the whole mass of individuals in a country lumped together. That is the
people, a mere varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common motive,
a complex interplay. The People, as the believer understands the word,
is something more mysterious than that. The People is something that
overrides and is added to the individualities that make up the people.
It is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order—as, indeed,
its capital “P” displays. It has a will of its own, which is not the
will of any particular person in it, it has a power of purpose and
judgment of a superior sort. It is supposed to be the underlying reality
of all national life and the real seat of all public religious emotion.
Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, and so there is need of
rulers and interpreters. If they express it well in law and fact, in
book and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do
not, it revolts or forgets or does something else of an equally
annihilatory sort. That, briefly, is the idea of the People. My modest
thesis is that there exists nothing of the sort, that the world of men
is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the
collective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual actions.
How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligent
Americans or read the contemporary literature of the first French
Revolution to understand. I find, for example, so typical a young
American as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the
People to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of
Shakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries, and the passage in
which this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general
expression of this sort of mysticism. “One must keep one’s faith in the
People—the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers—else of all men the
artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit and
concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in the
end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate
between it and the false.” And then he resorts to italics to emphasise:
“_In the last analysis the People are always right._”
And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, who
declared his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collective
being. “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the
people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
The thing is in the very opening words of the American Constitution, and
Theodore Parker calls it “the American idea” and pitches a still higher
note: “A government of all the people, by all the people, for all the
people; a government of all the principles of eternal justice, _the
unchanging law of God_.”
It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct from any individual
and personal one is intended in these passages. Mr. Norris, for example,
never figured to himself a great wave of critical discrimination
sweeping through the ranks of the various provision trades and a
multitude of simple, plain burgesses preferring Shakespeare and setting
Marlowe aside. Such a particularisation of his statement would have at
once reduced it to absurdity. Nor does any American see the people
particularised in that way. They believe in the People one and
indivisible, a simple, mystical being, which pervades and dominates the
community and determines its final collective consequences.
Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a large part of the
political organisation of the modern world. The idea was one of the
chief fruits of the speculations of the eighteenth century, and the
American Constitution is its most perfect expression. One turns,
therefore, inevitably to the American instance, not because it is the
only one, but because there is the thing in its least complicated form.
We have there an almost exactly logical realisation of this belief. The
whole political machine is designed and expressed to register the
People’s will, literature is entirely rewarded and controlled by the
effectual suffrages of the bookseller’s counter, science (until private
endowment intervened) was in the hands of the State Legislatures, and
religion the concern of the voluntary congregations.
On the assumption that there is a People there could be no better state
of affairs. You and I and everyone, except for a vote or a book, or a
service now and then, can go about our business, you to your grocery and
I to mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe in the
People’s hands. Now that is by no means a caricature of the attitude of
mind of many educated Americans. You find they have little or nothing to
do with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the professional
politician with a certain contempt; they trouble their heads hardly at
all about literature, and they contemplate the general religious
condition of the population with absolute unconcern. It is not that they
are unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; it
is that they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatever
troubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that “in the
last analysis” the People will get it right.
And now suppose that I am right and that there are no People! Suppose
that the crowd is really no more than a crowd, a vast miscellaneous
confusion of persons which grows more miscellaneous every year. Suppose
this conception of the People arose out of a sentimental idealisation,
Rousseau fashion, of the ancient homogeneous peasant class—a class that
is rapidly being swept out of existence by modern industrial
developments—and that whatever slender basis of fact it had in the past
is now altogether gone. What consequences may be expected?
It does not follow that because the object of your reverence is a dead
word you will get no oracles from the shrine. If the sacred People
remains impassive, inarticulate, non-existent, there are always the
keepers of the shrine who will oblige. Professional politicians, venial
and violent men, will take over the derelict political control, people
who live by the book trade will alone have a care for letters, research
and learning will be subordinated to political expediency, and a great
development of noisily competitive religious enterprises will take the
place of any common religious formula. There will commence a secular
decline in the quality of public thought, emotion and activity. There
will be no arrest or remedy for this state of affairs so long as that
superstitious faith in the People as inevitably right “in the last
analysis” remains. And if my supposition is correct, it should be
possible to find in the United States, where faith in the people is
indisputably dominant, some such evidence of the error of this faith. Is
there?
I write as one that listens from afar. But there come reports of
legislative and administrative corruption, of organised public
blackmail, that do seem to carry out my thesis. One thinks of Edgar
Allan Poe, who dreamt of founding a distinctive American literature,
drugged and killed almost as it were symbolically, amid electioneering,
and nearly lied out of all posthumous respect by that scoundrel
Griswold; one thinks of State Universities that are no more than mints
for bogus degrees; one thinks of “Science” Christianity and Zion City.
These things are quite insufficient for a Q.E.D., but I submit they
favour my proposition.
Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, differentiating
millions of men. All sorts of widely accepted generalisations will
collapse if that foundation is withdrawn. I submit it as worth
considering.
THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS
§ 1
There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the
world.
