti-communal; and,
in a word, no man pretending to sanity can challenge in matters temporal
and civil the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be (though with
what difficulty is it not defined!) the general civic sense which builds
up a State.
Those words “civil” and “temporal” must lead the reader to the next
consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside
even in the community.
It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature
and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act
is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication
to-day, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect
phrase), “the moral sense.”
Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a
few families so depraved or so necessitous that, against the teachings
of their own consciences, and well knowing that what they are doing is
what we call _wrong_, yet they will unanimously agree to do it, then
that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil
authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another
authority lies behind. Still more evidently would this be true if, of
say, twelve, seven decided (knowing the thing to be wrong) that the
wrong thing should be done, five stood out for the right--and yet the
majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient
authority for the wrongful command.
But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority
of the moral law (God, as the author of this book, with due deference to
his readers, would prefer to say) is recognised and yet flouted. If
those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general
action to be right, then not only is their authority when they carry it
into practice a civil and a temporal authority; it is an authority
absolute in all respects; and further, if, upon a division of opinion
among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay, perhaps not a majority at
all, but at any rate a determinant current of opinion--determinant in
intensity and in weight, that is, as well as in numbers--declares an
action to be right, then that determinant weight of opinion gives to its
resolve a political authority not only civil and temporal but absolute.
Beyond it and above it there is no appeal.
In other words, men may justly condemn, and justly have in a thousand
circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major
part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is, for that
matter, self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion,
another, also sovereign, in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right.
Reasoning men have also protested, and justly, against the conception
that what a majority in numbers, or even (what is more compelling still)
a unanimity of decision in a community may order, may not only be wrong
but may be something which that community has no authority to order
since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts
against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right.
Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is
incapable of doing deliberate evil; it is as capable of such an action
as is an individual. But men nowhere do or can deny that the community
acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign: there is no
alternative to so plain a truth.
Let us take it, then, as indubitable that where civil government is
concerned, the community is supreme, if only from the argument that no
organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the
corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression.
All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political
ethics are, when they are analysed, found to repose upon a confusion of
thought. Thus a man will say, “This doctrine would lead my country to
abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but were I to consent to
this, I should be weakening my country, to which I owe allegiance.” The
doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is
a member is free to make its dispositions for safety, and is bound to
preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel.
Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual
lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does
nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility, and all the other
things that limit the application of the doctrine, in no way touch its
right reason, any more than the fact that the speech of all men is
imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to
self-expression. That a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write,
is, so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the
prime expression of man; and in the same way a community utterly without
the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a
proof, of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such
decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between
the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a
people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion,
or a people free from foreign oppression yet bewildered at the prospect
of self-government, the oddity of the phenomenon proves our rule.
But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our
political axiom not a contradiction added, but a criticism; and all men
with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive,
_first_, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially
from the psychology of individual action, and _secondly_, that in
proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in
general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community,
corporate self-realisation and the imposition of a corporate will,
varies from the difficult to the impossible.
On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are
agreed that, in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the
difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get
in a lively people explosions of popular will violent, acute, and
certainly real; but rare. We may attempt with a people more lethargic to
obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent
machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a
great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national
sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that
large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves
where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. Our
attachment, which may be passionate, to the rights of the Common Will we
must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small,
self-governing states, or submitting the central government of large
ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of
opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the
governed.
All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals
which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is
sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot
act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions
more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any
alternative thesis.[1]
Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of
Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable
expression in that book whose style and logical connection may be
compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it
the _Contrat Social_, and it became the formula of the Revolutionary
Creed. But though no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political
morals so well, that truth was as old as the world; it appears in the
passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or
has been woven into the laws of free States without number. In the
English language the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest
expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of
Rousseau and (through the genius of Jefferson) was in some part
descended from it, its language, and still more the actions of those who
drafted and supported it, are sufficient to explain what I mean to
English readers.
Now with this general theory there stand connected on the one hand
certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and
also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than
the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second,
in spite of their great popularity at the time of the Revolution and of
the sanction which the Revolution gave them, nay, of their universality
since the Revolution, have in reality nothing to do with the
revolutionary theory itself.
Of these two categories the type of the first is the doctrine of the
equality of man; the type of the second is the mere machinery called
“representative.”
The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine: a
“dogma,” as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it
is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
objects. We may attempt to rationalise it by saying that what is common
to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_ important than
the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to
tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements;
we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man,
and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None
of these metaphors explains the matter; still less do any of them
satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible.
Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men
are _not_ equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no
movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship, has any
meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of
the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results
consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it--and all lively
societies believe it.
It is certainly not in man to prove the equality of men save, as I have
said, by negation; but it demands no considerable intellectual faculty
to perceive that, void of the doctrine of equality, the conception of
political freedom and of a community’s moral right to self-government
disappear. Now to believe that doctrine positively, and to believe it
ardently, to go on crusade for that religious point, was indeed
characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited
religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years
seized and defined point after point in the character of man, to grow
enamoured of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect, but as
it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it, and that enormous
march of theirs, overrunning Europe, which may not inaptly be compared
to their adventures in the twelfth century, when they engaged upon the
Crusades, was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political
freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality.
