As in our own time, however, parties have arisen which call themselves Christian Socialists, while some who do not use that name have argued that Socialism is a legitimate development from the teaching of the Gospels, it is worth while to examine whether any such connection exists.
If the aims of Socialism and Communism be defined as being the establishment of a greater equality of economic conditions and the extinction of suffering due to poverty, these are ends which Christianity also seeks. But the means by which it would attain these ends are different from those which any political party has advocated. The renunciation or abolition of private property is not inculcated in the New Testament, although some of the first believers, in the passionate exaltation of their new sense of brotherhood, had all things in common. 1 Communist politicians propose to carry out their programmes (whatever form these may take) by law, i.e. by the compulsive power of the State using physical force. The Gospel contemplates quite other means of bettering human society. It appeals to the sympathy and conscience of the individual, bidding him love his neighbour as himself, and, since he is bound to rejoice in his neighbour's happiness equally with his own, to treat his neighbour, not as a competitor, but as a partner or a brother, giving to him freely all he needs. In a Christian society regulated by these principles there would be no need for the various organs of State action, for an army, or a navy, or courts of law, or police, nor would there be any State relief of poverty, because relief would already have been voluntarily effected by private benevolence. Under the conditions of such a society the State would in fact be superfluous, except as an organization for devising and carrying out a variety of purposes beneficial to all, such as the construction of public works and the preservation of public health. It need hardly be added, for this follows from what has been said already, that there is nothing in the New Testament to require a Christian to be or not to be a political Socialist, nothing either to dissuade or to recommend the use of State power to effect social or economic reforms. If it is sought to effect those reforms by legal compulsion methods, that is a matter for the State which has its own means and methods.
Some have complained that in the Gospel precepts for the conduct of life there is no reference to public or civic duties, unless it be in the saying “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.” But the answer or explanation seems to be, not only that any such precepts would have been inapplicable (if indeed intelligible) to men living in the political conditions of those to whom the Gospel was first preached, but also that they would have been superfluous. Had Christianity been put in practice, forms of government would have mattered little.
But Christianity never has been put in practice. Even that precept which it might have seemed comparatively easy to observe — the avoidance of war between Christians — was entirely disregarded. Whatever was the original meaning of the saying “I am come to send not peace but a sword,” one of those many dicta in the Gospels whose true sense remains doubtful, the prophecy was fatally fulfilled, for many wars have sprung from religion, and wars have been as frequent between so-called Christian States as ever they were between those heathen States which Augustine held to be the offspring of sin.
This brief survey may suffice to show that the relation of the Christian Church or Churches to the State has varied from people to people and from age to age according to local circumstances and transitory issues. Many were the attempts from time to time to represent Christianity as the natural bulwark of some set of political doctrines, or to draw the Church into an alliance with the party that professed them. Monarchy and Democracy alternately, or both at the same moment, made bids for ecclesiastical support. Theologians or statesmen appealed to the Bible as favouring the views they propounded. Monarchists and democrats could equally well do so, for there were plenty of texts for both to cite. In England High Churchmen like Laud and Sheldon maintained the divine right of kings by quoting the passages in the book of Samuel which refer to Saul the king of Israel as the Lord's anointed, but the Puritans and the Jesuits alike could counter them by references to the deposition of Saul by the prophet acting under the direction of Jehovah. Every one can find in the Christian Scriptures what he seeks, because those books are not, like the Koran, the product of any one mind or time but of eight centuries, and record not only events and the words of men, but also the emergence and growth of ideas and beliefs slowly developed in the long life of a people which has contributed more than any other to the religious thought of mankind. The habit of trying to apply to current politics isolated dicta meant for other conditions has now passed away. No party resorts to an arsenal which provides weapons equally available for all.
But though, as we have seen, none of the great religions has any natural or necessary affinity to any particular form of government, there are still ways in which religion, or an ecclesiastical body, can affect the course of political events. Such an organization can unite with and intensify racial or national or party passion. When strong enough to command the obedience of its own members, it can strengthen by its alliance a secular government or a political party. A glance at the world of to-day shows that although ecclesiastical influences on politics are slighter than formerly, they still exist. 1 In Russia the Orthodox Church of the East may, though she failed to stem the Bolshevik tide in 1917, prove to have retained part of that power over the peasantry and the middle class which seemed immense ten years ago. In Canada, Australia, and Ireland, in Belgium and Holland and Switzerland, the support of Roman bishops and priests counts for something in elections. In France the Church is the pillar of the conservative Right; in Germany it has furnished the foundation of a considerable political party. It is in English-speaking countries only that the Roman Church has frankly embraced democratic principles, declaring that she has no complaint against popular government, and confining her action to educational questions.
What, then, is the relation to democracy of the fundamental ideas of the Gospel? Four ideas are of special significance.
The worth of the individual man is enhanced as a being to whom the Creator has given an immortal soul, and who is the object of His continuing care.
In that Creator's sight the souls of all His human creatures are of like worth. All alike need redemption and are to be redeemed. “In Christ there is neither barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.”
Supremely valuable is the inner life of the soul in its relation to the Deity. “The kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
It is the duty of all God's creatures to love one another, and form thereby a brotherhood of worshippers.
The first of these ideas implies spiritual liberty, the obligation to obey God (who speaks directly to the believer's heart) rather than man. It is freedom of conscience.
The second implies human equality, in respect not of intellectual or moral capacity but of ultimate worth in the eyes of the Creator, and it points to the equal “right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The third idea, expressed in those precepts which bid the Christian to live, with a pure heart, in close communion with God, and the fourth which implies the creation of a Christian community, cannot but affect a man's attitude to life in the world, and may innuence it in one of two ways. Absorption in the inner life may tend to individualism, engendering a Quietism or isolated mysticism. On the other hand, the idea of a Christian brotherhood of worship points to the value of the collective life and may dispose men to submission in matters of faith and a merging of their own wills in the will of the community.
Either of these principles, taken alone, may be pushed to an extreme. He who regards the welfare of his own soul may neglect his social and political duties, may passively endure tyranny, or may withdraw, like the early Christian hermits, into the desert. On the other hand, the gathering of the individual worshippers into a community which almost inevitably passes into an organization, may build up a hierarchy which will sacrifice liberty to orthodoxy and become a worldly power. Each of these tendencies was pushed very far, and each has exposed Christianity to censure. Voltaire attacked it as an aggressive and persecuting force, inimical to freedom, yet also a troublesome rival to well-ordered civil government. Rousseau attacked it as an anti-social influence which, in detaching men from the life of this world and turning their hopes to another, made them neglectful of civic duty. The one thought it dangerous as a stimulant, the other as a narcotic.
If we regard the essential quality of Christianity rather than the errors and corruptions which led men to neglect or pervert its teachings, if we fix our minds not so much on its direct action upon events in history as upon the ideas it contained which affected the course of events, we shall find its influence to have been operative in two respects chiefly. It implanted the conception of a spiritual freedom prepared when necessary to defy physical force. The sentence, “We must obey God rather than men,” 1 went echoing down the ages, strengthening the heart of many a man accused for his opinions. It created a sentiment of equality between men — all alike sinful beings, yet also all worth saving from the power of sin — which restrained the degrading idolatry of power which had existed under Asiatic despotisms. The greatest king was a sinner no less than the humblest subject, and might, as a sinner, be resisted and, if the need arose, deposed. These ideas, which from time to time broke through the crust of monarchical tradition in the Middle Ages, became potent factors among the Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wherever monarchs stood opposed to the principles of the Reformers.
In the political as in the moral sphere the fundamental ideas of the Gospel have effected much, yet how much less than was expected by those who first felt their purifying and vitalizing power. That power sank lowest just when it had secular authority most fully at its disposal. The more the Church identified itself with the world, the further did it depart from its own best self. The Church expected or professed to Christianize the world, but in effect the world secularized the Church. The Kingdom of Heaven became an Ecclesiastical State. Such victories as Christian principles have from time to time won in the unending strife of good and evil have been won by their inherent moral force, never through earthly weapons. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau saw that the belief in “life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel “may vivify a man's higher impulses and give a new worth and force to all the work he can do under the sun.
The teachings of the Gospel live and move and have their being in a plane of their own. The values they reveal and exalt are values for the soul, not to be measured by earthly standards. Their influence is not institutional but spiritual. It has nothing to do with governments, but looks forward to a society in which law and compulsion will have been replaced by goodwill and the sense of human brotherhood. However remote the prospect that such a society can be established on earth, the principles which that teaching inculcates are sufficient to guide conduct in every walk of life. He who does justice and loves mercy and seeks the good of others no less than his own will bring the right spirit to his public as well as his own private duties. If ever that spirit pervades a whole nation, it will be a Christian nation as none has ever yet been.
It is the newspaper press that has made democracy possible in large countries. The political thinkers of antiquity assumed that a community of self-governing citizens could not be larger than one voice could reach, because only by the voice could discussion be carried on: and they might have added that only where the bulk of the citizens dwell near one another can they obtain by word of mouth the knowledge of political events that is needed to make discussion intelligent and profitable. Within the last hundred years the development of the press has enabled news to be diffused and public discussion to be conducted over wide areas; and still more recently the electric telegraph has enabled news and the opinions of men regarding it to be so quickly spread over a vast and populous country that all the citizens can receive both news and comments thereon at practically the same moment, so that arguments or appeals addressed to the people work simultaneously upon their minds almost as effectively as did the voice of the orator in the popular assembly.
Even before this immense change had arrived, it had been recognized in all free countries that the function of diffusing news and arguments must be, in normal times, open to all persons, so that every man may publish what he pleases, subject to whatever liability law may impose in respect of the misuse of this power. From the days of Milton, whose Areopagitica was the first great statement of the case for unlicensed printing, the friends of popular government have treated the freedom of the press as indispensable to its proper working, so much so that it has figured in nearly all the written constitutions of modern free States. The faith in popular government rested upon the old dictum: “Let the people have the truth and freedom to discuss it, and all will go well “ (Fortis semper Veritas 1 ). A free press — so it was assumed — may be relied on to supply true facts because false facts will soon be discovered and discredited. Competition among those who know that the people desire the truth will enable truth to be discerned from falsehood. Free discussion will sift all statements. All arguments will be heard and canvassed. The people will know how to choose the sound and reject the unsound. They may be for a time misled, but general freedom will work out better than any kind of restraint. In free countries no one now impeaches the principle, whether or not he expects from it all it seems to promise. The liberty of the press remains an Ark of the Covenant in every democracy.
To this let it be added that the press was earning the favour it received. During many years in which one country after another was striving to extort full self-government from mon-archs or oligarchies the press was one of the strongest forces on the popular side. It exposed oppression and corruption; it arraigned an arbitrary executive, denouncing its selfish or blundering policies; it helped the friends of liberty to rouse the masses. It won popular confidence and sympathy, because it embodied and focussed the power of public opinion. Without it the victory of opinion over the armed force of governments could not have been won.
A time, however, arrived when difficulties and dangers previously unforeseen came to light. It was perceived that the power of addressing large masses of men could be used in many ways and for many purposes. Two or three of these may be mentioned as illustrations.
The old monarchies had possessed their official organs which set forth the facts — or falsehoods — to which it was desired to give currency, but these organs were generally discredited by their official character. Bismarck, if he did not invent, was the first who practised extensively and efficiently the practice of suborning newspapers not supposed to be connected with the government to propagate the statements and views he sought to foist upon the people. His so-called “Reptile Press “proved an effective engine for strengthening his position, and set an example followed in other countries. This method involved no restriction of press freedom, but the well-spring of truth was poisoned at its source.
In countries long attached to the principles of liberty such as the United States and England some violent journalists were found advocating the assassination of rulers or statesmen. Could this he permitted? Did the existence of a political motive justify incitement to murder? This question was answered in the United States by the conviction and punishment, nearly forty years ago, of Johann Most, a German anarchist. The murder, in 1901, of President Mc-Kinley, by a Polish anarchist, probably under the influence of literature suggesting the removal of the heads of States, gave further actuality to this issue. In a country which provides constitutional means for the redress of grievances, political assassination is an offence against democracy, and cannot plead the arguments used to justify tyrannicide in lands ruled by tyrants. Will democracy allow itself to be stabbed in the back?
In a different quarter another problem arose which showed how hard it is to apply, irrespective of special conditions, principles previously assumed to be of universal validity. British administrators in India were agreed, whatever their school of thought, in holding it unsafe to allow the same liberty to newspapers published in the native languages as might be allowed to all newspapers in Europe or North America. The absence of restrictions would enable unscrupulous persons not only to disturb public order by false statements, hard to track and refute, and by pernicious incitements addressed to ignorant minds, but also to extort money from individuals by methods of blackmailing, a device peculiarly hurtful in a country where women are secluded. The ordinary penal law could not be effectively used to prevent these evils. Thus a people like the English, heartily democratic in sentiment, found itself unable to apply to the vernacular Indian press its own cherished maxims. Cases like these — and others might be added — show that unlimited publicity, the life-blood of free government, may have its dangers, just as explosives, useful for mining and tunnelling, have been turned to the purposes of violent crime.
Other things have happened in our time to shake the complacent optimism which the growth of a cheap press had inspired. With the growth of population in industrial centres, with the diffusion among all classes of the habit of reading, with the need for information on many new topics of interest, newspapers began to be far more widely read, and as their circulation increased, so did the size of their daily and weekly issues, and the volume of their non-political matter. So also did the pecuniary returns which, if successful, they brought in to their proprietors. They became lucrative business undertakings. Moreover, as most of their readers now belonged to a class with less education and less curiosity for what may be called the higher kinds of knowledge, and with more curiosity for the lower kinds, such as reports of sporting contests, fatal accidents, and above all, accounts of crimes and matrimonial troubles, there appeared in some countries newspapers of a new type which throve by the support of this uninstructed, uncritical, and unfastidious mass of readers. Such papers, free from that restraint which the public opinion of the more educated class had hitherto imposed, could play down to the tastes of the crowd and inflame its passions or prejudices by invectives directed against other classes or against foreign nations, or by allegations and incitements the falsity of which few of its readers were qualified to discover. Since many in this less educated social stratum read newspapers of this type and no others, currency could be given with impunity to misrepresentations and fallacies which there was no means of exposing, however deceptive the colour they gave to the questions before the nation.
The rise of these journals, inauspicious in their moral as in their political influence, has led observers to note a change which has been passing on the press as a whole. But first let us distinguish two aspects a newspaper wears, two functions it discharges.
In one aspect it is a commercial undertaking. It sells news to those who wish to buy news. It sells space in its columns to those advertisers who desire means for bringing their wares (or offered services) to the notice of the public. So far its aims and purposes are simple, straightforward, unexceptionable. It is a trading concern, directed to the making of pecuniary profits.
Its other aspect is that of a guide and adviser, seeking to form the opinion and influence the action of the public. It comments on current events; it advocates or opposes certain views or politics, professing to be in such advocacies animated by public spirit and a disinterested wish to serve the whole community. This spirit may, and often does, prompt the, proprietor's or the editor's action. But the real though of course unavowed motive may be selfish and even sordid, perhaps the desire to make gain for the proprietor or his friends out of some undertaking which the State can help or discourage, perhaps a pecuniary inducement offered by persons needing the help of the press. It is of course impossible for the public to know in any given case what may be the motives that lie behind the action of the newspaper; and in most cases its professions of disinterested patriotism are taken at their face value. The same confiding spirit which makes the average reader believe the news which he reads in the paper makes him assume that the views and arguments which accompany the news are also, even though they may be partisan, at least honestly partisan. Thus, that commercial character which a newspaper has in its first-mentioned aspect of a seller of news and of advertising space, and which is innocuous in that aspect, because understood by everybody, may be secretly present and potent in affecting its performance of the function of commenting on events and advocating policies. Premising this significant distinction between the two aspects a newspaper wears, we may return to consider the course of recent developments in political journalism.
The leading organs of the press have been, and are still, in free countries, the one great and indispensable medium for the diffusion of information and opinion on political topics. The daily paper reports events and the views, spoken and written, of prominent men regarding events, and it does this with a perfection of machinery and a display of executive talent that are among the most conspicuous achievements of our time. As already observed, it generally adds to its accounts of events happening and words spoken its own comments, intended to influence the minds of its readers in favour of the political views which it professes and which are, presumably, those of the proprietors and the editorial staff. This is partisanship, but when, as usually happens, the partisanship is known to the reader, it can be allowed for and discounted. So long as there is no suppression or perversion of truth no harm is done. The attitude is (subject to two differences to be hereafter noted) substantially the same as that of a public speaker advocating on a platform the cause of his party. Neither from him nor from the newspaper can impartiality be expected. We are satisfied if each is fairly honest, neither distorting facts nor misrepresenting the position of opponents.
If every newspaper did its best to ascertain and to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and gave equal opportunities for the expression of all views, leaving the public to judge between those views, newspapers would be, so far as politics are concerned, an almost unmixed good. Everything that can be done would have been done to enable the formation of a sound and sober public opinion, and though the people would sometimes err they would have only themselves to blame. This virtue is not to be looked for in such a world as the present. To demand it would be what theologians call a Counsel of Perfection. The people are pretty well served when a party paper reports events and speeches with fairness to both sides. Such a paper consults its own interests in doing so, for it is respected, and is more likely to be read, by members of the other party. The paper has, moreover, a sort of responsibility to its own party, which regards it as an asset, the value of whose advocacy is reduced if it becomes intemperately reckless, or descends to personal abuse, for that may produce a reaction beneficial to the person assailed, who might relish attacks as a tribute to his importance. It is not invective that damages an antagonist but the bringing up against him of his own errors in word or deed. Sensible men, a minority no doubt, but a minority which influences the rank and file, form their own opinion from the facts little affected by newspaper praise or dispraise.
