mankind, and the earliest records testify to its antiquity. The
regulation of human intercourse, the delimiting of rights and
privileges, protection of life and property, the codifying of laws,
vague, various and conflicting, the making of new laws and the enforcing
of those that have taken organic form; all these and an hundred other
governmental functions, appeal strongly to the mind and touch closely on
personal interests. It is no wonder that the political history of human
society is the most varied, voluminous and popular in its appeal. At the
present moment this problem has, in general, an even more poignant
appeal, and no rival except the industrial problem, for in both cases
systems that, up to ten years ago, were questioned only by a minority
(large in the case of industry, small and obscure in the case of
government) have since completely broken down, and it is probable that a
political system which had existed throughout the greater part of Europe
and the Americas for a century and a half, almost without serious
criticism, has now as many assailants as industrialism itself.
The change is startling from the "Triumphant Democracy" period, a space
of time as clearly defined and as significant in its characteristics as
the "Victorian Era." Before the war, during the war, and throughout the
earlier years of the even more devastating "peace," the system which
followed the ruin of the Renaissance autocracies, the essential elements
in which were an ever-widening suffrage, parliamentary government, and
the universal operation of the quantitative standard of values, was
never questioned or criticised, except in matters of detail. That it was
the most perfect governmental scheme ever devised and that it must
continue forever, was held to be axiomatic, and with few exceptions the
remedy proposed for such faults as could not possibly escape detection
was a still further extension of the democratic principle. Even the war
itself was held to be "a war to make the world safe for democracy." It
is significant that the form in which this saying now frequently appears
is one in which the word "from" is substituted in place of the word
"for." It is useless to blink the fact that there is now a distrust of
parliamentary and representative government which is almost universal
and this distrust, which is becoming widespread, reaches from the
Bolshevism of Russia on the one hand, through many intermediate social
and intellectual stages, to the conservative elements in England and the
United States, and the fast-strengthening royalist "bloc" in France.
In many unexpected places there is visible a profound sense that
something is so fundamentally wrong that palliatives are useless and
some drastic reform is necessary, a reform that may almost amount to
revolution. Lord Bryce still believes in democracy in spite of his keen
realizations of its grievous defects, because, as he says, hope is an
inextinguishable quality of the human soul. Mr. Chesterton preaches
democracy in principle while condemning its mechanism and its workings
with his accustomed vigour; the Adamses renounce democracy and all its
works while offering no hint as to what could consistently take its
place with any better chance of success, while the royalists excoriate
it in unmeasured terms and preach an explicit return to monarchy.
Meanwhile international Bolshevism, hating the thing as violently as do
kings in exile, substitutes a crude and venal autocracy, while organized
labour, as a whole, works for the day when a "class-conscious
proletariat" will have taken matters into its own hands and established
a new aristocracy of privilege in which the present working classes will
hold the whip-hand. Meanwhile the more educated element of the general
public withdraws itself more and more from political affairs, going its
own way and making the best of a bad job it thinks itself taught by
experience it cannot mend.
It is useless to deny that government, in the character of its
personnel, the quality of its output, the standard of its service and
the degree of its beneficence has been steadily deteriorating during the
last century and has now reached, in nearly every civilized country, a
deplorably low level. Popular representatives are less and less men of
character and ability; legislation is absurd in quantity, short-sighted,
frivolous, inquisitorial, and in a large measure prompted by selfish
interests; administration is reckless, wasteful and inefficient, while
it is overloaded in numbers, without any particular aptitude on the part
of its members, and in a measure controlled by personal or corporate
interests. The whole system is in bad odour for it is shot through and
through with the greed for money and influence, while the cynicism of
the professional politician and the low average of character,
intelligence and manners of the strata of society that increasingly are
usurping all power, work towards producing that general contempt and
aversion that have become so evident of late and that are a menace to
society no less than that of the decaying institution itself.
Confronted by a situation such as this, the natural tendency of those
who suffer under it, either in their material interests or their ideals,
is to condemn the mechanism, perhaps even the very principles for the
operation of which the various machines were devised. Some reject the
whole scheme of representative, parliamentary government, and, failing
any plausible substitute, are driven back on some form of the soviet, or
even government by industrial groups. Those that go to the limit and
reject the whole scheme of democracy are in still worse plight for they
have no alternative to offer except a restored monarchy, and this, the
_terminus ad quem_ of their logic, their courage will not permit them to
avow.
