Is democracy a failure? Is it going to be retained much as it is in the
years to come, or is it to be changed almost out of recognition, or
cast aside as a hopelessly bad method in human affairs?
Democracy is a word with a remarkable variety of meanings. Here I
am using it in its commonest current sense to express government by
legislators and administrators appointed by a popular vote, government
based on the assumption that ultimately the “people” is sovereign. It
involves a denial of all hereditary or class or professional claims to
power and privilege except in so far as the sovereign people consents
and permits. Even a king is understood to be king by popular consent
and not by any right divine. Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its
great function, is the election. Thereby power is assigned, and public
issues are understood to be decided.
Unless Democracy is thus defined, its meaning will flap away into the
wildest contradictions. Leaving out of consideration the very especial
and definite meaning it had in the ancient world, it has carried a
hundred different sets of implications since the mighty shock of the
first French Revolution brought it into free and frequent use. It has
stood for human equality against every form of privilege and control,
and it has stood for the right of the individual to realize himself to
the full against every form of restrictive assumption.
It has stood, therefore, for the extremest socialism and the extremest
individualism. And it has stood, with an equal facility, for limitless
progress and for a reaction to a peasant life, just as its liberating
or its equalitarian side was brought uppermost. Europe has seen social
democracy, Christian democracy, even democratic monarchy, shaking
hands with every one, and showing baby to all the world. All these
paradoxical variants and interpretations I put aside here, and I will
not reflect for a moment upon the Democratic Party in the United
States. Here I am discussing simply democracy in politics; government
and the control of affairs in general by persons elected on a broad or
universal franchise.
That sort of democracy is traceable, latent or overlaid, in most
parts of Europe throughout history. Switzerland is an old story
and democracy muttered close to the surface in seventeenth-century
England and Scotland, but it was only with the American and French
revolutions of the late eighteenth century that it became widely
prevalent and respected. It was the creed of nineteenth-century
liberalism everywhere. Throughout that age the great mother of
parliaments at Westminster bred for exportation, like an Ostend
rabbit, and legislatures and responsible cabinets sprang up all round
the globe from Japan to Brazil. Franchise spread like an epidemic,
and has now spread until the nuns in the convents of England and the
ladies in Turkish harems are voting. The coloured vote in South Africa
has become a very grave question indeed. No doubt this comprehensive
democratization of mankind has had many beneficial consequences; it has
forced the most inattentive to a temporary attention to the world’s
affairs, and it has been the symbol of a new self-respect for women
and other enfranchised classes, and for many subject races--but to-day
the question whether it is really a permanently good way of doing our
collective business is being more and more insistently pressed upon
us. Is the world going on that way, or is it seeking for fresh and
more satisfactory paths of development? Or, to put it concretely:
will general elections and municipal elections or any sort of popular
elections be of more than the slightest importance in the affairs of
A.D. 2027?
There exists a great variety of indictments of political democracy,
but the main, most essential one is that it has produced a special
and objectionable type of ruler, the politician, with certain very
definable characteristics. The primitive theory of electional democracy
was that the great, good, and capable men, statesmen, leaders in
affairs, would offer, or be persuaded, to stand for the suffrages of
their fellow-citizens, and would be chosen and elected for their known
gifts and virtues. But the business of getting elected proved to be
susceptible to considerable complication, and demanded almost from the
outset something more than conspicuous public services and utility to
ensure a candidate’s return. No good for Cincinnatus to stay at his
plough; he had to exert himself.
The would-be ruler found it incumbent to divert so much of his time
from being good and great to the task of getting himself elected, and
he had to bind himself in such close party relationship with others
engaged upon the same task, that his individual goodness and greatness
speedily became a minor consideration. His interest in what was good
for his country and mankind has been, and is, entirely subordinate
to what will gain and what will lose votes. Independence of mind,
magnanimity and greatness of desire are positive disadvantages for him.
And so we find in all the great democratic countries that the direction
of affairs has passed into the hands of men who are great merely as
politicians, and who are otherwise neither remarkably intelligent,
creative, nor noble beings.
They are, indeed, in a great number of cases, conspicuously shifty
and ambiguous, strategic, and practically ineffective. Let the reader
try to name a single man of really first-class moral and intellectual
quality in British, French, American, or German politics to-day. With
a sort of baffled dismay we look up to these men we have elected
to make the world anew for us, and we see leaders who do not lead
and representatives who, at best, impress us as acutely humiliating
caricatures of the struggling soul of our race. We realize that the
real working out of human destiny is going on, so far as it is going
on, beside, independently of, or partially hampered by, our ostensible
public life.
In America, France, and Great Britain, for example, where democracy
has had the longest run, we see that the democratic method has brought
about practically the same situation. A number of politicians have
secured the confidence and support of the main groups of prosperous
people, who do not want the world changed to any great extent. These
politicians of the right and centre form so solid, well-alimented, and
effective a constellation that they are generally in power, albeit
not always in an electional majority. Naturally these politicians of
conservation have the support of all the great selling businesses
which advertise in the Press and influence the Press. A second group
of politicians appeals, with a feebler Press support, to the less
comfortable masses. And while property, which demands no changes, can
be of one mind politically, projected remedies for social uneasiness
are various, and the discontented are a divided force. Leftism
seems everywhere in a majority, for this is a very insecure and
unsatisfactory world for the larger half of mankind, but nowhere is it
in effective control.
