There can be few people alive who have not remarked on occasion that
men are the creatures of circumstances. But it is one thing to state a
belief of this sort in some incidental application, and quite another to
realize it completely. Towards such a completer realization we have been
working in these papers, in disentangling the share of inheritance and
of deliberate schooling and training, in the production of the civilized
man. The rest we have to ascribe to his world in general, of which his
home is simply the first and most intimate aspect. In every
developing citizen we have asserted there is a great mass of fluid and
indeterminate possibility, and this sets and is shaped by the world
about him as wax is shaped by a mould. It is rarely, of course, an
absolutely exact and submissive cast that ensues; few men and women are
without some capacity for question and criticism, but it is only
very rare and obdurate material--only, as one says, a very original
personality--that does not finally take its general form and direction
in this way. And it is proposed in this paper to keep this statement
persistently in focus, instead of dismissing it as a platitude and
thinking no more about it at all after the usual fashion, while we
examine certain broad social and political facts and conventions which
constitute the general framework of the world in which the developing
citizen is placed. I would submit that at the present time with regard
to such things as church and kingdom, constitution and nationality, we
are altogether too much enslaved by the idea of “policy,” and altogether
too blind to the remoter, deeper, and more lasting consequences of our
public acts and institutions in moulding the next generation. It
will not, I think, be amiss to pass beyond policy for a space, and to
insist--even with heaviness--that however convenient an institution
may be, however much it may, in the twaddle of the time, be a “natural
growth,” and however much the “product of a long evolution,” yet, if it
does not mould men into fine and vigorous forms, it has to be destroyed.
We “save the state” for the sake of our children, that, at least, is the
New Republican view of the matter, and if in our intentness to save the
state we injure or sacrifice our children, we destroy our ultimate for
our proximate aim.
Already it has been pointed out, with certain concrete instances, how
the thing that is, asserts itself over the thing that is to be; already
a general indication has been made of the trend of the argument we are
now about to develop and define. That argument, briefly, is this, that
to attain the ends of the New Republic, that is to say the best results
from our birth possibilities, we must continually make political
forms, social, political and religious formulæ, and all the rules and
regulations of _life the clearest, simplest, and sincerest expression
possible of what we believe about life and hope about life;_ that
whatever momentary advantage a generation may gain by accepting what
is known to be a sham and a convention, by keeping in use the detected
imposture and the flawed apparatus, is probably much more than made up
for by the reaction of this acquiescence upon the future. As the typical
instance of a convenient convention that I am inclined to think is now
reacting very badly upon our future, the Crown of the British Empire,
considered as the symbolical figurehead of a system of hereditary
privilege and rule, serves extremely well. One may deal with this
typical instance with no special application to the easy, kindly,
amiable personality this crown adorns at the present time. It is a
question that may be dealt with in general terms. What, we would ask,
are the natural, inseparable concomitants of a system of hereditary
rulers in a state, looking at the thing entirely with an eye to the
making of a greater mankind in the world? How does it compare with the
American conception of democratic equality, and how do both stand with
regard to the essential truth and purpose in things? . . .
To state these questions is like opening the door of a room that has
long been locked and deserted. One has a lonely feeling. There are quite
remarkably no other voices here, and the rusty hinges echo down empty
passages that were quite threateningly full of men seventy or eighty
years ago. But I am only one very insignificant member of a class of
inquirers in England who started upon the question “why are we becoming
inefficient?” a year or two ago, and from that starting point it is
I came to this. . . . I do not believe therefore that upon this dusty
threshold I shall stand long alone. We take most calmly the most
miraculous of things, and it is only quite recently that I have come
to see as amazing this fact, that while the greater mass of our
English-speaking people is living under the profession of democratic
Republicanism, there is no party, no sect, no periodical, no teacher
either in Great Britain or America or the Colonies, to hint at a
proposal to abolish the aristocratic and monarchical elements in the
British system. There is no revolutionary spirit over here, and very
little missionary spirit over there. The great mass of the present
generation on both sides of the Atlantic takes hardly any interest
in this issue at all. It is as if the question was an impossible one,
outside the range of thinkable things. Or, as if the last word in this
controversy was said before our grandfathers died.
But is that really so? It is permissible to suggest that for a time the
last word had been said, and still to reopen the discussion now. All
these papers, the very conception of New Republicanism, rests on the
assumption--presumptuous and offensive though it must needs seem to
many--that new matter for thought altogether, new apparatus and methods
of inquiry, and new ends, have come into view since the early seventies,
when the last Republican voices in England died away. We are enormously
more aware of the Future. That, we have already defined as the essential
difference of our new outlook. Our fathers thought of the Kingdom as it
was to them, they contrasted with that the immediate alternative, and
within these limits they were, no doubt, right in rejecting the latter.
So, to them at any rate, the thing seemed judged. But nowadays when we
have said the Kingdom is so and so, and when we have decided that we do
not wish to convert it into a Republic upon the American or any other
existing pattern before Christmas, 1904, we consider we have only begun
to look at the thing. We have then to ask what is the future of the
Kingdom; is it to be a permanent thing, or is it to develop into and
give place to some other condition? We have to ask precisely the same
question about the American democracy and the American constitution.
Is that latter arrangement going to last for ever? We cannot help being
contributory to these developments, and if we have any pretensions to
wisdom at all, we must have some theory of what we intend with regard to
these things; political action can surely be nothing but folly,
unless it has a clear purpose in the future. If these things are not
sempiternal, then are we merely to patch the fabric as it gives way, or
are we going to set about rebuilding--piecemeal, of course, and without
closing the premises or stopping the business, but, nevertheless, on
some clear and comprehensive plan? If so, what is the plan to be? Does
it permit us to retain in a more or less modified form, or does it urge
us to get rid of, the British Crown? Does it permit us to retain or does
it urge us to modify the American constitution? That is the form, it
seems to me, in which the question of Republicanism as an alternative
to existing institutions, must presently return into the field of public
discussion in Great Britain; not as a question of political stability
nor of individual rights this time, but as an aspect of our general
scheme, our scheme to make the world more free and more stimulating
and strengthening for our children and our children’s children; for the
children both of our bodies and of our thoughts.
