Democracy and the Future
MARCH, 1922
BY W. R. INGE
I
THE father of political philosophy taught us that human association began for the purpose of living, and was developed for the purpose of living well. Some nations have lately been thrown back on taking thought for the bare existence of their members. It is not any kind of civilization, but life itself, which is at stake for the victims of Bolshevist or Turkish misrule. But, on the whole, we may follow Aristotle, and say that all settled states embody some aspiration to live well.
From this point of view, the history of institutions is the most pathetic of all records. Man has conquered the wild beasts; he has conquered his fellow men; he has conquered nature; but, collectively, he has never succeeded in governing himself. A good government remains the greatest of human blessings, and no nation has ever enjoyed it. There is no ruler, says Plato, who would be unjustly condemned by his subjects. The world swings backward and forward between the ideals of Order and of Liberty; not because anyone thinks it possible or desirable to enjoy either of these boons without the other, but because, after a brief experience of a government ostensibly based on one of them, no price seems too high to pay for being delivered from it. So the pendulum swings, now violently, now slowly; and every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
The German Eucken found, in this tendency of all human movements to generate violent reactions, the master-key of history. Every idea and institution, he says, passes into its opposite. Greek philosophy, beginning as natural science based on the hypothesis of monism, ended in a dualism of matter and spirit. Roman imperialism was created by an intense national consciousness; it ended by destroying the nationality of rulers and subjects alike. The Church began by renouncing the world, and ended by subjugating it. In the first century, it cursed the Babylon which sits on seven hills; a few centuries later, we find it firmly seated on the same eminence.
The law of cycles, or, more accurately, of the swinging pendulum, is in fact so generally valid, that no historian can afford to neglect it; though the superstition of progress as a law of nature, buttressing itself on a grotesque misreading of the facts of evolution, has caused it to be ignored by most modern writers. In political philosophy, it should be used as a salutary cold douche. For example, Sybel says that universal suffrage has always heralded the downfall of parliamentary government. Tocqueville caps this by reminding us that the more successful Democracy is in leveling a population, the less will be the resistance which the next despotism will have to encounter.
No doubt, in this region there are transformations which can hardly occur without an intermediary phase. It does not seem possible for Democracy, which disintegrates society into individuals and only collects them again into mobs, to pass directly into its opposite state, Socialism. Russian autocracy, now standing on its head, is more of an autocracy than ever; the little finger of Lenin is thicker than the loins of Nicholas the First. But other transformations are quite possible. We may trace the progress of unlimited competition toward a point where it destroys itself. The competing units, which began as individuals acting in isolation, become larger and larger aggregates, until they succeed in establishing monopolies, which bring competition to an end.
Or, if competition is not terminated in this way, it may end by exhausting the competitors. The conditions of success may become so severe that the ruling caste rides itself out, and is displaced by non-competitive strata of the population. This fate often befalls warlike and predatory races: they who take the sword perish by the sword. The wolves disappear; the sheep survive. Some movements disintegrate so rapidly that they live only in the reactions which they produce. This is true of all violent revolutions, especially when they include communistic experiments. Thus the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, which looked like mere anarchism and bloodthirstiness, inaugurated the bourgeois regime of the nineteenth century. Our present social unrest may issue in the emergence of a privileged section of wageearners, and so broaden the basis of conservatism.
Somet imes t he transformation is of a more subtle kind. Roman imperialism broke up the old city patriotism in the civilized Eastern provinces, and destroyed the tribal patriotism of the barbarians by substituting for it. a feeling of reverence for t he Empire. The ruling race itself was partly absorbed, but very largely extinguished. Yet. the Empire, though it decayed as a fact, survived as an idea. It had a new and very remarkable lease of life, in an idealized form, as the Roman Church.
So, on a still larger scale, Jewish nationalism, by its uncompromising fanaticism, caused the destruction of the Holy City and the annihilation of the Jewish State; but in Christianity it had a new and boundless extension. The civilized world has adopted Zion as its spiritual capital, and David and the prophets as its spiritual heroes. In both cases the idea triumphed in the form most repugnant to its first custodians. The patriotic Jew would have regarded with horror the prospect of his sacred books being annexed by the Gentiles of the West; and we can imagine the feelings of Trajan, or Tacitus, on being told that a Christian priest would rule a world-wide theocracy from the Vatican. The ironies of history are on a colossal scale, and must, one is tempted to think, cause great amusement to a superhuman spectator.
