The way the world is going

Is democracy a failure? Is it going to be retained much as it is in the years to come, or is it to be changed almost out of recognition, or cast aside as a hopelessly bad method in human affairs?

Democracy is a word with a remarkable variety of meanings. Here I am using it in its commonest current sense to express government by legislators and administrators appointed by a popular vote, government based on the assumption that ultimately the “people” is sovereign. It involves a denial of all hereditary or class or professional claims to power and privilege except in so far as the sovereign people consents and permits. Even a king is understood to be king by popular consent and not by any right divine. Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its great function, is the election. Thereby power is assigned, and public issues are understood to be decided.

Unless Democracy is thus defined, its meaning will flap away into the wildest contradictions. Leaving out of consideration the very especial and definite meaning it had in the ancient world, it has carried a hundred different sets of implications since the mighty shock of the first French Revolution brought it into free and frequent use. It has stood for human equality against every form of privilege and control, and it has stood for the right of the individual to realize himself to the full against every form of restrictive assumption.

It has stood, therefore, for the extremest socialism and the extremest individualism. And it has stood, with an equal facility, for limitless progress and for a reaction to a peasant life, just as its liberating or its equalitarian side was brought uppermost. Europe has seen social democracy, Christian democracy, even democratic monarchy, shaking hands with every one, and showing baby to all the world. All these paradoxical variants and interpretations I put aside here, and I will not reflect for a moment upon the Democratic Party in the United States. Here I am discussing simply democracy in politics; government and the control of affairs in general by persons elected on a broad or universal franchise.

That sort of democracy is traceable, latent or overlaid, in most parts of Europe throughout history. Switzerland is an old story and democracy muttered close to the surface in seventeenth-century England and Scotland, but it was only with the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century that it became widely prevalent and respected. It was the creed of nineteenth-century liberalism everywhere. Throughout that age the great mother of parliaments at Westminster bred for exportation, like an Ostend rabbit, and legislatures and responsible cabinets sprang up all round the globe from Japan to Brazil. Franchise spread like an epidemic, and has now spread until the nuns in the convents of England and the ladies in Turkish harems are voting. The coloured vote in South Africa has become a very grave question indeed. No doubt this comprehensive democratization of mankind has had many beneficial consequences; it has forced the most inattentive to a temporary attention to the world’s affairs, and it has been the symbol of a new self-respect for women and other enfranchised classes, and for many subject races—but to-day the question whether it is really a permanently good way of doing our collective business is being more and more insistently pressed upon us. Is the world going on that way, or is it seeking for fresh and more satisfactory paths of development? Or, to put it concretely: will general elections and municipal elections or any sort of popular elections be of more than the slightest importance in the affairs of A.D. 2027?

There exists a great variety of indictments of political democracy, but the main, most essential one is that it has produced a special and objectionable type of ruler, the politician, with certain very definable characteristics. The primitive theory of electional democracy was that the great, good, and capable men, statesmen, leaders in affairs, would offer, or be persuaded, to stand for the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, and would be chosen and elected for their known gifts and virtues. But the business of getting elected proved to be susceptible to considerable complication, and demanded almost from the outset something more than conspicuous public services and utility to ensure a candidate’s return. No good for Cincinnatus to stay at his plough; he had to exert himself.

The would-be ruler found it incumbent to divert so much of his time from being good and great to the task of getting himself elected, and he had to bind himself in such close party relationship with others engaged upon the same task, that his individual goodness and greatness speedily became a minor consideration. His interest in what was good for his country and mankind has been, and is, entirely subordinate to what will gain and what will lose votes. Independence of mind, magnanimity and greatness of desire are positive disadvantages for him. And so we find in all the great democratic countries that the direction of affairs has passed into the hands of men who are great merely as politicians, and who are otherwise neither remarkably intelligent, creative, nor noble beings.

They are, indeed, in a great number of cases, conspicuously shifty and ambiguous, strategic, and practically ineffective. Let the reader try to name a single man of really first-class moral and intellectual quality in British, French, American, or German politics to-day. With a sort of baffled dismay we look up to these men we have elected to make the world anew for us, and we see leaders who do not lead and representatives who, at best, impress us as acutely humiliating caricatures of the struggling soul of our race. We realize that the real working out of human destiny is going on, so far as it is going on, beside, independently of, or partially hampered by, our ostensible public life.

In America, France, and Great Britain, for example, where democracy has had the longest run, we see that the democratic method has brought about practically the same situation. A number of politicians have secured the confidence and support of the main groups of prosperous people, who do not want the world changed to any great extent. These politicians of the right and centre form so solid, well-alimented, and effective a constellation that they are generally in power, albeit not always in an electional majority. Naturally these politicians of conservation have the support of all the great selling businesses which advertise in the Press and influence the Press. A second group of politicians appeals, with a feebler Press support, to the less comfortable masses. And while property, which demands no changes, can be of one mind politically, projected remedies for social uneasiness are various, and the discontented are a divided force. Leftism seems everywhere in a majority, for this is a very insecure and unsatisfactory world for the larger half of mankind, but nowhere is it in effective control.

