CHAPTER II

THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF PURELY DEMOCRATIC ACTION, OR THE ACTION OF AVERAGE MEN IN CO-OPERATION.

The great-man theory as held by the conventional historian, and expressed by Carlyle and others in those vehement formulas which have so justly excited the ridicule of Mr. Herbert Spencer, errs not because it emphasises the fact that the great man is the sole cause of progress in the sense that no progress could have taken place without him, but because it ignores the fact that the ordinary men of his time, being the tools with which he works, or the instrument on which he plays, the result is conditioned not only by his capacities, but by theirs; just as the kind of music that can be produced by a pianist is determined not only by his own skill, but by the character of the piano also. Writers like Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, and with him the whole school of socialists, impressed by the obvious fact that the many do something, never pause to inquire what they do, or how much they do, or how little, but rush to the conclusion that {216} the many do everything. This conclusion is even more meaningless than the doctrine which it is intended to contradict. The many do something, and they do what is of extreme importance; but its importance is strictly limited, and is indeed only intelligible through its limitations, just as the character of a profile is intelligible only through its outlines. The object, therefore, of the sociological inquirer must be to discover precisely what these limitations are. The methods by which the discovery is to be made have been already indicated. Let us now go on to apply them. They are of two kinds. One consists of an examination of what, in any domain of activity, the many would produce, if the influence of the few were absent. The other consists in an examination of the kind of faculties which the production of such or such a result implies. If these faculties are common to all, we say the result is produced by the many; if the faculties are rare, we say it is produced by the few.

The practical validity of both these kinds of reasoning is shown by the following imaginary, but not impossible case. A hundred Russian workmen, all of them loyal to the Czar, are employed by a citizen of Moscow to enlarge a subterranean cellar, and another hundred are employed to fill it with heavy wine-cases. A week after the work is completed the Czar is driving outside, and, as he passes the citizen’s house, is killed by an explosion from below. The so-called cellar was a mine, the wine-cases were filled with dynamite. Now if all {217} those who were concerned in the production of this catastrophe were tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played by the workmen would be sharply separated from that played by the man employing them; and that, though they no doubt would have contributed something to the result, they would have contributed nothing to its essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that if the designed and attained result had been not criminal, but beneficent, the elements in it that made it glorious would be the product of the man who planned and intended it, and not of the workmen who blindly obeyed his orders, neither knowing nor caring what the result would be. Let us take another case of a somewhat different character. When a spontaneous cheer bursts from a thousand people, the volume of sound is obviously the unadulterated product of the many. On the other hand, when a thousand people with ordinarily good voices are so trained and organised as to sing a chorus out of _Israel in Egypt_, the peculiar qualities which render the sounds produced by them valuable, obviously imply the existence of the musical genius of Handel, or in other words, faculties which belong to hardly one man in a million, and are thus the product not of the many, but of one.

And now let us turn to the actual facts of life, and the kinds of activity on which progress and civilisation depend, and let us apply our two analytical methods to these. It is needless to repeat, after what has been said in a previous chapter, that it is {218} impossible, in a case like this, to examine social activity as a whole. Such activity is of various kinds, and each must be dealt with separately. Let us begin, then, with two—the activity of economic production, and the activity which results in the growth of speculative knowledge. The first affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering what it would shrink to were the influence of the few absent. The second affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering the nature of the faculties which the production of the result implies.

To begin with production, then, let us take the case of the United Kingdom, and consider the amount per head that was annually produced by the population a hundred years ago. This amount was about £14. At the present time it is something like £35, and the purchasing power of money has so increased with the cheapening of commodities, that the excess of the latter sum over the former is far greater than it seems. Now, if we attribute the entire production of this country, at the close of the last century, to common or average labour (which is plainly an absurd concession), we shall gain some idea of what the utmost limits of the independent productivity of the ordinary man are; for the ordinary man’s talents as a producer, when directed by nobody but himself, have, as has been said already, not appreciably increased in the course of two thousand years, and have certainly not increased {219} within the past three generations. The only thing that has increased has been the concentration on the ordinary man’s productive talents of the productive talents of the exceptional man. The talents of the exceptional man, in fact, have been the only variant in the problem; and, accordingly, the minimum which these talents produce is the total difference between £14 and £35. This sum is no mere piece of fanciful ingenuity. Parts of it are being done daily before our eyes, and its practical character is being shown in the most conclusive manner, when the profits of a business decline on the death of some head or partner, or when some declining town is restored to its old prosperity by some man of industrial genius, who starts in it some new manufacture.

