in the United States, will be dealt with in the same adroit and
effective manner. The same thing has been done in other democratic
states: I point to the so-called general strike in England in 1926,
which was wrecked by pitting half of the proletariat against the other
half. The capitalistic system now enlists the best brains in all the
democratic nations, including France and Germany, and I believe that,
instead of losing such support hereafter, it will get more and more
of it. As the old aristocracies decline, the plutocracy is bound to
inherit their hegemony, and to have the support of the nether mob.
An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning
is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic
society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their
achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he
can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating
it. Thus the imponderable but powerful force of public opinion
directs the aspirations of all the more alert and ambitious young
men toward business, and what is so assiduously practised tends to
produce experts. E. W. Howe, I incline to think, is quite right when
he argues that the average American banker or business man, whatever
his demerits otherwise, is at least more competent professionally than
the average American statesman, musician, painter, author, labour
leader, scholar, theologian or politician. Think of the best American
poet of our time, or the best soldier, or the best violoncellist,
and then ask yourself if his rank among his fellows in the world is
seriously to be compared with that of the late J. Pierpont Morgan
among financial manipulators, or that of John D. Rockefeller among
traders. The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all
democracies: they emerged in Germany, after the republic arose from the
ruins of the late war, like Anadyomene from the sea. They organize and
control the minorities that struggle eternally for power, and so get a
gradually firmer grip upon the government. One by one they dispose of
such demagogues as Bryan and Roosevelt, and put the helm of state into
the hands of trusted and reliable men--McKinley, Harding, Coolidge.
In England, Germany and France they patronize, in a somewhat wistful
way, what remains of the old aristocracies. In the United States,
through such agents as the late Gompers, they keep Demos penned in a
gilt and glittering cage. Public opinion? Walter Lippmann, searching
for it, could not find it. A century before him Fichte said “_es gar
nicht existirte_.” Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the
immemorial form of the mob’s fears. It is piped to central factories,
and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.
CODA
IV
CODA
1.
_The Future of Democracy_
Whether or not democracy is destined to survive in the world until
the corruptible puts on incorruption and the immemorial Christian
dead leap out of their graves, their faces shining and their yells
resounding--this is something, I confess, that I don’t know, nor
is it necessary, for the purposes of the present inquiry, that I
venture upon the hazard of a guess. My business is not prognosis,
but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.
That simple statement of fact, I daresay, will be accepted as a
confession, condemning me out of hand as unfit for my task, and even
throwing a certain doubt upon my _bona fides_. For it is one of the
peculiar intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of
the insoluble becomes unfashionable--nay, almost infamous. To lack a
remedy is to lack the very license to discuss disease. The causes of
this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy
itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily
a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast
and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may
be stopped by passing a law. The aim of government is to repeal the
laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments. War becomes
simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the
mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to
make over the father which begat it. Nothing remains inscrutable and
beyond remedy, not even the way of a man with a maid. It was not so
under the ancient and accursed systems of despotism, now happily purged
out of the world. They, too, I grant you, had certain pretensions of
an homeric gaudiness, but they at least refrained from attempts to
abolish sin, poverty, stupidity, cowardice, and other such immutable
realities. Mediæval Christianity, which was a theological and
philosophical _apologia_ for those systems, actually erected belief in
that immutability into a cardinal article of faith. The evils of the
world were incurable: one put off the quest for a perfect moral order
until one got to heaven, _post mortem_. There arose, in consequence,
a scheme of checks and balances that was consummate and completely
satisfactory, for it could not be put to a test, and the logical holes
in it were chinked with miracles. But no more. To-day the Holy Saints
are deposed. Now each and every human problem swings into the range of
practical politics. The worst and oldest of them may be solved facilely
by travelling bands of lady Ph.D.’s, each bearing the mandate of a
Legislature of kept men, all unfaithful to their protectors.
Democracy becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis
of it: the Ku Kluxers, though their reasoning may be faulty, are not
far off the facts in their conclusion that Holy Church is its enemy.