Till past the middle of last century a newspaper occupying itself with political affairs — and it is only with these that we are here concerned — was primarily a party organ, in close touch with party leaders. The editor was often an independent and forceful personality, who took his own line, perhaps trying to hold an Olympian position in which he could bestow censure or praise on one or other party at his pleasure. 1 But in either case it was as an organ and leader of public opinion that the paper stood out to the world. It was, of course, also a commercial undertaking which had to pay its way and earn a profit; and the wish to earn a profit might influence its political attitude. But the advocacy of political doctrines and the function of giving the public the means of judging for itself by a copious supply of news purported to be its first aim.
Latterly, however, the newspaper has developed another side. Though it still claims to stand as the purveyor of truth and the disinterested counsellor of the people, it is now primarily a business concern, an undertaking conducted for profit like any other. The proprietor has begun to dwarf the editor. The latter has been a man of letters with a pride in his gifts, and usually with a set of opinions which he seeks to propagate. The proprietor is a man of business, and though he may desire power as well as money, profit comes before political opinions. The editor and his staff may be animated by the purest public spirit and may believe all they write, but the proprietor must make money by extending his circulation and (through the circulation) the more considerable returns from advertisements. When the function of purveying truthful news and tendering sound advice seems to conflict with that of increasing the paper's circulation, the obvious way of attaining the latter aim is by taking the line most likely to please the buyers. Noting the direction in which public opinion is moving, the paper will follow, perhaps exaggerate and intensify, the feeling of the moment, or, still more adroitly, it will anticipate the feeling it sees just arising. Another form of gainful activity occurs when the paper's help is desired by a class or a group of persons who have some private interests to promote. They may induce it to advocate legislation from which they expect some benefit, perhaps a protective duty, or a railroad project. Or they may wish to work up a boom in the stock market or to influence the action of Government in some foreign or colonial question out of which money may be made. A financial group may acquire a number of journals, and while working them for profit may also use its power to promote other business enterprises, and to further the ambitions of political leaders. In cases of this kind, where the attitude of the paper is determined not by honest conviction but by an undisclosed motive, the public, ignorant of the secret inducement, is misled. It is only in some few countries where the tone of journalism has declined with that of public life in general that these evils have become serious. But the risk is always present.
Another perversion of press power appears when a group of politicians, or perhaps a single person, works a paper, or even a number of papers, for their or his political advancement. In a country where service in the legislature, or eloquence on the stump, is not the only door open to high political office, an ambitious man may seek to win influence and votes by addressing the electorate through his journal or journals just as a politician would do by platform speeches. In such instances it may be thought that the journal's influence is lessened when the facts are known, because intelligent readers understand and discount the motives for its proprietor's action. Yet this may not happen. If the paper commands a host of readers by the attractiveness of its non-political matter, the support it gives to the political group, or to the man, still continues to tell on their minds; and it must be remembered that the great majority of these readers are neither well informed nor intelligent enough to realize the nature of the game that is being played.
Where a journal, from whatever motives, desires to influence opinion and votes in a particular direction, it has two methods available. One is that of argument. It will advocate or oppose a policy, will extol, or disparage or even calumniate, a party chief, after the manner of party speakers on the platform. Experience has shown that, where party government exists, such advocacy is inevitable and is, within reasonable limits, the best way of bringing out the issues involved and rousing the attention of the citizens. This method, if it abstains from falsification and calumny, is fair and above-board. Sensitive men may suffer more than they would if attacked by a public speaker, because to him they can reply directly, calling him to account for misrepresentation more easily than they can an anonymous journalist. Yet no great harm is done. In political warfare hard knocks must be expected.
The other method is more crafty and more effective. Since it is Facts that count for most in the formation of opinion, the newspaper which desires its views to prevail will try to make out its case by facts. Sometimes it may assume facts: i.e. it will put forward a theory of the motives or intentions of a person or a group of politicians, and presently treat that theory as an accepted reality, proceeding to ground charges upon it. Sometimes it may even invent facts — i.e. it will catch up (possibly itself set agoing) a rumour, and then proceed to refer to the rumour as a fact, give it prominence, hammer it into the public mind by repeated blows. This method needs to be prudently applied, for the alleged fact may be disproved, and if this happens frequently, the paper's credit will suffer. A safer and more telling device than either argument or misrepresentation is found in the Selection of facts. In every controversy there are plenty of facts fit to be adduced on both sides. If a paper skilfully and systematically selects for publication all the facts that point to one conclusion, and suppresses or mentions curtly and scantily all the facts that bear the other way, it cannot be charged with direct falsehood, though it practically falsifies the case by withholding from its readers the means of forming a just judgment. The suppression of the truth is more insidious than the suggestion of the false. This Negative misrepresentation is as easy and more prudent than Positive, because detection and conviction are more difficult. Partisan speakers as well as journals slip into it more or less unconsciously, but it is far more effective, and usually more deliberate, in the hands of the journal, and has been employed on a great scale, especially in matters of foreign policy. Before the outbreak of the war between the United States and Spain in 1898 the newspapers of the former country were deluged with matter putting the conduct of Spain in Cuba — conduct doubtless open to grave censure — in the worst light and letting little or nothing appear on her behalf. A more remarkable case was seen a year later, when the bulk of the British press 1 stated and exaggerated what case there was against the Transvaal Government, while ignoring the facts which made in favour of that republic, with the result that the British public never had the data necessary for forming a fair judgment.
These instances, to which others might be added, illustrate the fact that press exaggerations or misrepresentations are especially mischievous in questions arising with foreign countries. Where the controversy is domestic, the citizens know more about it, and the activity of the opposing parties may be relied on to bring out the facts and provide answers to mendacious statements and fallacious arguments. This may not happen where a foreign country is concerned, whose case no political party nor any newspaper need feel bound (except from purely conscientious motives) to state and argue. To do so is usually unpopular, and will be stigmatized as unpatriotic. Here, accordingly, the policy of suppressing or misrepresenting what may be said on behalf of the foreign case commends itself to the journal which thinks first of its own business interests. Newspapers have in all countries done much to create ill feeling and bring war nearer. In each country they say the worst they can of the other country, and these reproaches, copied by the newspapers of the other, intensify distrust and enmity. All this is done not, as sometimes alleged, because newspapers gain by wars, for that is not always the case, since their expenditure also increases, but because it is easier and more profitable to take the path of least resistance. The average man's patriotism, or at least his passion, is aroused. It is comforting to be told that the merits are all on his side; nor can there ever be too many reasons for hating the foreigner.
Arts of this nature have long been used by public speakers. The newspaper is only an orator addressing a reader instead of a hearer. It lacks the personal charm, the gift of attracting enthusiasm and inspiring attachment, which the great orator possesses. But in other respects its power is greater than his. It addresses many audiences at once. It is indispensable, because it gives a mass of non-political news which most people want for business purposes, and the rest from curiosity. For the multitude who follow public affairs with an interest not strong enough to draw them to public meetings or make them read the reports of proceedings in a legislature, it is the only source of political instruction, perhaps almost their only reading of any kind. It can go on reiterating its arguments, or setting forth the same set of facts intended to suggest or enforce those arguments, day by day and week by week.
The last fifty or sixty years have seen an evident increase in the power of the great newspapers. As the number of their readers, as well as the habit of reading, has grown, and as their range has expanded, for they supply news from all over the world and treat many new subjects, which only specialists can handle, so also their revenue and their expenditure have increased. Since they require a larger capital than formerly, the stronger papers have grown, and the weaker have withered away, while few new rivals have appeared, because to establish a daily journal is a costly and risky enterprise. Thus, in the great cities of nearly every country, the number of leading papers is now comparatively small, but each wields a greater power than formerly. This is not due to any finer quality in their articles, for the writing is no more brilliant than formerly — in some countries it seems to have declined. The “leading articles,” moreover, count for less than does the news and what may be called the “attitude” of the great journal, with the prestige it derives from the vast scale of its operation, addressing myriads at the same moment, in the same words, with the same air of confidence. The feeling that so many people read it and believe in it raises the presumption that if they do read it, it is because they believe. Seeing in it a force that cannot be ignored, each accepts its views because each thinks that others are accepting. It speaks ex cathedra with a pontifical authority which imposes deference. Goldwin Smith said fifty years ago that he remembered an article in which a great British newspaper claimed that it discharged in the modern world the functions of the mediaeval Church.
Prestige is heightened by mystery. Scarcely any of those who read what the paper tells them know who has written what they read, or what sources of information he possesses, or what intellectual weight. The voice seems to issue from a sort of superman, and has a hypnotic power of compelling assent. An elderly clubman who has been behind the scenes may remark to his friend over their coffee: “After all, these thundering articles are written by a fellow with the arrogance of inexperience, who knows much less about the matter than you and I do, a young fellow scribbling in a dingy room up three pair of stairs.” But to the tens of thousands in and all round the city the thunder seems to come from the sky above. It is like the voice of a great multitude. And in truth the paper does represent much more than the scribe in the dingy room, for a great journal has traditional authority as well as large capital behind it, and its policy may be the product of the combined action of a number of shrewd minds, watching the ebbs and flows of opinion, studying how to please the vast electorate, or how to terrify the men in office. Behind the argumentative advocacy, in itself a small matter, is the power of manipulating news, and of reporting what the proprietors wish to be known and ignoring what they wish to keep out of sight. Strange is the fascination of the printed page. Men who would give little credence to a tale told them by a neighbour, or even written to them by a friend, believe what the newspaper tells them merely because they see it in print. In one country where newspaper inaccuracy is taken as matter of course, the same man who says, “You know the papers are full of lies,” will forthwith repeat some charge against a politician on the faith of a paragraph, believing, because he saw it in the newspaper, that there must be something in it.
There are countries in which one source of a journal's power consists in its relations, real or supposed, with the ministry of the day, or with those great financial interests which are believed, not without reason, to exert an influence more permanent than that of officials, since they do not come and go with a popular vote. Ministers, and also prominent politicians not in office, have frequently used, and been helped by, newspapers, repaying them sometimes by private intelligence, sometimes, as in the United States, by the bestowal of foreign missions, sometimes, as in England, by titular honours. 1 Not to speak of Germany under Bismarck, Katkoff rendered great services to the Russian Government in the'seventies, and some English politicians have owed much to the incessant efforts of their press friends, while in Australia there have been times when a powerful paper could make or unmake a Prime Minister.
A more important element in the growing ascendancy of the press may be found in the fact that in most countries it depends less than it did two generations ago on the favour of what is called “Society “and the educated classes. The political and literary sides of its action had then a significance which has declined with the increasing importance of its commercial aspects. It is less amenable to the critical judgment of what are called the “men of culture,” because it relies on the vast mass of persons who buy it merely for news or for business purposes, and who advertise in it for the latter. To the majority of such persons its political attitude is indifferent; and this makes the political news it publishes, and the interpretations of that news it supplies, a more efficient means of propaganda. Secure in its hold upon the business community and the multitude of readers who are glad to have their thinking done for them, it need not regard criticisms proceeding from the austere or fastidious few.
Those whose recollections go back half a century seem agreed that the power of journalism, as compared with that of the most eminent individual statesmen, has in nearly every free country been growing. Let us compare the opportunities of influence which were open to such men as Peel or Gladstone, Calhoun or Seward or Grover Cleveland, with those which their successors to-day enjoy, and estimate the advantages the journal possesses when engaged in a conflict with the statesman.
To-day the statesman, even if he be a brilliant speaker whose speeches are invariably reported, has a far smaller audience than the newspaper, because it is read steadily from day to day, and he only occasionally. He may have a personal charm which the paper lacks. He may be an orator on whose lips the crowd hangs. He may, like Theodore Roosevelt, be a figure throbbing with life, who becomes the hero, almost the personal friend, of a multitude who admire his force and love his breezy ways. But the aggressive quality which is indispensable to prominence makes enemies, and exposes him to a fire of criticism and misrepresentation. He cannot be always contradicting misstatements and repelling charges; nor be sure that his denials will reach those who have read the charges. He can grapple with and throw a personal foe, but in a conflict with the impersonal newspaper it will always have the last word. It can persistently take for granted statements which require proof until the reader believes they have been proved. It can incessantly repeat the same argument or the same accusation, and can do this incidentally, as well as in a set way, so as to influence that host of readers who are too listless to enquire into the truth of assertions or insinuations sandwiched in between the news about markets or sport. Tactics like these will win against all but those strongest antagonists who have already by intellectual force and moral dignity secured the confidence of the people. Iteration is like the ceaseless stream of bullets from a machine-gun. It is the deadliest engine of war in the press armoury.
The power of the newspaper, one of the most remarkable novelties of the modern world, has two peculiar features. It has no element of Compulsion and no element of Responsibility. Whoever exposes himself to its influence does so of his own free will. He need not buy the paper, nor read it, nor believe it. If he takes it for his guide, that is his own doing. The newspaper, as it has no legal duty, is subject to no responsibility, beyond that which the law affixes to indefensible attacks on private character or incitements to illegal conduct. It is an old maxim that power and responsibility should go together, and that no man is good enough to be trusted with power for the employment of which he need give no account. Here, however, we have power which can be used without anything except conscience to restrict or guide its use. A journal is not liable, civilly or criminally, for propagating untruth or suppressing truth unless damage to a particular individual or harm to the State can be proved.
This is the case with politicians also, as with all who speak in public, but they, being individuals, have something to lose by speaking untruth or perverting truth. They can be denounced, and deprived of whatever respect or influence they may have enjoyed. To penalize a newspaper for like conduct is so difficult as to be often scarcely possible. The paper is an impersonal entity. Its writers are unknown: its editor, and even its proprietors, may be known to comparatively few. Proof of a deliberate purpose to mislead will not necessarily affect its circulation or reduce its influence upon masses of men who know little and care less about such offences. Except in the most glaring cases, it can with impunity misuse its power. The proprietor, or the editor to whom his proprietor gives a free hand, may be patriotic and well-intentioned, but the power either wields is not accompanied by responsibility.
These things being what they are, it may seem surprising that the influence of the press should not, in English-speaking countries, have been more abused than has in fact been the case. How far it is now abused, either there or elsewhere, is a subject which cannot be here dealt with, for the facts, differing in different countries, are everywhere hard to ascertain. It is enough to indicate how liable to abuse power so irresponsible must be, and how salutary the traditions which have, in the countries just referred to, maintained, among the leading journals, a creditable standard of courtesy and a fair, if not perfect, standard of honour. The vigilance of public opinion, the strenuous competition which exists between the able men who fill the higher posts, and their pride in their profession, have helped to guard these traditions.
In the chapters of Part II. which deal with the six democracies there selected for description, I have attempted to estimate the authority actually exerted in each by its press. That authority seems to be stronger in Great Britain — possibly also in the British self-governing Dominions — than in the United States; but it must be remembered that in a very large country there are so many journals, each relying on the circulation it holds in its own territory, that no such general predominance can be won as a very few may possess in a small country. In England, and even in Scotland, politicians, and especially candidates for Parliament, a class prone to the habit of nervously “tapping the weather-glass,” are apt to exaggerate the political importance of the press. There have been General Elections at which the balance of journalistic strength was heavily on the side which suffered a crushing defeat at the polls. A member may hold his seat for many years against the hostility of all the local papers. If he is personally liked and trusted, their attacks produce a reaction in his favour. But in a large country, and even in a city like New York, full of ignorant voters, persistent denigration may destroy a politician. A calumny once launched cannot be overtaken. Attack is easier than defence: and the resources of misrepresentation are infinite. 1
A journal which addresses itself specially to one particular section of a nation, be it a racial, or religious, or industrial section, needed as it may be for some purposes, can be dangerous if it presents to that section a purely partisan set of facts and opinions, exaggerating whatever grievances the section has, and intensifying its sense of separation from and antagonism to other parts of the nation. Those belonging to such a section who read other newspapers also will not be seriously affected, but where they see only their own class organ, and take its statements for truth, an irritable fanaticism on behalf of sectional ideas and class aims may be engendered. This is an instance of the general principle that the best remedy against whatever dangers the dominance of the press involves is to be found in the free and full competition of independent newspapers. It is the predominance in one particular area or among the members of one particular class, of a single paper, or of several controlled by the same person or group and working for the same ends, that threatens the formation of a fair and enlightened public opinion. The tyranny of monopoly is even worse in opinion than in commerce. Suppose a capitalistic combination to acquire a large number of newspapers, placing them under the direction of one capable mind and forceful will, and using their enormous resources to drive rivals out of the field. The papers would be able to supply the fullest and latest news in every department of journalism, and to purchase the service of the ablest pens. With their vast circulation, they could, by presenting facts of one colour and tendency and suppressing or discolouring all news of an opposite tendency, succeed in impressing, if not on the majority yet on a large percentage of the voters, whatever opinion they desired. The weaker kind of politician would succumb to them. Ministries would fear to offend them. Foreign countries would soon begin to recognize their supremacy. If the capital needed to finance such an enterprise and the powerful brain needed to direct it were to be united, what might not happen in a country not too large for such an enterprise? The contingency is improbable, but those who know what centralization and combination have in all branches of business been able to effect will hardly deem it impossible. How could the dictatorship of such a syndicated press be resisted? The remedy proposed for industrial monopolies is nationalization, but here nationalization would aggravate the evil, making the State itself the tyrant. Recourse might be needed to drastic legislation of a kind not yet tried.
