The Moral Economy Part 9

The principle of rationality in government is parsimony. When its benefit involves a wasteful sacrifice of interests and may be purchased more thriftily, the pressure of interest inevitably in the long run brings about the change. The interests upon which the burden weighs most heavily const.i.tute the unstable factor, and since, in order that equilibrium may be restored, these must be relieved, there is necessarily a gradual liberalization of governmental inst.i.tutions. In the light of these general considerations I wish briefly to examine three historical types of government, and then to present a summary of present tendencies.

There is an interesting estimate of the benefits and cost of the _ancient military monarchy_ in the history of Israel, as recorded by the writer of the Book of Samuel. The elders have demanded that Samuel make them a king, to judge them, "like all the nations." But he first warns them of the price that they will have to pay:

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: he will take your sons, and {153} appoint them unto him, for his chariots, and to be his hors.e.m.e.n; and they shall run before his chariots; and he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and captains of fifties; and he will set some to plow his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the instruments of his chariots. . . . And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. . . . And he will take your men servants, and your maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your a.s.ses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king that ye shall have chosen you.

But the men of Israel were willing to pay even this price, saying:

Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.[7]

The benefits of monarchy, in which Israel sought to emulate her neighbors, were _judgment_ and _military prowess_. Even where the evils of tyranny were most aggravated these benefits actually accrued and const.i.tuted a rational ground of authority. The king was, at least in a measure, worthy of his hire. But the cost was extravagant; the king exacted a disproportionate share of the plunder, and reduced his subjects to a condition of personal bondage. In the great monarchies, such as a.s.syria, Egypt, Persia, and the Roman {154} Empire in its later period, the benefits of his role were greatly attenuated before they reached to the depths and extremities of his kingdom, judgment being reduced to the caprice of an irresponsible officer, and military prowess to a faint reflection of national glory. Now the weakness of such a polity lay in its doubtful value to the governed, these failing to partic.i.p.ate fairly in its achievements, and so lacking incentive to support it. There was no clear and convincing identification of individual interest and national purpose.

The strength of Greek and Roman oligarchies, on the other hand, lay in precisely this _morale_, or solidarity of interest. Their small size and racial h.o.m.ogeneity brought the ruler into direct relations with a const.i.tuency which was clearly conscious of its purpose and held him closely to it. So even where the kings.h.i.+p lingered on as a form, this polity was virtually a compact self-governing community. The benefits of government, to which every other interest was harshly subordinated, were still judgment and military prowess. But these benefits were effectually guaranteed; and the sacrifices which they required became a code of honor, both to be praised and gloried in as parts of happiness.

Those who think that the Spartans felt their discipline to be essentially a hards.h.i.+p should read the song of Tyrtaeus, {155} which they recited in their tents on the eve of battle:

With spirit let us fight for this land, and for our children die, being no longer chary of our lives. Fight, then, young men, standing fast one by another, nor be beginners of cowardly flight or fear. But rouse a great and valiant spirit in your b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and love not life when ye contend with men. And the elders, whose limbs are no longer active, the old desert not or forsake. For surely this were shameful, that fallen amid the foremost champions, in front of the youths, an older man should lie low, having his head now white and his beard h.o.a.ry, breathing out a valiant spirit in the dust. . . . Yet all this befits the young while he enjoys the brilliant bloom of youth. To mortal men and women he is lovely to look upon, whilst he lives; and n.o.ble when he has fallen in the foremost ranks.[8]

But the cost is none the less heavy because it is not felt. In the first place, there was the cost untold to those whom the oligarchy held in subjection, a hundred thousand Messenians and twice as many Helots.

Their unequal partic.i.p.ation in the benefits of government, necessary though it may have been, lent instability to the whole polity. It was the menace of their resentment that forced upon their rulers a policy of perpetual vigilance and military discipline. And in the second place, there was the cost to the Spartan himself of attaining to a physical efficiency equal to that of ten Helots.

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In the rival polity of Athens, the first of these abuses is only in a measure corrected. The liberal extension of the privileges of citizens.h.i.+p is the achievement of a later age. But the democracy of Athens did demonstrate the internal wastefulness of a polity dominated by purely military aims. The cla.s.sic representation of this protest against sacrificing individual taste and capacity, together with all growth and abundance in the arts of peace, to the harsh rigors and pa.s.sive obedience of a soldier's life, is to be found in Thucydides.

