Part 6

But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished for doing wrong if that State happens to be its own? It is not that this school does not believe in punishment; it believes in it enthusiastically, rapturously, so long as it is directed against the wrong-doing of some other State. Punishment is good for other States, when they do wrong; without punishment the justice of God would not be satisfied. But for their own particular State punishment is bad, and is no longer to be advocated. And so you may say--looking back in history--that your country was quite wrong in waging such and such a war; but patriotism forbids the wish in that case that right should have prevailed and the justice of God been satisfied.

Now that school was very vocal in England during the Boer War; and I daresay during the Opium War with China; and I daresay, also, during the American War of Independence--very loud that we were in the wrong; but not at all admitting, for that reason, that it would be good for us to be beaten. But I think it should be one of our proudest boasts that, in the long run (not immediately--not perhaps for a generation or two) the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day--not yet, for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any white race you can name--but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see, incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet--permitting, namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came, however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its medical needs for 140 years!)

Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern State runs its foreign policies--reflecting outwardly something which lives strongly engrained in our midst--the Will to Power. It is because that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him; it was because we wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home. It was because we wanted--or because our ruling classes wanted--to give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy, you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions, and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whether they touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise.

Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging example to others.

Our prisons are impure because they are lacking in good-will; we have regarded power instead of love as the solution of the crime problem; and we have been contented to apply an impatient, unintelligent, and soul-destroying remedy to the crimes of others, which we would not wish to see applied in like case to those of our own family.

Of course, I know that our prisons have been greatly improved; because, as I said before, we are in a state of transition, and a new school of thought, whose basis is Love and Service, is fighting an old school of thought whose basis is Power, and gradually--only very gradually--getting the better of it.

It is the same with Education; the old idea of education was largely based on dominance and power--the power of the teacher to punish. The new idea is largely based upon the power of the teacher to interest, and upon trust in youth’s natural instinct to acquire knowledge. It is a tremendous change; the old system was impure in its psychology, and corrupted alike the mind of the teacher and the taught. Nobody in the old days was so unteachable as a school-master; and yet his whole profession is really--to learn of youth. And the ethical impurity of the old system came at the point where there was a lack of goodwill--a lack of mutual confidence.

In trade again, how much co-operation has been over-ridden by competition--manœuvres of one against the other, designed to the other’s detriment. We have been told that competition is absolutely necessary to keep us efficient in business; it is precisely the same school of thought which says that war is necessary to keep us efficient as a nation.

But in a family you don’t need competition; where there is goodwill, co-operation and the give-and-take of new ideas for the common stock are enough.

To-day we are beginning to wake up to the possibility of co-operation taking the place of competition. It is the purer idea; and being the purer we shall probably in the end find it the more economical.

And what shall we say about politics? Does anyone pretend that our politics are pure; or that the system on which we run them is anything but a vast system of adulteration?--which may perhaps be thus expressed:--Two great bodies of opinion trying to misunderstand each other and trying to make the general public share in their misunderstanding, in order that their own side may attain to power.

When you start on a discussion, what is the pure reason for that discussion? To try to arrive at a common understanding--mental co-operation. But is it for that purpose that we raise our party cries and run a general election?

We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the words and thoughts and motives of their opponents--and very often men will be misrepresenting their own motives--because their end is really power--power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation!

That process--which we see quite well is an impure process--is forced upon us because we are in a stage of transition; it is difficult as a matter of practical politics to suggest a better.

But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our present stage of political development--and humble in general about the position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a little premature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all?

Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed--you find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. And the only thing that is consistent and is pure (once you have started with the social idea) is that we are all one brotherhood--and that harm to one member of the community is harm to all. And when you have once got a nation that has really taken that idea to heart and made a practice of it, such a nation will never rest content till there is a Society of Nations of like mind extending over all the world.

I referred just now to the Sermon on the Mount. To most of the world its teachings sound impracticable. They are the extreme statement of an ideal; and it is hard in this world to live ideally. But that statement has about it this merit of commonsense--it is pure, it is consistent--it is a united whole; and it is based on something of which we have never yet really allowed ourselves the luxury--a trust in human nature. A belief that if you set yourself whole-heartedly to do good to others--to do good even to your enemies--human nature will respond.

We cannot all love our neighbours as ourself--that individual emotion is beyond us. But if we can love our country enough to die for it, we can also love it enough to give to it laws and institutions and policies that shall prepare the way for the universal brotherhood of man.

THE RIGHTS OF MAJORITIES

(1912)

In every age some fetich of government has been set up designed to delude the governed, and to induce a blind rather than an intellectual acceptance of authority.

