Chapter 12

This equality which democracy affirms--the identity of the soul, the sameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment--draws after it as a consequence the soul's right to opportunity for self-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall be its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both by inherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals, classes, and races; but the determination of democracy is that, so far as may be, it will secure equality of opportunity to every soul born within its dominion, in the expectation that much in human conditions which has hitherto fed and heightened inequality, in both heredity and circumstance, may be lessened if not eradicated; and life after birth is subject to great control. This is the meaning of the first axiom of democracy, that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and its early cries--"an open career," and "the tools to him who can use them." In this effort society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature; for in human history the accumulation of the selfish advantage of inequality has told with as much effect as ever it did in the original struggle of reptile and beast; and in our present complex and extended civilization a slight gain over the mass entails a telling mortgage of the future to him who makes it and to his heirs, while efficiency is of such high value in such a society that it must needs be favoured to the utmost; on the other hand a complex civilization encourages a vast variety of talent, and finds a special place for that individuation of capacity which goes along with social evolution. The end, too, which democracy seeks is not a sameness of specific results, but rather an equivalence; and its duty is satisfied if the child of its rule finds such development as was possible to him, has a free course, and cannot charge his deficiency to social interference and the restriction of established law.

The great hold that the doctrine of equality has upon the masses is not merely because it furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, which is a logic they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishes their title to such good in human life as they can obtain, on the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. What other claim, so rational and noble in itself, can they put forth in the face of what they find established in the world they are born into? The results of past civilization are still monopolized by small minorities of mankind, who receive by inheritance, under natural and civil law, the greater individual share of material comfort, of large intelligence, of fortunate careers. It does not matter that the things which belong to life as such, the greater blessings essential to human existence, cannot be monopolized; all that man can take and appropriate they find preoccupied so far as human discovery and energy have been able to reach, understand, and utilize it; and what proposition can they assert as against this sequestering of social results and material and intellectual opportunity, except to say, "we, too, are men," and with the word to claim a share in such parts of social good as are not irretrievably pledged to men better born, better educated, better supplied with the means of subsistence and the accumulated hoard of the past, which has come into their hands by an award of fortune? It is not a fanciful idea. It is founded in the unity of human nature, which is as certain as any philosophic truth, and has been proclaimed by every master-spirit of our race time out of mind. It is supported by the universal faith, in which we are bred, that we are children of a common Father, and saved by one Redeemer and destined to one immortality, and cannot be balked of the fulness of life which was our gift under divine providence. I emphasize the religious basis, because I believe it is the rock of the foundation in respect to this principle, which cannot be successfully impeached by any one who accepts Christian truth; while in the lower sphere, on worldly grounds alone, it is plain that the immense advantage of the doctrine of equality to the masses of men, justifies the advancement of it as an assumption which they call on the issue in time to approve.

It is in this portion of the field that democracy relies most upon its prophetic power. Within the limits of nature and mortal life the hope of any equal development of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment extends, in men of the same race and community it appears to me that the sameness in essentials is so great as to leave the differences inessential, so far as power to take hold of life and possess it in thought, will, or feeling is in question. I do not see, if I may continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among the common people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, which remains life as all know it--a thing of affection, of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it may be of human use. Is it not reasonable, then, on the ground of what makes up the substance of life within our observation, to accept this principle of equality, fortified as it is by any conception of heaven's justice to its creatures? and to assume, if the word must be used, the principle primary in democracy, that all men are equally endowed with destiny? and thus to allow its prophetic claim, till disproved, that equal opportunity, linked with the service of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? At all events, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement than would otherwise be attained within our national limits; and what is found to be true of us may be extended to less developed communities and races in their degree.

The doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent right to equality of opportunity for self-development as a part of social justice, establishes a common basis of conviction, in respect to man, and a definite end as one main object of the State; and these elements are primary in the democratic scheme. Liberty is the next step, and is the means by which that end is secured. It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly secondary to equality in importance. Every State, every social organization whatever, implies a principle of authority commanding obedience; it may be of the absolute type of military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in constitutional monarchies; but some obedience and some authority are necessary in order that the will of the State may be realized. The problem of democracy is to find that principle of authority which is most consistent with the liberty it would establish, and which acts with the greatest furtherance and the least interference in the accomplishment of the chief end in view. It composes authority, therefore, of personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consent of the governed, and not merely from their consent but from their active decree. The social will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not of men; particular wills enter into it, and make it, so constituted, themselves in a larger and external form. The citizen has parted with no portion of his freedom of will; the will of the State is still his own will, projected in unison with other wills, all jointly making up one sum,--the authority of the nation. This is social self-government,--not the anarchy of individuals each having his own way for himself, but government through a delegated self, if one may use the phrase, organically combined with others in the single power of control belonging to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the secondary stage, for the continuous action of the State, by representation, technically; but, in its primary stage and original validity, by universal suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that in constituting this authority, which is social as opposed to personal freedom,--personal freedom existing in its social form,--it includes every unit of will, and gives to each equivalence. Democracy thus establishes the will of society in its most universal form, lying between the opposite extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy; it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters into it with the entire original force of the community.

This universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limited forms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the fact that nothing enters into it except man as such. The rival powers which seek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a pure democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has its claim as the custodian of education and property and the advantages flowing from their long possession; the trained mind, the accumulated capital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most intense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and would appropriate to themselves in the structure of government a representation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds. If it be still allowed that all men should have a share in a self-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, in addition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants of such men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity, a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these three things, education, property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities in human conditions which democracy would minimize. They embody past custom and present results which are a deposit of the past; they plead that they found men wards and were their guardians, and that under their own domination progress was made, and all that now is came into being; but they must show farther some reason in present conditions under democracy now why such potent inequalities and breeders of inequality should be clothed with governing power.

Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument against it is twofold. It is said that, though much in the theory of democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. The operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring knowledge and skill, and it has no limits. In state affairs education should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they will retain deciding power. But is this so? or if there be some truth in the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the special sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally, a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect human life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is a better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses? Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally diffused. Education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It is not synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men, and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it. Intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man applies it, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating, comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man; for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters which touch his own interests, widely shared. The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in the main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting masses of men, the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competent to deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, though highly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure of things, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, at a less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mild forms. Besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that are required to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. The sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is really limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfish struggle of material interests in a vast and diversified State.

Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy once put into operation. The capacity of the people to judge the event in the long run must be allowed. But does broad human experience, however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? I am not well assured that it is not so. The masses have been long in existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed that through

"old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain."

The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal conditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life. They listen to those they trust who, by neighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund of information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion and their instruments in the policy they adopt. These leaders may be called demagogues. They may be thought to employ only resources of trickery upon dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is a shallow one, and not justified by facts. It is right in the masses to make men like themselves and nigh to them, especially those born and bred in their own condition of life, their leaders, in preference to men, however educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not embodiments of the social conditions, needs, and aspirations of the people in their cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader among themselves. Such a man is a true chief of a party, who is not an individual holding great interests in trust and managing them with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own superior brain; he is the incarnation, as a party chief, of other brains and wills, a representative exceeding by far in wisdom and power himself, a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, have their governmental life. No doubt he has great qualities of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to become a chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of public support, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, which store themselves in him. Such the leaders of the people have always been.

If this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of power rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the result with more determining force--be apparently crude in its early stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever masses of men are entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur? in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodist movement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement, world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort of characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those that belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving masses of men upward into more noble ranges. Men of the people lead, because the people are the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, however well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply in the popular soil. Literary education, it must never be forgotten, is not specially a preparation for political good judgment. It is predominantly concerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate political consequence--with books generally, science, history, language, technical processes and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity of life not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political. Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of political system, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics, unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing from their pursuits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with ideas in a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas which are in reality as much a part of life as of thought; and the method of dealing with these vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty of its own.

It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated class as a whole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been on the side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary era the class was not--though it is now coming to be--a germinating element in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius which foresees the times to come and develops principles by which they come; it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property and ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them is deeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable, enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative of the past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a note of despair. I do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutions have come from below, from the masses and their native leaders, however they may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some welcome in aristocrats. The power of intellectual education as an element in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which is less than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and arrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection with love or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, or selfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with the field of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in the popular life. Intelligence, in the form of high education, can make no authoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, as a rule, its successful examples in character. The suffrage, except as by natural modes it embodies the people's practical and general intelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives of themselves whom it elects to serve the State, need not look to high education as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading in matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expert knowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but in so far as it is separable from the business of the State, and stands by itself in a class not servants of the State and mainly critical and traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because of any superiority of judgment it may allege. In fact, education has entered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power, in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, and the enfranchisement of education, if I may use the term, is rather a democratic than an aristocratic trait. Education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the older systems. But in a democracy it remains true, that so far as education deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, and enter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own. There, least of all, does it need privilege. Education is one inequality which democracy seems already dissolving.