democracy in crisi - harold laski

7/27/2019 Democracy in Crisi - Harold Laski

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UNIVERSITYOF FLORIDALIBRARIES

COLLEGE LIBRARY


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Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliivein 2011 witli funding from

LYRASIS IVIembers and Sloan Foundation


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DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS


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Other Books by Professor LaskiA GRAMMAR OF POLITICS

( Third Edition, Sixth Impression)STUDIES IN LAW AND POLITICSAN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS

( Third Impression)THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY

AND OTHER ESSAYS{Cheaper Edition, Second Impression)

THE SOCIALIST TRADITION IN THEFRENCH REVOLUTIONKARL MARX

Messrs. Faber & FaherLIBERTY IN THE MODERN STATE

Messrs. Harper Bros.THE DANGERS OF OBEDIENCEAND OTHER ESSAYS

The Oxford University PressAUTHORITY IN THE MODERN STATETHE PROBLEM OF SOVEREIGNTY

In the Home University LibraryPOLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

FROM LOCKE TO BENTHAMCOMMUNISM


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DEMOCRACYIN CRISIS

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HAROLD J. LASKIPROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

IN THE UNIVERSITYOF LONDON

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THE UNIVERSITYOF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

1935


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All rights vfservedPRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BYUNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING


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ToTHE FACULTY OF YALE UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL

IN GRATITUDE FOR GRACIOUS ANDSTIMULATING HOSPITALITYFEBRUARY-JUNE, 1931

H.J L

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PREFACEThis book is an expanded version of the Weil lectureswhich I delivered in April 1931 to the University ofNorth Carolina. Publication was a condition of theirdelivery, and I have to thank my friend, PresidentGraham, for the permission to delay their completionfor a period beyond my promise.

I am aware that my argument is a pessimistic one,and that it is rooted in a sombre picture ofour situation.I do not think any explanation, beyond the argumentitself, is called for by its character. I shall be satisfiedif I can either persuade a few readers to realise hownear our feet lie to the abyssthe usual point at whichEnglishmen are stimulated to consider principleor,alternatively, be shown by critics to have misunderstoodthe position. I have arrived at my conclusions withregret, and only after long and careful thought uponthe material they summarise. I should have beenhappier if my conclusions had been in another direc-tion ; but the obligation to follow the compulsion of thefacts is inescapable.

I owe a deep debt to my colleagues, Mr. H. L. Bealesand Mr. K. B. Smellie, for constant illumination of thethemes I have ventured to discuss; and I should liketo register here my special obligations to Mr. and Mrs.J. L. Hammond and Professor R. H. Tawney for theinsight their books have given me into the generalproblem of discontent in a democracy. I hasten to addthat none of them has any responsibility for my dis-


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lO DEMOCRACY IN CRISIScussion of the themes upon which they have broughtso profound and sympathetic an understanding to bear.The dedication is a shght acknowledgment of infinite

kindness. In the months I spent at Yale University in193 1 Dean Clark and his colleagues in the Law andGraduate Schools made me realise how learning canbe made an avenue to friendship.

H. J. L.


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CONTENTSCHAPTER PAGE

Preface 9I. The Illusion of Security 13

11. The Decay of RepresentativeInstitutions 67

III. Authority and Discipline inCapitalist Democracy 147

IV. The Revolutionary Claim 233V. Conclusion 264


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DEMOCRACY IN CRISISCHAPTER I

THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY

Everyone knows the famous passage in which, ageneration before its advent, Chesterfield predicted thecoming of the French Revolution. "All the symptoms,"he wrote on December 25, 1763, "which I ever metwith in history previous to great changes and revolu-tions in government now exist and daily increase inFrance," Few of those who controlled its destinies wereable to see the significance of the portents he observed.They were as blind to their own fate as the men who,on the eve of the Puritan rebellion, comforted them-selves with the assurance that England had neverknown peace and loyalty so profound. ^ Yet, in the onecase, as in the other, all the symptoms were presentwhich involve those final adjustments in institutionalperspective which men later recognise as marking anepoch in history.We who have observed the revolutionary experimentin Russia are perhaps not less inclined than ourpredecessors to minimise its significance. The differencein economic conditions is vast. Our national character,our historical traditions, have made for a very different

' Gooch, English Democratic Ideas (2nd edition), p. 87.


