Modern Democracy

MODERN DEMOCRACY Modern democracy, so different from that of ancient times, rose to power through the fierce struggles of three revolutionary cen turies. The stages of this long conflict between the people at the bottom and the privileged classes at the top were marked by the wars of the Low Countries against Spain and the rise of the Dutch Republic, the English revolutions of 1642 and 1688, the war of American Independence in 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the subsequent and complementary revolutions of 183o and 1848, and the revolutions in Europe between 1906 and 192o. The English revolutions of 1642 and 1688 consolidated parliamentary government. But the cycle of political liberty was not complete until the liberal and reform movements in the 19th century had been carried to success.

In the middle of the i8th century there was in France no political liberty or social equality, but there was a great literary and philosophical liberty, arising from the prevailing scepticism among the nobles and clergy. Voltaire, Rousseau and the philos ophers were busily sapping and mining the Ancien Regime; the Encyclopaedia, a collaboration of all the innovators and free thinkers who wished to modify society, was published; Quesnay established the individualist school of the physiocrats with its device of laissez faire, founded modern political economy with its belief in freedom of thought, of labour and of trade, and laid the basis of modern Liberalism.

The American and French Revolutions.

In the midst of the metaphysical discussion that had been going on in France there was plumped down the concrete fact of the American Revo lution. The revolt of the colonies was not, strictly speaking, in spired by a belief in democracy, though it resulted in the estab lishment of a republic. In its beginnings it was the familiar and typical revolt of the haute bourgeoisie. It was only after Thomas Paine arrived from England and in simple and rude language stirred the feelings of the masses that the struggle took on the aspects of a democratic movement. His pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis, with their flaming appeals to democratic principles and prejudices, roused that popular emotion without which such a movement could never be carried to success, and Thomas Jefferson, saturated with the doctrines of the philosophers and the most thorough-going democrat of his land, wrote the Declara tion of Independence, setting forth eloquently the theory of the natural rights of man. Many of the leaders had no belief in such a doctrine, and no liking for its implications; but any weapon that comes to hand is welcome in a scrimmage. Nor had the responsible French ministers who came to the assistance of the infant republic any illusions about democracy or republicanism. Vergennes, Louis XVI.'s great minister for foreign affairs, a hard realist, disgusted by the spectacle presented by the Congress at Philadelphia, wrote privately to Gerard, French minister to the United States, "The essence of government in a democracy is always jealousy in some sort." However when La Fayette and all the young talons rouges of the court of Louis XVI. who had gone over to America with Rochambeau returned to France they were all on fire with the new ideas of liberty. It was sentimental and romantic with most of them, no doubt, but none the less powerful for all that. The idea dropped into a soil that had been prepared by the teachings of the philosophers and by the follies of the Government, and it sprouted up at once in the French Revolution. Had it followed the ideas of the physiocrats whose metaphysics at first dominated the thought of the Constituent Assembly and incidentally pro longed its interminable debates, the Revolution might have had a different outcome. But it got beyond the bounds of their liberal theory. Idealists were brushed aside by fanatical and venal radicals, and for a long time the horrors of the anarchical State impressed themselves on men's minds everywhere as the insep arable concomitant of democracy, so that the good results of the vast upheaval were only slowly perceived. But the absolutism of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration, set the benefits of the Revolution into high relief, and liberal doctrines swept over Europe. There were outbreaks in Poland, Italy, Spain and Portu gal, and the colonies in South America set themselves up as republics. The Revolution of 183o, largely organized by bankers, placed the political power in the hands of the commercial middle classes. The duke of Orleans was raised to the throne, as Louis Philippe, not king of France by the Grace of God, but king of the French by the people's will. In 1848 his government gave way to a republic founded on universal suffrage; but it was only with the establishment of the Third Republic in 187o that the struggle for constitutionalism and liberal reforms, the right of suffrage, responsible parliamentary government and freedom of the press had been won.

Suffrage.

The principal result of the American and French Revolutions was a by-product ; they liberated upon the world the idea of individual self-expression in politics. The Revolution of 183o gave an immense impulsion to the demand for votes and stimulated the reform movement in England—which led to the first Reform Bill in 1832—with its accompaniment of riots and Chartist agitation until the repeal of the Corn Laws signalized the triumph of the Manchester school of economists. The agita tion went on, gradually expanding the categories of citizens ad mitted to the franchise, until finally, with the militant movement for woman suffrage, and the stress of the World War, both men and women in Great Britain had the vote.