And now let us pass from industrial activity to intellectual, and apply to this our second method of analysis. Of purely intellectual results, or, as Mill calls them, “_advances in speculative knowledge_,” the most striking examples are to be found in the mathematical sciences. To the advances made in these it is not only certain but obvious, that the many have contributed nothing, because even of that section of mankind which has some mathematical aptitude the majority are unable even to appreciate them completely when they are made; much less do they possess the powers to make them. No one would contend that the books of Euclid are the result of the faculties possessed by every average school-boy, or of the kind of man into which the average school-boy grows. We may indeed dismiss {220} purely intellectual progress as the domain in which the efficiency of the many stands absolutely at zero.

Let us pass now to the domain of political government, and consider to what extent the faculties of the many, as distinct from those of the few, are capable of operating there. This inquiry resolves itself mainly into the question of how much the many can do to direct the activity of the few, the activity of the few being presupposed; but it will be well to consider first how much, if anything, the many can accomplish, or the faculties of ordinary men can accomplish, without any assistance from exceptional faculties whatsoever. In the domain of politics, which is here meant to include all organised action of a public and political character, as well as the making and the administration of laws, the only positive functions or actions which can be performed by the co-operation of the average faculties of men, or by absolute and unadulterated democracy, are very simple destructive actions and the formulation of, and the insistence on, very simple demands. Of the destructive actions referred to we shall find an excellent example in the lynching of a negro who has outraged some white American girl, or in such an act as the burning of the Tuileries by the communists. In each of these actions the feelings of those who take part in it are as nearly as possible identical. In the first, all of the men are equal in their sense of righteous indignation; in the second, they are all equal in their feeling of blind rebellion; and no special skill is in either case {221} required by any one of them. It is true that even in such cases as these there will most probably be leaders, of some sort, but they will be leaders by accident, and the others will be their comrades rather than their subordinates. Of the simple demands which the many can formulate and insist upon unaided, we may take as an example a demand for the abolition of a tax which distresses in an obvious way multitudes of men equally; or a demand for the continuance of a war, in which the issues at stake are sufficiently apparent to anybody who can read a newspaper. The protest against the tax by the multitudes of men whom it harasses, and the national demand, when it arises, for the continuance of such a war, are phenomena which are absolutely democratic. They are each the sum of a number of spontaneous feelings and reasonings. They do not require any leader to stimulate them; and all who contribute to their force do so in an equal degree.

But the moment we come to cases of any complexity the situation changes. If the negro’s guilt could be established only by inference, the lynchers would have to be convinced of it by some clever advocate. If the lynching itself were a matter of extreme difficulty, the lynchers would require to be commanded by the boldest and shrewdest of their number. If the tax protested against were indirect, if its injurious effects were hard to detect and realise, and if it were capable of being represented as less injurious than any other, men of exceptional {222} activity and exceptional sharpness would be required to rouse the sufferers to a perception of what caused their suffering. In other words, democracy, the many, or the faculties possessed by the many, are incapable of initiation in any complex matter, or of carrying out any course of complex action when initiated; and we may sum up the case by saying that all corporate action in politics is less and less purely democratic in proportion as the questions dealt with are less and less simple.

Now, as a matter of fact, in any civilised country the majority of the measures which the Government has to devise and carry out, however simple in appearance, are very far from simple in reality. Even when their details are few, the good or the bad effects of them are certain to depend on a great variety of circumstances, with regard to which ordinary faculties can form no independent judgment; and if ordinary men are to express any judgment on such measures at all which is not put into their mouths by others and then uttered by rote, these measures must be placed before them by talented interpreters and advocates, who will reduce the details to a real or apparent simplicity and invest their alleged results with charm and an air of certainty.† Accordingly, when we approach the {223} question from the point of view of the many, we do nothing but arrive at the same conclusion to which we were brought when we approached it from the point of view of the few. We arrive, that is to say, at the conclusion that, if we mean by government the devising, the passing, and the administration of this and of that measure, the genuine power of the many, even under the most popular constitution, becomes less and less in proportion as the greatness and the civilisation of the country increase. The voice of the many is heard as loudly as ever; but what guides the voice is not the personality that seems to utter it. What guides it is a handful of men, exceptionally active, though not always exceptionally wise. The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

† This truth is strikingly illustrated by the history of the Home Rule agitation in Ireland. Whether Home Rule would be advantageous for the British Empire or for Ireland is a very complicated question, and the demand for it consequently never became genuinely popular until it was identified with the simplest of all aspirations—the non-payment of rent.

And here before pursuing the subject farther let us look back for a moment, and consider the point in our argument at which we have now arrived. We have seen, then, that in the domain of modern industrial activity the many, if we estimate the total produced in terms of value, produce only an insignificant portion of the total. We have seen that in the domain of intellectual and speculative progress the many literally produce or achieve nothing. We have seen that in the devising and administration of governmental measures the many are powerful in proportion as the issues are exceptionally simple—that is to say, in proportion as they are few and far between.