To set up in government some point over which you must not argue, is always very convenient to those who govern; and so you will note, throughout the world’s history, that the manipulators of government have always tried to impose some incontrovertible proposition as the basis on which their authority shall rest; and then, having done so, to get the strings of it into their own hands, and work it to their own convenience.

In the present day “majority rule” is the pretended fetich; a majority whose qualification is almost automatic, whose registration is all done for it by the party agents, and whose free and independent vote is brought up to the polling-booth very largely by the bribe of a free ride in a motor-car.

Scores of elections, that is to say, are turned by the indifferent voter, and on this sort of cookery recipe the moral products of majority rule are served up to us as “a dish fit for a king,” and as giving moral sanction to government. And whatever indigestion comes to us as the result of our swallowing it whole we are to sit down under. If the majority has decided, the matter (we are told) is beyond argument.

That is the fetich, the superstition on which, in theory, government rests to-day.

In other times there were other fetiches, quite as respectable. “The King can do no wrong,” was one of them. And we have had staged before our eyes, in due order, the divine right--or the divine sanction; it is all the same--of Kings, of Property, of Inheritance, of Slavery, and of War.

All these have been maintained as necessities of government--infallible doctrines, based on Scripture and the will of God.

Some of them present rather a battered front to-day. The fetich which has taken their place is the “Right of Majorities.”

We do not exactly say “Majorities can do no wrong.” But we do incline to say (often for the sake of a quiet life, and for no better reason) “Majorities must be allowed to do as they please.” And that means in effect--those must be allowed to do as they please who can pull the wires by which majorities are manipulated.

I need hardly remind you that to-day the wire-pullers are the statesmen, the leaders of party, who have secured more and more the control of the party-machine, and with it the control of the education of the electorate.

Having secured this control, they let loose upon you the astonishing doctrine that, if you have numbers, there you have your right cut and dried; that if you have not numbers your right (politically speaking) does not exist.

Now every student of history knows that in the past majorities, more especially manipulated majorities--or their counterpart _force majeure_--have done great crimes.

But we do not to-day maintain that those majorities had a “right” to sack cities, to violate women, to massacre, to exterminate, and to bring others into subjection. The most we say is that these happenings are an extreme, and, under some circumstances, an inevitable expression of certain bad elements in human nature. Is it not, then, perfectly absurd to imagine that under internal and domestic conditions all such bad elements have departed from majorities; and that a consensus of vice, of self-indulgence, of unfairness, of a desire for domination, may not spread through very large sections of the community, even through whole peoples where the opportunity so to indulge is accorded--especially if it be accorded by law or embodied as a State doctrine?

Clearly, therefore, there must be some limitation or check imposed upon the so-called “rights” of majorities; and some of them may be limitations which those majorities would not choose for themselves, but will, all the same, submit to without revolt if they are properly rubbed home! One of the essential conditions for majority rule (if it is to carry with it any moral sanction at all) is that it must be ready to submit to the same conditions which it imposes upon others; and that it must not set up qualification, or prohibition from qualification, without any liability of that prohibition falling upon itself. It must make the liability fairly equal.

The specious excuse and justification for government by majority, as put forward by the materialists, is that, latent, within it, lies the physical force of the nation. (I may say, in passing, that the physical force of the nation lies latent in every form of government which secures the assent of the governed; and only ceases to be latent when some of it gets on to its hind-legs and insists on another form of government; and to be effective, that “some of it” need not always be a majority.)

But it is no use talking of physical force being the basis and the moral justification of majority rule--it is no use invoking the physical force argument--unless your majority is also prepared to go to the trouble of exercising it and paying the price for exercising it. And the main phenomenon of our present form of government by majority is that the majority won’t take any trouble at all; that, taken in the bulk, they care very little, and won’t put themselves to inconvenience--certainly won’t risk physical discomfort and pain--unless government has very seriously incommoded them by damaging or by neglecting their interests.

If the physical force basis is to be your full sanction of government--if that is really your argument--then that basis, that sanction, is possessed equally by king or despot, so long as he has his organisation at his command. There are his numbers, obeying him just as, with us, M.P.’s, 700 strong, obey the party-whips, often against their principles, but from no physical compulsion whatever.

What the preachers of physical force seem to ignore in arguing about the basis of government, is the aim of government. What, in the minds and consciences of those who believe in government, is government aiming for? Is its aim only to keep order or to be just? Does it seek to repress humanity to the utmost extent, or to develop it? To wrap its talents in a napkin, or to make it spiritually a ruler of cities?

What is humanity out for? To what is it evolving? What has been its impulse, its motive force in pressing for, and in extracting from reluctant authorities Representative Government, with its accompanying symbol--the voice of the majority?