Manhood suffrage had been won in the United States long before. For a while after the establishment of independence the limitations of voting that had prevailed in the colonies were con tinued in the states; some sort of property qualification was everywhere imposed. Hamilton, the leader of the conservative Federalists, said in the Constitutional Convention that all com munities divide themselves into the few and the many, the first being "the rich and well born," the other the mass of the people. ... "The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share of government." . . . Hamilton was discussing a republican form of government in which he had no faith, be cause, as Gouverneur Morris shrewdly said "he confounded it with democratical government." Morris, though he shared Hamil ton's dislike of democracy, thus early saw the confusion of re publicanism with democracy that so long existed in men's minds. He realised that, to preserve its power privilege could assume any shape—monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, autocracy, aristocracy, even republicanism ; the real antithesis of democracy being ab solutism. Jefferson was away in France at the time, and when he came back to find that democracy had been hobbled, he tried to repair the damage with the Bill of Rights. Jefferson as leader of the anti-Federalists, who soon exchanged this negative name for that of Republicans, was for the levelling doctrine of democ racy that he had proclaimed with so much eloquence in the Declaration of Independence.

One of the most significant features of the history of these late revolutionary centuries was the fact that the natural sciences and democracy rose and developed together, both having their beginnings in the rationalistic thought of the Greeks, from whom we inherit all our political standards and conceptions. Jefferson constantly meditated on the problem of applying all this advanced knowledge to the amelioration of the lot of man. Writing to John Adams long afterwards in retrospective vein he said that his followers had believed "in the improvability of the human mind in science, in ethics, in government, etc. Those who advocated a reformation of institutions, pari passu with the progress of science, maintained that no definite limits could be assigned to progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand, denied improvement and advocated steady adherence to the principles, practices, and institutions of our fathers which they represented as the con summation of wisdom and the acme of excellence beyond which the human mind could never advance." It would be difficult to frame a more accurate statement of the concept of social evolu tion as held by Jeffersonian democracy. He believed in an individ ualistic and humanistic democracy. Whilst Hamilton contemned the masses, Jefferson placed his faith in them. Already, during Washington's term as president, the new social forces brought into play had created a demand for universal manhood suffrage, and before long the cohorts of the new democracy, the small farmers of the West, and the mechanics of the East, were march ing on the Government, determined to wrest it from the "rich and well born." This new democracy, bent on levelling down all social distinctions, and sometimes by that fact mistaking the superficial for the real, rose steadily, but half a century rolled by before it came into power. Even then so slow is the American system in responding to the popular will, it had to wait four years longer—another whole "presidentiad" to use Walt Whitman's queer word—before it could install its leader Andrew Jackson in the White House. This uprising of the masses altered the mode of electing the president by depriving the electoral college of its discretionary powers; democracy dethroned "King Caucus," and the modern system of nominations by parties whose electors are pledged to vote for the party nominee, came into being. Mean while the old property qualifications were gradually abolished by the various states, and by the middle of the century white man hood suffrage was practically universal.

By one of those inconsistencies that are not infrequent in his tory, this new democracy—like the old democracy in Greece— became the party of the slave-holding oligarchy of the South, but the Civil War abolished slavery, and the nation conferred upon four million negroes, ignorant and unequipped for citizenship, all the civil rights legally enjoyed by white men. The destruction of the old aristocracy of planters cleared the way for business enterprise. The age of the machine had dawned, the industrial revolution had begun. The wage-slave succeeded the chattel slaves; but with enlightenment labour was growing in solidarity and consciousness of its power. Trade unionism arose, and the conflict between capital and labour emerged. Politics began to feel the impact of economics. Every man in the country had a vote, but the masses had an uneasy feeling that they did not rule; somehow by delegations of the taxing-power they could not under stand, the economic stratification of society was still preserved. Demos, depending on representative government, began to sus pect that the government was not representing it. Demands arose for a more direct democracy—primary laws, the initiative, ref erendum and recall and other "tools of democracy." Economics.—Elsewhere in the world the effect of the indus trial revolution had been to turn the thought of democratic lead ers away from the political towards the economic conception of the State. During the revolutions of 1848 Karl Marx and Fred erick Engels issued their communistic manifesto, an appeal to the labouring classes to seize the "means of production." Marx originated "scientific" socialism, with its harsh doctrine of the materialistic conception of history and the class struggle, holding that as the middle classes had overthrown the feudal overlords and succeeded to their powers and privileges, so now the pro letariat was to replace the capitalist class. His book Das Kapital profoundly affected the political history of Europe, and in all countries socialist parties came into existence, claiming to be the real representatives of the people and the only true champions of democracy.

