It has long (perhaps throughout the entire duration of British
freedom) been a common form of speech, that if a good despot could be
insured, despotic monarchy would be the best form of government. I
look upon this as a radical and most pernicious misconception of what
good government is, which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally
vitiate all our speculations on government.
The supposition is, that absolute power, in the hands of an eminent
individual, would insure a virtuous and intelligent performance of all
the duties of government. Good laws would be established and enforced,
bad laws would be reformed; the best men would be placed in all
situations of trust; justice would be as well administered, the public
burdens would be as light and as judiciously imposed, every branch of
administration would be as purely and as intelligently conducted as
the circumstances of the country and its degree of intellectual and
moral cultivation would admit. I am willing, for the sake of the
argument, to concede all this, but I must point out how great the
concession is, how much more is needed to produce even an
approximation to these results than is conveyed in the simple
expression, a good despot. Their realization would in fact imply, not
merely a good monarch, but an all-seeing one. He must be at all times
informed correctly, in considerable detail, of the conduct and working
of every branch of administration, in every district of the country,
and must be able, in the twenty-four hours per day, which are all that
is granted to a king as to the humblest laborer, to give an effective
share of attention and superintendence to all parts of this vast
field; or he must at least be capable of discerning and choosing out,
from among the mass of his subjects, not only a large abundance of
honest and able men, fit to conduct every branch of public
administration under supervision and control, but also the small
number of men of eminent virtues and talents who can be trusted not
only to do without that supervision, but to exercise it themselves
over others. So extraordinary are the faculties and energies required
for performing this task in any supportable manner, that the good
despot whom we are supposing can hardly be imagined as consenting to
undertake it unless as a refuge from intolerable evils, and a
transitional preparation for something beyond. But the argument can do
without even this immense item in the account. Suppose the difficulty
vanquished. What should we then have? One man of superhuman mental
activity managing the entire affairs of a mentally passive people.
Their passivity is implied in the very idea of absolute power. The
nation as a whole, and every individual composing it, are without any
potential voice in their own destiny. They exercise no will in respect
to their collective interests. All is decided for them by a will not
their own, which it is legally a crime for them to disobey. What sort
of human beings can be formed under such a regimen? What development
can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?
On matters of pure theory they might perhaps be allowed to speculate,
so long as their speculations either did not approach politics, or had
not the remotest connection with its practice. On practical affairs
they could at most be only suffered to suggest; and even under the
most moderate of despots, none but persons of already admitted or
reputed superiority could hope that their suggestions would be known
to, much less regarded by, those who had the management of affairs. A
person must have a very unusual taste for intellectual exercise in and
for itself who will put himself to the trouble of thought when it is
to have no outward effect, or qualify himself for functions which he
has no chance of being allowed to exercise. The only sufficient
incitement to mental exertion, in any but a few minds in a generation,
is the prospect of some practical use to be made of its results. It
does not follow that the nation will be wholly destitute of
intellectual power. The common business of life, which must
necessarily be performed by each individual or family for themselves,
will call forth some amount of intelligence and practical ability,
within a certain narrow range of ideas. There may be a select class of
_savants_ who cultivate science with a view to its physical uses or
for the pleasure of the pursuit. There will be a bureaucracy, and
persons in training for the bureaucracy, who will be taught at least
some empirical maxims of government and public administration. There
may be, and often has been, a systematic organization of the best
mental power in the country in some special direction (commonly
military) to promote the grandeur of the despot. But the public at
large remain without information and without interest on all greater
matters of practice; or, if they have any knowledge of them, it is but
a _dilettante_ knowledge, like that which people have of the
mechanical arts who have never handled a tool. Nor is it only in their
intelligence that they suffer. Their moral capacities are equally
stunted. Wherever the sphere of action of human beings is artificially
circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed and dwarfed in the same
proportion. The food of feeling is action; even domestic affection
lives upon voluntary good offices. Let a person have nothing to do for
his country, and he will not care for it. It has been said of old that
in a despotism there is at most but one patriot, the despot himself;
and the saying rests on a just appreciation of the effects of absolute
subjection even to a good and wise master. Religion remains; and here,
at least, it may be thought, is an agency that may be relied on for
lifting men's eyes and minds above the dust at their feet. But
religion, even supposing it to escape perversion for the purposes of
despotism, ceases in these circumstances to be a social concern, and
narrows into a personal affair between an individual and his Maker, in
which the issue at stake is but his private salvation. Religion in
this shape is quite consistent with the most selfish and contracted
egoism, and identifies the votary as little in feeling with the rest
of his kind as sensuality itself.