This chameleon-like character of human institutions, these Protean changes, are, when they are once realized, a considerable obstacle to the extreme form of state-loyalty. They do not affect the love of country, for we may imagine that the innermost life of a nation persists through all changes; but they do make it difficult to worship the State as the embodiment of a type of government which we admire; for, by the mere fact of being a successful example of such a type, it may be preparing the way for the triumph of an opposite principle, which we dislike extremely.
II
The world, as we have lately been told on high authority, is being made safe for Democracy. The Western European is half puzzled and half amused by the reverential tones in which this word is uttered on the other side of the Atlantic. For us, Democracy is a necessary step in the evolution of human institutions; or, perhaps, only a stage through which we happen to be passing. Most of us think that, for the present at all events, it is the least bad of possible alternatives; or that, for the time being, there really is no alternative. But we see no reason to sing pæans over it. As Quinet said, he could not worship ce curieux fétiche: he had seen it at too close quarters.
The fact is that in America the word Democracy is charged with emotional values which do not really belong to it. To a good American it suggests emancipation from the ‘effete’ traditions of Europe, the continent of hereditary monarchs and feudal aristocracies and prancing generals and officials in gold lace; it suggests the career open to the talents, and free-trade in religion, and other things of which he is proud. And so we find a Boston professor saying: ‘You cannot separate God and Democracy. For, if we believe in Democracy, we believe in God’s purpose, God’s ideal, and that is believing in God.’ And a writer in the New York Medical Journal, who is discussing the treatment of gout, exclaims: ‘Uric acid is tottering upon its throne. Democracy is advancing in medical theory as well as in political practice.’
But I refrain. It is bad manners to smile at our friends when they are at their devotions. I only suggest that Democracy, by derivation, is neither an attribute of God nor a method of therapeutics; it is merely the name of a particular form of government — ‘an experiment in government,’ as James Russell Lowell called it.
But perhaps it would be a fair answer, that Democracy is not only a form of government: it is also a form of State, and a form of society. As a form of government, it means properly the direct rule of a nation by popular vote. This form of government is, of course, possible only in a small town or canton, like the Greek states that invented the word. ‘So perfect a government,’ said Rousseau, ‘is not suited to human beings.’ Those who have lived under it have generally agreed that it is not suited to human beings. But Democracy, as a form of State, is consistent with representation; it only implies ultimate popular sovereignty. Unless the sovereignty is retained by the voters, we cannot call the State democratic, even if the government has been established by a plebiscite. Napoleon III, for example, was elected emperor by an almost unanimous popular vote. Democracy, as a form of State, is a mode of appointing, controlling, and dismissing a government. This form of State may be criticized like any other; there is nothing specially sacred about it.
Democracy, as a form of society, rests on the idea of social equality. It is easy to say that men are, in fact, not equal, and that equality is therefore, as Carlyle calls it, ‘a palpable incredibility and delirious absurdity.’ But, in spite of all the nonsense that has undoubtedly been talked about equality, the right of human beings to equal consideration is a fundamental principle of Christianity. It is the best achievement of Democracy as a form of State that it has fostered social equality and broken down the barriers between classes. The modern substitutes for Democracy, of which I shall speak presently, have on the whole the opposite tendency. It may be surmised that, when an American rhapsodizes about Democracy, he is usually not thinking of the ‘Initiative, Referendum, and Recall,’ but of the absence of class-distinctions, with the injustice and snobbishness which those distinctions have produced in other countries. It is a quite tenable argument that under any undemocratic governments the tendency of society to split into castes would reappear.
The other advantages of Democracy may be very briefly summarized. It has a very great educational value, diffusing knowledge of public affairs and a sense of responsibility. It rests on a broad base, and is not easily overturned. It obliges the government to conform to public opinion and to the wishes of the majority, and therefore, in times of stress, the whole nation is likely to rally round the government and support it till the danger is past. The democracies of France and England showed a greater determination and tenacity than the Central Empires, from 1914 to 1918; autocratic Russia collapsed miserably.
Whether a democracy is likely to act on higher principles than a monarchy is more doubtful. Englishmen and Americans are alike in thinking their own nations virtuous and innocent, while other governments are suspected of acting on Machiavellian principles. But I have not found that foreigners credit either of us with superior goodness, or with stupidity. The French do not claim to be either disinterested or stupid, and they are certainly neither; though, if they were more alive to the solidarity of European civilization, it might be their best policy in the long run.
