franchise to the classes that still remain in the dark would make
government more delicately responsive to the general will. Such
classes, as a matter of fact, are now so few and so small in numbers
in all of the Western nations that they may be very conveniently
disregarded. It is as if doctors of philosophy, members of the Society
of the Cincinnati or men who could move their ears were disfranchised.
In the United States, true enough, there is one disfranchised group
that is much larger, to wit, that group of Americans whose African
descent is visible to the naked eye and at a glance. But even in this
case, the reality falls much below the appearance. The more intelligent
American Negroes vote in spite of the opposition of the poor whites,
their theological brothers and economic rivals, and not a few of them
actually make their livings as professional politicians, even in the
South. At the Republican National Convention at Chicago, in 1920, such
a swart statesman gave an inspiring exhibition of his powers, and in
the presence of a vast multitude. His name was Henry Lincoln Johnson,
and he has since gone to that bourn where black is white. When he died
Dr. Coolidge sent a long and flirtatious telegram of condolence to his
widow. The widow of Jacques Loeb got no such telegram. This Johnson
was chairman of the Georgia delegation, and his colleagues were all
of the Nordic race. But though they came from the very citadel of the
Ku Klux Klan, he herded them in a public and lordly manner, and voted
them as if they had been stuffed chemises. As Nordics, no doubt, they
viewed him with a bitter loathing, but as politicians yearning for jobs
they had to be polite to him, and even fawning. He has his peers and
successors in all the American States. In many a proud city, North and
South, the Aframericans hold the balance of power, and know it.
Moreover, even those who are actually disfranchised, say in the rural
wastes of the South, may remove their disability by the simple device
of moving away, as, in fact, hundreds of thousands have done. Their
disfranchisement is thus not intrinsic and complete, but merely a
function of their residence, like that of all persons, white or black,
who live in the District of Columbia, and so it takes on a secondary
and trivial character, as hay-fever, in the pathological categories,
takes on a secondary and trivial character by yielding to a change of
climate. Moreover, it is always extra-legal, and thus remains dubious:
the theory of the fundamental law is that the coloured folk may and
do vote. This theory they could convert into a fact at any time by
determined mass action. The Nordics might resist that action, but they
could not halt it: there would be another Civil War if they tried to
do so, and they would be beaten a second time. If the blacks in the
backwaters of the South keep away from the polls to-day it is only
because they do not esteem the ballot highly enough to risk the dangers
that go with trying to use it. That fact, it seems to me, convicts them
of unfitness for citizenship in a democratic state, for the loftiest
of all the rights of the citizen, by the democratic dogma, is that of
the franchise, and whoever is not willing to fight for it, even at the
cost of his last drop of gore, is surely not likely to exercise it
with a proper sense of consecration after getting it. No one argues
that democracy is destroyed in the United States by the fact that
millions of white citizens, perfectly free under the law and the local
_mores_ of their communities to vote, nevertheless fail to do so. The
difference between these negligent whites and the disfranchised Negroes
is only superficial. Both have a clear legal right to the ballot; if
they neglect to exercise it, it is only because they do not esteem
it sufficiently. In New York City thousands of freeborn Caucasians
surrender it in order to avoid jury duty; in the South thousands of
Negroes surrender it in order to avoid having their homes burned and
their heads broken. The two motives are fundamentally identical; in
each case the potential voter values his peace and security more than
he values the boon for which the Fathers bled. He certainly has a right
to choose.
3.
_Disproportional Representation_
The matter of disproportional representation, already alluded to in
connection with the Prussian-Belgian voting system, is intimately
bound up with this question of disfranchised classes, for it must be
plain that a community whose votes, man for man, count for only half
as much as the votes of another community is one in which half of
the citizens are, to every practical intent, unable to vote at all.
As everyone knows, the United States Senate is constituted upon a
disproportional plan. Each State, regardless of population, has two
Senators and no more, and the votes of the two representing so small
and measly a State as Delaware or Nevada count for precisely as much
as the votes of the Senators from Pennsylvania or New York. The same
sophistication of the one-man-one-vote formula extends into the States
themselves. There is hardly a large city in the United States that has
completely proportional representation in the State Legislature. In
almost every State, sometimes with slight ameliorative differences,
the upper house of the Legislature is constituted upon the plan of the
Federal Senate--that is, the divisions run according to geographical
boundaries rather than according to population, and the congested
urban centres tend to be grossly under-represented. Moreover, the
lower house commonly shows something of the same disharmony, even
when it is ostensibly based upon proportional representation, for the
cities grow in population much faster than the country districts, and
reapportionment always lags behind that growth.
