than there is of mere hatred of beauty. The common man, as a matter
of fact, has no yearning for moral perfection. What ails him in that
department is simply fear of punishment, which is to say, fear of his
neighbours. He has, in safe privacy, the morals of a variety actor.
Beauty fevers and enrages him for another and quite different reason.
He cannot comprehend it, and yet it somehow challenges and disturbs
him. If he could snore through good music he would not object to it;
the trouble with it is that it keeps him awake. So he believes that it
ought to be put down, just as he believes that political and economic
ideas which disturb him and yet elude him ought to be put down. The
finest art is safe from him simply because he has no contact with it,
and is thus unaware of it. The fact, in this great Republic, saves the
bacon of Johann Sebastian Bach. His music remains lawful because it
lies outside the cognizance of the mob, and of the abandoned demagogues
who make laws for the mob. It has thus something of the quality of
the colours beyond violet and of the concept of honour. If, by some
abominable magic, it could be brought within range, it would at once
arouse hostility. Its complexity would puzzle and dismay; its lack of
utilitarian purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to
proscribe it, and Baptist clergymen would rove the land denouncing
it, as they now denounce the plays of Shakespeare and the science
of Darwin. In the end some poor musician, taken playing it in rural
Tennessee, would be hailed before a Judge Raulston, tried by a jury of
morons, and railroaded to the calaboose.
9.
_The Eternal Mob_
Such is man on the nether levels. Such is the pet and glory of
democratic states. Human progress passes him by. Its aims are
unintelligible to him and its finest fruits are beyond his reach:
what reaches him is what falls from the tree, and is shared with his
four-footed brothers. He has changed but little since the earliest
recorded time, and that change is for the worse quite as often as it
is for the better. He still believes in ghosts, and has only shifted
his belief in witches to the political sphere. He is still a slave to
priests, and trembles before their preposterous magic. He is lazy,
improvident and unclean. All the durable values of the world, though
his labour has entered into them, have been created against his
opposition. He can imagine nothing beautiful and he can grasp nothing
true. Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one
sound and the other not, he chooses almost infallibly, and by a sort
of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great
tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but
his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit
of the race. He was in favour of Nero and Torquemada by instinct, and
he was against Galileo and Savonarola by the same instinct. When a
Cagliostro dies he is ready for a Danton; from the funeral of a Barnum
he rushes to the triumph of a Bryan. The world gets nothing from him
save his brute labour, and even that he tries to evade. It owes nothing
to him that has any solid dignity or worth, not even democracy. In
two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena
to the lynching-party--and another inch: from the obscenities of the
Saturnalia to the obscenities of the Methodist revival. So he lives
out his life in the image of Jahveh. What is worth knowing he doesn’t
know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true. The cardinal
articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are
mainly scoundrels.
Do I forget his central virtue--at least in Christendom? Do I forget
his simple piety, his touching fidelity to the faith? I forget nothing:
I simply answer, What faith? Is it argued by any rational man that
the debased Christianity cherished by the mob in all the Christian
countries of to-day has any colourable likeness to the body of ideas
preached by Christ? If so, then let us have a better teaching of
the Bible in the public-schools. The plain fact is that this bogus
Christianity has no more relation to the system of Christ than it
has to the system of Aristotle. It is the invention of Paul and his
attendant rabble-rousers--a body of men exactly comparable to the corps
of evangelical pastors of to-day, which is to say, a body devoid of
sense and lamentably indifferent to common honesty. The mob, having
heard Christ, turned against Him, and applauded His crucifixion. His
theological ideas were too logical and too plausible for it, and his
ethical ideas were enormously too austere. What it yearned for was
the old comfortable balderdash under a new and gaudy name, and that
is precisely what Paul offered it. He borrowed from all the wandering
dervishes and soul-snatchers of Asia Minor, and flavoured the stew with
remnants of the Greek demonology. The result was a code of doctrines
so discordant and so nonsensical that no two men since, examining
it at length, have ever agreed upon its precise meaning. But Paul
knew his mob: he had been a travelling labour leader. He knew that
nonsense was its natural provender--that the unintelligible soothed
it like sweet music. He was the _Stammvater_ of all the Christian
mob-masters of to-day, terrorizing and enchanting the mob with their
insane damnations, eating their seven fried chickens a week, passing
the diligent plate, busy among the women. Once the early church emerged
from the Roman catacombs and began to yield to that reorganization
of society which was forced upon the ancient world by the barbarian
invasions, Paul was thrown overboard as Methodists throw Wesley
overboard when they acquire the means and leisure for golf, and Peter
was put in his place. Peter was a blackguard, but he was at least free
from any taint of Little Bethel. The Roman Church, in the aristocratic
feudal age, promoted him _post mortem_ to the Papacy, and then raised
him to the mystical dignity of Rock, a rank obviously quasi-celestial.