It shows all the magical potency of the great systems of faith. It
has the power to enchant and disarm; it is not vulnerable to logical
attack. I point for proof to the appalling gyrations and contortions of
its chief exponents. Read, for example, the late James Bryce’s “Modern
Democracies.” Observe how he amasses incontrovertible evidence that
democracy doesn’t work--and then concludes with a stout declaration
that it does. Or, if his two fat volumes are too much for you, turn to
some school reader and give a judicious perusal to Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address, with its argument that the North fought the Civil War to save
self-government to the world!--a thesis echoed in falsetto, and by
feebler men, fifty years later. It is impossible, by any device known
to philosophers, to meet doctrines of that sort; they obviously lie
outside the range of logical ideas. There is, in the human mind, a
natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly simplifies the process
of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the great majority
of men. What dulls and baffles the teeth may be got down conveniently
by an heroic gulp. No doubt there is an explanation here of the
long-continued popularity of the dogma of the Trinity, which remains
unstated in plain terms after two thousand years. And no doubt the
dogma of Transubstantiation came under fire in the Reformation because
it had grown too simple and comprehensible--because even the Scholastic
philosophy had been unable to convert its plain propositions into
something that could be believed without being understood. Democracy
is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal
mysticism. One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous
postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the
whiskers of Moses himself. I have alluded to its touching acceptance
of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God--that
every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.
There are corollaries that are even more naïve. One, for example, is
to the general effect that optimism is a virtue in itself--that there
is a mysterious merit in being hopeful and of glad heart, even in the
presence of adverse and immovable facts. This curious notion turns the
glittering wheels of Rotary, and is the motive power of the political
New Thoughters called Liberals. Certainly the attitude of the average
American Liberal toward the so-called League of Nations offered superb
clinical material to the student of democratic psychopathology. He
began by arguing that the League would save the world. Confronted by
proofs of its fraudulence, he switched to the doctrine that believing
in it would save the world. So, later on, with the Washington
Disarmament Conference. The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in
some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who
detects and exposes the truth. Bear this sweet democratic axiom clearly
in mind. It is, fundamentally, what is the matter with the United
States.
As I say, my present mandate does not oblige me to conjure up a system
that will surpass and shame democracy as democracy surpasses and
shames the polity of the Andaman Islanders or the Great Khan--a system
full-blown and perfect, like Prohibition, and ready to be put into
effect by the simple adoption of an amendment to the Constitution. Such
a system, for all I know, may lie outside the farthest soarings of the
human mind, though that mind can weigh the stars and know God. Until
the end of the chapter the ants and bees may flutter their sardonic
antennæ at us in that department, as they do in others: the last joke
upon man may be that he never learned how to govern himself in a
rational and competent manner, as the last joke upon woman may be that
she never had a baby without wishing that the Day of Judgment were a
week past. I am not even undertaking to prove here that democracy is
too full of evils to be further borne. On the contrary, I am convinced
that it has some valuable merits, not often described, and I shall
refer to a few of them presently. All I argue is that its manifest
defects, if they are ever to be got rid of at all, must be got rid of
by examining them realistically--that they will never cease to afflict
all the more puissant and exemplary nations so long as discussing
them is impeded by concepts borrowed from theology. As for me, I have
never encountered any actual evidence, convincing to an ordinary jury,
that _vox populi_ is actually _vox Dei_. The proofs, indeed, run the
other way. The life of the inferior man is one long protest against
the obstacles that God interposes to the attainment of his dreams,
and democracy, if it is anything at all, is simply one way of getting
’round those obstacles. Thus it represents, not a jingling echo of
what seems to be the divine will, but a raucous defiance of it. To
that extent, perhaps, it is truly civilized, for civilization, as I
have argued elsewhere, is best described as an effort to remedy the
blunders and check the cruel humours of the Cosmic Kaiser. But what is
defiant is surely not official, and what is not official is open to
examination.
For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as
civilization itself seems to be. There are obvious paradoxes in its
philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe
a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making
Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising. I here
attempt no pretty logical gymnastics: the history of democratic states
is a history of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of
that dilemma. There is not only the natural yearning of Doe to use
and enjoy the superiority that he has won; there is also the natural
tendency of Roe, as an inferior man, to acknowledge it. Democracy, in
fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical
abhorrence of them. The baron has departed, but in his place stand the
grand goblin, the supreme worthy archon, the sovereign grand commander.