In the funeral oration attributed to Pericles there is this account of the superiority of Athenian inst.i.tutions:

It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service. . . . And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of our living is refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. . . . And in the matter of education, whereas they [the Spartans] from early youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which are to make them brave, we live at ease, and yet are equally ready to face the perils which they face. . . . If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the gainers? Since we do not antic.i.p.ate the {157} pain, although, when the hour comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow themselves to rest; and thus too our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.[9]

The political disorders of later Athenian history ill.u.s.trate the difficulty of reconciling individualism with order and stability. But at the same time they prove that the task is a necessary one, and that until it has been successfully performed, government can enjoy at best only a false security. For no interests can safely be neglected, least of all those which arise from the natural activities of men and lie in the direction of the normal growth of human capacities.

Now these ancient polities ill.u.s.trate the inevitable pressure in the direction of liberal government. The original and always the fundamental values of government are _order_ and _power_. But these must be obtained with the minimum of personal exploitation on the part of the ruler; the function of government must be clearly understood and vigilantly guarded by a body of citizens who identify their interests with it. And secondly, order and power must be made compatible with individual initiative, with playfulness and leisure, and with the free development of all worthy interests. This pressure has been steadily operative in the evolution of modern political inst.i.tutions.

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But there has also been another force at work of equally far-reaching importance. This force is the modern idea of democracy, in which _justice is modified by good-will_. With the ancients justice meant "that every man should practise one thing only, that being the thing to which his nature was most perfectly adapted." [10] Equality upon the highest plane of human capacity was limited even in theory to a privileged cla.s.s. But since the advent of Christianity it has never been possible for European society to acquiesce with good conscience in a limited distribution of the benefits of civilization. For the new enlightenment teaches that when men's potentialities are considered, rather than their present condition, _there are no cla.s.ses_. As a consequence men demand representation not for what they are, but for what they may become if given their just opportunity. The body of citizens whose good is the final end of government virtually includes, then, all men without exception. It is no longer possible simply to dismiss large groups of human beings from consideration on grounds of what is held to be their unfitness. For they now demand that they be made fit. Burke expresses this enlightenment when he says, in speaking of the lower strata of society:

As the blindness of mankind has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is made a pretence of keeping them in a state of blindness; for {159} the politician will tell you gravely, that their life of servitude disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies them with no other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is but too true; and this is one of the reasons for which I blame such inst.i.tutions.[11]

And so does every man now demand of the community as a whole that he shall be permitted to share equally in its benefits, and also, in order that his claims may be represented, that he shall have a voice in its councils. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that all men, therefore, must here and now be held to be equal; but only that they must be held to be capable of being as good as the best until they have demonstrated the contrary by forfeiting their opportunity. Nor do I mean that all men must therefore be given the ballot. We are discussing a question not of instrument, but of principle. I do mean that there is an idea that the best of life is for all; and that if there are many that are incapable of entering into it, then they must be helped to be capable. And I mean, furthermore, that _this idea works irresistibly_. It commands the support of the whole army of interests. It will never be abandoned because it makes for the increase of life on the whole; and hence no social order will from henceforth be stable that is not based upon it.

This idea that all men alike shall be the beneficiaries of government, when taken together {160} with the ancient ideas that government shall be directly responsible to its beneficiaries, and shall make as liberal an allowance as possible for their individual claims and opinions, const.i.tutes the general principle upon which the progressive modern state is founded. Let me briefly recapitulate certain characteristics of the modern state[12] which indicate its recognition of this principle, and hence its advance on the whole over earlier types.

1. In the first place, the modern state is essentially a territorial rather than a racial or proprietary unit. In other words, it is clearly defined as a necessity and utility arising out of the circ.u.mstance of propinquity. If men are to cast in their lot together they must submit to organization, and obey laws promulgated in the interest of the community as a whole. To-day men understand that if they had no government it would be necessary to invent one; that the existing government, whatever divinity doth hedge it, is thus virtually the instrument of their needs.

2. Secondly, this moral function of government is emphasized through being largely freed from personal or dynastic connections and expressed as a const.i.tutional office.

3. Thirdly, the requirements of justice and good-will are reconciled with order through the principle of representation. Without this {161} principle it would be impossible for societies large enough to afford men protection, to admit all men to a share in their positive benefits and to a voice in their councils. Representative government is a method of political procedure through which authority is made answerable in the long run to all interests within its jurisdiction.

