Chapter 12

Since the Revolution of July and the Presidency of Jackson gave the impulse which has made democracy preponderate, the ablest political writers, Tocqueville, Calhoun, Mill, and Laboulaye, have drawn, in the name of freedom, a formidable indictment against it. They have shown democracy without respect for the past or care for the future, regardless of public faith and of national honour, extravagant and inconstant, jealous of talent and of knowledge, indifferent to justice but servile towards opinion, incapable of organisation, impatient of authority, averse from obedience, hostile to religion and to established law. Evidence indeed abounds, even if the true cause be not proved. But it is not to these symptoms that we must impute the permanent danger and the irrepressible conflict. As much might be made good against monarchy, and an unsympathising reasoner might in the same way argue that religion is intolerant, that conscience makes cowards, that piety rejoices in fraud. Recent experience has added little to the observations of those who witnessed the decline after Pericles, of Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and of the writer whose brilliant tract against the Athenian Republic is printed among the works of Xenophon. The manifest, the avowed difficulty is that democracy, no less than monarchy or aristocracy, sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives, with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain, to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and deviation, and to secure, by Plebiscite, Referendum, or Caucus, free play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every man's free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing. Religious toleration, judicial independence, dread of centralisation, jealousy of State interference, become obstacles to freedom instead of safeguards, when the centralised force of the State is wielded by the hands of the people. Democracy claims to be not only supreme, without authority above, but absolute, without independence below; to be its own master, not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new one, who may be flattered and deceived, but whom it is impossible to corrupt or to resist, and to whom must be rendered the things that are Cæsar's and also the things that are God's. The enemy to be overcome is no longer the absolutism of the State, but the liberty of the subject. Nothing is more significant than the relish with which Ferrari, the most powerful democratic writer since Rousseau, enumerates the merits of tyrants, and prefers devils to saints in the interest of the community.

For the old notions of civil liberty and of social order did not benefit the masses of the people. Wealth increased, without relieving their wants. The progress of knowledge left them in abject ignorance. Religion flourished, but failed to reach them. Society, whose laws were made by the upper class alone, announced that the best thing for the poor is not to be born, and the next best, to die in childhood, and suffered them to live in misery and crime and pain. As surely as the long reign of the rich has been employed in promoting the accumulation of wealth, the advent of the poor to power will be followed by schemes for diffusing it. Seeing how little was done by the wisdom of former times for education and public health, for insurance, association, and savings, for the protection of labour against the law of self-interest, and how much has been accomplished in this generation, there is reason in the fixed belief that a great change was needed, and that democracy has not striven in vain. Liberty, for the mass, is not happiness; and institutions are not an end but a means. The thing they seek is a force sufficient to sweep away scruples and the obstacle of rival interests, and, in some degree, to better their condition. They mean that the strong hand that heretofore has formed great States, protected religions, and defended the independence of nations, shall help them by preserving life, and endowing it for them with some, at least, of the things men live for. That is the notorious danger of modern democracy. That is also its purpose and its strength. And against this threatening power the weapons that struck down other despots do not avail. The greatest happiness principle positively confirms it. The principle of equality, besides being as easily applied to property as to power, opposes the existence of persons or groups of persons exempt from the common law, and independent of the common will; and the principle, that authority is a matter of contract, may hold good against kings, but not against the sovereign people, because a contract implies two parties.

If we have not done more than the ancients to develop and to examine the disease, we have far surpassed them in studying the remedy. Besides the French Constitution of the year III., and that of the American Confederates,--the most remarkable attempts that have been made since the archonship of Euclides to meet democratic evils with the antidotes which democracy itself supplies,--our age has been prolific in this branch of experimental politics.

Many expedients have been tried, that have been evaded or defeated. A divided executive, which was an important phase in the transformation of ancient monarchies into republics, and which, through the advocacy of Condorcet, took root in France, has proved to be weakness itself.

The constitution of 1795, the work of a learned priest, confined the franchise to those who should know how to read and write; and in 1849 this provision was rejected by men who intended that the ignorant voter should help them to overturn the Republic. In our time no democracy could long subsist without educating the masses; and the scheme of Daunou is simply an indirect encouragement to elementary instruction.