A good despotism means a government in which, so far as depends on the
despot, there is no positive oppression by officers of state, but in
which all the collective interests of the people are managed for them,
all the thinking that has relation to collective interests done for
them, and in which their minds are formed by, and consenting to, this
abdication of their own energies. Leaving things to the government,
like leaving them to Providence, is synonymous with caring nothing
about them, and accepting their results, when disagreeable, as
visitations of Nature. With the exception, therefore, of a few
studious men who take an intellectual interest in speculation for its
own sake, the intelligence and sentiments of the whole people are
given up to the material interests, and when these are provided for,
to the amusement and ornamentation of private life. But to say this is
to say, if the whole testimony of history is worth any thing, that the
era of national decline has arrived; that is, if the nation had ever
attained any thing to decline from. If it has never risen above the
condition of an Oriental people, in that condition it continues to
stagnate; but if, like Greece or Rome, it had realized any thing
higher, through the energy, patriotism, and enlargement of mind,
which, as national qualities, are the fruits solely of freedom, it
relapses in a few generations into the Oriental state. And that state
does not mean stupid tranquillity, with security against change for
the worse; it often means being overrun, conquered, and reduced to
domestic slavery either by a stronger despot, or by the nearest
barbarous people who retain along with their savage rudeness the
energies of freedom.
Such are not merely the natural tendencies, but the inherent
necessities of despotic government; from which there is no outlet,
unless in so far as the despotism consents not to be despotism; in so
far as the supposed good despot abstains from exercising his power,
and, though holding it in reserve, allows the general business of
government to go on as if the people really governed themselves.
However little probable it may be, we may imagine a despot observing
many of the rules and restraints of constitutional government. He
might allow such freedom of the press and of discussion as would
enable a public opinion to form and express itself on national
affairs. He might suffer local interests to be managed, without the
interference of authority, by the people themselves. He might even
surround himself with a council or councils of government, freely
chosen by the whole or some portion of the nation, retaining in his
own hands the power of taxation, and the supreme legislative as well
as executive authority. Were he to act thus, and so far abdicate as a
despot, he would do away with a considerable part of the evils
characteristic of despotism. Political activity and capacity for
public affairs would no longer be prevented from growing up in the
body of the nation, and a public opinion would form itself, not the
mere echo of the government. But such improvement would be the
beginning of new difficulties. This public opinion, independent of the
monarch's dictation, must be either with him or against him; if not
the one, it will be the other. All governments must displease many
persons, and these having now regular organs, and being able to
express their sentiments, opinions adverse to the measures of
government would often be expressed. What is the monarch to do when
these unfavorable opinions happen to be in the majority? Is he to
alter his course? Is he to defer to the nation? If so, he is no longer
a despot, but a constitutional king; an organ or first minister of the
people, distinguished only by being irremovable. If not, he must
either put down opposition by his despotic power, or there will arise
a permanent antagonism between the people and one man, which can have
but one possible ending. Not even a religious principle of passive
obedience and "right divine" would long ward off the natural
consequences of such a position. The monarch would have to succumb,
and conform to the conditions of constitutional royalty, or give place
to some one who would. The despotism, being thus chiefly nominal,
would possess few of the advantages supposed to belong to absolute
monarchy, while it would realize in a very imperfect degree those of a
free government, since, however great an amount of liberty the
citizens might practically enjoy, they could never forget that they
held it on sufferance, and by a concession which, under the existing
constitution of the state might at any moment be resumed; that they
were legally slaves, though of a prudent or indulgent master.
