One evening not long since, in a certain New York club of authors and
scholars, the conversation turned, as it is so accustomed to turn, on
the politics of the day; and we were astonished when one of the
circle, a distinguished student of sociology well-known for his
radical opinions, said with conviction and emphasis that we were
talking of little things and that the one great question of the day
was whether a democratic society could develop a natural aristocracy.
By chance I had with me that night an excellent new book on _The
Political Philosophy of Burke_, by Prof. John MacCunn, late of the
University of Liverpool, and as we left the club I showed it to one of
my fellow writers with a word of commendation. "Ah," he said, handing
it back unopened, "Burke! he's dead, isn't he?" Well, Burke, I dare
say, is dead for us, as so many other great memories have perished,
and Lord Morley (plain John Morley then, a fairly practical statesman)
was indulging in the usual illusion of the biographer when, just
twenty-five years ago, he closed his luminous volume with the prophecy
that "the historic method, fitting in with certain dominant
conceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men round to
a way of looking at society for which Burke's maxims are exactly
suited; and it seems probable that he will be more frequently and more
seriously referred to within the next twenty years than he has been
within the whole of the last eighty." The historic method has an odd
way of discrediting the authority of history, and certainly in the
lustrum since Lord Morley's predicted score of years the world of
Lloyd George and Mr. Roosevelt has not been referring abundantly to
Burke's maxims. Yet, with the words of my radical sociological friend
in my ears, I could not help reflecting on the coincidence that
Professor MacCunn, a writer thoroughly imbued with modern ideas,
should have led the whole of Burke's political philosophy up to the
same question of natural aristocracy. "For Burke's feet," he says,
"were never on surer ground than when, as we have seen, he argued that
a civil society, by the very conditions of social struggle and growth,
must needs evolve 'a natural aristocracy, without which there is no
nation.'" And then, being sufficiently trained in the historic method,
he proceeds to show how Burke entirely missed the real problem that
faces society to-day in its effort to create such a leadership--as if
human nature had first sprung into existence with the Reform Bill.
Of the urgency of the problem a reflective man will scarcely doubt.
The only thing, in fact, that might lead him to question its urgency
is its hoary antiquity. Plato wrestled with it when he undertook to
outline the ideal republic, and many of his pages on the range of
government through its five forms--aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy,
democracy, and tyranny--sound as if he had been reading yesterday's
newspapers of London and New York. In the orgy of misrule that brought
Athens to humiliation in the last years of the Peloponnesian war he
had seen oligarchs and democrats tearing at each other's throats like
mad dogs; he had seen the disastrous triumph of the democratic party,
and, knowing its instability, he had composed the long dialogue of
_The Republic_ to show how, if possible, it might be saved from
impending tyranny. He wrote, so far as the public was concerned, in a
spirit of despair, almost as if foreseeing the domination of an
Alexander and the cold despotism of Rome; and in that saddened
scepticism he was thinking more of holding up the aristocratic
principle of balance and restraint before the happier individual soul,
and establishing the idea of justice for any pious seeker of the
future, than of creating an actual commonwealth. Yet, however his
application of the law of the individual to the machinery of politics
may appear at times fantastic, his argument never really gets far from
the everlasting questions of government.
The oligarchy which he knew and described was what we should rather
call a plutocracy. He had in mind a State in which, "instead of loving
contention and honor [as under a timocracy], men become lovers of
money and business, and they praise and admire the rich man and confer
office upon him, but despise the poor man." "And such a State," he
adds, "will necessarily be not one but two States, one of the poor,
the other of the rich, who are living in the same place and always
plotting against each other." And when in such a society the disposers
of wealth proceed from privilege to insolence and folly, and on their
side the many have lost the sense of reverence and at the same time
have become aware of the sheer power of numbers, then the plutocratic
State is converted to the true democracy, the unbridled sway of the
majority. The change is like that which comes to a rich young man who,
forgetting the discipline of necessity, passes into the libertinism of
indulgence. He will hearken to no word of advice; and if anyone tells
him there is a distinction among pleasures, that some are the
satisfaction of gross and ignoble desires and others are the
satisfaction of good and useful desires, he shakes his head in
superiority, and swears that all pleasures are alike. So the
oligarchical faction loses its power and position; and the democracy
in its turn follows the same path, despising the constraint of
authority and the guidance of experience, caught by the lure of
indiscriminate pleasure. "The father comes down to the level of the
son, being afraid of his children, and the son is on a level with his
father, having no shame or fear of his parents.... So the schoolmaster
fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their
masters and tutors; and, in general, young and old are alike, the
young competing with the old in speech and action, and the old men
condescending to the young in their gay and easy manners, from dread
of being thought morose and dictatorial."