The more recent tendencies in democratic communities to modify the representative system indicate the direction in which the pressure of interests is still urging society forward. It is no longer a question merely of the extension of the suffrage, but of directness and publicity. The procedure of government being recognized as of vital importance to all citizens, it must be straightforward and businesslike, with its books constantly open to inspection. The present distrust in elected representatives is not a sign of reaction, but of the evolution of the democratic intelligence. Where the machinery of representation becomes wasteful and clumsy, it ceases to serve the community. But this may mean either direct legislation, that is, a direct partic.i.p.ation in public affairs by the people at large, or the intrusting of these affairs to a few conspicuously responsible agents selected for their businesslike competence and owing their tenure of office to the consent of their const.i.tuency. These methods are entirely consistent with one another; and they owe their {162} adoption entirely to their better execution of the intent of democracy.

Both presuppose that political authority is empowered by all the interests of the community to serve them, and that these interests shall in the end decide whether or not that service is adequately performed.

4. Fourthly, the modern state lays a constantly greater stress on questions of internal policy, thus emphasizing its basal function of conserving and fostering the interests directly committed to its charge. It is less occupied with war, and more occupied with education, sanitation, the conservation of national resources, and the regulation of commerce and industry.

5. Fifthly, the sequel to this is the growing recognition of the folly and wastefulness of war. War is becoming a last resort, a hard necessity, rather than an opportunity of national glory. The growth of the idea of international peace, and the improvement and extension of the method of arbitration, are evidence of a yielding to the weight of the collective interests of humanity. They prove the priority of the principle of construction over that of destruction, and the essentially thrifty and provident function of the state.

The present form of progressive political inst.i.tutions will serve as an index of the times and a pledge of the future. It reflects better than any other element of civilization that growth of {163} liberality and solidifying of interests which is the deep current of progress. Human society is becoming one enterprise, provident of all existing interests and covetous of the best. Now I know that this is to many but a dreary spectacle. There are those who feel diminished by it, overwhelmed by numbers, and degraded to the low level of average capacity and average attainment. Therefore I wish in conclusion to deal further with this spirit of the age, to guard it against misunderstanding, and make its fine quality more apparent.

V

It is charged that modern democracy is contrary to enlightenment through subordinating the strong man to the mult.i.tude of weak men, or the wise man to the mult.i.tude of ignorant men. But the modern idea of justice is based fundamentally neither on the mere sentiment of pity nor on fear of the mob, but on love of truth, and respect for all organs that mediate it. Society cannot afford forcibly to repress the judgment of any individual or cla.s.s, lest her deeds be deeds of darkness. The task of good living is a task of well-nigh overwhelming difficulty, because it requires that no interest shall be ignored, and yet that all interests shall be in unison. Interests left out of the account will inevitably a.s.sert themselves, and through their steady pressure or {164} violent impact destroy the organization which has excluded them. Hence the need of an order that shall provide for its own gradual correction; stable enough for security, and pliant enough to yield without shock to the claims of neglected or abused interests.

This need underlies the modern sentiment of tolerance, and the love of all the liberties that give a hearing to any sincere demand: freedom of speech and press, the wide distribution of the franchise, and of opportunity for power. Contrary to a theory that philosophers have done much to support, democracy is not a method of confounding intelligence with the clamor of many voices, but a method of correcting the single intelligence by the report of whatever other intelligence may be most advantageously related to the matter at issue. Human intelligence must operate from a centre, and must always overcome an initial bias due to familiarity and proximity. The consensus of opinion, or public opinion, is not essentially a composite opinion, but a corrected opinion in which such accidents of locality cancel one another. The following justification of democracy, formulated by Matthew Arnold, lays bare its insistent and wholly incontrovertible motive:

If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any {165} great cla.s.s or description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other cla.s.ses, the so-called educated and intelligent cla.s.ses, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. They do not really understand its wants, they do not really provide for them. A cla.s.s of men may often itself not either fully understand its own wants or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.[13]

This conception of democracy has come latterly to be as fine a point of honor as any article in the code of chivalry or n.o.blesse. The arrogance that claims a superiority of cla.s.s, and the obsequiousness that loves a lord, all this Nietschean "pathos of distance," whether felt from the heights or the depths, is sharply repugnant to a new gentility, that embraces all that have had the joy of promiscuous social intercourse. From this aristocracy no one is excluded that does not exclude himself through servility or superciliousness. Its distinction is liberality, that is, the habit of disputing questions and judging persons on their merits, with due allowance for that never wholly negligible possibility that the other man is right. Among those who are united by this spirit, there is one joke that is an unfailing touchstone and bond of union--the inst.i.tution of _lese-majeste_. It is a matter for unquenchable laughter, {166} that superiority should require to be protected against inferiority by the enforced signs of respect, or by a hedge of reserve.