The coincidences of opportunity with a supreme talent for using opportunity mark the turning points of history. Alexander of Macedon having received from nature extraordinary gifts, inherited a well-trained army and saw before him a divided Greece and an effete Persian empire waiting to be conquered. Had he been born earlier or later, the whole course of events might have been different. The career of Napoleon points the same moral. There have doubtless been many other men of genius who might have equally affected the fortunes of the world had like opportunities come to them. 1
What has been said as to the influence the press can exert on the working of popular government through its power of forming opinion may be summed up in a few propositions.
Universal suffrage has immensely increased the proportion of electors who derive their political views chiefly or wholly from newspapers.
The causes which enable newspapers well managed, and commanding large capital, to drive weaker papers out of the field, have in all countries reduced the number of influential journals, and left power in comparatively few hands.
The influence upon opinion exercised by a great newspaper as compared with a prominent statesman or even with the debates in legislative bodies, has grown.
Newspapers have become more and more commercial undertakings, devoted primarily to their business interests.
The temptations to use the influence of a newspaper for the promotion of pecuniary interests, whether of its proprietors or of others, have also increased. Newspapers have become one of the most available instruments by which the Money Power can make itself felt in politics.
The power of the press is a practically irresponsible power, for the only thing it need fear (apart from libel suits) is the reduction of circulation, and the great majority of its readers, interested only in business and sport, know little of and care little for the political errors or tergiversations it may commit.
Press power is wielded more effectively through the manipulation and suppression of news than by the avowed advocacy of any political views. It is more dangerous in the sphere of foreign than in that of domestic policy, and is one of the chief hindrances to international goodwill.
Democratic government rests upon and requires the exercise of a well-informed and sensible opinion by the great bulk of the citizens. Where the materials for the formation of such an opinion are so artfully supplied as to prevent the citizens from judging fairly the merits of a question, opinion is artificially made instead of being let grow in a natural way, and a wrong is done to democracy.
No one will suppose that an indication of the dangers which misuse of the power of the press may bring implies any disparagement of the invaluable services it renders in modern free countries. Without it, as already observed, there could be no democracy in areas larger than were the city communities of the ancient world. The newspaper enables statesmen to reach the whole people by their words, and keeps legislatures and executive officials under the eyes of the people. Itself irresponsible, it enforces responsibility upon all who bear a part in public work. It is because the press alone can do and is doing so much salutary and necessary work that attention needs to be called to any causes which might, by shaking public confidence in it, impair its usefulness to the community.
Political parties are far older than democracy. They have existed in nearly all countries and under all forms of government, though less in monarchies than in oligarchies, in the latter of which they have been particularly frequent and fierce. The Guelfs and Ghibellines, after having for a time divided Germany, divided the feudal nobility and the cities of northern and middle Italy for three centuries.
In popular governments, however, parties have a wider extension if not a more strenuous life, for where every citizen has a vote, with the duty to use it at elections, each of the parties which strive for mastery must try to bring the largest possible number of voters into its ranks, organize them locally, appeal to them by the spoken and printed word, bring them up to the poll. Ballots having replaced bullets in political strife, every voter is supposed to belong to one of the partisan hosts and to render more or less obedience to its leaders. He has, moreover, at least in theory, something to gain from its victory, because each party promises legislation of the kind he is supposed to desire, whereas most men who called themselves Guelfs and Ghibellines fought merely out of an attachment, usually hereditary, to a party name, and probably also to the cause of some particular leader, as in Mexico today if the member of a band is asked to what he belongs, he answers, “To my chief “ (mi jefe ).
Many have been the origins whence in time past parties have sprung. Religious or ecclesiastical differences have given birth to them, as in England and Scotland in the seventeenth century, or racial divisions, or loyalty to a dynasty, as in the case of the Stuarts in England after James II's expulsion, and the Bourbons in Erance after 1848. Even attachment to a particular leader who has gathered followers round him may keep them together long after he has passed away. In the republic of Uruguay there were, sixty years ago, two prominent generals, each with a band of adherents. These Reds and Whites still divide the country. A party may in its first beginnings be built on any foundation — wood or stubble as well as rock — for it is not the origin that matters so much as the forces which, once created, a party can enlist. However, in more recent days, and especially in countries enjoying representative government, the normal source is found in the emergence of some type of political doctrine or some specific practical issue which divides the citizens, some taking one side, some another.
Though the professed reason for the existence of a party is the promotion of a particular set of doctrines and ideas, it has a concrete side as well as a set of abstract doctrines. It is abstract in so far as it represents the adhesion of many minds to the same opinions. It is concrete as consisting of a number of men who act together in respect of their holding, or professing to hold, such opinions. But being a living organism, it develops in ways not limited by its theory or its professions, and is affected by the constantly changing circumstances amid which it moves and to which it must adapt itself.
Whatever its origin, every party lives and thrives by the concurrent action of four tendencies or forces, which may be described as those of Sympathy, Imitation, Competition and Pugnacity. Even if intellectual conviction had much to do with its creation, emotion has more to do with its vitality and combative power. Men enjoy combat for its own sake, loving to outstrip others and carry their flag to victory. The same sort of passion as moves the crowd watching a boat race between Oxford and Cambridge or a football match between Yale and Harvard, is the steam which works the great English and American parties. Nothing holds men so close together as the presence of antagonists strong enough to be worth defeating, and not so strong as to be invincible. This is why a party can retain its continuity while forgetting or changing its doctrines and seeing its old leaders disappear. New members and new leaders, as they come in, imbibe the spirit and are permeated by the traditions which the party has formed. It is pleasant to tread in the steps of those who have gone before and associate one's self with their fame. Life becomes more interesting when each talks to each of how the opposite party must be outgeneralled, and more exciting when the day of an electoral contest arrives. Though a certain set of views may have been the old basis of a party, and be still inscribed on its banner, the views count for less than do the fighting traditions, the attachment to its name, the inextinguishable pleasure in working together, even if the object sought be little more than the maintenance of the organization itself. In England, sixty years ago, few indeed of the crowds that at an election flaunted their blue or yellow colours could have explained why they were Blues or Yellows. They had always been Blues or Yellows; probably their fathers were. It was irrational, but it expressed a sentiment of loyalty to a cause. If the bulk were not fighting for principles, they were fighting unselfishly for something outside themselves, expecting from victory nothing but the pleasure of victory. 1
It was in English-speaking countries that party first became a force in free political life. Whigs and Tories in England date from the days of Charles II., parties in America from the presidential election of 1796. In the former case party appeared first in Parliament. In the latter it appeared simultaneously in Congress and in the people at large. The influence and working of a party system need to be considered separately in each of these two fields. Let us begin with the people.
In countries which enjoy representative government parties have two main functions, the promotion by argument of their principles and the carrying of elections. These provide constant occupation, and success in either contributes to success in the other. The business of winning elections involves the choice of candidates. In every election area, the local members of the party must agree upon a candidate for whom their united vote will be cast. While constituencies were small, because electoral districts were small and the suffrage was restricted by a property qualification, men either put themselves forward as candidates, or induced a small group of influential electors to nominate them. A person of local prominence as landowner in a county or merchant in a borough was known to many of the electors, and accepted on the score of his position or personal abilities or popularity. This still happens in parts of France and of Switzerland, and formerly happened in America. But when constituencies became large and the feeling of democratic equality pervaded all classes, the principle of popular sovereignty required the choice of a party candidate to be made by those of the electors who belonged to the party. So local party Committees grew up, and local party meetings were convoked to select the candidate. This custom was, many years later, adopted in England where, however, the Central Office (i.e. the national party managers) may tactfully suggest to the local association the name of a particular aspirant. Without some party authority recognized as entitled to recommend a candidate, the voting strength of the party might be dispersed among competing party candidates, many electors not knowing for whom they ought to vote. In large constituencies, guidance is essential, 1 so when in the United States it is desired to put forward as candidates for city offices better men than those whom the party organization is nominating, a Citizens' Committee or Good Government Organization, formed for the occasion, issues a list of candidates whom a bevy of respected inhabitants join in recommending.
Another branch of political work formerly left to private initiative has now become recognized as incumbent on a party. It is the conduct of elections and the defraying, where the candidate is a poor man, of part at least of the expenses of a contest, expenses which have grown with the increased size of constituencies due to universal suffrage. Every party has now funds available for helping candidates, a practice liable to be abused, yet unavoidable, for without help capable men might be excluded, and the candidate with the longest purse would have an unfair advantage.
Another and not less important function of a party is that of holding together the members of a representative assembly who profess the political opinions for which the party stands, so as to concentrate their efforts on the advocacy of its principles and the attainment of its ends. This is especially needed in countries living under what is called Parliamentary Government, where the Executive is virtually chosen and dismissible by the majority of the legislature. Under such a system the majority, called the Party in Power, carries on the government of the country through some of its leaders, the executive ministers, whom it keeps in office so long as they retain its confidence. Such a scheme cannot work without some sort of discipline to keep the members of the majority solid, reminding them of their responsibility to their supporters in the constituencies. From Great Britain, which has been governed in this way for about two centuries, this scheme spread to such countries as Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, Holland and the three Scandinavian kingdoms, in all of which a “Party in Power “carries on the government, while the rest of the legislature constitute the Opposition or Oppositions.
In other countries, such as the United States, the majority in the legislature, though it controls legislation, does not choose the Executive, that function being reserved to the people voting at the polls; so that the expression “Party in Power “describes the party which holds the Executive. But this difference reduces but little the need for party organization and discipline in the legislative chambers. In both cases the party must hold together in order to pursue its purposes. In both the motive and regulative force that keeps them united together, consists in the common wish to give effect to their doctrines by legislation, and in both, moreover, the party leaders have a prospect of winning authority, distinction, and emoluments, the rank and file of the party sharing, when their turn comes, in getting or securing for their friends whatever patronage may be going. Thus the impulse to hold together is strong: thus a party may maintain unity and vigour even if it has ceased to care for the principles for whose sake it professes to exist.
This system, under which the fortunes of a nation are entrusted to one set of persons who represent the majority, possibly only a bare majority, of the voters, has been much censured, especially by theorists unfamiliar with the actual working of representative institutions. Why, it is urged, should administrative officers, most of whose work has nothing to do with their party opinions, be they Whig or Tory in England, Republican or Democratic in America, be taken entirely from those who profess one set of political views and belong to one organization? The man with the fullest knowledge of foreign relations, or the man who best understands educational problems, may belong to the minority. Why should his abilities be lost to the public service? Why make so many public questions controversial that need not be so? What is the sense of setting up one group of men, A, B, C and D, to introduce legislation and handle administrative problems, and of setting up a second set, W, X, Y, Z, to harass and trip up the former, opposing their proposals and hampering their executive action? Yet this is understood to be, under the British system, the especial business of a parliamentary opposition, for the men who compose it find a motive for their attacks in the hope of turning their antagonists out of office to install themselves therein. Thus a parliament becomes a battlefield, and its deliberations a perpetual struggle of the Ins and the Outs, in which the interests of the country are forgotten.
Other charges brought against the party system may be enumerated, because they indicate dangers which threaten the working of democratic government.
It is alleged to encourage hollowness and insincerity. The two great American parties have been compared to empty bottles, into which any liquor might be poured, so long as the labels were retained. Party divides not only the legislature but the nation into hostile camps, and presents it to foreign states as so divided. It substitutes passion and bitterness for a common patriotism, prejudices men's minds, makes each side suspect the proposals of the other, prevents a fair consideration of each issue upon its merits, enslaves representatives and discourages independent thought in the party as a whole, because the “solidity” or “regularity” which casts a straight ballot is enforced as the first of duties. It prompts each party to make promises and put forward plans whose aim is not to benefit the country but to attract popular support. When one party plays this game, the other party has to follow suit with another and, if possible, more attractive program me.
Another perversion is the extension of national party issues to local elections, with which they have, as a rule, nothing to do. To run a candidate for a county or city office in an American state, or for a county or borough council in England, as a Republican or Democrat, as a Tory or Liberal, diverts attention from the personal merits of the candidates to their party affiliations, obscures the local issues of policy by putting loyalty to the national party into the foreground, and tends to divide the members of a deliberative local authority into sections drawn together by their political affinities, so that these affinities determine their action in questions purely local.
A further dereliction from principle is found in countries where posts in the public service are reserved for persons who belong to the dominant party. This practice, known as the Spoils System, though reduced of late years, is not yet extinct in the United States, nor France, Canada, and Australia. In Britain, where it was formerly general, it can be still discovered in odd corners, such as some legal, and more rarely, some educational, posts. Here, however, it is only a secondary force, sometimes giving one candidate a slight advantage over another, but seldom installing an incompetent man. Retained as a means of rewarding supporters, it is excused on the ground that as the other side have practised it, “our fellows must have their chance.” Neither party desires to run ahead of the other in the practice of austere virtue.
Lastly, party spirit is accused of debasing the moral standards, because it judges every question from the standpoint of party interest. It acclaims a successful leader as a hero and secures forgiveness for his faults. If the leaders of a party in power embark in an unwise foreign policy, or if some ardent spirits among the Opposition resort to questionable methods of resistance to what they think unjust, the voice of temperate criticism within the party is overborne, because party spirit either blinds men to the truth or fears to admit errors which the other party will use against it. 1 Even if the heads of a party organization are discovered to have been using their power for selfish — perhaps for sordid — purposes, the party tries to shield them from exposure; and it may accept the tainted aid of rich men seeking their own private gains. In one way or another, the sentiment of party solidarity supersedes the duty which the citizen owes to the State, and becomes a weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous chief who can lead the party to victory. Party spirit will always be an instrument on which personal ambition can play. In the republics of antiquity a party might help its leader to make himself a Tyrant because it hated the other faction more than it loved freedom. Similar phenomena were seen in mediaeval Italy, and their pale reflex has been sometimes visible in modern states.
That these are among the dangers to which the system of party government exposes a State is practically admitted by each party when it is denouncing the action of a rival party. They describe those rivals as actuated by the “spirit of faction.” They exhort the wiser and more moderate members to shake off that spirit, rid themselves of prejudice, and consider all proposals, even those of opponents, with an open mind, while in the same breath they exhort their own followers to close their ranks and go to the polls cherishing the traditions of their party, grateful for its services, mindful that it emancipated the slave or bestowed old-age pensions upon working men. They must sometimes wish that it was possible for them to address their own followers in one tongue, and their opponents in another, each uncomprehended by the other, as shepherds in the Scottish Highlands are said to shout their orders to one dog in English and to another in Gaelic.
History is full of the mischiefs wrought by party spirit. Yet there is another side to the matter. If parties cause some evils, they avert or mitigate others.
To begin with, parties are inevitable. No free large country has been without them. No one has shown how representative government could be worked without them. They bring order out of the chaos of a multitude of voters. If in such vast populations as those of the United States, Trance, or England, there were no party organizations, by whom would public opinion be roused and educated and directed to certain specific purposes? Each party, no doubt, tries to present its own side of the case for or against any doctrine or proposal, but the public cannot help learning something about the other side also, for even party spirit cannot separate the nation into water-tight compartments; and the most artful or prejudiced party spell-binder or newspaper has to recognize the existence of the arguments he is trying to refute. Thus Party strife is a sort of education for those willing to receive instruction, and something soaks through even into the less interested or thoughtful electors. The parties keep a nation's mind alive, as the rise and fall of the sweeping tide freshens the water of long ocean inlets. Discussion within each party, culminating before elections in the adoption of a platform, brings certain issues to the front, defines them, expresses them in formulas which, even if tricky or delusive, fix men's minds on certain points, concentrating attention and inviting criticism. So few people think seriously and steadily upon any subject outside the range of their own business interests that public opinion might be vague and ineffective if the party searchlight were not constantly turned on. And it may be added that the power of the press to influence the average voter by one-sided statements of fact, incessantly repeated, would be still greater than it is were there not party organizations whose business it is to secure a hearing for their own views.
Of nominations and elections I have already spoken. But a vast deal of preparatory work is needed beyond that which the State does when it makes up a register of voters and provides machinery for taking the votes. Who is to do this? Who is to get literature to the voters, stir them out of their apathy, arrange public meetings, remind the citizens of their duty to vote? Only a permanent party. Temporary organizations formed to promote a particular cause, such as were (in England) the Anti-Corn Law League of 1838 and the Eastern Question Association of 1876, may effect much for the time being, but die out when the crisis has passed; and it becomes increasingly difficult and costly to find means for reaching the enormous voting masses of our time.
