Part 7
The English, who gave us all we know of freedom, have been the first to understand its meaning. They too have suffered during the last century from the ravages of plutocracy, from the disease of commerce. But they had behind them the intellectual heritage of the world. They had bulwarks of education, philanthropy, thought, training, ambition, enthusiasm, the ideals of man. It was these things, this reservoir of spiritual power, that turned the tide of commercialism in England, and not as we so cheaply imagine her “leisure class.” The men and women who in the last ten years have taken hold of the Municipality of London, and now work like beavers in its reform, are not rich. Some of them may be rich, but the force that makes them toil comes neither out of riches nor out of poverty, but out of a discovery as to the use of life. These Englishmen have outlived the illusions of business. As towards them we are like children. If it were a matter of mere riches we have wealth enough to make their “leisure class” ridiculous. If there must be some term in the heaping of money before the energies of our better burghers are to be diverted toward public ends, we may wait till doomsday. But the reaction is of another sort, and is very simple. Let us be just to the conscience-givers. They dare not give more. The American is ashamed to lose a dollar. He does not want the dollar half the time, but he will lose caste if he foregoes it. Our merchant princes go on special commissions for rapid transit, and receive $5000 apiece. They must be paid. Out of custom they must receive pay because “their time is valuable,” and thus the virtue and meaning of their office receives a soil: they do not work. All this is, even at the present moment, against the private instincts of many of them. It is apparent that they stand without, shame-faced. It needs only example to give them courage. A few more reform movements in which they see each other as citizens, will knock the shackles from their imagination and make men of them. And then we shall have reform in earnest. For with this enfranchisement will come their great awakening to the fact that not they only but all men are really unselfish. It is the obscure disbelief in this salvation which has made reform so hard where it might be so easy. As soon as the reformers shall have reformed themselves, they will avoid making any appeal to self-interest as so much lost time, so much corruption, and will walk boldly upon the waves of idealism which will hold them up.
If commerce has been our ruin, our form of government is our salvation. Imagine a hereditary aristocracy, a State church, a limited monarchy to have existed here during the last thirty years. By this time it would have been owned hand and foot, tied up and anchored in every abuse, engaged day and night in devising new yokes for the people. The interests now dominant know the ropes and do their best, but they cannot corrupt the sea. They cannot stop the continual ferment of popular election and reform candidate. The whole apparatus of government is a great educational machine which no one can stop. The power of light is enlisted on the side of order. A property qualification would have been an anchor to windward for the unrighteous. At the bottom of the peculiarly hopeless condition of Philadelphia lie the small house and lot of the laboring man. They can be taxed. They can be cajoled and conjured with. Corruption is entrenched.
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We find then in democracy a frame of government by which private selfishness, the bane and terror of all government, is thrust brutally to the front and kept there, staring in hideous openness.
Nothing except such an era as that which we have just come through, during which we have grown used to absolute self-seeking as the normal state of man, could so have glazed the eyes of men that they could not see thrift even in a public official as a crime, or self-sacrifice even in a public official except as a folly. And yet so sound is the heart of man that in spite of this corruption and debauchery, the American people, the masses of them, are the most promising people extant. We have a special disease. It is our minds which have been injured. We are cross-eyed with business selfishness and open to the heavens on all other sides. For this openness we must thank Democracy. Here are no warped beings, but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary spell. The American citizen, by escaping the superstitions studded over Europe since the days of the Roman empire, has a directer view of life (when he shall open his eyes) than any people since the Elizabethans. He will have no prejudices. He will be empirical. But he must forswear thrift, and the calculating of interest in his sleep. No religious revival will help us. We are religious enough already. It is our relaxation. Only the painful unwinding of that intellectual knot into which our minds are tied,--that state of intense selfishness during which we see business advancement as our first duty, taught us at the cradle, enforced by example, inculcated like a religion,--can make us begin to operate our institutions upon the lines on which they alone can run freely, and we ourselves develop normally. This unwinding will come through a simple inspection of our condition. Let no one worry about the forms and particular measures of betterment. They will flow naturally from the public acknowledgment by the individual of facts which he privately knows and has always known and always denied.