But Paul remained the prophet of the sewers. He was to emerge centuries
later in many incarnations--Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and so on. He
remains to-day the arch-theologian of the mob. His turgid and witless
metaphysics make Christianity bearable to men who would be repelled by
Christ’s simple and magnificent reduction of the duties of man to the
duties of a gentleman.
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
II
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
1.
_The Two Kinds of Democracy_
The lowly Christian I have limned is not only the glory of democratic
states, but also their boss. Sovereignty is in him, sometimes both
actually and legally, but always actually. Whatever he wants badly
enough, he can get. If he is misled by mountebanks and swindled by
scoundrels it is only because his credulity and imbecility cover a
wider area than his simple desires. The precise form of the government
he suffers under is of small importance. Whether it be called a
constitutional monarchy, as in England, or a representative republic,
as in France, or a pure democracy, as in some of the cantons of
Switzerland, it is always essentially the same. There is, first, the
mob, theoretically and in fact the ultimate judge of all ideas and the
source of all power. There is, second, the camorra of self-seeking
minorities, each seeking to inflame, delude and victimize it. The
political process thus becomes a mere battle of rival rogues. But the
mob remains quite free to decide between them. It may even, under the
hand of God, decide for a minority that happens, by some miracle, to be
relatively honest and enlightened. If, in common practice, it sticks to
the thieves, it is only because their words are words it understands
and their ideas are ideas it cherishes. It has the power to throw them
off at will, and even at whim, and it also has the means.
A great deal of paper and ink has been wasted discussing the difference
between representative government and direct democracy. The theme is a
favourite one with university pundits, and also engages and enchants
the stall-fed Rousseaus who arise intermittently in the cow States,
and occasionally penetrate to Governors’ mansions and the United
States Senate. It is generally held that representative government, as
practically encountered in the world, is full of defects, some of them
amounting to organic disease. Not only does it take the initiative in
law-making out of the hands of the plain people, and leave them only
the function of referees; it also raises certain obvious obstacles
to their free exercise of that function. Scattered as they are, and
unorganized save in huge, unworkable groups, they are unable, it is
argued, to formulate their virtuous desires quickly and clearly,
or to bring to the resolution of vexed questions the full potency
of their native sagacity. Worse, they find it difficult to enforce
their decisions, even when they have decided. Every Liberal knows
this sad story, and has shed tears telling it. The remedy he offers
almost always consists of a resort to what he calls a purer democracy.
That is to say, he proposes to set up the recall, the initiative
and referendum, or something else of the sort, and so convert the
representative into a mere clerk or messenger. The final determination
of all important public questions, he argues, ought to be in the hands
of the voters themselves. They alone can muster enough wisdom for the
business, and they alone are without guile. The cure for the evils of
democracy is more democracy.
All this, of course, is simply rhetoric. Every time anything of the
kind is tried it fails ingloriously. Nor is there any evidence that
it has ever succeeded elsewhere, to-day or in the past. Certainly
no competent historian believes that the citizens assembled in a New
England town-meeting actually formulated _en masse_ the transcendental
and immortal measures that they adopted, nor even that they contributed
anything of value to the discussion thereof. The notion is as absurd
as the parallel notion, long held by philologues of defective powers
of observation, that the popular ballads surviving from earlier ages
were actually composed by the folk. The ballads, in point of fact,
were all written by concrete poets, most of them not of the folk; the
folk, when they had any hand in the business at all, simply acted as
referees, choosing which should survive. In exactly the same way the
New England town-meeting was led and dominated by a few men of unusual
initiative and determination, some of them genuinely superior, but
most of them simply demagogues and fanatics. The citizens in general
heard the discussion of rival ideas, and went through the motions of
deciding between them, but there is no evidence that they ever had all
the relevant facts before them or made any effort to unearth them, or
that appeals to their reason always, or even usually, prevailed over
appeals to their mere prejudice and superstition. Their appetite for
logic, I venture, seldom got the better of their fear of hell, and
the Beatitudes moved them far less powerfully than blood. Some of the
most idiotic decisions ever come to by mortal man were made by the New
England town-meetings, and under the leadership of monomaniacs who are
still looked upon as ineffable blossoms of the contemporary _Kultur_.
