Part 4

There are of course many advocates of the initiative and referendum who qualify their support in various ways; and, so far as that goes, there are many opponents who admit that, within proper limitations, these methods may be desirable. With all this I am not concerned. The real force behind the general movement--including not only direct legislation but also the recall of judges and the nullification of judicial decisions by popular vote--is the dogma of the inherent rightfulness of the unlimited rule of the majority. In the collection of papers on the subject issued by the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading place is given to a paper by Senator Bourne, of Oregon. Of any hesitation as to the application of the direct legislation method to the irreversible decision of fundamental questions, he shows not the faintest trace. On the contrary, it is precisely to questions of the highest moment, to the decision of issues of great sweep and significance, that he regards the application of the direct vote as peculiarly just and desirable. "It is not proposed," he says, "that the people shall act directly in all the intricate details of legislation." The great function of the initiative is in the field of ideas: "Under the initiative any man can secure the submission of his ideas to a vote of all the people, provided eight per cent. of the people sign a petition asking that the measure he proposes be so submitted." That any such question, so submitted, will be decided as it should be, Senator Bourne not only does not doubt, but apparently does not imagine that anybody else can be so perverse as to doubt. "The people of a state will never vote against their own interests, hence they will never vote to adopt a law unless it proposes a change for the improvement of the general welfare." No sign of consciousness that there may be a difference between the interests of the majority and the interests of the whole people, between immediate interests and permanent interests, between apparent interests and real interests; still less of any possible conflict between interests--as that word is commonly understood--and the abiding principles of justice or of honor. The 300,000 are certain to be right if the count of noses against them is but 290,000. To be sure, no rational man can actually believe this; and there is little doubt that Senator Bourne would repudiate such an interpretation of his words. But there is equally little doubt as to the position he would fall back upon. "The chief function"--this is the declaration with which he opens his discussion--"the chief function of the initiative and referendum is to restore the absolute sovereignty of the people." The idea that the sovereignty of the people means absolute and unrestricted rule over the whole people according to the immediate will and pleasure of fifty-one per cent. of the people--a crude error whose almost unchallenged currency among the "progressives" of our day is one of the most remarkable psychological phenomena of our time--lies at the bottom of the whole direct-rule propaganda.

THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS

The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the democratic ideal. For a long time, too--until he had come to know more of the actual business of democracy--he had never questioned democratic practice. He was young and innocent.

But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him--or his hopeful heart had not let him understand--that men had to struggle against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.

His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in democracy--quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never imagined. Surely, the love of money _was_ the root of all evil--or of nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement and potentiality--yes, and whose freedom--he and his schoolfellows had written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought. War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.

And all this took place under a democracy--a government which he had been taught was the most equitable on earth, the refuge of the poor and the oppressed, who sailed into the haven where Liberty was Enlightening the World to enter the Land of Promise where all their tears should be wiped away! And the worst of it was, that those who talked most loudly of the democratic ideal were those most eager to profit at its expense. If he could have laid it all to the rich or the aristocratic, it would not have been so bad; but he couldn't. The poor were by nature as greedy and unjust as the rich, and showed themselves as bad in practice when they had the chance, and the democrat turned tyrant as soon as it suited his purse or ambition. It was dismaying. The contrast between the actual workings of democracy and the ideal his innocence had worshipped was so enormous that he sometimes doubted whether they had anything at all in common.

But in time dismay, and even surprise, had worn away, and he recovered equanimity. He was disillusioned, but still a democrat. At the same time he learned of the weakness of his idol, he learned of the weakness of human nature. He knew that the evils he lamented were due much more to human weakness than to the form of government under which the evils occurred. With a philosopher of his own land, he agreed that no form of government was so good as not to work ill in the hands of the bad, and none so bad as not to work well in the hands of the good. Henceforth, if he must worry, let it be about men.