This goes on hourly. Those people who do not see it, look for it in the wrong places. You cannot expect it to show itself in the public offices. They are the strongholds of the enemy. You cannot expect it to appear very often in the children of captivity, the upper bourgeoisie. These men are easily put to sleep and will take the promise of a politician any day as an excuse for non-activity. They give consent. What we want is assertion, and it is coming like a murmur from the poorer classes who desire the right and who need only leadership to make them honest.
It is the recurrent tragedy in reform movements that the merchants put forward something that the laboring man instantly nails for a lie. It is not the loss of the election which does the harm, but this insult to the souls of men.
Let no one expect the millennium, but let us play fair. We can see that our standards, particularly among the well-to-do, are so low that mere inspection of them causes indignant protest. But we must also know that when we accepted democracy as our form of government we ranked the political education of the individual as more important than the expert administration of government. This last can come only as a result, not as a precurser of the other.
The example of a whole people, mad with one passion, living under a system which implies the abnegation of that passion, has laid bare the heart of a community, has shown the interrelations between the organs and functions of a society, in a way never before visible in the history of the world. Everything is disturbed, but everything is visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, yet betraying all things; Architecture, still submerged in commerce but showing every year some vital change; Social Life, the mere creature of abuses, like a child covered with scars, but growing healthy; the Drama, a drudge to thrift every way and yet palpably alive. By the light of these things and their relation to each other we may view history.
The American is a typical being. He is a creature of a single passion. In so far as Tyre was commercial she was American. You can reconstruct much of Venetian politics from a town caucus. In so far as London is commercial it is American. You can trace the thing in the shape of a handbill in Moscow. Or to take the matter up from the other side: you can, by taking up these correlated ganglia of American society, which do nevertheless simply represent the heart of man, and are always present in every society--by imagining the enlargement of one function, and the disuse of the next, you can reconstruct the Greek period and re-imagine Athens.
No wonder the sociologists study America. It seems as if the key and cause of human progress might be clutched from her entrails.
GOVERNMENT
V
GOVERNMENT
When two men are fighting and agree that they will stop at sundown, we have government. Their consent is government. Their memory of that consent is an institution. There never was a government of any kind or for any purpose that did not rest upon the consent of the governed; but the means by which the consent is obtained have varied. The consent records the extent to which the individuals are alike. It is only by virtue of similarity in the governed that government exists. On a ship, all men are alike in their danger of being drowned, and they consent to dictation from the captain for the welfare of all. The aim of the despot is to keep the population alike in their need of him or their fear of him. After the French Revolution, the entire French people were alike both in their desire for order and in their lack of training in self-government. A dictator was inevitable. Gouverneur Morris, whose experience in America qualified him to judge, saw the matter clearly as early as 1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by the two opposite means of giving them social order and foreign war. Henry V. kept himself on top in England by waging war in France. Seward in 1861 thought to unite the people of the United States by declaring war against everybody in Europe. The German Emperor is sustained to-day by the popular fear of France and Russia. It makes no difference what foolishness he commits; so long as that fear predominates he will be absolute.
For the converse proposition is also true, that in so far as people are like-minded, they must be ruled by a single mind. A hundred Malays cannot establish a representative government. They must have a boss. The population of Russia can only be ruled by a Czar. So also whenever under any form of government all the people want one thing, one man does it. The reasons for it are invented afterwards, and “war powers” are found to justify the proclamation setting the slaves free.