The truth is that the difference between representative democracy
and direct democracy is a great deal less marked than political
sentimentalists assume. Under both forms the sovereign mob must employ
agents to execute its will, and in either case the agents may have
ideas of their own, based upon interests of their own, and the means
at hand to do and get what they will. Moreover, their very position
gives them a power of influencing the electors that is far above
that of any ordinary citizen: they become politicians _ex officio_,
and usually end by selling such influence as remains after they have
used all they need for their own ends. Worse, both forms of democracy
encounter the difficulty that the generality of citizens, no matter
how assiduously they may be instructed, remain congenitally unable
to comprehend many of the problems before them, or to consider all of
those they do comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner. Thus
it is often impossible to ascertain their views in advance of action,
or even, in many cases, to determine their conclusions _post hoc_. The
voters gathered in a typical New England town-meeting were all ardent
amateurs of theology, and hence quite competent, in theory, to decide
the theological questions that principally engaged them; nevertheless,
history shows that they were led facilely by professional theologians,
most of them quacks with something to sell. In the same way, the
great masses of Americans of to-day, though they are theoretically
competent to decide all the larger matters of national policy, and have
certain immutable principles, of almost religious authority, to guide
them, actually look for leading to professional politicians, who are
influenced in turn by small but competent and determined minorities,
with special knowledge and special interests. It was thus that the
plain people were shoved into the late war, and it is thus that they
will be shoved into the next one. They were, in overwhelming majority,
against going in, and if they had had any sense and resolution they
would have stayed out. But these things they lacked.
2.
_The Popular Will_
Thus there is no need to differentiate too pedantically between the
two forms of democratic government, for their unlikeness is far more
apparent than real. Nor is there any need to set up any distinction
between the sort of democracy that is met with in practice, with its
constant conflicts between what is assumed to be the popular will
and the self-interest of small but articulate and efficient groups,
and that theoretical variety which would liberate and energize the
popular will completely. The latter must remain purely theoretical
for all time; there are insuperable impediments, solidly grounded in
the common mind, to its realization. Moreover, there is no reason
for believing that its realization, if it should ever be attained by
miracle, would materially change the main outlines of the democratic
process. What is genuinely important is not that the will of mankind in
the mass should be formulated and made effective at all times and in
every case, but simply that means should be provided for ascertaining
and executing it in capital cases--that there shall be no immovable
impediment to its execution when, by some prodigy of nature, it takes
a coherent and apposite form. If, over and beyond that, a sufficient
sense of its immanent and imminent potency remains to make politicians
walk a bit warily, if the threat always hangs in the air that under
_x_ circumstances and on _y_ day it may be heard from suddenly and
devastatingly, then democracy is actually in being. This is the case,
it seems to me, in the United States. And it is the case, too, in every
European country west of Vienna and north of the Alps.
The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys.
Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They
are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of
their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even
by exterior groups. The business of victimizing them is a lucrative
profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has
its masters and it has its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat
in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, _i. e._, a licensed
blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner
is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his
ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of
the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to
halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then,
raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to
it. There are no legal or other bars to the free functioning of their
will, once it emerges into consciousness, save only such bars as they
themselves have erected, and these they may remove whenever they so
desire. No external or super-legal power stands beyond their reach,
exercising pressure upon them; they recognize no personal sovereign
with inalienable rights and no class with privileges above the common
law; they are even kept free, by a tradition as old as the Republic
itself, of foreign alliances which would condition their autonomy. Thus
their sovereignty, though it is limited in its everyday exercise by
self-imposed constitutional checks and still more by restraints which
lie in the very nature of government, whatever its form, is probably
just as complete in essence as that of the most absolute monarch who
ever hanged a peasant or defied the Pope.
