The Rise of the Democracy Part 10

A hundred years later, John Ball and his fellow agitators preached a gospel of social equality that inspired the Peasant Revolt. But communism was the goal of the peasant leaders in 1381, and freedom from actual oppression the desire of their followers. No conception of political democracy can be found in the speeches and demands of Wat Tyler.

In the sixteenth century Robert Ket in Norfolk renewed the old cries of social revolution, and roused the countryside to stop the enclosures by armed revolt. And again the popular rising is an agrarian war to end intolerable conditions, not a movement for popular government.

THE "SOCIAL CONTRACT" THEORY

The theory of a pact or contract between the Government and the people became the favourite a.s.sumption of political writers from the sixteenth century onward, and it was this theory that Rousseau popularised in his "Social Contract," the theory, too, which triumphed for a season in the French Revolution.

The theory is, of course, pure a.s.sumption, without any basis in history, and resting on no foundation of fact. It a.s.sumes that primitive man was born with enlightened views on civil government, and that for the greater well-being of his tribe or nation he deposited the sovereign authority which belonged to himself, in a prince or king--or in some other form of executive government--retaining the right to withdraw his allegiance from the government if the authority is abused, and the contract which conferred sovereignty violated. It was not maintained that the contract was an actually written doc.u.ment; it was supposed to be a tacit agreement. The whole theory seems to have sprung from the study of Roman law and the const.i.tutions of Athens and Sparta. Nothing was known of primitive man or of the beginnings of civilisation till the nineteenth century. The Bible and the cla.s.sical literature of Greece and Rome are all concerned with civilised, not primitive, man, and with slaves and "heathens" who are accounted less than men. The "sovereign people" of Athens and Sparta became the model of later republican writers, while the choosing of a king by the Israelites recorded in the Old Testament sanctioned the idea, for early Protestant writers, that sovereignty was originally in the people.

The Huguenot Languet, in his _Vindiciae contra Tyrannos_ (1579), maintained on scriptural grounds that kingly power was derived from the will of the people, and that the violation by the king of the mutual compact of king and people to observe the laws absolved the people from all allegiance.[72]

The Jesuit writers, Bellarmine and Mariana, argued for the sovereignty of the people as the basis of kingly rule; and when the English divines of the Established Church were upholding the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the Spanish Jesuit, Suarez, was amongst those who attacked that doctrine, quoting a great body of legal opinion in support of the contention that "the prince has that power of law giving which the people have given him." Suarez, too, insists that all men are born equal, and that "no one has a political jurisdiction over another." Milton, in his "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" (1649), had taken a similar line: the people had vested in kings and magistrates the authority and power of self-defence and preservation. "The power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright." Hooker, fifty years earlier (1592-3), in his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I., had affirmed the sovereignty or legislative power of the people as the ultimate authority, and had also declared for an original social contract, "all public regiment of what kind soever seemeth evidently to have risen from deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful." Hobbes made the social contract a justification for Royal absolutism, and Locke, with a Whig ideal of const.i.tutional government, enlarged on the right of a people to change its form of government, and justified the Revolution of 1688. The writings of Hobbes and Locke have had a lasting influence, and Locke is really the source of the democratic stream of the eighteenth century. It rises in Locke to become the torrent of the French Revolution.

But Huguenots and Jesuits, Hooker and Milton--what influence had their writings on the ma.s.s of English people? None whatever, as far as we can see. Milton could write of "the power" of "the people" as a "natural birthright," but the power was plainly in Cromwell's army, and "the people"

had no means of expression concerning its will, and no opportunity for the a.s.sertion of sovereignty. Lilburne and the Levellers held that democracy could be set up on the ruins of Charles I.'s Government, and the sovereignty of the people become a fact; and with a ready political instinct Lilburne proposed the election of popular representatives on a democratic franchise. Cromwell rejected all Lilburne's proposals; for him affairs of State were too serious for experiments in democracy; and Lilburne himself was cast into prison by the Commonwealth Government.

Lilburne's pamphlets were exceedingly numerous, and his popularity, in London particularly, enormous. He was the voice of the unrepresented, powerless citizens in whom the republican theorists saw the centre of authority. The one effort to persuade the Commonwealth Republic to give power to the people was made by John Lilburne, and it was defeated. The Whig theory that an aristocratic House of Commons, elected by a handful of people, and mainly at the dictation of the landowners, was "the People,"

triumphed. The bulk of the English people were left out of all account in the political struggles of Whigs and Tories, and democracy was not dreamed of till America was free and France a republic. The industrial revolution compelled the reform of the British House of Commons, and democracy has slowly superseded aristocracy, not from any enthusiasm for the "sovereign people," but from the traditional belief that representative government means the rule of the people.

