bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern
State runs its foreign policies--reflecting outwardly something which
lives strongly engrained in our midst--the Will to Power. It is because
that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy
than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies
have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to
give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him;
it was because we wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And
that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home.
It was because we wanted--or because our ruling classes wanted--to
give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed
to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like
institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour
and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy,
you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In
proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has
looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind
is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon
securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind
will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions,
and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every
instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination
to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in
an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and
non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which
social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and
we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love
our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good
of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whether they
touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of
our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can
to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for
others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is
entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise
punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make
their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise.
Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed
first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a
useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging
example to others.
Our prisons are impure because they are lacking in good-will; we have
regarded power instead of love as the solution of the crime problem;
and we have been contented to apply an impatient, unintelligent, and
soul-destroying remedy to the crimes of others, which we would not wish
to see applied in like case to those of our own family.
Of course, I know that our prisons have been greatly improved;
because, as I said before, we are in a state of transition, and a new
school of thought, whose basis is Love and Service, is fighting an
old school of thought whose basis is Power, and gradually--only very
gradually--getting the better of it.
It is the same with Education; the old idea of education was largely
based on dominance and power--the power of the teacher to punish. The
new idea is largely based upon the power of the teacher to interest,
and upon trust in youth’s natural instinct to acquire knowledge. It
is a tremendous change; the old system was impure in its psychology,
and corrupted alike the mind of the teacher and the taught. Nobody in
the old days was so unteachable as a school-master; and yet his whole
profession is really--to learn of youth. And the ethical impurity of
the old system came at the point where there was a lack of goodwill--a
lack of mutual confidence.
In trade again, how much co-operation has been over-ridden by
competition--manœuvres of one against the other, designed to the
other’s detriment. We have been told that competition is absolutely
necessary to keep us efficient in business; it is precisely the same
school of thought which says that war is necessary to keep us efficient
as a nation.
But in a family you don’t need competition; where there is goodwill,
co-operation and the give-and-take of new ideas for the common stock
are enough.
To-day we are beginning to wake up to the possibility of co-operation
taking the place of competition. It is the purer idea; and being the
purer we shall probably in the end find it the more economical.
And what shall we say about politics? Does anyone pretend that our
politics are pure; or that the system on which we run them is
anything but a vast system of adulteration?--which may perhaps be
thus expressed:--Two great bodies of opinion trying to misunderstand
each other and trying to make the general public share in their
misunderstanding, in order that their own side may attain to power.
When you start on a discussion, what is the pure reason for that
discussion? To try to arrive at a common understanding--mental
co-operation. But is it for that purpose that we raise our party cries
and run a general election?
We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And
when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood
through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the
words and thoughts and motives of their opponents--and very often men
will be misrepresenting their own motives--because their end is really
power--power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that
process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation!
That process--which we see quite well is an impure process--is forced
upon us because we are in a stage of transition; it is difficult as a
matter of practical politics to suggest a better.
But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our
present stage of political development--and humble in general about the
position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a
little premature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really
free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all?
Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where
the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you
arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed--you
find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. And the only
thing that is consistent and is pure (once you have started with the
social idea) is that we are all one brotherhood--and that harm to one
member of the community is harm to all. And when you have once got a
nation that has really taken that idea to heart and made a practice of
it, such a nation will never rest content till there is a Society of
Nations of like mind extending over all the world.
I referred just now to the Sermon on the Mount. To most of the world
its teachings sound impracticable. They are the extreme statement
of an ideal; and it is hard in this world to live ideally. But that
statement has about it this merit of commonsense--it is pure, it is
consistent--it is a united whole; and it is based on something of which
we have never yet really allowed ourselves the luxury--a trust in human
nature. A belief that if you set yourself whole-heartedly to do good to
others--to do good even to your enemies--human nature will respond.
We cannot all love our neighbours as ourself--that individual emotion
is beyond us. But if we can love our country enough to die for it,
we can also love it enough to give to it laws and institutions and
policies that shall prepare the way for the universal brotherhood of
man.