Then arises the problem which confronted the State in Plato's day, as
it did in Burke's, and which may not seem entirely irrelevant to the
watcher of to-day: How shall the people be saved from themselves? How,
indeed? To Plato, who beheld the future as in a vision, the actual
historic answer was a gloomy picture of the change from license to
tyranny. His account of the impending fall can never lose its fresh
interest:--
When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil
cup-bearers presiding over the feast, then, unless her rulers are
very amenable and give a plentiful draft, she calls them to
account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed
oligarchs. And loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her
slaves who hug their chains; she would have subjects who are like
rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are the men whom
she praises and honors both in private and public.
By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends
by getting among the animals and infecting them. Nor must I
forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in
relation to each other. And I must add that no one who does not
know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the
animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy
than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb
says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and
asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and
dignities of freemen; and they will run at anybody who comes in
their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all
things are just ready to burst with liberty.
The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same desire
magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy--the
truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes
a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not
only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above
all in forms of government. The excess of liberty, whether in
States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most
aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme
form of liberty.
Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and
nurse into greatness. This is he who begins to make a party
against the rich. After a while he is driven out, but comes back,
in spite of his enemies, a tyrant full grown. Then comes the
famous request for a body-guard--"Let not the people's friend,"
as they say, "be lost to them." (Jowett, condensed.)
One escape from this fatal declension Plato saw--that, by the working
of the inner law of self-restraint or by some divine interposition,
the people should, before it was too late, be turned to hearken to
their natural leaders, and the State should thus develop from anarchy
into a true aristocracy. The question, then or at any time, is not
whether there shall be leaders, but of what character these leaders
shall be. There was the brawling tribe of demagogues and sycophants in
the Athenian democracy, as there have been at other times of
licentious upheaval. And the character of these men is always the
same: they lead by flattery and by clamorous justification of the
passing wave of desire. The aristocratic leaders whom Plato had in
mind, and whom, for the confusion of posterity, he called
philosophers, were of the very opposite sort, being men who should
guide by imposing their authority and experience on the impulsive
emotions of the multitude. They should be politicians who might dare
the displeasure of the people, as Burke dared his constituents at
Bristol: "The very attempt towards pleasing everybody discovers a
temper always flashy, and often false and insincere.... I am to look,
indeed, to your opinions; but to such opinions as you and I _must_
have five years hence." They should be philosophers like John Stuart
Mill, who, facing the electors of Westminster and being asked whether
he had ever said the English workingmen were "generally liars,"
replied simply, "I did." Such were to be the aristocrats of Plato's
State, men of simple and rational desires, lords of their own souls,
and so masters of others. Nor should they govern for their own smaller
profit. For, as Socrates says, "it is not to the injury of the servant
that we think he ought to be governed, but because it behooves each of
us to be governed by the divine wisdom, having that power within us if
possible, or, if that be impossible, then by an external authority, so
that we may all, following the same guidance, be brought into likeness
one to another and into good will."
There is something at once strange and familiar in this political
discussion, now more than two thousand years old. To it Plato brought
all his wisdom, sometimes not disdaining sophistry, trying to show by
what kind of education and by what arts of persuasion and illusion a
natural aristocracy could be imposed and maintained. It was pretty
much the same problem that confronted Burke at the time of the French
Revolution, inspiring his earlier writings on that event with
incomparable eloquence, and stinging him in the end almost to a frenzy
of despair. Burke did not come to the question with so clear an
intuition as the Greek, and in some ways his _Reflections_, despite
their modern dress, are more remote from us than is Plato's
_Republic_, because he dealt less with the universal aspects of human
nature. And in so far as his practical reason was colored by the
peculiar circumstances of his own day, it has lost in direct
application to the needs of another age. But he is not dead, despite
my literary friend; wisdom is of longer life than the generations of
mankind, and there is scarcely another book of modern times so full of
political wisdom as Burke's _Reflections_.
