nationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of a
nation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving
too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to
superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and with
too much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much too
unconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms of
consciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin is
ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things are
not the things that are most admired by the English, or for which the
English admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and in
daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should be
destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That
is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for
the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the
nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant
costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of
England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and
revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind
of beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humour
there is in an English public-house, are things that cannot be found in
lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or
where the vine is far more honourably served and praised. Yet we shall
not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of
contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms
would allow us to do so. We must in a sense get far away from England in
order to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be
practically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remote
things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they
are; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the
dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a
peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul.
_The Future of Democracy_
The title of this final chapter requires an apology. I do not need to be
reminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. It is written
in accordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no particular
harm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom which
it would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes
to America for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly
everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trouville or Dieppe is not
confronted on his return with the question, 'When is your book on France
going to appear?' A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the
winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, 'I suppose your
History of the Helvetian Republic is coming out this spring?' Lecturing,
at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious
than ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-maker
far less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. Of all this
I am only too well aware; and my only defence is that I am at least
sincere in my enjoyment and appreciation of America, and equally sincere
in my interest in its most serious problem, which I think a very serious
problem indeed; the problem of democracy in the modern world. Democracy
may be a very obvious and facile affair for plutocrats and politicians
who only have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a very
serious problem for democrats. I certainly do not apologise for the word
democracy; but I do apologise for the word future. I am no Futurist; and
any conjectures I make must be taken with the grain of salt which is
indeed the salt of the earth; the decent and moderate humility which
comes from a belief in free will. That faith is in itself a divine
doubt. I do not believe in any of the scientific predictions about
mankind; I notice that they always fail to predict any of the purely
human developments of men; I also notice that even their successes prove
the same truth as their failures; for their successful predictions are
not about men but about machines. But there are two things which a man
may reasonably do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do
not involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to tell the truth,
and especially the neglected truth, about the tendencies that have
already accumulated in human history; any miscalculation about which
must at least mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of being
right about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrong
about the future, if we are wrong about the past. The other thing that
he can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their own
nature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence it
follows that this final chapter must consist of two things. The first is
a summary of what has really happened to the idea of democracy in recent
times; the second a suggestion of the fundamental doctrine which is
necessary for its triumph at any time.
The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic
idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a
paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught
history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual
inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation
of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican
orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and
backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction
was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American
Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It
was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of
conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of
peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.
These men encountered various difficulties and made various compromises
in relation to the practical politics of their time; in England they
preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved slavery. But though
they had more difficulties, they had less doubts. Since their time
democracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these political
doubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religious
doubts. This fact could be followed over almost the whole field of the
modern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take the
great American example of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of
intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the Fathers of
the Republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew no
better, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown
and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in England said
recently that even those who drew up the Declaration of Independence did
not include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. This is quite
consistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up;
the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of
brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black
beetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of
American history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South,
the eighteenth century was _more_ liberal than the nineteenth century.
There was _more_ sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than
in the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark estate of his
simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble,
remembering that God is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of
the world's advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they did
not go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. And they
were supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion that
nature is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, to
the mind of Jefferson; but so they did to the mind of Lincoln. But that
the slave was human and the servitude inhuman--that was, if anything,
clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter
separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a _progress_;
it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a
triumph of science over superstition. It was 'the way the world was
going,' as Matthew Arnold reverentially remarked in some connection;
perhaps as part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jefferson's
definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a Father
who had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was the
practice, such democratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory.
It was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood was
really disputed. Gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about the
superiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by
the less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth of
science and a new defence of slavery. It was not really until the dawn
of Darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of the
monkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the
baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy has been a modern
and even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was the
Missing Link. The Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than
one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain.
By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutal
under the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressive
sort. Its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity of
Lancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial and
competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. We may say
with no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery were
Huxley and Cobden. The machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great
many more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but they
were certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of
the best quality of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of
the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism
which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision
of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth
century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the
anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution
lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least
with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of
the American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the
preliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening,
which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing
evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race,
or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. The
South had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The
South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of
monkeys.
That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years.
Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say with
the ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far
more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnson
than in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. Stephen
Douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the
age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like Cecil
Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as a
consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the
old mystical doctrines of equality. He 'did not care whether slavery was
voted up or voted down.' His great opponent Lincoln did indeed care
very much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincoln
exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was not
much more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. I
am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular
mental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical
ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of
indifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with what
some called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was a
sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that the
slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt
whether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolition
was a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite other
reasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes
and Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves would
ever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till the
modern movement for the Servile State, they would never have been
emancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the black
man when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owe
the change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its
real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a
primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the
tables of an ancient law, _against_ the trend of the nineteenth century;
repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,' to a
generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this:
'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all
things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity
and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so
on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded
a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never
have overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was to
produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical
imagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions of
monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as
the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species,
so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat
devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and
his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that
were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the
bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of
brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the
chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degree
and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference
between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and
eating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt
that we were the superior sort.
Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. Against
all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be
symbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro
can be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the
Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the
manhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it
could not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilute
democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood,
in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black
bishop. And he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritual
privileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a
monkey in a mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic
democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment more
democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is
indestructible. And by the nature of things that mystical democracy was
destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to
destroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly
moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old
tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the story
about the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, 'The
Serpent.' But few seem to have noticed what would be the more modern
answer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propounding
it. 'Adam never delved and Eve never span, for the simple reason that
they never existed. They are fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos,
and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For the
real beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin's _Origin of
Species_.' And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to
the mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and the
Survival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by
means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad.
Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on the
literal and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think
the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than that
of the prehistoric 'strongest man' who could fight a hundred men. But I
do note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in the
form of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of an
appeal to Science. And I do note also that democrats were still driven
to make the same appeal even in the very century of Science. Tennyson
was, if ever there was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an
aristocrat in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John Bull was
evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as these Frenchmen. He did not
pretend to have any creed beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. But
when human dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the same
old argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara Vere de Vere that 'the
gardener Adam and his wife smile at the claim of long descent'; their
own descent being by no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scored
off him pretty smartly by quoting from 'Maud' and 'In Memoriam' about
evolution and the eft that was lord of valley and hill. But Tennyson has
evidently forgotten all about Darwin and the long descent of man. If
this was true of an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally ten
times truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration of
Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created
all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they
were certainly evolved unequal.
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine
origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world
will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of
sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds.
Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of
constraining the tyrant. An idealist may say to a capitalist, 'Don't you
sometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the
distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?' But it
is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity and
decision, 'No, I don't,' and there is no more disputing about it further
than about the beauty of a fading cloud. And the modern world of moods
is a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds.
For I have only taken here, as a convenient working model, the case of
negro slavery; because it was long peculiar to America and is popularly
associated with it. It is more and more obvious that the line is no
longer running between black and white but between rich and poor. As I
have already noted in the case of Prohibition, the very same arguments
of the inevitable suicide of the ignorant, of the impossibility of
freedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought
from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. It is argued
even by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submerged
below the status of emancipated mankind. They imply that the Missing
Link is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, and
that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientific
hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the
masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the
dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And any
man who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell the
millionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing the
sentiments of Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in the
eighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that they
are not observing the creed of St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St.
Benedict.
The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot make
secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secular
perfection. That will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument
for a Church independent of the world and the secular order. What has
become of all those ideal figures from the Wise Man of the Stoics to the
democratic Deist of the eighteenth century? What has become of all that
purely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of the
good knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? The very name of
knight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the
very word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of all
that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the high
tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beauty
that is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language that
they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a
mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a
symbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time when
the heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to
Jefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in its
turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which all
the colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural as
flowers. We cannot re-enact the intellectual experiences of the
Humanists, for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird in
spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem that
these old experiences are now only alive, where they have found a
lodgment in the Catholic tradition of Christendom, and made themselves
friends for ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.
Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis is the only
surviving knight.
It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even
so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American
democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also
the same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or
remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic.
In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly
undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond
the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at
least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen
slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in
method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human
appetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals,
formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves
the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents
depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are
still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men
will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if
there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in
anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an
authority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in every
ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that
finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of
Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them
as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures
may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats
existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land
of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went
forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.
End of Project Gutenberg's What I Saw in America, by G. K. Chesterton