The Unfinished Programme of Democracy. Richard Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ class”; and social prestige still possesses an inordinate influence upon the distribution of political power. In France, on the other hand, an insufficient stress on liberty has tended to make Frenchmen étatistes. According to Emile Faguet, they are accustomed to submit to despotism and are eager in turn to practise it. They are liberals only when they are in a minority. In the United States, egalitarianism produces a kind of compulsory uniformitarianism. It is significant that, while in a state of war all nations are intolerant of dissent and free discussion, in the United States where the doctrine of political equality has reached its completest expression, dissent from the common view has been much more harshly treated than in any other belligerent country. The cardinal sin appears to be that of breaking the ranks. Liberty, according to Lord Acton, is “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom, and opinion;” and if that be true, it does not necessarily follow that democracy is the home of liberty. An egalitarian democracy may indeed become the tomb of liberty. “Democracy,” says the same learned authority, “no less than monarchy or aristocracy sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and deviation, and to secure by plebiscite, referendum, or caucus, free play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle that none shall have power over the people is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to evade its power; the true democratic principle that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall not be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle that every man’s free-will shall be as unfettered as possible is taken to mean that the free will of the sovereign people shall be fettered in nothing. … Democracy claims to be not only supreme, without authority above, but absolute, without independence below, to be its own master and not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new one, who may be flattered and deceived but whom it is impossible to corrupt or to resist; and to whom must be rendered the things that are Cæsar’s, and also the things that are God’s.” Democracy appeared in order to deliver the individual from a dehumanising subjection; but it may become a dehumanising tyranny itself. A sovereign people may become as harsh and merciless as a sovereign lord.

      The democratic idea is the corollary of the doctrine of the equal intrinsic worth of every individual soul. The modern democratic movement has started from a recognition of this principle; and the principle is meaningless unless it implies the prescriptive right of the individual to self-determination. Lord Acton’s definition of liberty is inadequate because he approaches it from the standpoint of one who was in a permanent religious minority in his own country, and in a permanent intellectual minority in his church. Liberty is surely the assurance that a man may have full opportunity to live out his own life and to grow to the full stature of his manhood, to be true to himself through everything. This requires the recognition of real personal independence and a definite minimum of obligatory uniformity. In another connection, Acton insists that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” It is so frequently assumed that the function of government is the establishment and preservation of order that it is well to remember that it is a comparatively easy thing to secure some kind of order. The real difficulty is to establish and to secure liberty. We are far too ready to assume that liberty is capable of looking after itself and that the fragile plant which needs our solicitude is social order. But liberty stands in jeopardy every hour, not less in a democracy than in an autocracy. And in so far as a democracy, which was born of the craving for liberty fails to preserve and to extend liberty, it proves itself bankrupt.

      And just as democracy is only made safe from corruption and subordination to undemocratic ends by repeated solemn affirmation of its moral and spiritual foundations, so it is only made safe from declining into absolutism and tyranny by constant return upon its metaphysical centre—the sanctity of the individual. In the modern world, the multitude is not in danger; our chief pre-occupation must be to save the individual from being swamped by the multitude. We are apt not to see the trees for the wood; we must be for ever reminding ourselves that the wood is made up of the trees. Democracy that tends to authority and uniformity is foreordained to decay; the democracy of life is one of freedom and infinite variety. Democracy has yet to solve the problem of setting the individual free without opening the door to individualism and anarchy.

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      It may be with some reason pleaded that the defects of modern democracy spring from the conditions under which it emerged as a historical fact. It has appeared with an aspect altogether too negative, as though the abolition of monarchy or aristocracy or any form of privilege were sufficient to bring it to birth. The democratic principle has implications which are not exhausted with the destruction of autocracy or aristocracy or even with the formal affirmation of popular sovereignty and the institution of a universal and equal franchise. Historically, democracy is the product, direct or indirect, of popular risings against political privilege whether vested in a person or in a class. Probably we should have to seek a still anterior cause in the power of economic exploitation which political power confers upon him who holds it. The mainspring of revolution is the sense of disinheritance rendered intolerable by injustice and exploitation and the consequent demand of the disinherited class for its appointed share in the common human inheritance of light and life. But the tragedy of revolution (despite the conventional historical judgment) is that it has never gone far enough. The records of revolution are filled chiefly with its negative and destructive performances because its impulse, not having been sustained by an adequate social vision, ran out before it completed its work or before it could swing on to the business of construction. It was too readily assumed that the one thing needful was to break down the one palpable disabling barrier of privilege. That done, the rest would follow; the golden age would at once materialise. But it has never done so. It was not perceived that the logic of revolution required and pointed to a sequel of positive and creative social action.

      This was essentially Lamennais’ plea in 1831. A revolution, he told his fellow countrymen, is only the beginning of things. You have cleared the ground; upon that cleared ground, you have to raise the fabric of a living society. France did, indeed, already provide the instance of the danger of an uncompleted revolution. The political equality established by the Revolution of 1789, was intended to give a fair field to every man; but because it went no further, in effect it opened the door to the strong man. The strong man appeared presently in the person of Napoleon; and with Napoleon came the Empire and all that that episode cost Europe in blood and treasure. The same kind of miscarriage (in another region and on a larger scale) has befallen the wider historical development of the French Revolution. Because it was not seen that the “natural right” of property might no less than the “divine right” of noble birth become a source of disinheritance, the door was opened to a movement which in the nineteenth century produced a new type of privilege and a new manner of disinheritance. That Jack’s vote has been declared to be as good as his master’s has not saved Jack from an exploitation as real and burdensome as that under which his father groaned. But it is of a different kind. The older disability was chiefly agrarian; the new is industrial. The doctrine of political liberty (interpreted in the light of Adam Smith) received an economic translation in the doctrine of “laissez-faire”; and this combined, first, with the restrictions imposed upon the power of the territorial aristocracy, second, with the new commercial civilisation which began at the Industrial Revolution, and third, with the advantage with which the propertied classes, especially the rich merchant class, started in the new order, has brought about a new kind of disability. The common people have exchanged the old master for a new, a feudal aristocracy for an industrial plutocracy, land barons for trade barons; they have been released from agrarian serfdom only to be tied to the wheel of industrial wage-slavery. Political emancipation did not bring with it real freedom.

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