It is a dilemma, but forced, I believe, by the fatal passion of the man
of modernism for the machine, the mechanical device, the material
equivalent for a thing that has no equivalent, and that is the personal
character of the constituents of society and the working factors in a
political organism. There was never a more foolish saying than that
which is so frequently and so boastfully used: "a government of laws and
not of men." This is the exact reversal of what should be recognized as
a self-evident truth, viz, that the quality of the men, not the nature
of the laws or of the administrative machine, is the determining factor
in government. You may take any form of government ever devised by man,
monarchy, aristocracy, republic, democracy, yes, or soviet, and if the
community in which this government operates has a working majority of
men of character, intelligence and spiritual energy, it will be a good
government, whereas if the working majority is deficient in these
characteristics, or if it makes itself negligible by abstention from
public affairs it will be a bad government. There is no one political
system which is right while all others are wrong. The monarchy of St.
Louis was better than the Third Republic, as this is better than was the
monarchy of Louis XV. The aristocracy of Washington was better than the
democracy of this year of grace, as this in itself is better than the
late junker aristocracy of Prussia. You cannot substitute a machine in
place of character, you cannot supersede life by a theory.
This does not mean that the form of government is of no moment, it is of
the utmost importance for I cannot too often insist that the organic
life of society is the resultant of two forces; spiritual energy working
through and upon the material forms towards their improvement or--when
this energy is weak or distorted--their degeneration; the material forms
acting as a stimulus towards the development of spiritual energy through
association and environment that are favourable, or towards its
weakening and distortion when these are deterrents because of their own
degraded or degrading nature. If it is futile to look for salvation
through the mechanism, it is equally futile to try to act directly and
exclusively on the character of the social constituents in the patient
hope that their defects may be remedied, and the preponderance of
character of high value achieved, before catastrophe overtakes the
experiment. Life is as sacramental as the Christian religion and
Christian philosophy; neither the spiritual substance nor the material
accidents can operate alone but only in a conjunction so intimate that
it is to all intents and purposes--that is, for the interests and
purposes of God in human life--a perfect unity. However completely and
even passionately we may realize the determining factor of spiritual
energy as this manifests itself through personal character, however
deeply we may distrust the machine, we are bound to recognize the
paramount necessity of the active interplay of both within the limits of
life as we know it on the earth, and therefore it is very much our
concern that the machine, whether it is industrial, political,
educational, ecclesiastical or social, is as perfect in its nature and
stimulating in its operations as we are able to compass.
In the present liquidation of values, theories and institutions we are
bound therefore to scrutinize each operating agency of human society, to
see wherein it has failed and how it can be bettered, and the problem
before us now is the political organism.
Now it appears that in the past there have been just two methods whereby
a civil polity has come into existence and established itself for a
short period or a long. These two methods are, first, unpremeditated and
sometimes unconscious growth; second, calculated and self-conscious
revolution. The first method has produced communities, states and
empires that frequently worked well and lasted for long periods; the
second has had issue in nothing that has endured for any length of time
or has left a record of beneficence. Evolution in government is in
accord with the processes of life, even to the extent that it is always
after a time followed by degeneration; revolution in government is the
throwing of a monkey-wrench into the machinery by a disaffected workman,
with the wrecking of the machine, the violent stoppage of the works, and
frequently the sudden death of the worker as a consequence. The English
monarchy from Duke William to Henry VIII, is a case of normal growth by
minor changes and modifications, but its subsequent history has been one
of revolutions, six or seven having occurred in the last four hundred
years; the scheme which now holds, though precariously, is the result of
the great democratic revolution accomplished during the reign of Queen
Victoria. The free monarchies of Europe which began to take form during
the long period of the Dark Ages and pursued their admirable course well
through the Middle Ages, were also normal and slow growths; but the
revolutions that have followed the Great War will meet a different fate,
several of them, indeed, have counted their existence in months and have
already passed into history.
If we are wise we shall discount revolutions for the future, for nothing
but ill is accomplished by denying life and exalting the ingenious
substitutes of ambitious and presumptuous Frankensteins; the result is
too often a monster that works cleverly at first, and with a semblance
of human intelligence, but in the end shows itself as a destroyer. Our
task is to envisage, as clearly as possible, the political systems
established amongst us, note their weaknesses either in themselves or in
their relationship to society as it is, and then try to find those
remedies that can be applied without any violent methods of dislocation
or substitution; always bearing in mind the fact that the energizing
force that will make them live, preserve them from deterioration, and
adapt them to conditions which will ever change, is the spiritual force
of human personality, and that this force comes only through the
character qualities of the individual components of society.