These facts fever certain romantic fuglemen of so-called pure
democracy, and they come forward with complicated remedies, all of
which have been tried somewhere or other and failed miserably. The
truth is that disproportional representation is not a device to nullify
democracy, but simply a device to make it more workable. All it
indicates, at least in the United States, is that the sovereign people
have voluntarily sacrificed a moiety of the democratic theory in order
to attain to a safer and more efficient practice. If they so desired
they could sweep all of the existing inequalities out of existence--not
instantly, perhaps, but nevertheless surely. Every such inequality
is founded upon their free will, and nearly every one enjoys their
complete approval. What lies under most of them is not a wish to give
one voter an advantage over another, but a wish to counter-balance an
advantage lying in the very nature of things. The voters of a large
urban centre, for example, are able to act together far more promptly
and effectively than their colleagues of the wide-flung farms. They
live in close contact both physically and mentally; opinions form among
them quickly, and are maintained with solid front. In brief, they
show all of the characters of men in a compact mob, and the voters
of the rural regions, dispersed and largely inarticulate, cannot
hope to prevail against them by ordinary means. So the yokels are
given disproportionally heavy representation by way of make-weight:
it enables them to withstand the city stampede. There are frequent
protests from the cities when, taking advantage of their strength in
the State Legislatures, the yokels dodge their fair share of the burden
of taxation, but it is perhaps significant that there is seldom any
serious protest against the plan of organization of the United States
Senate, despite the fact that it has cursed the country with such
bucolic imbecilities as Prohibition. In both cases, genuine discontent
would make itself felt, for the majority under democracy remains the
majority, whatever laws and constitutions may say to the contrary, and
when its blood is up it can get anything it wants.
Most of the so-called constitutional checks, in fact, have yielded, at
one time or other, to its pressure. No one familiar with the history
of the Supreme Court, for example, need be told that its vast and
singular power to curb legislation has always been exercised with one
eye on the election returns. Practically all of its most celebrated
decisions, from that in the Dred Scott case to that in the Northern
Securities case, have reflected popular rages of the hour, and many
of them have been modified, or even completely reversed afterward,
as the second thought of the plain people has differed from their
first thought. This responsiveness to the shifts of popular opinion
and passion is not alone due to the fact that the personnel of the
court, owing to the high incidence of senile deterioration among
its members, is constantly changing, and that the President and the
Senators, in filling vacancies, are bound as practical politicians to
consider the doctrines that happen to be fashionable in the cross-roads
grocery-stores and barber-shops. It is also due, and in no small
measure, to the fact that the learned and puissant justices are, in the
main, practical politicians themselves, and hence used to keeping their
ears close to the grass-roots. Most of them, before they were elevated
to the ermine, spent years struggling desperately for less exalted
honours, and so, like Representatives, Senators and Presidents, they
show a fine limberness of the _biceps femoris_, _semitendinosus_ and
_semimembranosus_, and a beautiful talent for reconciling the ideally
just with the privately profitable. If their general tendency, in late
years, has been to put the rights of property above the rights of man
then it must be obvious that they have not lost any popularity thereby.
In boom times, indeed, democracy is always very impatient of what used
to be called natural rights. The typical democrat is quite willing to
exchange any of the theoretical boons of freedom for something that he
can use. In most cases, perhaps, he is averse to selling his vote for
cash in hand, but that is mainly because the price offered is usually
too low. He will sell it very willingly for a good job or for some
advantage in his business. Offering him such bribes, in fact, is the
chief occupation of all political parties under democracy, and of all
professional politicians.
For all these reasons I esteem it a vanity to discuss the question
whether the democracy on tap in the United States is really ideal.