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14 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISevolution. Our administrative mechanism is not indecay. Our middle class, for all the losses it has suffered,remains strong and conscious of its strength. No partypreaching a revolutionary gospel has attained thatdegree of importance which enables it to make aserious impact upon the mind of the electorate. Noimportant party of the left consciously admits that itis willing to depart from the traditional lines of con-stitutional method. The armed forces of the state haveshown no signs of serious disloyalty to the civilgovernment. Strike after strikeeven, in the case ofGreat Britain, a general strikehas been met andbroken without exceptional loss. The trade unions havebeen for years upon the defensive ; and a rapid declinein their membership has been one of the most markedfeatures of their recent history. If it is true that theeconomic depression is both dangerous and widespreadmore dangerous and more widespread than any otherin the recordits causes are in process of removal. Thevicious system of reparations has been ended. Thecancellation of inter-allied debts is increasinglyrecognised as inevitable. The evil post-war system ofeconomic nationalism has not improbably alreadypassed its zenith. The discovery of an adequate basisof international exchange proceeds more rapidly thancould have been hoped before the economic blizzardof 1928. It took a generation for Europe to recoverfrom the grim effects of the Napoleonic wars. It is not,therefore, unlikely that, after a similar period of crisis,the world will discover the foundations of a newequilibrium.


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 15Nothing, certainly, is gained by a denial of the

recuperative power inherent in any social system ; thereis, as Adam Smith insisted, a great deal of ruin in anation. Yet the careful observer, who is willing to lookbelow the surface, will not, I think, be blind to thepresence amongst us of those symptoms which, in thepast at least, have usually been the precursors of socialconvulsion. We confront wide disparities of wealth andpower; and these are to-day so deeply resented thatthe philosophy of social equality, half-silent since thetime of Matthew Arnold, has taken on a new lease oflife. The disinherited show signs of those half-consciousbut deeply felt protests which are the more moving totheir makers because they are unsuccessful; in thisaspect the British General Strike, those of Gastonia andHeeren in the United States, have a significance themore important the more carefully they are considered.The repression of discontent has become everywheremore thoroughgoing. The British Trades Disputes Actof 1927 was the first legislation hostile to the tradeunions which this country has placed on the statute-book since the Combination Acts of 1799. The use ofthe injunction in American labour disputes, whileprobably less important than either its advocates or itsopponents pretend, ^ has had the dangerous effect ofmaking organised labour in the United States regardthe Courts as simply one more instrument on the sideof capital in the eternal struggle for economic power. 2I D. McCracken, Strike Injunctions in the Mew South (1932), p. 131 f.' E. E. Cummins, Labour Problem in the United States (1932),p. 6i6f.


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l6 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISThe handling of Communists in both Great Britainand America, the terrible treatment to which they havebeen subjected above all in Poland, Hungary, andRumania, suggest a temper of hostility to free dis-cussion which has reached very grave proportions ; fora regime which persecutes severely is always one thatis conscious ofa threat to its foundations. The settlementof differences by violenceno doubt a habit in partintensified by the warseems to have become a part ofour mental climate in a degree not paralleled since thetragic events of 1848. Italy and Russia are only thefinal terms in a process of which the end has still tocome in other places.The general temper of the world is one of profound

and widespread disillusionment. Our generation seemsto have lost its scheme of values. Certainty has beenreplaced by cynicism ; hope has given room to despair.The movements of art, literature, and music seem todeny the tradition which created the great achievementsof the past and to seek their inspiration in forms whichare a denial of its whole meaning ; or, as with T. S.Eliot in England and Willa Cather in America, theyseek refuge in a philosophy whose medieval note isequally a denial of the experience inherent in thediscoveries of the last hundred years. The war dealt amortal blow at religious belief as a body of permanentsanctions for behaviour ; and the churches seem to havebecome rather a way of performing a time-honouredritual than a method of influencing the convictions ofmen. The institutions which, a generation ago, werehardly challengedthe public schools in England, the