Now in considering our own case in this day and generation there are
first of all two matters to be borne in mind. One is that we shall do
well to confine our inquiry to the United States, for while the defects
we shall have to point out are common to practically all the
contemporary governments of Europe and the Americas, our own enginery is
different in certain ways, and our troubles are also different between
one example and another. After all, our immediate interest must lie with
our own national problems. The other point is that in criticising the
workings of government in America we are not necessarily criticising its
founders or the creators of its original constitutions, charters, and
other mechanisms. The Constitution of the United States, for example,
was conceived to meet one series of perfectly definite conditions that
have now been superseded by others which are radically, and even
diametrically different. The original Constitution was a most able
instrument of organic law, but just because it did fit so perfectly
conditions as they were four generations ago, it applies but
indifferently to present circumstances, and even less well than the
Founders hoped would be the case; for the reason that the amendments
which were provided for have seldom taken cognizance of these changing
conditions, and even when this was done the amendments themselves have
not been wisely drawn, while certain of them have been actually
disastrous in their nature, others frivolous, and yet more the result of
ephemeral and hysterical ebullitions of an engineered public opinion.
The same may be said of state constitutions and municipal charters,
which have suffered incessant changes, mostly unfortunate and
ill-judged, except during the last few years, when a spirit of real
wisdom and constructiveness has shown itself, though sporadically and as
yet with some timidity. The reforms, such as they are, are largely in
the line of palliatives; the deep-lying factors, those that control both
success and failure, are seldom touched upon. The necessary courage--or
perhaps temerity--is lacking. What is needed is such a clear seeing of
conditions, and such an approach, as manifested themselves in the
Constitutional Convention of the United States, for in spite of the many
compromises that were in the end necessary to placate a public opinion
not untouched by prejudice, superstition and selfishness, the great
document--and even more the records of the debates--still brilliantly
set forth both the clear-seeing and the lofty attitude that
characterized the Convention. Had these men been gathered together
today, even the same men, they would frame a very different document,
for they took conditions and men as they were, and, with an
indestructible hope to glorify their common sense, they produced a
masterpiece. It is in the same spirit that we must approach our problem
of today.
Now in considering the situation that confronts us, we find certain
respects in which either the methods are bad, or the results, or both.
There is no unanimity in this criticism, indeed I doubt if any two of us
would agree on all the items in the indictment, though we all might
unite on one or two. I can only give my own list for what it is worth.
In the first place we, in common with all the nations, have drifted into
imperialism of a gross scale and illiberal, even tyrannical working. We
could hardly do otherwise for such has been the universal tendency for
more than an hundred years. By constant progression municipal
governments have absorbed into themselves matters that in decency, and
with any regard for liberty, belong to the individual. Simultaneously
our state governments have followed the same course, infringing even on
the just prerogatives of the towns and cities, while, more than all, the
national government has robbed the states, the cities and the citizens
of what should belong to them, until at last we have an imperial,
autocratic, inquisitorial, and largely irresponsible government at
Washington that is the one supreme political fact; we are no longer a
Federal Republic but an Imperialism, in which is centralized all the
authority inherent in the one hundred and ten millions of our population
and from which a constantly diminishing stream of what is practically
devolved authority, trickles down through state and city to the
individual in the last instance--if it gets there at all! This I believe
to be absolutely and fatally wrong. In the first place, human society
cannot function at this abnormal scale, it is outside the human scale,
for in spite of our pride and insolence there are limits on every hand
to what man can do. In the second place, I conceive it to be absolutely
at variance with any principle of republicanism or democracy or even of
free monarchy. It is at one only with the imperialism of Egypt, Babylon,
Rome and the late Empire of Germany. In a free monarchy, a republic, or
a democracy, the pyramid of political organism stands, not on its point
but broad-based and four-square, tapering upward to its final apex. A
sane and wholesome society begins with the family--natural or
artificial--which has original jurisdiction over a far greater series of
rights and privileges than it now commands. From the family certain
powers are delegated to the next higher social unit, the village or
communal group, which in its turn concedes certain of its inherent
rights to the organic group of communities, or states, and finally the
states commit to the last and general authority, the national
government, some of the elements of authority that have been delegated
to them. The principle of this delegation from one organism to another,
is common interest and welfare; only those functions which can be
performed with more even justice and with greater effectiveness, by the
community for example, than by the family, are so delegated. In the same
way the several groups commit to their common government only so much as
they cannot perform with due justice and equity to the others in the
same group. In the end the national government exists only that it may
provide for a limited number of national necessities, as for example,
defence against extra-national aggression, the conduct of diplomatic
relations with foreign powers, the maintaining of a national currency
and a national postal service, the provision of courts of last resort,
and the raising of revenue for the support of these few and explicit
functions.