The opponents of Democracy generally say that it brings a very poor type of men to the top. Lord Bryce, who is a moderate optimist, thinks that there is some improvement in this respect. My own opinion is that an incomplete democracy, like that of England before the war, brings forward a better type of politician than a complete democracy, like France or Australia. But in times of great national danger, democracies have often picked out the right man to deal with the crisis, and have trusted him, virtually abdicating in his favor. The names of Lincoln, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George will occur to everybody; and early in the war England gave a free hand to Kitchener, who was anything rather than a demagogue.
A more difficult charge to meet is that the crowd falls an easy victim to catchwords, and is swayed by rascals who have made a special study of mobpsychology. Democracies —and especially, I am afraid, democratic societies — are, also, no friends to social liberty; they are meddlesome and inquisitive. A man with unusual tastes is far less interfered with in an undemocratic society.
But the real danger of democracies is that, in an industrial society, the power of numbers gives an overwhelming preponderance to one class. Sooner or later, this class will begin to pillage the minority, and the minority is helpless. This danger was foreseen and predicted; but it is only lately that the forebodings of the prophets have begun to be realized. Under a parliamentary System, with no minority representation, it may easily happen that the class which pays most of the taxes returns no members at all.
There are other evils that are very apparent in democratic communities; but it is doubtful whether they ought to be placed to the discredit of Democracy. Every government ought to be able to count on a certain fundamental loyalty and patriotism in all classes. Where this sentiment does not exist, no constitution can work smoothly. It is probably true that a democracy is less able than an autocracy to deal with anti-social conspiracies, because it is difficult for it to resort to drastic measures against a section of its own citizens; but a so-called autocrat is often quite helpless against rebellion and sedition, and may be driven to all the humiliating surrenders and acts of injustice to minorities with which democracies are reproached.
III
These charges and countercharges have been brought so often that the discussion of them seems rather academic. But it has not yet been sufficiently realized that there is a widespread and growing revolt against Democracy among the population of the large towns — a revolt which may bring this great ‘experiment in government’ to an early and ignominious end. It is t he educated class which now sings hymns to Democracy; the workingman has no enthusiasm for it, and is more and more inclined to give it up.
The cause of this strange phenomenon is that Democracy seems to have failed in the one thing which the workingman cares about. lie has no ambition to govern the country; he cares very litt le for equality, and still less for liberty; but he cares a great deal for the equitable distribut ion of t he products of labor. He thinks that Democracy has failed signally to secure this equitable distribution, and he has no longer any faith in getting what he wants by const itutional means. He sees that laborsaving inventions have been introduced on a prodigious scale; and instead of making the lot of the worker more comfortable, they seem only to have swelled the fort unes of a few millionaire employers, bankers, and financiers. He thinks that he is being robbed; and since Democracy has failed to protect him, he is disposed to try something else.
All the new revolutionary parties are frankly anti-democratic. This fact is well brought out in Professor Hearnshaw’s admirable book, Democracy at the Crossways, which every thoughtful American should study. The Anarchists, of course, declare war upon the state in all its forms. Their ideal is unfettered individual liberty; their method is ruthless destruction of every kind of social organization. England has long been the Cloaca Maxima into which all the enragés of Europe discharge their poison, because we alone have no laws against Anarchists as such; but the agitators are seldom Englishmen. Nevertheless, we are beginning to discover the danger of harboring these enemies of society. The criminal suffragettes, the ‘shop-steward’ movement, and other anti-social combinations, are in principle anarchical and anti-democratic, and they have many sympathizers. Similar societies, like the Industrial Workers of the World, are giving trouble in America.
Syndicalism is equally hostile to Democracy, as its leaders admit. ‘If revolutionary Syndicalism triumphs,’ says Sorel, ‘the parliamentary regime so dear to the intellectuals will be done away with.’ — ‘Syndicalism and Democracy,’ says another French writer, ‘are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.’ — ‘The Syndicalist,’ says A. D. Lewis, ‘ has a contempt for the vulgar idea of Democracy. The vast unconscious mass is not to be taken into account when the minority wishes to act so as to benefit it.’ Pouget, in the same sense, says, ‘There is for the conscious minority an obligation to act without paying any attention to the unconscious mass.’
