development of material science, it is too often assumed that this war
is being as horrible and destructive as war can be. There never was so
great a delusion. This war has only begun to be horrible. No doubt it is
much more horrible and destructive than any former war, but even in
comparison with the full possibilities of known and existing means of
destruction it is still a mild war. Perhaps it will never rise to its
full possibilities. At the present stage there is not a combatant,
except perhaps America, which is not now practising a pinching economy
of steel and other mechanical material. The Germans are running short of
first-class flying men, and if we and our allies continue to press the
air attack, and seek out and train our own vastly greater resources of
first quality young airmen, the Germans may come as near to being
"driven out of the air" as is possible. I am a firmer believer than ever
I was in the possibility of a complete victory over Germany--through and
by the air. But the occasional dropping of a big bomb or so in London is
not to be taken as anything but a minimum display of what air war can
do. In a little while now our alliance should be in a position to
commence day and night continuous attacks upon the Rhine towns. Not
hour-long raids such as London knows, but week-long raids. Then and then
only shall we be able to gauge the really horrible possibilities of the
air war. They are in our hands and not in the hands of the Germans. In
addition the Germans are at a huge disadvantage in their submarine
campaign. Their submarine campaign is only the feeble shadow of what a
submarine campaign might be. Turning again to the atlas the reader can
see for himself that the German and Austrian submarines are obliged to
come out across very narrow fronts. A fence of mines less than three
hundred miles long and two hundred feet deep would, for example,
completely bar their exit through the North Sea. The U-boats run the
gauntlet of that long narrow sea and pay a heavy toll to it. If only our
Admiralty would tell the German public what that toll is now, there
would come a time when German seamen would no longer consent to go down
in them. Consider, however, what a submarine campaign would be for Great
Britain if instead of struggling through this bottle-neck it were
conducted from the coast of Norway, where these pests might harbour in a
hundred fiords. Consider too what this weapon may be in twenty years'
time in the hands of a country in the position of the United States.
Great Britain, if she is not altogether mad, will cease to be an island
as soon as possible after the war, by piercing the Channel Tunnel--how
different our transport problem would be if we had that now!--but such
countries as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, directly they are
involved in the future in a war against any efficient naval power with
an unimpeded sea access, will be isolated forthwith. I cannot conceive
that any of the great ocean powers will rest content until such a
tremendous possibility of blockade as the submarine has created is
securely vested in the hands of a common league beyond any power of
sudden abuse.
It must always be remembered that this war is a mechanical war conducted
by men whose discipline renders them uninventive, who know little or
nothing of mechanism, who are for the most part struggling blindly to
get things back to the conditions for which they were trained, to
Napoleonic conditions, with infantry and cavalry and comparatively light
guns, the so-called "war of manoeuvres." It is like a man engaged in a
desperate duel who keeps on trying to make it a game of cricket. Most of
these soldiers detest every sort of mechanical device; the tanks, for
example, which, used with imagination, might have given the British and
French overwhelming victory on the western front, were subordinated to
the usual cavalry "break through" idea. I am not making any particular
complaint against the British and French generals in saying this. It is
what must happen to any country which entrusts its welfare to soldiers.
A soldier has to be a severely disciplined man, and a severely
disciplined man cannot be a versatile man, and on the whole the British
army has been as receptive to novelties as any. The German generals have
done no better; indeed, they have not done so well as the generals of
the Allies in this respect. But after the war, if the world does not
organize rapidly for peace, then as resources accumulate a little, the
mechanical genius will get to work on the possibilities of these ideas
that have merely been sketched out in this war. We shall get big land
ironclads which will smash towns. We shall get air offensives--let the
experienced London reader think of an air raid going on hour after hour,
day after day--that will really burn out and wreck towns, that will
drive people mad by the thousand. We shall get a very complete cessation
of sea transit. Even land transit may be enormously hampered by aerial
attack. I doubt if any sort of social order will really be able to stand
the strain of a fully worked out modern war. We have still, of course,
to feel the full shock effects even of this war. Most of the combatants
are going on, as sometimes men who have incurred grave wounds will still
go on for a time--without feeling them. The educational, biological,
social, economic punishment that has already been taken by each of the
European countries is, I feel, very much greater than we yet realize.