The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which
associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most
absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and
the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and
fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the
Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.
Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight
of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time
enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to
lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly
impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the
material face of society--in a word, to make modern Europe--must be
content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its
flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality
of man.
The minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of
democracy during the Revolution, which are not of its principles, and
which would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence, are of quite
another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the
machinery of deputation or of “representation.”
The representative system had been designed for a particular purpose
under the influence of the Church and especially of the monastic orders
(who invented it) in the Middle Ages. It had been practised as a useful
check upon the national monarchy in France, and as a useful form of
national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was
peculiarly demanded.
In Spain it became, as the Middle Ages proceeded, a very vital national
and local thing, varying from place to place. It is not surprising that
Spain (seeing that in her territory the first experiments in
representation were made) should have thus preserved it, popular and
alive.
In England Representation, vigorous as everywhere else in the true
Middle Ages, narrowed and decayed at their close, until in the
seventeenth century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic
government.
In France for nearly two hundred years before the Revolution it had
fallen into disuse, but an active memory of it still remained;
especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation
of the whole people was required, and when the corporate initiative of
the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the French, on the eve of the
Revolution, clamoured for a revival of representation, or, as the system
was called in the French tongue, “the States-General.” But as a
permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how
the system might serve the ends of democracy. In England democracy was
not practised nor was representation connected with the conception of
it. The nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten
the religion and the old ideals of the Middle Ages.
In those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian
institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an
oligarchy or dwindled to be a mere provincial custom, its use had
disappeared. The ancient function of Representation, when it had been
most lively and vigorous, that is, in the Middle Ages, was occasionally
to initiate a national policy in critical moments, but more generally to
grant taxes. What a democratic parliament might do, no one in 1789 could
conceive.
There was indeed one great example of democratic representation in
existence: the example of the United States; but the conditions were
wholly different from those of Europe. No true central power yet existed
there; no ancient central institution, no Crown nor any Custom of the
City. The numbers over which American representative democracy then held
power were not to be compared to the twenty-five millions who inhabited
the French realm. And even so, most of what counted in their lives was
regulated by a system of highly local autonomy: for they were as
scattered as they were few, and the wisest and strongest and best were
dependent upon slaves. In Europe, I repeat, the experiment was untried;
and it is one of the chief faults of the French revolutionaries that,
having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the
Revolution to the use of election and representation, they envisaged the
permanent use of a similar machinery as a something sacred to and normal
in the democratic State.
True, they could not foresee modern parliamentarism. Nothing could be
more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method
of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce
to-day.
True, the French people during the revolutionary wars made short work of
parliamentary theory, and found it a more national thing to follow a
soldier (being by that time all soldiers themselves), and to incarnate
in a dictator the will of the nation.
But though the French revolutionaries could not have foreseen what we
call “Parliamentarism” to-day, and though the society from which they
sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament
when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered, yet
they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of
representation and election.
They went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the
Church; they introduced it everywhere into civil government, from the
smallest units to the highest. They even for a moment played with the
illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at--the
business of arms: they allowed the election of officers. They were led
to do this by that common fallacy, more excusable in them than in us,
which confounds the individual will with the corporate. A representative
(they thought) could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his
electorate. They imagined that corporate initiative was always
sufficiently active, in no matter what divisions or subdivisions, to
react at once upon the delegate, to guide him as may be guided a driven
animal, or to command him as may be commanded a servant.
It was in vain that Rousseau, the great exponent of the democratic
theory upon which France attempted to proceed, had warned posterity
against the possible results of the representative system: they fell
into the error, and it possesses many of their descendants to this day.
Rousseau’s searching mind perceived indeed no more than the general
truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only
while the representatives are not sitting. But (as is so often the case
with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he
had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just
principle which he laid down--that under a merely representative system
men cannot be really free--flow all those evils which we now know to
attach to this method of government. What a rather clumsy epigram has
called “the audacity of elected persons” is part of this truth. The
evident spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their
will into economic conditions which appal them, proceeds again from the
same truth; the conspicuous and hearty contempt into which parliamentary
institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it, and there
proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives
themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate
and that in all parliamentary countries a few intriguers are the
unworthy depositories of power, and by their service of finance permit
the money-dealers to govern us all to-day. Rousseau, I say, the chief
prophet of the Revolution, had warned the French of this danger. It is a
capital example of his talent, for the experiment of democratic
representation had not yet, in his time, been tried. But much more is
that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of
democracy as it had never till then been minted. No one man makes a
people or their creed, but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal
the creed of a people, and it is advisable or necessary for the reader
of the Revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what
nature was Rousseau’s abundant influence upon the men who remodelled the
society of Europe between 1789 and 1794.
Why did he dominate those five years, and how was it that he dominated
them increasingly?
An explanation of Rousseau’s power merits a particular digression, for
few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to
understand it, and in the academies provincial men have been content to
deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to
themselves.