Precedent, not theory, has been the argument for democracy in England.

THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679)

The writings of Hobbes are important, because they state the case for absolute rule, or "a strong government," as we call it to-day. Hobbes was frankly rationalist and secular. Holding the great end of government to be happiness, he made out that natural man lived in savage ill-will with his fellows. To secure some sort of decency and safety men combined together and surrendered all natural rights to a sovereign--either one man, or an a.s.sembly of men--and in return civil rights were guaranteed. But the sovereignty once established was supreme, and to injure it was to injure oneself, since it was composed of "every particular man." The sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. Whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though Hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular a.s.semblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. Civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy--the very things that induced men to establish sovereignty. Only when the safety of the state was threatened was rebellion justifiable.

At bottom, the objection to the theories of Hobbes is the same objection that must be taken to the theories of Locke and Rousseau. All these writers a.s.sume not only the fiction of a social contract, but a _static_ view of society. Society is the result of growth: it is not a fixed and settled community. Mankind proceeds experimentally in forms of government. To Hobbes and his followers, security of life and property was the one essential thing for mankind--disorder and social insecurity the things to be prevented at all cost. Now, this might be all very well but for evolution. Mankind cannot rest quietly under the strongest and most stable government in the world. It will insist on learning new tricks, on thinking new thoughts, and if it is not allowed to teach itself fresh habits, it will break out in revolt, and either the government will be broken or the subjects will wither away under the rule of repression.

Hobbes may be quoted as a supporter of the rule of the Stuarts, and equally of the rule of Cromwell. Every kind of strong tyranny may be defended by his principles.

In the nineteenth century Carlyle was the finest exponent of "strong"

government, and generally the leaders of the Tory party have been its advocates, particularly in the att.i.tude to be taken towards subject races.

JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704)

Locke, setting out to vindicate the Whig Revolution of 1688, rejects Hobbes' view of the savagery of primitive man, and invents "a state of peace, goodwill, mutual a.s.sistance and preservation"--equally, as we know to-day, far from the truth. Locke's primitive men have a natural right to personal property--"as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property"--but they are as worried and as fearful as Hobbes' savages. So they, too, renounce their natural rights in favour of civil liberty, and are happy when they have got "a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected on it."

According to Hobbes, once having set up a government, there was no possible justification for changing it--save national peril; and a bad government was to be obeyed rather than the danger of civil war incurred.

But Locke never allows the government to be more than the trustee of the people who placed it in power. It rules by consent of the community, and may be removed or altered when it violates its trust. Hobbes saw in the break-up of a particular government the dissolution of society. Locke made a great advance on this, for he saw that a change of government could be accomplished without any very serious disturbance in the order of society or the peace of a nation. Hobbes did not believe that the people could be trusted to effect a change of government, while Locke had to justify the change which had just taken place in 1688.

Only when we have dropped all Locke's theories of primitive man's happiness, and the social-contract fiction, does the real value of his democratic teaching become clear, and the lasting influence of his work become visible.

Mankind is compelled to adopt some form of government if it is to sleep at nights without fear of being murdered in its bed, or if it wishes to have its letters delivered by the postman in the morning. As the only purpose of government is to secure mutual protection, mankind must obey this government, or the purpose for which government exists will be defeated.

But the powers of government must be strictly limited if this necessary consent of the governed is to continue, and if the government has ceased to retain the confidence that gives consent, then its form may be changed to some more appropriate shape.

Now all this theory of Locke's has proved to be true in the progress of modern democracy. It was pointed out that the danger of his doctrine--that a nation had the right to choose its form of government, and to change or adapt its const.i.tution--lay in the sanction it gave to revolution; but Locke answered that the natural inertia of man was a safeguard against frequent and violent political changes, and as far as England was concerned Locke was right. The average Englishman grumbles, but only under great provocation is he moved to violent political activity. As a nation, we have acknowledged the right of the majority to make the political changes that have brought in democracy, and we have accepted the changes loyally.

Occasionally, since Locke, the delay of the government in carrying out the wishes of the majority has induced impatience, but, generally, the principle has been acted upon that government is carried on with the consent of the governed, and that the Parliamentary party which has received the largest number of votes has the authority from the people to choose its ministry, and to make laws that all must obey.