It is interesting to recall the assumptions under which the last
vestiges of militant Republicanism died out in Great Britain. As late
as the middle years of the reign of Queen Victoria, there were many
in England who were, and who openly professed themselves to be,
Republicans, and there was a widely felt persuasion that the country was
drifting slowly towards the constitution of a democratic republic. In
those days it was that there came into being a theory, strengthened
by the withdrawal of the Monarch from affairs, which one still hears
repeated, that Great Britain was a “crowned republic,” that the crown
was no more than a symbol retained by the “innate good sense” of the
British people, and that in some automatic way not clearly explained,
such old-time vestiges of privilege as the House of Lords would
presently disappear. One finds this confident belief in Progress towards
political equality--Progress that required no human effort, but was
inherent in the scheme of things--very strong in Dickens, for example,
who spoke for the average Englishman as no later writer can be said to
have done. This belief fell in very happily with that disposition
to funk a crisis, that vulgar dread of vulgar action which one must
regretfully admit was all too often a characteristic of the nineteenth
century English. There was an idea among Englishmen that to do anything
whatever of a positive sort to bring about a Republic was not only
totally unnecessary but inevitably mischievous, since it evidently meant
street fighting and provisional government by bold, bad, blood-stained,
vulgar men, in shirt sleeves as the essential features of the process.
And under the enervating influence of this great automatic theory--this
theory that no one need bother because the thing was bound to come, was
indeed already arriving for all who had eyes to see--Republicanism
did not so much die as fall asleep. It was all right, Liberalism told
us--the Crown was a legal fiction, the House of Lords was an interesting
anachronism, and in that faith it was, no doubt, that the last of the
Republicans, Mr. Bright and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, “kissed hands.”
Then, presently, the frantic politics of Mr. Gladstone effected what
probably no other human agency could have contrived, and restored the
prestige of the House of Lords.
Practically the Crown has now gone unchallenged by press, pulpit, or
platform speaker for thirty years, and as a natural consequence there
is just now a smaller proportion of men under forty who call themselves
Republicans even in private than there ever was since Plutarch entered
the circle of English reading. To-day the Aristocratic Monarchy is an
almost universally accepted fact in the British Empire, and it has so
complete an air of unshakable permanence to contrast with its condition
in the early nineteenth century that even the fact that it is the only
really concrete obstacle to a political reunion of the English-speaking
peoples at the present time, seems merely a fact to avoid.
There are certain consequences that must follow from the unchallenged
acceptation of an aristocratic monarchy, consequences that do not seem
to be sufficiently recognized in this connection, and it is to these
that the reader’s attention is now particularly drawn. There are a great
number of British people who are more or less sincerely seeking the
secret of national efficiency at present, and I cannot help thinking
that sooner or later, in spite of their evident aversion, they will be
forced to look into this dusty chamber of thought for the clue to the
thing they need. The corner they will have to turn is the admission
that no state and no people can be at its maximum efficiency until every
public function is discharged by the man best able to perform it, and
that no Commonweal can be near efficiency until it is endeavouring very
earnestly to bring that ideal condition of affairs about. And when
they have got round that corner they will have to face the fact that an
Hereditary Monarchy is a state in which this principle is repudiated
at a cardinal point, a state in which one position, which no amount of
sophistication will prevent common men and women regarding as the most
honourable, powerful, and responsible one of all, which is indeed by
that very fact alone a great and responsible one, is filled on
purely genealogical grounds. In a state that has also an aristocratic
constitution this repudiation of special personal qualities is carried
very much further. Reluctantly but certainly the seeker after national
efficiency will come to the point that the aristocracy and their friends
and connections _must_ necessarily form a caste about the King, that
their gradations _must_ set the tone of the whole social body, and
that their political position must enable them to demand and obtain a
predominating share in any administration that may be formed. So long,
therefore, as your constitution remains aristocratic you must expect
to see men of quite ordinary ability, quite ordinary energy, and
no exceptional force of character, men frequently less clever and
influential than their wives and lady friends, controlling the public
services, a Duke of Norfolk managing so vital a business as the Post
Office and succeeded by a Marquis of Londonderry, and a Marquis of
Lansdowne organizing military affairs, and nothing short of a change
in your political constitution can prevent this sort of thing. No one
believes these excellent gentlemen hold these positions by merit or
capacity, and no one believes that from them we are getting anything
like the best imaginable services in these positions. These positions
are held by the mere accident of birth, and it is by the mere accident
of birth the great mass of Englishmen are shut out from the remotest
hope of serving their country in such positions.
And this evil of reserved places is not restricted by any means to
public control. You cannot both have a system and not have a system,
and the British have a system of hereditary aristocracy that infects the
whole atmosphere of English thought with the persuasion that what a man
may attempt is determined by his caste. It is here, and nowhere else,
that the clue to so much inefficiency as one finds it in contemporary
British activity lies. The officers of the British Army instead of being
sedulously picked from the whole population are drawn from a really
quite small group of families, and, except for those who are called
“gentleman rankers,” to enlist is the very last way in the world to
become a British officer. As a very natural corollary only broken men
and unambitious men of the lowest class will consent to become ordinary
private soldiers, except during periods of extreme patriotic excitement.
The men who enter the Civil Service also, know perfectly well that
though they may possess the most brilliant administrative powers and
develop and use themselves with relentless energy, they will never win
for themselves or their wives one tithe of the public honour that comes
by right to the heir to a dukedom. A dockyard hand who uses his brains
and makes a suggestion that may save the country thousands of pounds
will get--a gratuity.
Throughout all English affairs the suggestion of this political system
has spread. The employer is of a different caste from his workmen,
the captain is of a different caste from his crew, even the Teachers’
Register is specially classified to prevent “young gentlemen” being
taught by the only men who, as a class, know how to teach in England,
namely, the elementary teachers; everywhere the same thing is to be
found. And while it is, it is absurd to expect a few platitudes about
Freedom, and snobbishness, and a few pious hopes about efficiency, to
counteract the system’s universal, incessant teaching, its lesson of
limited effort within defined possibilities. Only under one condition
may such a system rise towards anything that may be called national
vigour, and that is when there exists a vigorous Court which sets the
fashion of hard work. A keen King, indifferent to feminine influence,
may, for a time, make a keen nation, but that is an exceptional state of
affairs, and the whole shape of the fabric gravitates towards relapse.
Even under such an influence the social stratification will still, in
the majority of cases, prevent powers and posts falling to the best
possible man. In the majority of cases the best that can be hoped
for, even then, will be to see the best man in the class privileged in
relation to any particular service, discharging that service. The most
efficient nation in the world to-day is believed to be Germany, which
is--roughly speaking--an aristocratic monarchy, it is dominated by a
man of most unkingly force of character, and by a noble tradition of
educational thoroughness that arose out of the shames of utter defeat,
and, as a consequence, a great number of people contrive to forget that
the most dazzling display of national efficiency the world has ever seen
followed the sloughing of hereditary institutions by France. One credits
Napoleon too often with the vigour of his opportunity, with the force
and strength it was his privilege to misdirect and destroy. And one
forgets that this present German efficiency was paralleled in the
eighteenth century by Prussia, whose aristocratic system first winded
Republicans at Valmy, and showed at Jena fourteen years after how much
it had learnt from that encounter.