Political philosophers have been wont to deplore the existence of party in legislative assemblies and to accuse it of leading to dishonesty. They observe that, in the words of the comic opera, a member who has “always voted at his party's call” cannot but be demoralized. But if there were no party voting, and everybody gave his vote in accordance with his own perhaps crude and ill-informed opinions, Parliamentary government of the English type could not go on. Ministers would not know from hour to hour whether they could count on carrying some provision of a Bill which might in appearance be trifling, but would destroy its coherency, many of those who would have supported it might be absent, while others might give an unconsidered vote. Perpetual uncertainty and the weakness of the Executive which uncertainty involves would be a greater public evil than the subordination to his party of a member's personal view in minor matters. Where he has a strong conviction, he must of course obey it, even at the risk of turning out a ministry, but when, dismissing any thought of his own personal interest, he honestly applies the general principle that party government requires some subordination of individual views, his conscience will not suffer. 1
Party discipline in a legislature imposes a needed check on self-seeking and on the greater mischief of corruption. The absence of discipline, far from helping conscience to have free scope, may result in leaving the field open for selfish ambitions. Some years ago a group of strong men who had practically controlled the party majority in the United States Senate was broken up, and party discipline vanished. Ingenuous persons expected an improvement. But the first result was that a few pushing men came to the front, each playing for popularity, and things fell into confusion, the legislative machine working in so irregular and unpredictable a fashion that a call soon came for the restoration of discipline. In every governing body there must be some responsibility, some persons on whom blame can be fixed if bad advice be given and bad results follow. How a ruling body can suffer by the want of permanent parties was illustrated by the Athenian Assembly, a crowd of citizens largely guided by brilliant speakers holding no office, owning no allegiance to any party, each using his talents for his own advancement. When the multitude had been misled by such an orator there was nobody to be blamed except the orator, and his discredit was only a passing incident, for which he might have had secret compensation in a corrupt payment. An organized party with recognized leaders has a character to lose or to gain; and this applies to an Opposition as well as to a Ministerialist party, for every minority hopes to be some day a majority. In Great Britain during the war of 1914–19 party warfare was suspended, and two successive Coalition Ministries formed, so that for a time there was no regular Opposition to keep the Ministry up to the mark, inasmuch as those party chiefs who stood outside were unwilling to be charged with embarrassing their former opponents. The result was that a number of members, who, like the Athenian orators, were not sufficiently important to feel the bridle of responsibility, carried on, each for himself, a sort of guerilla warfare, which had not force enough to impose an effective check on ministerial errors. An administration formed by a coalition of parties is usually weak, not merely because the combination is unstable, but because men whose professed principles differ are likely to be entangled in inconsistencies or driven to unsatisfactory compromises. So a well-compacted party in Opposition which stands on its own feet, having had power before and hoping to have power again, is steadied by the fact that it has a character to lose. Inspiring confidence because it is known to be responsible, it can follow a definite policy and expect a loyal obedience.
In countries where the few large parties of former times have dissolved into small groups, no one of which is large enough to command a majority of the legislature, and in few of which is there any party discipline, other inconveniences are added. The leaders of a large and strong party have an opinion of their followers to regard, as well as the public opinion of the nation outside. That opinion within the party keeps them straight, for if they are seen to be playing for their own hand the party ceases to be trusted. Where there are small groups, each becomes a focus of intrigue, in which personal ambitions have scope. The groups make bargains with one another and by their combinations, perhaps secretly and suddenly formed, successive ministries may be overturned, with injury to the progress of legislation and to the continuity of national policy. Since there must be parties, the fewer and stronger they are, the better.
Must there then always be parties? No one has yet shown how such governments could get on without them. 1 Statesmen of exceptional force, such as Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone, while fully aware of their faults most clearly recognized their value. One can imagine a small community in which the citizens know one another so well that they select men for legislative and executive posts on the score of personal merit, and where the legislators are of a virtue so pure that they debate every question with a sole regard to truth and to the advantage of the State. If any such community has existed, its records have not been preserved for our instruction. One can also imagine that in some far distant future when all experiments have been tried, and nations, weary of politics, wish to settle down to a quiet life, a plan may be devised by which each small community, trusting its local concerns to its most honest and capable men, shall empower them to choose others who will go to some centre where they can deliberate on matters of common concern with other such delegates, party being eliminated, because the questions out of which the old parties arose have become obsolete. But the wings of fancy do not support our flight in a thin air so far above the surface of this planet.
We have so far been considering political parties of the old type, co-extensive with the nation and trying to draw adherents from all sections and classes within it. There are, however, three other kinds of party which ought to be noticed, and which may be either within or outside of a large non-sectional political party covering the whole country.
One of these is an ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical organization. Where the interests of a religious body are supposed to need advocacy or protection, or where, on the other hand, a Church is deemed to be unduly powerful in political affairs, an organization may be formed either to defend it in the former case or to resist it in the latter. 1 There are in France and Belgium Catholic or so-called “Clerical” parties. Examples have been seen in the United States, where an apprehension that the Roman Catholic Church was acquiring undue power gave birth to the “Know Nothings” in 1853, and long afterwards created what was almost an Anti-Catholic party, under the title of American Protective Association (A. P. A.). Both rose suddenly into prominence, but died out after a few years. The chief instance of an organization acting as an anti-ecclesiastical force, all the stronger for being secret, is to be found in the Freemasons of Continental Europe. This society with its branches exists in England and the United States for purposes purely social and charitable, but the Masonic Lodges have in France and Italy an ardently anti-clerical, even indeed anti-Christian, colour. They are believed to exert an influence before which candidates and deputies quail.
The second class has grown out of the Trade or Labour Unions which sprang up during last century among the industrial populations of Europe, North America, and Australasia. Formed originally for the purpose of mutual charitable help, they became effective in planning and carrying on strikes, and thereafter, realizing the voting power which an extended suffrage had given them, passed into the field of political action. Out of them and the congresses which they hold there have arisen in many countries what are called Labour Parties, putting forward programmes of legislation intended to benefit the wage-earning class, and to throw more of the burden of taxation upon the wealthier part of the community. Such platforms, while commanding sympathy from those among the richer who think that the wage-earners have not yet received a sufficient share in what their toil produces, make their most direct appeal to the labouring class itself and draw most of their strength from the prospect they open of improving its material condition. Though extending over the whole country, they are in so far contrasted with the older parties that they create a cleavage in the nation which is not, as formerly, vertical, but horizontal, having a social as well as a political character. In England the Whig and Tory parties were each of them composed of persons of all degrees of rank and wealth, poor as well as rich. In both the ruling section belonged to the richer class, and was apt to legislate in its own interest, but between the two sections there was no social antagonism. So also in the United States, both the Republican and the Democratic party have been composed, in almost equal proportions, of the poorer and the richer citizens. Now, however, there is a tendency for the community to be divided, as the Greek republics were already in Plato's time, into a party of the poor and a party of the rich, a state of things unfavourable to the formation of a truly national opinion and to some extent to national unity in general.
A third species is the Local or Racial party, familiar examples of which are furnished by the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners of Ireland and the Regionalists of Catalonia, and were furnished in the Austrian Reichsrath before 1914 by the Polish and Czech parties. These, like the ecclesiastical organizations, are apt to suffer by undue preoccupation with their own particular aims and tenets. But what they lose in this way they may gain in the power of purchasing, by the solid vote they can deliver, the help of one or other of the great national parties.
Other new parties which have appeared in recent years are those called Socialist or Communist. They are not, strictly speaking, class parties, for although they have many aims in common with the Labour parties, they base themselves not on proposals for the benefit of the working class as such, but upon theoretic systems of economic doctrine which are held by many persons in all classes. Their emergence, coupled with that of Labour parties, has had the effect of drawing away from each of the old established parties many of its adherents. This has brought these old parties nearer together, for those who dislike the new doctrines or scent danger in the new proposals, begin to find the familiar differences between the old parties less important than is the coincidence of their opposition to the new parties. 1 In some cases accordingly the old parties have been fused into one; in others they have agreed to make common cause at elections with one another. Questions relating to the distribution of political power having been everywhere largely disposed of, the dividing lines between parties tend to be economic. The result has been to accentuate class sentiment, making a sharper division than previously existed between the richer and more conservative element in every country and that which is poorer and more disposed to experimental legislation.
This, however, has been compatible with a tendency for the large parties to split up into smaller sections. There are shades in Conservatism, and even more shades in Radicalism and in Socialism, for the activity of thought and the disappearance of respect for authority multiply new doctrines, helping them to spread fast. Such a tendency makes for definiteness and sincerity in the views of each section or group, but it increases the difficulty of working the machinery of government. This difficulty is in some countries aggravated by the rise of parties founded in the interests of a particular set of producers, such as is the Farmers' party in Canada, and the party of Peasants ( i.e. small land-owning agriculturists and pastoralists) in Switzerland.
Two other features characteristic of party in democratic countries deserve mention. The increase in the number of voting citizens and the disappearance of those distinctions of social rank which made the rich landowner the obvious leader in a rural district, as was the rich merchant in a city, have made organization more needful. Those parties which have behind them either an ecclesiastical or a labour organization are in this respect stronger than parties with no religious or class basis. The latter are therefore obliged to find funds to conduct propaganda and to pay their agents. The smaller parties, or the groups which appear in representative assemblies, suffer from want of funds, having few adherents over the country at large, nor are they aided by contributions from capitalists, though the latter readily support a strong party capable of serving their commercial or financial interests. Poverty shortens the life of many groups or drives them to fusion, for “Publicity,” i.e. the advertising, in a direct or indirect form, now deemed essential to success, is so costly that money tends to become the sinews of politics as well as of war.
In every party — and this is especially true of the United States and Britain — one may distinguish three sets of men. There are the national leaders, eminent persons who associate their own fortunes with those of the party and desire by it to obtain office and power. There is the mass of moderate men who have a general sympathy with the party aims, and have been accustomed to vote with it. The third class are zealots and care more for the principles or aims of the party than for its immediate victory. These are the men who do unpaid work in the constituencies and keep the local party machinery going. They summon the meetings of associations, and generally carry their resolutions in the local meetings of the party which are attended by its more ardent members. Their enthusiasm, often coupled with inexperience, makes them eager to go full steam ahead, and their activity often enables them to commit the party, at its larger gatherings, to a policy more extreme than is pleasing to the bulk of the members. The more prudent chiefs sometimes try to slow down the pace, but are not always able to do so in time, so it may befall that the party is officially pledged to proposals in advance not only of public opinion generally but even of the average opinion of its own members. The result is that the moderate members drop away, and may possibly drift into the opposite camp. This phenomenon is of course more frequent in the parties of movement than in those of resistance, but even in the latter the formally declared attitude of a party may not truly represent its general sentiment, for the moderate men, because less keenly interested, usually take least part in the deliberations at which the attitude of the party is proclaimed and its course determined. Thus party spirit often appears to be hotter, and party antagonisms more pronounced, than is really the case, for in a large nation the mass of the electors take their politics more coolly than is realized by those who derive their impressions from newspaper reports of party meetings.
The power of Party Organization and the power of Party spirit are of course very different things, and not necessarily found together. If either should assume undue proportions, what remedies can be found for checking the undue power of an organization over its own members, and what can be done to soften the antagonisms which party spirit creates in a nation, disturbing its internal concord and weakening it in its relations with foreign powers?
Law can do little or nothing. Though many countries have tried to repress by penal legislation factions from which the ruling power apprehended danger, only two seem to have attempted to regulate them. Czarist Russia in the earlier days of the Duma allowed certain parties to apply for and obtain legalization. Many States in the American Union have created administrative Boards on which provision is made for the representation of both the great political parties, and nearly all have passed laws for regulating the nomination of party candidates by the members of the parties or by the voters at large. The rather disappointing results of these expedients are described in later chapters. 1
Party spirit as a Force working for good or evil in public life is a matter which must be left to the citizens themselves. Upon them it must depend whether it is reasonable and temperate or violent and bitter. It is no greater a danger in democracies than elsewhere. So, too, experience seems to show that it is only the members of a party who can control the action of organizations and can keep them from being either perverted by astute party managers for their own selfish purposes, or used by honest extremists to launch proposals which the party as a whole does not approve. The more a party lives by the principles for which it stands, the more it subordinates its own aims to the strength and unity of the whole people, and the more it is guided by men who can recognize whatever may be sound in the views of their opponents and prevent opposition from passing into enmity, the better will it serve the common interests of its country.
The beginnings of popular government were in small areas, rural communities and tiny cities, each with only a few hundreds or possibly thousands of free inhabitants. The earliest form it took was that of an assembly in which all the freemen met to discuss their common affairs, and in which, although the heads of the chief families exerted much influence, the mind and voice of the people could make itself felt. Such assemblies marked the emergence of men from barbarism into something approaching a settled and ordered society. In many places these communities lay within a monarchy, in others (as in Iceland) they were independent, but everywhere they accustomed the people to cherish a free spirit and learn to co-operate for common aims. First among these was joint defence against a neighbouring and hostile community. A second, important for the prevention of internal strife, was the settlement, by some kind of judicial method, of disputes between the members, frequently arising from the demand of compensation for the killing of some one whose kinsfolk were bound by custom to avenge his death, such blood-money being awarded by the assembly, or the elders, to the kin, who thereupon desisted from revenge. 1 A third was the disposal and management of land belonging to the local community (whether forest or pasture) not allotted in severalty to the members, or of arable land in which there were usually rights assigned to each individual, even if only for a limited period and subject to re-allotment when the period has expired. This was frequent among peoples of South Slavonic stock. It existed till quite recently in the Russian Mir, and still exists in many parts of India.
This self-governing assembly, though there are some races (such as the Celtic) in which we find little or no trace of it, was widely diffused, though its power or influence was greater in some countries than in others. A familiar example may be found in the Agora of Homeric Greece, in the Comitia of Rome, in the meeting of the People (Folk Mot) of the Angles and Saxons in England, in the Thing of the Norsemen in Norway and Iceland. That it is an institution not confined to any one stock of mankind appears from its presence among the Bantu races of South Africa, where it maintains a vigorous life in the Pitso of the Basutos and Bechuanas. 1
In the process of time nations were formed by the expansion of these small communities, or by their fusion, or by their absorption into larger units. The other functions of the assembly were either assumed by the whole nation (as was defence) or transferred to special authorities. In the ancient Greek and Italic republics regular courts were set up. In most parts of Europe judicial functions passed to the feudal landowners, and ultimately, first in England and later in Scotland, to the king. Thus popular self-government came to lose what may be called its political (including its military) and its judicial side. But it usually retained the right of managing whatever land belonged to the community; and in some countries functions connected with the parish church, while afterwards other matters of local welfare came under its care. The only country in which the small autonomous unit of the thirteenth century held its ground as a political unit was Switzerland, and particularly those Alpine valleys in which Swiss freedom had its origin. In a few cantons the Landesgemeinde or primary assembly of the whole canton continues to meet to-day. 2 In England the Parish, originally similar to the Commune of continental Europe as an ecclesiastical unit and land-holding body, had retained a feeble life, but for ecclesiastical purposes only, until it received a re-grant of limited civil functions by a statute of 1894, while beyond the Atlantic the self-government of small areas had a new birth among the English who settled in the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. The Town (rural as well as urban) became a strong organism, drawing life not only from the English traditions which the colonists brought with them, but also from the daily needs of a people dispersed in small groups over a wild country, who had to help one another in many ways, and defend themselves against native tribes. Thus the old Teutonic form of self-government has continued to flourish and to spread out over all the northern States of the American Union. 1
The small communities here described may be called the tiny fountain-heads of democracy, rising among the rocks, sometimes lost altogether in their course, sometimes running underground to reappear at last in fuller volume. They suffice to show that popular government is not a new thing in the world, but was in many countries the earliest expression of man's political instincts. It was a real misfortune for England — and the remark applies in a certain sense to Germany also — that while local self-government did maintain itself in the county and borough it should in both have largely lost the popular character which once belonged to it, as it was a misfortune for Ireland and for France that this natural creation of political intelligence should not have developed there. Many things that went wrong in those four countries from the end of the sixteenth century onwards might have fared better under institutions like those of Switzerland or the Northern United States.
Of the part to be assigned to Local Government in a modern democracy, of its relations to the Central Government, and of the forms in which it works best, I propose to speak in a later chapter, following upon those which describe the working of democracy in six modern countries. Here, however, a few words may be said as to the general service which self-government in small areas renders in forming the qualities needed by the citizen of a free country. It creates among the citizens a sense of their common interest in common affairs, and of their individual as well as common duty to take care that those affairs are efficiently and honestly administered. If it is the business of a local authority to mend the roads, to clean out the village well or provide a new pump, to see that there is a place where straying beasts may be kept till the owner reclaims them, to fix the number of cattle each villager may turn out on the common pasture, to give each his share of timber cut in the common woodland, every villager has an interest in seeing that these things are properly attended to. Laziness and the selfishness which is indifferent to whatever does not immediately affect a man's interests is the fault which most afflicts democratic communities. Whoever learns to be public-spirited, active and upright in the affairs of the village has learnt the first lesson of the duty incumbent on a citizen of a great country, just as, conversely, “he that is unfaithful in the least is unfaithful also in much.” The same principle applies to a city. In it the elector can seldom judge from his own observation how things are being managed. But he can watch through the newspapers or by what he hears from competent sources whether the mayor and councillors and their officials are doing their work, and whether they are above suspicion of making illicit gains, and whether the taxpayer is getting full value for what he is required to contribute. So when the election comes he has the means of discovering the candidates with the best record and can cast his vote accordingly.