And we must note, in the first place, that to Burke, as to Plato, it
never occurred to think that society, even under the most lawless
anarchy, could exist without leaders. "Power," he knew, "of some kind
or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions
perish." He knew too, and declared, that in the end he who made
himself master of the army would overbear all other influences; but
meanwhile he beheld the State of France under the sway of demagogues
who were preparing the people for a carnival of blood and cruelty, and
all his eloquence was exerted, and with extraordinary effect, to avert
from his own country this plague of revolution. The _philosophes_, who
had prepared the dogmas of popular flattery for the mouths of a Marat
and a Robespierre, had intensified in Burke the natural British
distrust of all application of abstract reasoning to government and
the affairs of life; and he felt a profound aversion for those who
would "lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal
consequences," and would then "limit logic by despotism." Being thus
barred from belief in a true philosophy, by his experience of the
false, yet having himself a mind that grasped at general principles,
he turned to "the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom
without reflection, and above it." In that "discipline of nature" he
looked for the genuine guidance of society, and one of the memorable
passages of his works is that in which he describes the character of
those who, themselves under this control, should be for others "men of
light and leading":--
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the
State, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of
any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class
of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be
admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation;
to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to
respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection
of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon
such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the
widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and
affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect,
to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the
wise and learned wherever they are to be found;--to be habituated
in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger
in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest
degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of
things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the
slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences;--to be
led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are
considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their
highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God
and man;--to be employed as an administrator of law and justice,
and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind;--to
be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous
art;--to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are
presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to
possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and
regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to
commutative justice--these are the circumstances of men, that
form what I should call a _natural_ aristocracy, without which
there is no nation.
Not many, even among the wisest of our own generation, would fail to
respond favorably to that glowing picture of nature's aristocrats, but
when we come to the means by which Burke would assure the existence
and supremacy of such a class, it is different. Despite some tincture
of the so-called "enlightenment," which few men of that age could
entirely escape, Burke had a deep distrust of the restive,
self-seeking nature of mankind, and as a restraint upon it he would
magnify the passive as opposed to the active power of what is
really the same human nature. This passive instinct he called
"prejudice"--the unreasoning and unquestioning attachment to the
family and "the little platoon we belong to in society," from which
our affection, coincident always with a feeling of contented
obligation, is gradually enlarged to take in the peculiar institutions
of our country; "prejudice renders a man's virtues his habits, ...
through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature."
Prejudice is thus the binding force which works from below upwards;
the corresponding force which moves from above is "prescription"--the
possession of rights and authority which have been confirmed by
custom. In other words, Burke believed that the only practical way of
ensuring a natural aristocracy was by the acceptance of a
prescriptive oligarchy; in the long run and after account had been
taken of all exceptions--and he was in no wise a blind worshipper of
the Whig families which then governed England--he believed that the
men of light and leading would already be found among, or by reason of
their preëminence would be assumed into, the class of those whose
views were broadened by the inherited possession of privilege and
honors.
He so believed because it seemed to him that prejudice and
prescription were in harmony with the methods of universal nature.
Sudden change was abhorrent to him, and in every chapter of history he
read that the only sound social development was that which
corresponded to the slow and regular growth of a plant, deep-rooted in
the soil and drawing its nourishment from ancient concealed sources.
_Saltus non facit natura._ In such a plan prejudice was the ally of
the powers of time, opposing to all visionary hopes a sense of duty to
the solid existing reality, and compelling upstart theory to prove
itself by winning through long resistance. And with the force of time
stood the kindred force of order and subordination personified in
privilege. "A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve,
taken together," would be Burke's standard of a statesman; "everything
else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution." In
passages of a singular elevation he combines the ideas of Hobbes on
the social contract with those of Hooker on the sweep of divine
universal law, harmonizing them with the newer conception of
evolutionary growth. "Each contract of each particular State," he
says, "is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal
society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the
visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned
by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures,
each in their appointed place." And thus, too, "our political system
is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the
world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body
composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a
stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious
incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old,
or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall,
renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature,
in the conduct of the State, in what we improve, we are never wholly
new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete."
If we look below these ideas of prejudice and privilege, time and
subordination, for their one animating principle, we shall find it, I
think, in the dominance of the faculty of the imagination. Nor did
this imaginative substructure lying beneath all of Burke's writings
and speeches, from the early essay on the _Sublime and Beautiful_ to
his latest outpourings on the French Revolution, escape the
animadversion of his enemies. Tom Paine made good use of this trait in
_The Rights of Man_, which he issued as an answer to the
_Reflections_. "The age of chivalry is gone," Burke had exclaimed at
the close of his famous tirade on the fall of Marie Antoinette. "Now
all is changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle,
and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life,
and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the
sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be
dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the
decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded
ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a _moral imagination_...." To
this Paine retorted with terrible incision. Ridiculing the lamentation
over the French Queen as a mere sentimental rhapsody, he catches up
Burke's very words with malign cunning: "Not one glance of compassion,
not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book,
has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives,
a life without hope in the most miserable of prisons. It is painful to
behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been
kinder to Mr. Burke than he has been to her. He is not affected by the
reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance
of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the
dying bird."