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY I7right of American business men to shape the ethos oftheir civiHsationare now criticised with an angryhostility which assumes that they are permanently onthe defensive. About the whole character of our desiresthere is a temper of feverish haste, a recklessness, awant ofcalm, which suggests an ignorance ofthe thingsto be sought in life. The spirit which denies hastriumphed over the spirit which affirms.Nor is this all. The foundations of our civiHsation are

being subjected to a criticism more thoroughgoingthan at any period since Rousseau burst upon anastonished eighteenth century. None of our prophetscan compete with him in stature ; but most of themresemble him in their fierce rejection of the existingorder and in their romantic anxiety for the principlesof a new equilibrium. Mr. Wells among the oldergeneration, Mr. Aldous Huxley among the new, Mr.Sinclair Lewis and Mr. dos Passos in post-war America,may not be certain what they want; the one thing ofwhich they are certain is that the thing which is willnot do. Whether in poetry, fiction, or philosophy, theonly effective literature is that either of despair or ofprotest ; exactly as in eighteenth-century France, it wasonly the literature of dissent from the estabfished orderwhich made a decisive impact on men's minds. Fiftyyears ago the statesman of eminence was an object ofuniversal respect ; now he is in danger of becomingan object of imiversal scepticism. We know that theVictorian dogma is in process of erosion. Philosophiescompete with passion to take its place. But there isnowhere either the serenity or the self-confidence which

B


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l8 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISpersuades men to choose some alternative as an objectof worship.The Western way of Hfe is in the melting-pot.

Science, whether in physics or in biology, has dissolvedinto metaphysics; and, on one side, if it has become,as with Eddington and Jeans, part of the half-conscioustechnique of reaction, it seems so void of purpose as torepresent nothing so much as the omnipresent anarchyof values. It is able to offer material comfort ; it seemsunable to discover the formulae ofspiritual satisfaction.And it is part of this scepticism of foundations that theancient Eastso long content with passive acquiescencein the ascendancy ofthe Westshould now have issueddefinitive challenge to those who seek to preserve theconditions of tutelage. In the nineteenth century wecould dominate India and China because we believedourselves to be the torch-bearers of civilisation. Now,when they challenge our mission, we have no answerbut the clamant and dubious insistence upon our powerto force their acceptance of our exploitation. And it isnot the smallest part of the Far Eastern tragedy thatJapan, which might have learned to be the bridge ofaccommodation between the East and the West, seemsto have taken nothing from its Victorian experiencebut the shabby lesson of economic imperialism. It hasfound the secret of efficiency in London and Berlin, inParis and New York. But it seems to have no great endto which to devote its efficiency.

This search by the intelligentsia for new canons ofbehaviour is, once more, Uke nothing so much as thelast period of the ancient French regime. It seems to its


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY I9opponents an invitation to confusion just as the earliereffort did to the reactionaries of Burke's school. Tothe demand for experiment they answer with a likeinsistence upon a tradition which is dead. To theinsistent desire for new values they reply with the sameangry emphasis that it is dangerous to go back to thefoundations of the state. A century or so ago religioncould offer to the multitude the comfort of consolationin the hereafter for the inadequacies of this life ; in ourtime, scientific discovery has extinguished the lights ofheaven, and it is in the conditions of immediaterelevance that release must be found. A century agodespite warnings like those of Carlylemen saw theprospect of relief in the new industrial power ; now,despite its enormous benefits, it is clear that, divorcedfrom principle, the merely physical power to shapenature to our purposes is meaningless unless power isinformed by a consciousness of ends.Nowhere, perhaps, is the unsatisfactory character of

our standards more clearly shown than in the field ofindustrial relationships. The victory of individualism,the triumph of the acquisitive society, has been almostentirely a Pyrrhic one. It has shown us, in marvellouslyingenious fashion, the secret of the arts_of prQHi]rt|rvnjit has given us no clue to the problem of justice indistributioj^. The history, indeed, ofmodern productionihight not be unfairly described as a frantic search bygovernments to repair the holes cut in the social dykesby the owners of economic power. They have fulfilled,in ample degree, the grave prediction made byTocqueville a hundred years ago. "Not only are the