Thus it was that the Democrat, from being a partisan, became a Spectator. Democracy--or what was called that--was amusing: it was so human--so human in its faults, so human in its self-deception. He was moved to smiles at the spectacle of a nation of individuals all wisely thinking themselves intelligent voters, patriots, and capable managers of their country's affairs.

Was it, after all, a democracy? The Democrat possessed the none too common art of looking behind mere words, and contemplating Things as They Are. He was reading his magazine one evening--it contained one of those comforting political science essays, entitled "Whither Are We Drifting?"--when the notion seized on him to find some better name for the government under which he lived. So he laid aside the essay, and let his thoughts run.

Elimination seemed to appeal as a method. He made a whimsical beginning: it wasn't a timocracy; however much the love of honor flourished, it seemed agreed that it was not that which ruled the nation. That the government wasn't an ochlocracy he also felt sure; for, in spite of the rule of mobs, in labor troubles, lynchings, institutions of learning, and weddings in high life, he well knew that the real authority of the land lay in fewer hands.

Was it, then, an aristocracy? That could not be, for no one was better than anyone else. In matters of personal worth there was no superlative; there was not even a comparative. At least, there was no surer path to defeat at the polls than for a candidate to be called "better," to say nothing of "best."

Whether it was a theocracy hardly needed consideration. True, the coin of the realm recorded the nation's Trust in God, and God was frequently quoted as being heartily in favor of a variety of political projects; but on the whole the Democrat was convinced that the function of the inscription was decorative, and felt that any proposal to entrust God alone with the affairs of the nation would create a mighty upheaval in politics and commerce, and be followed by a period of depression. He couldn't really see that God had much part in the actual government, though he would not go so far as Epicurus, and say that He cared nothing about what men were doing. He felt more like agreeing with the Hebrew who conceived God as laughing men to derision. And besides, to say that the government was at present a theocracy would place the Democrat in the position of an adverse critic of the Almighty, which was as much as to say that he himself was better than the Almighty; and that would be undemocratic.

On the whole, those who called the government an oligarchy seemed to be getting more near to reality; for at certain crises it became quite clear that a few men determined the measures of government. And yet, the individuals of the group were not always the same, but varied according to the interests involved; and they were not an openly constituted and declared body, elected by the people. To be sure, they operated through legislators, but they themselves were more often than not far removed from open political life. To call the real government a plutocracy, its governing agents plutocrats, and their instruments the legislators, seemed reasonable enough. It was humiliating, it seemed the fact that the great democracy was ruled, not by itself, but by a Thing.

However, the rule of money, that is, financial self-interest, was not really a form of government; it was only an influence, and one that might work good as well as ill. It underlay, more or less, all governments, not only modern, but ancient as well, and had to, in the nature of things, so long as property existed and prosperity meant increase. What else did the phenomenon of economic history-writing signify but the appreciation of this fact?

The Democrat concluded to let the government under which he lived stand as a democracy. The term might not be absolutely sufficient, but it covered the case as well as any. At any rate, whatever the reality, the government was cast in the democratic mold: every man had a vote, and was sovereign over it, and could sell it, or throw it away, or even make use of it, as he chose; and he was represented, or at least thought he was, by someone whom he elected, or thought he elected; and was heeded when he clamored his desires or his indignation, provided it didn't interfere too much with what his representative was induced to conceive to be the interests of "the people."

And there were also other manifestations of the democratic ideal which really distinguished the government under which he lived from that of many other nations. There was democracy in education. The public set out to educate _all_ its sons and daughters, from kindergarten to college Commencement. The day was past when education was only for gentlemen's sons; the children of the people, rich and poor, blue-blooded and flat-footed, male and female, brainy and brainless, came to college, and within its walls there was no connection, it was said, between honors and money or place. Students dressed from the same clothes-shop, yelled the same college yell, bought their apparatus at a co-operative store, ate at the same boarding-house, took the same examinations, often subserving the cause of democracy by evading aristocratic tyranny in the person of the faculty and making democratic use of their neighbors' learning, and asked no questions about each other's finances or forbears--except, of course, the fraternity and sorority students, who had _tria nomina_ and were the exceptions to prove the rule.