The power of the people is demonstrated by the free election of members of Parliament, and, therefore, democracy requires that its authority be obeyed by all who are represented in Parliament. There is no social contract between the voter and the government; but there is a general feeling that it is not so much partic.i.p.ation in politics as the quiet enjoyment of the privileges of citizens.h.i.+p that obliges submission to the laws. The extension of the franchise was necessary whenever a body of people excluded from the electorate was conscious of being unrepresented and desired representation. Otherwise the consent of the voteless governed was obviously non-existent, and government was carried on in defiance of the absence of that consent.

It is not Locke's theories that have guided politically the great ma.s.ses of the people, for Locke's writings have had no very considerable popularity in England. But it has happened that these theories have influenced the conduct of statesmen, and with reason, since they offer an explanation of political progress, and constrain politicians to act, experimentally indeed, but with some reasonable antic.i.p.ation of safety to the nation.

British statesmen and politicians have made no parade of Locke's opinions; they have done nothing to incur the charge of "theorist," but the influence of Locke can be seen all the same--chiefly in the loyal acceptance of political change, in the refusal to be shocked or alarmed at a "leap in the dark," and by a willingness to adjust the machinery of government to the needs of the time. In England Locke's influence has been less dynamic than static; it has helped us to preserve a moderation in politics; to be content with piecemeal legislation, because to attempt too much might be to alienate the sympathies of the majority; to keep our political eye, so to speak, on the ebb and flow of public opinion--since it is public opinion that is the final court of appeal; to tolerate abuses until it is quite plain a great number of people are anxious to have the abuse removed; and above all to settle down in easy contentment under political defeat, and make the best of accomplished reforms, not because we like them, but because a Parliamentary majority has decreed them.

For England, in fact, the essence of Locke's teaching has helped to produce a deference almost servile to political majorities and to public opinion, a reluctance to make any reform until public opinion has p.r.o.nounced loudly and often in favour of reform, and an emphatic a.s.surance that every reform enacted by Parliament is the unmistakable expression of the will of the people. Locke has discouraged us from hasty legislation and from political panics.

ROUSSEAU AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Locke's influence in France and in America has been altogether different.

Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot were all students and admirers of Locke, and his political theories were at the base of Rousseau's "Social Contract." A return to nature, a harking back to an imaginary primitive happiness of mankind, the glorification of an ideal of simplicity and innocence,--supposed to have been the ideal of early politics--the restoration of a popular sovereignty built up on natural rights alleged to have been lost: these were the articles of faith Rousseau preached with pa.s.sionate conviction in his "Discourses" and in the "Social Contract."

Individual man was born naturally "free," and had become debased and enslaved by laws and civilisation. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," is the opening sentence of the "Social Contract." This liberty and equality of primitive man was acclaimed as a law of nature by eighteenth century writers in France, and to some extent in England too.

Pope could write, "The state of nature was the reign of G.o.d." Instead of a forward movement the business of man was to recover the lost happiness of the childhood of the world, to bring back a golden age of liberty and equality. Locke's "state of peace, goodwill, mutual a.s.sistance, and preservation" is to be the desire of nations, and with wistful yearning Rousseau's disciples gazed on the picture painted by their master.

It was all false, all a fiction, all mischievous and misleading, this doctrine of a return to an ideal happiness of the past, and it was the most worthless portion of Locke's work. To-day it is easy for us to say this, when we have learnt something of the struggle for existence in nature, something of the habits and customs of primitive man, and something of man's upward growth. But Locke and Rousseau were born before our limited knowledge of the history of man and his inst.i.tutions had been learnt; before science, with patient research, had revealed a few incidents in the long story of man's ascent. Even the history of Greece and Rome, as Rousseau read it, was hopelessly inaccurate and incomplete. Therefore, while we can see the fallacy in all the eighteenth century teaching concerning the natural happiness of uncivilised man, we must at the same time remember it as a doctrine belonging to a pre-scientific era. The excuse in France, too, for its popularity was great. Civilisation weighed heavily on the nation. The whole country groaned under a misrule, and commerce and agriculture were crippled by the system of taxation. It seemed that France was impoverished to maintain a civilisation that only a few, and they not the most useful members of the community, could enjoy.