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20 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISrich not compactly united among themselves," hewrote, I "but there is no real bond between them andthe poor. Their relative position is not a permanentone; they are constantly drawn together or separatedby their interests. The workman is generally dependenton the master, but not on any particular master ; thesetwo men meet in the factory, but know not each otherelsewhere; and while they come into contact on onepoint, they stand very far apart on all others. Themanufacturer asks nothing of the workman but hislabour; the workman expects nothing from him buthis wages. The one contracts no obligation to protect,nor the other to defend ; and they are not permanentlyconnected either by habit or by duty. . . . Betweenthe workman and the master there are frequent rela-tions, but no real partnership."That is the inevitable consequence of an industrial

system of which the basis is the belief that the mereconflict of private interests will produce a well-orderedcommonwealth. The modern business man was sowholly devoid of any sense of obligation to the peoplewho worked for him ; he was so convinced that his ownattainment of profit was of itself a justification for hishabits ; that he was indignant at, or bewildered by, anycriticism which went to the roots ofthe system. He hadno real sense of the state. He regarded it either as anorganisation to promote the conditions under whichhis profits had maximum securitya purely policeconception; or, where it was driven to mitigate theterms he imposed, he insisted that its paternalistic

' Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part II, Bk. II, Chap. 20.


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 21interference was sapping the foundations of civicresponsibility. In the United States the record of hispoHtical activities is a sorry one; he reduced itslegislatures to the position of a dubious instrument ofhis zeal for gain. City government and state governmentwere the spoils alternately lost and won by groupsdevoid of any principle save the degree of corruptionthey represented. In Great Britain the development ofa social service state was an insurance against revoltby the disinherited; but after the war, at any rate,there was no clear division of doctrine between theolder parties. They represented nothing more than theeffort of business men to salvage what was possiblefrom the rapid decay of individualism. Despite theirprofession of profound differences, once they werechallenged seriously by the Labour Party, their unionpresented no real difficulty to their leaders.The observer will find it difficult not to interpret the

evolution of the last generation as showing a demons-trable loss of confidence in their own system by thebusiness men who profited by it. They began with anample and luxurious faith in laissez-faire. Cobden andBright, Nassau Senior, Cairnes, and Fawcett allpreached a gospel which warned the state, for the sakeof its own well-being, to hold off its hands from theindustrial area. In America, even more amply, thesame doctrine was taught ; and if Bismarck introducedpaternalistic measures in Germany, it was less fromconviction of their inherent rightness than from asuspicion that this was the best way to beat the socialistsat their own game. But the results of laissez-faire were


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22 DEMOCRACY IN CRISIStoo hideous even for its own protagonists to defend.It was clear, even in its heyday, that Hberty of contractwas without meaning in the presence of individual andunequal bargaining power. Even moderate Liberals,like T. H. Green, were driven by the spectacle of socialmisery to outline a theory of the positive state in whichthe government interfered, without seeking to disturbthe foundations of the old order, at least to remove thehindrances to the good life. From the doctrine whichtaught that all men are the best judges of their ownwelfare, public necessity had moved, by the turn ofthecentury, to a doctrine which defined an area of be-haviour, of increasing extent, in which the individualchoices of men were no longer paramount. The mini-mum wage, the regulation of hours, legislation abouthealth, unemployment, education, maternity and childwelfare, housing and public utilities, were all sympto-matic of this very different temper.Their root was less a doctrine of equality than a

desire to mitigate the worse consequences of un-hampered industrialism. They did not disturb theessential thesis that the ownership of economic powermust remain in private hands. They were the necessaryconcessions ofthe capitalist system to the outcry againstits more naked consequences. To that extent, of course,they represented a loss of the optimistic faith of earlyVictorianism in its power to produce contentment byindividual enterprise. There was never any boundaryat which, on principle, the concessions could cease.And as the state became increasingly based on a widerfranchise, political parties were more and more driven