Scarcely represented at all are the creative minds that would educate, reorganize, and push towards an ampler life for our race. Their purposes are difficult to understand and easy to misrepresent, and it suits the needs of the politician of the left far better to excite the voter at a disadvantage by wild promises and by stirring up class resentment—a procedure the politician of the right seeks to counter by the exacerbation of international hatred and suspicion and threats of foreign aggression. So he confuses and deflects popular anger. And a political party that represents wealth is not necessarily a party that represents stability. In a world of such swaying and uncertain values as ours to-day, much of our wealth is adventurous wealth and a heavy mass of business and financial operations are speculative operations dependent on insecurity. If the party of the right does not want things changed to any great extent, it may nevertheless find itself dominated by an active section quite eager to see them very considerably rocked about. No political party in any of the democratic countries of our contemporary world is anything but a resultant of current social and economic with traditional forces. No politician produced by the democratic methods stands for any authentic effort to order matters better. The great democratic countries of our globe are entirely without such political leading at the present time.

Now this is in a phase of the world’s affairs when certain matters of tremendous practical importance press for attention and can be handled only through the political machine. The art of war has come to such a pitch that civilization demands the establishment of war-proof relationships between State and State. No such relationships are forthcoming and there are no signs that any politician anywhere is prepared to risk votes by even seeming to impair the national independence, as such relationships must necessarily do.

The financial and economic life of mankind has become world-wide, and it is suffering a vast demoralization by the universal insecurity in monetary standards. There is no evidence anywhere of democracy’s ability to tackle this difficult and urgent problem. The world needs a common money, or—what is a slightly clumsier form of the same thing—moneys firmly established in relation one to another. It can only get a practically common money through the co-operation of governments. No government on this planet displays the intellectual and moral quality to handle the matter magisterially.

Economic life, too, has ceased to be manageable through comparatively small businesses run as individual adventures. Control of staple products, systematic regulated production and distribution in the case of such commodities as coal are urgently needed. These things extend beyond national limits. The welfare of thousands of people in Italy, for example, depends upon the coal production in France and England. Oil, cotton, wheat—the mention of these words now conjures up thoughts of world-wide operations. Democracy seems incapable of producing politicians competent to direct these big affairs. Private business alone is too chaotic and individualistic to direct them. It is powerful enough to deflect and involve democratic rulers and politicians, but it is not united nor powerful enough to achieve efficient administration nor able to free its creative and productive activities from the destructive raids of mere money-making adventurers. Economically we drift upon a rudderless ship.

Such simple truths are being recognized by a growing multitude of people, and they are felt far more widely than they are clearly recognized. The discontent with elected persons gathers and grows. No politician is any longer a hero to his fellow-countrymen. When Lord Oxford and Lord Birkenhead strike attitudes to remind the world of Gladstone and Palmerston everybody laughs. And the disposition to push aside parliamentary governments spreads daily. Russia has a pretence of representative government entirely and openly controlled by the Communist Party. The Duma, which I visited in January, 1914, and heard debating and dividing and rising to points of order about nothing in the best style, with its Speaker, Opposition, and reporters all complete, has vanished beyond recall. China, after some parliamentary beginnings in Peking, has cast them aside for that remarkable students’ association, the Kuomintang. Italy, in the throes of economic crisis after the war, scrapped and chased away her politicians and gave herself over also to a banded society. Spain has gone back upon parliamentary government. Poland and Hungary have scarcely tried the celebrated mixture before rejecting it. Greece follows on the same lines, and in the new Turkey it is criminal to be in opposition.

We came near to something of the same sort of thing in France last summer, when the rapid fall of the franc so scared the politicians out of their party manœuvres that Herriot, Briand, and Poincaré all took office together. We have the interesting spectacle in France of a country with its party politics largely in suspense. For ten nervous days of general strike it seemed as though Great Britain also might join the comity of nations weary of politicians. For two years Parliament has muddled with the vital question of coal production and done nothing: it has weathered one crisis and learnt nothing from it. The British coal industry goes on, socially and economically wasteful, in scandalous defiance of the Samuel Report and the Sankey Report, and Parliament continues to do nothing. The defeated miners are in the mental state of France in 1871.