Now the reader may think that this brings us to {224} the end of our inquiry; but it only brings us to the beginning of what is really the important part of it. For though these conclusions, so far as they go, are absolutely true, they by no means dispose of the whole question which is before us, nor do they really reduce the social power of the many to such small dimensions as they at first sight seem to do. Thus speculative knowledge, though the many contribute nothing to its progress, itself contributes nothing to progress until the many are affected by it, and respond somehow to its stimulus; economic production, when regarded merely as an affair of quantity or as an accumulation of values—a process in which the part played by the many is humble—does not represent that process in its true social entirety; nor is civil government wholly an affair of measures which are devised, discussed, amended, demanded, opposed, carried, or rejected from year to year. We shall find, accordingly, that, in spite of what has just been said, there is room in social life for the operation of the genuine will of the many—of pure, spontaneous, and unadulterated democracy. We shall find that the power of this will, though it is in certain directions incalculably less than it is at present generally believed to be, is paramount in domains where its action is not generally recognised at all; and the nature of its action here will throw a remarkable light on the nature of all action which is in a true sense democratic. Of the domains of activity here referred to, the most important are those of religion and family life. {225}

Every religion, regarded as a body of doctrines and observances, with the special habits of mind and dispositions of the heart which are appropriate to them, which has ever influenced great masses of mankind, is mainly a result of pure democratic action. It is true that in the establishment of the great religions of the world another agency has played a great part also. In no other sphere has the influence of great individuals been so vast and so far-reaching as in this. The mere mention of such personages as Christ, Buddha, and Mahomet will make us realise that such is the case; and to these we may add the missionaries, saints, and theologians who have spread and explained the respective gospels entrusted to them, and given by their saintly lives examples of the value of their teaching. But whilst nowhere is the power of the few—of the very few—more conspicuous than in the domain of religion, nowhere is the power of the many more conspicuous also. No religion has ever grown, become established, and influenced the lives of men unless its doctrines and its spirit have appealed to those wants of the heart and soul which have been shared, to a degree approximately equal, by all members of the communities, nations, or races amongst whom the religion in question has become established.

The truth of this statement is not in the least invalidated if we apply it to a religion which we assume to have been supernaturally revealed. Indeed, the clearest example of its truth may be found in the phenomenon of Christianity. Whether we {226} attribute the doctrines of Christianity to a natural or a supernatural source, it will be equally plain in either case that they have found acceptance amongst men because there was something inherent in the nature of each individual Christian which naturally responded to them. Even the staunchest Protestant who takes his stand most exclusively on the Bible will be unable to deny that Protestant Christianity, as it exists, represents not merely an assent to a number of bare propositions uttered by Christ, or made with regard to Him by His disciples, but also the subjective interpretation given to these by each believer as he assents to them. Thus the doctrine of the Atonement would never have been accepted by men, it would never even have conveyed any meaning to them, if there had not been something in their nature corresponding to a sense of sin; and the universal effect which, for a time at least, this doctrine had on all the Western nations and on all classes alike, showed that this something which corresponded with the sense of sin was one of those characteristics in which all men were approximately equal, and that the acceptance of the doctrine was therefore a true act of democracy.

But the clearest illustration of the truth thus insisted on is to be found, not amongst the varying and conflicting doctrines of Protestantism, which represent theoretically the direct result of the revealed truths of the Bible on each believer individually, but in Christianity as represented by the Church of Rome. According to ordinary Protestant opinion, {227} the doctrines of the Church of Rome represent a structure built up by the misguided ingenuity of priests, and imposed by them on a credulous and passive laity; but so far, at all events, as the more important doctrines are concerned, the very reverse is the case really. It has been the world of ordinary believers that has imposed its beliefs on the priests; not the priests that have imposed them on the world of ordinary believers. Let us take, for instance, the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, or the beliefs implied in the _cultus_ of the Virgin Mary. That the sacramental elements were actually the body and blood of Christ, that the Redeemer who died on the cross for each individual sinner entered under the form of these elements into each sinner’s body—entered bearing the stripes on it by which the sinner was healed, and mixing with the sinner’s blood the divine blood that had been shed for him—this was the belief of the common unlettered communicant long before priests and theologians had, by the aid of Aristotle, explained the assumed miracle as a process of transubstantiation; and longer still before their philosophic explanation was, by the ratification of any general Council, given its place amongst the definite teachings of the Church. Similarly, the devotion to the Virgin Mary first sprang up amongst the mass of believers naturally, because the idea of God’s mother, with all her motherly love, with all her virgin purity, and with all her human sorrows allied so closely to omnipotence, touched countless hearts {228} in a way which was in all cases practically similar; just as the offer of a helping hand would make a similar appeal to each one of a multitude of men drowning. The official teaching of the Church with regard to the Virgin’s sinlessness, and the degree of worship which is her due, has been the work, no doubt, of the few, not of the many—of priests, of theologians, of Councils, of the spiritual aristocracy; but the doctrines which they have thus defined have been no more fabricated by themselves than the wines, good or bad, which a peasantry have made for centuries, are made by the chemist of to-day, who at last undertakes to analyse them.

