Part 5

So far I have been attempting to make a case for the assertion that a consideration of the chief forms of human expression during the past age enables us to see in all of them Democracy as a great process of loosening of bonds and general disintegration. But that loosening and disintegration were not universal. Now I would point out that in certain fields synthesis is so necessary, so inherent, that it has put up a very successful fight against the solvent tendencies of Democracy.

In certain fields the ascent of Democracy has not meant dissolution. No doubt the whole world of modern science became possible, and could only become possible, through the immense mental releases of ascendent Democracy. But while in the realms of political, literary, and artistic expression Democracy meant fragmentation and reduction to unorganized masses, in this newer world of science the onset of Democracy was accompanied by synthesis of the most extensive sort. The development of science in the past three centuries has been diametrically different from the political, literary, and artistic development of the same period. In the preceding ages, when everything else was organized and relevant, science was a mere miscellany of disconnected facts. With the release of the human mind from authority, science began to be systematic and coherent. Release from established traditions and precedences meant in the world of politics, literature, and art, limitless freedom. In science it meant subjugation to experimental verification and the logical consistency of fact with fact. So while the broad visible history of the Age of Democracy so far has been one of release, escape, go-as-you-please: less conspicuous in laboratories and faculties and books and classes--but in the end infinitely more significant--has been the growth of one consistent vision of reality to which all things must be referred, in which the moods of a man are made to march with chemical changes, and the structure of the smallest atom is brought into relation with the physics of the remotest star. To that release of synthetic forces I shall presently return.

Next let me point out that this period of the ascent of Democracy has by no means been a period of easy, undisputed ascent. Nor has it been merely a struggle against kings and aristocracies, privileges and advantages, ancient traditions and old authority. The proposition that any man is as important as any man has come hard against certain mental and material realities. History for the last hundred years or so has been largely the story of that collision. This assertion of human equality has come against the severest stresses at the boundaries where language meets language, and at the geographical or social frontiers of dissimilar races. There the common man, who has been willing to break down all the boundaries between himself and his superiors, discovers deep instinctive dispositions to call a halt and draw the line. His mind is invaded by an exaggerated sense of difference. He develops rivalries, suspicions, antagonisms. The Age of Democracy has also been the Age of Nationalism. Never in the whole history of mankind have national and racial antagonisms been so acute and conscious, so massive, powerful, and dangerous, as they have become during the ascent of Democracy. And yet that is entirely inconsistent with the larger and completer aspirations of Democracy, which have insisted always that there shall be no distinctions of class or creed or race. One of the most human and interesting things to watch at the present time is the struggle of the Labour parties in the European democracies against their ingrained nationalist feelings and their belligerent patriotism. And still more edifying are the fluctuations of the Labour movement in such countries as Australia and South Africa with regard to yellow and brown immigration and the black vote.

But nationalism is not the greatest force that Modern Democracy has evoked against itself in its ascent. Far more fundamental is the synthetic drive in economic life, the enormous material pressure making for the replacement of individual and small competitive businesses by great and unifying enterprises, not merely in manufactures but in the production of such staples as coal, oil, iron and steel, cotton, food substances, and fundamental chemical products. The small man and the medium-sized business are pushed aside by highly organized and often quite scientifically organized concerns.

Here again the paradoxical aspect of Democracy reappears. These great crystallizations of business--so large as to become at last monopolies--are plainly due to the releases of Democracy, the freedom of science, invention, experiment and enterprise, the lack of control and restriction the ascent of Democracy has involved. But just as plainly do these crystallizations run counter to the more intimate feeling of Democracy that every man is as good as every man, that every man should be his own master and live his life in his own fashion after his own heart. Essential to the life and success of these big businesses is an intricate system of specialization and subordination of functions, and great freedoms of action for the executives. Most of those engaged in working them must be simply employed persons, and there must be great inequalities of authority and initiative between one man and another. In America a sort of reconciliation between this democratic reality of economic synthesis and democratic ideals of quality has been attempted by Anti-Trust legislation, and in England there is a small but delightfully logical movement for what is called the Distributive State, which is to cut up big businesses periodically and hand the bleeding fragments back to the common man. But the main expression of this conflict between synthesis and analysis in the democratic age has been the struggle for and against Socialism. For there is scarcely any form of Socialism that does not fall within the definition of an attempt to take the general economic life out of whatever hands control it at present and hand it over to the direction either of representatives elected by the workers, or of politicians elected by the voters of the entire community. Socialism is the attempt to democratize economic life as political life has already been democratized. And the final practical objection to Socialism, partial or general--the objection that has usually carried the argument--has always been this: that politicians and elected people are not good enough for the job.