Secondly: Local institutions train men not only to work for others but also to work effectively with others. They develop common sense, reasonableness, judgment, sociability. Those who have to bring their minds together learn the need for concession and compromise. A man has the opportunity of showing what is in him, and commending himself to his fellow-citizens. Two useful habits are formed, that of recognizing the worth of knowledge and tact in public affairs and that of judging men by performance rather than by professions or promises.
Criticisms are often passed on the narrowness of mind and the spirit of parsimony which are visible in rural local authorities and those who elect them. These defects are, however, a natural product of the conditions of local life. The narrowness would be there in any case, and would affect the elector if he were voting for a national representative, but there would be less of that shrewdness which the practice of local government forms. Such faults must be borne with for the sake of the more important benefits which self-government produces. The main thing is that everybody, peasant and workman as well as shopkeeper and farmer, should join in a common public activity, and feel that he has in his own neighbourhood a sphere in which he can exercise his own judgment and do something for the community. Seeing the working, on a small scale, of the principle of responsibility to the public for powers conferred by them, he is better fitted to understand its application in affairs of larger scope.
These good results have been sometimes wanting in municipal governments, especially in Transatlantic cities where the rapid growth of enormous populations has created abnormal conditions, making it impossible for the citizens to have such a knowledge of one another as is needed to secure a wise choice of councils or administrative officials. Of these I shall speak elsewhere. Meanwhile it is enough to observe that the countries in which democratic government has most attracted the interest of the people and drawn talent from their ranks have been Switzerland and the United States, especially those northern and western States in which rural local government has been most developed. These examples justify the maxim that the best school of democracy, and the best guarantee for its success, is the practice of local self-government.
What Habit is to an individual during the brief term of his existence here, Traditions are to a nation whose life extends over hundreds or thousands of years. In them dwells the moral continuity of its existence. They link each generation to those that have gone before and sum up its collective memories. To understand their action upon the nation, let us begin by considering how habit affects the individual.
Habit, that is to say, the tendency of each man to go on thinking and acting upon the same general lines, is due not only to hereditary predispositions rooted in a race or in a family, but also to certain fundamental ideas which each person either forms for himself or has received from instruction, or from the example of others who have influenced him in that formative period of life when the mind and character are still comparatively fluid. Once such ideas have been solidified, they constitute, for nearly all persons, the permanent basis of conduct and the standard by which they judge both themselves and others. Most men are indolent, prone to follow the line of least resistance in thinking as well as in acting, so they find it easier to apply the maxims already in their minds than to think out afresh on each occasion every serious question. That would make life too burdensome. Here habit helps; for where it is so strong that there is no need felt for turning the mind on to examine the question, judgment and action in minor matters become almost automatic. A man's disposition to imitate others, or to repeat himself, has its source in physiological facts, certain in their action though obscure in their causes, which I cannot attempt to deal with here.
Psychologists since Aristotle have dwelt on the supreme importance of habit as the basis of moral action. Once settled, it is the most constant factor, especially in those persons, everywhere the majority, to whom independent thinking is an effort for which they have neither taste nor talent. Under its power, action becomes instinctive. Parents, teachers, the public opinion of the school, stamp certain notions and rules of conduct on the soft metal of a young mind, and when the metal has hardened they are not readily effaced. For one who can think out a doubtful ethical question, there are ten who can remember what they were taught to believe. If men are from childhood accustomed to regard certain conduct as honourable, because approved by the general sentiment of their fellows, they do not ask why that should be so, but promptly judge themselves and others by the standards they have accepted. If, on the contrary, they either have not imbibed, or have not made for themselves, such standards, they yield to the desire or passion of the moment, or are deterred from obeying it only by a fear of the consequences. So when one generation after another of a people has grown up valuing certain virtues and believing that the welfare of the nation depends on their maintenance, when it respects those who are faithful to virtue, and reveres the memory of those heroes of the past in whom virtue shone forth with peculiar lustre, the virtues and the memories become a part of the people's heritage, and are cherished as an ancient family prizes the shield and sword which a forefather carried in battle. In one of the finer and more impressionable spirits, the glory of national heroes becomes a living force, part of himself, inspiring him as he reads its history. He is proud of belonging to such a stock. He feels a sense of duty to it. He asks himself what made the nation great, and finds the source of greatness in what are deemed its characteristic virtues.
Something similar is observable on a small scale in a profession, or in any body, such as a college, with a long corporate life behind it. Its members feel a measure of pride belonging to such a body. The mantle of old distinction falls upon them, and helps to maintain a high standard of conduct. It is of course only persons of superior intelligence some historic knowledge in whom any such sentiments strong, but it is usually such men who lead the nation in action, or instruct it by their words, or set in public life an example which the average man respects. Thus there is formed in the people a standard by which statesmen are tested, an ideal created to which they must live up, if they are to receive the people's confidence. Truthfulness, honour, unselfishness, courage are enshrined as parts of that ideal. In a democracy where the sentiment of equality has gone so far as to make men unwilling to recognize the authority of the wise or defer to the counsels of experience, references to what their ancestors felt or did may still command respect. And while the nation's own self-esteem willingly appropriates such virtues as its own, those who aspire to leadership feel that they must try to possess or seem to possess them. If they are high-minded, their good intentions are strengthened; if of common clay, they must at least pay homage to the ideal by not falling too far below it. Nobody wants to be compared to “the fause Menteith” 1 or to those whom history has branded as unworthy, such as the timorous pontiff who made “the great refusal.” 2 Thus the ideals of public conduct, and the recollections of those in whom the ideals were exemplified, become the traditions of a nation, deemed by it to be a part of its national character, most familiar and powerful when embodied in famous persons who are the shining lights of its history.
The best instances of the influence of such ideals and traditions are to be found in the histories of more or less popularly governed countries, and especially of Rome, of England, of Switzerland, and of the United States.
In Rome the virtue most honoured was that of devotion to the State. Decius giving himself to death in order to secure victory over the Samnites, the legendary Curtius leaping into the gulf, Regulus returning to a cruel death at Carthage rather than advise the Senate to sanction an unfavourable peace, even Manlius Torquatus condemning his own son to death in order that military discipline might be maintained, were real or imagined examples held up for imitation to the Roman youth, and for a long time serving to inspire it. Patriotism possessed the mind of the Swiss before it had laid hold on any other people in mediaeval Europe. The memory of those three confederates of Grutli who led the revolt against the oppressions of the Count of Hapsburg, and of Arnold von Winkelried sacrificing himself in Decian fashion to win the fight at Sempach, have sunk into the heart of every Swiss. They helped to form the sentiment of dauntless loyalty in the Swiss Guards who perished at the Tuileries in 1792, fighting not even for their own country, but in defence of the monarch with whom they had taken service. And in Switzerland patriotism has been turned into a peaceful channel in creating a sense of the civic duty which every man owes to his canton. Nowhere in the world has this sense been so strong, or done so much to make men take an interest in domestic politics and bring so much intelligence to hear upon it. It shows us a tradition embodied in a habit of daily life.
In England whose national independence was never threatened from the Norman Conquest until the time when Bonaparte was encamped at Boulogne, the growth of national traditions was more gradual and less definitely connected with particular historical cases. Nevertheless there were incidents from the days of Magna Charta down to the revolution of 1688 which created in the more educated classes a steady attachment to liberty as well as to law, law being regarded not merely as the enforcement of order but as the safeguard of liberty. Whatever unconstitutional acts might be done by any king or minister, no one in either English party ventured, after the fall of the Stuarts, to disparage liberty as a fundamental principle.
Taken in their widest sense Traditions include all the influences which the Past of a nation exerts upon its Present, in forming its thoughts and accustoming its will to act upon certain fixed lines. The traditions of valour are, of course, those most generally cherished in every country, because every one understands and honours courage. In mediaeval Spain, however, the crusading character of the wars waged against the Moors for four centuries formed not only a love of battle but also a religious intolerance which is not yet extinct. Its strength is shown by the violence of the anti-clerical recoil among Spanish anarchists. The victorious campaigns of Frederick the Great which made Prussia a nation, created also that spirit of militarism and that supremacy of military ideals which a series of successful wars brought to their highest development a century after his time. In Japan the religious devotion to a dynasty whose origin is lost in the mist of fable combined with the personal devotion of the feudal retainer to his lord to produce that chivalric self-forgetting loyalty to State and Nation which has made the Japanese warrior feel it a privilege to offer up his life in the national cause. 1 Nowhere does this sort of loyalty seem to have equally pervaded all classes of a people.
Besides these traditions of honour and dignity in conduct there are also certain ideas or principles of policy which have so often been recognized by a nation, and applied in the management of its affairs, that they have become a part of its mental equipment. Some of these ideas have been embodied in its institutions, and by them the institutions have stood. Some are associated with events in national history which approved their soundness. In the United States, for instance, the dogmas contained in the Declaration of Independence and the view of policy known as the Monroe Doctrine, the theory of the sovereignty of the people and the necessity of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers, have by general consent become axiomatic. Abiding foundations of policy glide into other principles which have come to so inhere in national consciousness as to seem parts of national character. Such, for the English, are the respect for law as law, the feeling that every citizen is bound to come forward in its support, the confidence in the Courts which administer it — a confidence not felt in the seventeenth century, because then not yet deserved. Such in France is the passion for equality, still more recent, and a deference to executive authority greater than Englishmen or Americans feel, together with a passionate attachment to the soil of France which has replaced the old feudal attachment to the person of the sovereign.
Among traditions, those which approve and maintain principles and habits of political action have been due to the people itself, guided by wise leaders, while those which have a moral character and secure respect for public virtue, are generally due to the influence and example of some famous man who so impressed his contemporaries as to become a model for later generations. The classic instance comes from the United States. Its people had the singular good fortune to find in the beginning of their national life a hero whose character became a tradition for them of all that was highest and purest in statesmanship. George Washington set a standard of courage, calmness, dignity, and uprightness by which every public man's conduct was to be tried. Seventy years later the tradition of unselfish patriotism, as well as of firmness and of faith in the power of freedom was, so to speak, reconsecrated by Abraham Lincoln. Two such lives (the former of which had much to do with inspiring the latter) have been an asset of incomparable value to the people among whom they were lived. When the War of Secession had ended and the dawn of reconciliation began after a time to appear, Northern as well as Southern men found in the memory of Washington a bond of reunion, for it was a memory cherished and honoured by both alike.
Habits can be bad as well as good, though when found in a people they are commonly attributed not so much to historical causes as to the inherent depravity of mankind, allowed to indulge itself unchecked, and infecting one generation after another, because there was neither legal penalty nor public disapproval to restrain it. An offence that is familiar and goes unpunished is deemed venial and excites no surprise. Corruption and malversation were common in the Greek republics, even among brilliant leaders. They were common in the later days of Rome among ambitious politicians, who were wont to bribe the voters, or the jurors before whom they were prosecuted, with money extorted from the provincial subjects of the republic. The laws were stringent, but the offenders frequently escaped. Among the statesmen of Italy, and indeed of Europe generally, in the fifteenth and sixteenth century there was little honour. Machiavelli was no worse than others in his means, and better than most in his aims. In Russia, under the Tsars, corruption was the rule among officials, civil and military. In China it successfully overcame, a few years ago, the nascent virtue of many among the young enthusiasts who had proclaimed a republic. In England bribery was rife in Parliament under Walpole and in parliamentary constituencies till the middle of last century. It was, for the briber, a matter of jest, not of social stigma, the habit being an old one. So in tropical America there are some republics in which the ruling faction has for many a year “made the elections,” and many in which a President is expected to enrich himself, and leaves a good name if he has shot comparatively few of his opponents. 1
Traditions are built up slowly but crumble quickly, just as it takes longer to form in an individual the virtue that will resist temptation than it takes to break down what had seemed to be a settled habit. Seldom can he who has once succumbed to strong inducements be thereafter trusted to stand firm. 2
Various have been the causes that have weakened or destroyed old traditions. Sometimes the quality of a population is changed; it may be, as happened in Home, by the impoverishment of the bulk of the old citizen stock and the increase in the number of freedmen; it may be by the influx of a crowd of immigrants, ignorant of the history of their new country, irresponsive to sentiments which the old inhabitants have cherished. The English stock to which the farmers and artisans of Massachusetts and Connecticut belonged has now become a minority in these States.
There are times when under the pressure of some grave national crisis, such as a foreign or even perhaps a civil war, a nation resigns some of its liberties into the hands of the Executive, or adopts new methods of government calculated to strengthen its position in the world. If the period of suspension of liberties be short and the attachment of the people to their old institutions exceptionally strong, no harm may be done. This proved to be the case after the American War of Secession, when constitutional government was restored uninjured. But there is always a risk that the stream may not return to its old channel. After a great war a nation is never, for better or worse, what it was before. Sometimes the waves of internal discord run so high that the tradition of devotion to common national interests is forgotten in the strife of religions or of classes. Sometimes the intellectual development of a people has sapped the foundations of its beliefs without replacing them by new conceptions of duty fit to stand the strain of new conditions. The most familiar instance is that of the Greek republics in the age of Socrates when the teachings of some eminent Sophists, pulverizing the simple belief in gods who punished perjury and bad faith, were representing justice as merely the advantage of the stronger. Here the traditions first affected were religious and ethical, but an old system of beliefs and habits hangs together; when the religious part of it is smitten, other parts feel the shock. Traditions last longest in peoples who live amid simple conditions and whose minds are slow and steady rather than swift. The Roman spirit was more conservative than that of the highly susceptible Greeks, as the English have been less prone to charge than have the nimbler-minded French. No tradition lasts for ever, not even in China. When it shows signs of decay, the best chance of saving it lies in reinforcing an ancient sentimental reverence by considerations drawn from reason and experience. These are supplied by history, the teaching of which in schools and universities might in most countries do more than it has yet done to fill the people's mind with memories of what is finest in its history and to dwell upon the worth of experience as a guide in polities.
The traditions of virtue shown in political life are not so well remembered by all classes of any people as are those of warlike valour or disinterested patriotism, because they appeal less to the imagination, and are more apt to be associated with those who have been the leaders of parties rather than of the nation. Nelson and Garibaldi are names more popular than Hampden, Mazzini, or Kossuth. Even in Switzerland there are few outstanding civil figures — and hardly any known outside its own borders — to whom traditions are attached. Appealing to reason rather than to emotion, they are less promising themes for rhetoric. But the greatest statesmen have rendered services greater than any rendered by arms, except indeed where the war was for national independence. The traditional love of liberty, the traditional sense of duty to the community, be it great or small, the traditional respect for law and wish to secure reforms by constitutional rather than by violent means — these were the habits engrained in the mind and will of Englishmen and Swiss which have helped each people to build up its free institutions from rude beginnings, and have enabled those institutions to continue their beneficent work. Those traditions carried across the sea rendered the same service in America. When similar institutions, however skilfully devised, are set down among those who, like the peoples of tropical America, have no such traditions, the institutions work imperfectly or do not work at all, because men have not that common basis of mutual understandings, that reciprocal willingness to effect a compromise, that accepted standard of public honour, that wish to respect certain conventions and keep within certain limits, which long habit has formed in the minds of Englishmen or Americans or Switzers.
The Sovereignty of the People is the basis and the watchword of democracy. It is a faith and a dogma to which in our time every frame of government has to conform, and by conformity to which every institution is tested. We shall have, in the course of our examination of the working of many forms of government, to observe in what ways doctrine is applied to practice, and how far each of the methods of applying it gives good results. It is therefore worth while to begin by enquiring what that sovereignty imports, and who are those that exercise it?
What is the People? The word has always had a fascination. It appeals to the imagination by suggesting something vast and all-embracing, impersonal and intangible. We are in the midst of a multitude and a part of it, and yet we do not know its thoughts and cannot forecast its action, even as we stand on the solid earth and cannot tell when it will be shaken by an earthquake; or as we dwell under and constantly watch the sky yet can seldom say when tempests will arise and lightnings flash forth, or as we live in the midst of the vibrating ether and have no sense-perceptions of its presence. There seems to be something about the mind and will of the People so far transcending human comprehension as to have a sort of divine quality, because it is a force not only unpredictable but irresistible. It has the sacredness of an oracle. The old saying, Vox populi, vox Dei , was meant to convey that when the People speaks, it speaks by that will of the Higher Powers which men cannot explain but are forced to obey.
This kind of feeling seems grounded, consciously or unconsciously, on an assumption that the People cannot go wrong. Wisdom must dwell in it because it includes all the wisdom there is in the nation, and Justice must dwell in it because it includes all there is of justice; and Justice must be present even more certainly than wisdom, because the injustice and selfishness of individuals and groups, each of which has its own conflicting interests, will be swallowed up in the justice which is the common interest of all. Moreover, man is naturally prone to worship Power. That is an impulse that underlies all religion. To-day the people are the ultimate source of Power. Their will, be it wise or unwise, must prevail. Just as an individual man is carried away by the passion that sways a vast crowd filled by one emotion and purpose, so when that purpose is universalized to embrace the nation of which he and all the others in the crowd are a trifling part, he realizes the insignificance of each and the grandeur of all. He is awed by something mystical in the conception. That which was once the divine Right of the king has become the overriding Majesty of the People.
