Nevertheless, the indictment against democracy is a very heavy one, and it is worth while to state the main items in the charge.
1. Whatever may be truly said about the good sense of a democracy during a great crisis, at ordinary times it does not bring the best men to the top. Professor Hearnshaw, in his admirable 'Democracy at the Crossroads,' collects a number of weighty opinions confirming this judgment. Carlyle, who proclaimed the merits of silence in some thirty volumes, blames democracy for ignoring the 'noble, silent men' who could serve it best, and placing power in the hands of windbags. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Sir James Stephen, Sir Henry Maine, and Lecky, all agree that 'the people have for the most part neither the will nor the power to find out the best men to lead them.' In France the denunciations of democratic politicians are so general that it would be tedious to enumerate the writers who have uttered them. One example will suffice; the words are the words of Anatole Beaulieu in 1885:
The wider the circle from which politicians and state-functionaries are recruited, the lower seems their intellectual level to have sunk. This deterioration in the personnel of government has been yet more striking from the moral point of view. Politics have tended to become more corrupt, more debased, and to soil the hands of those who take part in them and the men who get their living by them. Political battles have become too bitter and too vulgar not to have inspired aversion in the noblest and most upright natures by their violence and their intrigues. The élite of the nation in more than one country are showing a tendency to have nothing to do with them. Politics is an industry in which a man, to prosper, requires less intelligence and knowledge than boldness and capacity for intrigue. It has already become in some states the most ignominious of careers. Parties are syndicates for exploitation, and its forms become ever more shameless.
A later account of French politics, drawn from inside knowledge and experience, is the remarkable novel, 'Les Morts qui parlent,' by the Vicomte Le Vogué. Readers of this book will not forget the description of the bain de haine in which a new deputy at once finds himself plunged, and the canker of corruption which eats into the whole system. It is no wonder that the majority of Frenchmen do not care to record their votes. In 1906, 5,209,606 votes were given, 6,383,852 electors did not go to the poll. The record of democracy in the new countries is no better. We must regretfully admit that Louis Simond was right when he said, 'Few people take the trouble to persuade the people, except those who see their interest in deceiving them.'
2. The democracy is a ready victim to shibboleths and catchwords, as all demagogues know too well. 'The abstract idea,' as Schérer says, 'is the national aliment of popular rhetoric, the fatal form of thought which, for want of solid knowledge, operates in a vacuum.' The politician has only to find a fascinating formula; facts and arguments are powerless against it. The art of the demagogue is the art of the parrot; he must utter some senseless catchword again and again, working on the suggestibility of the crowd. Archbishop Trench, 'On the Study of Words,' notices this fact of psychology and the use which is commonly made of it.
If I wanted any further evidence of the moral atmosphere which words diffuse, I would ask you to observe how the first thing men do, when engaged in controversy with others, is ever to assume some honourable name to themselves, such as, if possible, shall beg the whole subject in dispute, and at the same time to affix on their adversaries a name which shall place them in a ridiculous or contemptible or odious light. A deep instinct, deeper perhaps than men give any account of to themselves, tells them how far this will go; that multitudes, utterly unable to weigh the arguments on one side or the other, will yet be receptive of the influences which these words are evermore, however imperceptibly, diffusing. By argument they might hope to gain over the reason of a few, but by help of these nicknames the prejudices and passions of the many.
The chief instrument of this base art is no longer the public speech but the newspaper.
The psychology of the crowd has been much studied lately, by Le Bon and other writers in France, by Mr. Graham Wallas in England. I think that Le Bon is in danger of making The Crowd a mystical, superhuman entity. Of course, a crowd is made up of individuals, who remain individuals still. We must not accept the stuffed idol of Rousseau and the socialists, 'The General Will,' and turn it into an evil spirit. There is no General Will. All we have a right to say is that individuals are occasionally guided by reason, crowds never.
3. Several critics of democracy have accused it not only of rash iconoclasm, but of obstinate conservatism and obstructiveness. It seems unreasonable to charge the same persons with two opposite faults; but it is true that where the popular emotions are not touched, the masses will cling to old abuses from mere force of habit. As Maine says, universal suffrage would have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power-loom, the threshing-machine and the Gregorian calendar; and it would have restored the Stuarts. The theory of democracy—vox populi vox dei—is a pure superstition, a belief in a divine or natural sanction which does not exist. And superstition is usually obstructive. 'We erect the temporary watchwords of evanescent politics into eternal truths; and having accepted as platitudes the paradoxes of our fathers, we perpetuate them as obstacles to the progress of our children.'[1]
4. A more serious danger is that of vexatious and inquisitive tyranny. This is exercised partly through public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man. But partly it is seen in constant interference with the legislature and the executive. No one can govern who cannot afford to be unpopular, and no democratic official can afford to be unpopular. Sometimes he has to wink at flagrant injustice and oppression; at other times a fanatical agitation compels him to pass laws which forbid the citizen to indulge perfectly harmless tastes, or tax him to contribute to the pleasures of the majority. In many ways a Russian under the Tsars was far less interfered with than an Englishman or American or Australian.
5. But the two diseases which are likely to be fatal to democracy are anarchy and corruption. A democratic government is almost necessarily weak and timid. A democracy cannot tolerate a strong executive for fear of seeing the control pass out of the hands of the mob. The executive must be unarmed and defenceless. The result is that it is at the mercy of any violent and anti-social faction. No civilised government has ever given a more ludicrous and humiliating object-lesson than the Cabinet and House of Commons in the years before the war, in face of the outrages committed by a small gang of female anarchists. The legalisation of terrorism by the trade-unions was too tragic a surrender to be ludicrous, but it was even more disgraceful. None could be surprised when, during the war, the Government shrank from dealing with treasonable conspiracy in the same quarter.
The Times for May 24, 1917, contained a noteworthy example of justice influenced by pressure, and therefore applied with flagrant inequality. In parallel columns appeared reports of 'sugar-sellers fined' and 'strike leaders released.' The former paid the full penalty of their misdeeds because no body of outside opinion maintained them. The latter, who were stated to have committed offences for which the maximum penalty was penal servitude for life, got off scot-free because they were members of a powerful organisation which was able to bring immense weight to bear on the Government.[2]
The 'immense weight' was, of course, the threat of virtually betraying the country to the Germans. The country is at this