the average House of Commons member will be changed by Proportional
Representation. It will. It will make the election of obscure and
unknown men, of carpet-bag candidates who work a constituency as a
hawker works a village, of local pomposities and village-pump "leaders"
almost impossible. It will replace such candidates by better known and
more widely known men. It will make the House of Commons so much the
more a real gathering of the nation, so much the more a house of
representative men. (Lord Harcourt's "faddists and mugwumps.") And it is
perfectly true as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (also an opponent) declares, that
Proportional Representation means constituencies so big that it will be
impossible for a poor man to cultivate and work them. That is
unquestionable. But, mark another point, it will also make it useless,
as Mr. Chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate and work
them. All this cultivating and working, all this going about and making
things right with this little jobber here, that contractor there, all
the squaring of small political clubs and organizations, all the
subscription blackmail and charity bribery, that now makes a
Parliamentary candidature so utterly rotten an influence upon public
life, will be killed dead by Proportional Representation. You cannot job
men into Parliament by Proportional Representation. Proportional
Representation lets in the outsider. It lets in the common, unassigned
voter who isn't in the local clique. That is the clue to nearly all this
opposition of the politicians. It makes democracy possible for the first
time in modern history. And that poor man of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's
imagination, instead of cadging about a constituency in order to start
politician, will have to make good in some more useful way--as a leader
of the workers in their practical affairs, for example--before people
will hear of him and begin to believe in him.
The opposition to Proportional Representation of Mr. Sidney Webb and his
little circle is a trifle more "scientific" in tone than these naive
objections of the common run of antagonist, but underlying it is the
same passionate desire to keep politics a close game for the politician
and to bar out the politically unspecialized man. There is more conceit
and less jobbery behind the criticisms of this type of mind. It is an
opposition based on the idea that the common man is a fool who does not
know what is good for him. So he has to be stampeded. Politics,
according to this school, is a sort of cattle-driving.
The Webbites do not deny the broad facts of the case. Our present
electoral system, with our big modern constituencies of thousands of
voters, leads to huge turnovers of political power with a relatively
small shifting of public opinion. It makes a mock of public opinion by
caricature, and Parliament becomes the distorting mirror of the nation.
Under some loud false issue a few score of thousands of votes turn over,
and in goes this party or that with a big sham majority. This the
Webbites admit. But they applaud it. It gives us, they say, "a strong
Government." Public opinion, the intelligent man outside the House, is
ruled out of the game. He has no power of intervention at all. The
artful little Fabian politicians rub their hands and say, "_Now_ we can
get to work with the wires! No one can stop us." And when the public
complains of the results, there is always the repartee, "_You_ elected
them." But the Fabian psychology is the psychology of a very small group
of pedants who believe that fair ends may be reached by foul means. It
is much easier and more natural to serve foul ends by foul means. In
practice it is not tricky benevolence but tricky bargaining among the
interests that will secure control of the political wires. That is a bad
enough state of affairs in ordinary times, but in times of tragic
necessity like the present men will not be mocked in this way. Life is
going to be very intense in the years ahead of us. If we go right on to
another caricature Parliament, with perhaps half a hundred leading men
in it and the rest hacks and nobodies, the baffled and discontented
outsiders in the streets may presently be driven to rioting and the
throwing of bombs. Unless, indeed, the insurrection of the outsiders
takes a still graver form, and the Press, which has ceased entirely to
be a Party Press in Great Britain, helps some adventurous Prime Minister
to flout and set aside the lower House altogether. There is neither much
moral nor much physical force behind the House of Commons at the present
time.
The argument of the Fabian opponents to Proportional Representation is
frankly that the strongest Government is got in a House of half a
hundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of the Parliament driven
sheep. But the whole mischief of the present system is that the obscure
members of Parliament are not sheep; they are a crowd of little-minded,
second-rate men just as greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us.