And not only were the college rolls and records indicative of democracy, but there was a democracy of subjects to study. You had free election: one subject was as good as another, one course as valuable as another. So long as you had the required number of credits, the character of the credits made no difference: an hour contained sixty minutes, and no hour set up to be better than its fellows. A college education was defined as "something of everything for everybody," and the definition was especially applicable to the education of the State Universities, those great examples of learning in action. In them anyone might study anything at any time under any instructor under any conditions and in any place--for you could study in absence, and by correspondence, and hypnotism, and Christian Science. And when you got through, whatever your method or matter or capacity or docility or imbecility, you were labelled A. B., and were as good as any other A. B., and had a fortune assured--until you found out that the great democratic world thought A. B. no better than D. F., or any other combination of letters, or no letters at all.

Yes, and there was democracy of religion as well as of education. Ministers wore plain clothes, avoided religion in conversation, greeted everyone with the loudness which in some way had become confused with cordiality, romped with children, attended kissing parties, and used slang in sermons. Men believed anything, or nothing; it was a free country, a free age. Any religion, or any interpretation of it, was as good as any other, so long as you really believed it. You could pray kneeling, or standing, or sitting, or walking, or jumping--as you chose. You could interpret your creed literally, or symbolically, or allegorically, or pragmatically. You could devote your church edifice to God, or you could make it a meeting-house for the people, and use it for socials, athletics, kindergarten, lyceum, vaudeville, soup kitchens, rummage sales, teachers' institutes--and when all these religious activities grew too extensive for it, you could sell it to the liveryman or the storage company or the movie-man. What were churches for, if not for the people?

There was democracy in art, too--especially in literature. Poets wrote in what vein and in what meter they chose, at what length, with what attention to rhyme and rhythm, with what preparation or equipment they chose. They bowed before no laws, ancient or modern. If they made use of the great names in poetry, it was to justify their own vagaries. They not only pleaded Tennyson for Tennysonian liberties, but took what additional license they chose on the ground of personal liberty. Didn't Homer nod? Of course; and, taking advantage of the example, they slept the sleep of the unworrying. Poets could write in prose, and prose authors dress their commonplace thoughts in verse. In oratory and the novel, matter was all, form nothing. Men were content if their readers _could_ get their meaning; the compelling power of style and accurate expression were qualities for which they were unwilling to pay the price of long and patient preparation. Olympus, Helicon, and Arcadia had become the paradise of anarchists, to say nothing of democrats. Who cared now when Zeus's ambrosial locks were shaken in wrath, or Apollo slammed his baton down in a rage? Who were they, to set up to be better than others?

And, as for painters and sculptors, and architects and musicians, who should presume to tyrannize over them by requiring standards of style or subject? If an architect chose to construct a High School that looked like a prison or a warehouse, why shouldn't he? After all, what was the High School but the people's college, and what was its purpose if not to fit the sons and daughters of the commonwealth for life, and why _should_ it be built in the Tudor style, or in any other style? What the people needed was usefulness, not style. And if a musician wished to compose an overture imitative of all the noises that accompanied the Retreat from Moscow, including French and Russian profanity, or if a painter preferred to paint a drunken prostitute rather than Diana or a Daughter of the Revolution, why shouldn't he? It was a free country, a democratic age, and it was time art entered into the service of the people.

And there was democracy of manners, too, and of dress. Democracy had grown so used to insisting on clothes not making the man, that distinction in dress had long been a rarity, and men were no longer constrained to live up to the garb they wore. You could wear a white vest without obligation to keep it clean, and you could appear with silk hat and long coat without being suspected of religion or literature. Men made the clothes now: the process was reversed; they made them by the wholesale, every season, and if you weren't satisfied with a good democratic costume--i. e., the one imposed by the despotic democratic fashion of the season--and had your clothing made to adorn, why, you were an aristocrat.