THE RIGHTS OF MAJORITIES
(1912)
In every age some fetich of government has been set up designed to
delude the governed, and to induce a blind rather than an intellectual
acceptance of authority.
To set up in government some point over which you must not argue, is
always very convenient to those who govern; and so you will note,
throughout the world’s history, that the manipulators of government
have always tried to impose some incontrovertible proposition as the
basis on which their authority shall rest; and then, having done so, to
get the strings of it into their own hands, and work it to their own
convenience.
In the present day “majority rule” is the pretended fetich; a majority
whose qualification is almost automatic, whose registration is all
done for it by the party agents, and whose free and independent vote
is brought up to the polling-booth very largely by the bribe of a free
ride in a motor-car.
Scores of elections, that is to say, are turned by the indifferent
voter, and on this sort of cookery recipe the moral products of
majority rule are served up to us as “a dish fit for a king,” and as
giving moral sanction to government. And whatever indigestion comes
to us as the result of our swallowing it whole we are to sit down
under. If the majority has decided, the matter (we are told) is beyond
argument.
That is the fetich, the superstition on which, in theory, government
rests to-day.
In other times there were other fetiches, quite as respectable. “The
King can do no wrong,” was one of them. And we have had staged before
our eyes, in due order, the divine right--or the divine sanction; it is
all the same--of Kings, of Property, of Inheritance, of Slavery, and of
War.
All these have been maintained as necessities of government--infallible
doctrines, based on Scripture and the will of God.
Some of them present rather a battered front to-day. The fetich which
has taken their place is the “Right of Majorities.”
We do not exactly say “Majorities can do no wrong.” But we do incline
to say (often for the sake of a quiet life, and for no better reason)
“Majorities must be allowed to do as they please.” And that means in
effect--those must be allowed to do as they please who can pull the
wires by which majorities are manipulated.
I need hardly remind you that to-day the wire-pullers are the
statesmen, the leaders of party, who have secured more and more the
control of the party-machine, and with it the control of the education
of the electorate.
Having secured this control, they let loose upon you the astonishing
doctrine that, if you have numbers, there you have your right cut and
dried; that if you have not numbers your right (politically speaking)
does not exist.
Now every student of history knows that in the past majorities,
more especially manipulated majorities--or their counterpart _force
majeure_--have done great crimes.
But we do not to-day maintain that those majorities had a “right” to
sack cities, to violate women, to massacre, to exterminate, and to
bring others into subjection. The most we say is that these happenings
are an extreme, and, under some circumstances, an inevitable expression
of certain bad elements in human nature. Is it not, then, perfectly
absurd to imagine that under internal and domestic conditions all such
bad elements have departed from majorities; and that a consensus of
vice, of self-indulgence, of unfairness, of a desire for domination,
may not spread through very large sections of the community, even
through whole peoples where the opportunity so to indulge is
accorded--especially if it be accorded by law or embodied as a State
doctrine?
Clearly, therefore, there must be some limitation or check imposed
upon the so-called “rights” of majorities; and some of them may be
limitations which those majorities would not choose for themselves,
but will, all the same, submit to without revolt if they are properly
rubbed home! One of the essential conditions for majority rule (if
it is to carry with it any moral sanction at all) is that it must
be ready to submit to the same conditions which it imposes upon
others; and that it must not set up qualification, or prohibition from
qualification, without any liability of that prohibition falling upon
itself. It must make the liability fairly equal.
The specious excuse and justification for government by majority, as
put forward by the materialists, is that, latent, within it, lies the
physical force of the nation. (I may say, in passing, that the physical
force of the nation lies latent in every form of government which
secures the assent of the governed; and only ceases to be latent when
some of it gets on to its hind-legs and insists on another form of
government; and to be effective, that “some of it” need not always be a
majority.)
But it is no use talking of physical force being the basis and the
moral justification of majority rule--it is no use invoking the
physical force argument--unless your majority is also prepared to go
to the trouble of exercising it and paying the price for exercising
it. And the main phenomenon of our present form of government by
majority is that the majority won’t take any trouble at all; that,
taken in the bulk, they care very little, and won’t put themselves
to inconvenience--certainly won’t risk physical discomfort and
pain--unless government has very seriously incommoded them by damaging
or by neglecting their interests.