It is not much to be wondered at if impatient or disappointed
reformers, groaning under the impediments opposed to the most salutary
public improvements by the ignorance, the indifference, the
untractableness, the perverse obstinacy of a people, and the corrupt
combinations of selfish private interests, armed with the powerful
weapons afforded by free institutions, should at times sigh for a
strong hand to bear down all these obstacles, and compel a
recalcitrant people to be better governed. But (setting aside the fact
that for one despot who now and then reforms an abuse, there are
ninety-nine who do nothing but create them) those who look in any such
direction for the realization of their hopes leave out of the idea of
good government its principal element, the improvement of the people
themselves. One of the benefits of freedom is that under it the ruler
can not pass by the people's minds, and amend their affairs for them
without amending _them_. If it were possible for the people to be well
governed in spite of themselves, their good government would last no
longer than the freedom of a people usually lasts who have been
liberated by foreign arms without their own co-operation. It is true,
a despot may educate the people, and to do so really would be the best
apology for his despotism. But any education which aims at making
human beings other than machines, in the long run makes them claim to
have the control of their own actions. The leaders of French
philosophy in the eighteenth century had been educated by the Jesuits.
Even Jesuit education, it seems, was sufficiently real to call forth
the appetite for freedom. Whatever invigorates the faculties, in
however small a measure, creates an increased desire for their more
unimpeded exercise; and a popular education is a failure if it
educates the people for any state but that which it will certainly
induce them to desire, and most probably to demand.
I am far from condemning, in cases of extreme exigency, the assumption
of absolute power in the form of a temporary dictatorship. Free
nations have, in times of old, conferred such power by their own
choice, as a necessary medicine for diseases of the body politic which
could not be got rid of by less violent means. But its acceptance,
even for a time strictly limited, can only be excused, if, like Solon
or Pittacus, the dictator employs the whole power he assumes in
removing the obstacles which debar the nation from the enjoyment of
freedom. A good despotism is an altogether false ideal, which
practically (except as a means to some temporary purpose) becomes the
most senseless and dangerous of chimeras. Evil for evil, a good
despotism, in a country at all advanced in civilization, is more
noxious than a bad one, for it is far more relaxing and enervating to
the thoughts, feelings, and energies of the people. The despotism of
Augustus prepared the Romans for Tiberius. If the whole tone of their
character had not first been prostrated by nearly two generations of
that mild slavery, they would probably have had spirit enough left to
rebel against the more odious one.
There is no difficulty in showing that the ideally best form of
government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling
power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the
community, every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of
that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on
to take an actual part in the government by the personal discharge of
some public function, local or general.
To test this proposition, it has to be examined in reference to the
two branches into which, as pointed out in the last chapter, the
inquiry into the goodness of a government conveniently divides itself,
namely, how far it promotes the good management of the affairs of
society by means of the existing faculties, moral, intellectual, and
active, of its various members, and what is its effect in improving or
deteriorating those faculties.
The ideally best form of government, it is scarcely necessary to say,
does not mean one which is practicable or eligible in all states of
civilization, but the one which, in the circumstances in which it is
practicable and eligible, is attended with the greatest amount of
beneficial consequences, immediate and prospective. A completely
popular government is the only polity which can make out any claim to
this character. It is pre-eminent in both the departments between
which the excellence of a political Constitution is divided. It is
both more favorable to present good government, and promotes a better
and higher form of national character than any other polity
whatsoever.
Its superiority in reference to present well-being rests upon two
principles, of as universal truth and applicability as any general
propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs. The
first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are
only secure from being disregarded when the person interested is
himself able, and habitually disposed to stand up for them. The second
is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more
widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the
personal energies enlisted in promoting it.
Putting these two propositions into a shape more special to their
present application--human beings are only secure from evil at the
hands of others in proportion as they have the power of being, and
are, self-_protecting_; and they only achieve a high degree of success
in their struggle with Nature in proportion as they are
self-_dependent_, relying on what they themselves can do, either
separately or in concert, rather than on what others do for them.
