Earthquakes in Japan The Real Tennyson No. 560. Vol. XCIV By G. H. BONNER By PROFESSOR J. H. LONGFORD, D.Litt. By SIR HERBERT WARREN, K.C.V.O. Charles Lamb, Cary, and the London Magazine' (concluded). By R. W. KING WE are enslaved by words. Used carelessly by men who do not understand them, they become swollen with the wind of their false meanings until their mere appearance terrifies us, and our minds are numbed by their approach. Like paper coinage with no gold behind it, we bandy them to and fro; like the symbols of a creed from which life has departed, we bow down and worship them. Such a word is 'democracy,' rule of the people, the mob, the multitude. We speak of the great democracy of the West, and of the new democracy which the golden age is to bring us. What do we mean? What is this form of government which the men of the future are to bring to perfection, and what are the meanings, if any, which lie behind our facile use of this highsounding word? Let us inquire first of all whether at any time in the world's history there has been a democracy in the true sense of the word, a rule of the people, by the people, for the people.' The answer is emphatically, No. The people as a people are incapable of ruling and aware of their own incapacity; what is more, they VOL. XCIV-No. 560 473 I I never show the slightest desire to rule. It is true that there have been occasions, as, for example, the French Revolution and the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia, when the galls of misrule have chafed so virulently that the body politic has erupted; but the eruption occurred, not primarily because the moujiks wished themselves to rule, but because they could no longer bear to be misruled. It is necessary to clear up the tangle of associations with which the word 'democracy' is overgrown. We deal here with the only true meaning rule of a country-that is to say, the active undertaking of administration, foreign affairs and all cares of state— by the demos, the less educated majority. This, we maintain, has never been desired or come to pass. In France the pendulum swung back to a dictatorship, and has now settled down into an intellectual aristocracy. Russia is still in the throes, but one may venture to prophesy that whatever form of government does at length emerge will not be a democracy. If we examine any of the so-called democracies-Athens, Rome under the Republic-we find the same thing, an inner ring of the more powerful men, an aristocracy of wealth or brains, imposing its will upon the masses. All this is more or less obvious, and we may ask how it is then that the word 'democracy,' founded as it is on an absurdity, could have gained such wide acceptance as it has. The stumblingblock is, perhaps, in the use of the verb крaтev, to be strong, and hence to rule, and in the unsound assumption that because the demos is strong and healthy as a demos, it must therefore rule. The ideal which lies behind our indiscriminate use of the word 'democracy' is briefly this: that in a properly organised State the common citizen, the man who is in a numerical majority, shall be free, so long as he obeys the law, to live his own life and not be subject to the arbitrary will of the governor. The people must be strong enough to make itself felt in case of need; it must have in its own strength a safeguard against possible misuse of power on the part of the rulers. It must, in fact, be able to compel its rulers to rule well, a very different matter from being itself ruler. We confuse freedom with domination, the right to expand with the power to compress others. Tyrants have proved untrustworthy, mob rule intolerable, and we set out in search of the golden mean. A word, a shibboleth, comes to our aid; there is great virtue in names. 'Democracy!' we cry, and proceed to construct aristocracies. We even talk about the sovereign people—as if a people ever could be sovereign! Why is freedom disappearing from the United States? Because the people, with terrible sincerity, is attempting to decide what is good for itself, and to bring that good about by legislation. What aristocracy would dream of prohibiting wine? To be truly free one must be subject to discipline. The grown man disciplines himself; the child must be disciplined by his elders. The child knows this, and looks naturally to his parents for guidance. The children of the world, the less educated majority, know it too, and look instinctively to their more evolved brethren for rule. It is only when these latter fail them that they revolt, and cry passionately to rule themselves. If we can bring ourselves to the question impartially, putting aside all preconceived notions and prejudices, how absurd does the idea of democracy appear! The body politic is an organism just like a Church, an army, or a business. Its efficiency depends on the proper correlation of the activities of its members, all working to the same end. Yet our armies are not ordered by the votes of the private soldiers; our great Churches are ruled by the bishops, not the laity; the rank and file of a business could never successfully assume the office of the directorate. It is true that in business experiments are being made in order to bring about a closer relation between employers and employed, and to give the latter a stake in the concern, and some say in its government. These are not truly democratic; they are tending in the direction of aristocracy. A reaction has set in in business, a revolution comparable to that which takes place in States when the burdens are unfairly distributed, and the good things go all to a few persons. It is being realised very slowly that the good of the workman is ultimately the good of the employer, and that, apart from any question of ethics, the exploitation of humanity is in the long run commercially unsound. The Victorian era was one of exploitation, and it is, therefore, natural that the pendulum should swing back to the other extreme. Hence much of the nonsense talked and thought about Communism. We must clear our ideas, and realise what we are doing in working out schemes of profit-sharing and control by the workers. These steps are mere compromise; by enabling employers and workers to get in touch with each other they afford the necessary safeguard, a check on the possible selfishness of the directors. They allow the human side of the machine to be correlated; but the actual control, the administration, the steering-wheel, as it were, of the concern, is still, and must always remain, in the hands of the specialists, the aristocracy. When the workers once again feel that they can trust their employers, they will gladly surrender the difficult task of administration to them, and settle again into their comfortable groove.. The ordinary man hates responsibility. This came out very clearly in the war, when many a harassed professional man found the life of a private soldier, with all its discomforts, a restful one. There was no thinking to be done, no arranging. But the ordinary |