Russia, the heaviest and worst-trained combatant, has indeed shown the
effects and is down and sick, but in three years' time all Europe will
know far better than it does now the full price of this war. And the
shock effects of the next war will have much the same relation to the
shock effects of this, as the shock of breaking a finger-nail has to the
shock of crushing in a body. In Russia to-day we have seen, not indeed
social revolution, not the replacement of one social order by another,
but disintegration. Let not national conceit blind us. Germany, France,
Italy, Britain are all slipping about on that same slope down which
Russia has slid. Which goes first, it is hard to guess, or whether we
shall all hold out to some kind of Peace. At present the social
discipline of France and Britain seems to be at least as good as that of
Germany, and the _morale_ of the Rhineland and Bavaria has probably to
undergo very severe testing by systematized and steadily increasing air
punishment as this year goes on. The next war--if a next war comes--will
see all Germany, from end to end, vulnerable to aircraft....
Such are the two sets of considerations that will, I think, ultimately
prevail over every prejudice and every difficulty in the way of the
League of Free Nations. Existing states have become impossible as
absolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them so
close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury
that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in
subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter
one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the
League of Free Nations and a famished race of men looting in search of
non-existent food amidst the smouldering ruins of civilization. In the
end I believe that the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of
its ideas of nationality and imperialism, to the latter alternative. It
may take obstinate men a few more years yet of blood and horror to learn
this lesson, but for my own part I cherish an obstinate belief in the
potential reasonableness of mankind.
IX
DEMOCRACY
All the talk, all the aspiration and work that is making now towards
this conception of a world securely at peace, under the direction of a
League of Free Nations, has interwoven with it an idea that is often
rather felt than understood, the idea of Democracy. Not only is justice
to prevail between race and race and nation and nation, but also between
man and man; there is to be a universal respect for human life
throughout the earth; the world, in the words of President Wilson, is to
be made "safe for democracy." I would like to subject that word to a
certain scrutiny to see whether the things we are apt to think and
assume about it correspond exactly with the feeling of the word. I would
like to ask what, under modern conditions, does democracy mean, and
whether we have got it now anywhere in the world in its fulness and
completion.
And to begin with I must have a quarrel with the word itself. The
eccentricities of modern education make us dependent for a number of
our primary political terms upon those used by the thinkers of the small
Greek republics of ancient times before those petty states collapsed,
through sheer political ineptitude, before the Macedonians. They thought
in terms of states so small that it was possible to gather all the
citizens together for the purposes of legislation. These states were
scarcely more than what we English might call sovereign urban districts.
Fast communications were made by runners; even the policeman with a
bicycle of the modern urban district was beyond the scope of the Greek
imagination. There were no railways, telegraphs, telephones, books or
newspapers, there was no need for the state to maintain a system of
education, and the affairs of the state were so simple that they could
be discussed and decided by the human voice and open voting in an
assembly of all the citizens. That is what democracy, meant. In Andorra,
or perhaps in Canton Uri, such democracy may still be possible; in any
other modern state it cannot exist. The opposite term to it was
oligarchy, in which a small council of men controlled the affairs of the
state. Oligarchy, narrowed down to one man, became monarchy. If you
wished to be polite to an oligarchy you called it an aristocracy; if you
wished to point out that a monarch was rather by way of being
self-appointed, you called him a Tyrant. An oligarchy with a property
qualification was a plutocracy.
Now the modern intelligence, being under a sort of magic slavery to the
ancient Greeks, has to adapt all these terms to the problems of states
so vast and complex that they have the same relation to the Greek states
that the anatomy of a man has to the anatomy of a jellyfish. They are
not only greater in extent and denser in population, but they are
increasingly innervated by more and more rapid means of communication
and excitement. In the classical past--except for such special cases as
the feeding of Rome with Egyptian corn--trade was a traffic in luxuries
or slaves, war a small specialized affair of infantry and horsemen in
search of slaves and loot, and empire the exaction of tribute. The
modern state must conduct its enormous businesses through a system of
ministries; its vital interests go all round the earth; nothing that any
ancient Greek would have recognized as democracy is conceivable in a
great modern state. It is absolutely necessary, if we are to get things
clear in our minds about what democracy really means in relation to
modern politics, first to make a quite fresh classification in order to
find what items there really are to consider, and then to inquire which
seem to correspond more or less closely in spirit with our ideas about
ancient democracy.