If the physical force basis is to be your full sanction of
government--if that is really your argument--then that basis, that
sanction, is possessed equally by king or despot, so long as he has his
organisation at his command. There are his numbers, obeying him just
as, with us, M.P.’s, 700 strong, obey the party-whips, often against
their principles, but from no physical compulsion whatever.
What the preachers of physical force seem to ignore in arguing about
the basis of government, is the aim of government. What, in the minds
and consciences of those who believe in government, is government
aiming for? Is its aim only to keep order or to be just? Does it seek
to repress humanity to the utmost extent, or to develop it? To wrap its
talents in a napkin, or to make it spiritually a ruler of cities?
What is humanity out for? To what is it evolving? What has been its
impulse, its motive force in pressing for, and in extracting from
reluctant authorities Representative Government, with its accompanying
symbol--the voice of the majority?
It has been seeking humane government--in the belief, surely, that
the nearer you get to really humane government the more will unrest
and revolt and crime cease; and, by the consequent reduction of the
police and of the forces of repression now needed, repay the State a
hundred-fold for the liberties it has established. And majority rule
is merely a device to get nearer to humane government, to open up the
mind of man to his own humane possibilities, and to develop his trust
in others by reposing trust in him. The more you spread government as
an organization of the people themselves, the more humane, upon that
working basis, are likely to be its operations--on one condition: that
such organisation of the people, whatever its numbers, submits to the
operation of its own laws and shares equally in the conditions which
it imposes--that, if it provides a qualification for citizenship, it
provides also the means for all to qualify.
Now this brings us to the relative duties of those who govern and of
those who are governed; and, whereas, fundamentally their duty is the
same, in one important respect it differs. In each case, broadly and
fundamentally, their duty is toward their neighbour--to do to him as
they would he should do unto them. That axiom, rightly carried out,
covers all the law and the prophets, being greater than either; nay, if
it were rightly and universally carried out, the law and the prophets
might safely be shelved. Law merely exists as an expedient, because men
have not yet learned thoroughly to do, or even to wish to do, their
duty toward their neighbour; and as law is an imperfect thing, only
existing because of, and only applicable to, imperfect conditions, the
law and its upholders are not, and never can be, a perfect expression
of that duty which is mutually owed by all. Law is only an expedient
for averting greater evils which might, and probably would, take place
without it in our present very imperfect stage of human development.
But there is one obvious difference between the governors and the
governed. In the action of the former there is an assertion of
authority--an underlying assumption of a power to improve matters by
regulating them. In the governed there is no such assumption of moral
superiority; the governed are there whether they like it or no; and the
laws which condition their lives are laid upon them by a power beyond
themselves, even when--under a representative system--they have secured
some minute voice in regard to their shaping.
The governors, therefore, by their assumption of an ability to improve
matters, are in a fiduciary position to the rest of the community--the
_onus probandi_ of their beneficence rests upon them and not upon
the people. It is their duty to pacify the governed; it is not the
duty of the governed to pacify them; and if they fail in the work of
pacification, which is their main _raison d’être_, they, and not the
community, have to meet the charge of functional incompetence.
Government is a function; being governed is not a function. Humanity
in all stages of civilization or of savagery has fallen subject to
government without being asked to show any certificate of its fitness
to be governed. It is therefore, the governors who have to prove
themselves fit--not the governed; and if a penal code be found, or
declared, necessary to enable the governors to secure peace and
order, then (if your system be just and equal) the penal code should
be applicable in at least equal severity to the governors who impose
it, when instead of producing contentment, it produces unrest and
disorder. Liability to impeachment and condemnation under laws of an
equal stringency would be, I think, a very wholesome corrective to the
legislative action of M.P.’s voting coercive measures which only result
in failure. I fancy that under such conditions there would have been,
for instance, a far smaller majority for the “Cat and Mouse Act,” the
futility of which soon became so ridiculously apparent. Imprisonment
with compulsory starvation, followed by release upon a medical
certificate, and then by a fresh term of imprisonment would have been a
most enlightening form of vacation for certain members of Parliament.