The theory, however, was a denial of equality, since it proposed the substitution of one ruling class for another, and it had little concern with liberty since under it there would be no room for individual development or expression.

Socialism, however, never profoundly influenced political action in America. Against the deeply rooted belief of Americans in their own social equality the theory of the class-struggle could never make much headway.

Henry George, in his book Progress and Poverty, urged the single tax, an adaptation of the physiocratic doctrines, as a demo cratic means of absorbing the unearned increment in land values and thus abolishing gross inequalities of wealth; but the theory had only indirect effects on legislation. The significant thing, how ever, was the fact that underlying all these programmes was the idea of democracy, not as a political system, but as an economic status—an idea that had a high explosive potentiality.

Modern Democratic Theory.

The Allies in the World War waged their final and victorious campaign to President Wilson's battle-cry of "Make the world safe for democracy." Under the shock empires were dismembered, more than a dozen dynasties overthrown, and numerous republics set up. Suffrage was extended not only to men but to women. There is more voting than ever before in human history, but it may be doubted whether the nations are any more democratic, except in manners, than they were. For many countries—Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia— are under dictatorships or tyrannies, ruling in the name of various political evangels, such as Fascism in Italy and Mandan Socialism in Russia. Everywhere indeed, there has been a certain decline in respect for liberty if not in liberty itself. There is no longer that almost religious devotion to it which inspired the old liberals of the isgth century, who still felt the generous and naive enthu siasm of the fith century. No doubt this is due to a distrust and fear of democracy as it grows more powerful, and perhaps to the fact that in a materialistic age men are not so sentimentally de voted to abstract principles. It is a practical age, impatient of dreamers and their dreams. As men realize themselves as a part of a large mass they grow bolder, and less tolerant of the views of others; they are ready to resort to any means to impose on others those prejudices that so many of them mistake for prin ciples, and so in democracies there is apt to be a tyranny of majorities, and the protection of the rights of minorities is one of the unsolved problems, though various expedients have been tried, such as proportional representation. Another danger is that within the State and side by side with the constituted authority there is sometimes organized and set up an extra-legal and irresponsible authority, which, by controlling a large block of votes, exercises an influence on legislation and administration un warranted in the constitution. One of the great blessings con fidently expected of democracy was the abolition of war. The World War, fought on the side of the Allies in the name of democ racy, was to be the war that would end war. It must not be for gotten however that once their interests are touched, or their passions aroused, and it is not difficult to excite them, democracies can be as fierce and bellicose, and often as imperialistic, as tyrants and dictators.

Modern democracy differs from ancient democracy in that the scheme is applied not only to the inhabitants of a city, but to millions scattered over vast extents of territory and bound by common national interests. On such a scale popular government could not function directly, but only by the complicated machinery of representative institutions. The form of absolutism disappeared, but not the thing; privilege is Protean, and even in republics assumes convenient or appropriate disguises. The old conflict of interests and ambitions, the old antagonisms still remained, strong as ever, and in the party system that inevitably developed found their expression in various groups of opinion. As civilization ad vanced, as education became popular, and with the development of printing the mechanical means of disseminating knowledge were carried to a high degree of development, the lower orders demanded larger liberties, and even those statesmen who did not believe in democracy began to use its terms, so that most of the policies of governments in late years have been proposed and advocated as measures in the popular interest, even when they were most reactionary. If modern democracy has not yet wholly become that government of the people, by the people, for the people which was prefigured in Lincoln's imagination, it has be come a government of public opinion in which he had an almost mystical faith. It is in the name of the people that, since the last vestige of the old theory of divine right disappeared in the debacle of the German empire in 1918, Governments in the lead ing nations rule to-day. It is this public opinion that statesmen and ministers flatter, try to conciliate and control, by appeals to self-interest, cupidity and sentiment. The politician has been forced to develop and apply a new technique. Nowadays every body, man and woman, in most of the advanced nations, has the vote, and there is a widespread intelligence due to popular educa tion. Every mechanical miracle of an astonishingly proficient industrial age has contributed to the formation and the dissemina tion of this vast body of mass opinion. The printing press with cheap newspapers and cheap reading matter ; steam and electricity with the railway, the steamship, the telegraph and telephone, and now the wireless or radio, have implemented democracy for new conquests. In the democracy of ancient Greece the stentor had a voice "as powerful as fifty voices of other men," but in the mod em democracy the candidate for high office, whose voice is amplified and broadcast by mechanical means, can pour his prom ises or his persuasions into the ears of millions of voters without troubling them to rise from their easy chairs. But rival interests are constantly disputing the favour of this opinion, and in the process the new and unforeseen abuses that are the inseparable concomitant of every reform spring up. The demagogue and the irresponsible and unscrupulous newspaper proprietor have more scope and more power. At the same time there has been a decline in respect for parliaments or at least for parliamentarians, due to a demagogic subservience to what is thought to be public opinion, which may be swayed this way or that by those who control the various agencies of publicity. The old views of constitutional liberalism have been weakened and liberal parties have lost ground; the opposing extremes of conservatism and Bolshevism have grown more bitter and uncompromising. Majorities have less respect for the rights of minorities. The equality that pre vails in the modern democracy is in some ways factitious, a con cession to the popular feeling on the part of the ruling, i.e.. the possessing classes. But even were the equality real it does not necessarily follow that liberty would exist. Indeed in the very process of maintaining this equality, democracies become quite as tyrannical as autocracies ; inhuman bureaucracies are created which fetter the movements, regulate the personal habits and meddle in the private affairs of the citizen—partly from a natural love of interference and partly to justify the employment of vast armies of officials and clerks.