Scarcely represented at all are the creative minds that would educate,
reorganize, and push towards an ampler life for our race. Their
purposes are difficult to understand and easy to misrepresent, and it
suits the needs of the politician of the left far better to excite
the voter at a disadvantage by wild promises and by stirring up class
resentment--a procedure the politician of the right seeks to counter by
the exacerbation of international hatred and suspicion and threats of
foreign aggression. So he confuses and deflects popular anger. And a
political party that represents wealth is not necessarily a party that
represents stability. In a world of such swaying and uncertain values
as ours to-day, much of our wealth is adventurous wealth and a heavy
mass of business and financial operations are speculative operations
dependent on insecurity. If the party of the right does not want things
changed to any great extent, it may nevertheless find itself dominated
by an active section quite eager to see them very considerably rocked
about. No political party in any of the democratic countries of our
contemporary world is anything but a resultant of current social
and economic with traditional forces. No politician produced by the
democratic methods stands for any authentic effort to order matters
better. The great democratic countries of our globe are entirely
without such political leading at the present time.
Now this is in a phase of the world’s affairs when certain matters
of tremendous practical importance press for attention and can be
handled only through the political machine. The art of war has come
to such a pitch that civilization demands the establishment of
war-proof relationships between State and State. No such relationships
are forthcoming and there are no signs that any politician anywhere
is prepared to risk votes by even seeming to impair the national
independence, as such relationships must necessarily do.
The financial and economic life of mankind has become world-wide, and
it is suffering a vast demoralization by the universal insecurity
in monetary standards. There is no evidence anywhere of democracy’s
ability to tackle this difficult and urgent problem. The world needs
a common money, or--what is a slightly clumsier form of the same
thing--moneys firmly established in relation one to another. It can
only get a practically common money through the co-operation of
governments. No government on this planet displays the intellectual and
moral quality to handle the matter magisterially.
Economic life, too, has ceased to be manageable through comparatively
small businesses run as individual adventures. Control of staple
products, systematic regulated production and distribution in the case
of such commodities as coal are urgently needed. These things extend
beyond national limits. The welfare of thousands of people in Italy,
for example, depends upon the coal production in France and England.
Oil, cotton, wheat--the mention of these words now conjures up thoughts
of world-wide operations. Democracy seems incapable of producing
politicians competent to direct these big affairs. Private business
alone is too chaotic and individualistic to direct them. It is powerful
enough to deflect and involve democratic rulers and politicians, but it
is not united nor powerful enough to achieve efficient administration
nor able to free its creative and productive activities from the
destructive raids of mere money-making adventurers. Economically we
drift upon a rudderless ship.
Such simple truths are being recognized by a growing multitude of
people, and they are felt far more widely than they are clearly
recognized. The discontent with elected persons gathers and grows. No
politician is any longer a hero to his fellow-countrymen. When Lord
Oxford and Lord Birkenhead strike attitudes to remind the world of
Gladstone and Palmerston everybody laughs. And the disposition to push
aside parliamentary governments spreads daily. Russia has a pretence
of representative government entirely and openly controlled by the
Communist Party. The Duma, which I visited in January, 1914, and heard
debating and dividing and rising to points of order about nothing
in the best style, with its Speaker, Opposition, and reporters all
complete, has vanished beyond recall. China, after some parliamentary
beginnings in Peking, has cast them aside for that remarkable students’
association, the Kuomintang. Italy, in the throes of economic crisis
after the war, scrapped and chased away her politicians and gave
herself over also to a banded society. Spain has gone back upon
parliamentary government. Poland and Hungary have scarcely tried the
celebrated mixture before rejecting it. Greece follows on the same
lines, and in the new Turkey it is criminal to be in opposition.
We came near to something of the same sort of thing in France last
summer, when the rapid fall of the franc so scared the politicians
out of their party manœuvres that Herriot, Briand, and Poincaré all
took office together. We have the interesting spectacle in France
of a country with its party politics largely in suspense. For ten
nervous days of general strike it seemed as though Great Britain also
might join the comity of nations weary of politicians. For two years
Parliament has muddled with the vital question of coal production and
done nothing: it has weathered one crisis and learnt nothing from it.
The British coal industry goes on, socially and economically wasteful,
in scandalous defiance of the Samuel Report and the Sankey Report, and
Parliament continues to do nothing. The defeated miners are in the
mental state of France in 1871.
