The Unlimited Franchise
LATELY so much corruption has been uncovered in high places that our faith in the national ideal is impaired. Many of the men in politics have become half-hearted believers in the popular vote. And even among those who make a profession of preserving ideals, the old enthusiasm for democracy is rare. At a luncheon of the Republican Club in New York City I heard a preacher, amid general applause, stand up and appeal for a strictly limited franchise, and the rule of what he called ‘Intellect.’
In these days preachers who exalt intellect in just his tone, reveal that they have not themselves caught the vital outcome of modern science — namely, that it is not intellect but will that is fundamental and, if we are to use the word, divine. And politicians who uphold, without hesitation and a sense of their own temerity, a proposal to retract the basic principle of our civilization because of vice in the seats of government, show themselves to have a limited sense of the social importance of a political system. It will therefore be profitable to dwell, in opposition to them, upon the true function of intelligence, and the main significance of a democratic form of government.
A realization of the primary importance of people’s wishes is the chief contribution of modern philosophy to the wisdom of life. Modern philosophy is determined in its unique character by the theory of evolution, and that theory teaches us not to worship general intellectual judgments as the ancients did. It teaches us that those judgments are but the product of a thing prior to them, namely, an organism with a wish —a spontaneous, arbitrary, whimsical, non-reasonable wish: the wish to live and go after the things that it likes. And the nature of that wish no thinking can determine. The organism likes the things simply because it likes them. Intelligence was subsequently developed, with other appurtenances, as a servant of that impulse. And judgments as to what is better or worse are still — at bottom — judgments as to what will enable each organism to attain the richest satisfaction of its voluntary nature. These judgments, therefore, are not true overhead, or abstractly, or eternally, but they are true for the individuals whose inmost wishes they ultimately serve.
Some wishes, to be sure, are common to almost all beings, and the judgments of right and wrong which rest upon those wishes we call universally true. But the majority of intelligent decisions demanded by the current of events cannot be made in general, and without taking account of the particular impulse of an individual concerned. In short, the function of intelligence is not to tell a person what he wants; its function is to tell him how to get it, or what to do about it, having first, ascertained from the depths of him what it is.
If judgments of what is well or ill for individuals depend for determination upon the natural wishes of those individuals, surely judgments of what is well or ill for states depend upon the wishes of those individuals who compose them and for whom they exist. This fact is recognized in our ballot system — for, fundamentally, it is not an intelligent decision that we ask for upon election day, but the expression of a wish. If it were an intelligent decision, we should not ask the majority, we should ask an educated and experienced and not very busy man. But since it is the expression of a wish, we ask all except those whose wishes we can be sure arc dangerous to the very existence of our society.
The uneducated have as keen wishes as the educated, and the wishes of the educated are as arbitrary and non-reasonable as the wishes of the unedcated. We therefore refer to both. And while we acknowledge that an intelligent man is the best judge of how to attain our ends, we beware of ascribing to intelligence the false function of determining what those ends are. We beware of letting educated people tell uneducated people what they ought to want. The very difference established by their education renders them unfit for this function. All the people, at some point in the political programme, must effectually express their desires, and only after that event is assured can we safely contrive schemes to bring it about that the most intelligent shall determine how in detail those desires are to be attained.
A popular sovereignty is thus but. the expression in politics of what is a characteristic of the awakened in this age to express everywhere — in philosophy as a pragmatic tolerance, in art as a free individualism, in education a reliance upon interest as well as discipline, in religion a faith in feeling rather than authority, in homes the encouraging of women and children to lives of their own. The principle under all these changes is the recognition of the divine rightness of the individual, natural will of a man, and that it goes behind all judgments of value because the individual wills of men are what brought value into the world.
All this is exceedingly theoretical, and it would be smiled at by those practical politicians we spoke of. Perhaps it would be smiled at by that intellectually educated minister also, as containing an anachronism, because the democratic ideal appeared so long before the theory of evolution or the new psychology. To these two smiles I should make the same answer — that I have been so theoretical deliberately, because I wish to show that the democratic ideal, which developed out of practical life, and notout of speculative science, acquires fresh support from the deepest conclusion of that science at the present day. And if nothing can give us courage to reinforce and renew what we call our faith in the will of the people, then let us by deeper thinking recognize that, this is not really a question of faith but of acceptance. We are not required to believe that a low-class citizen has good judgment; we are required to acknowledge in practice what we cannot help believing in meditation, that the natural desires of a lowclass citizen have just as imperial a right to satisfaction from the universe out of which they sprang as the natural desires of the children of fortune, and that no man or god but the citizen himself can decide what those desires are.
