introductory pages the ideas that guide him; and, indeed, the reader who
fails to recognise the lesson of the book in every chapter will read in
vain. Sir Erskine May is persuaded that it is the tendency of modern
progress to elevate the masses of the people, to increase their part in
the work and the fruit of civilisation, in comfort and education, in
self-respect and independence, in political knowledge and power. Taken
for a universal law of history, this would be as visionary as certain
generalisations of Montesquieu and Tocqueville; but with the necessary
restrictions of time and place, it cannot fairly be disputed. Another
conclusion, supported by a far wider induction, is that democracy, like
monarchy, is salutary within limits and fatal in excess; that it is the
truest friend of freedom or its most unrelenting foe, according as it is
mixed or pure; and this ancient and elementary truth of constitutional
government is enforced with every variety of impressive and suggestive
illustration from the time of the Patriarchs down to the revolution
which, in 1874, converted federal Switzerland into an unqualified
democracy governed by the direct voice of the entire people.
The effective distinction between liberty and democracy, which has
occupied much of the author's thoughts, cannot be too strongly drawn.
Slavery has been so often associated with democracy, that a very able
writer pronounced it long ago essential to a democratic state; and the
philosophers of the Southern Confederation have urged the theory with
extreme fervour. For slavery operates like a restricted franchise,
attaches power to property, and hinders Socialism, the infirmity that
attends mature democracies. The most intelligent of Greek tyrants,
Periander, discouraged the employment of slaves; and Pericles designates
the freedom from manual labour as the distinguishing prerogative of
Athens. At Rome a tax on manumissions immediately followed the
establishment of political equality by Licinius. An impeachment of
England for having imposed slavery on America was carefully expunged
from the Declaration of Independence; and the French Assembly, having
proclaimed the Rights of Man, declared that they did not extend to the
colonies. The abolition controversy has made everybody familiar with
Burke's saying, that men learn the price of freedom by being masters of
slaves.
From the best days of Athens, the days of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and
Socrates, a strange affinity has subsisted between democracy and
religious persecution. The bloodiest deed committed between the wars of
religion and the revolution was due to the fanaticism of men living
under the primitive republic in the Rhaetian Alps; and of six democratic
cantons only one tolerated Protestants, and that after a struggle which
lasted the better part of two centuries. In 1578 the fifteen Catholic
provinces would have joined the revolted Netherlands but for the furious
bigotry of Ghent; and the democracy of Friesland was the most intolerant
of the States. The aristocratic colonies in America defended toleration
against their democratic neighbours, and its triumph in Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania was the work not of policy but of religion. The French
Republic came to ruin because it found the lesson of religious liberty
too hard to learn. Down to the eighteenth century, indeed, it was
understood in monarchies more often than in free commonwealths.
Richelieu acknowledged the principle whilst he was constructing the
despotism of the Bourbons; so did the electors of Brandenburg, at the
time when they made themselves absolute; and after the fall of
Clarendon, the notion of Indulgence was inseparable from the design of
Charles II. to subvert the constitution.
A government strong enough to act in defiance of public feeling may
disregard the plausible heresy that prevention is better than
punishment, for it is able to punish. But a government entirely
dependent on opinion looks for some security what that opinion shall be,
strives for the control of the forces that shape it, and is fearful of
suffering the people to be educated in sentiments hostile to its
institutions. When General Grant attempted to grapple with polygamy in
Utah, it was found necessary to pack the juries with Gentiles; and the
Supreme Court decided that the proceedings were illegal, and that the
prisoners must be set free. Even the murderer Lee was absolved, in 1875,
by a jury of Mormons.
Modern democracy presents many problems too various and obscure to be
solved without a larger range of materials than Tocqueville obtained
from his American authorities or his own observation. To understand why
the hopes and the fears that it excites have been always inseparable, to
determine under what conditions it advances or retards the progress of
the people and the welfare of free states, there is no better course
than to follow Sir Erskine May upon the road which he has been the first
to open.