Now there is an element of truth in Paine's charge, but there is
distortion also. To say that Burke had no thought for the oppressed
and the miserable is a wanton slander, disproved by abundant passages
in the very _Reflections_ and by his whole career. "If it should come
to the last extremity," he had once avowed in Parliament, with no fear
of contradiction, "and to a contest of blood, God forbid! God
forbid!--my part is taken; I would take my fate with the poor, and
low, and feeble." But it is the fact nevertheless, construe it how one
will, that in the ordinary course of things Burke's ideas of
government were moulded and his sentiment towards life was colored by
the vivid industry of his imagination, and that he thought the world
at large controlled by the same power. I doubt if analysis can reach a
deeper distinction between the whole class of minds to which Burke
belongs, and that to which Paine belongs, than is afforded by this
difference in the range and texture of the imagination.
And in this Burke had with him the instinct of his people, while in a
way transcending it; for a good deal of what we regard as the British
character depends on just the excess of imagination over a rather dull
sensibility and sluggish intelligence. This, if we look into it, is
what Bagehot signalized as the saving dulness of England, and what
Walpole meant by attributing to "the good sense [note the contrast of
_sense_ and _sensibility_] of the English that they have not painted
better." It was this same quality that inspired Burke's great
comparison of the French excitability with the British stolidity:
"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring
with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle,
reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are
silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only
inhabitants of the field." In its higher working, when sensibility and
intelligence are also magnified, the imagination, no doubt, is the
source of the loftier English poetry and eloquence, but in the lower
range, which we are now considering, it is rather a slow, yet powerful
and endearing, visualization of what is known and familiar; it is the
beginning of distrust for innovation and of that prejudice for
existing circumstances and actual relations which Burke exalted as the
mother of content. And with content it produces a kind of egotistic
satisfaction in the pomps and privileges which pass before the eye,
giving to the humble a participation in things wherein they have no
material share. In the baser nature this evokes a trait which we
condemn as snobbishness; in the higher it results in a fine
magnanimity: "He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart, who
wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been
adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive
esteem. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste
for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that
sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in
splendor and in honor." Thus, too, the imagination is an accomplice of
time, as well as of the law of subordination; indeed, its deepest and
noblest function lies in its power of carrying what was once seen and
known as a living portion and factor of the present, and there is no
surer test of the quality of a man's mind than the degree in which he
feels the long-remembered past as one of the vital and immediate laws
of his being. So it is that the imagination is the chief creator and
sustainer of the great memorial institutions of society, such as the
Crown and the Church and the other pageantries of state, which are the
very embodiment of prescription, as it were the soul of tradition
taking form and awful authority among the living. How deeply Burke
felt this prescriptive right of the imagination, no one need be told;
nor is it necessary to quote in full the familiar passages in which he
likens the British monarchy, with its bulwark of nobility, to "the
proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt
with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers," or calls on
the Church to "exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments."
There is the true Burke; he knew, as Paine knew, that the support of
these institutions was in their symbolic sway over the imaginations of
men, and that, with this defence undermined, they would crumble away
beneath the aggressive passions of the present, or would remain as
mere bloodless vanities. He thought that the real value of life was in
its meaning to the imagination, and he was not ashamed to avow that
the fall and tragedy of kings, because they bore in their person the
destiny of ancient institutions, stirred him more profoundly than the
sufferings of ordinary men.
It is perfectly easy for a keen and narrow intelligence to ridicule
Burke's trust in the imagination, but as a matter of fact there is
nothing more practical than a clear recognition of its vast domain in
human affairs--it was Napoleon Bonaparte who said that "imagination
rules the world." Burke is not dead; his pages are an inexhaustible
storehouse of inspiration and wisdom. But it is true nevertheless,
that his ideas never quite freed themselves from their matrix, and
that in his arguments the essential is involved in the contingent.