It has been said that the part which democracy plays in the development of religion is shown us by the Church of Rome with greater distinctness than it is by any other great communion of believers; and the reason is that no other great communion of believers shows us with so much precision the part played by an aristocracy, and thus leaves the part played by democracy with so sharply defined a frontier. The Roman Church alone is in possession of a complete machinery by which all the pious opinions of the whole body of its members—the opinions which have spontaneously shaped themselves in the minds of innumerable Christians as the result of a multitude of independent spiritual experiences, and which, when sufficiently manifested, have been studied by various theologians, and reduced by them to logical and coherent forms—shall be finally submitted to one great representative {229} Council. This Council considers how far they are consistent with doctrines already defined, and with one another, and how far, explicitly or implicitly, there is any warrant for them in the Scriptures. It ends with rejecting some, whilst others are reconciled and affirmed by it; and then these last are added to the authoritative teachings of the Church. But the Council, with the Pope included in it, is nothing more than a lens by which the rays originating in the democracy of the faithful are focalised and made to transmit a clear and coherent picture; and the Roman Catholic religion, regarded as a body of doctrines which have actually influenced the spiritual lives of men, is a magnified picture, projected, as it were, upon the sky, of those secret but common elements of the human mind and heart, in virtue of which all men are supposed to be equal before God, and which unite the faithful into one class, instead of graduating them into many.

This analysis of what may be called the natural history of Catholicism may be thought, perhaps, to have little appreciable connection with those social or sociological problems which at present agitate the world, and give to the theory of democracy its main practical interest. But neither Catholicism nor religion at large has been referred to here for its own sake. They have been referred to because the case of religion affords a singularly clear illustration of the essential nature of democratic action generally, because it helps us to understand that action in the affairs of ordinary life, and {230} because it shows us very vividly how democracy, as a political power, operates outside the domain to which it is popularly supposed to be confined.†

† The political power of the religious beliefs of a community can be seen at a glance when we consider our own government of India. Our government there, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a government of the few, not a government of the many; and yet the religion or religions of the many impose limitations on our legislators as stringent as any that could be imposed on them by any number of formal mandates.

And now let us turn again to a nation’s family life, and consider it in the light which the case of Catholicism throws on the question of what, essentially, democratic action is. The religious life of a Catholic is meritorious only when the beliefs and dispositions of heart which his religion requires of him are spontaneous. No doubt they may have been developed in him by some stimulus from without, but it is essential that, when once present in him, they should draw their life from himself. A saint may rouse a sinner to repentance, but the repentance in its minutest details must be the sinner’s own work. He must be his own overseer, he must be his own taskmaster. In economic production this is not so. A bricklayer may contribute to the building of some exquisite cathedral without any sympathy with the architect’s intentions, and indeed without any knowledge of them; but a man cannot be a true Christian unless Christ’s will becomes his, and unless the beliefs suggested from without are seized on by his own soul, and made a part of himself by his soul’s {231} spontaneous workings. Thus the common religious opinions of the mass of devout Catholics are, theoretically at all events, the sum of a number of independent opinions, which agree because they result from a number of similar but independent experiences. Here we have the essence of democratic action—namely, a natural coincidence of conclusions, which happen to be identical, not because those who hold them have allowed their thinking to be done for them by the same thinkers, but because with regard to the points in question they naturally themselves think and feel identically.