In the midst of an invincible despotism, among paternal, military, and
sacerdotal monarchies, the dawn rises with the deliverance of Israel out
of bondage, and with the covenant which began their political life. The
tribes broke up into smaller communities, administering their own
affairs under the law they had sworn to observe, but which there was no
civil power to enforce. They governed themselves without a central
authority, a legislature, or a dominant priesthood; and this polity,
which, under the forms of primitive society, realised some aspirations
of developed democracy, resisted for above three hundred years the
constant peril of anarchy and subjugation. The monarchy itself was
limited by the same absence of a legislative power, by the submission of
the king to the law that bound his subjects, by the perpetual appeal of
prophets to the conscience of the people as its appointed guardian, and
by the ready resource of deposition. Later still, in the decay of the
religious and national constitution, the same ideas appeared with
intense energy, in an extraordinary association of men who lived in
austerity and self-denial, rejected slavery, maintained equality, and
held their property in common, and who constituted in miniature an
almost perfect Republic. But the Essenes perished with the city and the
Temple, and for many ages the example of the Hebrews was more
serviceable to authority than to freedom. After the Reformation, the
sects that broke resolutely with the traditions of Church and State as
they came down from Catholic times, and sought for their new
institutions a higher authority than custom, reverted to the memory of a
commonwealth founded on a voluntary contract, on self-government,
federalism, equality, in which election was preferred to inheritance,
and monarchy was an emblem of the heathen; and they conceived that there
was no better model for themselves than a nation constituted by
religion, owning no lawgiver but Moses, and obeying no king but God.
Political thought had until then been guided by pagan experience.
Among the Greeks, Athens, the boldest pioneer of republican discovery,
was the only democracy that prospered. It underwent the changes that
were the common lot of Greek society, but it met them in a way that
displayed a singular genius for politics. The struggle of competing
classes for supremacy, almost everywhere a cause of oppression and
bloodshed, became with them a genuine struggle for freedom; and the
Athenian constitution grew, with little pressure from below, under the
intelligent action of statesmen who were swayed by political reasoning
more than by public opinion. They avoided violent and convulsive change,
because the rate of their reforms kept ahead of the popular demand.
Solon, whose laws began the reign of mind over force, instituted
democracy by making the people, not indeed the administrators, but the
source of power. He committed the Government not to rank or birth, but
to land; and he regulated the political influence of the landowners by
their share in the burdens of the public service. To the lower class,
who neither bore arms nor paid taxes, and were excluded from the
Government, he granted the privilege of choosing and of calling to
account the men by whom they were governed, of confirming or rejecting
the acts of the legislature and the judgments of the courts. Although he
charged the Areopagus with the preservation of his laws, he provided
that they might be revised according to need; and the ideal before his
mind was government by all free citizens. His concessions to the popular
element were narrow, and were carefully guarded. He yielded no more than
was necessary to guarantee the attachment of the whole people to the
State. But he admitted principles that went further than the claims
which he conceded. He took only one step towards democracy, but it was
the first of a series.
When the Persian wars, which converted aristocratic Athens into a
maritime state, had developed new sources of wealth and a new
description of interests, the class which had supplied many of the ships
and most of the men that had saved the national independence and founded
an empire, could not be excluded from power. Solon's principle, that
political influence should be commensurate with political service, broke
through the forms in which he had confined it, and the spirit of his
constitution was too strong for the letter. The fourth estate was
admitted to office, and in order that its candidates might obtain their
share, and no more than their share, and that neither interest nor
numbers might prevail, many public functionaries were appointed by lot.
The Athenian idea of a Republic was to substitute the impersonal
supremacy of law for the government of men. Mediocrity was a safeguard
against the pretensions of superior capacity, for the established order
was in danger, not from the average citizens, but from men, like
Miltiades, of exceptional renown. The people of Athens venerated their
constitution as a gift of the gods, the source and title of their power,
a thing too sacred for wanton change. They had demanded a code, that the
unwritten law might no longer be interpreted at will by Archons and
Areopagites; and a well-defined and authoritative legislation was a
triumph of the democracy.