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 23to promise these concessions in order to win thesuffrages of the poor. Taxation, after the war, mountedto heights which would have been unthinkable in theGladstonian epoch. The Chancellor of the Exchequerwas like nothing so much as an unwilling Robin Hoodproclaiming a doctrine of ransom to the poor while heinsisted to the rich that this was a necessary insuranceif the rights of property were to be capable of effectivedefence. And the rich, especially in the atmosphere ofthe Russian Revolution, were far too uneasy abouttheir own security to deny the wisdom ofwhat, in theirhearts, they felt to be the methods oforganised banditry.That loss of self-confidence, therefore, so typical of

the aristocracy in the last phase ofthe ancien regime, wasaccompanied by a definite rise in welfare of theoppressed classes. But because each concession, as itcame, was strongly opposed, its source seemed to be notthe recognition ofa rightjustly granted, but a surrenderextorted by the power of those who profited by it.Again, the analogy of 1789 is a striking one. Had theabrogation of privilege come thirty years earlier, thedisparities ofthe older system would not have appearedas a victory won against it. As it was, each surrenderonly gave opportunity for new demands. What seemedgenerosity to Voltaire and Montesquieu seemed con-servatism to Marat and Robespierre. Had PresidentHoover established a system ofunemployment insurancein 1928, it would have seemed in the next years a wiseprecaution against the fluctuations of the trade cycleto establish it in the presence of ten millions ofunemployed evokes not a gesture of gratitude but of


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24 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISindignation at its unstatesmanlike postponement. Theinability, in a word, of capitalism to take measuresagainst its own mistakes has the two vital effects ofmaking all its preventive effort seem precipitate andungenerous on the one hand, and, on the other, ofstimulating its critics to realise how much morepowerful was their case than they had imagined. Fortheir opponents yield to them in a panic the thingswhich, as it seemed but the day before, they haddeclared with passion it was impossible to undertake.And this leads, in most countries, to the accessionto power of the more moderate reformers. PresidentWilson, in his first term of office, the Liberal Govern-ment of 1906, the Labour Governments of 1924 and1929, represent nothing so much as the effort todiscover middle terms between an old regime which isdying and a new one which is seeking to be born. Theygo through the old gestures ; they are barely consciousof the old objectives. They enhance the concessions,they multiply the preventives against the patent vicesof the old system ; but, like Turgot and Necker, theydo not dare deliberately to plan a new equilibriumseparated in principle from the foundations of the old.Yet even such timidity is too much for their

opponents. The price of their measures is high ; and itopens up vistas offurther expenditure to which, at leaston principle, it is difficult to set limits. If a publiceducational system is satisfactory, it challenges theposition of those who educate their children by theirown exertions. If the level of unemployment insurancerepresents anything Hke a decent standard of fife, it


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 25acts as a stimulus towards demands for higher wagesamong those who earn their daily bread, A policy ofsocial reform raises no difficult questions in a period ofexpanding trade; concessions may then be offeredwithout altering the way of life of those who are themasters of the engines of economic power. But a policyofexpensive social reform in a period of declining traderaises grave problems for that class. It tends to driveinvestments abroad. It interferes with capital accumula-tion. It involves taxation upon a scale which makes theold standards of personal expenditure difficult tomaintain. Not least, it multiplies the number ofcompetitors for a place in the sun where the shrinkageof markets has of itself limited that area. Social reformbecomes a technique of equalisation immediately asociety has reached the period of diminishing returns.A cry for economy is raised. It becomes clear that therights of propertyby which is meant the mainten-ance of inequalityare in danger. The reformers arepushed aside, and the stern reactionaries take theirplace.But they take the place of the reformers at a period

of exceptional trial. The masses have become accus-tomed to a system of habits built upon the expectationof continuing concession. They are not prepared fortheir drastic amendment, still less for their revocation.In a representative democracy, where the power ofnumbers is against the rich, a policy of economy seemslike a deliberately organised weighting of the scalesagainst the poor. It may succeed as a temporarymeasure, amid the drama of crisis ; it cannot succeed