That brings me to the great conspicuous fact of our present time, to what I may call the arrest, the pause, in the advance of political Democracy--to the fact that now, and since the war, there has been a growing distrust of and discontent with the politicians and the political methods evolved by Parliamentary Democracy.

In two great Latin countries we have seen politicians and parliamentary institutions thrust aside with no signs of popular regret. In Russia a parliamentary republic appeared and vanished like a dream and gave place to a government by an organized association of a quite unprecedented pattern, the Communist Party, making only the slightest concessions to the representative idea. In China we see another extraordinary organization, the Kuomintang, consolidating the whole country with tremendous vigour in the face of the discredited parliamentarianism of Peking. I will not discuss nor even raise other instances to enforce my argument that the magic has gone out of the method of government by general elections.

I have said enough, I think, to pose my essential question. Is the process of ascendent Democracy played out? Or is it going on upon the old lines, in spite of these appearances? Or is it perhaps entering upon a new phase, a phase so different as practically to open a new age in the story of human experience? Are not its synthetic releases overtaking and mastering its tendency to fragmentation?

I have already betrayed, even in my title, the answer I am disposed to give to these questions, which is that Democracy is entering upon a phase of revision in which Parliaments and parliamentary bodies and political life as we know it to-day are destined to disappear. And that with the disappearance will come profound changes in all our methods of expression, indeed in all our lives.

For a number of generations the democratic process ruling the world has meant nothing but release, enfranchisement for freedom, the breaking down of controls and restraints and obstacles. There has been a world-wide detachment of individuals from codes and controls, subjugations and responsibilities, functions and duties. I suggest that this process of dissolution is at an end, and that mankind is faced--is challenged--by the need for reorganization and reorientation, political and social and intellectual, quite beyond the power of the negligent common voter and his politicians and the happy-go-lucky education and literature on which our minds are fed.

Let me state three great interrelated problems that have been facing mankind since the war, and let me remind you how futile so far have been the attempts of our modern democratic Governments and communities to find solutions, to produce any hope of solutions, for these problems.

Foremost of these three in our consciousness is the problem of war. I need not, before such an audience as this, dilate upon the cruelty, the horror, the sheer destructiveness into which the war process, equipped by modern science, necessarily develops. I will not talk of air bombardment, or of poison gas and germs, nor of the practical abolition of the immunity of the non-combatant, nor of the complete economic and social disorganization that would probably ensue upon another group of wars. I take it that upon these matters you are of the same mind as myself. I take it that an enormous majority of humanity now wants no more war.

Yet consider how feeble have been the efforts of any Government since 1918 to set up more than the flimsiest paper barriers against war. The sabres still rattle in Europe. The big guns are moved from position to position. In 1910 war hung over Europe, over the world, like a cliff we knew must fall. And it fell. Here and now, are we any safer? For what were these politicians elected? Little conferences, little junketings, little demonstrations of amiability--like tying back the cliff with coloured cotton. Meanwhile the foundries go on making tanks, battleships, guns, all the world over.

And second of these three problems Modern Democracy has no power to handle is the monetary question. If anything is plain, if there is anything upon which every one must be agreed, it is that for the proper working of contemporary civilization a stable money basis of world-wide validity is essential. Just so far as money is unstable, so far does speculation undermine and replace sound business enterprise and honest work for profit. For eight years now we have seen the exchanges of the world dance together. We have seen the effort for economic recuperation crippled and deflected by this drunkard dance of money. Each democratic Government has pursued its own policy according to its lights and apparent interests. The bankers and the financiers have performed their mysterious operations in obscurity. And nowhere, in any Democracy, has the mass of voters shown the slightest understanding of or ability to grasp the processes which threw them out of employment, made their poor savings evaporate, and snatched the necessaries of life out of their reach.