What this means in practice we see in Russia. The Bolsheviki estimate their supporters at 000,000 out of 160,000,000, and Lenin complains that out of these there are only a few thousand whom he can trust thoroughly. Syndicalism and Anarchism have much in common, and the baffled Syndicalist tends to become an Anarchist. They both aim at destroying the democratic state. ‘ Democracy,’says Sorel, ‘ is the paradise of which unscrupulous financiers dream.’ If they had their way, government of the people, by the people, and for the people would vanish from the earth. The only difference between them is that Syndicalists rely chiefly on the weapon of the general strike, while the Anarchists exhort their disciples to ' learn the use of dynamite.'
Bureaucratic State-Socialism is the antipodes of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It is a bourgeois and intellectualist movement, which aims at making the state omnipotent, by entrusting it with the sole ownership of the means of production. There is nothing democratic about this ideal; in practice it would mean a cast-iron officialdom, under which malcontents would be repressed by the simple process of depriving them of their means of livelihood and turning them out of their state-owned homes. Under a bureaucracy, every official must be responsible, not to those below him, but only to those above him; and the only persons to whom nobody would be responsible would be — all who are not officials.
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that all these new movements are fiercely anti-democratic in principle. However vehemently they may differ from each other, some desiring to make the State absolute, others to destroy it altogether, they agree in one thing — they all hate Democracy. And so it appears that the democratic idea, which was heralded not so long ago as the panacea for all human ills, the idol before which we still burn incense, and whose immortality is almost an article of faith with orthodox politicians, has few friends and many enemies, and is very far from standing secure upon its pedestal. It has never been in favor with privileged classes; it is now threatened with destruction by the proletariat.
IV
Let us now consider what possible alternatives there are for Democracy; for it is useless to complain of existing institutions unless we have something to put in their place. The answer to this question may turn out to be more reassuring to democrats than the passionate denunciations of the revolutionary parties would lead us to expect.
Two of the suggested alternatives may probalbly be dismissed as absolutely unworkable. Anarchism is not worth discussing. It is a purely disruptive force; no form of state could be constructed by it. Even Lenin has been compelled to shoot Anarchists, in the company of myriads of more respectable victims. But Communism, also, has received its death-blow in Russia. It is not generally recognized that Russia was an ideally favorable soil for a great revolutionary experiment. The people were accustomed to tyranny; they had never known anything else. Their country, with its wide plains and poor communications, makes any large rebellion against a centralized despotism very difficult. The mass of the people are illiterate, and have no means of combining, or of acquiring any information which the government wishes to withhold from them. The land is, under normal conditions, self-sufficing; the population can live on the produce of the soil without any foreign trade whatever. Industrial life is very backward, and the towns are not essential to the national life; the only way to ruin Russia permanently would be to sow her fields with salt. A total destruction of commerce and industry was possible, without dissolving the existence of the nation, so long as agriculture remained intact. Lastly, the houses of the nobility and religious institutions contained vast accumulations of portable and readily convertible wealth, in the form of pearls, jewels, and gold, such as no other country, not even India, could approach. The loot of a single monastery near Moscow was valued at 400,000,000 dollars. Thus the government could maintain itself and its armies without attempting to squeeze money out of those who had lost everything.
And yet four years of Communistic misrule have turned that unhappy country into a putrefying carcass. Only a corner of the veil has yet been lifted, which covers the most ghastly tragedy in modern history. No such tyranny has ever before been exercised; no such misery has ever before been suffered. When the truth is known, the whole crazy fabric of Marxian economics must fall in ruins to the ground.
Communism is not a new experiment; it has been tried many times on a small scale. And history proves that it can succeed only under two conditions — a religious basis, and a rule of celibacy. The monasteries supply the one and only instance of successful Communism. For private property cannot be abolished unless the family also is destroyed; and these sacrifices will not be made except under the strong constraint of religious vows. The Bolsheviki aim at destroying private property, and they find themselves compelled to destroy the family. But they also wage war against religion; quite consistently, they have put up statues to Judas Iscariot. Thus they are pledged to abolish the three strongest instincts of human nature — private ownership, family life, and religion. Human nature may be trusted to make short work of these fanatics and their theories.
Syndicalism is a dangerous disruptive force; but it offers no alternative form of State in place of Democracy. It may paralyze the government by strikes and threats of strikes; it is an ominous feature of the present situation, that no effective weapon against this form of civil war has yet been discovered. It may cripple trade, and create a new pariah class of unfortunates who are unable to enter the unions. It may, and probably will, bring into existence a new and oppressive privileged class — the members of monopolist trade-guilds; but it is not an alternative to Democracy.