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26 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISas a permanent policy. Its acceptance depends uponthe clear proof that it is intended only as an expedientwhich is to be the prelude to further generosity.Otherwise, it is rapidly and deeply resented. Thereformers can point out that the sacrifices demandedhave no reference to principles of distributive justice.They simply mean the maintenance of inequality forits own sake. They can show pretty easily how hardlythey bear upon the masses, and they can awakenwidespread indignation against their incidence. Areactionary government, which proposes to remainreactionary over any long period, has no alternativebut to suspend the classic principles of representativegovernment. For, otherwise, it cannot rely upon thatcontinuity of popular support upon which the successof its measures depends. It has to govern by force indefiance of public opinion ; and to do so, it cannotsubmit itselfto the hazards of a popular verdict. Its lawof life is simply its own will, and it has to adapt theforms of state to the conditions upon which its triumphdepends. In the long run, the price of that decision isrevolution. That was the history of France and ofRussia; it was also, despite compHcations of detail,the essential history of modern Italy. There seemsno good reason to suppose that it is not a universalrule.And there is a special reason which gives it peculiar

force in our own epoch. The central fact of the age isinternational economic interdependence. The standardof life of each people depends upon its ability to sellabroad. But because each nation seeks the conditions


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 27of self-sufficiency, the free movement of goods ishampered at every turn. We seem on the horns of adilemma. Economic nationalism is fatal to the generalstandard of life, since it destroys that interchange ofgoods and services which is the condition of worldprosperity. On the other hand, above all in an age ofmachine-technology, the wider the area of free tradethe more difficult it is for the more advanced industrialpeoples, with a relatively high standard of life, tocompete with the more backward peoples with a largesupply of cheap labour at their disposal. The Lancashirecotton manufacturer cannot compete with his Japaneserival when the labour costs of each are so gravelydifferent. The result is the development of a protestagainst the conditions of differentiation which, in thelong run, necessarily issues in economic war. Nationalcapitalisms use the machinery of the state to fight forthe markets upon which their standards of life dependhence the development of an imperialist exploitationof the backward peoples. But this, in its turn, not onlybrings competing imperialisms into collision, by aninescapable logic it develops a nationaHst outlook inthe subject peoples involved. The history ofthe Turkishand Spanish empires, which governed their subject-peoples badly, does not differ in this regard from thoseof Great Britain and America, which, on the whole,governed their subject-peoples well. In a capitalistsociety, the modern scale of production involves aconstant expansion ofmarkets ; this begets imperialismand imperialism, in its turn, is the inevitable parent ofa new nationalism which immediately organises a


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28 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISprotective system to secure the market of its owncapitalists from foreign invasion. ^As always, the only way in which we can deal with

the dilemma is to evade its necessity. For a world ofseparate national states living by their access to marketsmust arm themselves to be certain that the access isavailable ; and if they are challenged they must fight.But we who have learned in unforgettable terms theprice of conflict cannot but realise the incompatibilitybetween its onset and the continued existence ofcivilisation. World-war means universal revolution,and the decencies of life could not survive the chaos andanarchy involved in that prospect. We are driven,accordingly, to escape the dilemma by discovering theformulae of an international society.What does this involve? Above all, the abrogation of

the sovereign national state, and the transference tointernational control of all those economic functions,currency, tariffs, migration, foreign investment, and theconditions of labour, of which the incidence is inter-national in the modern world. There is a faint beginningof such a system in the League of Nations and itssubject bodies. But no one can seriously consider thefirst decade of the League's history without realisingthat the danger of the vested interests it confronts isgreater than the promise that it will triumph over them.All the powers of prejudice and ignorance are at thedisposal of the vested interests which stand in the wayof its purposes; to give effect to them means anadjustment in terms of reason greater than any the

' Cf. my Nationalism and the Future of Civilisation (1932).