Though he saw clearly enough the imperfections of the actual union of
a prescriptive and a natural aristocracy, he was not able, with all
his insight, to conceive the existence of the latter alone and by
virtue of its own rights. He cried out that the age of chivalry was
gone; he saw that the age of prescription, however it might be propped
up for a time, was also doomed, not only in France but in his England
as well, and with that away there was nothing for his imagination but
an utter blank. As a consequence the problem of government for us
to-day in its fundamental aspects is really closer to the exposition
of the Greek philosopher two thousand years ago, than to that of the
modern English statesman. We have the naked question to answer: How
shall a society, newly shaking itself free from a disguised
plutocratic régime, be guided to suffer the persuasion of a natural
aristocracy which has none of the insignia of an old prescription to
impose its authority? Shall the true justice prevail, which by a right
discrimination would confer power and influence in accordance with
inner distinction; or shall that so-called justice prevail--for no man
acknowledges open injustice--which recommends itself as equality of
opportunity, but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age,
sex, and character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might
makes right, whether that might be the material strength of money or
the jealous tyranny of numbers?
Leaders there will be, as there always have been. Leaders there are
now, of each class, and we know their names. We still call the baser
sort a demagogue, and his definition is still what it was among those
who invented the term: "a flatterer of the people." Or, if that
description seems too vague, you will recognize him as one who unites
in himself enormous physical and mental activity, yet who employs his
extraordinary talents in no serious way for the comfort and sustenance
of the higher life of the imagination, but for running about
restlessly and filling the public mind with stentorian alarms. He is
one who proclaims ostentatiously that the first aim of government
"must always be the possession by the average citizen of the right
kind of character," and then, in his own person, gives an example of
identifying character with passion by betraying a friend and
malignantly misinterpreting his words, as soon as that friend may be
decried for balking the popular will--and balking the path of the
decrier's ambition. He is one who has been honored as the leader of a
great political party, and then, as soon as he is dethroned from its
leadership, denounces that same party as the tool of privilege and the
source of corruption. He is one who in proclaiming the principles of
his new party, has constantly on his lips the magical word "justice,"
which he defines by the specious phrase "equality of opportunity," yet
in the end identifies justice with the removal of all checks from
government so that the desire of the majority may be immediately
carried out, whether right or wrong. For "it is impossible to invent
constitutional devices which will prevent the popular will from being
effective for wrong without also preventing it from being effective
for right. The only safe course to follow in this great American
democracy is to provide for making the popular judgment really
effective."
To this end our exemplary demagogue would take away every obstacle
between the opinion of the moment and the enactment of that opinion
into law. Hence the initiative and referendum.
Above the legislators is the Constitution, devised in order that
legislation upon any particular question may be made to conform
essentially with what has been laid down on deliberation as the wisest
general course of government. It is a check upon hasty action, and
implies a certain distrust of the popular judgment at any moment when
passion or delusion may be at play. Therefore our demagogue will
denounce reverence for the Constitution as a fetich. Blithely ignoring
the fact that Constitution-making and remaking is one of the pastimes
of some States, and that even the Federal Constitution can be amended
with none too great difficulty when the opinion of the people is
really formed (as in the recent case of the election of senators), he
will earnestly call upon the Constitutional Convention of Ohio "to
provide in this Constitution means which will enable the people
readily to amend it if at any point it works injustice"; and then, as
if that provision were not sufficient to relax its mortmain, he will
virtually abrogate its function of imposing any check whatsoever by
adding "means which will permit the people themselves by popular vote,
after due deliberation and discussion, but finally and without appeal,
to settle what the proper construction of any constitutional point
is"; and this construction is to be made, not legally, that is by an
attempt to get at the actual meaning of the language used, but in
accordance with the current notion of what is right.
But the full venom of his attack will be directed against the courts,
because in them is impersonated the final sovereignty of unimpassioned
judgment over the fluctuations of sentiment, and with it the last
check upon the operations of the demagogue. The interpretation of the
law in accordance with the conditions of life is to rest with the
people. If necessary they are to have the power of recalling the judge
who is recalcitrant to their views, and at the least they are to have
opportunity to reverse any decision of the courts which seems to them
wrong. In this way he thinks to ensure "an independent judiciary"! To
enforce the need of the recall he accuses the courts of "refusing to
permit the people of the States to exercise their right as a free
people." Thereupon he cites what he calls a "typical" case in New
York, in which the judges declared a workingmen's compensation act
unconstitutional. "In other words, they insisted that the Constitution
had _permanently_ cursed our people with impotence to right wrong and
had _perpetuated_ a cruel iniquity." This tirade, followed by the most
inflammatory appeals to the emotions, was uttered in 1912; at the very
time when he was inveighing against the courts for perpetuating
iniquity, the machinery was in train for amending the Constitution,
and in less than two years that permanent curse was removed by the
passage of a constitutional law in full favor of the workingman. Such
is the despotism of facts. And ever through these vituperative charges
runs the high note of flattery: "If the American people are not fit
for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants
and not the masters of the men whom they themselves put in office!"
