The Unfinished Programme of Democracy. Richard Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ promise. Nevertheless, it is of some consequence that already that part of the democratic programme which has been achieved and put to the proof is being exposed to heavy fire of destructive criticism. During the past few years, we have become familiar with the idea of a world made safe for democracy; and in the minds of many people democracy (which in this connection means representative popular government) stands as a sort of ultimate good which it is impious to challenge or to criticise. Yet this democracy, for which the world has been presumably made safe at so great and sorrowful a price, is by some roundly declared to be radically unsafe for the world and a hindrance to social progress. The syndicalists, for instance, believe the democratic state to be no more than the citadel of bourgeois and plutocratic privilege, and have decreed its destruction, proposing to substitute for it a modified anarchism. Others, like Paul Bourget and Brunetiere, so far from finding it the sanctuary of the privileged, fear it as a source of anarchy and social confusion, and invite us to retrace our steps to happier days when authority being less diffused was more speedily and effectually exercised. Neither the syndicalist nor the authoritarian criticism is wholly baseless; yet it is true that in neither case does it arise from an inherent defect in the democratic principle. The one arises from the circumstance that political democracy still lacks its logical economic corollary; the other from the fact that democracy is not sustained by its proper ethical coefficient.

      These, however, are not the only grounds for the increasing scepticism of the validity of democratic institutions. The democratic state, like its predecessors, has proved itself to be voracious of authority; and in the exercise of its presumed omnicompetency it has increasingly occupied itself with matters, which—both in respect of extent and content—it is incapable of handling adequately. It has become palpably impossible to submit all the concerns of government to parliamentary discussion; and in consequence there has been a tendency on the one hand to invest administrative departments with virtual legislative power, and on the other to convert representative assemblies into mere instruments for registering the decisions of the executive government. The recent proposal for the establishment of a permanent statutory National Industrial Council in England has been evoked by the palpable inability of Parliament to deal effectually with the problems of industrial production. Even before the War, it was becoming plain that the congestion of parliamentary business in England called for some drastic remedy if parliament was to be saved from futility and discredit. But here again, the failure has been due to no inherent defect in the democratic principle but rather to the fact that the unitary and absolutist doctrine and practice of the state has hindered the proper development of democracy.

      In a word, the trouble with democracy is that there is not enough of it. The remedy for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Politically, it is still incomplete; its economic applications have yet to be made; and while we do lip service to its ethical presuppositions, they are far from being a rule of life. Yet lacking these things, democracy is condemned to arrest, and through arrest to decay.

      Meantime the dynastic principle has fallen—has indeed fallen under circumstances which make its revival seem exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, if democracy suffers arrest at this point in its history, if the peoples fail to work out its logic, society may lapse into an anarchy out of which dynasticism or something like it may once more emerge. It is no hyperbole to speak of the crisis of democracy; and it is only to be saved as the democratic peoples set themselves earnestly to the business of strengthening its stakes and lengthening its cords.

I

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      Few British people of liberal mind are able to look back upon that period of their history which gathers around the Boer War without a certain humiliation. Professor L. T. Hobhouse ascribes the popular defection of the British people from the democratic principle and temper during that time to four causes: (a) the decay of profound and vivid religious belief; (b) the diffusion of a stream of German idealism “which has swelled the current of retrogression from the plain rationalistic way of looking at life and its problems,” and which has stimulated the growth of the doctrine of the absolute state and its imperialistic corollaries; (c) the career of Prince Bismarck, and (d) “by far the most potent intellectual support of the reaction … the belief that physical science has given its verdict (for it came to this) in favour of violence against social justice.” This provides us with an instance (so plain that another were superfluous) of the inability of an unfulfilled democratic order to resist alien and hostile influences that may be “in the air,” and of its consequent perversion to ends which belie its own first principles. It is the permanent danger of democracy when it is not sustained and inspired by a generous moral impulse to be prostituted to undemocratic ends. “It is at best” (to quote Mr. Hobhouse again) “an instrument with which men who hold by the ideal of social justice and human progress can work; but when these ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base uses.” Lord Morley, with a similar sensitiveness to the perils of democracy asks whether we mean by it “a doctrine or a force; constitutional parchment or a glorious evangel; perfected machinery for the wire-puller, the party-tactician, the spoils-man and the boss, or the high and stern ideals of a Mazzini or a Tolstoi.” It may, indeed, be reasonably held that worse has befallen it than Lord Morley’s fears. We have evidence how frequently democracy has in practice become the tool of strong and unscrupulous men and gangs of such men seeking selfish and corrupt ends; and how, for Lincoln’s famous formula, we have had government of the people by a well-to-do oligarchy in the interest of the privileged classes.

      Nor have we any guarantee against this kind of degradation and degeneracy except in the perpetual reaffirmation and revitalising of the spiritual and moral grounds of democracy. It may indeed be possible to create political safeguards against the exploitation of the people and their government in the interest of individuals and classes; but there is no such safeguard against democracy, as it were, exploiting itself for undemocratic ends or sinking into undemocratic practices except in its continued education in the purposes for which it exists, in its extension into every region of life, and in its repeated solemn submission of itself to its principles and ideals. Until democracy becomes and is felt to be a personal and collective vocation, it is forever liable to corruption and apostasy. Democracy can only live and thrive while men remain sincerely and consciously democratic. Liberty and Equality are doubtful and precarious boons, and may—as they often have—become positive dangers without Fraternity. Democracy without its appropriate moral coefficient must be a vain and short-lived thing. So long as, while professing to give a fair field to every man, it does no more than provide an open field for the strong man, it will inevitably lead to the exploitation of the multitude and to the creation of new forms of privilege; and that in the main has been its recent history.

      Not less than by the loss or the absence of moral impulse, is democracy endangered by ignorance or forgetfulness of what it exists for. Two words are usually taken to describe the characteristics of democracy, liberty and equality; and the atmosphere of a particular democracy depends upon whether it lays the larger emphasis on one or on the other of these. In England, for instance, the type is libertarian. The Briton has cared less for political equality than for what he calls freedom, the right of self-determination, the opportunity to live out his own life in his own way. He has been less doctrinaire than his French neighbours and has not been much troubled by the logical anomaly of an aristocracy so long as the aristocracy left him reasonable elbow-room. When the aristocracy was found to be obstructive, its pretensions were suitably abridged. In general, the idea of formal equality has played a less important part in England than it has in France or the United States. Democracy in the two latter countries is more specifically egalitarian. This difference is, however, mainly a difference of stress upon two aspects of the same thing, the egalitarian emphasis having to do with the formal status of the citizen, the libertarian with the personal independence which should belong to the status.

      Yet the inadequate co-ordination of the two ideas may, and indeed does, lead to certain unhappy consequences. In Great Britain, an insufficient attention to equality has СКАЧАТЬ