has been very marked in the last few years. The mental distress and
physical discomforts arising out of the steady process of financial,
social, and economic decay in the tangle of nationalist States in
Europe, have liberated a lively and widespread discontent with
the methods of representative government. The legal way and the
parliamentary way has seemed too long, tedious, and disingenuous
for the urgent needs of the times. In Italy and Spain, in Hungary
and Germany, we have had the complete dictatorship; the shadow of
a dictatorship has fallen upon the French outlook. There has been
an outbreak of bosses, strong men, tyrants after the Greek pattern,
statesmen with special powers, suspensions of the constitution and so
forth, across the entire European stage.
To a certain small extent this may be due to a rebellion of ordinary
common-sense people against the absurdity of committees doing one-man
jobs. In America the disposition to give great powers to mayors and
prominent public servants--a disposition which Mr. Belloc calls,
absurdly enough, a disposition to “monarchy,” and makes out to be a
fundamental difference between Americans and Europeans--is probably
due mainly to the perception of the need for a single head and a free
hand in many complicated jobs. But the job is defined, and the term of
power is defined. That concentration of _ad hoc_ powers in a single
competent responsible person is of course a legitimate and most hopeful
development of democratic method. It is no more “monarchy” than the
power of a judge is monarchy. But the drift in Europe, in Germany, and
the Latin countries generally is to a general and not to a specific
free hand. The man is there not to do this or that specified thing
but to take the whole power of the State out of the hands of the
politicians. Russia is a special case; the dictator there is the ghost
of Karl Marx acting through the Communist Party. But Russia is as far
from parliamentary democracy as any country in the world. Parliamentary
democracy did for a brief interval appear in Russia, but it was as
suitable wear for that country at its present phase of education as a
silk hat for a whale.
Why have all these dictatorships sprung up? Why has there been this
decline of faith throughout the world in the Anglo-Saxon device of
parliamentary government? Every intelligent person must know that this
is a world of men and not supermen, and every lapse to a dictatorship
implies a belief in a superman. Every year of a dictatorship
diminishes the autonomous vitality of a community, no dictatorship is
proof against the degeneration of the dictator through impunity and
presumption, and no dictator has ever provided an efficient successor.
Yet we find the peoples of important European countries acquiescing in
Mussolinis, Riveras, and the like, and powerful minorities in almost
every European State asking for similar dictatorships. It is not that
they are blind to the defects of dictatorships, but that they dislike
parliamentary government more. A dictator may carry on a Government
roughly and dangerously, but in many cases Parliaments have failed to
carry on government at all.
English-speaking peoples are beginning to realise that what they call
“democracy” may not be a universal panacea, and that Parliamentary and
Congressional government as it flourished in the nineteenth century
with two parties and a choice for the elector limited to two party
hacks, instead of being a method of universal validity and altogether
perfect, was a temporarily convenient method of government for a fairly
homogeneous dominant middle class living under apparently stable
conditions. Social developments in Western Europe evolved this class
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a national
mentality was evolved concurrently. Transferred to alien soils,
parliamentary institutions wilt or become weedy. And it is extremely
doubtful whether in Britain, that mother of Parliaments, it is possible
for the parliamentary machine to work now except in a very hectic and
unsatisfactory way, unless it undergoes extensive adaptations to meet
the great financial, economic, and social stresses that have still to
try the British community.
In a previous paper I have discussed the electoral reforms whereby
Parliament or Congress could be made really representative of the
national mind, would cease to be an arena for a stupid and boring party
conflict, and would become a smaller assembly, a working council,
alive throughout, appointing and criticising the various Ministries.
But a reform of representative methods is not in itself a sufficient
solution to our problem. A graver and profounder weakness both of the
American and British community at the present time is the incoherence
and diffuseness of public opinion. Great changes in the range and
material of economic life during the last quarter of a century and
the financial earthquakes that have followed the war have shattered
the old homogeneous and dominant middle-class stratum on both sides
of the Atlantic. That was the reservoir of public opinion, and there
is nothing equivalent on the new scale to replace it. There have
been bold extensions of the franchise in Britain to great classes of
inexperienced and inattentive voters; Mr. Adamson’s Bill has brought
us within sight of universal suffrage for every man and woman over
twenty-one; but there has been no development of political education
upon the same scale. Probably a third of the British voting mass
after these additions--seven millions, say--will be too indifferent
to political issues to vote at all. A half, another ten or eleven
millions, will vote for trivial or silly reasons, and will certainly
never take the slightest trouble to sustain the Parliament it has
elected. Politically they will accept anything they get. They have
still to learn to consider politics seriously. There remains about a
sixth of the British electorate; less than five millions, a miscellany
of every sort of opinion and drawn from every class, with this much
in common, that it cares enough about politics to fight about them if
necessary. But it is not this sixth but the half that the vote-hunting
politician need consider. And it is not the half but some sections of
the sixth which may presently resort to illegal methods to achieve its
ends.