It is the ridiculousness of the haughty or the prostrate manner that is absolutely fatal to it. And its ridiculousness appears at the moment when you let in the light. Cla.s.s elevation is pretence, not superiority; complacence, not wisdom; impudence, not power. But the contempt of the just man for the unjust is edged with knowledge. It arises out of a sense for things as they are: a recognition of the breadth and intricacy of life, compared with the pitifully small understanding of those who propose to regulate it on their own authority; of the vivid reality and worth of interests that do not exist for those whose claims are absolute, but who are only the hapless victims of a narrow and warping tradition.

Many think that the modern democracy is too easy-going; too much infected with charity. Now it is quite true that it means that no interest whatsoever shall be cut off through being forgotten or lightly estimated. The conscience of to-day expresses the persuasion that there is no stable happiness in any activity which entails cruelty, which has any other motive than to save. But this is no more than the full meaning of the Platonic dictum that "the injuring of another can be in no case just." [14] This sensitiveness to {167} life that is remote or obscure, this feeling for the whole wide manifold of interests, is not a weakness; it is enlightenment, a lively awareness of what is really relevant to the task of civilization. To imagine and think life collectively, with all its interests abreast, is only to measure up roundly and proportionately to the practical situation as it actually is. Upon a mind thus alive to the whole spectacle there at once flashes the awkwardness here, the waste there, as of an enterprise only begun. Let me allow another to interpret this latter-day conscience. I quote from _First and Last Things_, written by Wells:

I see humanity scattered over the world, dispersed, conflicting, unawakened. . . . I see human life as avoidable waste and curable confusion. I see peasants living in wretched huts knee-deep in manure, mere parasites on their own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering in primeval forests; I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial perfection; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury . . . I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a pa.s.sionate desire to end waste, to create order, to develop understanding. . . . All these people reflect and are part of the waste and discontent of my life, and this coordinating of the species in a common general end, and the effort of my personal salvation are the social and the individual aspect of essentially the same desire.[15]

But it must not be thought that this is a matter of mere creature comfort, of distributing staple {168} benefits for which men already have the appet.i.te. For every step in the organization of life is attended with the growth of new interests, and especially of interests fostered or directly evoked by principles that have proved their moral virtue. Thus the forms of prudence and justice are supported by the immediate love of these things. And a growing rationality involves an increasing subtlety and delicacy in desires, the enrichment of life through the multiplication of such sources of satisfaction as are consistent with order and liberality. The true democracy is considerate not only of present interests, but also of the potentiality and promise of life.

Only when the imagination pictures life in these terms is it possible to avoid a sense of ignominy and irresponsibility. And, contrary to a common misconception, there is no other att.i.tude that can reconcile one to the unavoidable partic.i.p.ation in the common life of all men. Only when thus united with one's fellows in a spirited and enn.o.bling enterprise can one endure their fellows.h.i.+p. Comrades in arms are not fastidious. If one confines one's self, on the other hand, to a cultivation of one's rarity, or to a company of choice spirits, not only do these values themselves grow stale and vanish away, but the remainder of mankind becomes a crowd, and civilization a tumult. The collective life of {169} mankind ceases to be jarring and repugnant only at the moment when one enters into it and becomes infused with its morale.

There will be some in whom this prospect arouses no eagerness. The wise men of any day are, of course, agreed among themselves that the times are bad--that they are likely to be still worse after they, the remnant, have departed. But this is an opinion which most men acquire when they attain to maturity, and happily the world has long since seen that they cannot help it, and learned on that account not to take it to heart. The part of Ca.s.sandra is always being played somewhere by a gentleman of middle age with a ripe experience of life. But in any serious judgment concerning progress this bias of maturity must be overcome by the use of the imagination, by a rational estimate of human affairs in their broad sweep, or, if necessary, by an infusion of youthfulness. We shall wait long if we wait

"Till old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain."

There is a more serious cause of hopelessness, in the complexity of modern civilization. Its very teeming life, its wealth, its multiplicity of activities and pa.s.sions, overwhelm the mind in its moments of fatigue like a devouring chaos. One longs for the day when the house of {170} civilization shall be completed, so that one may dwell in it in peace.

We are, it is true, in a time when there is still rough work to be done. But it is not blind work. Never has society been so clear as to its several special ends, never has so little effort been due to chance or compulsion. Nor is it ineffective work; for man now works with good tools and the help of many hands. And there is consolation in the fact that the foundations of civilization are laid wide and deep in charity and welfare. There remains the perpetual task of re-establis.h.i.+ng a spiritual order which has been strained and wracked by the heaving of many forces. But when the sanctuaries and altars are restored it will prove to be a new order, richer, more liberal, and more complete than any since men began to live.