There has always been discord between governments and governed since
States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and
obedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a
matter of course that under all absolutisms and narrow oligarchies the
community, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration
developed a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it
attained to any power of thought and expression at all, would express
discontent. But we English and Americans and Western Europeans generally
had supposed that, so far as our own communities were concerned, this
discontent was already anticipated and met by representative
institutions. We had supposed that, with various safeguards and
elaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact, govern
themselves. Our panacea for all discontents was the franchise. Social
and national dissatisfaction could be given at the same time a voice and
a remedy in the ballot-box. Our liberal intelligences could and do still
understand Russians wanting votes, Indians wanting votes, women wanting
votes. The history of nineteenth-century Liberalism in the world might
almost be summed up in the phrase “progressive enfranchisement.” But
these are the desires of a closing phase in political history. The new
discords go deeper than that. The new situation which confronts our
Liberal intelligence is the discontent of the enfranchised, the contempt
and hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and governments.
This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to
duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic
country or that; it is an almost worldwide movement. It is an almost
universal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in many
communities—in Great Britain particularly—it is manifesting itself by an
unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a strange and
ominous contempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the refusal
of large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurance
legislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in the
steady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards the
conception of a universal strike. The case of the discontented workers
in Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people
form effective voting majorities in many constituencies; they send
alleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the legislative
assembly; and, in addition, they have their trade unions with staffs of
elected officials, elected ostensibly to state their case and promote
their interests. Yet nothing is now more evident than that these
officials, working-men representatives and the like, do not speak for
their supporters, and are less and less able to control them. The
Syndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and Larkinism in Great
Britain, are, from the point of view of social stability, the most
sinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring classes
with representative institutions. These movements are not revolutionary
movements, not movements for reconstruction such as were the democratic
Socialist movements that closed the nineteenth century. They are angry
and vindictive movements. They have behind them the most dangerous and
terrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath,
of a cheated crowd.
Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions
differ from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably
follow a different course. American labour is very largely immigrant
labour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from the
established thought of the nation. It will be long before labour in
America speaks with the massed effectiveness of labour in France and
England, where master and man are racially identical, and where there is
no variety of “Dagoes” to break up the revolt. But in other directions
the American disbelief in and impatience with “elected persons” is and
has been far profounder than it is in Europe. The abstinence of men of
property and position from overt politics, and the contempt that
banishes political discussion from polite society, are among the first
surprises of the visiting European to America, and now that, under an
organised pressure of conscience, college-trained men and men of wealth
are abandoning this strike of the educated and returning to political
life, it is, one notes, with a prevailing disposition to correct
democracy by personality, and to place affairs in the hands of
autocratic mayors and presidents rather than to carry out democratic
methods to the logical end. At times America seems hot for a Cæsar. If
no Cæsar is established, then it will be the good fortune of the
Republic rather than its democratic virtue which will have saved it.
And directly one comes to look into the quality and composition of the
elected governing body of any modern democratic State, one begins to see
the reason and nature of its widening estrangement from the community it
represents. In no sense are these bodies really representative of the
thought and purpose of the nation; the conception of its science, the
fresh initiatives of its philosophy and literature, the forces that make
the future through invention and experiment, exploration and trial and
industrial development have no voice, or only an accidental and feeble
voice, there. The typical elected person is a smart rather than
substantial lawyer, full of cheap catchwords and elaborate tricks of
procedure and electioneering, professing to serve the interests of the
locality which is his constituency, but actually bound hand and foot to
the specialised political association, his party, which imposed him upon
that constituency. Arrived at the legislature, his next ambition is
office, and to secure and retain office he engages in elaborate
manœuvres against the opposite party, upon issues which his limited and
specialised intelligence indicates as electorally effective. But being
limited and specialised, he is apt to drift completely out of touch with
the interests and feelings of large masses of people in the community.
In Great Britain, the United States and France alike there is a constant
tendency on the part of the legislative body to drift into unreality,
and to bore the country with the disputes that are designed to thrill
it. In Great Britain, for example, at the present time the two political
parties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence,
which is sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to get rid of
both of them. Irish Home Rule—an issue as dead as mutton—is opposed to
Tariff Reform, which has never been alive. Much as the majority of
people detest the preposterously clumsy attempts to amputate Ireland
from the rule of the British Parliament which have been going on since
the breakdown of Mr. Gladstone’s political intelligence, their dread of
foolish and scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong to
retain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of the profound
financial rottenness of the Liberal party have deepened the public
resolve to permit no such enlarged possibilities of corruption as Tariff
Reform would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. And
meanwhile, beneath those ridiculous alternatives, those shame issues,
the real and very urgent affairs of the nation, the vast gathering
discontent of the workers throughout the Empire, the racial conflicts in
India and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our
severance from India, the insane waste of national resources, the
control of disease, the frightful need of some cessation of armament,
drift neglected....
Now do these things indicate the ultimate failure and downfall of
representative government? Was this idea which inspired so much of the
finest and most generous thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries a wrong idea, and must we go back to Cæsarism or oligarchy or
plutocracy or a theocracy, to Rome or Venice or Carthage, to the strong
man or the ruler by divine right, for the political organisation of the
future?