Democratic man, as I have remarked, is quite unable to think of himself
as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear
and loneliness--and the group, of course, must have its leaders.
It would be hard to find a country in which such brummagem serene
highnesses are revered with more passionate devotion than they get in
the United States. The distinction that goes with mere office runs far
ahead of the distinction that goes with actual achievement. A Harding
is regarded as genuinely superior to a Halsted, no doubt because his
doings are better understood. But there is a form of human striving
that is understood by democratic man even better than Harding’s, and
that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic
state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even
to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different.
It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean
tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above
all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state;
it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most
puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob only yesterday--and
from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities. As practically
encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the _honnête
homme_ as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its
incurable timorousness; it is for ever grasping at the straws held
out by demagogues. Half a dozen gabby Jewish youths, meeting in a
back room to plan a revolution--in other words, half a dozen kittens
preparing to upset the Matterhorn--are enough to scare it half to
death. Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest,
untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its
aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by
accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold
and precious stones, _i. e._, with money. There are, of course,
reactions against this ignoble ideal among men of more civilized
tastes, even in democratic states, and sometimes they arouse the mob
to a transient distrust of certain of the plutocratic pretensions.
But that distrust seldom arises above mere envy, and the polemic
which engenders it is seldom sound in logic or impeccable in motive.
What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic
security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the
strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine
irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another--which is to say, men
chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living
under such terrors, with the plutocracy policing them harshly on one
side and the mob congenitally suspicious of them on the other, it is
no wonder that their revolt usually peters out in metaphysics, and
that they tend to abandon it as their families grow up, and the costs
of heresy become prohibitive. The pedagogue, in the long run, shows
the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the
butler, not those of the aristocrat. When, by any chance, he persists
in contumacy beyond thirty, it is only too commonly a sign, not that
he is heroic, but simply that he is pathological. So with most of
his brethren of the Utopian Fife and Drum Corps, whether they issue
out of his own seminary or out of the wilderness. They are fanatics;
not statesmen. Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself into
impossible alternatives. Whatever the label on the parties, or the war
cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice
is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous
impossibilists on the other. One must either follow the New York
_Times_, or one must be prepared to swallow Bryan and the Bolsheviki.
It is a pity that this is so. For what democracy needs most of all is
a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from
the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good
into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of
liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as
despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same
drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and
installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.
2.
_Last Words_
I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them
is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government
ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon
propositions that are palpably not true--and what is not true, as
everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to
the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that
alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable
romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to
the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting,
and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than
the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is
at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world,
and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter,
which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority
than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a
certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man,
functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to
the world--that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin
herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of
vast and mysterious power--which is what makes archbishops, police
sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes
happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow
wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters--which is what
makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals
happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a
high duty triumphantly done--which is what makes hangmen and husbands
happy.
All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last.
The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God,
is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I
have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naïve
delusion--so beautifully Christian!--that happiness is something to be
got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too,
in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise,
even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against
its fulfilment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula.
Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the
quest for happiness, as always, brings only _un_happiness in the end.
But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy
is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it
seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre.
Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false
pretences! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter
of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a
psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than
any other--more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion.
Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more
characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any
of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If
you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh
on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like
chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulæ, and they
leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.
I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a
self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more:
it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without
being impressed by its curious distrust of itself--its apparently
ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign
of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic
states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes
of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as
simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous
ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson
and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is
this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day
in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it
theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against
liberty, the very corner-stone of its political metaphysic. It not only
wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy
of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill
of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the
modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining
the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for
arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has
been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy
the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a commonplace of every
day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many
amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to
rule the rest of us--but it must be rigorously policed itself. There
is a government, not of men, but of laws--but men are set upon benches
to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function
of the citizen is to serve the state--but the first assumption that
meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his
disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then
the farce only grows the more glorious.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy
immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the
pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of
seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant,
dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are
enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart
of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue
to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is
necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself--that
civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do
not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the
spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat
malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy.
What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels
for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a
show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
THE END
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