Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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СКАЧАТЬ of Governments and to alienate from them the public spirit and enthusiasm that should support them; but except in very small and poor countries they seldom amount to a serious economical evil. Wars, overgrown armaments, policies that shake credit and plunder large classes, laws that hamper industry, the forms of corruption which bribe constituencies or classes by great public expenditure, by lavish, partial unjust, taxation—these are the things that really ruin the finances of a nation. To most of these evils unqualified democracies are especially liable.

Modern Radicalism is accustomed to dilate much upon the cost to a nation of endowing princes and supporting the pageantry of a Court. If there be a lesson which repeated and very recent experience clearly teaches, it is the utter insignificance of such expenditure, compared with the cost of any revolution which renders the supreme power in a State precarious, lowers the national credit, drives out of a country great masses of capital, dislocates its industry and trade, or gives a false and extravagant ply to its financial policy. Brazil and Spain are poor countries, but the millions that have been lost to them by revolutions due to the selfish ambition of a few unprincipled adventurers would have gone far to pay for all the extravagances of all the Courts in Europe.

      France can, no doubt, bear the burden of her enormous debt better than most countries. Her great natural advantages, her vast accumulated wealth, the admirable industrial qualities of her people, the wide distribution among them both of landed property and of portions of the national debt, and the fact that this debt is mainly held within the country, have all contributed to the high credit which she still enjoys. Great as is her present debt, it bears a much smaller proportion to her riches than the English debt did to the revenue of Great Britain at the Peace of 1815, than the debts of Italy and Russia still bear to their national resources. No one can doubt that, if a policy of strict economy and steady peace is pursued in France for the coming half-century, her finances will again become very sound. Some portions of her debt consist of terminable annuities. The good credit which is largely due to the wide diffusion of the debt among Frenchmen renders the policy of conversion at diminished interest possible; and in 1950 the railways of France will become national property. A country which was able in 1894 to convert without difficulty 280,000,000l. of stock bearing 4 1/2 per cent. interest into 3 1/2-percent. stock is certainly in no desperate financial condition, and the cheapness and abundance of money, while it increases the temptation to borrow, diminishes the burden of debts.

But, in spite of all these things, no serious French economist can contemplate without alarm the gigantic strides with which both her debt and her taxation have of late years advanced. Such men well know that few national diseases are more insidious in their march, more difficult to arrest, more disastrous in their ultimate consequences. The immediate stimulus to employment given by a new loan masks its ultimate and permanent effects, and if the interest alone is paid out of taxation, the increase is at first scarcely perceptible. No one can suppose that France is destined for a long period to remain at peace, and there is very little prospect of serious retrenchment in her internal affairs. A policy which would involve greatly diminished expenditure in public works, and, at the same time, considerable increase of taxation, can never be popular with the great uninstructed masses, on whose votes all French Governments now depend. Few Governments would venture to propose it, and least of all feeble, transitory, and precarious Governments, like those which have existed in France since 1870. Such Governments necessarily take short views, and look eagerly for immediate support. All the lines of policy that are most fitted to appeal to the imagination and win the favour of an uninstructed democracy are lines of policy involving increased expenditure, and the whole tendency of European democracy is towards enlarging the functions and burdens of the State. When great sections of the people have come habitually to look to Government for support, it becomes impossible to withdraw, and exceedingly difficult to restrict, that support. Public works which are undertaken through political motives, and which private enterprise would refuse to touch, are scarcely ever remunerative. On the other hand, nothing can be more certain than that the evil of excessive taxation is not merely to be measured by the amount which is directly taken from the taxpayer; its indirect, remote consequences are much more serious than its direct ones. Industries which are too heavily weighted can no longer compete with those of countries where they are more lightly taxed. Industries and capital both emigrate to quarters where they are less burdened and more productive. The credit which a nation enjoys on the Stock Exchange is a deceptive test, for the finance of the market seldom looks beyond the prospect of a few years. A false security grows up, until the nation at last slowly finds that it has entered irretrievably on the path of decadence.

It is scarcely to be expected, under the conditions I have described, that the tone of public life should be very high. The disclosures that followed the Panama scandals, though the most startling, were by no means the only signs that have thrown ominous light on this subject. Scherer, in an admirable work, has described in detail the action of the present system on French political life. Nearly every deputy, he says, enters the Chamber encumbered with many promises to individuals; the main object of his policy is usually to secure his re-election after four years, and the methods by which this may be done are well known. There is the branch line of railroad which must be obtained for the district; there is the fountain that should be erected in the public place; there is, perhaps, even the restoration of the parish church to be effected. But it is not less important that all public offices which carry with them any local influence should be in the hands of his supporters. He therefore at once puts pressure on the Government, which usually purchases his support by giving him the patronage he desires. There is a constant shifting in the smaller local offices. Never, it is said, were there so many dismissals and changes in these offices as during the Republic; and they have been mainly due to the desire of the deputies to make room for their supporters or their children. The idea that a vote is a personal favour, establishing a claim to a personal reward, has rapidly spread. At the same time, any vote in favour of public works, and especially public works in his own constituency; any reorganisation that tends to increase the number of men in Government employment, increases the popularity of the deputy. The socialistic spirit takes different forms in different countries, and this is the form it seems specially adopting in France. The old idea, that the representative Chamber is pre-eminently a check upon extravagance, a jealous guardian of the public purse, seems to have almost vanished in democratic countries, and nowhere more completely than in France. In the words of Léon Say, a great proportion of the deputies are, beyond all things, ‘agents for instigating to expense,’ seeking to secure a livelihood out of the public taxes for the greatest possible number of their electors. The electoral committee, or, as we should say, the local caucus, governs the deputy, who, in his turn, under the system of small parliamentary groups and weak and perpetually fluctuating ministries exercises an exaggerated influence on the Administration.²⁹

We may, in the last place, ask whether democracy has given France a nobler and more generous foreign policy. French writers have often claimed for their country that, more than any other, it has been governed by ‘ideas;’ that it has been the chief torchbearer of civilisation; that French public opinion is pre-eminently capable of rising above the limits of a narrow patriotism in order to support, popularise, and propagate movements of cosmopolitan liberalism. These cosmopolitan sympathies, it must be owned, sometimes fade into Utopia, and lead to a neglect of the duties of a rational patriotism; and not unfrequently they have either disguised, or served, or ended in, designs of very selfish military aggrandisement. Still, no impartial student will deny that France has for a long period represented in an eminent degree the progressive element in European civilisation; that her great influence has usually been thrown into the scale of freedom, enlightenment, and tolerance. Can this noble position be now claimed for her? Can it be denied that a policy of rancour and revenge has, in the later phases of her history, made her strangely false to the nobler instincts of her past? Let the reader follow, in the work of Sir Alfred Milner, the account of the way in which, through very unworthy motives, she has obstructed in Egypt all those reforms which were manifestly necessary to relieve the misery of the Egyptian fellah. Or, let him take a more conspicuous instance, and study that most hideous story of our century—the Russian persecution of the Jews—and then remember that it was on the morrow of this persecution that the French democracy threw itself, in a transport of boundless, unqualified enthusiasm, into the arms of Russia, and declared by all СКАЧАТЬ