When we turn to bureaucratic StateSocialism, there is a different tale to tell. It is probably quite workable. In a very mild form, it existed in the German Empire, which before the war was in many ways the best-governed State in the world. Given an official class that is patriotic, hard-working, highly intelligent and incorruptible, and such a government may be far more efficient than any democracy. It would avoid the terrible wastefulness which is one of the banes of democratic government; it could deal drastically with disaffection; it could pursue a long-sighted policy of penetration and expansion, whether military or commercial. But I think its efficiency would soon begin to decay. Its citizens, especially if they had Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins, would violently resent being treated like tame animals in a farmyard. And, what is more serious still, such a nation would soon lose all initiative, all inventiveness, all that makes for progress. It would stagnate; and in human life stagnation means retrogression. In any case, England and America are the last countries in which such an experiment is likely to be tried.
There remain the time-honored forms of government — monarchy, and theocracy, and the formidable combination of the two which has been called Cæsaro-papism. The world has not seen the last of these; but at present they are discredited. A cataract of nonsense has been poured out over the subject of ‘autocracy,’ especially during the World War. We need not discuss the Asiatic form of despotism, in which the ruler consumes his time and health and his subjects’ money in a harem, and the power is wielded by a grand vizier whom the pout of a singing-girl may at any moment condemn to receive the fatal bowstring, with which he obediently consents to be strangled.
European autocracy is a very different thing. It is a form of bureaucracy, rendered more stable by the hereditary principle, which makes the sovereign at the apex of the pyramid irremovable, unless indeed he makes himself intolerable, in which case assassination always remains in reserve. The stability is of course increased if the monarch is also a semi-divine personage, supported by a powerful priesthood. We have only to think of t he Augustan Age at Rome, the Tudor period in England, and the reign of the Grand Monarque in France, to see that this form of government is by no means to be despised. It involves, no doubt, the idealization of some very ordinary man; but this is not more absurd, or less natural, than the idealization of a very ordinary piece of striped bunting. These symbols mean whatever we like to put into them. The weakness of a ‘strong’ monarchy is that the monarch holds a certain amount of real power, which he is seldom competent to use. In Germany, for example, all was in perfect order till one came to the top; and then all was weakness and indecision. In the rare instances when the monarch is not an ordinary man, but a Napoleon, this type of government shows a tremendous and formidable efficiency.
The theocratic type seems at present quite obsolete in Europe and America. Theoretically it might appear to be the best; practically it is almost the worst, having no virtue except extreme stability. A deified ruler must be kept in absolute seclusion, since he cannot behave like a human being without compromising his dignity. So the only thing to do is to shut him up. But a ruler who is shut up cannot govern. A good example is the position of the Mikado of Japan before the Revolution. All the real power was in the hands of the Shoguns, of the Tokugawa clan. The Mikado kept a phantom court, surrounded by a few high-born officials. A theocratic state inspires fanatical loyalty, generally shown in hatred and contempt for other nations; it is stable, but unprogressive, and the priests, having no material force behind them, are compelled to foster and exploit superstition. In most cases, however, they establish a concordat with the civil power; and we have the Byzantine type of government, which till lately survived in Russia.
V
This brief review of alternative forms of State leaves us with the impression that Democracy still holds the field, for want of rivals. But it is no longer worshiped, or even highly respected. Of late years democratic governments have shown an astonishing weakness in face of sectional treason and anarchy; they can no longer appeal to the people at large with any confidence of support. This is obviously a very grave symptom.
Many people will say that Democracy may save itself by taking up in earnest the task in which it is accused of having failed — the distribution of wealth. Andrew Carnegie was doubtless right when he said to Sir Charles Macara shortly before his death: ‘The day of the multi-millionaire is over; the people will not stand it.’ But experience shows that it is very much easier to destroy wealth than to redistribute it. The British Government has, in fact, confiscated inherited wealth in the most sweeping fashion; nothing like it has ever been done before, except after a violent revolution. Take the case of a duke who dies, leaving his heir a fortune of £100,000 a year. The heir has, to begin with, to pay about £800,000 in death-duties, which reduces his income to about £60,000. This income is again reduced by income-tax, supertax, and local rates, to about £25,000. The inflation of the currency, which is of course a disguised and very dishonest form of taxation, diminishes the purchasing power of £25,000 to about £12,000. It does not seem that this treatment of the rich has either benefited the workingman, or mitigated his discontent. What it has done is to seal the doom of the old stately countryhouse life — a feature of English society for many centuries. Some of the mansions of the nobility have been sold at a derisory price; others are derelict; in most of them the owners still live, occupying a few rooms and trying, with a pathetic loyalty, to keep the old place in repair.
