CHAP.
LII

hapless victim, the stricken hero. The well-made plot of novel or drama is a challenge to the instinct of curiosity, like a puzzle or a riddle. The fighting spirit is never neglected, for, in the language of President Hall, "Every drama and romance pivots on a conflict ending in the triumph of one and the defeat of the other force or person, and the zest of it all is that the conflict is more intense and the issues more clearly drawn and palpable than in real life about us."

There are signs that society, which has recently been converted to the policy of making provision for play, may yet be brought to do something for music and art. Municipal bands and orchestras are not uncommon, and the Puritan horror of the theater is nearly gone. Educators recognize the socializing power of good drama, and a stage is often provided in the newer school buildings. The social settlements have taken a hand in producing good plays, and their successors, the public social centers, may offset the evil tendencies of the commercial theater.

PLAY AS BUILDER OF THE SOCIAL VIRTUES

Let it not be supposed that the innocent stimulation of instinctive tendencies measures society's interest in the promotion of play. Certain games, particularly antagonistic team games, afford character discipline of the highest value. The game fosters loyalty to one's fellows, to one's team, and to one's institution. It accustoms one to obey the captain, to accept without a murmur the decision of the recognized authority and to work for the good of the whole rather than for self. It develops facility in concerted action and gives practice in quick unreflecting adjustment to the intentions and moves of others. In being required to abide by the rules of the game under circumstances which sorely try the temper, one acquires self-control. Sport, moreover, imposes the difficult ideal of the "good sportsman," who is just, magnanimous, who neither gloats in victory nor sulks in defeat.

The playground, then, offers experience in an animated stimulating miniature society which presents many of the situations one encounters later in adult life. It forms the cooperator, the competitor, the rival, the leader, the follower, the comrade. On the other hand, it contributes nothing of moment to forming the friend, the lover, the parent, the painstaking craftsman, the creative artist, or the seeker after truth.

THE

CHAPTER LIII

INSTITUTIONS - THE STATE

HE state is unique among associations in that membership in it is not voluntary and it asserts over its members an unlimited power of coercion. The origin of the state has been an enigma. Relying on certain modern instances, some imagine that the state came into existence as an agency for preserving order and protecting the rights of the individual member. The fact is, however, that early crime is held in check by blood revenge or the vengeance of the local community. Disputes between individuals are settled by public opinion or arbitrated. The group of kinsmen or neighbors handle the problem of justice and the state does not arise.

СНАР.
LIII

State

in Con

Why the

State Has

been Arbi

trary and

Ruthless

Nor did the state originate primarily as an organization for The True common defense against external foes. An emergency may, it is Originated true, call into being a political headship but, after the danger is quest past, the former tribal or local authorities resume sway. The fact is, a coercive organization has arisen generally as a result of the conquest of one people by another. Usually the conquered are tillers of the soil while the conquerors are a folk of hunters or herdmen, who abhor toil. The latter create the state in order to hold down the beaten, so that they may be thoroughly and continuously exploited. The masters of the state and the subjects of it are therefore altogether different peoples. The state exists not to serve those on whom chiefly it operates, but to bleed them. This explains the traditional harshness of the state, its bloody methods, its ferocity when opposed, its arrogant refusal to acknowledge limits to its authority, its contempt for public opinion and accepted moral standards. No people would frame such an organization if it were intended to bear upon themselves. History fully justifies Herbert Spencer's remark: "Government, begotten of aggression and by aggression, ever continues to betray its original nature by its aggressiveness."

It is a striking fact that this type of state has invariably es

CHAP.
LIII

The People

caped the control even of the conquering folk which calls it into being. Regularly it comes to be the engine of a small social class, Lose Con- perhaps 5 per cent. of the dominant people, perhaps but I or 2 per cent. It may, indeed, become, as it were, the personal possession of a monarch who can declare, "I am the State." How is it that so few are able to subjugate so many?

trol of

Their
State

The King
Juggles
Power to
His Own

It is due, in

physical force.

THE GENESIS OF ABSOLUTISM

part, of course, to the cunning organization of The despot has his Pretorians, Varangians, JaniAdvantage zaries, Swiss, Cossacks or pet guard regiments, privileged and well paid, or else a standing army which long ago lost its sense of brotherhood with the people from which it was recruited. Again, the jealousies between subject races are dextrously played upon, so that the soldiers of one oppressed people delight in holding down another people. This was the favorite trick of the Hapsburgs in ruling their polyglot Empire.

Religion
Props the
Throne

The State
Grew too
Big for
Common

Men to

Grasp

Then throne enters into partnership with altar in order that the State and its agents may be clothed with sanctity. Priests proclaim the Divine Right of Kings, so that to resist the monarch is to lift hand against God's anointed. From the fifth century to the sixteenth this doctrine was coextensive with Christianity. It is possible to go even further in hedging authority with superstitious terrors. In the Roman Empire and in modern Japan the sovereign becomes a god!