Are we so remote and secure from the violent phase in Britain as
people are apt to suppose? Can Britain go on indefinitely with a
crazy electoral method that leaves masses of people thwarted and
masses indifferent, and that leaves the mandate of any Government
ambiguous? The present Government picks its precarious way amidst
issues of the most inflammatory sort. The financial difficulty is not
tackled; the Capital Levy is shelved for the time, and we do not know
whether the method of taxing and more or less expropriating large
bulks of property only, or the method of taxing every creditor,
great or small, down to the penny of credit in the beggar woman’s
hand, is to be followed. One or other it must be. The first course
will evoke the prompt resistance of the Fascist element in the Tory
Party. Since the great days of the gun-running by Carson and F. E. in
Ulster and the Curragh Pronunciamento, the Tories have been infected
with dreams of reactionary illegalities. Army people and so forth
are drenched with such stuff. They lost Ireland by it, but they are
quite capable of setting about to lose England by the same methods.
But though the Tory elements in British life might easily attempt
forcible resistance to parliamentary socialisation, they are far
too unintelligent to face the alternative of inflation, which will
certainly produce just such conditions as will promote a drift towards
revolution from the Communist end.... Violence from either side means
ultimately dictatorship and the opening phase of a process of disorder
and collapse for the entire British system. Between the horns of this
dilemma the existing British system has still a few years left in which
to modernise, enlarge, and clean its parliamentary methods and to
educate its masses to political efficiency.
XXIX
YOUTH AND THE VOTE: THE REJUVENESCENCE OF THE WORLD
29.3.24
The recent discussion of the extension of the British parliamentary
suffrage has been an amusing and instructive display. The finer parts
of the debate upon Mr. Adamson’s Bill were a little overshadowed in the
Press by the Duchess of Atholl’s possibly exaggerated objection to the
proposed enfranchisement of several hundred travelling tinkers, and her
nightmare of all the women in the country voting down all the men in
the country upon some unexpected issue. I must confess that I am not
very much interested by the question whether there are to be slight
traces of tinker in the next election or not, and the end of the world
by collision with some other planet seems a far less remote possibility
to me than the lining up of the two separate sexes in flat opposition
to each other. But what did interest me was to note that everyone
seemed to have caught up his or her opinion just anyhow, and worn it
much as people wear false noses at a carnival, and that in the whole
ridiculous fray there was no apparent perception of any general reason
why some people should vote and not others. I could not find any
evidence that a single member had asked himself why people had to vote
at all, whether it was a privilege or a duty to vote, and what were the
proper qualifications or just claims of a voter.
Mostly, I don’t think they had ever asked themselves any such
questions. Members of Parliament don’t think about questions of that
kind. They seem to think very little about anything of importance in
the world, so much of their time is spent in division lobbies and
loafing and gossiping about the House of Commons; but what attention
they do give to franchise and electoral method is usually given in
close consultation with a parliamentary agent, who is far from the
spirit of scientific truth.
Let us try and put the question on rather broader foundations than
the House succeeded in doing. And, to begin with, let us consider
whether the age of twenty-one is a sensible age at which to graduate
a citizen as voter. Sir Sydney Russell-Wells and Sir Martin Conway,
two University members, very properly declared it was not. With that
we can well agree. Twenty-one marks no natural epoch in the mental and
moral life of either man or woman. It is too old for adolescence and
too young for any other phase. Twenty-one is a magic compound of seven
and three, but nowadays we do not believe very much in the magic of
numbers. The reasons why twenty-one was made the “coming-of-age” are
lost in the mists of antiquity. But why these two gentlemen should
propose therefore to make five-and-twenty the minimum age for a voter
of either sex is not very clear. Sir Martin Conway, indeed, warmed
up to a luscious eloquence about “woman’s great flowering time.”
The young woman between twenty-one and twenty-five “should have her
eye upon the glory of life,” and so forth. Even if this were so, it
is a little hard to understand the application of the limit to men.
Apparently the young man is to undergo a sort of political “couvade”
during these rich years, and think sympathetically about babies. As
a matter of fact, lots of women far over twenty-five have not yet
reached these preoccupations; it would, indeed, be highly improper for
most of these below that limit to engage their minds in this fashion,
since the majority do not marry until close upon twenty-five, and many
much later. The twenty-fifth birthday is, indeed, no more a natural
epoch for woman or man than the twenty-first, and Sir Martin Conway’s
argument was just a sample of the careless nonsense people talk on
these important questions.