Now there are two primary classes of idea about government in the
modern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity of
the common man. We may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideas
and wishes about the state and the world, or we may suppose that he
isn't. We may believe that the common man can govern, or we may believe
that he can't. We may think further along the first line that he is so
wise and good and right that we only have to get out of his way for him
to act rightly and for the good of all mankind, or we may doubt it. And
if we doubt that we may still believe that, though perhaps "you can fool
all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time,"
the common man, expressing himself by a majority vote, still remains the
secure source of human wisdom. But next, while we may deny this
universal distribution of political wisdom, we may, if we are
sufficiently under the sway of modern ideas about collective psychology,
believe that it is necessary to poke up the political indifference and
inability of the common man as much as possible, to thrust political
ideas and facts upon him, to incite him to a watchful and critical
attitude towards them, and above all to secure his assent to the
proceedings of the able people who are managing public affairs. Or
finally, we may treat him as a thing to be ruled and not consulted. Let
me at this stage make out a classificatory diagram of these elementary
ideas of government in a modern country.
CLASS I. It is supposed that the common man _can_ govern:
(1) without further organization (Anarchy);
(2) through a majority vote by delegates.
CLASS II. It is supposed that the common man _cannot_ govern, and that
government therefore must be through the agency of Able Persons who may
be classified under one of the following sub-heads, either as
(1) persons elected by the common man because he believes them to be
persons able to govern--just as he chooses his doctors as persons able
to secure health, and his electrical engineers as persons able to attend
to his tramways, lighting, etc., etc.;
(2) persons of a special class, as, for example, persons born and
educated to rule (e.g. _Aristocracy_), or rich business adventurers
_(Plutocracy)_ who rule without consulting the common man at all.
To which two sub-classes we may perhaps add a sort of intermediate stage
between them, namely:
(3) persons elected by a special class of voter.
Monarchy may be either a special case of Class II.(1), (2) or (3), in
which the persons who rule have narrowed down in number to one person,
and the duration of monarchy may be either for life or a term of years.
These two classes and the five sub-classes cover, I believe, all the
elementary political types in our world.
Now in the constitution of a modern state, because of the conflict and
confusion of ideas, all or most of these five sub-classes may usually be
found intertwined. The British constitution, for instance, is a
complicated tangle of arrangements, due to a struggle between the ideas
of Class I.(2), Class II.(3), tending to become Class II.(1) and Class
II.(2) in both its aristocratic and monarchist forms. The American
constitution is largely dominated by Class I.(2), from which it breaks
away in the case of the President to a short-term monarchist aspect of
Class II.(1). I will not elaborate this classification further. I have
made it here in order to render clear first, that what we moderns mean
by democracy is not what the Greeks meant at all, that is to say, direct
government by the assembly of all the citizens, and secondly and more
important, that the word "democracy" is being used very largely in
current discussion, so that it is impossible to say in any particular
case whether the intention is Class I.(2) or Class II.(1), and that we
have to make up our minds whether we mean, if I may coin two phrases,
"delegate democracy" or "selective democracy," or some definite
combination of these two, when we talk about "democracy," before we can
get on much beyond a generous gesture of equality and enfranchisement
towards our brother man. The word is being used, in fact, confusingly
for these two quite widely different things.
Now, it seems to me that though there has been no very clear discussion
of the issue between those two very opposite conceptions of democracy,
largely because of the want of proper distinctive terms, there has
nevertheless been a wide movement of public opinion away from "delegate
democracy" and towards "selective democracy." People have gone on saying
"democracy," while gradually changing its meaning from the former to the
latter. It is notable in Great Britain, for example, that while there
has been no perceptible diminution in our faith in democracy, there has
been a growing criticism of "party" and "politicians," and a great
weakening in the power and influence of representatives and
representative institutions. There has been a growing demand for
personality and initiative in elected persons. The press, which was once
entirely subordinate politically to parliamentary politics, adopts an
attitude towards parliament and party leaders nowadays which would have
seemed inconceivable insolence in the days of Lord Palmerston. And there
has been a vigorous agitation in support of electoral methods which are
manifestly calculated to subordinate "delegated" to "selected" men.
The movement for electoral reform in Great Britain at the present time
is one of quite fundamental importance in the development of modern
democracy. The case of the reformers is that heretofore modern democracy
has not had a fair opportunity of showing its best possibilities to the
world, because the methods of election have persistently set aside the
better types of public men, or rather of would-be public men, in favour
of mere party hacks. That is a story common to Britain and the American
democracies, but in America it was expressed in rather different terms
and dealt with in a less analytical fashion than it has been in Great
Britain. It was not at first clearly understood that the failure of
democracy to produce good government came through the preference of
"delegated" over "selected" men, the idea of delegation did in fact
dominate the minds of both electoral reformers and electoral
conservatives alike, and the earlier stages of the reform movement in
Great Britain were inspired not so much by the idea of getting a better
type of representative as by the idea of getting a fairer
representation of minorities. It was only slowly that the idea that
sensible men do not usually belong to any political "party" took hold.