Once we have got full of that socalled theoretic truth, we shall approach the practical question of determining the franchise with a different mind. We shall see that it is a matter of choosing a way between two dangers — on one side the danger of letting some people tell the others what their interests are, and on the other the danger of letting those try to express their interests who have not enough understanding to perceive the relation between those interests and a public question. A glance at history and life will show that the first of these dangers is the more imminent and the more awful. Most of the troubles that arise when two people try to live together, arise not because their opinions diverge, but because one of them tries to tell the other what she or he wants. Moreover, if there is anything in the world that a man can be relied upon to understand, it is the bearing of a general question upon his particular desire. A little kitchen or backyard common sense, at least, is more apposite to such understanding than is any educational attainment which we might measure. Indeed, we cannot better conclude an estimate of the amount of respect due to intelligence than with an admonition that the intelligence to which respect is due is not identical with school education. It is a gift of nature evoked by experience. And it should be the pride of this republic to acknowledge, not only that those great minds which were peculiarly her own, Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, were without formal schooling, but that much of the sinew of her collective good sense lies in the homely thought of lesser citizens of the same type.
Still more, however, should it be the pride of this and of every republic, that whatever increasing good sense it does possess shall be in truth collective good sense. It shall be social intelligence — that intelligenc which results from a free, sympathetic intercommunication of all kinds of people. From that source, and from that source alone, will arise political judgments that the future will call intelligent. And the equality in citizenship of all people is what will guard that source, and foster the growth of that sympathy and that communication, until there appears a true civic wisdom. It is for such purposes as that, more than for any direct gains through the suffrage, that democratic government will survive pure in the world. Its main significance is not, and will not be, political, but social and moral.
Were it only in what he achieves with his vote upon election day, indeed, that the common man’s wish attains recognition in a republic, our enthusiasm for that form of government might well be mild. We cannot wonder that practical politicians, who see only the congregations at our capitols and how they employ themselves, thinking them to be the sole outcome of democracy, doubt its value. They doubt their own value. But they and their little meetings are not what democracy exists for; they are a necessary and in part an unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment. For my part I would be willing to do away with them, and all their bickering and thimble-rigging, and the whole tedious forth-laboring of an electoral system, and put the business in the hands of a few expert despots who would carry it on without bungling, if I could retain among thepeople every indirect benefit of a popular system of politics. For it is in results remote from the seat of government that democracy realizes itself, and the will of the common man receives its sovereignty.
Indeed, some of the supposed drawbacks of a democratic polity are, in the light of those results, not drawbacks at all, but of the essence of its success. The disorder, the indignity and irregularity, the scattered extravagance, squabbling, and mud-slinging, and general uncertainty,—all these aspects of our government which make it unsatisfactory to contemplate, — are signs that it is doing well. Democracy does not aim to produce a government as complete and regular and satisfying to the cultivated mind as possible; it aims to produce a government somewhat loose and dirty, in which the citizens are great as individuals. Remember that a republican government is a continuous education, and you will not expect to find in it the virtues of a graduation ceremony. You will expect to find the children kicking out upon all sides, overturning things the moment they begin to run smooth, forever putting up irrelevant questions, and in general making it appear that nothing is being accomplished. If there is anything in this world that looks like a complete failure, it is a successful kindergarten. And much the same thing is true of a successful experiment in self-government. The success is inside of individuals. It is happiness, and experimental knowledge, and moral independence, and humility.
By humility we mean no seventhday self-abnegation, but that rarest of simple virtues, the tendency to listen with understanding and enter with readiness into the minds of others. We find among people nourished upon aristocratic traditions, both in remote history and now, a kind of aggressive self-hood, a tendency to be always informing others, asserting before others their persons, — whether small or great, — that is not accepted among us. And it is a pleasure to believe that the democratic culture and environment have been factors in the change. The ability to listen is a mark of the true children of democracy. And that habit of mind is more precious to the progress of happiness in the world than some public virtues about which we are now greatly exercised. In 1714, Bernard De Mandeville wrote a book called The Fable of the Bees, in which he set forth the belief that private vices are, or beget, public virtues; but it seems more necessary to say that public vices appear inevitable in the culture of the rarest of private virtues.