So well was this conservative spirit understood, that the revolution
which abolished the privileges of the aristocracy was promoted by
Aristides and completed by Pericles, men free from the reproach of
flattering the multitude. They associated all the free Athenians with
the interest of the State, and called them, without distinction of
class, to administer the powers that belonged to them. Solon had
threatened with the loss of citizenship all who showed themselves
indifferent in party conflicts, and Pericles declared that every man who
neglected his share of public duty was a useless member of the
community. That wealth might confer no unfair advantage, that the poor
might not take bribes from the rich, he took them into the pay of the
State during their attendance as jurors. That their numbers might give
them no unjust superiority, he restricted the right of citizenship to
those who came from Athenian parents on both sides; and thus he expelled
more than 4000 men of mixed descent from the Assembly. This bold
measure, which was made acceptable by a distribution of grain from Egypt
among those who proved their full Athenian parentage, reduced the fourth
class to an equality with the owners of real property. For Pericles, or
Ephialtes--for it would appear that all their reforms had been carried
in the year 460, when Ephialtes died--is the first democratic statesman
who grasped the notion of political equality. The measures which made
all citizens equal might have created a new inequality between classes,
and the artificial privilege of land might have been succeeded by the
more crushing preponderance of numbers. But Pericles held it to be
intolerable that one portion of the people should be required to obey
laws which others have the exclusive right of making; and he was able,
during thirty years, to preserve the equipoise, governing by the general
consent of the community, formed by free debate. He made the undivided
people sovereign; but he subjected the popular initiative to a court of
revision, and assigned a penalty to the proposer of any measure which
should be found to be unconstitutional. Athens, under Pericles, was the
most successful Republic that existed before the system of
representation; but its splendour ended with his life.
The danger to liberty from the predominance either of privilege or
majorities was so manifest, that an idea arose that equality of fortune
would be the only way to prevent the conflict of class interests. The
philosophers, Phaleas, Plato, Aristotle, suggested various expedients to
level the difference between rich and poor. Solon had endeavoured to
check the increase of estates; and Pericles had not only strengthened
the public resources by bringing the rich under the control of an
assembly in which they were not supreme, but he had employed those
resources in improving the condition and the capacity of the masses. The
grievance of those who were taxed for the benefit of others was easily
borne so long as the tribute of the confederates filled the treasury.
But the Peloponnesian war increased the strain on the revenue and
deprived Athens of its dependencies. The balance was upset; and the
policy of making one class give, that another might receive, was
recommended not only by the interest of the poor, but by a growing
theory, that wealth and poverty make bad citizens, that the middle class
is the one most easily led by reason, and that the way to make it
predominate is to depress whatever rises above the common level, and to
raise whatever falls below it. This theory, which became inseparable
from democracy, and contained a force which alone seems able to destroy
it, was fatal to Athens, for it drove the minority to treason. The glory
of the Athenian democrats is, not that they escaped the worst
consequences of their principle, but that, having twice cast out the
usurping oligarchy, they set bounds to their own power. They forgave
their vanquished enemies; they abolished pay for attendance in the
assembly; they established the supremacy of law by making the code
superior to the people; they distinguished things that were
constitutional from things that were legal, and resolved that no
legislative act should pass until it had been pronounced consistent with
the constitution.
The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection
of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A
State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000,
and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting,
is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its
quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of
right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the
credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a
very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no
gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If
nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no
moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of
life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had
the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny
oneself the enjoyment it affords. The doctrine of the Sophists gave no
limits to power and no security to freedom; it inspired that cry of the
Athenians, that they must not be hindered from doing what they pleased,
and the speeches of men like Athenagoras and Euphemus, that the
democracy may punish men who have done no wrong, and that nothing that
is profitable is amiss. And Socrates perished by the reaction which they
provoked.
The disciples of Socrates obtained the ear of posterity. Their testimony
against the government that put the best of citizens to death is
enshrined in writings that compete with Christianity itself for
influence on the opinions of men. Greece has governed the world by her
philosophy, and the loudest note in Greek philosophy is the protest
against Athenian democracy. But although Socrates derided the practice
of leaving the choice of magistrates to chance, and Plato admired the
bloodstained tyrant Critias, and Aristotle deemed Theramenes a greater
statesman than Pericles, yet these are the men who laid the first stones
of a purer system, and became the lawgivers of future commonwealths.
The main point in the method of Socrates was essentially democratic. He
urged men to bring all things to the test of incessant inquiry, and not
to content themselves with the verdict of authorities, majorities, or
custom; to judge of right and wrong, not by the will or sentiment of
others, but by the light which God has set in each man's reason and
conscience. He proclaimed that authority is often wrong, and has no
warrant to silence or to impose conviction. But he gave no warrant to
resistance. He emancipated men for thought, but not for action. The
sublime history of his death shows that the superstition of the State
was undisturbed by his contempt for its rulers.