Outside of America extraordinarily few people still believe in
political democracy at all except as a makeshift to stand in the way
of worse things, tyrannies, oligarchies, and the like horrors. Many
of those who still believe demand extensive changes of method. A
number of us do imagine that democracy might be preserved, as a vastly
different and more efficient method of government, if election by
proportional representation with the single transferable vote in large
constituencies returning many representatives could be substituted for
the present bilateral system. Such an electrical method, associated
with very much smaller parliamentary bodies, would in practice wipe out
the party system, destroy the professional politicians, and hand over
the decisive control of things to a body of prominent citizens--whose
return would be very largely due to prominence and public confidence
won by other than political activities. However, all politicians who
have not already arrived at prominence hate the idea, and so, since
they constitute the body of political life, there is not the slightest
chance of its ever becoming, except perhaps in name and with essential
mutilations, the electoral method of any modern state. It can be left
out of this present discussion, therefore, and so also can projects
for a special Economic Parliament of trade unionists and employers and
suchlike collateral developments, or for elections by suddenly and
fortuitously appointed jurymen instead of by entire constituencies.
Such things can be attained only through political bodies, and though
the politician of the existing type can do little or nothing with
things when he has them in his hands, he is far too human to let them
go out of his hands and legislate himself out of existence in favour of
a different kind of ruler altogether--which is the admitted purpose of
these novelties.
None of such schemes for making democracy more effective or more truly
representative really touches the essential weakness of democracy,
which is that the great mass of human beings are not sufficiently
intelligent nor sufficiently interested to follow political issues at
all. The representative body represents, for nine out of ten of its
voters, a vacant mind. At an election the Sovereign People is roused
to a temporary sporting interest, and votes according to panic or
prejudice. It does not even vote according to its interests, because
the ordinary citizen leads so narrow, limited, and purblind a life that
he is unable to see--even in such matters as sound money or war--how
politics may come home to him.
Every extension of the suffrage in Great Britain has brought in more
masses of utterly indifferent people to vote. Half a century ago,
when I was a child, the chief English newspapers gave almost verbatim
reports of parliamentary debates and political speeches. Such a
newspaper would not sell a hundred thousand copies to-day. Now, when
every one has a vote, it is almost impossible to tell from the papers
every one reads whether Parliament is in session. The more “democratic”
democracy has become, the more complete has become its disregard of
public affairs.
I put forward these by no means very exhilarating considerations in
partial answer to the question with which this paper began. Political
democracy is still apparently a going concern in America, least
chastened of continents, but elsewhere there seems very little go left
in it. And I do not think that we begin yet to realize the significance
of those new associations of which Communism and Fascism are the best
known types, and the Kuomintang a less thoroughly understood example.
I find the Communist Party a very wonderful and instructive fact in
my world. I want to be quite plain here in what I am writing; I have
recently produced what I consider a very complete and destructive
analysis of Communist dogma, and here, though it may seem egotistical,
I am obliged to insist upon that fact. But a severely critical and
sceptical attitude towards these doctrines in theory and action is
one thing, and participation in the fear, hostility, and insane abuse
with which those who hold them are treated, is quite another. Economic
and social doctrine apart, I recognize very enviable and admirable
qualities in the Communist Party both in Russia and in England. In
Russia not one person in fifty is a member of the party; in all Great
Britain I doubt if there are three thousand members. In our British
way we try to believe that the Communist Party consists of unwashed
and extremely bearded ruffians flourishing (God knows why they do it!)
bombs. But really it is very largely composed of quite young people
who give themselves to an astonishing extent to what they believe to
be the social, political, and economic rebirth of the world. They
are, the most of them, animated by an intense, essentially religious
passion. They toil mentally and make great sacrifices. They shape
their lives to fit their faith. They study with an immense devotion
what my critical conscience compels me to describe as dull, dogmatic,
and misleading literature. They co-operate with one another with a
remarkably willing discipline. “Religious” is the only word I know to
describe their enthusiasm, and there is not a religious teacher in the
world who would not gladly inoculate the youth of his congregation with
the courage, spirit, and energy these Communists display--if he could
get it separated from the mind and spirit of Marx. There they are, a
numerically quite small organization. And they hold Russia against all
comers with the acquiescence of the general population. They stand up
to quite lively persecutions in most Western countries. They go to
prison and even, in some Eastern countries, to death very courageously.
And if you are loth to hear so much good of the Communist Party,
perhaps the Fascists are more to your taste. I have already criticized
them for stupidity, brutality, cruelty, injustice, and so forth. I have
no respect for their idol, Mussolini. But there, too, in bands of no
very considerable multitude, is a devotion and a spirit that can give
over a great country into their hands.
I want to suggest that we may be only in the opening phase of this
sort of political religiosity, both on the left side and on the right
side, and that in its development lies the answer to the question
of what is to come after democracy. There is an immense fund of
unsatisfied seriousness in the young people of our Western communities
to-day, and not only in the young. These movements of Communism and
Fascism may be mere first attempts of that unsatisfied seriousness
to make a new world out of our present disorders. What is called the
decay of faith and the discrediting and fading of many old loyalties
have not destroyed the serious type; they have merely let it loose
for new experiments. These experiments seem to show already quite new
possibilities of concentrated directive power. If once we get control
of our present obsession about votes, we may discover that it is not
necessary to convert a majority of the “electorate” before a new world
begins.
_20 March, 1927._
V