But the military obsession with its war threat and the monetary tangle are, so to speak, merely complications of the more general riddle before mankind, which is that, chiefly through changes in methods of transport and the advance of science and invention, economic life has become world-wide and a certain economic unity is being imposed willy-nilly upon the globe. A vast change of scale is happening in economic life--a vast extension of range. So that the method of the small individual manufacturer and trader, the method even of the moderate-sized competing company, the method even of national groups, tend to be superseded, in the case of all our staple supplies, by combinations upon a universal scale. The master problem before us all, before our race, is how to achieve this world economic unity, how to produce a system of world controls with as little blind experiment as possible, without the sacrifice of countless millions of whole generations, in the throes of this inevitable reconstruction. How to establish enough political unity in the world to ensure peace; how to establish enough political unity to save industry and trade from becoming the mere preliminaries to a gamble with the exchange; how to establish enough political unity to control and direct the distribution of raw products, employment and manufactured goods about the earth--that, in brief, is the present task before the human intelligence. And we have no Governments, we have nothing in the world able to deal with this trinity of problems, this three-headed Sphinx which has waylaid and now confronts mankind.

Now the sense of the inadequacy of modern democratic Governments for the task before them grows upon us all. What is going to be attempted, what is going to be done in the matter? We are all familiar nowadays with various projects of electoral reform. Some, such as the Referendum, aim merely at restraining and paralyzing Governments. Others, such as the proposal to have smaller representative bodies of members elected by large constituencies by the methods of proportional representation by the simple transferable vote, would no doubt give a more free and vigorous assembly, and go far to abolish political parties and the hack professional politician. But none of these electoral reform projects go to the root of the trouble with Modern Democracy, which is the indifference, ignorance, and incapacity of the common man towards public affairs.

We have to recognize more plainly than is generally admitted to-day that the ordinary voter does not care a rap for his vote. He does not connect it with the idea of the world at large, nor use it to express any will or purpose whatever about the general conduct of things. I have already called attention to the fact that the novel, the characteristic literary form of Modern Democracy, and the modern drama ignore all comprehensive political and religious ideas. Thereby they display current reality with the utmost veracity. These forms, the novel and the play, have so far embodied no new concepts and directions about life as a whole, they have simply represented life at large released from pre-existing concepts and directions. Our modern democratic Governments reveal as clearly that the onset of Modern Democracy did not mean a transfer of power from the few to the many, but a disappearance of power from the world. The vote is an instrument of defence, and not a constructive tool. Faced with gigantic constructive needs of ever-increasing urgency, political Democracy fails. It cannot produce inventive and original Governments; it cannot produce resolute Governments; it cannot produce understanding, far-thinking Governments. Its utmost act of will is the capricious or peevish dismissal of Governments by a general election.

For a century or more it has worked well that the world should be under-governed and under-organized. In that liberty science has won its way, established itself in a world-wide system of research and record, gained an invincible inertia. Music has achieved the most glorious developments, painting risen to unprecedented levels of technique, literature learnt a new fearlessness, and industry and commerce have tried and expanded a thousand subtle and huge combinations no official control would ever have permitted. The mere breakdown of the cramping systems of the past, the escape from traditional privilege and authority, was enough to permit the great expansion of life that has gone on since the sixteenth century. But there is a limit to unguided and uncontrolled expansion, and at that limit we seem to have arrived with a war threat, a monetary instability, and a chronic conflict between the organic growth of economic processes and the desire of the worker for freedom and happiness, which none of the Governments in the world seem to have the necessary initiative and vigour to meet.

We need now more definite direction and government in human affairs, on a scale and of a quality commensurate with the three mighty problems our race has to face. It is idle to talk of returning to the little royalties, aristocracies, and so forth of the pre-democratic past. Are there any signs of a new, more decisive, and more vigorously constructive form of government in our world? I submit there are, and on these signs I rest my anticipations of the Age of Democracy Under Revision that is dawning upon us. Coming events cast their shadows before, and a keen eye can detect a number of shadows of what is coming. But the two shadows to which I would particularly draw your attention are the Communist Party and Fascism.