Now our main argument lies in this: that the great mass of a generation
of children born into a country, all those children who have no more
than average intelligence and average moral qualities, will accept the
ostensible institutions of that country at their face value, and will
be almost entirely shaped and determined by that acceptance. Only a
sustained undertone of revolutionary protest can prevent that happening.
They will believe that precedences represent real superiority, and they
will honour what they see honoured, and ignore what they see treated
as of no account. Pious sentiment about Equality and Freedom will enter
into the reality of their minds as little as a drop of water into a
greasy plate. They will act as little in general intercourse upon the
proposition that “the man’s the gowd for a’ that,” as they will upon the
proposition that “man is a spirit” when it comes to the alternative of
jumping over a cliff or going down by a ladder.
If, however, your children are not average children, if you are so happy
as to have begotten children of exceptional intelligence, it does not
follow that this fact will save them from conclusions quite parallel to
those of the common child. Suppose they do penetrate the pretence
that there is no intrinsic difference between the Royal Family and the
members of the peerage on the one hand, and the average person in any
other class on the other; suppose they discover that the whole scale of
precedence and honour in their land is a stupendous sham;--what
then? Suppose they see quite clearly that all these pretensions of an
inviolate superiority of birth and breeding vanish at the touch of
a Whitaker Wright, soften to a glowing cordiality before the sunny
promises of a Hooley. Suppose they perceive that neither King nor lords
really believe in their own lordliness, and that at any point in the
system one may find men with hands for any man’s tip, provided it is
only sufficiently large! Even then!--How is that going to react upon our
children’s social conduct?
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they will accept the system still,
they will accept it with mental reservations. They will see that to
repudiate the system by more than a chance word or deed is to become
isolated, to become a discontented alien, to lose even the qualified
permission to do something in the world. In most cases they will take
the oaths that come in their way and kiss the hands--just as the British
elementary teachers bow unbelieving heads to receive the episcopal
pat, and just as the British sceptic in orders will achieve triumphs of
ambiguity to secure the episcopal see. And their reason for submission
will not be absolutely despicable; they will know there is no employment
worth speaking of without it. After all, one has only one life, and it
is not pleasant to pass through it in a state of futile abstinence
from the general scheme. Life, unfortunately, does not end with heroic
moments of repudiation; there comes a morrow to the Everlasting Nay.
One may begin with heroic renunciations and end in undignified envy and
dyspeptic comments outside the door one has slammed on one’s self. In
such reflections your children of the exceptional sort, it may be after
a youthful fling or two, a “ransom” speech or so, will find excellent
reasons for making their peace with things as they are, just as if they
were utterly commonplace. They know that if they can boast a knighthood
or a baronetcy or a Privy Councillorship, they will taste day by day and
every day that respect, that confidence from all about them that no one
but a trained recluse despises. And life will abound in opportunities.
“Oh, well!” they will say. Such things give them influence,
consideration, power to do things.
The beginning of concessions is so entirely reasonable and easy! But
the concessions go on. Each step upward in the British system finds that
system more persistently about them. When one has started out under
a King one may find amiable but whom one may not respect, admitted a
system one does not believe in, when one has rubbed the first bloom off
one’s honour, it is infinitely easier to begin peeling the skin. Many
a man whose youth was a dream of noble things, who was all for splendid
achievements and the service of mankind, peers to-day, by virtue of such
acquiescences, from between preposterous lawn sleeves or under a tilted
coronet, sucked as dry of his essential honour as a spider sucks a fly.
But this is going too far, the reader will object! There must be
concessions, there must be conformities, just as there must be some
impurity in the water we drink and flaws in the beauty we give our
hearts to, and that, no doubt, is true. It is no reason why we should
drink sewage and kneel to grossness and base stupidity. To endure the
worst because we cannot have the best is surely the last word of folly.
Our business as New Republicans is not to waste our lives in the pursuit
of an unattainable chemical purity, but to clear the air as much as
possible. Practical ethics is, after all, a quantitative science. In
the reality of life there are few absolute cases, and it is foolish to
forego a great end for a small concession. But to suffer so much
Royalty and Privilege as an Englishman has to do before he may make any
effectual figure in public life is not a small concession. By the time
you have purchased power you may find you have given up everything that
made power worth having. It would be a small concession, I admit, a
mere personal self-sacrifice, to pretend loyalty, kneel and kiss hands,
assist at Coronation mummeries, and all the rest of it, in order, let us
say, to accomplish some great improvement in the schools of the country,
were it not for the fact that all these things must be done in the sight
of the young, that you cannot kneel to the King without presenting a
kneeling example to the people, without becoming as good a teacher
of servility as though you were servile to the marrow. There lies the
trouble. By virtue of this reaction it is that the shams and ceremonies
we may fancy mere curious survivals, mere kinks and tortuosities, cloaks
and accessories to-day, will, if we are silent and acquiescent, be
halfway to reality again in the course of a generation. To our children
they are not evidently shams; they are powerful working suggestions.
Human institutions are things of life, and whatever weed of falsity lies
still rooted in the ground has the promise and potency of growth. It
will tend perpetually, according to its nature, to recover its old
influence over the imagination, the thoughts, and acts of our children.
Even when the whole trend of economic and social development sets
against the real survival of such a social and political system as
the British, its pretensions, its shape and implications may survive,
survive all the more disastrously because they are increasingly
insincere. Indeed, in a sense, the British system, the pyramid of King,
land-owning and land-ruling aristocracy, yeomen and trading middle-class
and labourers, is dead--it died in the nineteenth century under
the wheels of mechanism [Footnote: I have discussed this fully in
_Anticipations_, Chapter III., Developing Social Elements.]--and the
crude beginnings of a new system are clothed in its raiment, and greatly
encumbered by that clothing. Our greatest peers are shareholders,
are equipped by marriage with the wealth of Jews and Americans, are
exploiters of colonial resources and urban building enterprises; their
territorial titles are a mask and a lie. They hamper the development of
the new order, but they cannot altogether prevent the emergence of
new men. The new men come up to power one by one, from different
enterprises, with various traditions, and one by one, before they can
develop a sense of class distinction and collective responsibility, the
old system with its organized “Society” captures them. If it finds the
man obdurate, it takes his wife and daughters, and it waylays his sons.
[Footnote: It is not only British subjects that are assimilated in this
way, the infection of the British system, the annexation of certain
social strata in the Republic by the British crown, is a question
for every thoughtful American. America is less and less separate from
Europe, and the social development of the United States cannot be
a distinct process--it is inevitably bound up in the general social
development of the English-speaking community. The taint has touched the
American Navy, for example, and there are those who discourage promotion
from the ranks--the essential virtue of the democratic state--because
men so promoted would be at a disadvantage when they met the officers
of foreign navies, who were by birth and training “gentlemen.” When
they met them socially no doubt was meant; in war the disadvantage
might prove the other way about.] Because the hereditary kingdom and
aristocracy of Great Britain is less and less representative of economic
reality, more and more false to the real needs of the world, it does
not follow that it will disappear, any more than malarial fever will
disappear from a man’s blood because it is irrelevant to the general
purpose of his being. These things will only go when a sufficient number
of sufficiently capable and powerful people are determined they shall
go. Until that time they will remain with us, influencing things about
them for evil, as it lies in their nature to do.