The demagogue paints himself. In a word you may know him by this
single trait: he is one who, in the pursuit of the so-called rights of
humanity, has a supreme contempt for those
Unconcerning things, matters of fact;
one who, by means of an hypnotic loquaciousness, is constantly
persuading the people that they have only to follow their first
impulsive emotions to be right and safe, and that as a consequence
every institution should be swept away which in their wiser, calmer
moments they have created as a bulwark against their own more variable
nature. To complete the picture we need to contrast with it Burke's
portrait of the men of light and leading, with his sober statement of
the law of liberty: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact
proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own
appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their
rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of
understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as
they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good,
in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a
controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the
less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is
ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of
intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
Or we may go further back and look upon Plato's portrait of the guides
who have earned the right to persuade others to temperance by the
diligent exercise of that virtue in their own lives.
But the most notable example of demagoguery to-day is not a man,
though he be clothed with thunder, but an institution. There are
newspapers and magazines, reaching millions of readers, which have
reduced the art to a perfect system. Their method is as simple as it
is effective: always appeal to the emotion of the hour, and present it
in terms which will justify its excess. Thus, in times when there is
no wave of international envy disturbing the popular mind, our journal
will print edifying editorials on brotherly love, and laud the people
as the great source of peace among nations. But let some racial
dispute arise, as in the months preceding our Spanish war or the
Italian raid on Africa, and this same journal will day after day use
its editorial columns to inflame national hatred--and increase its
circulation. On days when no sensational event has occurred, it will
indulge in the prettiest sentimental sermons on the home and on family
felicities. Nothing so moral; it will even plead in lacrimose type
against the evil of allowing babies to lie in perambulators with their
eyes exposed to the sun. But let the popular mind be excited by some
crime of lust, and the same journal will forget the sweet obligations
of home and wife--
That silly old morality,
That, as these links were knit, our love should be--
and will deck out the loathsome debauchery of a murderer and his trull
as the spiritual history of two young souls finding themselves in the
pure air of passion; or some sordid liaison will be virtually lifted
above marriage by the terms "affinity" or "heart-wife." And always,
meanwhile, the people are to be soothed out of a sense of
responsibility for errors and corruption by the skilfully maintained
suggestion of a little group of men entirely removed from the feelings
and motives of ordinary humanity, sitting somewhere in secret
conclave, plotting, plotting, to pervert the government. Our public
crimes are never our own, but are the result of conspiracy.
These are the agencies that, in varying forms, have been at work in
many ages. Only now we have formulated them into a noble maxim, which
you will hear daily resounding in the pulpit and the press and in the
street: "The cure of democracy is more democracy." It is a lie, and we
know it is a lie. We know that this cry of the demagogue has
invariably in the past led to anarchy and to despotism; and we know
that to-day, were these forces unopposed, as happily they are not
unopposed, the same result would occur--
Our liberty reversed and charters gone,
And we made servants to Opinion.
The remedy for the evils of license is not in the elimination of
popular restraint, but precisely in bringing the people to respect and
follow their right leaders. The cure of democracy is not _more_
democracy, but _better_ democracy.
Nor is such a cure dependent primarily on the appearance, in a
community, of men capable of the light: for these the world always
has, and these we too have in abundance; it depends rather on so
relating these select natures to the community that they shall be also
men of leading. The danger is lest, in a State which bestows influence
and honors on its demagogues, the citizens of more refined
intelligence, those true philosophers who have discourse of reason,
and have won the difficult citadel of their own souls, should withdraw
from public affairs and retire into that citadel, as it were into an
ivory tower. The harm wrought by such a condition is twofold: it
deprives the better minds of the larger sustenance of popular
sympathy, producing among them a kind of intellectual _préciosité_ and
a languid interest in art as a refuge from life instead of an integral
part of life; and, on the other hand, it tends to leave the mass of
society a prey to the brutalized emotions of indiscriminate
pleasure-seeking. In such a State distinction becomes the sorry badge
of isolation. The need is to provide for a natural aristocracy.