Now the home or family lives of the citizens of any race or nation owe their points of identity to essentially the same causes. They result from propensities in a vast multitude of men which, although they are similar, are independent. The structure of the family differs amongst different races. Amongst some it is based on polygamy; amongst others on monogamy; but no matter what its details in either case may be, the government, however autocratic, accommodates itself to the family life of the people; not the family life of the people to the laws and the dictation of the government. It will be enough to confine ourselves to the Western or progressive races, amongst whom family life has its basis in monogamy. Advocates of socialism often distinctly say, and the principles of socialism beyond all doubt require, that the family, as now existing, shall be practically broken up; and that whilst the union of the parents is {232} made terminable with an ease unapproached at present, the multiplication of children shall be regulated by State authority, and that the children themselves shall be reared by the State rather than by the parents. For both these arrangements there are many obvious arguments, which are from the point of view of the socialist quite unanswerable. If the State binds itself to provide for all the children that are born, it is bound to claim some control over the number of them that shall be thrown on its hands. If the State is to be the sole employer and sole director of labour, it must settle the number of children that shall be educated for each branch of industry. If the solidarity of feeling requisite to make socialism possible is ever to be obtained, it can be obtained only by fusing into one those family groups now so obstinately separate. But here the socialists encounter one of their great stumbling-blocks.‡ In theory the advocates of the extremest and most complete democracy, they are baffled by the habits and character of the very masses to whom they address themselves. There may be unhappy homes, and there may be unnatural parents, but the masses, as a whole, will not listen to any proposal for invading the privacy of the home or for tampering with the parental tie. Any average {233} mother would, when it came to the point, tear out the eyes of any socialist legislator who, under pretext of increasing her weekly wages, should seriously attempt to snatch her children out of her arms. Similar resistance would be offered to any attempt to modify, beyond certain limits, the institution of marriage, or to interfere in any way with the habits of a people’s home life. These habits give rise to legislation by the few, but they do not originate in it. The legislation of the few, on the contrary, has so to shape itself as to protect those modes of life and institutions which these habits naturally produce; and the laws that do this, no matter who devises and administers them, come into being under genuinely democratic dictation. It is a genuinely democratic power which maintains them unaltered, or imposes its own limits on any modification of them which may be made.

‡ The Italian socialist, Giovanni Rossi, who attempted in 1890 to found a socialistic colony in Brazil (an attempt which completely failed), attributes his failure largely to the tenacity with which his followers clung to family life. “If I had the power,” he writes, “to banish the greatest afflictions of this word, plagues, wars, famines, etc. etc., I would renounce it, if instead I could suppress the family.”

The effects, however, of the natural similarities of men’s family lives are not to be found only in the domain of laws and government. They confront us even more openly in the material surroundings of our existence, especially in the structure of the dwellings of all classes except the lowest. The detached cottage as well as the large mansion, the row of cottages each with its separate door, and the tenement of three rooms, are in one respect all alike. They are constructed and arranged in accordance with those propensities which keep the members of the family group united, and each family group separate from all others. Nor do matters end here; {234} for if the propensities which result in family life affect the structure of the dwelling, other tastes or propensities equally spontaneous determine what commodities shall be put in it. It is true that these tastes are different in different social classes; it is true also that they have not, so far as their details are concerned, as deep a root in our nature as the propensities which give its character to the family. They are stimulated, sustained, and modified by constant suggestions from without, by circumstances, and by tastes which, within limits, vary greatly; but they are all alike in this, that when they become efficient, or, in other words, take definite shape as a want, the want has become a part of the man who feels it, and is for the time as spontaneous as are the family instincts themselves.

The influence, however, of men’s spontaneous wants is not confined to the house and household appliances, but extends itself over the whole domain of economic products. And here we are brought back again to another portion of the ground which we have already traversed. We are brought back to the domain of economic production; but brought back with eyes opened to a new order of facts.

Now before we proceed to a consideration of these, let us recapitulate what has been said with regard to this subject already. The main fact which was dwelt upon in our previous examination of it was the fact that in wealth-production all but the earlier advances are due, both in their achievement and their maintenance, to the few, {235} and to the few alone. The practical validity of this reasoning has been shown in the preceding chapter, and defended against the common objections sure to be brought against it; and just now it was reinforced incidentally when we were considering the influence of the many on the doctrines of the Church of Rome; for whilst the essentially democratic origin of these doctrines was insisted on, it was shown that the religion of the Catholic democracy could have no organic growth, no definition nor cohesion without the aristocracy of theologians and the machinery of popes and councils. It was further pointed out that if even in the development of religion the many are dependent on the exceptional powers of the few, in the process of economic production they are incalculably more dependent. For whilst Catholicism represents the ideas of the multitude, analysed, perfected, and carried out by the few, advanced economic production, such as the production of a beautiful cathedral, represents the ideas of the few carried out in partial or complete ignorance by the multitude.

Attention must now be called to certain further facts which constitute the final evidence of the truth of the same conclusions.