Before, however, any sufficiently great and capable body of men can be
found to abolish these shams, these shams that must necessarily hamper
and limit the development of our children, it is necessary that they
should have some clear idea of the thing that is to follow, and the real
security of these obsolete institutions lies very largely in the fact
that at present the thing that is to follow does not define itself.
It is too commonly assumed that the alternative to a more or less
hereditary government is democratic republicanism of the American type,
and the defence of the former consists usually in an indictment of the
latter, complicated in very illogical cases by the assertion (drawn from
the French instance) that Republics are unstable. But it does not follow
that because one condemns the obvious shams of the British system that
one must accept the shams of the United States. While in Great Britain
we have a system that masks and hampers the best of our race under
a series of artificial inequalities, the United States theory of the
essential equality of all men is equally not in accordance with the
reality of life. In America, just as in England, the intelligent
child grows up to discover that the pretensions of public life are not
justified, and quite equally to be flawed in thought and action by that
discovery.
The American atmosphere has one great and indisputable superiority
over the British: it insists upon the right of every citizen, it almost
presents it as a duty, to do all that he possibly can do; it holds out
to him even the highest position in the state as a possible reward for
endeavour. Up to the point of its equality of opportunity surely no
sane Englishman can do anything but envy the American state. In
America “presumption” is not a sin. All the vigorous enterprise that
differentiates the American from the Englishman in business flows quite
naturally from that; all the patriotic force and loyalty of the common
American, which glows beside the English equivalent as the sun beside
the moon, glows even oppressively. But apart from these inestimable
advantages I do not see that the American has much that an Englishman
need envy. There are certainly points of inferiority in the American
atmosphere, influences in development that are bad, not only in
comparison with what is ideally possible, but even in comparison with
English parallels.
For example, the theory that every man is as good as his neighbour, and
possibly a little better, has no check for fools, and instead of the
respectful silences of England there seems--to the ordinary English
mind--an extraordinary quantity of crude and unsound judgments in
America. One gets an impression that the sort of mind that is passively
stupid in England is often actively silly in America, and, as a
consequence, American newspapers, American discussions, American social
affairs are pervaded by a din that in England we do not hear and do not
want to hear. The real and steady development of American scientific men
is masked to the European observer, and it must be greatly hampered by
the copious silliness of the amateur discoverer, and the American crop
of new religions and new enthusiasms is a horror and a warning to
the common British intelligence. Many people whose judgments are not
absolutely despicable hold a theory that unhampered personal freedom for
a hundred years has made out of the British type, a type less deliberate
and thorough in execution and more noisy and pushful in conduct,
restless rather than indefatigable, and smart rather than wise. If
ninety-nine people out of the hundred in our race are vulgar and unwise,
it does seem to be a fact that while the English fool is generally a shy
and negative fool anxious to hide the fact, the American fool is a loud
and positive fool, who swamps much of the greatness of his country to
many a casual observer from Europe altogether. American books, American
papers, American manners and customs seem all for the ninety and nine.
Deeper and graver than the superficial defects of manner and execution
and outlook to which these charges point, there are, one gathers, other
things that are traceable to the same source. There is a report of
profounder troubles in the American social body, of a disease of
corruption that renders American legislatures feeble or powerless
against the great business corporations, and of an extreme
demoralization of the police force. The relation of the local political
organization to the police is fatally direct, and that sense of ordered
subordination to defined duties which distinguishes the best police
forces of Europe fails. Men go into the police force, we are told, with
the full intention of making it pay, of acquiring a saleable power.
There is probably enough soundness in these impressions, and enough
truth in these reports and criticisms, to justify our saying that all
is not ideally right with the American atmosphere, and that it is not
to present American conditions we must turn in repudiating our British
hereditary monarchy. We have to seek some better thing upon which
British and American institutions may converge. The American personal
and social character, just like the English personal and social
character, displays very grave defects, defects that must now be
reflected upon, and must be in course of acquisition by the children who
are growing up in the American state. And since the American is still
predominantly of British descent, and since he has not been separated
long enough from the British to develop distinct inherited racial
characteristics, and, moreover, since his salient characteristics are in
sharp contrast with those of the British, it follows that the difference
in his character and atmosphere must be due mainly to his different
social and political circumstances. Just as the relative defects of the
common British, their apathy, their unreasoning conservatism, and
their sordid scorn of intellectual things is bound up with their
politico-social scheme, so, I believe, the noisiness, the mean
practicalness, and the dyspeptic-driving restlessness that are the
shadows of American life, are bound up with the politico-social
condition of America. The Englishman sticks in the mud, and the
American, with a sort of violent meanness, cuts corners, and in both
cases it is quite conceivable that the failure to follow the perfect way
is really no symptom of a divergence of blood and race, but the
natural and necessary outcome of the mass of suggestion about them that
constitutes their respective worlds.
The young American grows up into a world pervaded by the theory of
democracy, by the theory that all men must have an equal chance of
happiness, possessions, and power, and in which that theory is expressed
by a uniform equal suffrage. No man shall have any power or authority
save by the free consent and delegation of his fellows--that is the
idea--and to the originators of this theory it seemed as obvious as
anything could be that these suffrages would only be given to those who
did really serve the happiness and welfare of the greatest number. The
idea was reflected in the world of business by a conception of free
competition; no man should grow rich except by the free preference of
a great following of customers. Such is still the American theory, and
directly the intelligent young American grows up to hard facts he finds
almost as much disillusionment as the intelligent young Englishman. He
finds that in practice the free choice of a constituency reduces to two
candidates, and no more, selected by party organizations, and the free
choice of the customer to the goods proffered by a diminishing number
of elaborately advertised businesses; he finds political instruments
and business corporations interlocking altogether beyond his power of
control, and that the two ways to opportunity, honour, and reward are
either to appeal coarsely to the commonest thoughts and feelings of the
vulgar as a political agitator or advertising trader, or else to make
his peace with those who do. And so he, too, makes his concessions. They
are different concessions from those of the young Englishman, but they
have this common element of gravity, that he has to submit to conditions
in which he does not believe, he has to trim his course to a conception
of living that is perpetually bending him from the splendid and
righteous way. The Englishman grows up into a world of barriers and
locked doors, the American into an unorganized, struggling crowd. There
is an enormous premium in the American’s world upon force and dexterity,
and force in the case of common men too often degenerates into
brutality, and dexterity into downright trickery and cheating. He has
got to be forcible and dexterous within his self-respect if he can.