It is only now being realized that what sensible men desire in a member
of parliament is honour and capacity rather than a mechanical loyalty to
a "platform." They do not want to dictate to their representative; they
want a man they can trust as their representative. In the fifties and
sixties of the last century, in which this electoral reform movement
began and the method of Proportional Representation was thought out, it
was possible for the reformers to work untroubled upon the assumption
that if a man was not necessarily born a
"... little Liber-al,
or else a little Conservative,"
he must at least be a Liberal-Unionist or a Conservative Free-Trader.
But seeking a fair representation for party minorities, these reformers
produced a system of voting at once simple and incapable of
manipulation, that leads straight, not to the representation of small
parties, but to a type of democratic government by selected best men.
Before giving the essential features of that system, it may be well to
state in its simplest form the evils at which the reform aims. An
election, the reformers point out, is not the simple matter it appears
to be at the first blush. Methods of voting can be manipulated in
various ways, and nearly every method has its own liability to
falsification. We may take for illustration the commonest, simplest
case--the case that is the perplexity of every clear-thinking voter
under British or American conditions--the case of a constituency in
which every elector has one vote, and which returns one representative
to Parliament. The naive theory on which people go is that all the
possible candidates are put up, that each voter votes for the one he
likes best, and that the best man wins. The bitter experience is that
hardly ever are there more than two candidates, and still more rarely is
either of these the best man possible. Suppose, for example, the
constituency is mainly Conservative. A little group of pothouse
politicians, wire-pullers, busybodies, local journalists, and small
lawyers, working for various monetary interests, have "captured" the
local Conservative organization. They have time and energy to capture
it, because they have no other interest in life except that. It is their
"business," and honest men are busy with other duties. For reasons that
do not appear these local "workers" put up an unknown Mr. Goldbug as the
official Conservative candidate. He professes a generally Conservative
view of things, but few people are sure of him and few people trust him.
Against him the weaker (and therefore still more venal) Liberal
organization now puts up a Mr. Kentshire (formerly Wurstberg) to
represent the broader thought and finer generosities of the English
mind. A number of Conservative gentlemen, generally too busy about their
honest businesses to attend the party "smokers" and the party cave,
realize suddenly that they want Goldbug hardly more than they want
Wurstberg. They put up their long-admired, trusted, and able friend Mr.
Sanity as an Independent Conservative.
Every one knows the trouble that follows. Mr. Sanity is "going to split
the party vote." The hesitating voter is told, with considerable truth,
that a vote given for Mr. Sanity is a vote given for Wurstberg. At any
price the constituency does not want Wurstberg. So at the eleventh hour
Mr. Sanity is induced to withdraw, and Mr. Goldbug goes into Parliament
to misrepresent this constituency. And so with most constituencies, and
the result is a legislative body consisting largely of men of unknown
character and obscure aims, whose only credential is the wearing of a
party label. They come into parliament not to forward the great
interests they ostensibly support, but with an eye to the railway
jobbery, corporation business, concessions and financial operations that
necessarily go on in and about the national legislature. That in its
simplest form is the dilemma of democracy. The problem that has
confronted modern democracy since its beginning has not really been the
representation of organized minorities--they are very well able to look
after themselves--but _the protection of the unorganized mass of busily
occupied, fairly intelligent men from the tricks of the specialists who
work the party machines_. We know Mr. Sanity, we want Mr. Sanity, but we
are too busy to watch the incessant intrigues to oust him in favour of
the obscurely influential people, politically docile, who are favoured
by the organization. We want an organizer-proof method of voting. It is
in answer to this demand, as the outcome of a most careful examination
of the ways in which voting may be protected from the exploitation of
those who _work_ elections, that the method of Proportional
Representation with a single transferable vote has been evolved. It is
organizer-proof. It defies the caucus. If you do not like Mr. Goldbug
you can put up and vote for Mr. Sanity, giving Mr. Goldbug your second
choice, in the most perfect confidence that in any case your vote cannot
help to return Mr. Wurstberg.
With Proportional Representation with a single transferable vote (this
specification is necessary, because there are also the inferior
imitations of various election-riggers figuring as proportional
representation), it is _impossible to prevent the effective candidature
of independent men of repute beside the official candidates_.