They vote straight indeed on all the main party questions, they obey
their Whips like sheep then; but there is a great bulk of business in
Parliament outside the main party questions, and obedience is not
without its price. These are matters vitally affecting our railways and
ships and communications generally, the food and health of the people,
armaments, every sort of employment, the appointment of public servants,
the everyday texture of all our lives. Then the nobody becomes somebody,
the party hack gets busy, the rat is in the granary....
In these recent debates in the House of Commons one can see every stock
trick of the wire-puller in operation. Particularly we have the old
dodge of the man who is "in theory quite in sympathy with Proportional
Representation, but ..." It is, he declares regretfully, too late. It
will cause delay. Difficult to make arrangements. Later on perhaps. And
so on. It is never too late for a vital issue. Upon the speedy adoption
of Proportional Representation depends, as Mr. Balfour made plain in an
admirable speech, whether the great occasions of the peace and after the
peace are to be handled by a grand council of all that is best and most
leaderlike in the nation, or whether they are to be left to a few
leaders, apparently leading, but really profoundly swayed by the obscure
crowd of politicians and jobbers behind them. Are the politicians to
hamper and stifle us in this supreme crisis of our national destinies or
are we British peoples to have a real control of our own affairs in this
momentous time? Are men of light and purpose to have a voice in public
affairs or not? Proportional Representation is supremely a test
question. It is a question that no adverse decision in the House of
Commons can stifle. There are too many people now who grasp its
importance and significance. Every one who sets a proper value upon
purity in public life and the vitality of democratic institutions will,
I am convinced, vote and continue to vote across every other question
against the antiquated, foul, and fraudulent electoral methods that have
hitherto robbed democracy of three-quarters of its efficiency.
XI
THE STUDY AND PROPAGANDA OF DEMOCRACY
In the preceding chapter I have dealt with the discussion of
Proportional Representation in the British House of Commons in order to
illustrate the intellectual squalor amidst which public affairs have to
be handled at the present time, even in a country professedly
"democratic." I have taken this one discussion as a sample to illustrate
the present imperfection of our democratic instrument. All over the
world, in every country, great multitudes of intelligent and serious
people are now inspired by the idea of a new order of things in the
world, of a world-wide establishment of peace and mutual aid between
nation and nation and man and man. But, chiefly because of the
elementary crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly anywhere at
present, except at Washington, do these great ideas and this world-wide
will find expression. Amidst the other politicians and statesmen of the
world President Wilson towers up with an effect almost divine. But it
is no ingratitude to him to say that he is not nearly so exceptional a
being among educated men as he is among the official leaders of mankind.
Everywhere now one may find something of the Wilson purpose and
intelligence, but nearly everywhere it is silenced or muffled or made
ineffective by the political advantage of privileged or of violent and
adventurous inferior men. He is "one of us," but it is his good fortune
to have got his head out of the sack that is about the heads of most of
us. In the official world, in the world of rulers and representatives
and "statesmen," he almost alone, speaks for the modern intelligence.
This general stifling of the better intelligence of the world and its
possible release to expression and power, seems to me to be the
fundamental issue underlying all the present troubles of mankind. We
cannot get on while everywhere fools and vulgarians hold the levers that
can kill, imprison, silence and starve men. We cannot get on with false
government and we cannot get on with mob government; we must have right
government. The intellectual people of the world have a duty of
co-operation they have too long neglected. The modernization of
political institutions, the study of these institutions until we have
worked out and achieved the very best and most efficient methods whereby
the whole community of mankind may work together under the direction of
its chosen intelligences, is the common duty of every one who has a
brain for the service. And before everything else we have to realize
this crudity and imperfection in what we call "democracy" at the present
time. Democracy is still chiefly an aspiration, it is a spirit, it is an
idea; for the most part its methods are still to seek. And still more is
this "League of Free Nations" as yet but an aspiration. Let us not
underrate the task before us. Only the disinterested devotion of
hundreds of thousands of active brains in school, in pulpit, in book and
press and assembly can ever bring these redeeming conceptions down to
the solid earth to rule.