The facts now referred to are those of contemporary trade unionism. These are supposed by many of the trade unionists and their sympathisers to show the growth of democratic power in the domain of production generally. What they do in reality is to exhibit its essential limitations. They {236} show this in a way which is hidden from the careless thinker by a curiously inaccurate and misleading use of language. Trade unionism is constantly described as the organisation of Labour. In reality it is nothing of the kind. It is an organisation of labourers; and that, as we shall see, is a totally different thing; for where labourers are spoken of under the collective name of Labour, they are so spoken of with special and exclusive reference to the phenomena which they manifest when actually exerting themselves in production. Were the same men organised for some ethical or religious purpose, they would be spoken of not as Labour, but as the National or Popular Conscience. The organisation of Labour is the setting men to perform a large variety of correlated productive tasks, and prescribing to each man what his own task shall be. But the organisation of labourers that has been brought about by trade unionism is of a precisely opposite kind, and has a precisely opposite end. Its end is not production, but the cessation of production; not the prescribing, the devising, and the allotting of tasks, but the taking men away from them. In a word, it is the organisation not of production, but of obstruction; nor does the fact that the trade unions have succeeded in organising the latter give so much as a hint that they would be able to organise the former. Even if they could do so, it would be the leaders, not the men, that performed the feat—a new race of employers separating themselves from the body of the employed; and this fact is oddly enough acknowledged {237} by the very men who are apparently most blind to it. For one of the arguments most frequently used to show the practicability of industrial democracy is based on the unusual ability manifested by the officials of the trade unions in managing strikes and great demonstrations of strikers. Must not these men, it is asked, have very exceptional capacities who can gather together their thousands at the shortest possible notice, and march them into Hyde Park through the crowded thoroughfares of London? And it is perfectly true that many of the trade union leaders are, in their own way, men with remarkable and exceptional characteristics. But, in the first place, the more that their admirers magnify them, the more do they detract from the democratic character of trade unionism; and in the second place, if a man is necessarily exceptional because he can so far organise some thousands of men as to march them occasionally into an enclosure where they walk about sucking oranges, how much more exceptional must be the abilities that can organise similar men, day after day, for the performance of the most intricately adjusted tasks, in such a way that their efforts shall result in an Atlantic liner! Trade unionism, then, whatever the ability of its leaders, does not represent democratic action in the actual process of economic production at all; and instead of pointing to any development of such action in the future, merely helps to show us that no such development is to be looked for.

Such being the case, then, the facts that now {238} claim our attention will, when they are first stated, wear an appearance of paradox; for though the power of democracy, in the advanced processes of production, is smaller than it is in any other kind of social activity, abstract thought and discovery alone excepted, yet it exercises an influence on production none the less, which is as purely democratic in character and as far-reaching in its consequences as that which it has ever exercised over the doctrines of any religion.

For what is the object of production? It is the satisfaction of human wants, which begin as needs, and gradually develop into tastes. The multiplication of these needs, together with the satisfaction of them, is what civilisation means; and though material wealth may increase, as it does in many new countries, without any concurrent development of civilisation in its higher forms, civilisation in its higher forms cannot increase, and certainly cannot diffuse itself throughout the community at large, without a development in the means of material production. Books, for example, though they are vehicles of mental culture, are themselves economic commodities, and depend for their accessibility to the public on the same kind of industrial agencies as do cotton, sugar, tobacco, and that comforter of the nations—alcohol. Refinement of taste and feeling, again, is largely diffused by pictures; but the accessibility of any great picture to the vast majority of any nation depends on the industrial processes by which it can be cheaply and faithfully {239} reproduced—processes which have only of late years reached any sort of perfection.

But all the industrial ingenuity that great men have ever possessed would be absolutely futile unless the commodities they were employed in producing, or the services they were employed in rendering, satisfied tastes and wants existing in various sections of the community. The eliciting of these wants, or the development of these tastes, depends often on the previous supply of the products or services that minister to them. Thus the introduction of railways, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the electric light, preceded any popular demand for them; and many a great writer, according to the well-known saying, has to create the taste by which he is to be appreciated. But he could not create the taste, or, in other words, make it actual, unless it existed already in human nature as a potentiality, any more than the producers of electric light could make the general public anxious to have it in their houses if mankind at large entertained no wish whatever to do anything but sleep between the hours of sunset and sunrise. The wants and tastes, then, to which all production ministers, whether common to all men, like the desire for food, or developed by influences from without, like the desire for telegraphic accommodation, are, when once they are in existence, essentially democratic in their nature. They are not like the movements of a mason, who constructs under an architect’s order a cathedral with the design of which he has nothing at {240} all to do. They represent the uncontrolled promptings of the individual’s own nature, and they affect production, and dictate to the producers what they shall produce, because they represent a spontaneous similarity of taste amongst a multitude of individuals living under similar circumstances. Here we have the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory facts, that the power of the many over production is at once paramount and small.