But if neither twenty-five nor twenty-one is a real natural division
line between the human being capable of citizenship and the junior,
the natural minor, where shall we draw that line? I would suggest
that we draw it at the age when the individual’s education comes to
an end. Education, we are assured, is to prepare the individual for
citizenship. When a State turns its young people out of its schools
into the streets to seek employment and toil for the community, it
tacitly declares that their preparation for citizenship is at an end.
If they are not prepared for citizenship they should not be turned out.
If they are, then they ought to go on at once to the most stimulating
exercise of the rights of citizenship, and vote before they forget
their lessons in history and geography and economics and so forth. Why
should they have to wait for years, forgetting nearly every general
idea they have learnt before the vote comes to rouse them? But the
reader will object that this means giving the vote to children of
fourteen or indeed in some American States to children even younger.
I submit that is no disproof of the principle I have laid down, but
only a disqualification of the shocking inefficiency of the educational
systems of the English-speaking world. We have no right to cheat our
young people out of their votes because we are defrauding them of the
best part of their education.
I am one of those people who believe that the minimum age at which
whole-time general education should cease is sixteen, and that for at
least two years more education in some form, a technical or industrial
training at least, associated perhaps with productive employment,
and a continuation of the general intellectual work should be given.
That would make eighteen the boundary between tutelage and complete
responsible citizenship. And to that age I am willing and anxious to
see the franchise extended. Education and the franchise are correlated
questions, and I do not believe a community can be in a sound state of
political organisation until education has moved up and the vote moved
down the scale of age to this meeting-point.
Let us consider first the justice of this. Think what we thrust upon
the youth of eighteen in our communities. We voters, a good third of
us above military age, will treat him as citizen enough to undergo
the utmost fatigues and horrors of war, and to be maimed and to die
for us, and the girl of fourteen (is it?) may marry, and the girl of
sixteen may commit herself to dishonour, and either man or girl may
toil in factory or foundry. All that we put upon them. We force them
by need and circumstance to forgo the better part of their education,
to subdue all the wide and wonderful imaginations of these opening
years, and we oblige them to contribute to the wealth of the State in
unattractive work. But they may have no voice in matters in general
until they are thoroughly broken in. I can see a sort of expediency in
disenfranchising unsuccessful people after forty or so, they are dull
and cowed by that time and will bring little to the polls but their
fears and inferiorities. But why gag the young for three of their most
vivid years?
And next there is to be considered the benefit to the individual
citizen of stepping straight from learning to responsibility. He will
be brought into conscious and effective relationship with political
and industrial institutions at the same time; he will face them as two
aspects of one thing just when the spirit of inquiry is strongest in
him. And such of the younger women who are waking up to what Sir Martin
Conway calls the “glory of life” will realise that childbearing is a
thing of issues wider than the fireside; they will be called upon to
think of war and education and the whole future in the very time when
the continuity of life is brought most effectively before their minds.
What sort of a world, what sort of political process can Sir Martin
be thinking about when he suggests that a vision of the glory of life
ought to disqualify a voter?
And finally let us consider the benefit to the country and the world
at large of a more youthful electorate. To bring in voters in their
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first years will be to bring in
three million and more fresh minds, all unsettled as yet, all facing
the world adventurously. They will be a wholesome counterweight to
the grudging rate-payer, the small shopkeeper, the _rentier_, the
anxious and hopeless and fearful multitude of the unsuccessful and
defensive middle-aged, the great supporters of “Anti-Waste” campaigns,
“safety” armaments, policies of “security,” and all sorts of patriotic
cowardice. These elder folk think of the next quarter day or the next
year; it is all that interests them; they will be dead soon and they
want to shuffle along as comfortably and with as little troublesome
novelty as possible until then. The interests of the youth of eighteen
reach forward half a century and they may work with a reasonable hope
of a better world for themselves as well as their children. They may
have the more wisdom for the very reason that they have acquired less
worldly discretion. And for all of us who believe that education is
already touched by a new spirit and that it is surely being made
better, the younger the age of enfranchisement the greater our hopes of
an early effect of the new education upon the affairs of mankind.
“Universal education up to eighteen, universal enfranchisement at
eighteen”; along that line lies our path to a real civilisation. Along
that path we shall go as the breath of a new generation blows into
Congress and Parliament and these assemblies cease to be the gatherings
of political botchers and tinkers representing the broken spirit and
curtailed desires of a forty-year-old electorate. For round about forty
must be the average age of the present-day British elector.
XXX
OLIVE BRANCHES OF STEEL: SHOULD THE ANGELS OF PEACE CARRY BOMBS?