Ideal or not, it works, and the people are actually sovereign. The
governmental process, perhaps, could be made more quickly responsive to
the public will, but that is merely a temporal detail; it is responsive
enough for all practical purposes. Any conceivable change in the laws
could be effected without tampering with the fundamental scheme. The
fact, no doubt, largely explains the hostility of the inferior American
to the thing called direct action--the darling of his equals in most
other countries. He is against it, not merely because he is a coward
and distrusts liberty, but also, and maybe mainly, because he believes
that revolution, in the United States, is unnecessary--that any reform
advocated by a respectable majority, or even by a determined minority,
may be achieved peacefully and by constitutional means. In this
belief he is right. The American people, keeping strictly within the
Constitution, could do anything that the most soaring fancy suggested.
They could, by a simple amendment of that hoary scripture, expropriate
all the private property in the land, or they could expropriate
parts of it and leave the rest in private hands; they have already,
in fact, by tariff juggling, by Prohibition and by other devices,
destroyed billions of dollars of property without compensation and
even without common politeness, and the Constitution still survives.
They could enfranchise aliens if they so desired, or children not
taxed, or idiots, or the kine in the byres. They could disfranchise
whole classes, _e. g._, metaphysicians or adulterers, or the entire
population of given regions. They have done such things. They could
abolish the Federal and State Legislatures, as they have already
abolished the city councils in hundreds of municipalities. They could
extend the term of the President to life, or they could reduce it to
one year, or even to one day. They could provide that he must shave his
head, or that he must sleep in his underclothes. They could legalize
his assassination for malfeasance, and the assassination of all other
recreant public officers, as I myself once proposed, entirely within
my rights as a citizen and a patriot. They could introduce burning
at the stake, flogging, castration, ducking and tar-and-feathering
into our system of legal punishment; they have already done so in
the South by acclamation, regardless of the law and the courts, and,
as the phrase is, have got away with it. They could abolish the jury
system, abandon the writ of _habeas corpus_, authorize unreasonable
searches and seizures, legalize murder by public officers and provide
that all Federal judges be appointed by the Anti-Saloon League: a
beginning has been made in all these fields by the Volstead Act. They
could make war without constitutional authority and refuse to engage in
it in the face of a constitutional declaration. They could proscribe
individuals or classes, and deny them the protection of the laws. They
could convert arson into a laudable act, provide a bounty for persons
skilled at mayhem and make it a crime to drink coffee or eat meat.
They have already, either by Federal action or by State action, made
crimes of such intrinsically harmless acts as drinking wine at meals,
smoking cigarettes on the street, teaching the elements of biology,
wearing a red necktie on the street, and reading “Das Kapital” and
“The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua.” They could, with equal
facility, make it criminal to refuse to do these things. Finally,
they could, if they would, abandon the republican form of government
altogether, and set up a monarchy in place of it; during the late war
they actually did so in fact, though refraining from saying so frankly.
They could do all of these things freely and even legally, without
departing in the slightest from the principles of their fundamental
compact, and no exterior agency could make them do any of them
unwillingly.
It is thus idle to amass proofs, as Hans Delbrück does with great
diligence, that the result of this or that election was not a
manifestation of a concrete popular wish. The answer, nine times out
of ten, is that there _was_ no popular wish. The populace simply
passed over the matters principally at issue as incomprehensible or
unimportant, and voted irrelevantly or wantonly. Or, in large part, it
kept away from the polls. Both actions might be defended plausibly by
democratic theorists. The people, if they are actually sovereign, have
a clear right to be wanton when the spirit moves them, and indifference
to an issue is an expression of opinion about it. Thus there is little
appositeness in the saying of another German, the philosopher Hegel,
that the masses are that part of the state which doesn’t know what it
wants. They know what they want when they actually want it, and if they
want it badly enough they get it. What they want principally are safety
and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride
them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes
to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple
minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to
sacrifice everything else in order to get them. The science of politics
under democracy consists in trading with them, _i. e._, in hoodwinking
and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere
appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants,
and what the enterprising minorities behind him want. The bargaining is
conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with music by the choir,
but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of a mule. It lies
quite outside the bounds of honour, and even of common decency. It is a
combat between jackals and jackasses. It is the master transaction of
democratic states.
4.