Now it must be clearly understood that in advocating such a measure,
at least under the conditions that actually prevail to-day, there is
involved no futile intention of abrogating democracy, in so far as
democracy means government by and of the people. A natural aristocracy
does not demand the restoration of inherited privilege or a relapse
into the crude dominion of money; it is not synonymous with oligarchy
or plutocracy. It calls rather for some machinery or some social
consciousness which shall ensure the selection from among the
community at large of the truly "best," and the bestowal on them of
"power"; it is the true consummation of democracy. And, again, it must
be said emphatically that this is not an academic question, dealing
with unreal distinctions. No one supposes that the "best" are a
sharply defined class, moving about among their fellows with a visible
halo above them, and a smile of beatific superiority on their faces.
Society is not made of such classifications, and governments have
always been of a more or less mixed character. A natural aristocracy
signifies rather a tendency than a conclusion; and in such a sense it
was taken, no doubt, by my sociological friend of radical ideas who
pronounced it the great practical problem of the day.
The first requisite for solving this problem is that those who are
designed by nature, so to speak, to form an aristocracy should come to
an understanding of their own belief. There is a question to be faced
boldly: What is the true aim of society? Does justice consist
primarily in leveling the distribution of powers and benefits, or in
proportioning them to the scale of character and intelligence? Is the
main purpose of the machinery of government to raise the material
welfare of the masses, or to create advantages for the upward striving
of the exceptional? Is the state of humanity to be estimated by
numbers, or is it a true saying of the old stoic poet: _humanum paucis
vivit genus_? Shall our interest in mankind begin at the bottom and
progress upward, or begin at the top and progress downward? To those
who feel that the time has come for a reversion from certain present
tendencies, the answer to this question cannot be doubtful. Before
anything else is done we must purge our minds of the current cant of
humanitarianism. This does not mean that we are to deny the individual
appeals of pity, and introduce a wolfish egotism into human relations.
On the contrary it is just the preaching of false humanitarian
doctrines that practically results in weakening the response to
rightful obligations and "turning men's duties into doubts," and thus
throws the prizes of life to the hard grasping materialist and the
coarse talker. In the end the happiness of the people also, in the
wider sense, depends on the common recognition of the law of just
subordination. But, whatever the ultimate effect of this sort may be,
the need now is to counterbalance the excess of emotional
humanitarianism, with an injection of the truth--even the contemptuous
truth. Let us, in the name of a long-suffering God, put some bounds to
the flood of talk about the wages of the bricklayer and the trainman,
and talk a little more about the income of the artist and teacher and
public censor who have taste and strength of character to remain in
opposition to the tide. Let us have less cant about the great
educative value of the theatre for the people and less humbug about
the virtues of the nauseous problem play, and more consideration of
what is clean and nourishing food for the larger minds. Let us forget
for a while our absorbing desire to fit the schools to train boys for
the shop and the counting-room, and concern ourselves more effectively
with the dwindling of those disciplinary studies which lift men out of
the crowd. Let us, in fine, not number ourselves among the traitors to
their class who _invidiæ metu non audeant dicere_.
One hears a vast deal these days about class consciousness, and it is
undoubtedly a potent social instrument. Why should there not be an
outspoken class consciousness among those who are in the advance of
civilization as well as among those who are in the rear? Such a
compact of mutual sympathy and encouragement would draw the man of
enlightenment out of his sterile seclusion, and make him efficient; it
would strengthen the sense of obligation among those who hesitate to
take sides, and would turn many despondent votaries of fatalism and
many amateur dabblers in reform to a realization of the deeper needs
of the day. Nor is this an appeal to idle sentiment. Much is said
about the power of the masses and the irresistible spread of
revolutionary ideas from the lower ranks upward. The facts of history
point in quite the other direction. It was not the plebs who destroyed
the Roman republic, but the corrupt factions of the Senate, and the
treachery of such patricians as Catiline and Julius Cæsar. In like
manner the French Revolution would never have had a beginning but for
the teaching of the philosophers and the prevalence of equalitarian
fallacies among the privileged classes themselves. The Vicomtesse de
Noailles spoke from knowledge when she said: "La philosophie n'avait
pas d'apôtres plus bienveillants que les grands seigneurs. L'horreur
des abus, le mépris des distinctions héréditaires, tous ces sentiments
dont les classes inférieures se sont emparées dans leur intérêt, ont
dû leur premier éclat à l'enthousiasme des grands." And so to-day the
real strength of socialistic doctrines is not in the discontent of the
workingmen, but in the faint-hearted submission of those who by the
natural division of society belong to the class that has everything to
lose by revolution, and in the sentimental adherence of dilettante
reformers. The real danger is after all not so much from the
self-exposed demagogues as from the ignorant tamperers with explosive
material. It is not so much from the loathsome machinations of the
yellow press, dangerous as they are, as from the journals that are
supposed to stand for higher things, yet in their interest in some
particular reform, support whole-heartedly candidates who flirt with
schemes subversive of property and constitutional checks; in their
zeal for the brotherhood of man, deal loosely with facts; and in their
clamor for some specious extension of the franchise, neglect the finer
claims of justice. These men and these journals, betrayers of the
trust, are the real menace. Without their aid and abetment there may
be rumblings of discontent, wholesome enough as warnings against a
selfish stagnation, but there can be no concerted drive of society
towards radical revolution. For radical forces are by their nature
incapable of any persistent harmony of action, and have only the
semblance of cohesion from a constraining fear or hatred. The dynamic
source of revolution must be in the perversion of those at the top,
and anarchy comes with their defalcation. Against such perils when
they show themselves, the proper safeguard is the arousing of a
counter class consciousness.