5.4.24
_The will for peace is futile without the courage to disarm._ I would
like to have that proposition printed in large letters and put up
at all the meetings of the British League of Nations Union, just to
see what the worthy practitioners in easy optimism who fill these
gatherings would make of it. I doubt if half the kindly idealists who
support the League of Nations in Britain and America are prepared for
any effectual disarmament of their own countries. For others--yes; but
not for their own dear land.
Since the refusal of France even to discuss land disarmament or the
question of submarines at Washington I have kept up a pretty steady
fire of disagreeable allusions to France. I have sung and sung again,
with variations and amplifications, my little refrain about Senegalese
and Submarines in--quite a number of journals. But France has her
excuses, the next election may release her from the Bloc National and
the Armament firms to the free exercise of international virtue, and
after all virtue should begin at home. Are not both the United States
and the British Empire, considered in the rôle of peace-seeking States,
overarmed? The general will of all the English-speaking communities is,
we all know and say and repeat, for an enduring world peace. But even a
savage understands that he must drop and leave his weapons and hold up
innocent hands before he can get to honest peace talk.
Consider a crude form of the issue. Suppose the United States and the
British Empire got together and disarmed completely, suppose they
retained the merest police force and placed all the rest of their
joint navies at the disposal of an international council, on which
they would have an adequate representation of course, what would
happen? There would be an immediate reduction of public expenditure
and so much relief of economic life from taxation. Would anything else
happen? Would Japan suddenly fling herself upon California, Italy seize
Malta and Egypt, the Red Army pour down into India, or France destroy
London? Does anyone--unless it be my dear old friends Mr. Henry Arthur
Jones and Mr. Leo Maxse--believe any of these things would happen? Or
anything of the sort?
As a matter of fact we have France now, at the present time, so much
more powerfully equipped in the air than Britain and with the British
anti-aircraft establishment so reduced, that she could, if she wished
to do so and dared to do so, smash up London and put most of the
English naval and commercial ports out of action before any really
effective counterstroke could be made. There has been a powerful
Press campaign in France against Britain, and there is plenty of
hostile feeling there. Led by a propagandist Press a great multitude
of Frenchmen really believe that the favourite occupation of the
English-speaking peoples is buying francs at one price in order to sell
them at a lower one. Nevertheless, that attack doesn’t come and it
never will come. The temporary satisfaction would be so poor that it
would not balance the disagreeable anticipation of an ultimate revenge.
Moreover, the immediate financial and economic collapse both of France
and Britain would manifestly ensue. Air warfare and poison gas have
so enhanced the destructiveness of war and made it so inconclusive,
and France and Britain are so close together now and so accessible
one to the other, that they have to face the fact--an annoying fact
for every true patriot--that they can no longer regard war as a means
of settling even their worst differences. As well think of settling a
dispute between two next-door neighbours by burning both their houses
and massacring all the inmates. It really does not matter now which of
the two Powers is the stronger on land or sea. It is a consideration of
no practical value whatever between them.
And just as an attack of France upon Britain is unthinkable at the
present time, although all the military advantage lies at present with
France, so, too, any attack upon the vast joint territories of the
United States and the British Empire, though they neither of them had
a battleship in commission nor a ton of explosive ready, would be an
absurd proposition. There is no other Power on earth that could do it
to any profit at all, and without the ultimate certainty of a crushing
rearmament and revenge. It would be like a tiger-cat trying to kill and
eat an elephant. In all the world now there are only four countries
capable of starting-in at complete first-class modern warfare: Britain,
France, Japan, and the United States. Italy has neither the coal nor
the ore necessary for so heavy an enterprise; the hairiest, loudest
Fascisti in the world will not make up for that; and Russia has not
the industrial plant for the necessary munitions of aggression. She
has vast resisting power, as ever, but no attacking power. All the
other countries of the world, if they fight nowadays, must fight with
the munitions and loans the four possible belligerents grant them.
These four countries therefore, of themselves, could inaugurate a
world peace; and the interests of their peoples, as distinguished
from the armament interests, urgently demand a secure world peace.
The difficulty is to begin. The Press of each of the armament-capable
four is closely interwoven with the armament profiteers, and the Press
of either country will begin a campaign of panic about what the other
three are doing directly there is any serious possibility of relaxed
armament anywhere. Since the United States and Britain are easily first
in preaching peace and arbitration to the world, I suggest that it is
for them to set the example and begin. But at the first intimations
of a serious abandonment of “preparedness” Lord Rothermere and his
American equivalents--if there are equivalents of Lord Rothermere
in America--will see to it that the nervous householder dreams of
aeroplanes coming down the chimney and submarines coming up the sink,
and wakes gibbering of “security” like a _Matin_-soaked French patriot.