In 1799 Sieyès suggested to Bonaparte the idea of a great Council, whose function it should be to keep the acts of the Legislature in harmony with the constitution--a function which the _Nomophylakes_ discharged at Athens, and the Supreme Court in the United States, and which produced the Sénat Conservateur, one of the favourite implements of Imperialism. Sieyès meant that his Council should also serve the purpose of a gilded ostracism, having power to absorb any obnoxious politician, and to silence him with a thousand a year.

Napoleon the Third's plan of depriving unmarried men of their votes would have disfranchised the two greatest Conservative classes in France, the priest and the soldier.

In the American constitution it was intended that the chief of the executive should be chosen by a body of carefully selected electors. But since, in 1825, the popular candidate succumbed to one who had only a minority of votes, it has become the practice to elect the President by the pledged delegates of universal suffrage.

The exclusion of ministers from Congress has been one of the severest strains on the American system; and the law which required a majority of three to one enabled Louis Napoleon to make himself Emperor. Large constituencies make independent deputies; but experience proves that small assemblies, the consequence of large constituencies, can be managed by Government.

The composite vote and the cumulative vote have been almost universally rejected as schemes for baffling the majority. But the principle of dividing the representatives equally between population and property has never had fair play. It was introduced by Thouret into the constitution of 1791. The Revolution made it inoperative; and it was so manipulated from 1817 to 1848 by the fatal dexterity of Guizot as to make opinion ripe for universal suffrage.

Constitutions which forbid the payment of deputies and the system of imperative instructions, which deny the power of dissolution, and make the Legislature last for a fixed term, or renew it by partial re-elections, and which require an interval between the several debates on the same measure, evidently strengthen the independence of the representative assembly. The Swiss veto has the same effect, as it suspends legislation only when opposed by a majority of the whole electoral body, not by a majority of those who actually vote upon it.

Indirect elections are scarcely anywhere in use out of Germany, but they have been a favourite corrective of democracy with many thoughtful politicians. Where the extent of the electoral district obliges constituents to vote for candidates who are unknown to them, the election is not free. It is managed by wire-pullers, and by party machinery, beyond the control of the electors. Indirect election puts the choice of the managers into their hands. The objection is that the intermediate electors are generally too few to span the interval between voters and candidates, and that they choose representatives not of better quality, but of different politics. If the intermediate body consisted of one in ten of the whole constituency, the contact would be preserved, the people would be really represented, and the ticket system would be broken down.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. To break off that point is to avert the danger. The common system of representation perpetuates the danger. Unequal electorates afford no security to majorities. Equal electorates give none to minorities. Thirty-five years ago it was pointed out that the remedy is proportional representation. It is profoundly democratic, for it increases the influence of thousands who would otherwise have no voice in the government; and it brings men more near an equality by so contriving that no vote shall be wasted, and that every voter shall contribute to bring into Parliament a member of his own opinions. The origin of the idea is variously claimed for Lord Grey and for Considérant. The successful example of Denmark and the earnest advocacy of Mill gave it prominence in the world of politics. It has gained popularity with the growth of democracy, and we are informed by M. Naville that in Switzerland Conservatives and Radicals combined to promote it.

Of all checks on democracy, federalism has been the most efficacious and the most congenial; but, becoming associated with the Red Republic, with feudalism, with the Jesuits, and with slavery, it has fallen into disrepute, and is giving way to centralism. The federal system limits and restrains the sovereign power by dividing it, and by assigning to Government only certain defined rights. It is the only method of curbing not only the majority but the power of the whole people, and it affords the strongest basis for a second chamber, which has been found the essential security for freedom in every genuine democracy.