It is a sound theorem of President Lowell's that popular government
"may be said to consist of the control of political affairs by public
opinion." Now there is to-day a vast organization for manipulating
public opinion in favor of the workingman, and for deluding it in the
interest of those who grow fat by pandering in the name of
emancipation to the baser emotions of mankind; but of organization
among those who suffer from the vulgarizing trend of democracy there
is little or none. As a consequence we see the conditions of life
growing year by year harder for those whose labor is not concerned
immediately with the direction of material forces or with the supply
of sensational pleasure; they are ground, so to speak, between the
upper and the nether millstone. Perhaps organization is not the word
to describe accurately what is desired among those who are fast
becoming the silent members of society, for it implies a sharper
discrimination into grades of taste and character than exists in
nature; but there is nothing chimerical in looking for a certain
conscious solidarity at the core of the aristocratical class (using
"aristocratical" always in the Platonic sense), with a looser
cohesion at the edges. Let that class become frankly convinced that
the true aim of a State is, as in the magnificent theory of Aristotle,
to make possible the high friendship of those who have raised
themselves to a vision of the Supreme Good, let them adopt means to
confirm one another in that faith, and their influence will spread
outward through society, and leaven the whole range of public opinion.
The instrument by which this control of public opinion is effected is
primarily the imagination; and here we meet with a real difficulty. It
was the advantage of such a union of aristocracy and inherited
oligarchy as Burke advocated that it gave something visible and
definite for the imagination to work upon, whereas the democratic
aristocracy of character must always be comparatively vague. But we
are not left wholly without the means of giving to the imagination a
certain sureness of range, while remaining within the forms of popular
government. The opportunity is in the hands of our higher institutions
of learning, and it is towards recalling these to their duty that the
first efforts of reform should be directed. It is not my intention
here to enter into the precise nature of this reform, for the subject
is so large as to demand a separate essay. In brief, the need is to
restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that
train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely
æsthetic function, though that aspect of it also has been sadly
neglected, but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single
firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history, and of
distinguishing what is essential therein from what is ephemeral. The
enormous preponderance of studies that deal with the immediate
questions of economics and government, inevitably results in isolating
the student from the great inheritance of the past; the frequent habit
of dragging him through the slums of sociology, instead of making him
at home in the society of the noble dead, debauches his mind with a
flabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism. He comes out
of college, if he has learnt anything, a _nouveau intellectuel_,
bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as the
_nouveau riche_ to the man of inherited manners; he is narrow and
unbalanced, a prey to the prevailing passion of the hour, with no
feeling for the majestic claims of that within us which is unchanged
from the beginning. In place of this excessive contemporaneity we
shall give a larger share of time and honor to the hoarded lessons of
antiquity. There is truth in the Hobbian maxim that "imagination and
memory are but one thing"; by their union in education alone shall a
man acquire the uninvidious equivalent in character of those
broadening influences which came to the oligarch through
prescription--he is moulded indeed into the true aristocrat. And with
the assertion of what may be called an inner prescription he will find
among those over whom he is set as leader and guide a measure of
respect which springs from something in the human breast more stable
and honorable and more conformable to reason than the mere stolidity
of an unreflecting prejudice. For, when everything is said, there
could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts,
beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct
of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the
clear call from above.