Passing from these abstractions, let us see what in various concrete cases the term People has been taken to mean, and what questions have arisen as to the persons or classes included under it Does it in any given country cover, or ought it to cover, the whole population or only those who are legally “citizens,” i.e. entitled to share in the government by expressing their mind and will on public questions? In the ancient world the right of governing went with the obligation to fight. That obligation fell upon all free adult males, so that the army meant in practice the voters, and the voters (subject to exceptions hardly worth noting) meant the army. Duty and power went together. This view would not be accepted now either in countries which have extended the suffrage to women, or by those persons who deny that there should be any general obligation to serve the country in arms. Are resident aliens part of the people, or ought they to be deemed such, at least so far as to have a right to be after a time admitted to citizenship? Even if they are not permitted to vote how far are their wishes to be regarded? 1 If there is any distinct section of a nation few of whose members concern themselves with public affairs, is it to be deemed a part of the people for political purposes? If most of the members of such a section have no political opinions, can they be said to share in Popular Sovereignty, whether or no they vote, for if they do, they vote as others bid them? This question was much discussed in England and America before women were admitted to the suffrage; and in France it is still under discussion. Where a racially distinct body of unwilling subjects is included within a State, as were the Poles in the German Empire before 1919, or the German-speaking Tyrolese in the Italian kingdom since 1919, are they to be reckoned as part of the people? Where a race, confessedly backward, remains socially distinct from the rest of the population, is it to be counted as a part of the people, or if some few of its members are admitted to share in power as voters, does that imply that the whole body shall be so counted? This point is raised by the position of the Kafirs in the Union of South Africa, of the Chinese in Australasia, of the negroes in the Southern States of America. They are so sharply differentiated from their white neighbours by the fact that their chief interest is not in the general welfare of the country but in obtaining for themselves an equal status and the effective protection of the law that their wishes and hopes do not move on the same plane. When a white orator in Louisiana talks of “our people” he is thinking of whites only; but if he is speaking in Ohio, are negroes included? 1
Further questions arise when we consider how the people has to express its will. This, formerly done by a shout of the assembled freemen, now takes the form of voting. In voting, as normally in fighting, that oldest method of settling differences, numbers prevail. The majority is taken to speak for the whole. This need not be the majority of the whole nation, for the votes may be taken in some artificial divisions, as in the Roman Republic it was in “centuries” or in “tribes,” and as it is in the American Republic (at a presidential election) by States. Whatever be the mode, the greater number must, in any ordered State, prevail, and the lesser must submit. But although the legal authority goes with the majority, does the moral authority of the people go with it? What presumption is there that the majority, especially if it be small, is right? Is there likely to be any more wisdom in the Yeas than in the Nays? If it be true that most men are governed by emotion, and few men by reason, a cynic might argue that the presumption was the other way. Can one say that because the people are always right a decision reached by a majority of five in a body of five hundred will be right? In the General Councils of the mediaeval Church it was asked whether when a point of doctrine had to be decided by a vote, infallibility dwelt in the odd man, and whether, if so, it would not have been quite as easy, and much more impressive, for Divine Providence to arrange that the majority should be larger.
The cynic already referred to goes a step farther, and asks what ground there is for the trust reposed in the justice and wisdom of the People. “Why should they be less liable to error than monarchs or oligarchies? What is there in a nation of twenty or forty or one hundred millions of men, women, and children except so many individual human beings? Whence does there come into this mass any more wisdom or goodness than exists in these individuals, a large number of whom we all know to have little knowledge and less wisdom? The collective wisdom of the People is but the sum of their individual wisdoms, its excellence the sum of their excellences. A thing does not become different because you call it by a collective name. The Germans, a philosophical race, no doubt talk of the State as not only grander but also wiser than the individuals who compose the State, but that may be because their government took pains to gather as much trained wisdom as possible into the service of the State, so that the bureaucracy became a treasure-house of knowledge and experience beyond what any individuals can command. The State, they argued, is wiser than its component parts, because those who administer it are the refined quintessence distilled from all the sources of individual wisdom. Democratic nations do not attempt thus to concentrate knowledge and skill in a body of State servants; they put their faith in the individuals who come to the polling-booth. It is not true, as is alleged, that the selfishnesses of many individuals cancel one another, so as to produce a general unselfishness; rather may it be said that the selfish aims of men and sections of men are the materials with which the crafty politician plays, turning them to his own ends, giving to each section favours pernicious to the whole community.
“Every crowd poses as the people, and affects to speak in its name. The larger the crowd, the less is it guided by reason and the more by its emotions. The First Crusade was determined by a gathering at Clermont in Auvergne, when the mighty multitude is said to have shouted 'Deus id Vult.' But no one had weighed the difficulties of the enterprise, and sixty thousand of those who were the first to start perished long before they had approached the goal of pilgrimage. Have we not all seen how often the people err in their choice of representatives and how often their representatives err in their decisions on matters of policy? They admit their errors by frequently reversing those decisions.
“The people generally mean well. But what is the people for practical purposes when it comes to vote? Many, in some countries one half, and at some elections even more, abstain. How many of the thousands or tens of thousands who come to the polling-booths have any real acquaintance with the issues they are to decide, or with the qualities and the records of the candidates from among whom they are to choose their representatives and officials? How many, on the other hand, are voting merely because some one has brought them and told them that A, or B, is their man? Could the minds of most be examined, we should find that the vote cast did not express their individual wills, but rather the will of a group of leaders and wire-pullers who have put out the' party ticket' A decision no doubt there must be, and this may be the only way of getting it. But why bow down and worship the judgment of the people unless they are to be deemed to act, like a General Council of the Church, under Divine guidance? Is this the meaning of vox populi, vox Dei?”
Some of the questions raised by the critics whose views I have stated will be found, when we proceed to consider the practical working of popular government, to have been answered by the nations that have adopted that government, each for itself in its own way. But it is worth while to consider the causes which have given power to that faith in the people which has been for several generations a potent and pervasive force in politics.
It began as a combative and reforming force, a protest against monarchical government and class government. Men who saw the evil wrought by the overbearing arrogance of a ruling class saw the remedy in the transfer of authority to the whole body of a nation. Exclusive or even predominant power was a temptation to selfishness. Power shared by all would be honestly exercised for the benefit of all.
In the course of efforts to get rid of class rule, the contrast drawn between the enfranchised classes and the unenfranchised mass outside made men think of the latter as “the people,” giving the word a significance almost equivalent to what it is now the fashion to call the “proletariate.” This was the more natural because that part of the nation was the more numerous part. To it the more enthusiastic reformer attributed those virtues in which the rich had been found wanting. It was believed that by sinking a deep shaft into the humbler strata of society the springs might be tapped of a simple honesty and sense of justice which would renovate politics. The association of poverty with simplicity and of luxury with corruption is an old one. In the Golden Age there was no wretchedness because there were no rich. Virgil, who talks of the city crowd as an ignobile vulgus , tells us that when Justice quitted the earth her last footprints were among the tillers of the soil. The latest echo of the old sentiment is found in the pastoral poetry of the eighteenth century. Yet those who thus idealized the hand-workers and thought first of them when they talked of “the people,” did not mean to represent them as a class which should predominate and be deemed, because it was the largest, entitled to be the exponent of the national will. Rather was it thought that the intermingling in political action of all classes would give unity and strength to the nation as one body, because each would make its own contribution. Harmony would give solidity. When men were thinking not of class interests but of the national welfare, there would be less discord. Classes are naturally selfish; the People cannot be, for it is the welfare of all that they must desire. The generation in which these ideas sprang up and prevailed were influenced by abstract ideas and optimistic theories. As their experience extended only to cases in which a small privileged class had abused its authority to the prejudice of the whole community, it did not occur to them that a single class which constituted a majority of the whole might be possessed by a similar self-regarding spirit. They would indeed have grieved to think that this could happen, for they hoped to be rid of classes altogether, popular rule being to them the antithesis to class rule.
With these conceptions there went a belief in him whom they called the “common man,” or, as we should say, the average man. He is taken to be the man of broad common sense, mixing on equal terms with his neighbours, forming a fair unprejudiced judgment on every question, not viewy or pedantic like the man of learning, nor arrogant, like the man of wealth, but seeing things in a practical, businesslike, and withal kindly, spirit, pursuing happiness in his own way, and willing that every one else should do so. Such average men make the bulk of the people, and are pretty sure to go right, because the publicity secured to the expression of opinion by speech and in print will supply them with ample materials for judging what is best for all.
The experiences of recent years have dimmed the hope that class antagonisms would disappear under the rule of the People as a whole, and that the admission of all to a share in power would make every element of a nation rely on constitutional methods for curing whatever evils legislation can cure. Faith in the people was meant to be faith in the whole people, and must suffer when a people is distracted by class war. Yet whatever cynical critics may say, there remains a large measure of truth in that faith as it inspired the poets and philosophers of democracy a century ago. Where rights and duties are shared by all, there is full opportunity for ideas to make their way, for arguments to be heard, for projects to be considered. The unrestricted interchange of thought works for good. In the intermixture and collision of views a breadth of result is attained. Truth and wisdom have their chance, and truth, in an intelligent people, has a better chance than error. That Average Man to whom we recur when we talk of the People is in most countries neither captivated by theories nor swept off his feet by passion. If he does not, as some have fancied, become by the grant of citizenship fit for the functions of citizenship, he is usually raised to a higher level by the sense of a duty thrown on him, and has a sense of justice and fairness sometimes wanting in members of a privileged class. He may have limited knowledge and no initiative, yet be able to form, especially if he has a chance of seeing them at close quarters, a shrewd judgment of men. His instincts are generally sound, nor is he insensible to high ideals when presented to him in a form which makes them plain to him. What he lacks in knowledge he often makes up for by a sympathetic comprehension of the attitude of his fellow-men. Thus there is a sense in which the People are wiser than the wisest person or group. Abraham Lincoln, whom no one ever surpassed in knowing how to deal with men, summarized the results of his observation in the famous sentence, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.”
If this dictum of the great President seems severe in its recognition of the risk that the people may hastily commit a fatal error, it is none the less a tribute to their open-mindedness, to the value of an abounding variety of views and of free criticism, to the probability that with due consideration things will go well. Where the people rule, you cannot stifle independent views. You cannot presume on the ignorance of the people, nor on the appearance of apathy they may show, nor on the power party organization may acquire over them. If you can get at the people — for that is the difficulty — things will usually go well. But the people must have time.
All power springs from the People. This axiom accepted, the question follows: How is the People to exercise its power? By what means shall its mind and will he delivered? The answer given in all constitutional countries is, By Voting, i.e. or, as J. R. Lowell said, by counting heads instead of breaking them. Voting, an invention of the ancient Greek and Italian republics, has been adopted in all civilized States, whether, as in Switzerland and in many States of the North American Union, it is used to express directly the people's judgment upon a proposition submitted by Initiative or by Referendum, or is applied to the choice of persons to represent the people in an assembly, or to act on their behalf as officials. 1
But voting, though everywhere practised, has nowhere given complete satisfaction. The faults charged on it as a method of applying the popular will to self-government may be summarized as follows.
The purposes of the people cannot be adequately expressed through persons chosen to represent them, for these persons may innocently misconceive or dishonestly misrepresent the wishes of the people, nor can any instructions given by the people remove this danger. Moreover, any election of repreresentatives is an imperfect expression of the views on public policy of the voters, because it turns largely on the personal merits of the candidates, not on the doctrines they profess.
There may, moreover, be among the voters many who, having no mind of their own to express, give their vote at the bidding or under the influence of other persons. Some may have been intimidated or bribed. Some take no interest in the matter and, in default of personal knowledge, merely obey their party organization. Thus what purports to be the will of the people is largely a factitious product, not really their will.
In voting, every vote has the same effective value. One man may have conscience, knowledge, experience, judgment. Another may lack all these, yet his vote counts for just as much in the choice of a representative or the decision of a momentous issue. The wisest and the most foolish are put on the same level. Opinions are counted, not weighed.
Is there any answer to these criticisms or remedy for these alleged evils?
The first criticism is accepted as valid by that large body of opinion which, advocating direct popular voting on as many questions as possible, seeks to have the Initiative and Referendum methods adopted wherever constitutional government exists. Others, emphasizing the risk that representatives may fail to give effect to the people's wish, desire to make the mandate delivered at an election imperative and precise, and to give the people a power of recalling a representative whose action they disapprove.
The second evil has been in many countries reduced by laws against bribery and intimidation, but where these tangible offences are absent, no remedy seems possible, for how can any one know how far a voter has a mind of his own, or is merely an instrument in other hands? He may not himself know.
The third objection taken goes down to the root difficulty of democratic government, and has been made the ground of the severest arraignments of the People as a Ruling Power. An attempt was made in some of the ancient republics to give proportionately greater weight in voting, not indeed to virtue and wisdom, but to property and (implicitly) to education, by dividing the citizens into classes or sections, and allotting to each a single collective vote, determined by the majority within the section. The richer sort were placed in several of such sections and the poorer in others, each of these latter containing a larger number of voters than the sections of the richer citizens. Thus the votes of the richer sections balanced those of the poorer, i.e. the voting power of numbers was balanced by the power of voting wealth. Similarly, by the constitution of Belgium persons possessing certain property or educational qualifications were formerly given three or two votes each, the ordinary citizen having only one. This Belgian plan has now been abolished; and is not likely to be tried elsewhere. It was proposed in England many years ago, but then rejected on the ground, inter alia , that the rich had various means of exerting influence which other classes did not possess. 1 Whatever objections may be taken to a method which gives an equal voice to the wisest and most public-spirited citizen and to the ignorant criminal just released from gaol, no one has yet suggested any criterion by which the quality of voters should be tested and more weight allowed to the votes of the fittest. Equal suffrage as well as Universal Suffrage has apparently to be accepted for better or worse.
Is there then no other way in which the people can express their mind and exert their power? Can any means be found of supplying that which elections fail to give? Is the judgment delivered by polling, i.e. the counting of heads, the same thing as public opinion? Polling is the only explicit and palpable mode yet devised of expressing the people's will. But does a judgment so delivered necessarily convey the opinion of the thoughtful element among those who vote, and may not that opinion be able to exert a moral authority at times when no legal opportunity is provided for the delivery of a judgment at the polls?
What is Public Opinion? The term is commonly used to denote the aggregate of the views men hold regarding matters that affect or interest the community. Thus understood, it is a congeries of all sorts of discrepant notions, beliefs, fancies, prejudices, aspirations. It is confused, incoherent, amorphous, varying from day to day and week to week. But in the midst of this diversity and confusion every question as it rises into importance is subjected to a process of consolidation and clarification until there emerge and take definite shape certain views, or sets of interconnected views, each held and advocated in common by bodies of citizens. It is to the power exerted by any such view, or set of views, when held by an apparent majority of citizens, that we refer when we talk of Public Opinion as approving or disapproving a certain doctrine or proposal, and thereby becoming a guiding or ruling power. Or we may think of the Opinion of a whole nation as made up of different currents of sentiment, each embodying or supporting a view or a doctrine or a practical proposal. Some currents develop more strength than others because they have behind them larger numbers or more intensity of conviction; and when one is evidently the strongest, it begins to be called Public Opinion par excellence , being taken to embody the views supposed to be held by the bulk of the people. Difficult as it often is to determine the relative strength of the different streams of opinion — one cannot measure their strength as electric power is measured by volts — every one admits that when one stream is distinctly stronger than any other, i.e. when it would evidently prevail if the people were called upon to vote, it ought to be obeyed. Till there is a voting, its power, being open to doubt, has no legal claim to obedience. But impalpable though it may be, no sensible man disputes that power, and such governing authorities as ministries and legislatures are obliged to take account of it and shape their course accordingly. In this sense, therefore, the People are always ruling, because their will is recognized as supreme whenever it is known, and though it is formally and legally expressed only by the process of counting votes, it is frequently known for practical purposes without that process.
What I am trying to convey may be illustrated from phenomena perceived by any one who sits in a deliberative assembly such as the British House of Commons. In that body, which is a sort of microcosm of the nation, the opinion of the House, as pronounced in a division and recorded in the division lists, is not the same as that opinion gathered from the private talks which members have with one another. Many propositions which are carried on a division would be rejected if the members were free to express by their votes exactly what they think. Their judgment, formed after hearing all that can he said on both sides, is frequently different from, and sounder than, that which they deliver by their votes. The members are not to blame for this. It is incident to their position. They are required, not only by the pledges they have given to their constituents, but by the system of party government which could not be worked if every one was to vote exactly as he thought, to give votes not consistent with their personal views. Everybody knows this, and a ministry often feels it so strongly that it drops a proposal which it could carry if it put full pressure on the party loyalty of its adherents. The case of a nation differs from the case of a parliament, because the voters are not bound by pledges or by allegiance. They have only their own consciences to obey. But the cases are in this respect similar, that opinion as declared by voting may differ widely from that which would be elicited by interrogating privately (were it possible to do this on a large scale) those citizens who have what can be called an opinion: and the latter opinion so elicited would be more likely to be right than the former.