The former proposition--that each is the only safe guardian of his own
rights and interests--is one of those elementary maxims of prudence
which every person capable of conducting his own affairs implicitly
acts upon wherever he himself is interested. Many, indeed, have a
great dislike to it as a political doctrine, and are fond of holding
it up to obloquy as a doctrine of universal selfishness. To which we
may answer, that whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a
rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those
more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but
the only defensible form of society, and will, when that time arrives,
be assuredly carried into effect. For my own part, not believing in
universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that
Communism would even now be practicable among the _élite_ of mankind,
and may become so among the rest. But as this opinion is any thing but
popular with those defenders of existing institutions who find fault
with the doctrine of the general predominance of self-interest, I am
inclined to think they do in reality believe that most men consider
themselves before other people. It is not, however, necessary to
affirm even thus much in order to support the claim of all to
participate in the sovereign power. We need not suppose that when
power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and
deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices
that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the
excluded is always in danger of being overlooked; and, when looked at,
is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it
directly concerns. In this country, for example, what are called the
working-classes may be considered as excluded from all direct
participation in the government. I do not believe that the classes who
do participate in it have in general any intention of sacrificing the
working classes to themselves. They once had that intention; witness
the persevering attempts so long made to keep down wages by law. But
in the present day, their ordinary disposition is the very opposite:
they willingly make considerable sacrifices, especially of their
pecuniary interest, for the benefit of the working classes, and err
rather by too lavish and indiscriminating beneficence; nor do I
believe that any rulers in history have been actuated by a more
sincere desire to do their duty towards the poorer portion of their
countrymen. Yet does Parliament, or almost any of the members
composing it, ever for an instant look at any question with the eyes
of a working man? When a subject arises in which the laborers as such
have an interest, is it regarded from any point of view but that of
the employers of labor? I do not say that the working men's view of
these questions is in general nearer to the truth than the other, but
it is sometimes quite as near; and in any case it ought to be
respectfully listened to, instead of being, as it is, not merely
turned away from, but ignored. On the question of strikes, for
instance, it is doubtful if there is so much as one among the leading
members of either House who is not firmly convinced that the reason of
the matter is unqualifiedly on the side of the masters, and that the
men's view of it is simply absurd. Those who have studied the question
know well how far this is from being the case, and in how different,
and how infinitely less superficial a manner the point would have to
be argued, if the classes who strike were able to make themselves
heard in Parliament.
It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention,
however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it
safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true
is it that by their own hands only can any positive and durable
improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out. Through the
joint influence of these two principles, all free communities have
both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have
attained more brilliant prosperity than any others, or than they
themselves after they lost their freedom. Contrast the free states of
the world, while their freedom lasted, with the cotemporary subjects
of monarchical or oligarchical despotism: the Greek cities with the
Persian satrapies; the Italian republics and the free towns of
Flanders and Germany, with the feudal monarchies of Europe;
Switzerland, Holland, and England, with Austria or ante-revolutionary
France. Their superior prosperity was too obvious ever to have been
gainsayed; while their superiority in good government and social
relations is proved by the prosperity, and is manifest besides in
every page of history. If we compare, not one age with another, but
the different governments which coexisted in the same age, no amount
of disorder which exaggeration itself can pretend to have existed
amidst the publicity of the free states can be compared for a moment
with the contemptuous trampling upon the mass of the people which
pervaded the whole life of the monarchical countries, or the
disgusting individual tyranny which was of more than daily occurrence
under the systems of plunder which they called fiscal arrangements,
and in the secrecy of their frightful courts of justice.
It must be acknowledged that the benefits of freedom, so far as they
have hitherto been enjoyed, were obtained by the extension of its
privileges to a part only of the community; and that a government in
which they are extended impartially to all is a desideratum still
unrealized. But, though every approach to this has an independent
value, and in many cases more than an approach could not, in the
existing state of general improvement, be made, the participation of
all in these benefits is the ideally perfect conception of free
government. In proportion as any, no matter who, are excluded from it,
the interests of the excluded are left without the guaranty accorded
to the rest, and they themselves have less scope and encouragement
than they might otherwise have to that exertion of their energies for
the good of themselves and of the community, to which the general
prosperity is always proportioned.
Thus stands the case as regards present well-being--the good
management of the affairs of the existing generation. If we now pass
to the influence of the form of government upon character, we shall
find the superiority of popular government over every other to be, if
possible, still more decided and indisputable.