There is an enormous discount on any work that does not make money or
give a tangible result, and except in the case of those whose lot has
fallen within certain prescribed circles, certain oases of organized
culture and work, he must advertise himself even in science or
literature or art as if he were a pill. There is no recognition for him
at all in the world, except the recognition of--everybody. There will
be neither comfort nor the barest respect for him, however fine his
achievement, unless he makes his achievement known, unless he can
make enough din about it, to pay. He has got to shout down ninety-nine
shouting fellow-citizens. That is the cardinal fact in life for the
great majority of Americans who respond to the stirrings of ambition.
If in Britain capacity is discouraged because honours and power go by
prescription, in America it is misdirected because honours do not
exist and power goes by popular election and advertisement. In certain
directions--not by any means in all--unobtrusive merit, soundness of
quality that has neither gift nor disposition for “push,” has a better
chance in Great Britain than in America. A sort of duty to help and
advance exceptional men is recognized at any rate, even if it is not
always efficiently discharged, by the privileged class in England, while
in America it is far more acutely felt, far more distinctly impressed
upon the young that they must “hustle” or perish.
It will be argued that this enumeration of American and British defects
is a mere expansion of that familiar proposition of the logic textbooks,
“all men are mortal.” You have here, says the objector, one of
two alternatives, either you must draw your administrators, your
legislators, your sources of honour and reward from a limited,
hereditary, and specially-trained class, who will hold power as a right,
or you must rely upon the popular choice exercised in the shop and at
the polling booth. What else can you have but inheritance or election,
or some blend of the two, blending their faults? Each system has its
disadvantages, and the disadvantages of each system may be minimized by
education; in particular by keeping the culture and code of honour of
your ruling class high in the former case and by keeping your common
schools efficient in the latter. But the essential evils of each system
are--essential evils, and one has to suffer them and struggle against
them, as one has to struggle perpetually with the pathogenic bacteria
that infest the world. The theory of monarchy is, no doubt, inferior to
the democratic theory in stimulus, but the latter fails in qualitative
effect, much more than the former. There, the objector submits, lies the
quintessence of the matter. Both systems need watching, need criticism,
the pruning knife and the stimulant, and neither is bad enough to
justify a revolutionary change to the other. In some such conclusion as
this most of the English people with whom one can discuss this question
have come to rest, and it is to this way of looking at the matter that
one must ascribe the apathetic acquiescence in the British hereditary
system, upon which I have already remarked. There is a frank and
excessive admission of every real and imaginary fault of the American
system, and with the proposition that we are on the horns of a dilemma,
the discussion is dismissed.
But are we indeed on the horns of a dilemma, and is there no alternative
to hereditary government tempered by elections, or government by the
ward politician and the polling booth? Cannot we have that sense and
tradition of equal opportunity for all who are born into this world,
that generous and complete acknowledgment of the principle of promotion
from the ranks that is the precious birthright of the American,
without the political gerrymandering, the practical falsification, that
restricts that general freedom at last only to the energetic, and that
subordinates quality to quantity in every affair of life? It is evident
that for the New Republican to admit that the thing is indeed a dilemma,
that there is nothing for it but to make the best of whichever bad thing
we have at hand, that we cannot have all we desire but only a greater
or a lesser moiety, is a most melancholy and hampering admission.
And, certainly, no New Republican will agree without a certain mental
struggle, without a thorough and earnest inquiry into the possibility of
a third direction.
This matter has two aspects, it presents itself as two questions; the
question first of all of administration, and the question of honour and
privilege. What is it that the New Republican idea really requires in
these two matters? In the matter of administration it requires that
every child growing up in a state should feel that he is part owner of
his state, completely free in his membership, and equal in opportunity
to all other children--and it also wants to secure the management of
affairs in the hands of the very best men, not the noisiest, not the
richest or most skilfully advertised, but the best. Can these two things
be reconciled? In the matter of honour and privilege, the New Republican
idea requires a separation of honour from notoriety; it requires some
visible and forcible expression of the essential conception that there
are things more honourable than getting either votes or money; it
requires a class and distinctions and privileges embodying that
idea--and also it wants to ensure that through the whole range of life
there shall not be one door locked against the effort of the citizen to
accomplish the best that is in him. Can these two things be reconciled
also?
I have the temerity to think that in both cases the conflicting
requirements can be reconciled far more completely than is commonly
supposed.
Let us take, first of all, the question of the reconciliation as it is
presented in the administration of public affairs. The days have come
when the most democratic-minded of men must begin to admit that the
appointment of all rulers and officials by polling the manhood, or most
of the manhood, of a country does not work--let us say perfectly--and at
no level of educational efficiency does it ever seem likely to work in
the way those who established it hoped. By thousands of the most varied
experiments the nineteenth century has proved this up to the hilt. The
fact that elections can only be worked as a choice between two selected
candidates, or groups of candidates, is the unforeseen and unavoidable
mechanical defect of all electoral methods with large electorates.
Education has nothing to do with that. The elections for the English
University members are manipulated just as much as the elections in the
least literate of the Irish constituencies. [Footnote: There is a very
suggestive book on this aspect of our general question, _The Crowd_, by
M. Gustave le Bon, which should interest any one who finds this paper
interesting. And the English reader who would like a fuller treatment
of this question has now available also Ostrogorski’s great work,
_Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties_.] It is not a
question of accidentals, but a question of the essential mechanism. Men
have sought out and considered all sorts of devices for qualifying the
present method by polling; Mills’s plural voting for educated men will
occur to the reader; Hare’s system of vote collection, and the negative
voting of Doctor Grece; and the defects of these inventions have been
sufficiently obvious to prevent even a trial. The changes have been
rung upon methods of counting; cumulative votes and the prohibition of
plumping, and so on, have been tried without any essential modification
of the results. There are various devices for introducing “stages” in
the electoral process; the constituency elects electors, who elect the
rulers and officers, for example, and there is also that futile attempt
to bring in the non-political specialist, the method of electing
governing bodies with power to “co-opt.” Of course they “co-opt”
their fellow politicians, rejected candidates, and so on. Among other
expedients that people have discussed, are such as would make it
necessary for a man to take some trouble and display some foresight to
get registered as a voter or to pass an examination to that end, and
such as would confront him with a voting paper so complex, that only a
very intelligent and painstaking man would be able to fill it up without
disqualification. It certainly seems a reasonable thing to require that
the voter should be able at least to write out fully and spell correctly
the name of the man of his choice. Except for the last, there is
scarcely any of these things but its adoption would strengthen the power
of the political organizer, which they aim to defeat. Any complication
increases the need and the power of organization. It is possible
to believe--the writer believes--that with all this burthen of
shortcomings, the democratic election system is still, on the whole,
better than a system of hereditary privilege, but that is no reason for
concealing how defective and disappointing its practical outcome has
been, nor for resting contented with it in its present form. [Footnote:
The statement of the case is not complete unless we mention that, to the
method of rule by hereditary rulers and the appointment of officials
by noble patrons on the one hand, and of rule by politicians exercising
patronage on the other, there is added in the British system the Chinese
method of selecting officials by competitive examination. Within its
limits this has worked as a most admirable corrective to patronage;
it is one of the chief factors in the cleanhandedness of British
politicians, and it is continually importing fresh young men from
outside to keep officialdom in touch with the general educated world.