The first step, it seems to me, towards governmental reform, is
decentralization, with a return to the States, the civic communities and
the individual citizens of nine-tenths of the powers and the
prerogatives that have been taken from them in defiance of abstract
justice, of the principles of free government and of the theory of the
workable unit of human scale. In a word we must abandon imperialism and
all its works and go back to the Federal Republic.
The second cause of our troubles lies, I believe, in the institution of
universal suffrage founded on the theory (or dogma) that the electoral
franchise is an inalienable right. This doctrine is of recent invention,
only coming into force during the "reconstruction period" following the
War between the States, when it was brought forward by certain leaders
of the Republican party to justify their enfranchisement of the negroes
in the hope that by this act they could fix their party in power to
perpetuity. In any case, the plan itself has worked badly, both for the
community and for many of the voters. It is of course impossible for me
to argue the case in detail; I can do hardly more than state my own
personal belief, and this is that the question is wholly one of
expediency, and that the question of abstract justice and the rights of
man does not enter into the consideration. I submit that the electoral
franchise should again be accepted as a privilege involving a duty, and
not as a right inherent in every adult person of twenty-one years or
over and not lunatic or in jail. This privilege, which in itself should
confer honour, should be granted to those who demonstrate their capacity
to use it honestly and intelligently, and taken away for cause.
The acute critic will not be slow to remind me that this proposition is
somewhat beside the case and that it possesses but an academic interest,
since we are dealing with a _fait accompli._ This is of course perfectly
true. The electoral franchise could be so restricted only by the
suffrages of the present electorate, and it is inconceivable that any
large number, and far less, a majority, of voters would even consider
the proposition for a moment. For good or ill we have unrestricted adult
suffrage, and there is not the faintest chance of any other basis being
established by constitutional means. Something however can be done, and
this is a thing of great value and importance. What I suggest is
concerted effort towards a measured purification of the electorate
through the penalizing of law-breakers by temporary disfranchisement. It
is hardly too much to assume that a man who deliberately breaks the law
is constructively unfit to vote or to hold office, at all events,
conviction for any crime or misdemeanour gives a reasonable ground for
depriving the offender of these privileges, at least for a time. The
law-breaking element, whether it is millionaire or proletarian, is one
of the dangerous factors in society, which would lose nothing if from
time to time these gentry were removed from active participation in
public affairs. If, for example, any one convicted of minor offenses
punishable by fine or imprisonment were disfranchised for a year, if of
major offenses, for varying and increasing periods, from five years
upwards, and if a second offense during the period of disfranchisement
worked an automatic doubling of the time prescribed for a first offense,
I conceive that the electorate would be measurably purified and that
regard for the law would be stimulated. In one instance I am persuaded
that disfranchisement should be for life, and that is in the case of
giving or accepting a bribe or otherwise committing a crime against the
ballot; this, together with treason against the state, should be
sufficient cause for eliminating the offender from all further
participation in public affairs. If the electorate could be purified
after this fashion, and if more stringent laws could be passed in the
matter of naturalization of aliens, together with iron-clad requirements
that every voter should be able to speak, read and write the English
language, we should have achieved something towards the safeguarding of
the suffrage.
The third weakness in our system, and in some respect the most
dangerous, as it is in all respects the most pestiferous, is the
insanity of law-making. All parliamentary governments suffer from this
malady, but that of the United States most grievously, and this is true
of the national government, the states and the municipalities. It has
become the conviction of legislative bodies that they must justify their
existence by making laws, and the more laws they pass the better they
have discharged their duties. The thing has become a scandal and an
oppression, for the liberties of American citizens and the just
prerogatives of the states and the cities, as vital human groups, have
been more infringed upon, reduced, and degraded by free legislation than
ever happened in similar communities by the action of absolute monarchs.
It is a folly that works its insidious injury in two ways; first by
confusing life by innumerable laws ill-advised, ill-drawn, mutually
contradictory, ephemeral in their nature, inquisitorial in their
workings; second, by creating a condition where any personal or factious
interest can be served by due process of law, until at last we have
reached a point where liberty itself has largely ceased to exist and we
find ourselves crushed under a tyranny of popular government no less
oppressive than the tyranny of absolutism. Nor is this all; the mania
for making laws has bred a complete and ingenious and singularly
effective system of getting laws made by methods familiar to the members
of all legislative bodies whether they are city councils, state
legislatures or the national congress, and this means opportunities for
corruption, and methods of corruption, that are fast degrading
government in the United States to a point where there is none so poor
as to do it reverence. The whole system is preposterous and absurd,
breeding not only bad laws, but a widespread contempt of law, while the
personal freedom for which democracy once fought, is fast becoming a
memory.