This question really depends upon a still more fundamental one, viz.,
which of two common types of character, for the general good of
humanity, it is most desirable should predominate--the active or the
passive type; that which struggles against evils, or that which
endures them; that which bends to circumstances, or that which
endeavours to make circumstances bend to itself.
The commonplaces of moralists and the general sympathies of mankind
are in favor of the passive type. Energetic characters may be admired,
but the acquiescent and submissive are those which most men personally
prefer. The passiveness of our neighbors increases our sense of
security, and plays into the hands of our wilfulness. Passive
characters, if we do not happen to need their activity, seem an
obstruction the less in our own path. A contented character is not a
dangerous rival. Yet nothing is more certain than that improvement in
human affairs is wholly the work of the uncontented characters; and,
moreover, that it is much easier for an active mind to acquire the
virtues of patience, than for a passive one to assume those of energy.
Of the three varieties of mental excellence, intellectual, practical,
and moral, there never could be any doubt in regard to the first two,
which side had the advantage. All intellectual superiority is the
fruit of active effort. Enterprise, the desire to keep moving, to be
trying and accomplishing new things for our own benefit or that of
others, is the parent even of speculative, and much more of practical,
talent. The intellectual culture compatible with the other type is of
that feeble and vague description which belongs to a mind that stops
at amusement or at simple contemplation. The test of real and vigorous
thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming
dreams, is successful application to practice. Where that purpose does
not exist, to give definiteness, precision, and an intelligible
meaning to thought, it generates nothing better than the mystical
metaphysics of the Pythagoreans or the Veds. With respect to practical
improvement, the case is still more evident. The character which
improves human life is that which struggles with natural powers and
tendencies, not that which gives way to them. The self-benefiting
qualities are all on the side of the active and energetic character,
and the habits and conduct which promote the advantage of each
individual member of the community must be at least a part of those
which conduce most in the end to the advancement of the community as a
whole.
But on the point of moral preferability, there seems at first sight to
be room for doubt. I am not referring to the religious feeling which
has so generally existed in favor of the inactive character, as being
more in harmony with the submission due to the divine will.
Christianity, as well as other religions, has fostered this sentiment;
but it is the prerogative of Christianity, as regards this and many
other perversions, that it is able to throw them off. Abstractedly
from religious considerations, a passive character, which yields to
obstacles instead of striving to overcome them, may not indeed be very
useful to others, no more than to itself, but it might be expected to
be at least inoffensive. Contentment is always counted among the moral
virtues. But it is a complete error to suppose that contentment is
necessarily or naturally attendant on passivity of character; and
useless it is, the moral consequences are mischievous. Where there
exists a desire for advantages not possessed, the mind which does not
potentially possess them by means of its own energies is apt to look
with hatred and malice on those who do. The person bestirring himself
with hopeful prospects to improve his circumstances is the one who
feels good-will towards others engaged in, or who have succeeded in
the same pursuit. And where the majority are so engaged, those who do
not attain the object have had the tone given to their feelings by the
general habit of the country, and ascribe their failure to want of
effort or opportunity, or to their personal ill luck. But those who,
while desiring what others possess, put no energy into striving for
it, are either incessantly grumbling that fortune does not do for them
what they do not attempt to do for themselves, or overflowing with
envy and ill-will towards those who possess what they would like to
have.
In proportion as success in life is seen or believed to be the fruit
of fatality or accident and not of exertion in that same ratio does
envy develop itself as a point of national character. The most envious
of all mankind are the Orientals. In Oriental moralists, in Oriental
tales, the envious man is remarkably prominent. In real life, he is
the terror of all who possess any thing desirable, be it a palace, a
handsome child, or even good health and spirits: the supposed effect
of his mere look constitutes the all-pervading superstition of the
evil eye. Next to Orientals in envy, as in activity, are some of the
Southern Europeans. The Spaniards pursued all their great men with it,
embittered their lives, and generally succeeded in putting an early
stop to their successes. [1] With the French, who are essentially
a Southern people, the double education of despotism and Catholicism
has, in spite of their impulsive temperament, made submission and
endurance the common character of the people, and their most received
notion of wisdom and excellence; and if envy of one another, and of
all superiority, is not more rife among them than it is, the
circumstance must be ascribed to the many valuable counteracting
elements in the French character, and most of all to the great
individual energy which, though less persistent and more intermittent
than in the self-helping and struggling Anglo-Saxons, has nevertheless
manifested itself among the French in nearly every direction in which
the operation of their institutions has been favorable to it.