Outside of America extraordinarily few people still believe in political democracy at all except as a makeshift to stand in the way of worse things, tyrannies, oligarchies, and the like horrors. Many of those who still believe demand extensive changes of method. A number of us do imagine that democracy might be preserved, as a vastly different and more efficient method of government, if election by proportional representation with the single transferable vote in large constituencies returning many representatives could be substituted for the present bilateral system. Such an electrical method, associated with very much smaller parliamentary bodies, would in practice wipe out the party system, destroy the professional politicians, and hand over the decisive control of things to a body of prominent citizens—whose return would be very largely due to prominence and public confidence won by other than political activities. However, all politicians who have not already arrived at prominence hate the idea, and so, since they constitute the body of political life, there is not the slightest chance of its ever becoming, except perhaps in name and with essential mutilations, the electoral method of any modern state. It can be left out of this present discussion, therefore, and so also can projects for a special Economic Parliament of trade unionists and employers and suchlike collateral developments, or for elections by suddenly and fortuitously appointed jurymen instead of by entire constituencies. Such things can be attained only through political bodies, and though the politician of the existing type can do little or nothing with things when he has them in his hands, he is far too human to let them go out of his hands and legislate himself out of existence in favour of a different kind of ruler altogether—which is the admitted purpose of these novelties.

None of such schemes for making democracy more effective or more truly representative really touches the essential weakness of democracy, which is that the great mass of human beings are not sufficiently intelligent nor sufficiently interested to follow political issues at all. The representative body represents, for nine out of ten of its voters, a vacant mind. At an election the Sovereign People is roused to a temporary sporting interest, and votes according to panic or prejudice. It does not even vote according to its interests, because the ordinary citizen leads so narrow, limited, and purblind a life that he is unable to see—even in such matters as sound money or war—how politics may come home to him.

Every extension of the suffrage in Great Britain has brought in more masses of utterly indifferent people to vote. Half a century ago, when I was a child, the chief English newspapers gave almost verbatim reports of parliamentary debates and political speeches. Such a newspaper would not sell a hundred thousand copies to-day. Now, when every one has a vote, it is almost impossible to tell from the papers every one reads whether Parliament is in session. The more “democratic” democracy has become, the more complete has become its disregard of public affairs.

I put forward these by no means very exhilarating considerations in partial answer to the question with which this paper began. Political democracy is still apparently a going concern in America, least chastened of continents, but elsewhere there seems very little go left in it. And I do not think that we begin yet to realize the significance of those new associations of which Communism and Fascism are the best known types, and the Kuomintang a less thoroughly understood example.

I find the Communist Party a very wonderful and instructive fact in my world. I want to be quite plain here in what I am writing; I have recently produced what I consider a very complete and destructive analysis of Communist dogma, and here, though it may seem egotistical, I am obliged to insist upon that fact. But a severely critical and sceptical attitude towards these doctrines in theory and action is one thing, and participation in the fear, hostility, and insane abuse with which those who hold them are treated, is quite another. Economic and social doctrine apart, I recognize very enviable and admirable qualities in the Communist Party both in Russia and in England. In Russia not one person in fifty is a member of the party; in all Great Britain I doubt if there are three thousand members. In our British way we try to believe that the Communist Party consists of unwashed and extremely bearded ruffians flourishing (God knows why they do it!) bombs. But really it is very largely composed of quite young people who give themselves to an astonishing extent to what they believe to be the social, political, and economic rebirth of the world. They are, the most of them, animated by an intense, essentially religious passion. They toil mentally and make great sacrifices. They shape their lives to fit their faith. They study with an immense devotion what my critical conscience compels me to describe as dull, dogmatic, and misleading literature. They co-operate with one another with a remarkably willing discipline. “Religious” is the only word I know to describe their enthusiasm, and there is not a religious teacher in the world who would not gladly inoculate the youth of his congregation with the courage, spirit, and energy these Communists display—if he could get it separated from the mind and spirit of Marx. There they are, a numerically quite small organization. And they hold Russia against all comers with the acquiescence of the general population. They stand up to quite lively persecutions in most Western countries. They go to prison and even, in some Eastern countries, to death very courageously.

And if you are loth to hear so much good of the Communist Party, perhaps the Fascists are more to your taste. I have already criticized them for stupidity, brutality, cruelty, injustice, and so forth. I have no respect for their idol, Mussolini. But there, too, in bands of no very considerable multitude, is a devotion and a spirit that can give over a great country into their hands.

I want to suggest that we may be only in the opening phase of this sort of political religiosity, both on the left side and on the right side, and that in its development lies the answer to the question of what is to come after democracy. There is an immense fund of unsatisfied seriousness in the young people of our Western communities to-day, and not only in the young. These movements of Communism and Fascism may be mere first attempts of that unsatisfied seriousness to make a new world out of our present disorders. What is called the decay of faith and the discrediting and fading of many old loyalties have not destroyed the serious type; they have merely let it loose for new experiments. These experiments seem to show already quite new possibilities of concentrated directive power. If once we get control of our present obsession about votes, we may discover that it is not necessary to convert a majority of the “electorate” before a new world begins.

20 March, 1927.