In the old liberal conception of democracy the individualistic and humanistic idea was implicit ; in the new industrial democracy this idea disappears. There is an imposition of mass feeling that tends to standardize everything—dress, speech, manners, even thought. The stamp of uniformity is placed on everything; with the distrust of distinction there is a tendency to mediocrity and dull routine. Under the tyranny of the machine, interest and variety, spontaneity and individuality are taken out of life. It tends to lose its colour and its charm. These are the price of democracy, such as it is, under the industrial system. On the other hand, there are gains; if the highest in society is not so high, the lowest is not so low. There is education, of sorts, for the masses. Indeed, democracy itself is a daily process of educa tion for the citizen. The light of publicity penetrates everywhere; he acquires more knowledge and a greater understanding of the processes of government and feels, or should feel, a larger degree of responsibility for it. If more people are voting than ever before, they are voting more intelligently. Women have been "eman cipated" and are taking part in the daily life of the nation, though possibly at the expense of the home and family. Workingmen have better wages, shorter hours of labour and a higher standard of living. There are wider opportunities of material advancement ; communications are easier, cheaper, more rapid ; peoples are brought closer together. The democratic principle is more widely accepted than ever before, but it can triumph only as education reduces the obstacles that nature and human nature oppose to equality. The spirit is more important than the constitution, for without the spirit the only difference between one form of ab solutism and another lies in the numbers of those that impose it. This spirit, this ethos, of democracy, is adumbrated in the old war-cry of the French Revolution, "liberty, equality, and frater nity." Liberty for everyone to achieve a conscious aspiration for a larger and fuller life in a self governing people's state, from which all autocratic forces have been excluded and in which the power is exercised by all the people; equality by the abolition of all forms of privilege, political and economic, and fraternity, or solidarity, by the creation of a highly developed social conscious ness. This spirit is liberty, vague and impressionistic as the idea is, and perhaps should be, since liberty is a living, growing thing, and not something won in the wars and revolutions of long ago and placed on file in the archives of the State. The idea of liberty, of course, is implicit in true democracy; liberty is its end and aim, that is, the evolution of the free man. But liberty is elusive because it is impressionistic, as hard to capture as it is to define. Man has succeeded in shuffling off many chains; slavery and serf dom were done away; religious, civil and personal liberty largely won, in principle, at least; political liberty has been conquered by universal suffrage, but economic liberty has not been achieved, and plutocracy reigns in many a democracy. Indeed democracy, satisfied with political liberty, has never yet prevented, or often tried to prevent, either open or secret plutocracy. Worst of all, man is still the slave of his own passions and his own ignorance. Democracy can not triumph wholly until the spirit of democracy dwells in all the people. Without this spirit nothing more has been accomplished than to substitute for the tyranny of an individual or of a minority or a class the tyranny of a fluctuating majority, which is no more legitimate than that which it replaces. In the ideal democracy there would be, not an authority imposed by the force of a small number or the passions of a large number, but an authority exercised by the unanimous consent of the citizens, that government of the people, by the people, for the people which was the ideal and the dream of Lincoln. (B. WH.)