How mankind had pa.s.sed from primitive freedom to civilised slavery neither Locke nor Rousseau inquired. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," cries Rousseau, in sublime disregard of facts. For man was not born free in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome that Rousseau revered; children were not born free in his day any more than they are in ours; and any a.s.sembly or community of people necessarily involves mutual consideration and forbearance which are at once restrictive.

The truth is, of course, that man is not born free, but is born with free will to work out political freedom or to consent to servitude. He is not born with "natural" political rights, but born to acquire by law political rights.

The fiction of primitive man's happiness and of the natural goodness and freedom of man did little harm in England, for Locke was not a popular author, and Wesley's religious revival in the eighteenth century laid awful stress on man's imperfections. The sovereign people ruled in an unreformed House of Commons, and the "contract" theory was exhibited by ministers holding office on the strength of a majority in the Commons.

Rousseau's writings depicted, with a clearness that fascinated the reader, the contrast between the ideal state that man had lost and the present condition of society with its miseries and corruption; and by its explanation of the doctrines of a contract and the sovereignty of the people, suggested the way to end these miseries and corruptions. The "Social Contract" became the text-book of the men who made the French Revolution, and if the success of the Revolution is due to the teaching of Rousseau more than to that of any other French philosopher, the crimes and mistakes of the Revolution are directly to be traced to his influence, and this in spite of Rousseau's deprecation of violence.[73]

As there is a certain tendency in England to-day to attempt the resuscitation of Rousseau's theories of popular sovereignty and the natural rights of man, and as so distinguished a writer as Mr. Hilaire Belloc is at pains to invite the English working cla.s.s to seek illumination from Rousseau and to proceed to democracy guided by the speculative political doctrines of the eighteenth century rather than on the tried experimental lines of representative government and an extended franchise, it is necessary to devote to Rousseau and his "Social Contract" more s.p.a.ce than the subject deserves.

The "Social Contract" is full of inaccuracies in its references to history; it is often self-contradictory, and it has not even the merit of originality. From Hobbes Rousseau borrowed the notion of authority in the State; from Locke the seat of this authority; the nature of the original pact and of citizens.h.i.+p from Spinoza; from the Huguenot Languet the doctrine of fraternity; and from Althusius the doctrine of the inalienability of citizens.h.i.+p. Where Locke was content to maintain that the people collectively had the right to change the form of government, Rousseau would give the community continual exercise in sovereignty, while voting and representation are signs of democratic decadence in Rousseau's eyes. The sovereign people governing, not through elected representatives but by public meeting, has only been found possible in small slave-ridden states.

At the Revolution France had to elect its deputies. But the theory of the sovereignty of the people has over and over again, in France, upset the Government, and destroyed the authority of the deputies. In England we accept the rule of Parliament, and are satisfied that the election of representatives by an enfranchised people is the most satisfactory form of democracy, though we retain a healthy instinct of criticism of the Government in power. In France has happened what Locke's critics foretold: the sovereign people never wholeheartedly delegates its powers to its deputies, and indulges in revolution when impatient of government. During the Revolution the pa.s.sionate clamour of the sovereign people overpowered the votes and voices of elected representatives, and revolution and reaction were the rule in France from 1793 to 1871.

We may be frankly against the Government all the time in England; we may resist it actively and pa.s.sively, for the purpose of calling attention to some political grievance, some disability that needs removal. But we never forget that it is the Government, or believe that it can be overturned save by the votes of the electorate. At the time of the European revolutions of 1848, when crowns were falling, and ministers flying before the rage of the sovereign people, Chartism never seriously threatened the stability of the British Government, and its great demonstrations were no real menace to the existing order. Nothing seems able to shake the British confidence in its elected representatives, and in the Government that is supported by a majority of those representatives. We have never accepted the gospel of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Priestley and Price are almost the only names that can be mentioned as disciples of Rousseau before the advent of Mr. H.

Belloc.

France, still following Rousseau, does not a.s.sociate political sovereignty with representation as England does. It never invests the doings of its Cabinet with a sacred importance, and it readily transfers the reins of government from Ministry to Ministry. France has submitted to the sovereignty of an Emperor and to the rule of kings since the great Revolution, and though its Republic is now forty years old, and at present there are no signs of dictators.h.i.+p on the horizon, the Government of the Republic is never safe from a revolutionary rising of the sovereign people, and only by the strength of its army has revolution been kept at bay. If Louis XVI. had possessed the army of modern France he too might have kept the revolution at bay. All this revolution and reaction, disbelief in the authority of representative government, and lively conviction that sovereignty is with the citizens, and must be a.s.serted from time to time--to the confusion of deputies and delegates--is Rousseau's work, the reaping of the harvest sown by the "Social Contract." Let us sum up the character of Rousseau's work, and then leave him and his doctrines for ever behind us.