The extent to which people are similar to each other will be recorded in their institutions; in fact, those institutions are nothing but dials of similarity. For this reason any popular national institution gives you the nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, any consent has a tendency to modify the future because he or it is advertised and established. It is a factor in the consciousness of every individual. It is the conservative. It tends to affect the conduct and mind of every one, for any one coming in contact with it must conform or resist. It is a challenge to the individual. It impinges upon him. The thing changes daily in his mind, and occupies now more, now less, of his activities. In cases where his whole external conduct has been absorbed by one such power we have absolute rule, religious or military, and a uniform population. If there be a single predominating power which has not yet completely conquered, we have in some form or another a record of its growth by a tendency toward absolutism.
The American people have been growing strikingly uniform, owing to their one occupation,--business, their one passion,--a desire for money. They are divided by their system of politics into two great categories, and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, little nodes of power representing this identity of consciousness in each of the two great categories of the population, Republicans and Democrats. If you could cut open the consciousness of one thousand Americans and examine it with a microscope, you could set up our government with great ease.
Let us concede for the sake of argument that the full development of individual character and intellect is the aim of life.
Now in so far as individuals are developed, they differ from each other. We ought then to be distressed by any identity whatever found in the heads of individuals examined; and greatly distressed by the reign of the same passion manifested in the one thousand American organisms. You would say, ‘If this thing goes on, a dictator is absolutely certain,’ and then you would remember that you had heard a business man remark at the Club the evening before, that he would welcome a dictator as a cheap practical way out of it.
Let us now suppose you to examine one thousand English heads. The first thing you would notice would be that the number was not large enough to give reliable results. Certain types would be manifest, but the special variations would be so striking as to cloud your conclusions. In all these heads there would be spots of a density nowhere found in America, but the spontaneous variations outside and round about them would be magnificent. You would say, “These spots represent different kinds of conservatism. This one is reverence for the church, that one for the army, a third for the judiciary. They represent prejudice, but they also represent stability, a stability that is the resultant of a thousand positive and various forces. These spots hold England together and give scope to free government. The world never has done and never can do better than this. These individuals are developed. The line of force of one man passes through one institution, that of the next man through the next. No force, no passion, can make them all alike at any one time. They are anchored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid and free in the present. The only hope for freedom in the individual lies in the existence of different sorts of institutions.”
It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college of Jesuits is a protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that to have free government you must encourage institutions--and you will be wrong.
The fundamental reason why you are wrong is that these beneficent institutions are what is left of the activity of people who believed in them for their own sake. You can no more imitate one of them, or catch the power of one of them, than you can set up a king here to repel an invasion. You yourself believe in individualism. Go straight for that, and leave it to erect its bulwarks in what form it may.
A multiplication of institutions then serves two contradictory purposes. It limits the individual, creates black spots of prejudice and unreason in him; but on the other hand it encourages a free development of the individual outside of those spots. It creates types, and types are mutually protective. This is only another way of saying that free government results from a segregation of the government into provinces, which cannot all be captured, at one time, by one force.
The highly intelligent and artificial separation of our government into the branches of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial was in a sense an attempt to get free government by the erection of independent institutions. But these were never strong enough to create types (we have hardly the type of judge among us); and certainly no attachment to any part, but the sacredness of the entire system, has preserved it. It was the sentiment attaching to the single idea of a central government.
It is to institutions that the consent to be governed is given. The consent is always a highly complex affair. It implies a civilization. It is qualified, limited, infinitely diversified, and is in every case regulated by historic fact. For instance, under a limited monarchy, it is a consent to be governed by a particular dynasty after special ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, subject to such and such customs,--each and all existing in the imagination of the subject. For government is entirely a matter of the imagination, and it is inconceivable that it should ever be anything else. The English have spent two centuries in impressing the imagination of India with the vision of English power. A violation by the government, no matter how strong, of the popular imagination, an assumption of power in a field not yet subdued, always brings on riots. The Persians resented furiously the creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sultan had to rescind it. The Americans threw the tea into the harbor.
The forms and modes by which government is carried on are the record of things to which people have consented, and hence become important, become symbols so identified with power that almost all historical writing deals with them as entities. The power of the symbols in any case varies inversely to the power of the people for self-government, that is, to the average differentiation between individuals; or to put the thing the other way, the extent to which a man will permit another to rule him depends upon his incapacity to rule himself.
