LI
THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS
23.8.24
The other day I was discussing the political outlook in Great Britain with a very close and shrewd observer of political motives. I live very much in a dream of a saner world and he lives in active reaction to the passing hour, but we both knew most of the leading figures in public affairs and we were surveying the present extraordinary fragmentation of parties in Parliament—for even the Labour Party now is hardly on speaking terms with itself and has nothing but office to hold it together. His thoughts ran much more on personalities than mine did. Was Mr. Asquith played out? Would Lloyd George “come back”? What was the future of Lord Birkenhead? Would Mr. Baldwin ever be brighter and better? Was Mr. Masterman the resuscitated hope of the Liberal Party? Was there anyone of any promise at all in the Labour Party? And so on.
Unlike my friend, I do not go about culling incompatible posies of politicians. I have no interest in gathering together a marketable bunch. The failure of party government, the dissolution of all British parties, cheers and pleases me. Great Britain, I said, would have to lead the way to a new stage of democratic government and get itself a Legislature of a more manageable size, elected by Proportional Representation.
“They won’t,” said my friend, meaning by “they” our bright-eyed millions of voters. “They can’t grasp ideas like that—new, difficult ideas. It takes ten minutes’ attention to understand Proportional Representation. You can’t go to the country with a thing like that.”
“But unless we get a more efficient Legislature, how can we tackle our difficulties with money, with Europe, with India?”
“We don’t tackle difficulties,” said my friend; “Parliaments can’t.”
“Most of the Labour Party promised to support Proportional Representation at the last election.”
“And ran away from it. There was a tuppenny-ha’penny advantage in cheating on that, so of course they cheated. They’ll run away from everything except office. They’re just a lot of poor things who’ve spent too much money on Court clothes and in dressing up their wives and daughters fit and proper for the Garden Parties, and they want to get the wear out of it all before they go back into the shadows. Nobody in Parliament who isn’t conspicuous is going to let Parliament be altered so that it excludes second-rate people. It’s against nature. You might as soon expect Congress to scrap the American Constitution. You’ll never live to see a General Election in England or America that isn’t fought on thoroughly silly lines—on the old electoral method.”
“But think of the tasks that lie before the world!”
“What’s the good of thinking of them?” asked my friend. “It only worries you.”
“There has to be an organisation of international affairs to prevent war, there has to be disarmament with security, world transport at standard charges, the re-establishment of a workable world currency, the development of education throughout the world——”
“Things like that aren’t going to be done by Parliament,” said my friend. “They may be done behind the backs of the politicians—if there are interests and intelligences big enough to want them and organise them, but——Have you ever met the average voter?”
“I know, I suppose, as many people as you do.”
“But your head’s in the clouds....”
My friend paused, and then remarked with malignant satisfaction, “The next big question for England is Prohibition.”
“But it’s such a secondary matter!”
“Exactly. That’s why it’s going to be primary. It’s trivial enough for a democracy to be really earnest about it. Take international settlements and war possibilities; these are infinitely more important things, I grant you. But what does the average voter know about them? There are possibilities of enslavement, of blood and death, of millions of the silly rabbits being scared and starved and mutilated and killed in international conflicts. But these voters of yours can’t grasp the complexity of that. They want peace, of course, but they don’t know what makes peace. So everybody puts peace on the party platform, peace and the League of Nations, or peace and conscription, ‘be prepared,’ or peace and isolation, peace and the dear old flag. It doesn’t matter. The poor mutts can’t grasp it at all. Talk of that kind of thing, argument about that kind of thing, only confuses and wearies them. It doesn’t count in politics. And then there’s currency and finance. Even the bankers don’t understand that—and most of them don’t want to. Prices go up and down and credit expands and contracts and the rabbits get suddenly well off and full of conceit, or they get out-of-work and starved and driven to suicide, but it’s all quite beyond them how it happens, and it gives them a headache and a vicious temper even to try to understand. Obviously they don’t know and obviously therefore they ought to be concerned for knowledge, but what is obvious to you or me isn’t obvious to them. What is the vote-catching value of spending money on scientific and social and political research? What is the vote-catching value of raising the school age to sixteen? That only makes the grown-up voter jealous of the next generation.
“But Prohibition, shutting the public-house round the corner, every man and woman understands that, and the women will vote for it anyhow, blind to every other consideration. That is something they can understand, and the peace of the world, the volume of trade, and economic justice may go hang so long as son and husband can be shut and barred from the drink. Interference with the personal habits of other people is innate in women; they acquire it as sisters, wives, and mothers. The enfranchisement of women was the last step in the devotion of democracy to futility. It ended the last possibilities of constructive legislation and inaugurated the age of restraint.”
He went on to sketch the growth of the Prohibition movement in England; the drift of politicians towards a defined attitude in the matter; the way in which the question could be used to thrust aside wider and more abstract issues. “Watch the speeches of Lloyd George,” he said. “Watch the speeches of the pushing young men. They are nearer to it than you are. They know.” So-and-so said this yesterday, and So-and-so said that last week.
He produced an effect of being detestably right about his facts. He said that making Prohibition a part of the American Constitution was the silliest thing in history; one might hold the extremest temperance views and still understand that a matter of personal health and conduct should have no part in the fundamental laws of a State. But the American citizen had lost any idea of what a constitution was. Presently the American woman might put a morning bath in the constitution, or the weekly weighing of babies or the universal use of tooth-brushes. Or they might require every married man and woman to carry his or her marriage lines conspicuously displayed upon the person, like the bright little licence on an English motor-car. These were the things they held important. England was going the same way, following a few years behind America, because it was a country of more deeply established disciplines and diffidences, but I might rest assured it would get to the same end. In twenty years’ time there would be no politics left in Parliament but the politics of scandal and minor moralities, and the big things of human life would be managed in some other fashion.
Thus my friend, and I found it very difficult to gainsay him.