What is too often forgotten, in discussing the matter, is the fact
that no such monarch was ever actually free, at all times and under
all conditions. In the midst of his most charming tyrannies he had
still to bear it in mind that his people, oppressed too much, could
always rise against him, and that he himself, though a king _von Gottes
Gnaden_, was yet biologically only a man, with but one gullet to slit;
and if the people were feeble or too craven to be dangerous, then
there was always His Holiness of Rome to fear or other agents of the
King of Kings; and if these ghostly mentors, too, were silent, then
he had to reckon with his ministers, his courtiers, his soldiers, his
doctors, and his women. The Merovingian kings were certainly absolute,
if absolutism has ever existed outside the dreams of historians;
nevertheless, as every schoolboy knows, their sovereignty was gradually
undermined by the mayors of the palace, and finally taken from them
altogether. So with the emperors of Japan, who succumbed to the
shoguns, who succumbed in their turn to a combination of territorial
nobles and city capitalists, not unlike that which brought King John
to bay at Runnymede. It seems to me that the common people, under such
a democracy as that which now prevails in the United States, are more
completely sovereign, in fact as well as in law, than any of these
ancient despots. They may be seduced and enchained by a great variety
of prehensile soothsayers, just as Henry VIII was seduced and enchained
by his wives, but, like Henry again, they are quite free to throw off
their chains whenever they please, and to chop off the heads of their
seducers. They could hang Dr. Coolidge to-morrow if they really wanted
to do it, or even Bishop Manning. They could do it by the simple device
of intimidating Congress, which never fails to leap when their growl is
palpably in earnest. And if Congress stood out against them, they could
do it anyhow, under protection of the jury system. The executioners,
once acquitted, could not be molested more, save by illegal processes.
Similar executioners walk the land to-day, especially in the South, and
no one dares to challenge them. They are visible symbols of the powers
that lie in the mob, once it makes up its mind.
Nor is there much force or relevancy in the contention that democracy
is incomplete in the United States (as in England, France, Germany and
all other democratic countries) because certain classes of persons
are barred from full citizenship, sometimes for reasons that appear
to be unsound. To argue thus is to argue against democracy itself,
for if the majority has not the right to decide what qualifications
shall be necessary to participate in its sovereignty, then it has no
sovereignty at all. What one usually finds, on examining any given
case of class disfranchisement, is that the class disfranchised is
not actively eager, as a whole, for the ballot, and that its lack of
interest in the matter is at least presumptive evidence of its general
political incompetence. The three-class system of voting survived so
long in Belgium and Prussia, not because the masses victimized had no
means at hand to put an end to it, but simply because they were so
inept at politics, and so indifferent to the rights involved, that they
made no genuine effort to do so. The agitation against the system was
carried on mainly by a small minority, and many of its leaders were not
even members of the class transgressed. Here we have a reminder of
the process whereby democracy itself came in: it was forced upon its
beneficiaries by a small group of visionaries, all of them standing
outside the class benefited. So again, in our own time, with the
extension of the franchise to women. The great masses of women in all
countries were indifferent to the boon, and there was a considerable
body that was cynically hostile. Perhaps a majority of the more ardent
suffragists belonged biologically to neither sex.
Since the abolition of the three-class system in Prussia there has
been absolutely no improvement in the government of that country; on
the contrary, there has been a vast falling off in its honesty and
efficiency, and it has even slackened energy in what was formerly
one of its most laudable specialties: the development of legislation
for the protection of the working class, _i. e._, the very class
that benefited politically by the change. Giving women the ballot,
as everyone knows, has brought in none of the great reforms promised
by the suffragists. It has substituted adultery for drunkenness as
the principal divertissement at political conventions, but it has
accomplished little else. The majority of women, when they vote at all,
seem to vote unwillingly and without clear purpose; they are, perhaps,
relatively too intelligent to have any faith in purely political
remedies for the sorrows of the world. The minorities that show
partisan keenness are chiefly made up of fat women with inattentive
husbands; they are victimized easily by the male politicians,
especially those who dress well, and are thus swallowed up by the great
parties, and lose all separate effectiveness. Certainly it is usually
difficult to discover, in the election returns, any division along
anatomical lines. Now and then, true enough, a sentimentality appealing
especially to the more stupid sort of women causes a transient
differentiation, as when, for example, thousands of newly-enfranchised
farm-wives in the United States voted against Cox, the Democratic
presidential candidate, in 1920, on the double ground (_a_) that he was
a divorcé and hence an antinomian, and (_b_) that the titular chief of
his party, Dr. Wilson, had married again too soon after the death of
his first wife. But such fantastic sentimentalities, after all, rarely
enter into practical politics. When they are lacking the women voters
simply succumb to the sentimentalities that happen to be engaging their
lords and masters. The extension of the franchise has not changed the
general nature of the political clown-show in the slightest. Campaigns
are still made upon the same old issues, and offices go to the same
old mountebanks, with a few Jezebels added to the corps to give it
refinement.