There are, no doubt, in all countries, really contented characters,
who not merely do not seek, but do not desire, what they do not
already possess, and these naturally bear no ill-will towards such as
have apparently a more favored lot. But the great mass of seeming
contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or
self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising
itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level. And if we
look narrowly even at the cases of innocent contentment, we perceive
that they only win our admiration when the indifference is solely to
improvement in outward circumstances, and there is a striving for
perpetual advancement in spiritual worth, or at least a disinterested
zeal to benefit others. The contented man, or the contented family,
who have no ambition to make any one else happier, to promote the good
of their country or their neighborhood, or to improve themselves in
moral excellence, excite in us neither admiration nor approval. We
rightly ascribe this sort of contentment to mere unmanliness and want
of spirit. The content which we approve is an ability to do cheerfully
without what can not be had, a just appreciation of the comparative
value of different objects of desire, and a willing renunciation of
the less when incompatible with the greater. These, however, are
excellences more natural to the character, in proportion as it is
actively engaged in the attempt to improve its own or some other lot.
He who is continually measuring his energy against difficulties,
learns what are the difficulties insuperable to him, and what are
those which, though he might overcome, the success is not worth the
cost. He whose thoughts and activities are all needed for, and
habitually employed in, practicable and useful enterprises, is the
person of all others least likely to let his mind dwell with brooding
discontent upon things either not worth attaining, or which are not so
to him. Thus the active, self-helping character is not only
intrinsically the best, but is the likeliest to acquire all that is
really excellent or desirable in the opposite type.
The striving, go-ahead character of England and the United States is
only a fit subject of disapproving criticism on account of the very
secondary objects on which it commonly expends its strength. In itself
it is the foundation of the best hopes for the general improvement of
mankind. It has been acutely remarked that whenever any thing goes
amiss, the habitual impulse of French people is to say, "Il faut de la
patience;" and of English people, "What a shame!" The people who think
it a shame when any thing goes wrong--who rush to the conclusion that
the evil could and ought to have been prevented, are those who, in the
long run, do most to make the world better. If the desires are low
placed, if they extend to little beyond physical comfort, and the show
of riches, the immediate results of the energy will not be much more
than the continual extension of man's power over material objects; but
even this makes room, and prepares the mechanical appliances for the
greatest intellectual and social achievements; and while the energy is
there, some persons will apply it, and it will be applied more and
more, to the perfecting, not of outward circumstances alone, but of
man's inward nature. Inactivity, unaspiringness, absence of desire,
are a more fatal hindrance to improvement than any misdirection of
energy, and is that through which alone, when existing in the mass,
any very formidable misdirection by an energetic few becomes possible.
It is this, mainly, which retains in a savage or semi-savage state the
great majority of the human race.
Now there can be no kind of doubt that the passive type of character
is favored by the government of one or a few, and the active
self-helping type by that of the many. Irresponsible rulers need the
quiescence of the ruled more than they need any activity but that
which they can compel. Submissiveness to the prescriptions of men as
necessities of nature is the lesson inculcated by all governments upon
those who are wholly without participation in them. The will of
superiors, and the law as the will of superiors, must be passively
yielded to. But no men are mere instruments or materials in the hands
of their rulers who have will, or spirit, or a spring of internal
activity in the rest of their proceedings, and any manifestation of
these qualities, instead of receiving encouragement from despots, has
to get itself forgiven by them. Even when irresponsible rulers are not
sufficiently conscious of danger from the mental activity of their
subjects to be desirous of repressing it, the position itself is a
repression. Endeavour is even more effectually restrained by the
certainty of its impotence than by any positive discouragement.