A habit of mind more obviously important than humility, and more certainly begot and sustained by democratic politics, is the habit of according equal physical, social, economic, and legal rights and liberties to all men. We are so accustomed, in theory at least, to honor this demand of every man for a fair chance, that we forget how recent and how precariously established is that way of thinking. We little realize how much it depends upon its fixation in our national polity. Take away the political guarantee of a social attitude, and you take away the only overt support it has. We are equals once a year at the polls — rich and poor, armed and unarmed, educated and uneducated, known and unknown; and upon that occasion we announce to the world and to ourselves a high principle — a principle so high indeed above brute nature that without such annual certification it might soon exhale upward into the realm of inoperative sentiment.
‘So act ,’ says Immanuel Kant, ‘as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in t hat, of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.’ That is the principle we have laid hold of, and even wrought a little way into the frame of our national life. It is the principle most essential to the educating of men for mutual enjoyment. And while we might increase the perfection of the act of government, decrease the dishonesty that prevails in places of honor, and even elevate the average of honest legislation, we should never take a solid step forward toward that individual and social happiness which is the aim of all legislation, by taking a step backward from this fundamental principle of the art of living together.
We despair of democracy because we dwell upon current problems so much more than we read history. We fail to remember the wonders it has accomplished and sustains in the lives of the people. We cry that we are at the mercy of political bosses, and our votes — the symbols of personal dignity — are for sale to the highest bidder. And with our excessively political ways of thinking, we infer from these facts that the venture is lost. Politics has become unpleasant, and therefore democracy is a failure. But truly, nobody can tell whether or not democracy is a failure except by looking into the homes of the people. Whoever, with an historic sense, has looked there, will be able to face with faith the evils of bossism. He will not be ready to say that we have failed as a democracy until we have tried harder than we yet have to overcome those evils by measures not undemocratic.
Democracy will meet the problems it has produced, if we will but keep our pride in it, and if we will but remember that things human are never to be condemned by comparison with perfection, but by comparison with other things human that we might put in their place. We see in the agitation for direct nominations, and the short ballot, and the initiative and referendum and recall, only the first drastic attempts to mitigate the evils of bossism, not by limiting, but by perfecting the popular sovereignty. And we will not despair of that sovereignty until many such attempts have been debated and tried.
Not even the selling of votes, though it were habitual, could make lifeless all that we say of the divine will of the people. Go back into history, beyond the birth of these theories we have been expounding, and consider the practical troubles out of which the scheme of democratic politics arose, and we shall see that the corruption of voters is not a complete failure of that scheme. Democracy got its crude original momentum, I suppose, not out of any political speculations as to the voice of the people, but out of a gradually engendered conviction in the mind of the common man that he had a right to be somebody. Political status was only a vital expression and indispensable guarantee of the acceptance of that conviction. That expression and guarantee are not wholly abolished for him in the sale of his vote, nor in the loss of his pride of citizenship is there lost, all the dignity of character and ambition that political status conferred upon him.
It is a bad thing, the selling of votes, but it is not the worst that can be imagined. To be recognized as a man who has a power that cannot be taken from him even temporarily unless it be paid for, and that he will never sell for a cent less than he happens to think it is worth, is not the worst thing that can befall a man. A worse thing is to have rulers stand over him and hold him down and put a gag in his mouth by physical force. And that is the position out of which, by a thousand years of murder and self-sacrifice, the lowest of men has risen to the considerable dignity of being able to sell or withhold his vote. He must now be reckoned with. How cheap or often-soever he sells his vote, he has, what he never had under any other political system, a little of the personal dignity and sacredness of the sovereign. And from the standpoint both of immediate advantage and of educational possibility he is in higher standing. He is a man notable to his rulers and the powers of law. For my part, I value that standing of the poor man so highly, that I think it alone justifies a democratic polity. I think that the matter of commerce in votes, however it may give us despair of the human soul, has no bearing upon the question of democracy or no democracy. For, given bosses, it were better that they should reckon with the vote of the subjected classes financially — pay for it every time — than that they should not reckon with it at all.
The best system of government imaginable is, and will always be, a choice between different kinds oi imperfection. And we shall fare best in an unsatisfying world if we make ours that kind of imperfection which results from following a deep truth through shallow places. Let us think the principle of popular sovereignty profoundly enough, and we shall turn a skeptical eye in advance upon every proposal to retreat, for little obvious reasons, from the universal franchise. And let us remember how much vaster is the achievement of democracy than anything to be contained in chambers and halls of government; we shall give to those societies and those politicians who aim to improve our republic by developing the too amateurish machinery of its mature principle, all our energy of reform. With every high leader in the history of our country we shall continue to be, in the face of our peculiar troubles, which are probably no greater than theirs, democrats to the heart.