Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ or idleness, or dishonesty, have failed in the race of life; who either never possessed or have wholly lost the taste for honest continuous work; who hang loosely on the verge of the criminal classes, and from whom the criminal classes are chiefly recruited. These men are not real labourers, but their presence constitutes one of the chief difficulties and dangers of all labour questions, and in every period of revolution and anarchy they are galvanised into a sudden activity. With a very low suffrage they become an important element in many constituencies. Without knowledge and without character, their instinct will be to use the power which is given them for predatory and anarchic purposes. To break up society, to obtain a new deal in the goods of life, will naturally be their object.

      Men of these two classes no doubt formed parts of the old constituencies, but they formed so small a part that they did not seriously derange the constitutional machine or influence the methods of candidates. When they are very numerous they will naturally alter the whole action of politicians, and they may seriously impair the representative character of Parliament, by submerging or swamping the varieties of genuine opinion by great uniform masses of ignorant and influenced voters. That symptoms of this kind have appeared and increased in English politics since the Reform Bill of 1867 is, I believe, the growing conviction of serious observers. The old healthy forces of English life no doubt still act, and on great occasions they will probably do so with irresistible power; but in normal times they act more feebly and more uncertainly, and are more liable to be overborne by capricious impulses and unreasoning fluctuations. The evil of evils in our present politics is that the constituencies can no longer be fully trusted, and that their power is so nearly absolute that they have an almost complete control over the well-being of the Empire.

      One of the great divisions of politics in our day is coming to be whether, at the last resort, the world should be governed by its ignorance or by its intelligence. According to the one party, the preponderating power should be with education and property. According to the other, the ultimate source of power, the supreme right of appeal and of control, belongs legitimately to the majority of the nation told by the head—or, in other words, to the poorest, the most ignorant, the most incapable, who are necessarily the most numerous.

It is a theory which assuredly reverses all the past experiences of mankind. In every field of human enterprise, in all the competitions of life, by the inexorable law of Nature, superiority lies with the few, and not with the many, and success can only be attained by placing the guiding and controlling power mainly in their hands. That the interests of all classes should be represented in the Legislature; that numbers as well as intelligence should have some voice in politics, is very true; but unless the government of mankind be essentially different from every other form of human enterprise, it must inevitably deteriorate if it is placed under the direct control of the most unintelligent classes. No one can doubt that England has of late years advanced with gigantic strides in this direction. Yet, surely nothing in ancient alchemy was more irrational than the notion that increased ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place government more and more under the control of the least enlightened classes. The day will come when it will appear one of the strangest facts in the history of human folly that such a theory was regarded as liberal and progressive. In the words of Sir Henry Maine, ‘Let any competently instructed person turn over in his mind the great epochs of scientific invention and social change during the last two centuries, and consider what would have occurred if universal suffrage had been established at any one of them. Universal suffrage, which to-day excludes free trade from the United States, would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power-loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine. It would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; and it would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield's house and library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley's house and library in 1791.'⁹

It is curious and melancholy to observe how Rousseau's doctrine of the omnipotence of numbers and the supreme virtue of political equality is displacing in England all the old maxims on which English liberty once rested. I have spoken of the great inequalities in the qualifications for the suffrage that existed in the United Kingdom. They secured a healthy diversity of character in the representatives, and they followed with rough but general fidelity the different degrees of political advancement. There was one suffrage for the towns, and another for the country—one suffrage for England, and another for Ireland. All these diversities have now been swept away. The case of Ireland is especially significant. Ireland was greatly over-represented in the Imperial Parliament, and by universal acknowledgment the Irish representatives formed the diseased spot in the parliamentary body, the disaffected and obstructive element most hostile to its healthy action. It was also absolutely certain that a lowering of the Irish suffrage would aggravate the evil, and introduce into Parliament a larger body of men who were completely alienated from the interests of the Empire, and utterly indifferent to the dignity of Parliament and the maintenance of the Constitution. No one who knew Ireland doubted that it would throw a still larger amount of power into the hands of a poor, ignorant, and disaffected peasantry, completely under the influence of priests and agitators; that it would weaken, and in many districts virtually disfranchise, loyalty, property, and intelligence; that it would deepen the division of classes; that it would enormously increase the difficulty of establishing any form of moderate and honest self-government. Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that the elements of good government must be sought for in Ireland in a higher electoral plane than in England. The men who introduced and carried the degradation of the Irish suffrage were perfectly aware of what they were doing. They acted with their eyes open; they justified themselves, in the true spirit of the Contrat Social, on the plea that they would not allow a political inequality to continue, and they probably believed that they were playing a good card in the party game.

A very similar illustration may be found in the language now commonly held in the Radical party about university representation. According to any sane theory of representative government, no form of representation can be more manifestly wise. I may here once more go to Ireland for an illustration. Nothing in the Irish representation is so manifestly wanting as a more adequate representation of loyalty and intelligence in three provinces. Loyal and well-educated men are to be found there in abundance; in nearly every form of industry, enterprise, and philanthropy, they take the foremost place; but they have no corresponding weight in the political representation, as they are usually swamped by an ignorant and influenced peasantry. Owing to the purely agricultural character of the greater part of Ireland, and the steady decadence of most of its county towns, the Irish boroughs are for the most part singularly small and insignificant. Among these boroughs a leading place must be assigned to the one university constituency. This great University has for many generations educated the flower of the intelligence of Ireland. It has sent into the Imperial Parliament a greater number of representatives of conspicuous ability than any other Irish constituency. It comprises more than 4,300 electors, and is, therefore, even in point of numbers, much more considerable than many Irish boroughs; and its voters consist of highly educated men, scattered over the whole surface of the country, taking a leading part in many professions and industries, and coming in close contact with an altogether unusual variety of interests, classes, and opinions. If the object of representation be to reflect faithfully in its variety and due proportion the opinions, the interests, and the intelligence of the community, what constituency could be more essentially and more usefully representative? Yet we are now told that, in computing the relative strength of parties in Ireland, the University representation must be subtracted, as ‘it does not represent the nation.’ This dignity, it appears, belongs more truly to the illiterates—more than one in five professedly unable even to read the names upon the ballot-papers¹⁰—who, in some remote western district, or in some decaying county town, are driven like sheep to the polling-booth by agitators or priests!

Surely it is impossible to exaggerate the fatuity of these attacks upon university representation; and the men who make them have rarely the excuse of honest ignorance. With many the true motive is simply a desire to extinguish constituencies which return members opposed to their politics, СКАЧАТЬ