The fall of Guizot discredited the famous maxim of the Doctrinaires, that Reason is sovereign, and not king or people; and it was further exposed to the scoffer by the promise of Comte that Positivist philosophers shall manufacture political ideas, which no man shall be permitted to dispute. But putting aside international and criminal law, in which there is some approach to uniformity, the domain of political economy seems destined to admit the rigorous certainty of science. Whenever that shall be attained, when the battle between Economists and Socialists is ended, the evil force which Socialism imparts to democracy will be spent. The battle is raging more violently than ever, but it has entered into a new phase, by the rise of a middle party. Whether that remarkable movement, which is promoted by some of the first economists in Europe, is destined to shake the authority of their science, or to conquer socialism, by robbing it of that which is the secret of its strength, it must be recorded here as the latest and the most serious effort that has been made to disprove the weighty sentence of Rousseau, that democracy is a government for gods, but unfit for man.

We have been able to touch on only a few of the topics that crowd Sir Erskine May's volumes. Although he has perceived more clearly than Tocqueville the contact of democracy with socialism, his judgment is untinged with Tocqueville's despondency, and he contemplates the direction of progress with a confidence that approaches optimism. The notion of an inflexible logic in history does not depress him, for he concerns himself with facts and with men more than with doctrines, and his book is a history of several democracies, not of democracy. There are links in the argument, there are phases of development which he leaves unnoticed, because his object has not been to trace out the properties and the connection of ideas, but to explain the results of experience. We should consult his pages, probably, without effect, if we wished to follow the origin and sequence of the democratic dogmas, that all men are equal; that speech and thought are free; that each generation is a law to itself only; that there shall be no endowments, no entails, no primogeniture; that the people are sovereign; that the people can do no wrong. The great mass of those who, of necessity, are interested in practical politics have no such antiquarian curiosity. They want to know what can be learned from the countries where the democratic experiments have been tried; but they do not care to be told how M. Waddington has emended the _Monumentum Ancyranum_, what connection there was between Mariana and Milton, or between Penn and Rousseau, or who invented the proverb _Vox Populi Vox Dei_. Sir Erskine May's reluctance to deal with matters speculative and doctrinal, and to devote his space to the mere literary history of politics, has made his touch somewhat uncertain in treating of the political action of Christianity, perhaps the most complex and comprehensive question that can embarrass a historian. He disparages the influence of the mediæval Church on nations just emerging from a barbarous paganism, and he exalts it when it had become associated with despotism and persecution. He insists on the liberating action of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when it gave a stimulus to absolutism; and he is slow to recognise, in the enthusiasm and violence of the sects in the seventeenth, the most potent agency ever brought to bear on democratic history. The omission of America creates a void between 1660 and 1789, and leaves much unexplained in the revolutionary movement of the last hundred years, which is the central problem of the book. But if some things are missed from the design, if the execution is not equal in every part, the praise remains to Sir Erskine May, that he is the only writer who has ever brought together the materials for a comparative study of democracy, that he has avoided the temper of party, that he has shown a hearty sympathy for the progress and improvement of mankind, and a steadfast faith in the wisdom and the power that guide it.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: _The Quarterly Review_, January 1878.]

IV

THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW[6]

The way in which Coligny and his adherents met their death has been handed down by a crowd of trustworthy witnesses, and few things in history are known in more exact detail. But the origin and motives of the tragedy, and the manner of its reception by the opinion of Christian Europe, are still subject to controversy. Some of the evidence has been difficult of access, part is lost, and much has been deliberately destroyed. No letters written from Paris at the time have been found in the Austrian archives. In the correspondence of thirteen agents of the House of Este at the Court of Rome, every paper relating to the event has disappeared. All the documents of 1572, both from Rome and Paris, are wanting in the archives of Venice. In the Registers of many French towns the leaves which contained the records of August and September in that year have been torn out. The first reports sent to England by Walsingham and by the French Government have not been recovered. Three accounts printed at Rome, when the facts were new, speedily became so rare that they have been forgotten. The Bull of Gregory XIII. was not admitted into the official collections; and the reply to Muretus has escaped notice until now. The letters of Charles IX. to Rome, with the important exception of that which he wrote on the 24th _of_ August, have been dispersed and lost The letters of Gregory XIII. to France have never been seen by persons willing to make them public. In the absence of these documents the most authentic information is that which is supplied by the French Ambassador and by the Nuncio. The despatches of Ferralz, describing the attitude of the Roman court, are extant, but have not been used. Those of Salviati have long been known. Chateaubriand took a copy when the papal archives were at Paris, and projected a work on the events with which they are concerned. Some extracts were published, with his consent, by the continuator of Mackintosh; and a larger selection, from the originals in the Vatican, appeared in Theiner's _Annals of Gregory XIII_. The letters written under Pius V. are beyond the limits of that work; and Theiner, moreover, has omitted whatever seemed irrelevant to his purpose. The criterion of relevancy is uncertain; and we shall avail ourselves largely of the unpublished portions of Salviati's correspondence, which were transcribed by Chateaubriand. These manuscripts, with others of equal importance not previously consulted, determine several doubtful questions of policy and design.