Economic demand, though it owes most of its development to the few, is yet, when its development has taken place, fundamentally democratic in its nature. But, on the other hand, economic supply, which not only ministers to existing wants, but elicits new ones, tends ever more and more as civilisation advances to depend on the action of the few. For as wants increase there is required, in order to satisfy them, a growing elaboration in the methods and organisation of supply; and in proportion as supply becomes more and more elaborately organised, it becomes, from the necessities of the case, less and less democratic. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the only rich _supplying_ class consisted of merchants, because the exchange of commodities, and the bringing them in the required quantities to the proper markets, was a process more complicated than the orginal processes of producing them. Production has now become quite as complicated as commerce; and a manufacturing aristocracy has developed itself equal in wealth to the commercial. {241}

But though supply thus depends on the domination of the few, and rises and falls with the ability with which that domination is exercised, it is itself at the same time under the domination of the many. Some industrial genius may make a colossal fortune by directing the labour of some thousands of men to the production (let us say) of a new species of beer; but his enterprise will succeed only because millions of men like the beer, and demand it under the direction of their own taste alone. The tastes of the many, of course, exhibit many varieties. Where a million men demand beer, another million will demand whisky; and there are many commodities, such as guns, golf balls, and cricket bats, the demand for which is confined to comparatively small classes. But the point here insisted on is, not that every member of the community demands the same commodities, but that whatever commodities are demanded, are demanded in each case in accordance with the spontaneous wishes of individuals, and that the total force of the demand is the cumulative result of a number of actions and desires which happen to be spontaneously similar. The commodities supplied to them have, in other words, to be accommodated to a genuinely democratic order; and if the consuming democracy does not consider them suitable, it virtually, by refusing to buy them, condemns them to be destroyed. Thus if we direct our attention to consumption, the few—the directors of industry—are the servants of the many; though if we direct {242} our attention, as we did previously, to production, the many, in the capacity of workers, are the servants or subjects of the few.

And now let us turn back to the domain of politics. We shall find that we do so possessed of a new clue to the true nature and extent of the powers of the many there. For we shall find that in civil government, just as in economic production, the process involved is a process of supply and demand; and that whilst there is a certain kind of political demand in respect of which the many are paramount, and act as a true democracy, their power in the business of supply is never more than partial, and is in most cases illusory.

The first point of which we must here take notice is this—that though the analogy between economic production and civil government is a genuine one, it is not to be found in the phenomena in which we should naturally be tempted to look for it. What we should naturally be inclined to do would be to take the demand for laws and policies as the counterpart to the demand for commodities, and the framing of such laws and the carrying out of policies as the counterpart to economic supply; the first of these, like the demand for commodities, being simple and spontaneous; the second difficult, like the manufacture of them. But in arguing thus we should be wrong.

The demand for laws and policies is, as we have seen already, by no means a simple thing, like the demand, let us say, for a particular kind {243} of beer; nor is it the true counterpart to such a demand; for the beer is demanded for its own sake, but laws and policies are not. They are demanded for the sake of certain results on social life which, by various processes of reasoning, those who demand them have been led to believe that they will produce; and it is the results of laws and policies, not the laws and policies themselves, which are in the political sphere what commodities are in the economic, and for which alone the demand is purely and genuinely democratic. The multitudes of men who were led to demand the abolition of the corn laws were not led to do so because the actual process of abolishing them was profitable or pleasurable in itself, but because they believed it would mean a larger loaf on their breakfast-tables. It was in the demand for the loaf that the many were spontaneously unanimous, and expressed their own views, not those of anybody else. Their unanimity in demanding the measure was produced by the arguments of an intellectual oligarchy, and could not have been produced without them. Thus whilst the demand for the larger loaf was equivalent to a demand for a particular kind of beer, the demand for the law was equivalent to a demand that the brewer should employ some novel appliances for brewing, with the merits of which they were acquainted only through the puffs and explanations of the patentee.

There is therefore a great difference between political demand and economic. Economic demand {244} is single; political demand is double; and whilst one part of political demand—namely, the demand for social results—corresponds with economic demand, or the demand of the consumer for commodities, the other part of political demand—namely, the demand for particular measures—does not correspond with economic demand at all, but is, on the contrary, in contrast to it. For when workmen’s wives buy some particular make of calico for their husband’s shirts, or when cyclists buy some particular kind of tyre for their bicycles, they do so because they approve of the qualities which those goods manifest when in use; not because they approve of the machinery by which the goods were made. But in politics, although there is likewise a demand for political goods, as such,—for social security, personal prosperity, and so forth,—of which each man is naturally his own judge, just as those who use them are of the tyres or calico, and although statesmen and governments are frequently supported by the nation, not because they have carried this measure or that, but because the political goods supplied by them are on the whole satisfactory, yet the political demand which is supposed to be the special characteristic of democracies is not a demand for the completed goods, but a demand that this or that patent shall be used in the hope of producing them.