But it does not apply, and it does not seem applicable, to the broader
issues of politics, to the appointment and endorsement of responsible
rulers and legislators, where a score of qualities are of more
importance than those an examination can gauge.]
Is polling really essential to the democratic idea? That is the question
now very earnestly put to the reader. We are so terribly under the spell
of established conditions, we are all so obsessed by the persuasion that
the only conceivable way in which a man can be expressed politically is
by himself voting in person, that we do all of us habitually overlook
a possibility, a third choice, that lies ready to our hands. There is
a way by means of which the indisputable evils of democratic
government may be very greatly diminished, without destroying or even
diminishing--indeed, rather enhancing--that invigorating sense of
unhampered possibilities, that the democratic idea involves. There is
a way of choosing your public servants of all sorts and effectually
controlling public affairs on perfectly sound democratic principles,
_without ever having such a thing as an election, as it is now
understood, at all_, a way which will permit of a deliberate choice
between numerous candidates--a thing utterly impossible under the
current system--which will certainly raise the average quality of our
legislators, and be infinitely saner, juster, and more deliberate than
our present method. And, moreover, it is a way that is typically the
invention of the English people, and which they use to-day in another
precisely parallel application, an application which they have
elaborately tested and developed through a period of at least seven or
eight hundred years, and which I must confess myself amazed to think
has not already been applied to our public needs. This way is the Jury
system. The Jury system was devised to meet almost exactly the same
problem that faces us to-day, the problem of how on the one hand to
avoid putting a man’s life or property into the hands of a Ruler, a
privileged person, whose interest might be unsympathetic or hostile,
while on the other protecting him from the tumultuous judgments of a
crowd--to save the accused from the arbitrary will of King and Noble
without flinging him to the mob. To-day it is exactly that problem
over again that our peoples have to solve, except that instead of one
individual affair we have now our general affairs to place under a
parallel system. As the community that had originally been small enough
and intimate enough to decide on the guilt or innocence of its members
grew to difficult proportions, there developed this system of selecting
by lot a number of its common citizens who were sworn, who were
then specially instructed and prepared, and who, in an atmosphere of
solemnity and responsibility in absolute contrast with the uproar of
a public polling, considered the case and condemned or discharged the
accused. Let me point out that this method is so universally recognized
as superior to the common electoral method that any one who should
propose to-day to take the fate of a man accused of murder out of the
hands of a jury and place it in the hands of any British or American
constituency whatever, even in the hands of such a highly intelligent
constituency as one of the British universities, would be thought to be
carrying crankiness beyond the border line of sanity.
Why then should we not apply the Jury system to the electoral riddle?
Suppose, for example, at the end of the Parliamentary term, instead of
the present method of electing a member of Parliament, we were, with
every precaution of publicity and with the most ingeniously impartial
machine that could be invented, to select a Jury by lot, a Jury
sufficiently numerous to be reasonably representative of the general
feeling of the community and sufficiently small to be able to talk
easily together and to do the business without debating society
methods--between twenty and thirty, I think, might be a good working
number--and suppose we were, after a ceremony of swearing them and
perhaps after prayer or after a grave and dignified address to them
upon the duty that lay before them, to place each of these juries in
comfortable quarters for a few days and isolated from the world, to
choose its legislator. They could hear, in public, under a time limit,
the addresses of such candidates as had presented themselves, and they
could receive, under a limit of length and with proper precautions for
publicity, such documents as the candidates chose to submit. They could
also, in public, put any questions they chose to the candidates to
elucidate their intentions or their antecedents, and they might at any
stage decide unanimously to hear no more of and to dismiss this or that
candidate who encumbered their deliberations. (This latter would be
an effectual way of suppressing the candidature of cranks, and of
half-witted and merely symbolical persons.) The Jury between and after
their interrogations and audiences would withdraw from the public room
to deliberate in privacy. Their deliberations which, of course, would
be frank and conversational to a degree impossible under any other
conditions, and free from the dodges of the expert vote manipulator
altogether, would, for example, in the case of several candidates of
the same or similar political colours, do away with the absurdity of
the split vote. The jurymen of the same political hue could settle that
affair among themselves before contributing to a final decision.
This Jury might have certain powers of inquest. Provision might be made
for pleas against particular candidates; private individuals or the
advocates of vigilance societies might appear against any particular
candidate and submit the facts about any doubtful affair, financial or
otherwise, in which that candidate had been involved. Witnesses might be
called and heard on any question of fact, and the implicated candidate
would explain his conduct. And at any stage the Jury might stop
proceedings and report its selection for the vacant post. Then, at the
expiration of a reasonable period, a year perhaps, or three years
or seven years, another Jury might be summoned to decide whether the
sitting member should continue in office unchallenged or be subjected to
a fresh contest.
This suggestion is advanced here in this concrete form merely to show
the sort of thing that might be done; it is one sample suggestion, one
of a great number of possible schemes of Election by Jury. But even in
this state of crude suggestion, it is submitted that it does serve to
show the practicability of a method of election more deliberate and
thorough, more dignified, more calculated to impress the new generation
with a sense of the gravity of the public choice, and infinitely more
likely to give us good rulers than the present method, and that it would
do so without sacrificing any essential good quality whatever inherent
in the Democratic Idea. [Footnote: There are excellent possibilities,
both in the United States and in this Empire, of trying over such a
method as this, and of introducing it tentatively and piecemeal. In
Great Britain already there are quite different methods of election for
Parliament existing side by side. In the Hythe division of Kent, for
example, I vote by ballot with elaborate secrecy; in the University
of London I declare my vote in a room full of people. The British
University constituencies, or one of them, might very readily be used as
a practical test of this jury suggestion. There is nothing, I believe,
in the Constitution of the United States to prevent any one State
resorting to this characteristically Anglo-Saxon method of appointing
its representatives in Congress. It is not only in political
institutions that the method may be tried. Any societies or institutions
that have to send delegates to a conference or meeting might very easily
bring this conception to a practical test. Even if it does not prove
practicable as a substitute for election by polling, it might be found
of some value for the appointment of members of the specialist type, for
whom at present we generally resort to co-option. In many cases where
the selection of specialists was desirable to complete public bodies,
juries of educated men of the British Grand Jury type might be highly
serviceable.] The case for the use of the Jury system becomes far
stronger when we apply it to such problems as we now attempt to solve by
co-opting experts upon various administrative bodies.