The Protestants never occupied a more triumphant position, and their prospects were never brighter, than in the summer of 1572. For many years the progress of their religion had been incessant. The most valuable of the conquests it has retained were already made; and the period of its reverses had not begun. The great division which aided Catholicism afterwards to recover so much lost ground was not openly confessed; and the effectual unity of the Reformed Churches was not yet dissolved. In controversial theology the defence was weaker than the attack. The works to which the Reformation owed its popularity and system were in the hands of thousands, while the best authors of the Catholic restoration had not begun to write. The press continued to serve the new opinions better than the old; and in literature Protestantism was supreme. Persecuted in the South, and established by violence in the North, it had overcome the resistance of princes in Central Europe, and had won toleration without ceasing to be intolerant. In France and Poland, in the dominions of the Emperor and under the German prelates, the attempt to arrest its advance by physical force had been abandoned. In Germany it covered twice the area that remained to it in the next generation, and, except in Bavaria, Catholicism was fast dying out. The Polish Government had not strength to persecute, and Poland became the refuge of the sects. When the bishops found that they could not prevent toleration, they resolved that they would not restrict it. Trusting to the maxim, "Bellum Haereticorum pax est Ecclesiae," they insisted that liberty should extend to those whom the Reformers would have exterminated.[7] The Polish Protestants, in spite of their dissensions, formed themselves into one great party. When the death of the last of the Jagellons, on the 7th of July 1572, made the monarchy elective, they were strong enough to enforce their conditions on the candidates; and it was thought that they would be able to decide the election, and obtain a king of their own choosing. Alva's reign of Terror had failed to pacify the Low Countries, and he was about to resign the hopeless task to an incapable successor. The taking of the Brill in April was the first of those maritime victories which led to the independence of the Dutch. Mons fell in May; and in July the important province of Holland declared for the Prince of Orange. The Catholics believed that all was lost if Alva remained in command.[8]

The decisive struggle was in France. During the minority of Charles IX. persecution had given way to civil war, and the Regent, his mother, had vainly striven, by submitting to neither party, to uphold the authority of the Crown. She checked the victorious Catholics, by granting to the Huguenots terms which constituted them, in spite of continual disaster in the field, a vast and organised power in the State. To escape their influence it would have been necessary to invoke the help of Philip II., and to accept protection which would have made France subordinate to Spain. Philip laboured to establish such an alliance; and it was to promote this scheme that he sent his queen, Elizabeth of Valois, to meet her mother at Bayonne. In 1568 Elizabeth died; and a rumour came to Catherine touching the manner of her death which made it hard to listen to friendly overtures from her husband. Antonio Perez, at that time an unscrupulous instrument of his master's will, afterwards accused him of having poisoned his wife. "On parle fort sinistrement de sa mort, pour avoir été advancée," says Brantôme. After the massacre of the Protestants, the ambassador at Venice, a man distinguished as a jurist and a statesman, reproached Catherine with having thrown France into the hands of him in whom the world recognised her daughter's murderer. Catherine did not deny the truth of the report. She replied that she was "bound to think of her sons in preference to her daughters, that the foul-play was not fully proved, and that if it were it could not be avenged so long as France was weakened by religious discord."[9] She wrote as she could not have written if she had been convinced that the suspicion was unjust.