_The Politician Under Democracy_
I find myself quoting yet a third German: he is Professor Robert
Michels, the economist. The politician, he says, is the courtier
of democracy. A profound saying--perhaps more profound than the
professor, himself a democrat, realizes. For it was of the essence
of the courtier’s art and mystery that he flattered his employer in
order to victimize him, yielded to him in order to rule him. The
politician under democracy does precisely the same thing. His business
is never what it pretends to be. Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted
whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly
public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually
he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is
to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an
armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job
at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold it by lying; if
lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His
ear is ever close to the ground. If he is an adept he can hear the
first murmurs of popular clamour before even the people themselves are
conscious of them. If he is a master he detects and whoops up to-day
the delusions that the mob will cherish next year. There is in him,
in his professional aspect, no shadow of principle or honour. It is
moral by his code to get into office by false pretences, as the late
Dr. Wilson did in 1916. It is moral to change convictions overnight, as
multitudes of American politicians did when the Prohibition avalanche
came down upon them. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern
of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough. That place
is one of public honour, and public honour is the thing that caresses
him and makes him happy. It is also one of power, and power is the
commodity that he has for sale.
I speak here, of course, of the democratic politician in his rôle of
statesman--that is, in his best and noblest aspect. He flourishes also
on lower levels, partly subterranean. Down there public honour would be
an inconvenience, so he hawks it to lesser men, and contents himself
with power. What are the sources of that power? They lie, obviously,
in the gross weaknesses and knaveries of the common people--in their
inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal, in
their incurable tendency to fly into preposterous alarms, in their
petty self-seeking and venality, in their instinctive envy and hatred
of their superiors--in brief, in their congenital incapacity for the
elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state. The boss owns
them simply because they can be bought for a job on the street or
a load of coal. He holds them, even when they pass beyond any need
of jobs or coal, by his shrewd understanding of their immemorial
sentimentalities. Looking at Thersites, they see Ulysses. He is the
state as they apprehend it; around him clusters all the romance that
used to hang about a king. He is the fount of honour and the mould of
form. His barbaric code, framed to fit their gullibility, becomes an
example to their young. The boss is the eternal _reductio ad absurdum_
of the whole democratic process. He exemplifies its reduction of all
ideas to a few elemental wants. And he reflects and makes manifest
the inferior man’s congenital fear of liberty--his incapacity for
even the most trivial sort of independent action. Life on the lower
levels is life in a series of interlocking despotisms. The inferior
man cannot imagine himself save as taking orders--if not from the
boss, then from the priest, and if not from the priest, then from some
fantastic drill-sergeant of his own creation. For years the reformers
who flourished in the United States concentrated their whole animus
upon the boss: it was apparently their notion that he had imposed
himself upon his victims from without, and that they could be delivered
by destroying him. But time threw a brilliant light upon that error.
When, as and if he was overthrown there appeared in his place the
prehensile Methodist parson, bawling for Prohibition and its easy jobs,
and behind the parson loomed the grand goblin, natural heir to a long
line of imperial worthy potentates of the Sons of Azrael and sublime
chancellors of the Order of Patriarchs Militant. The winds of the world
are bitter to _Homo vulgaris_. He likes the warmth and safety of the
herd, and he likes a bell-wether with a clarion bell.
The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it.
Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue,
and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage
of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both
of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one
who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be
idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have
to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who
seeks elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing
or the other, and most men have to be both. The whole process is one
of false pretences and ignoble concealments. No educated man, stating
plainly the elementary notions that every educated man holds about
the matters that principally concern government, could be elected to
office in a democratic state, save perhaps by a miracle. His frankness
would arouse fears, and those fears would run against him; it is his
business to arouse fears that will run in favour of him. Worse, he must
not only consider the weaknesses of the mob, but also the prejudices
of the minorities that prey upon it. Some of these minorities have
developed a highly efficient technique of intimidation. They not only
know how to arouse the fears of the mob; they also know how to awaken
its envy, its dislike of privilege, its hatred of its betters. How
formidable they may become is shown by the example of the Anti-Saloon
League in the United States--a minority body in the strictest sense,
however skillful its mustering of popular support, for it nowhere
includes a majority of the voters among its subscribing members, and
its leaders are nowhere chosen by democratic methods. And how such
minorities may intimidate the whole class of place-seeking politicians
has been demonstrated brilliantly and obscenely by the same corrupt and
unconscionable organization. It has filled all the law-making bodies of
the nation with men who have got into office by submitting cravenly to
its dictation, and it has filled thousands of administrative posts, and
not a few judicial posts, with vermin of the same sort.