Now political patents are most of them highly complicated devices; the action of all of them is dependent on a complication of circumstances; and they {245} are always the work of a special class of inventors. They never represent the spontaneously similar ideas of the mass of ordinary men, any more than the machinery used in a great brewery represents the spontaneously similar ideas of the happy and united customers whom a spontaneously similar taste leads to the same tied house. All that the many can do with regard to these political patents is to listen to the accounts of them given by the patentees, their agents, and their travellers, and to make the best choice they can between a number of different contrivances which they have had no share in devising, and which they only partially understand. They are, indeed, in much the same position in which that portion of the public would be placed which travels habitually between London and Glasgow, if it were asked to decide by its votes which of five kinds of reversing gear should be made use of on the London and North-Western engines. If this question had really to be decided by vote, the public might so far instruct itself by lectures from the competing inventors as to give votes for this contrivance or for that; but the very grounds on which its choice was formed would be obviously supplied to it by others; its choice would be limited by the number of the contrivances before it, and the part spontaneously played by it in the whole transaction would be small. And yet, as has just been said, it is the making of a choice of this kind that is regarded as being, in the domain of politics, typically, if not exclusively, the exercise of {246} the power of the many. The result is that, whilst the many do in reality exert, through their spontaneously similar demand for certain social results, an influence on legislation which in certain respects is paramount, the political theorist, neglecting this fact altogether, confines himself to asserting their power in the demand for political means—the kind of demand in respect of which they are most influenced by others.

Now what, let us ask, is the explanation of this fact? How does it come that in government a power is attributed to the many which is, even by recent socialists, not attributed to them in economic production? The reason is that over the processes of economic production the many can exercise no control at all, but that over the devising of governmental measures they can exercise some, which, though absolutely small, is yet, by comparison, large.

Thus, for instance, though the structure and manufacture of watches is in one sense determined by the many, because the manufacture of those watches only can be continued permanently which satisfy the many, and which the many will consent to buy, it would be impossible for any watchmaker to produce good watches at all if his workmen were constantly required to be altering or readjusting the escapements in order to introduce some “dodge” devised by any man in the street. But in politics this is not the case. The influence of the men in the street, though it can exert itself through {247} exceptional men only, and is consequently not wholly their own, does continually make itself felt in law-making as it does not make itself felt in watchmaking; and yet the conduct of government is not rendered impossible, whereas the making of the watches would be. Indeed, in very many cases it is not even rendered unsatisfactory.

For this peculiarity in politics there are three reasons. One is that the connection between measures and the general welfare of the community is by no means so close or immediate as the connection between a watchmaker’s tool and the wheel or pinion to which he applies it. Social effects follow on measures slowly, and the tendencies of bad measures are neutralised by other causes. The second reason is that, as Mr. Spencer rightly insists—agreeing in this judgment with the wisdom of Dr. Johnson—the social ills which governments “can cause or cure” are far less numerous than many thinkers imagine; and the third reason is one with which we are already familiar, that the power of the many in determining what measures shall be adopted is, although not an illusion, less considerable than it appears to be. But whatever their power in this respect, the great point to remember is that it cannot exert itself or exist for any practical purpose unless the few provide it with the means of doing so, any more than a rudder has power to guide a ship unless some other power shall have set the ship in motion. The popular demand for measures, or the popular {248} choice between them, alike presupposes the few who will make the supply a possibility.

And if the power of the many over supply is thus limited even in the domain of politics, in the domain of economic production it is more limited still, and in the domain of intellectual progress it is absolutely non-existent. Their true power is in their demand for completed results—for knowledge which they can assimilate, for dogmas logically stated, which reveal to them clearly what they already believe dimly, for food they can enjoy, for clothes that please their eyes, for commodities and appliances that minister to their comfort and convenience, for social security, for freedom, and for personal and national prosperity. In other words, the truth, when properly understood, is a truism. The many are all powerful in determining the quality of progress and civilisation because it is their own tastes and wants to which civilisation must minister, and their own qualities which civilisation must draw out; but of initiating civilisation, of advancing it, or even maintaining it, the many are absolutely incapable unless they have the few to guide them. They contain within themselves the things that have to be developed, but they cannot themselves provide themselves with the conditions of their own development. Without the few to assist them they could no more progress than a train of railway carriages could progress in the absence of the locomotive.

It is impossible, however, to state these {249} conclusions plainly without realising that in some quarters violent objections will be taken to them; nor is it difficult to see on what grounds the objections will rest. These shall accordingly be discussed in the next chapter; and it shall be shown that the conclusions to which our inquiry has brought us thus far really contain in them nothing inconsistent with the sentiments, or incompatible with the objects, of even those extreme reformers who will certainly feel impelled to attack them.

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