How is the drift of Public Opinion to be ascertained? That is the problem which most occupies and perplexes politicians. They usually go for light to the press, but the press, though an indispensable, is not a safe guide, since the circulation of a journal does not necessarily measure the prevalence of the views it advocates. Newspaper accounts given of what men are thinking may be coloured and misleading, for every organ tends to exaggerate the support its views command. Neither are public meetings a sure index, for in populous centres almost any energetic group can fill a large hall with its adherents. Stray elections arising from the death or retirement of a legislator or (in the States of the North American Union) of an elected official, are much relied on, yet the result is often due rather to local circumstances than to a general movement of political feeling. There is, moreover, such a thing as an artificially created and factitious opinion. The art of propaganda has been much studied in our time, and has attained a development which enables its practitioners by skilfully and sedulously supplying false or one-sided statements of fact to beguile and mislead those who have not the means or the time to ascertain the facts for themselves. Against all these sources of error the observer must be on his guard.
The best way in which the tendencies at work in any community can be discovered and estimated is by moving freely about among all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or the arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge. In every neighbourhood there are unbiassed persons with good opportunities for observing, and plenty of skill in “sizing up” the attitude and proclivities of their fellow-citizens. Such men are invaluable guides. Talk is the best way of reaching the truth, because in talk one gets directly at the facts, whereas reading gives not so much the facts as what the writer believes, or wishes to have others believe. Whoever, having himself a considerable experience of politics, takes the trouble to investigate in this way will seldom go astray. There is a flair which long practice and “sympathetic touch “bestow. The trained observer learns how to profit by small indications, as an old seaman discerns, sooner than the landsman, the signs of coming storm.
There have doubtless been some remarkable instances in which English party managers anticipated success at a general election and encountered defeat. But these instances, like that of the prophets who bade Ahab go up against Ramoth Gilead, are explained by the propensity of party agents to find what they set out to seek, and to prophesy smooth things when it is anywise possible to do so.
How does public opinion grow, and how can the real volume and strength a view possesses be distinguished from those artificial and delusive appearances which politicians are obliged to present as true, each party wishing to pose before the public as the majority?
Three classes of persons have to do with the making of public opinion. There are the men who seriously occupy themselves with public affairs, whether professionally, as members of legislatures or journalists or otherwise actively engaged in politics, or as private persons who care enough for their duty as citizens to give constant attention to what passes in the political world. These persons are, taken all together, an exceedingly small percentage of the voting citizens. It is they, however, who practically make opinion. They know the facts, they think out and marshall and set forth, by word or pen, the arguments meant to influence the public.
The second class consists of those who, though comparatively passive, take an interest in politics. They listen and read, giving an amount of attention proportioned to the magnitude of any particular issue placed before them, or to the special interest it may have for them. They form a judgment upon the facts and arguments presented to them. Their judgment corrects and modifies the views of the first class, and thus they are, though not the originators, yet largely the moulders of opinion, giving to a doctrine or a proposition the shape it has to take if it is to succeed. Most of them belong to a party but are not so hotly partisan as to be unable to consider fairly both sides of a case. In countries accustomed to constitutional government, and when not swept off their feet by excitement, such men have the qualities of a good juryman and deliver a sensible verdict. What they think and feel is the opinion of the nation as a whole. It is Public Opinion.
The third class includes all that large residue of the citizens which is indifferent to public affairs, reading little and thinking less about them. So far as it has any opinion, it adopts that which prevails in the place where it lives, or in the social class or industrial milieu to which it belongs. Men of this type will now and then be attracted by a personality, and follow him irrespective of his politics, because some of his qualities, not always his better qualities, appeal to certain tastes of their own. Though they neither make opinion as thinkers nor help to mould it as critics, they swell its volume, and form, in some countries, a considerable proportion of those whom a party can enrol as loyal supporters, all the more sure to be loyal because they do not reflect, but are content to repeat current phrases. The proportion of this class to the total adult population varies in different countries, but is everywhere larger than is commonly supposed. It has been much increased in countries which have adopted universal suffrage. Smallest in Switzerland, it is small also in Scotland and Norway and New Zealand, and would be small in the United States but for the presence of eleven millions of negroes and some millions of recent immigrants.
Among the conditions requisite for the formation of a wise and tolerant public opinion the intelligence of the people and the amount of interest which the average citizen takes in public affairs are the most important. Another is the extent to which agreement exists upon certain fundamental political doctrines. In the United States everybody is attached to the republican form of government: everybody assumes the complete separation of Church and State and the exclusion of eeclesiasticism from politics. In France, on the other hand, the chasm between Roman Catholics and the opponents of Christianity is deep; and there are still many who desire some form of government which, whether or not monarchical in name, shall be monarchical in substance. In Canada and South Africa differences of race prevent the existence of a homogeneous public sentiment, for they may tend to make men judge a proposal not so much by its value for the community as by its probable effect on their own section. So if social classes are unfriendly, suspicion is rife, and agreement becomes difficult even on questions, such as those of foreign policy, which scarcely affect domestic interests. 1 Where marked incompatibilities of thinking or of feeling, whatever their source, breed distrust, that useful process of gradual assimilation and half-conscious compromise by which one general dominant opinion is formed out of the contact and mixture of many views works imperfectly. A truly national patriotism stills domestic discords at moments of danger, and helps to keep some questions above party even in quiet times. But such a patriotism needs to be strengthened and enlarged in each country by a better understanding among the citizens of one another's characters and aims, and a better sense of what each class or section gains by the others' prosperity, than most nations possess.
Now let us, returning to the point whence this discussion started, compare that influence upon the conduct of public affairs which is called, somewhat loosely, the Rule of Public Opinion, with the direct control exerted by the citizens when they vote either on a question submitted (Referendum) or for a candidate. The action of Opinion is continuous, that of Voting occasional, and in the intervals between the elections of legislative bodies changes may take place materially affecting the views of the voters. In France, where the duration of a Chamber is four years, in England where it is five, they cannot be assumed to be of the same mind after two years. At elections it is for a candidate that votes are given, and as his personality or his local influence may count for more than his principles, the choice of one man against another is an imperfect way of expressing the mind of a constituency. In countries which (like Britain and the British self-governing Dominions) allow a ministry to fix the date for a general election, a moment may be seized when the people are stirred by some temporary emotion which prevents a considered and temperate expression of their will. Such a “snap election” may misrepresent their more deliberate mind.
The result of an election may be determined by the action of an insignificant knot of voters specially interested in a question of slight importance. Anti-vaccinationists, or a few dozens of government employees demanding higher wages, have thus turned elections in English boroughs where parties were of nearly equal strength. The result seemed to give a victory to one political party, but the real victory was that of the little knot and more pliable candidate, with the result that the rest of the electors were debarred from delivering the judgment of the constituency on national issues.
Note also that in elections the spirit of party or of class, and the combative ardour which such a spirit inspires, cloud the minds of many voters, making them think of party triumph rather than either of a candidate's merits or of his principles. A large percentage of the votes are given with little reference to the main issues involved. It is the business of the managers to “froth up” party feeling and make excitement do the work of reason. 1
In all the points just enumerated Public Opinion, when and in so far as it can be elicited, is an organ or method through which the People can exert their power more elastic and less pervertible than is the method of voting. It is always operative: its action changes as the facts of the case change and keeps pace with them. It sets the larger and the smaller issues in their true perspective. It reduces petty “fads” or selfish groups to insignificance. It relies, not on organization and party drill, but on the good sense and fairness of the citizens as a whole. It expresses what is more or less thought and felt in all the parties by their more temperate and unbiassed members. It is a counterpoise to the power of mere numbers. At a poll one vote is as good as another, the ignorant and unreflecting counting for as much as the well-informed and wise, but in the formation of opinion knowledge and thought tell. The clash and conflict of argument bring out the strength and weakness of every case, and that which is sound tends to prevail. Let the cynics say what they will, Man is not an irrational animal. Truth usually wins in the long run, though the obsessions of self-interest or prejudice or ignorance may long delay its victory. The turbid fluid is slowly clarified as the mud sinks to the bottom, and the liquid is drawn off pure from the top of the vessel. Voting, though indispensable as a means of determining the view of the majority, is a mechanical operation, necessarily surrounded with legal forms, while in the formation and expression of opinion the essential spirit of democracy rises above the machinery and the trammels which machinery imposes and finds a means of applying its force more flexible, more delicate, more conciliatory and persuasive than is a decision given by the counting of votes.
Voting, I repeat, is indispensable, for it is positive, giving an incontrovertible result. But voting is serviceable just in proportion as it has been preceded and prepared by the action of public opinion. The discussion which forms opinion by securing the due expression of each view or set of views so that the sounder may prevail enables the citizens who wish to find the truth and follow it to deliver a considered vote. It is an educative process constantly in progress. In the intervals between elections it imposes some check on the vehemence of party spirit and the recklessness or want of scruple of party leaders, and restrains the disposition of party government to abuse its power. When a ministry or legislature feels the tide of opinion beginning to run against some of their purposes they pause. Many a plan has been abandoned without any formal declaration of popular disapproval because disapproval was felt to be in the air. This is not to say that the current of opinion for the time being dominant is always right, any more than that the people voting at the polls are always right. The people may err, in whichever way its will may be expressed, but error is more probable at moments, such as elections, when the passion of strife is hottest. It may be suggested that when the citizen is called to deliver his vote he will be impressed by the seriousness of the occasion and have a specially strong sense of his responsibility. But those who know what is the atmosphere elections generate, and how many persons vote under the influence of misrepresentations contrived to mislead them at the last moment when any correction will come too late, how many pledges are recklessly given, and how hard it is afterwards to escape from the pledge, will have no implicit faith in an election as an expression of genuine popular will, still less of popular thought.
As the excellence of public opinion — its good sense, its tolerance, its pervasive activity — is the real test of a nation's fitness for self-government, so the power it exerts, being constantly felt as the supreme arbiter irrespective of electoral machinery, is the best guarantee for the smooth and successful working of popular government, and the best safeguard against revolutionary violence.
What does a nation need to secure that excellence and to enable Opinion to exert its power as supreme? Besides the conditions already enumerated, the things to be chiefly desired are:
The presence in the nation of many vigorous minds, constructive and critical, constantly occupied in the public discussion of the current problems of statesmanship. These are the minds already referred to as constituting that first and relatively small class which makes Opinion.
The preponderance in the rest of the nation of men of the second, as compared with men of the third, of the three classes aforesaid, i.e. persons whose sense of civic duty makes them give steady attention to public affairs, and who bring to their consideration a fair judgment and an insight into character which, unseduced by the demagogue, respects uprightness and capacity in the leader who has given proof of these qualities.
In countries like France, the United States, and Britain, men of the first class are never wanting. But a nation needs something more than the intellectual guidance which such men can give. Among them there must also be leaders of a firmness which will face opprobrium and defend causes for the moment unpopular. The chief defect of public opinion is its tendency in times of excitement to overbear opposition and silence the voices it does not wish to hear. Courage is the highest and perhaps the rarest quality among politicians. It is specially needed in democratic countries.
Though it is the newer forms of democracy that are the subject of this book, some account must be given of popular government in the ancient world, where that government appeared in its earliest and simplest form, for though the constitutional arrangements were often complicated, the principles stand out sharp and clear. In the history of the Greek commonwealths we discover many traits of character which recur in the modern world. It is instructive to study in their free play, when mankind was making its first political experiments among economic and social conditions diverse from ours, those tendencies inherent in human nature which are the groundwork of scientific history.
There is also another reason why the ancient republics should still interest the student. Democracy is a new thing in the modern world. More than nineteen centuries have passed since it died out on the coasts of the Mediterranean. During all those centuries down to the days of our greatgrandfathers, those who thought or wrote about it had to go back to classical antiquity for example and for instruction, since the only descriptions of its actual working they could use were provided by ancient writers. Among those writers there were two of such outstanding power and range of mind that they formed the views of all who came after them till the eighteenth century saw a new series of experiments in free government begin. To Plato and Aristotle, and to the historians of Greece and Rome, often misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented, may be traced nearly all the doctrines that have been propounded regarding the respective merits and defects of divers forms of government. Their writings have become a part of the subject itself.
Only in three countries of the ancient world did men reach the stage of a settled and constitutional political life, and of these three only one need occupy us here. There were the Phoenicians of Carthage, there were some peoples in Italy, and there were the Greeks, whose small self-governing city communities scattered themselves out from continental Hellas along the coasts of the great inland sea as far as Trebizond and Kertch in the east, Monaco and Marseilles in the west.
Moderns have been apt to say: “What light can these little city states give to us who frame our systems for vast countries? Athens and Syracuse in the height of their power had fewer citizens than a single English or French constituency counts to-day. The voters who at Rome chose a Fabius or a Julius to be Consul were sometimes fewer than those who fill the hall of a nominating Convention at Chicago.” But the difference in scale and in other things, too, are not so remarkable as the similarities. As the problems of good government were essentially the same, so were the motives and the temptations. The gifts by which power is won and the faults by which it is lost are as discernible in the careers of Greek and Roman statesmen as in those which engage our curiosity to-day. On the small stage of an ancient city republic both figures and tendencies stand out more boldly, the personalities are less conventional, the action moves faster, and it is often more dramatic.
Of Carthage I have not space to speak, and the data we possess are scanty. It was an oligarchy rather than a democracy, in its earlier course singularly stable, for Aristotle tells us it never had a revolution. Neither was the Roman Constitution democratic, though it had a popular element in the assemblies which chose the magistrates and passed laws. It is the Greek democracies that best deserve attention. Before coming to their governments, let us note some of the points in which the conditions of their political life differed from those of modern times.
That social stratum which has been in the modern world the poorest and least educated lay altogether below the level of civic rights. Slavery did in one sense make democratic institutions more workable, because the class on whom hardship first fell had no political power, because the menace of its revolt sometimes prevented the free citizens from pushing their quarrels to extremity, and because every freeman, having as large or an even larger class below him than he had above him, acquired a certain sense of independence and personal dignity. Though servitude was less harsh among the Greeks than at Rome, it everywhere disposed men to cruelty and a disregard of human life. Unscrupulous adventurers could recruit among the slaves a force for revolutionary purposes, or might degrade citizenship by the admission of an ignorant and dangerous element.
The small size of a Greek republic, the territory of which seldom extended beyond a few dozens of square miles round the city, and the number of free citizens, usually less than ten and seldom exceeding thirty thousand, made it easy to bring within the hearing of one voice a majority of all who were entitled to vote in the popular Assembly, and enabled everybody to form his opinions on the personal qualities of those who aspired to leadership or to office. 1 But it increased the power of personal attraction, intensified hatreds and antagonisms, furnished opportunities for conspiracies or secret combinations formed by a few families or a group of ambitious politicians. 2
Representative government was unknown, superfluous where the whole body of citizens could meet in one spot to discuss public affairs. It does not seem to have entered the thoughts of any among the philosophers or constitution framers. 3 This deprived the ruling power in a State of such benefits as may be expected from the deliberations of a parliament whose members their fellow-citizens have chosen as best fitted by their abilities and character to give counsel, but on the other hand it raised the capacity, as well as the familiarity with public business, of the average citizen, raised it indeed to a higher point than it has ever attained elsewhere, except perhaps in Switzerland.
The citizens of these republics were originally, and most of them continued to be, cultivators of the city's territory, and many of their internal troubles arose over the distribution and enjoyment of land. Some, like Marseilles and Byzantium, were commercial: a few, like Miletus, derived wealth from the making or dyeing of woollen stuffs. But they were, taken all in all, less industrial in the character of their population than the cities of mediaeval Italy and Germany; and industries (apart from mines) were seldom worked by large-scale producers employing many hands. The organization of the citizens into orders or sections was accordingly not by trades or guilds, as in most parts of modern Europe, but either by tribes, based on real or supposed kinship, or else locally connected in respect of the district where they dwelt. Religion played a great part. As the city had its common gods whom it took for its protectors, and as every family worshipped the ghosts of its ancestors, so also tribes, and often local divisions also, had local or peculiar deities or semi-divine heroes whom it honoured at local shrines. 1
The citizens were organized on a military as well as a civil basis, for war service was obligatory. The cavalry, the heavy-armed infantry, and the light troops often constituted different classes for political purposes, the two former enjoying a privileged political position, and furnishing their own equipments according to their wealth. An interesting parallel may be found in the arrangements of the two Dutch Republics of South Africa, where the military officers (such as field cornets) also discharged political functions.
That which seems the most conspicuous contrast between these communities and modern European States, viz. the absence of newspapers and of the use of the printing-press for political purposes, did not make quite so much difference as might be supposed, for in small communities news spreads fast, and the inaccuracy to which it is exposed in spreading was hardly greater than the divergence between “happenings” and the newspaper reports of them observable in some modern countries, where nevertheless the average reader continues to fancy that a statement is true because he has seen it in print. The Greeks, enjoying their open-air and leisurely life, spent much of their time in talking, as do their descendants even unto this day. News was never wanting.
Abstract principles affected politics less than they have done in most modern democracies. Those who owned slaves could not very well have talked of the Rights of Man, for though the Americans of the South did so talk before the Civil War, reading the Declaration of Independence publicly on every Fourth of July, their difficulty was reduced by the fact that the bondmen were of a different colour, whereas among the ancients the slave might well be of as light a tint as his master, and possibly superior in natural intelligence. 1 The one abstract principle which did lead to strife and induce revolutions was the passion for political equality. Free citizens of a gifted race, prone to vanity, and valuing themselves all the more because they saw slaves beneath them, would not, when society had passed from its earlier stages into conditions comparatively orderly and peaceful, submit to the rule of a few persons who, while richer or better born, were neither wiser nor morally better than themselves, and dwelt as their neighbours in the same city. Political equality seemed to be prescribed by justice, for though Aristotle is at great pains to explain that justice must be measured with reference to the difference in the capacities of the individual, and in the value of what service each citizen can render, so that Proportionate Justice will assign larger functions, not indeed to the Rich, but to the Wise and Good, this was a doctrine then as now unwelcome to the average man. Moreover, Greek oligarchs always abused their power, so there were sure to be practical as well as theoretic grounds for attacking them.