This revolution, for it is no less, is perhaps not to be regretted from the point of view of the old families themselves. It is not a good thing that a man should be condemned to be a mere territorial magnate, when nature may have intended him to be a university professor, or an engineer, or a skilled mechanic. But Americans who have visited English country-houses, and have observed the wonderful beauty of the historic mansions and parks, with their galleries of family portraits and collections of art treasures; who have admired the gracious courtesy of the true aristocrat, and the perfect smoothness with which his great menage works, will feel some regret at the disappearance of one of the very few unique and beautiful things which England has to show7 to a visiting stranger. And I repeat that this spoliation does not seem to have done an}7 good as a remedy for social unrest.
More and more I am driven to the conviction that social unrest is an ineradicable disease of town life. The war is between town and country; between the countryman, who lives under natural and wholesome conditions, and the townsman, who lives under conditions which are neither natural nor wholesome. Allow me to quote from an American writer, Mr. Alleyne Ireland. ‘The average voter in a large town brings into politics a mentality utterly different from that of the country voter. It is the mind of the propertyless wage-earner; of the clerk, of the shop-assistant, of the day-laborer; of a man herded with other men and profoundly affected by the herd-instinct; of a man of weak individuality; of a man who spends his working hours doing things for other people, and his leisure hours in having things done for him by other people; of a man whose life is passed in surroundings entirely created by machinery, and in circumstances where his free will is perpetually constrained by the contagion of an artificial environment; of a man who knows (or at any rate, of whom it is known) that, if he drops dead while at his work, he can, in normal times, be replaced in an hour by another man who will do just as well.’
Mr. Ireland goes on to show that such a man, whose whole existence is passed in the feverish occupations of earning wages and spending them, who is never brought into contact with the real origins of things, and is incapable of realizing the mesh of causation in which he is entangled, naturally looks to government to supply him with all that he needs, and to redress all his grievances. The ' two nations ’ of which Disraeli speaks in Sibyl are not, as he supposed, the rich and the poor: they are the town and the country. And industrialism has thrown the balance of power into the hands of that section which, through no fault of its own, is stricken with an incurable malady.
This is what my medical friends would call a sombre diagnosis. It is very sombre indeed, as regards my own country, with its congested towns and limited rural area. It does not seem to be a disease which any form of government can cure. A Russian revolution would cure it in a way— by killing the patient. The evils of industrialism might, no doubt, be terminated by exterminating the industrialists. But the townsman of Europe and America has no mind to commit suicide, and, unlike the Russian, he is capable of sane reflection. In America he will probably come round to the policy which has long found favor in Australia and New Zealand: he will stop immigration from the backward races.
New Zealand has escaped the evil of large cities, and has kept its population almost exclusively British. This policy has retarded the development of the country; and those who, like many Americans, are affected with a pathological worship of mere numbers, will think that the New Zealanders have not made the most of their opportunities. The case is arguable on both sides. Personally, I am disposed to think that the old American stock, which, until the disastrous Civil War, was the finest in the world, has been too much diluted during the last half-century with infusions of inferior blood. But America, the most fortunate of countries, may make with impunity mistakes which would be disastrous in older nations.
In this short paper I have tried neither to defend Democracy nor to assail it. It is probably not the final form of State; it is easy to imagine something better. In America, the tendency to make the representatives mere delegates is said to be increasing; it is safe to predict that few self-respecting men will care to occupy this position. In England, the most notable change is the loss of prestige which the House of Commons has suffered since the days of Disraeli and Gladstone, and the absence of public interest in its proceedings. Fifty years ago all the leading newspapers reported the parliamentary debates at great length, devoting several columns to them; and every good citizen ploughed his way through those pompous and wordy harangues, almost as a religious duty. Now the debates are very scantily reported, and few people take the trouble to read them. The Cabinet has gained greatly in power; the Commons have lost. This is, in a sense, a movement away from Democracy; and the present Prime Minister completely dominates the Cabinet. His position is at least as powerful as that of an American President. The new status given to the Dominions in all imperial questions is not provided for by the Constitution; practically it puts the Prime Minister, when supported by the Dominion Premiers, above Parliament.
I have made a diagnosis of the malady from which all civilized nations are suffering. I have suggested no remedy, because I do not know where the remedy is to be found. If the disaffection of the town-dweller continues to grow and fester, Democracy may fall, and civilization with it.