My answer to that question would be an emphatic No. My answer would be
that the idea of representative government is the only possible idea for
the government of a civilised community. But I would add that so far
representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair
trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a
devastating caricature.
It is quite plain now that those who first organised the parliamentary
institutions which now are the ruling institutions of the greater part
of mankind fell a prey to certain now very obvious errors. They did not
realise that there are hundreds of different ways in which voting may be
done, and that every way will give a different result. They thought, and
it is still thought by a great number of mentally indolent people, that
if a country is divided up into approximately equivalent areas, each
returning one or two representatives, if every citizen is given one
vote, and if there is no legal limit to the presentation of candidates,
that presently a cluster of the wisest, most trusted and best citizens
will come together in the legislative assembly.
In reality the business is far more complicated than this. In reality a
country will elect all sorts of different people according to the
electoral method employed. It is a fact that anyone who chooses to
experiment with a willing school or club may verify. Suppose, for
example, that you take your country, give every voter one single vote,
put up six and twenty candidates for a dozen vacancies, and give them no
adequate time for organisation. The voters, you will find, will return
certain favourites, A and B and C and D let us call them, by enormous
majorities, and behind these at a considerable distance will come E, F,
G, H, I, J, K, and L. Now give your candidates time to develop
organisation. A lot of people who swelled A’s huge vote will dislike J
and K and L so much, and prefer M and N so much, that if they are
assured that by proper organisation A’s return can be made certain
without their voting for him, they will vote for M and N. But they will
do so only on that understanding. Similarly certain B-ites will want O
and P if they can be got without sacrificing B. So that adequate party
organisation in the community may return not the dozen a naïve vote
would give, but A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P. Now suppose that,
instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelve
constituencies and no candidate may contest more than one of them. And
suppose each constituency has strong local preferences. A, B and C are
widely popular; in every constituency they have supporters, but in no
constituency does any one of the three command a majority. They are
great men, not local men. Q, who is an unknown man in most of the
country, has, on the contrary, a strong sect of followers in the
constituency for which A stands, and beats him by one vote; another
local celebrity, R, disposes of B in the same way; C is attacked not
only by S but T, whose peculiar views upon vaccination, let us say,
appeal to just enough of C’s supporters to let in S. Similar accidents
happen in the other constituencies, and the country that would have
unreservedly returned A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L on the first
system, return instead O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Numerous
voters who would have voted for A if they had a chance vote instead for
R, S, T, etc., numbers who would have voted for B, vote for Q, V, W, X,
etc. But now suppose that A and B are opposed to one another, and that
there is a strong A party and a strong B party highly organised in the
country. B is really the second favourite over the country as a whole,
but A is the first favourite. D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, U, W, Y constitute
the A candidates, and in his name they conquer. B, C, E, G, I, K, M, O,
Q, S, V are all thrown out in spite of the wide popularity of B and C. B
and C, we have supposed, are the second and third favourites, and yet
they go out in favour of Y, of whom nobody has heard before, some mere
hangers-on of A’s. Such a situation actually occurs in both Ulster and
Home-Rule Ireland.
But now let us suppose another arrangement, and that is that the whole
country is one constituency, and every voter has, if he chooses to
exercise them, twelve votes, which, however, he must give, if he gives
them all, to twelve separate people. Then quite certainly A, B, C, D
will come in, but the tail will be different. M, N, O, P may come up
next to them, and even Z, that eminent non-party man, may get in. But
now organisation may produce new effects. The ordinary man, when he has
twelve votes to give, likes to give them all, so that there will be a
good deal of wild voting at the tails of the voting papers. Now if a
small resolute band decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T or
B and T, T will probably jump up out of the rejected. This is the system
which gives the specialist, the anti-vaccinator or what not, the maximum
advantage. V, W, X and Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probably
detach themselves from party and make some special appeal, say to the
teetotal vote or the Mormon vote or the single-tax vote, and so squeeze
past O, P, Q, R, who have taken a more generalised line.
I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical
fluctuations. Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do at
about this stage fly into a passion. But if you will exercise
self-control, then I think you will see my point that, according to the
method of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of an
election except the production of a genuinely representative assembly.
And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of
contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative
assemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will go
farther and say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of our
method of voting, not one-tenth of the present American and French
Senators, the French Deputies, the American Congressmen, and the English
Members of Parliament would hold their positions to-day. They would
never have been heard of. They are not really the elected
representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous
method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party
system and the ballot-box, who have ousted the legitimate heirs from
their sovereignty. They are no more the expression of the general will
than the Czar or some President by pronunciamento. They are an
accidental oligarchy of adventurers. Representative government has never
yet existed in the world; there was an attempt to bring it into
existence in the eighteenth century, and it succumbed to an infantile
disorder at the very moment of its birth. What we have in the place of
the leaders and representatives are politicians and “elected persons.”