All round the world there is this same obscuration of the real
intelligence of men. In Germany, human good will and every fine mind are
subordinated to political forms that have for a mouthpiece a Chancellor
with his brains manifestly addled by the theories of _Welt-Politik_ and
the Bismarckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad Kaiser.
Nevertheless there comes even from Germany muffled cries for a new age.
A grinning figure like a bloodstained Punch is all that speaks for the
best brains in Bulgaria. Yes. We Western allies know all that by heart;
but, after all, the immediate question for each one of us is, "_What
speaks for me?_" So far as official political forms go I myself am as
ineffective as any right-thinking German or Bulgarian could possibly be.
I am more ineffective than a Galician Pole or a Bohemian who votes for
his nationalist representative. Politically I am a negligible item in
the constituency of this Mr. Burdett Coutts into whose brain we have
been peeping. Politically I am less than a waistcoat button on that
quaint figure. And that is all I am--except that I revolt. I have
written of it so far as if it were just a joke. But indeed bad and
foolish political institutions cannot be a joke. Sooner or later they
prove themselves to be tragedy. This war is that. It is yesterday's
lazy, tolerant, "sense of humour" wading out now into the lakes of blood
it refused to foresee.
It is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day the nationalisms, the
suspicions and hatreds, the cants and policies, and dead phrases that
sway men represent the current intelligence of mankind. They are merely
the evidences of its disorganization. Even now we _know_ we could do far
better. Give mankind but a generation or so of peace and right education
and this world could mock at the poor imaginations that conceived a
millennium. But we have to get intelligences together, we have to
canalize thought before it can work and produce its due effects. To that
end, I suppose, there has been a vast amount of mental activity among
us political "negligibles." For my own part I have thought of the idea
of God as the banner of human unity and justice, and I have made some
tentatives in that direction, but men, I perceive, have argued
themselves mean and petty about religion. At the word "God" passions
bristle. The word "God" does not unite men, it angers them. But I doubt
if God cares greatly whether we call Him God or no. His service is the
service of man. This double idea of the League of Free Nations, linked
with the idea of democracy as universal justice, is free from the
jealousy of the theologians and great enough for men to unite upon
everywhere. I know how warily one must reckon with the spite of the
priest, but surely these ideas may call upon the teachers of all the
great world religions for their support. The world is full now of
confused propaganda, propaganda of national ideas, of traditions of
hate, of sentimental and degrading loyalties, of every sort of error
that divides and tortures and slays mankind. All human institutions are
made of propaganda, are sustained by propaganda and perish when it
ceases; they must be continually explained and re-explained to the young
and the negligent. And for this new world of democracy and the League of
Free Nations to which all reasonable men are looking, there must needs
be the greatest of all propagandas. For that cause every one must
become a teacher and a missionary. "Persuade to it and make the idea of
it and the necessity for it plain," that is the duty of every school
teacher, every tutor, every religious teacher, every writer, every
lecturer, every parent, every trusted friend throughout the world. For
it, too, every one must become a student, must go on with the task of
making vague intentions into definite intentions, of analyzing and
destroying obstacles, of mastering the ten thousand difficulties of
detail....
I am a man who looks now towards the end of life; fifty-one years have I
scratched off from my calendar, another slips by, and I cannot tell how
many more of the sparse remainder of possible years are really mine. I
live in days of hardship and privation, when it seems more natural to
feel ill than well; without holidays or rest or peace; friends and the
sons of my friends have been killed; death seems to be feeling always
now for those I most love; the newspapers that come in to my house tell
mostly of blood and disaster, of drownings and slaughterings, of
cruelties and base intrigues. Yet never have I been so sure that there
is a divinity in man and that a great order of human life, a reign of
justice and world-wide happiness, of plenty, power, hope, and gigantic
creative effort, lies close at hand. Even now we have the science and
the ability available for a universal welfare, though it is scattered
about the world like a handful of money dropped by a child; even now
there exists all the knowledge that is needed to make mankind
universally free and human life sweet and noble. We need but the faith
for it, and it is at hand; we need but the courage to lay our hands upon
it and in a little space of years it can be ours.
THE END.