Plato had not his master's patriotism, nor his reverence for the civil
power. He believed that no State can command obedience if it does not
deserve respect; and he encouraged citizens to despise their government
if they were not governed by wise men. To the aristocracy of
philosophers he assigned a boundless prerogative; but as no government
satisfied that test, his plea for despotism was hypothetical. When the
lapse of years roused him from the fantastic dream of his Republic, his
belief in divine government moderated his intolerance of human freedom.
Plato would not suffer a democratic polity; but he challenged all
existing authorities to justify themselves before a superior tribunal;
he desired that all constitutions should be thoroughly remodelled, and
he supplied the greatest need of Greek democracy, the conviction that
the will of the people is subject to the will of God, and that all civil
authority, except that of an imaginary state, is limited and
conditional. The prodigious vitality of his writings has kept the
glaring perils of popular government constantly before mankind; but it
has also preserved the belief in ideal politics and the notion of
judging the powers of this world by a standard from heaven. There has
been no fiercer enemy of democracy; but there has been no stronger
advocate of revolution.
In the _Ethics_ Aristotle condemns democracy, even with a property
qualification, as the worst of governments. But near the end of his
life, when he composed his _Politics_, he was brought, grudgingly, to
make a memorable concession. To preserve the sovereignty of law, which
is the reason and the custom of generations, and to restrict the realm
of choice and change, he conceived it best that no class of society
should preponderate, that one man should not be subject to another, that
all should command and all obey. He advised that power should be
distributed to high and low; to the first according to their property,
to the others according to numbers; and that it should centre in the
middle class. If aristocracy and democracy were fairly combined and
balanced against each other, he thought that none would be interested to
disturb the serene majesty of impersonal government. To reconcile the
two principles, he would admit even the poorer citizens to office and
pay them for the discharge of public duties; but he would compel the
rich to take their share, and would appoint magistrates by election and
not by lot. In his indignation at the extravagance of Plato, and his
sense of the significance of facts, he became, against his will, the
prophetic exponent of a limited and regenerated democracy. But the
_Politics_, which, to the world of living men, is the most valuable of
his works, acquired no influence on antiquity, and is never quoted
before the time of Cicero. Again it disappeared for many centuries; it
was unknown to the Arabian commentators, and in Western Europe it was
first brought to light by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the very time when an
infusion of popular elements was modifying feudalism, and it helped to
emancipate political philosophy from despotic theories and to confirm it
in the ways of freedom.
The three generations of the Socratic school did more for the future
reign of the people than all the institutions of the States of Greece.
They vindicated conscience against authority, and subjected both to a
higher law; and they proclaimed that doctrine of a mixed constitution,
which has prevailed at last over absolute monarchy, and still has to
contend against extreme Republicans and Socialists, and against the
masters of a hundred legions. But their views of liberty were based on
expediency, not on justice. They legislated for the favoured citizens of
Greece, and were conscious of no principle that extended the same rights
to the stranger and the slave. That discovery, without which all
political science was merely conventional, belongs to the followers of
Zeno.
The dimness and poverty of their theological speculation caused the
Stoics to attribute the government of the universe less to the uncertain
design of gods than to a definite law of nature. By that law, which is
superior to religious traditions and national authorities, and which
every man can learn from a guardian angel who neither sleeps nor errs,
all are governed alike, all are equal, all are bound in charity to each
other, as members of one community and children of the same God. The
unity of mankind implied the existence of rights and duties common to
all men, which legislation neither gives nor takes away. The Stoics held
in no esteem the institutions that vary with time and place, and their
ideal society resembled a universal Church more than an actual State. In
every collision between authority and conscience they preferred the
inner to the outer guide; and, in the words of Epictetus, regarded the
laws of the gods, not the wretched laws of the dead. Their doctrine of
equality, of fraternity, of humanity; their defence of individualism
against public authority; their repudiation of slavery, redeemed
democracy from the narrowness, the want of principle and of sympathy,
which are its reproach among the Greeks. In practical life they
preferred a mixed constitution to a purely popular government.
Chrysippus thought it impossible to please both gods and men; and Seneca
declared that the people is corrupt and incapable, and that nothing was
wanting, under Nero, to the fulness of liberty, except the possibility
of destroying it. But their lofty conception of freedom, as no
exceptional privilege but the birthright of mankind, survived in the law
of nations and purified the equity of Rome.