The great unifying forces have always been regarded as dangers to free government. War makes a nation a unit. It cannot be conducted by individualism. Religion condenses power. That is the reason why our ancestors were so afraid of a State church. Commerce has generally been thought a blessing because commerce gives scope to individualism. It enriches and educates. Yet commerce itself may bring in tyranny. Witness Venice. Commerce has centralized our government. Anything that affects everybody’s mind with the same appeal strengthens government and makes for unity. A nation only exists by virtue of such general appeals. It is inside of and subordinate to this general unity of feeling that individualism must go on. The rulers of mankind are men who have got control of the symbols, of the institutions, which stood in the imagination of the people as most important, and who by manipulating them extended their range over the popular imagination. Or to put the thing a little differently, the passions of the people are reflected in ever-changing institutions. The people seize a man and force him to do their bidding and rule them in such manner as to assuage their passions. They make a saint out of Lincoln, and a devil out of Torquemada.
If a man seems to be a great man, and seems to be leading the people, it is because he knows the people better than they know themselves. There was never a people yet that did not in this sense govern themselves, being themselves governed by the resultant of their dominant passions. The Southern Pacific Railroad has for years owned the State of California as completely as if it had bought it from a tyrant who ruled over a population of slaves. It was done by the purchase of votes. In so far as virtue shall regain predominance in the breast of the voter and set him free, virtue will replace money in the voting, and set free the State.
Universal suffrage is a mode and a symbol. Under certain conditions of education people must have it. Under others they cannot have it. But whether they have it or not, they will be ruled by their ruling passion, and if this renders them alike in character, their government will be a tyranny. If the reign of the passion be tempered, the reign of the tyrant will be tempered. Express the thing in terms of human feeling (and what else is there?) and universal suffrage is seen as a _quantité négligeable_.
It is thus apparent that there is no institution that cannot easily be made to operate to a contradictory end. The criminal courts here have been used to collect debt. There is no wickedness to which the enginery of the Christian Church has not at one time or another been lent. The passions of a period run its institutions as easily as a stream turns any sort of a mill. To-day the United States Senate is a millionaires’ club. To-morrow the Stock Exchange may become a church.
Now what is an institution?
It is a custom which receives an assent because it is a custom. Man has always been ruled by custom. The notion that there was a time when disputes were settled by fighting, and that arbitration came in as a matter of convenience, stands on the same sort of footing as Rousseau’s social contract. It is an academic _jeu d’esprit_. In looking back over history all we see is custom, and farther back, still custom. All the fighting of savages is regulated by custom and always has been regulated by custom. Nay, the bees and the ants are ruled by custom. The idea of custom is the one idea that the genius of Kipling led him to see in the jungle.
Now what is at the bottom of all this regard for custom? At the bottom of custom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is both selfish and unselfish, but it makes a great difference whether we regard him _primarily_ as one thing or the other. The scientists, owing to their study of the lower animals, have tried to explain man on the selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery of him. They say “He must eat or die; therefore, he must be primarily egoistic.” And they attempt to explain progress by the expanding of egoism to include, first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, and finally mankind. Society according to them is a convention of egoism, a compromise, a joint-stock company. Religion is a matter of ghosts and ancestor worship, not fully explained yet. Note that this whole view depends upon a dogma that man _must_ be primarily selfish because he must eat. It is fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man absolutely selfish could not survive. Man absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly. The individuals would support each other.
But let us start square and remember that it is a question of science. Take the other hypothesis. The horse runs in herds and propagates his species because he is fond of the species. Incidentally he gets protected. It is through the illusion that he loves his fellows that his own welfare is secured. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom, self-protection the result.
It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen that Democracy is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They perish.
The regard that every custom receives from the individual who supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral law, the element is the same. It is reverence. It is respect. It is self-surrender.