And until we have secured in this country a much more equal adjustment
of the relations between governors and governed, some such corrective
for vindictive legislation is certainly needed.
It is not a sufficient equivalent, or safeguard to popular liberty, to
be able merely to dismiss from office a Minister of the Crown who has
by his administrative blunders brought citizens to death and property
to destruction, or who has sedulously manufactured criminals out of
a class whose will is to be law-abiding. He, if anybody, deserves
punishment; and Parliaments (backed by whatever majority) which,
through maintaining political inequalities, produce such results, are
under the same condemnation. The _onus probandi_ of their beneficence
rests upon them; and if, commissioned to secure peace and order, they
produce only unrest and disorder, then the proof is against them.
Listen to these remarkable words by so great a supporter of
constitutional authority as Edmund Burke:
“Nations,” he says, “are not primarily ruled by laws, still less
by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed in force or
regulation, the operation of both is, in truth, merely instrumental.
Nations are governed by the same methods and on the same principles by
which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who
are his equals or his superiors--by a knowledge of their temper, and by
a judicious management of it. I mean--when public affairs are steadily
and quietly conducted: not when government is nothing but a continued
scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude, in which sometimes
one and sometimes the other is uppermost, in which they alternately
yield and prevail in a series of contemptible victories and scandalous
submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought,
therefore, to be the first study of the statesman. And the knowledge
of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he
has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.”
And further on he says:
“In all disputes between them (the governed) and their rulers, the
presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. Experience
may perhaps justify me in going further. When popular discontents
have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed that there has
been something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of
government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do
wrong, it is their error and not their crime. But with the governing
part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by
design as well as by mistake.... And if this presumption in favour of
the subject against the trustees of power be not the more probable, I
am sure it is the more comfortable speculation; because it is more easy
to change an administration than to reform a people.”
There, then, is a great authority, Edmund Burke, maintaining that
governments are more liable to wilful error than those whom they
govern--and the main value of majority rule is that it tends to bring
the presumption round to the side of government, by making the voice
of government also the voice of the people. I do not think the claims
of majority rule can be put on any higher footing than that--that if
the government is really expressive of a governed majority (and not
merely of a majority to whom the constitution has accorded licence and
privilege above its fellows) then the favourable presumption in any
conflict comes round to the side of government.
But if government claims its sanction from a majority, then we must
enquire further into the composition and character of that majority;
and yet further whether the mandate of that majority is the output
of its conscience or merely of its self-interest; we must watch its
workings, and see what really brings it to the poll--its moral sense,
its pleasure in motor-cars, or its inclination (based on a national
love of sport) to select and to back the winner.
At whose bidding to-day, and for what motive, are we really being
governed? Our duty toward government can never be greater than toward
that voice of sanction on which it rests. And short of a voice of
the whole people conscientiously uttered, and so conditioned as to
be really free and equal, I do not see whence an entire sanction
of government is to come--though you may have (under such and such
circumstances) a large increase of presumption in its favour.
But obviously there are degrees. We in England clearly recognise that.
We have recognised it in our own history; we recognise it in looking
abroad upon other countries. And we rather approve--most of us--of
revolution against a Russian or a German government which has refused
so to aim that the people shall be in some sort their own governors.
Similarly, in this country, the sanction may be imperfect--we may
have secured the form but not the substance. If so--if the form is
so manipulated as to be virtually of no effect--the moral sanction
is by so much lessened. Universal franchise--on the unattainable
qualification, let us say, of standing on one leg for a fortnight,
would be a mockery deserving of instant revolt. And there is some
mockery in setting up any qualification of which a willing and
painstaking citizen cannot avail himself--or herself. Perhaps there
is also some mockery--some cheapening of citizenship--in setting up a
qualification which requires no willingness and no pains.
The moral sanction of government, therefore, is ever fluctuant and
variable--conditioned always by the sincere relationship of theory to
practice, of form to fact. No amount of form or theory, however just
in appearance, or legal in fact, will condone unjust government. And
as we would wish to be condemned and punished were we so to impose on
others--so must we act towards any government which seeks to impose
on us by substituting form for substance. If its moral sanction is
imperfect it cannot claim perfect obedience.