The necessity either of raising the quality of representative bodies
or of replacing them not only in administration but in legislation by
bureaucracies of officials appointed by elected or hereditary rulers, is
one that presses on all thoughtful men, and is by no means an academic
question needed to round off this New Republican theory. The necessity
becomes more urgent every day, as scientific and economic developments
raise first one affair and then another to the level of public or
quasi-public functions. In the last century, locomotion, lighting,
heating, education, forced themselves upon public control or public
management, and now with the development of Trusts a whole host of
businesses, that were once the affair of competing private concerns,
claim the same attention. Government by hustings’ bawling, newspaper
clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more
impotent, and unless we are prepared to see a government _de facto_
of rich business organizers override the government _de jure_, or to
relapse upon a practical oligarchy of officials, an oligarchy that
will certainly decline in efficiency in a generation or so, we must set
ourselves most earnestly to this problem of improving representative
methods. It is in the direction of the substitution of the Jury method
for a general poll that the only practicable line of improvement known
to the present writer seems to lie, and until it has been tried it
cannot be conceded that democratic government has been tried and
exhaustively proved inadequate to the complex needs of the modern state.
So much for the question of administration. We come now to a second need
in the modern state if it is to get the best result from the citizens
born into it, and that is the need of honours and privileges to reward
and enhance services and exceptional personal qualities and so to stir
and ennoble that emulation which is, under proper direction, the most
useful to the constructive statesman of all human motives. In the United
States titles are prohibited by the constitution, in Great Britain they
go by prescription. But it is possible to imagine titles and privileges
that are not hereditary, and that would be real symbols of human worth
entirely in accordance with the Republican Idea. It is one of the
stock charges against Republicanism that success in America is either
political or financial. In England, in addition, success is also
social, and there is, one must admit, a sort of recognition accorded to
intellectual achievement, which some American scientific men have found
reason to envy. In America, of course, just as in Great Britain,
there exists that very enviable distinction, the honorary degree of a
university; but in America it is tainted by the freedom with which bogus
universities can be organized, and by the unchallenged assumptions of
quacks. In Great Britain the honorary degree of a university, in spite
of the fact that it goes almost as a matter of course to every casual
Prince, is a highly desirable recognition of public services.
Beyond this there are certain British distinctions that might very
advantageously be paralleled in America, the Fellowship of the Royal
Society, for example, and that really very fine honour, as yet untainted
by the class of men who tout for baronetcies and peerages, the Privy
Council.
There are certain points in this question that are too often overlooked.
In the first place, _honours and titles need not be hereditary_; in the
second, _they need not be conferred by the political administration_;
and, in the third, they are not only--as the French Legion of Honour
shows--entirely compatible with, but _they are a necessary complement to
the Republican Idea_.
The bad results of entrusting honours to the Government are equally
obvious in France and Great Britain. They are predominantly given, quite
naturally, for political services, because they are given by politicians
too absorbed to be aware of men outside the political world. In Great
Britain the process is modified rather than improved by what one knows
as court influence. And in spite of the real and sustained efficiency of
the Royal Society in distinguishing meritorious scientific workers, the
French Academy, which has long been captured by aristocratic dilettanti,
and the English Royal Academy of Arts, demonstrate the essential defects
and dangers of a body which fills its own gaps. But there is no reason
why a national system of honours and titles should not be worked upon
a quite new basis, suggested by these various considerations. Let
us, simply for tangibleness, put the thing as a concrete plan for the
reader’s consideration.
There might, for example, be a lowest stage which would include--as
the English knighthood once included--almost every citizen capable
of initiative, all the university graduates, all the men qualified to
practice the responsible professions, all qualified teachers, all
the men in the Army and Navy promoted to a certain rank, all seamen
qualified to navigate a vessel, all the ministers recognized by properly
organized religious bodies, all public officials exercising command;
quasi-public organizations might nominate a certain proportion of their
staffs, and organized trade-unions with any claim to skill, a certain
proportion of their men, their “decent” men, and every artist or writer
who could submit a passable diploma work; it would be, in fact, a mark
set upon every man or woman who was qualified to do something or who had
done something, as distinguished from the man who had done nothing in
the world, the mere common unenterprising esurient man. It might carry
many little privileges in public matters--for instance, it might qualify
for certain electoral juries. And from this class the next rank might
easily be drawn in a variety of ways. _In a modern democratic state
there must be many fountains of honour._ That is a necessity upon
which one cannot insist too much. There must be no court, no gang,
no traditional inalterable tribunal. Local legislative bodies, for
example,--in America, state legislatures and in England, county
councils,--might confer rank on a limited number of men or women yearly;
juries drawn from certain special constituencies, from the roll of the
medical profession, or from the Army, might assemble periodically to
nominate their professional best, the Foreign or Colonial Office might
confer recognition for political services, the university governing
bodies might be entrusted with the power--just as in the middle ages
many great men could confer knighthood. From among these distinguished
gentlemen of the second grade still higher ranks might be drawn. Local
juries might select a local chief dignitary as their “earl,” let us say,
from among the resident men of rank, and there is no reason why certain
great constituencies, the medical calling, the engineers, should not
specify one or two of their professional leaders, their “dukes.” There
are many occasions of local importance when an honourable figure-head is
needed. The British fall back on the local hereditary peer or invite a
prince, too often some poor creature great only by convention--and what
the Americans do I do not know, unless they use a Boss. There are
many occasions of something more than ceremonial importance when
a responsible man publicly honoured and publicly known, and not a
professional politician, is of the utmost convenience. And there are
endless affairs, lists, gatherings, when the only alternative to rank is
scramble. For myself I would not draw the line at such minor occasions
for precedence. A Second Chamber is an essential part of the political
scheme of all the English-speaking communities, and almost always it is
intended to present stabler interests and a smaller and more selected
constituency than the lower house. From such a life nobility as I
have sketched a Second Chamber could be drawn much as the Irish
representative peers in the House of Lords are drawn from the general
peerage of Ireland. It would be far less party bound and far less
mercenary than the American Senate, and far more intelligent and capable
than the British House of Lords. And either of these bodies could be
brought under a process of deliberate conversion in this direction with
scarcely any revolutionary shock at all. [Footnote: In the case of the
House of Lords, for example, the process of conversion might begin by
extending the Scotch and Irish system to England, and substituting a
lesser number of representative peers for the existing English peerage.