There was a reason for absolutism, too, in the fact that the state quite outgrew the social mind. It became imperial in extent, while the imaginations of the ignorant commoners who lifted on their shields their elected king were bounded by their tribe or township. The wisdom of the folk fell sadly short of the requirements of the situation. The war chief or king with large conceptions and far-reaching plans stood no chance of getting them past a popular assembly of unlettered narrow-minded men. Only those leaders who freed themselves from such hampering were able to accomplish much. As for the city-states which remained free because they did not outgrow the social mind, they were too small to hold their own in a world developing these huge political aggregates. It was their fate to be engulfed in some expanding empire.

Nor should it be forgotten that the "estates," " diets," " cortes,"

CHAP.

LIII

Why the

Stood with

witangemots," etc., which sought to curb the monarch were by no means truly representative of the people. They spoke for nobles, clergy or wealthy burghers, little class oligarchies which commons intended no good to the working masses. Hence, it was easy the King for the monarch to rally to his side the rightless layers of the people when he defied the privileged classes. Kings and commons stood together against the nobility.

Triumph

Thus the state escaped the people's control and became an of Sultanirresponsible power over them, against which there was no pro- ism tection save prayer. The larger part of mankind was delivered to Sultanism. In all Asia it seems to have occurred to no one that a ruler could be made accountable to the people. The idea of "citizen," which reached its flower in Greece, never even germinated in the Orient. The Asiatics knew government only as despotism tempered by assassination and even the Russians after long experience of the Mongol yoke lost their early liberties and became Asiatic in their attitude toward the ruler. In China the Sages balanced the Divine Right of the Emperor with what might be called the Divine Right of rebellion, for they insisted that a popular uprising was Heaven's mark of displeasure with a governor or ruler.

THE GERMINATION OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

Self-government, which had been well worked out both in practice and in theory in the maritime city states of the Greeks, vanished from the world with the advent of the Cæsars to reappear only in the free cities which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries sprang up in all parts of Europe. In the course of two or three hundred years the expanding royal power brought them all under in France, Italy, Spain, and Russia. Only in Switzerland, England and the Low Countries did absolutism meet with checkmate.

The colonization of France and Spain in America, no more than that of Russia in Siberia, gave rise to self-government. On the other hand, thanks to the motives of their founding, to their being settled largely by liberty seekers, and to their opportunity to bring to fruition certain sturdy English and Dutch traditions, the English colonies in North America developed the principle that government exists for the benefit of the people and is responsible to the people. This principle, vindicated in the American

Reappear

ance of the

Demo

cratic Idea

It Sprouts
in the

English
America

Colonies in

СНАР.

LIII

Dificulties of Representation in Large States

Veto

Revolution and spread broadcast by the French Revolution, has gone on from victory to victory until with the recent downfall of all the European autocracies its future is secure.

While in the city-state popular control by the town-meeting is easy enough, in the extended territorial states built up by conquest it is very difficult to devise an acceptable means of ascertaining and formulating the general will. It is by no means a simple matter for the people to act through representatives. Shall the representative sit for a stated term or until recalled? Is he to obey the instructions of his constituents or to use his own judgment? Does his vote bind his constituents or does his every act have to be ratified by them? It took generations to establish the political morality which forbids a representative to feather his own nest with the bribes and favors offered by the government he is sent to curb.

The principle that the will of the majority shall prevail strikes us as self-evident. But it was not so to the folk motes of the Slavs. Their veche or town meeting admitted no other mode of settling public affairs than unanimous decision. . . . "The veches passed whole days in debating the same subjects, the only interLiberum ruptions being free fights in the streets. At Novgorod these fights took place on the bridge across the Volchow, and the stronger party sometimes threw their adversaries into the river beneath. A considerable minority very often succeeded in suspending the measure already voted by the veche, but if the minority was small, its will had soon to yield to open force." The famous free veto" which was tolerated in the Polish Diet and which wrecked the Kingdom of Poland was but a survival of this old Slavonic custom. The discovery that it is cheaper to count heads than to break them is to politics what the discovery of the lever or the inclined plane is to mechanics.

Early Democracy Aims not to Govern but to

ernment

YOUTHFUL DEMOCRACY

In the infancy of modern democracy there was no question of setting up a people's government. A massive, venerable State was there, built up about the royal power and buttressed by Divine Right and the juristic doctrine of sovereignty. The strategy of the Commons was to rear barriers beyond which this State should not pass, to set constitutional bounds to it. Already some 1 Kovalevsky. "Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia.”