Let me be perfectly clear upon one point here. I am an unsparing hostile critic of Marxist Communism. I have a strong dislike for many aspects of Fascism--including particularly its head. May I insist upon that? There is a mental disease about called “Seeing red,” and I want to avoid any manifestations of that to-night. I am not sympathetic with Communist ideas. In my latest book, “The World of William Clissold,” you will find a most careful, elaborate, and destructive criticism of Marxism, and my treatment of Lenin has brought down upon me the violent vituperation of Mr. Trotsky. Quite as fervently have I plunged into conflict with Fascism. I am anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. But what I am discussing now is not the mental content of these two movements, but their quality and spirit as organizations.

Their quality and spirit as organizations.... They are both mainly composed of youngish people. They are so far democratic that they are open to any one who will obey their disciplines and satisfy their requirements. Some of my hearers may know something of the intimate lives of young Communists or young Fascists. The movement dominates the entire life. The individual gives himself--or herself--to the movement in a spirit essentially religious. It enters into the life and into the conscience as few religions do nowadays. Communism indeed claims that it is a complete substitute for religion. Everything else is to be subordinated to the ends of the movement. With the Fascist these are the supposed good of the Italian community; with the Communist they are the supposed good of the whole world. These movements began as voluntary movements of young people, so concerned about public affairs as willingly to give themselves to the sacrifices and dangers--and adventure--involved. I submit it is a fact of profound significance that Fascism could attract enough vigorous young people to capture and hold and govern Italy, and that the Communist Party, with perhaps a hundred thousand members or so in Russia, could seize upon the ruins of that war-broken land and hold it against all comers.

One has to admit, in spite of many assertions to the contrary, that neither in Italy nor Russia do the masses of the population seem to resent the dictatorship of these associations. No vote famine has broken out in these disenfranchised countries. You do not find haggard peasants wandering about in search of a polling booth. So that our assertion that the average common man, the common voter, does not care a rap about the commonweal and his vote, has to be supplemented by the fact that there is an active-minded minority capable of so vivid an interest in the direction of public affairs as to make the most complete sacrifices to see things going in the way it considers right. This is most conspicuous in Russia and Italy, but in China students’ associations, closely similar in character, are taking possession of the larger half of the country, and in Japan and many other countries kindred bodies of mentally energetic types are playing an increasingly important rôle in public life. In the nineteenth century such types were either not stimulated to activity, or their energies were spent upon parliamentary politics or diverted in other directions. Now all over the world a certain section of them is taking its activities out of parliamentary affairs and setting itself into vigorous competition with the parliamentary system.

You see, I am building my expectation of a new phase in human affairs upon the belief that there is a profoundly serious minority in the mass of our generally indifferent species. I cannot understand the existence of any of the great religions, I cannot explain any fine and grave constructive process in history, unless there is such a serious minority amidst our confusions. They are the salt of the earth, these people capable of devotion and of living lives for remote and mighty ends--and, unless the composition of our species has altered, they are as numerous as they have ever been. I see them less and less satisfied and used by existing loyalties and traditional faiths. I see them ready to crystallize about any constructive idea powerful enough to grip their minds. Is it not reasonable then to hold that these associations, these concentrations of mentally energetic types for political ends, these revelations of politico-religious fervour in the community--considerable as they are even now--are the mere beginnings of much greater things? The breakdown of the old loyalties and the old faiths in the past age has released this great fund of effort and synthetic possibility for new applications. And over against it we have the need for world peace--which can be achieved only by some sort of political unity--and for social adjustment, which seems only possible through the comprehensible handling of world economic affairs as one great system.

More than twenty years ago, in a book called “A Modern Utopia,” when there was not a fact on earth to support me, I sketched a World State ruled by a self-devoted organization of volunteers. To-day I can recall that conception of a future society and I can appeal to Russia, China, Italy, and much that is astir everywhere, to substantiate that possibility. I have spoken of the youth in these two specimen movements I have cited, but it is not merely the young who will be found willing to orient their dispersed lives to great aims and comprehensive ideas. The pain of aimlessness and ineffectiveness can be aroused at any age with the realization of insecurity. The search for a consuming objective ends only with life. In short, we have the morally energetic types needed for such a movement in a released and nascent state. We have the manifest need for such a movement. We are gathering the creative ideas and accumulating the impulse for such a movement. What is there to prevent a great politico-religious drive for social and world unity taking hold everywhere of the active and adventurous minority of mankind--that is to say, of all mankind that matters--even quite soon?