In all or nearly all the Greek states the first form of government was a monarchy or chieftainship, but, as we learn from the Homeric poems, it was a monarchy tempered by public opinion, which found expression in the public assembly (of the city or tribe) convoked by a chieftain and in practice guided by the leading men, but in which any freeman might speak his mind. 1
After a time kingship either died out, being replaced by elected magistracies, or was greatly reduced in authority, though sometimes (for religious reasons) continued in name. Power passed, in most cities, to the heads of the chief families, who were also the rich and the lenders of money. Their rule, sometimes respecting forms prescribed by old custom, sometimes based on force only, became more or less odious according as it was more or less harsh, but everywhere demands arose for a definition by law of the powers of magistrates and for the admission of the bulk of the citizens to the public offices and the councils. This was the beginning of democracy. In many cities the transition took place through the stage of a so-called Timocracy, in which only the richer sort held the offices and enjoyed a greater voting power than the rest of the citizens. Without attempting to trace in detail the process of evolution, which in Athens lasted for more than a century, it will suffice to describe the features of a normal full-blown democracy such as was that of Athens from the reforms of Cleisthenes (508 B.C.) till the days of Demosthenes, when the combined forces of Athens and Thebes were overthrown by the Macedonian Philip (338 B.C.) on the fatal field of Chaeroneia.
All these democratic republics had what we should call a Constitution. But this was not a Rigid Constitution (such as that of the United States or Switzerland), but merely a mass of laws, which could be altered by the people when and as they pleased. Constitutional law was constantly altered, not only, as was natural, during the process of evolution from an oligarchy to democracy, sometimes with intervals of tyranny, but also when the occurrence of a sedition had made new guarantees for liberty necessary. Athens had lived under eleven constitutions from the time of Draco (624 B.C.) to the settlement of 404 B.C. Aristotle collected and described in a treatise an immense number of constitutions, only one of which, that of Athens, is known to us in its minuter details.
The laws of these States covered the whole of civic life, every little city commonwealth being for political purposes an independent nation, making war and peace, maintaining its own army and navy, frequently at war with its neighbour cities. None (except possibly Athens) had a population of more than thirty or forty thousand free citizens, and few more than five thousand. Imagine such towns as Dover, Canterbury, and Maidstone in England, or such cities of the second or third rank as Salem, Concord, and Pittsfield, in Massachusetts, each one standing alone in a world full of other equally independent communities, if you wish to form an idea of what ancient republics were. In England all municipalities have practically the same form of municipal government. In the United States there is more, yet not very great, variety. In the Hellenic cities the variety was infinite, and the changes in the same city were frequent. There was seldom any distinction between what we should call National government and Local government, because the whole republic was usually smaller than most of our local administrative divisions in England or America. All offices were in fact national as well as municipal.
Confining ourselves to the democracies, let us note their characteristics. The salient feature was the vesting of supreme power for all purposes in the whole body of the citizens. That body was at once a Parliament and a Government, an Executive, Legislature, and Judiciary in one. It did much executive work, because it settled many important current questions by its vote. Not only did it choose the generals and other magistrates, it also instructed the generals, listened to envoys from other States, declared war, concluded peace, ratified treaties, ordered public ceremonials, civil or religious, received public accounts. It was the Legislature, passing Laws intended to be permanent, and Decrees prescribing the main issues of State policy from one meeting to another, and imposing taxes or burdens either generally or on some particular class of rich men. It, or a part of it, formed also the Judiciary, for the citizens acting as one body or divided into sections which may be described as gigantic juries, heard and determined nearly all cases, both civil and criminal, while the Assembly as a whole could, and sometimes did, even if irregularly, pass without any trial sentences of death or fine or exile upon those officials whose action had displeased it.
How did this system work in each of the three branches of government? I take Athens as the best example, for we know more about it than about any other republic, but, as already observed, there was no one general form of republican government.
As respects executive business, there were magistrates, civil and military, the former chosen almost wholly by lot, the latter by the vote of Assembly, for even these ardent equalitarians felt that skill and experience are essential in war. Whereas in other offices no man could serve more than once — even in the Council only twice — generals were often reelected, Pericles fifteen times, Phocion forty-five. Terms of office were short, none exceeding a year. The chief civil officials, the nine archons, were chosen by lot for a year, but the post carried little distinction and gave little scope for ambition. Far more important were the generals, elected yearly, ten together, each to be a sort of check on his colleagues. Sometimes an important command was given to one specially, but more frequently they exercised their functions jointly. They, or some of them, not only led in the field, but brought questions of foreign policy before the Assembly, and, since charged with military preparations, had war finance also to deal with. Whoever showed high capacity and won confidence became a leading man in the city.
For legislative purposes there was a Council which was meant to prepare work for, and to some extent guide, the Assembly. 1 It consisted of five hundred members, fifty being taken by lot from each of the ten tribes. No one under the age of thirty 2 was eligible, no one could serve in it more than twice. Each tribal group of fifty was placed in charge for the term of thirty-five days (one-tenth of a year), called a Prytany, and was responsible for the arrangement of the business that had to come before the Assembly during its term. This Council appointed, again by lot, a president (ἐπιστάτηs) whose office lasted for twenty-four hours only, and who could not be reappointed. This president took, again by lot, nine other persons (πρoέδρoι) out of the nine other tribes who were not then presiding, and from these nine took, once more by lot, one to be chairman. These nine then received the programme (πρóγραµµα) of business to be dealt with by the Assembly, and provided for the orderly conduct of business in that body, proposing the questions to be dealt with (including the elections of the magistrates chosen by vote), taking the votes, supervising the proceedings generally, but leaving to the Assembly all matters of policy. These ingenious arrangements were devised not only to respect the principle of equality, but also to prevent any one tribe from having things too much its own way, even during its thirty-five-day term. Yet the function of arranging and directing the course of business, though it gave importance to the annual appointment of the Council, carried less power than that which the Speaker enjoyed till recently in the American Congress, or that which the “Steering Committee” now exerts there; and much less than the Cabinet exerts in the British House of Commons. The Council nowise interfered with the freedom of the Assembly to discuss and (if it pleased) to decide a question raised by any ordinary private citizen.
The power of the Assembly was complete and absolute. As Aristotle remarks, it did what it pleased. 1 Its action embraced every department of State work, and was uncontrolled. There was no King, no President of the Republic, to interpose his veto, no Second Chamber to amend or reject a bill, no constitutional limitations fettering the Assembly's action, save one (not always respected) which is peculiar enough to be worth describing.
Holding the doctrine that political sovereignty, complete and final, rested not with the citizens but with the laws of the city, embodying the settled mind and will of the people, the Greeks drew a distinction between Laws (Nóµoι), containing general rules of permanent operation and Decrees (ψηφιµατα), 1 passed for a particular occasion or purpose. Now at Athens the Laws were liable to be amended once at least in every year on the proposal either of any private citizen or of a body officially charged with the duty of revision (Thesmothetai). When on the proposal either of the Thesmothetai or of a citizen, a resolution to amend was accepted by the Assembly, a body of citizens called Nomothetai, and constituting a Legislative Commission, was appointed by lot to preside over the process of amendment. The Commission discussed and voted on the amendments submitted, thus giving to the Laws their revised form, which lasted till another process of amendment was put through. This may be called Constitutional Legislation in the strict sense of the term. It was passed at a special time and by a sort of special Committee, though a huge one, sometimes of as many as one thousand citizens, taken by lot. Now in order to protect the Laws from being infringed by the Assembly, that is to say, to protect the citizens against their own hasty or ignorant action, a check was contrived. Whoever brought forward and carried in the Assembly any Decree or proposition which transgressed any Law in form or in substance, might be prosecuted by any citizen for his wrongful act in misleading the Assembly into an illegality. If the prosecution succeeded, the culprit was fined, or possibly even put to death, and the decree of the Assembly (if still operative) was annulled; but if a year had elapsed from the date of the illegality, no penalty was inflicted. This was called the Indictment for Illegality (γραφὴ παρανóµων), and served to deter the orators who guided the Assembly from reckless proposals infringing the formal safeguards; though often enough the threat was insufficient, and resolutions were passed which had worked their mischief before their illegality had been established. The same kind of indictment was employed where some one had proposed to amend a Law without following the formalities prescribed for that purpose. In this way the Constitution (as we should say), was deemed to be guarded, and that by a sort of judicial proceeding, the people being too jealous of their power to permit any presiding official to arrest their action as illegal, or to entrust to any authority but their own (acting in a judicial capacity) the duty of afterwards declaring it to have been illegal.
Though we know far less than we should like to know of the way debates were conducted in the Assembly, a few things stand out clearly. 1 There were no regularly organized parties. Any citizen could speak, but much of the debating fell to the practised orators whom the people knew and were apt to follow. The rule that every proposition ought to come through the Council was not strictly observed, and as those proposals which were brought from the Council could also be added to or varied, the Assembly's hands were practically free. There was little disorder, though sometimes much excitement, for the audience, which might number more thousands than any hall in London or Washington could well accommodate, and met in the open air (at Athens usually in the early morning), was so well accustomed to the exercise of its functions that we must think of it not as a mob or a mass meeting but rather as a House of Commons or Congress raised to seven or ten times the number of those legislatures. Four regular meetings were held in each Prytany period of thirty-five days, notice being usually given five days beforehand; and special meetings could be summoned in an emergency, sometimes by a trumpet-call. For some few purposes a quorum of 6000 was prescribed. Every one who attended received a sort of ticket or token, on presenting which at the proper office he was (in later days) paid his small attendance fee, payment having been introduced in the fourth century, long after the time of Pericles. Order was kept by the Scythian archers, public slaves or servants acting under the directions of the presidents. 2 We hear of no rules of closure, but large popular assemblies have speedier and more drastic means of curtailing debate. Attendance was chiefly given by those who dwelt in the city, or in the port of Piraeus, and seldom exceeded 5000 out of a possible total of 30,000 to 35,000 adult male citizens. Voting was usually by the holding up of hands, but sometimes by pebbles dropped into urns for the Ayes and the Noes.
Besides passing decrees and carrying on the executive work already described, the Assembly acted also as a Court of Justice to hear an impeachment (εσεἰιςαγγ∊λία) of persons charged with political offences, and could inflict on those whom it condemned fines, or exile, or death, all this without the formalities of a judicial proceeding. 1
There were, however, many details of current business which it could not deal with. These were left to the Council, formed as already described. It was a sort of Committee of the Assembly, as the British Cabinet is a sort of Committee of Parliament. But it was chosen by lot, and thus represented not the ripest wisdom and experience of the Assembly, but its average intelligence, consisting not of leaders, but of rank and file, with no preference for men of ability and influence. It sat in public, and was approachable by every citizen. Besides preparing business to be brought before the Assembly, it exerted a general supervision over the state administration as a whole, and particularly over finance, doing this mainly by committees or commissions appointed from itself for special purposes. Meeting daily, the Council was the constantly working organ of state life, by which the other numerous administrative Boards were kept in touch with one another, so that nothing should be omitted through the default of any one of them. Responsibility for neglect or misfeasance was strictly enforced, even when the error was one of judgment only, not of evil purpose. The Athenians thought they made up for their laxity in some respects by their stringency in others. The Assembly might break its own rules, but that made it none the less harsh towards others who did the like. Greek governments were often unjust and sometimes cruel.
Oddest of all, to modern eyes, of the features of Athenian democracy was the machinery provided for judicial business, and the use made of it for political purposes. The citizens were organized for judicial work in a hody called the Heliaea, which consisted of all who offered themselves to take the judicial oath. Its normal number is given as 6000; that being the number chosen annually for the purposes by the Demes (δῆµoι), local circumscriptions which exercised a sort of self-government in local affairs. Probably no more than 6000 could be found willing to serve, at least in the Demes with an agricultural population living some way from the city. Though the Heliaea might sit as a whole, it usually acted by sections, of which there were ten. They were called Dikasteries, and their members Dikasts, names which I use because the words “juries” and “jurors” would inevitably convey to modern readers the notion of small bodies, whereas these sections were very large. 1 The normal number seems to have been 500, but it was often smaller, perhaps 250 or 200. The lot determined who should sit in each section. To some one of the Dikasteries every case, civil or criminal, was referred. Plaintiff and defendant, accuser and accused, pleaded their cases in person, though they often read aloud the speeches which had been prepared for them by professional advocates. Sometimes a party to a cause was allowed to have the aid of a friend who would follow him and support his cause. The Dikasts were judges of every issue, for the presiding magistrate had no right either to state the law or to sum up on the facts. All was left to the crowd of Dikasts who, being a crowd, were impressionable, quickly excited by appeals to their feelings or prejudices, easily beguiled by plausible misrepresentations. 2 In such conditions, the law came off ill, and the pleader's skill was chiefly directed to handling, or mishandling, the facts. From the vote of the majority of the Dikastery there was no appeal. It not only delivered the verdict but fixed the penalty.
Seriously as these defects injured the course of justice in private suits, they were even more pernicious in their political results. There were not, as in modern countries, regular public prosecutors. Any citizen could indict another for an alleged offence against the State, and that not merely when an official was charged with negligence or other breach of duty, or corruption, or when any person was arraigned for a treasonable plot, or for having led the Assembly into a breach of the Laws or given it bad advice which it had followed. To prosecute became an obvious means not only of injuring a political opponent but of winning distinction for the accuser, and of levying blackmail by the threat of legal proceedings. A class of informers called Sycophants sprang up who made prosecutions their trade, and deterred many good citizens from coming forward to serve the public. Thus the battles of politics were fought out in the law courts almost as often as in the Assembly, the former being scarcely more impartial or circumspect than was the latter. Not only politicians, but almost every wealthy citizen who was worth worrying or harrying lived in perpetual disquiet. 1 He might be at any moment accused of some offence which could not be disproved without labour and anxiety, so it was probably cheaper to buy off the Sycophant than to fight him before the Dikastery. The system was often denounced, but it stood, partly because it was deemed to guarantee the safety of the State both against the predominance of any one man and against secret conspiracies, but also because the Dikasts found occupation and drew emolument from this incessant political as well as private litigation. Their pay, three obols a day, was scanty, but living was cheap, and the work light, suited to elderly men who liked to sun themselves in the city listening to well-turned rhetoric. A citizen drawing pay on most days for his judicial duties, and for his presence in the Assembly at least once a fortnight, had a chance of further pay for some other among the numerous lot-awarded offices, could attend some theatrical performance for which the means of paying were provided him, and received a share, small as it might be, from the silver mines or other source of public revenue. The fear of losing these “stakes in the country “was sufficient — so we are told — to make the orators use the argument that if heavy fines were not imposed on rich defendants so as to replenish the coffers of the State, there would not be enough left to pay the jury fees and Assembly fees of the citizens.
Who worked this machinery of government, legislative and administrative and judicial? Not a Cabinet, for there was none. Not party organizations, for there were no organized parties, but only tendencies which disposed this or that section of the voters to adhere generally to one type of view or follow some particular politician who had gained popularity. One can hardly talk even of political leaders, for though there were always prominent men who figured in debate, these could not count on any assured following among the voters. So far as there was any one centre of authority, it existed in the Assembly, a crowd of four, five, or six thousand persons, not always the same men, for the country dwellers came irregularly, and the more ignorant and irresponsible seaport folk and small tradespeople were apt to give more frequent attendance than did the richer class, who had their private affairs to look after. This grew in course of time as the number of poor citizens increased; and complaints were made that the quality of the Assembly was declining, though it did not sink so low as did that of the Comitia in the last century of the Republic at Rome. The Assembly never, however, became a mob, for it knew how to listen, and those who addressed it were commonly either orators with whom it was familiar, or some few generals whose services or character had won its confidence. Usually it was led by the orators, practised rhetoricians, most of whom held no office, and who devoted themselves to politics, some from ambition, some from public spirit, some in the hope of turning their influence to personal gain. Nowhere perhaps has the power of eloquence been so great as it was in these republics, where the ruling Assembly was full of bright and alert minds, equally susceptible to ingenious arguments and to emotional appeals, with every passion intensified by the contagion of numbers. It was the orators that practically held sway, and that an irresponsible sway, for as they had not the measures like the executive of a modern country, to carry out, they recommended, any blame for the failure of those measures would fall on others. They were Demagogues in the original sense of the word, for they “led the people.” Among the leaders there were great men like Themistocles and Pericles and Demosthenes, honest men like Aristides and Mcias and Phocion, who commanded respect by their talents or character. But many, especially in later days, were demagogues in the sense the word came to acquire, unscrupulous politicians, flattering and cajoling the people for their own selfish ends. Having power, they were often tempted by those who wished to get some benefit from the people. When tempted, they mostly fell. To take a bribe was hardly deemed an offence, unless it was given as payment for treason to the city's interests.