Then it would merely revive a question that was already under discussion
in middle Victorian times, to create non-hereditary peerages in the
three kingdoms. The several Privy Councils might next be added to the
three national constituencies by which and from which the representative
peers were appointed, and then advisory boards might be called from the
various Universities and organized professions, and from authoritative
Colonial bodies to recommend men to be added to the voting peerage. Life
peers already exist. The law is represented by life peers. The lords
spiritual are representative life peers--they are the senior bishops,
and they are appointed to represent a corporation--the Established
Church. So a generally non-hereditary functional nobility might come
into being without any violent break with the present condition of
things. The conversion of the American Senate would be a more
difficult matter, because the method of appointment of Senators is more
stereotyped altogether, and, since 1800, unhappily quite bound up with
the political party system. The Senate is not a body of varied and
fluctuating origins into which new elements can be quietly inserted. An
English writer cannot estimate how dear the sacred brace of Senators for
each State may or may not be to the American heart. But the possibility
of Congress delegating the power to appoint additional Senators to
certain non-political bodies, or to juries of a specific constitution,
is at least thinkable as the beginning of a movement that would come at
last into parallelism with that in the British Empire.]
When these issues of public honour and efficient democratic
administration have begun to move towards a definite solution, the
community will be in a position to extend the operation of the new
methods towards a profounder revolution, the control of private
property. “We are all Socialists nowadays,” and it is needless,
therefore, to argue here at any length to establish the fact that beyond
quite personal belongings all Property is the creation of society, and
in reality no more than an administrative device. At present, in spite
of some quite hideous and mischievous local aspects, the institution
of Property, even in land and the shares of quasi-public businesses,
probably gives as efficient a method of control, and even it may be
a more efficient method of control than any that could be devised to
replace it under existing conditions. We have no public bodies and
no methods of check and control sufficiently trustworthy to justify
extensive expropriations. Even the municipalization of industries
needs to go slowly until municipal areas have been brought more into
conformity with the conditions of efficient administration. Areas too
cramped and areas that overlap spell waste and conflicting authorities,
and premature municipalization in such areas will lead only to the
final triumph of the private company. Political efficiency must precede
Socialism. [Footnote: See Appendix I. ] But there can be no doubt that
the spectacle of irresponsible property is a terribly demoralizing force
in the development of each generation. It is idle to deny that
Property, both in Great Britain and America, works out into a practical
repudiation of that equality, political democracy so eloquently asserts.
There is a fatalistic submission to inferiority on the part of an
overwhelming majority of those born poor, they hold themselves cheap in
countless ways, and they accept as natural the use of wealth for wanton
pleasure and purposes absolutely mischievous, they despair of effort in
the public service, and find their only hope in gambling, sharp greedy
trading, or in base acquiescences to the rich. The good New Republican
can only regard our present system of Property as a terribly
unsatisfactory expedient and seek with all his power to develop a better
order to replace it.
There are certain lines of action in this matter that cannot but be
beneficial, and it is upon these that the New Republican will, no doubt,
go. One excellent thing, for example, would be to insist that beyond
the limits of a reasonable amount of personal property, the community
is justified in demanding a much higher degree of efficiency in the
property-holder than in the case of the common citizen, to require him
or her to be not only sane but capable, equal mentally and bodily to a
great charge. The heir to a great property should possess a satisfactory
knowledge of social and economic science, and should have studied with
a view to his great responsibilities. The age of twenty-one is scarcely
high enough for the management of a great estate, and to raise the
age of free administration for the owners of great properties, and to
specify a superannuation age would be a wise and justifiable measure.
[Footnote: Something of the sort is already secured in France by the
power of the _Conseil de Famille_ to expropriate a spendthrift.]
There should also be a possibility of intervention in the case of
maladministration, and a code of offences--habitual drunkenness, for
example, assaults of various kinds--offences that established the fact
of unfitness and resulted in deposition, might be drawn up. It might be
found desirable in the case of certain crimes and misdemeanours, to add
to existing penalties the transfer of all real or share properties to
trustees. Vigorous confiscation is a particularly logical punishment for
the proven corruption of public officers by any property owner or group
of property owners. Rich men who bribe are a danger to any state. Beyond
the limits of lunacy it might be possible to define a condition of
malignancy or ruthlessness that would justify confiscation, attempts to
form corners in the necessities of life, for example, could be taken
as evidence of such a condition. All such measures as this would be
far more beneficial than the immediate improvement they would effect
in public management. They would infect the whole social body with the
sense that property was saturated with responsibility and was in effect
a trust, and that would be a good influence upon rich and poor alike.
Moreover, as public bodies became more efficient and more trustworthy,
the principle already established in British social polity by Sir
William Vernon Harcourt’s Death Duties, the principle of whittling great
properties at each transfer, might be very materially extended. Every
transfer of property might establish a state mortgage for some fraction
of the value of that property. The fraction might be small when the
recipient was a public institution, considerable in the case of a son or
daughter, and almost all for a distant relative or no kindred at all. By
such devices the evil influence of property acquired by mere accidents
would be reduced without any great discouragement of energetic,
enterprising, and inventive men. And a man ambitious to found a family
might still found one if he took care to marry wisely and train and
educate his children to the level of the position he designed for them.
While the New Republican brings such expedients as this to bear upon
property from above, there will also be the expedients of the Minimum
Wage and the Minimum Standard of Life, already discussed in the third of
these papers, controlling it from below. Limited in this way, property
will resemble a river that once swamped a whole country-side, but has
now been banked within its channel. Even when these expedients have been
exhaustively worked out, they will fall far short of that “abolition of
property” which is the crude expression of Socialism. There is a certain
measure of property in a state which involves the maximum of individual
freedom. Either above or below that Optimum one passes towards slavery.
The New Republican is a New Republican, and he tests all things by their
effect upon the evolution of man; he is a Socialist or an Individualist,
a Free Trader or a Protectionist, a Republican or a Democrat just so
far, and only so far, as these various principles of public policy
subserve his greater end.
This crude sketch of a possible scheme of honour and privilege, and
of an approximation towards the socialization of property will, at any
rate, show that in this matter, as in the matter of political control,
the alternative of the British system or the American system does not
exhaust human possibilities. There is also the Twentieth Century System,
which we New Republicans have to discover and discuss and bring to the
test of experience. And for the sake of the education of our children,
which is the cardinal business of our lives, we must refuse all
convenient legal fictions and underhand ways, and see to it that the
system is as true to the reality of life and to right and justice as we
can, in our light and generation, make it. The child must learn not only
from preacher and parent and book, but from the whole frame and order
of life about it, that truth and sound living and service are the only
trustworthy ways to either honour or power, and that, save for the
unavoidable accidents of life, they are very certain ways. And then
he will have a fair chance to grow up neither a smart and hustling
cheat--for the American at his worst is no more and no less than
that--nor a sluggish disingenuous snob--as the Briton too often
becomes--but a proud, ambitious, clean-handed, and capable man.