And if clothes didn't oblige, neither did _noblesse_, that other aristocratic bugbear, oblige. Gentlemen? Family? Why, everyone was a gentleman, from pugilist to preacher. Who said so? Why, who but the gentleman himself? It was a free country, and a man had a right to be a gentleman if he chose, didn't he? Just what a gentleman was, to be sure, no one seemed able to say; but no one failed to lay claim to the title, or to pull off his coat and prove the justice of his claim if you denied it. Surely there was no greater proof of the beneficent power of democracy than that it made all men gentlemen, and all women ladies.

And there was democracy in the home as well. The American husband was so democratic that he bettered the apostolic instruction which told wives to be obedient to their husbands. You might have thought that it read the reverse. And children--the children of democratic America were famous the world over for their unquestioning assumption of knowledge and authority, for their assurance and aggressiveness; for their easy contradiction of their parents, who were intimidated by the pedagogical direction never to let your child fear you. Travellers returned from Europe and reported no Hans and Giovannino who made wide the mouth and thrust out the tongue in the streets of aristocracy. Since the time of the bald-headed prophet and the two and forty she-bears, it had been natural for youth to presume on its superiority, but it was only the spirit of democracy which seemed to _encourage_ the presumption.

But why not? If democracy meant equality, why not be consistent? If all men--black and white, good and bad, rich and poor, wise and foolish--were to be made equal, why not all women with them? Women were surely members of the commonwealth. And why not all children? Hadn't Spencer said so? Children were members of the commonwealth, too. And why not the beasts, wild and tame, who were also part and parcel of the population of the country? Why stop merely with men?

Yes, the Democrat concluded, his country was best described as a democracy, even though the few ruled over the many in matters of substance, and the many ruled over the few in art and manners, and both were tyrants. He remembered Plato's definition--Plato the blasphemer--and it seemed applicable to his own time: "Democracy, a charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike." It was marvellous how men believed in their equality with other men, what self-confidence they possessed, and what assurance came to them from the oft repeated word liberty. "This is a free country, and I'm just as good as you" could be said by anyone, and was said by everyone, and as a result his back was a little stiffer and his head a degree or two more erect. Foreigners learned to say it before they learned to speak the language. The very animals seemed to understand it; it was Plato over again: "And the horses and asses had come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of free men; and they would run at anybody whom they met in the street if he did not get out of their way: and all things were just ready to burst with liberty."

The Democrat, you see, through his habit of looking at Things as They Are, had come to possess a lively sense of the ridiculous side of democracy--its inconsistencies, its unconscious enjoyment of words, its silly self-deception and placid self-satisfaction.

Now that you have seen the workings of his mind, you will easily understand, too, how the expression of his thoughts might provoke those who were always on the lookout for the red rag of aristocracy. And the fact is, that on occasion he did express his thoughts with great frankness and no little vehemence; and, as no one likes to be told his faults by even a friendly critic, he often brought the angry hornets of democracy about his ears.

Yes, and by your smiling you seem to say that he deserved it. And yet I assure you now, as I did in the beginning, that he was really a democrat. You must not mistake realization of the faults of democracy in operation for hostility to democracy itself. He had seen something of life in aristocratic countries, and was thankful above all things that there _was_ something in the atmosphere of his own land which had the effect of making men look up. This virtue alone covered a multitude of the sins of democracy. There _was_ something in his country more than the mere form of democratic society. Whether men got their rights or not, they knew they had rights, and anyone who wanted to make them consent to injustice had at least to take the trouble of giving it the appearance of justice. And not only were they possessed of a lively sense of their own rights, but the air was full of talk about other people's having _their_ rights. Generosity and benevolence were abroad in the land. It was, to be sure, something of the sort of Sidney Smith's benevolence--the feeling which A experienced when he thought B ought to do something to relieve C's necessities; but even that kind was better than none. It was vastly important whether large classes of human beings acquiesced in being regarded as cattle--as they seemed to in the Old World--or not.