It has been seeking humane government--in the belief, surely, that the nearer you get to really humane government the more will unrest and revolt and crime cease; and, by the consequent reduction of the police and of the forces of repression now needed, repay the State a hundred-fold for the liberties it has established. And majority rule is merely a device to get nearer to humane government, to open up the mind of man to his own humane possibilities, and to develop his trust in others by reposing trust in him. The more you spread government as an organization of the people themselves, the more humane, upon that working basis, are likely to be its operations--on one condition: that such organisation of the people, whatever its numbers, submits to the operation of its own laws and shares equally in the conditions which it imposes--that, if it provides a qualification for citizenship, it provides also the means for all to qualify.

Now this brings us to the relative duties of those who govern and of those who are governed; and, whereas, fundamentally their duty is the same, in one important respect it differs. In each case, broadly and fundamentally, their duty is toward their neighbour--to do to him as they would he should do unto them. That axiom, rightly carried out, covers all the law and the prophets, being greater than either; nay, if it were rightly and universally carried out, the law and the prophets might safely be shelved. Law merely exists as an expedient, because men have not yet learned thoroughly to do, or even to wish to do, their duty toward their neighbour; and as law is an imperfect thing, only existing because of, and only applicable to, imperfect conditions, the law and its upholders are not, and never can be, a perfect expression of that duty which is mutually owed by all. Law is only an expedient for averting greater evils which might, and probably would, take place without it in our present very imperfect stage of human development.

But there is one obvious difference between the governors and the governed. In the action of the former there is an assertion of authority--an underlying assumption of a power to improve matters by regulating them. In the governed there is no such assumption of moral superiority; the governed are there whether they like it or no; and the laws which condition their lives are laid upon them by a power beyond themselves, even when--under a representative system--they have secured some minute voice in regard to their shaping.

The governors, therefore, by their assumption of an ability to improve matters, are in a fiduciary position to the rest of the community--the _onus probandi_ of their beneficence rests upon them and not upon the people. It is their duty to pacify the governed; it is not the duty of the governed to pacify them; and if they fail in the work of pacification, which is their main _raison d’être_, they, and not the community, have to meet the charge of functional incompetence.

Government is a function; being governed is not a function. Humanity in all stages of civilization or of savagery has fallen subject to government without being asked to show any certificate of its fitness to be governed. It is therefore, the governors who have to prove themselves fit--not the governed; and if a penal code be found, or declared, necessary to enable the governors to secure peace and order, then (if your system be just and equal) the penal code should be applicable in at least equal severity to the governors who impose it, when instead of producing contentment, it produces unrest and disorder. Liability to impeachment and condemnation under laws of an equal stringency would be, I think, a very wholesome corrective to the legislative action of M.P.’s voting coercive measures which only result in failure. I fancy that under such conditions there would have been, for instance, a far smaller majority for the “Cat and Mouse Act,” the futility of which soon became so ridiculously apparent. Imprisonment with compulsory starvation, followed by release upon a medical certificate, and then by a fresh term of imprisonment would have been a most enlightening form of vacation for certain members of Parliament. And until we have secured in this country a much more equal adjustment of the relations between governors and governed, some such corrective for vindictive legislation is certainly needed.

It is not a sufficient equivalent, or safeguard to popular liberty, to be able merely to dismiss from office a Minister of the Crown who has by his administrative blunders brought citizens to death and property to destruction, or who has sedulously manufactured criminals out of a class whose will is to be law-abiding. He, if anybody, deserves punishment; and Parliaments (backed by whatever majority) which, through maintaining political inequalities, produce such results, are under the same condemnation. The _onus probandi_ of their beneficence rests upon them; and if, commissioned to secure peace and order, they produce only unrest and disorder, then the proof is against them.

Listen to these remarkable words by so great a supporter of constitutional authority as Edmund Burke:

“Nations,” he says, “are not primarily ruled by laws, still less by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed in force or regulation, the operation of both is, in truth, merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the same methods and on the same principles by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors--by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it. I mean--when public affairs are steadily and quietly conducted: not when government is nothing but a continued scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude, in which sometimes one and sometimes the other is uppermost, in which they alternately yield and prevail in a series of contemptible victories and scandalous submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought, therefore, to be the first study of the statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.”

And further on he says:

“In all disputes between them (the governed) and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. Experience may perhaps justify me in going further. When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed that there has been something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error and not their crime. But with the governing part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by design as well as by mistake.... And if this presumption in favour of the subject against the trustees of power be not the more probable, I am sure it is the more comfortable speculation; because it is more easy to change an administration than to reform a people.”