"Rousseau's scheme is that of a doctrinaire who is unconscious of the infinite variety and complexity of life, and its apparent simplicity is mainly due to his inability to realise and appreciate the difficulties of his task. He evinced no insight into the political complications of his time; and his total ignorance of affairs, together with his contempt for civilised life, prevented him from framing a theory of any practical utility. Indeed, the disastrous attempt of the Jacobins to apply his principles proved how valueless and impracticable most of his doctrines were. He never attempted to trace social and political evils to their causes, in order to suggest suitable modifications of existing conditions.

He could not see how impossible it was to sweep away all inst.i.tutions and impose a wholly new social order irrespective of the natures, faculties, and desires of those whom he wished to benefit; on the contrary, he exaggerates the pa.s.sivity and plasticity of men and circ.u.mstances, and dreams that his model legislator, who apparently is to initiate the new society, will be able to repress all anti-social feelings. He aims at order and symmetry, oblivious that human nature does not easily and rapidly bend to such treatment. It is his inability to discover the true mode of investigation that accounts for much of Rousseau's sophistry. His truisms and verbal propositions, his dogmatic a.s.sertions and unreal demonstrations, savour more of theology than of political science, while his quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulae, a.s.sumed to be axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency which is apt to be mistaken for sound logic. He supports glaring paradoxes with an array of ingenious arguments, and with fatal facility and apparent precision he deduces from his unfounded premises a series of inconsequent conclusions, which he regards as authoritative and universally applicable. At times he becomes less rigid, as when (under the influence of Montesquieu) he studies the relations between the physical const.i.tution of a nation, its territory, its customs, its form of government, and its deep-rooted opinions, or avows that there has been too much dispute about the forms of government. But such considerations are not prominent. In certain cases his inconsistencies may be due to re-handling, but he is said to have observed that those who boasted of understanding the whole contract were more clever than he."[74]

This may sound very severe, but it is entirely just. The "Social Contract"

consists of four books: (1) The founding of the civilized state by a social pact. (2) The theory of the sovereignty of the people. (3) and (4). The different forms of government; the indestructible character of the general will of the community; and civil religion.

The whole work teems with generalisations, mostly ill-founded, and the details are not in agreement. The one thing of permanent value is the conception that the State represents the "general will" of the community.

How that "general will" finds expression and gets its way is of great importance to democracy. Even more important is the nature of that "general will." Individualist as Rousseau was in his views about personal property (following Locke in an apparent ideal of peasant proprietors.h.i.+p), he insisted on the subjection of personal rights to the safety of the Commonwealth.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

The resistance of the American colonies to the British Government did not commence with any spirit of independence. The tea incident at Boston took place in 1773, and it was not till three years later that the Declaration of Independence was drawn up. The Whig principles of 1688 are at the foundation of American liberties, and Locke's influence is to be seen both in the Declaration of Independence and in the American const.i.tution. The colonists from the first had in many states a Puritanism that was hostile to the prerogatives of governors, and appeals to the British Government against the misuse of the prerogative were generally successful. The colonists wanted no more, and no less, than the const.i.tutional rights enjoyed by Englishmen in Great Britain, and while the Whigs were in power these rights were fairly secure. George III., attempting a reversion to monarchist rule, drove the colonists to war and to seek independence; with the aid of France this independence was won.

If the French officers who a.s.sisted the Americans brought the doctrines of Rousseau to the revolted colonists, which is possible, it is quite certain that the establishment of the American Republic, and the principles of La Fayette and Paine, who had fought in the American War, were not without effect in France.

The American Const.i.tution was the work of men who believed in democratic government as Locke had defined it, and America has been the biggest experiment in democracy the world has seen. The fact that the President and his Cabinet are not members of Congress makes the great distinction between the British and American Const.i.tution. The College of Electors is elected only to elect the President; that done, its work is over. Congress, consisting of members elected from each state, and the Senate, consisting of representatives from each state, need not contain a majority of the President's party, and the President is in no way responsible to Congress as the British Prime Minister is to the House of Commons. The relation of the State Governments to the Federal Government has presented the chief difficulty to democracy in America.