Between subjection to the will of others and the virtues of self-help
and self-government there is a natural incompatibility. This is more
or less complete according as the bondage is strained or relaxed.
Rulers differ very much in the length to which they carry the control
of the free agency of their subjects, or the supersession of it by
managing their business for them. But the difference is in degree, not
in principle; and the best despots often go the greatest lengths in
chaining up the free agency of their subjects. A bad despot, when his
own personal indulgences have been provided for, may sometimes be
willing to let the people alone; but a good despot insists on doing
them good by making them do their own business in a better way than
they themselves know of. The regulations which restricted to fixed
processes all the leading branches of French manufactures were the
work of the great Colbert.
Very different is the state of the human faculties where a human being
feels himself under no other external restraint than the necessities
of nature, or mandates of society which he has his share in imposing,
and which it is open to him, if he thinks them wrong, publicly to
dissent from, and exert himself actively to get altered. No doubt,
under a government partially popular, this freedom may be exercised
even by those who are not partakers in the full privileges of
citizenship; but it is a great additional stimulus to any one's
self-help and self-reliance when he starts from even ground, and has
not to feel that his success depends on the impression he can make
upon the sentiments and dispositions of a body of whom he is not one.
It is a great discouragement to an individual, and a still greater one
to a class, to be left out of the constitution; to be reduced to plead
from outside the door to the arbiters of their destiny, not taken into
consultation within. The maximum of the invigorating effect of freedom
upon the character is only obtained when the person acted on either
is, or is looking forward to becoming, a citizen as fully privileged
as any other. What is still more important than even this matter of
feeling is the practical discipline which the character obtains from
the occasional demand made upon the citizens to exercise, for a time
and in their turn, some social function. It is not sufficiently
considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any
largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments. Their
work is a routine; not a labor of love, but of self-interest in the
most elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants; neither the
thing done, nor the process of doing it, introduces the mind to
thoughts or feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive
books are within their reach, there is no stimulus to read them; and,
in most cases, the individual has no access to any person of
cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for
the public supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If
circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be
considerable, it makes him an educated man. Notwithstanding the
defects of the social system and moral ideas of antiquity, the
practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual
standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond any thing of which
there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern.
The proofs of this are apparent in every page of our great historian
of Greece; but we need scarcely look further than to the high quality
of the addresses which their great orators deemed best calculated to
act with effect on their understanding and will. A benefit of the same
kind, though far less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the
lower middle class by their liability to be placed on juries and to
serve parish offices, which, though it does not occur to so many, nor
is so continuous, nor introduces them to so great a variety of
elevated considerations as to admit of comparison with the public
education which every citizen of Athens obtained from her democratic
institutions, makes them nevertheless very different beings, in range
of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done
nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a
counter. Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction
afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely,
in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh
interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by
another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn,
principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the
general good; and he usually finds associated with him in the same
work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and
operations, whose study it will be to supply reasons to his
understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general
interest. He is made to feel himself one of the public, and whatever
is their interest to be his interest. Where this school of public
spirit does not exist, scarcely any sense is entertained that private
persons, in no eminent social situation, owe any duties to society
except to obey the laws and submit to the government. There is no
unselfish sentiment of identification with the public. Every thought
or feeling, either of interest or of duty, is absorbed in the
individual and in the family. The man never thinks of any collective
interest, of any objects to be pursued jointly with others, but only
in competition with them, and in some measure at their expense. A
neighbor, not being an ally or an associate, since he is never engaged
in any common undertaking for joint benefit, is therefore only a
rival. Thus even private morality suffers, while public is actually
extinct. Were this the universal and only possible state of things,
the utmost aspirations of the lawgiver or the moralist could only
stretch to make the bulk of the community a flock of sheep innocently
nibbling the grass side by side.
From these accumulated considerations, it is evident that the only
government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social
state is one in which the whole people participate; that any
participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful; that
the participation should every where be as great as the general degree
of improvement of the community will allow; and that nothing less can
be ultimately desirable than the admission of all to a share in the
sovereign power of the state. But since all can not, in a community
exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some
very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal
type of a perfect government must be representative.