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 29world has so far known. An international societypostulates an international consciousness. The way toits attainment lies through the reorganisation of thevery foundations of our present order.For an international society, if it is to be effective,

has to plan international life; and this means adisturbance of vested interests upon a scale unpre-cedented in history. It can be effected in one of twoways : by voluntary abdication on the part ofthe vestedinterests involved, or by their surrender after defeat inconflict. Of these alternatives, the remorseless con-sequence of the second is a long period of suffering inwhich the accidents of violence will be the master ofhuman destiny. The first depends upon the relation,above all, within the Great Powers, of economic topolitical authority. It is a question of whether thosewho dominate the economic life ofthe state are preparedto abdicate their privileges as the price to be paid forthe evolution of those international institutions whichare now a primary necessity of our position. Obviouslyenough, the questions involved do not permit of anysimple or single answer.We are dominated by a communal psychology whichthinks essentially in terms of the national state; can werapidly transfer our thinking to the new plane aninternational society implies ? Those who remember theparalysis of the League before the Sino-Japanesedispute of 1 93 1, the lessons of the DisarmamentConference, the contrast between the practices of statesand the resolutions of the World Economic Conferencein 1927, will not be tempted to give an optimistic reply.


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30 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISThere is profit for the few to be made out ofthe presentway of life ; can they adjust themselves to that trans-valuation of values implied in a system which, by itsprimary assumptions, pays no regard to the individualtitle to profit? Are our national institutions so organisedthat, should the will of the masses be on the side of anew social order, their will has the chance ofprevailingagainst a powerful and obdurate minority? Whatever,let us note, be the forms of the modern state, thecharacter of its society is increasingly democratic ; itsprivileges now belong to a wealth whose power isindifferent to birth. But is there any reason to supposethat democratic societies have found their appropriateinstitutions? Is it not the fact that the basic principlesof the democratic state are more rigidly criticised thanat any previous time? Are we not driven to re-examinethe basis of our institutional habits if we are to findthe formulae of a new world ?

IIAnyone who begins to consider the problems of ourage in such terms as these will find it difficult not toconclude that the period whose character was definedby the French Revolution is now drawing to a close.Roughly speaking, the main feature of that period wasits search for the conditions of individual liberty. Itfinally threw off the yoke of aristocratic privilege andreplaced it by a faith in the right of the ordinary manto attain by his own effort whatever position in societyhe found open to him. That position was a function of


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 3Ithe property that he could amass; and to maximiseindividual opportunity, therefore, the functions of thestate were restricted within the smallest limits. Thedemand for individual liberty, moreover, synchronisedwith the Industrial Revolution. Its achievements wereso large, its miracles so obvious, that its gospel oflaissez-fdire triumphed easily over all competing faiths.Doubt, as with Carlyle and Ruskin, there might be;passionate hostility, as with the early Socialist move-ment. But no one who considers the confident optimismof Victorian England can fail to see how little doubtand hostility really counted in the scale.

In the world-movement, the outstanding result wasto make Great Britain the predominant state. Its wordcounted as that of no other people. Its habits were themodel which aU strove to imitate. Its political institu-tions were held to contain the secret of combiningliberty with order. Its avoidance, in the face of 1789,1830, 1848, ofrevolution proved it to possess a governingclass which knew how to base its power on popularconsent ; even in the height of Chartism there was nomoment when its supremacy was seriously challenged.It is small wonder that, when the twentieth centurydawned, parliamentary democracy seemed, to mostobservers, the way of life in which national salvationcould be discovered.

Parliamentary democracy, as the Victorians con-ceived it, had obvious and outstanding merits. It hadthe great virtue of immediate intelHgibility. Partiesappealed to the electorate for support, and the onewhich won a majority at the polls carried on the


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32 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISgovernment ofthe day until its mandate was exhausted.The opposition spent its time in revealing the defectsof the government programme. It sought to discoverways and means of persuading the voter that itsaccession to power would confer upon him greaterbenefit than its rival was prepared to offer. In theintellectual battle which ensued, the electorate waseducated by its opportunity to consider the rivalarguments put forward. The system offered the chanceof transferring all disputes from the plane of violenceto that of reason. Neither party sought the forcibleseizure of political authority. Each was prepared toagree that success at the polls gave an unquestionabletitle to office. From the reign of Queen Anne, thedynastic question apart, no party in England hadseriously considered the possibility of revolutionaryeffort.

It is a remarkable tradition, upon which it is difficultto dwell without complacency. The organisation oftheelectorate into parties ; the great drama of the day-to-day struggle in Parliament, with office as the prize ofvictory; the opportunity afforded to able men of asplendid career built upon the proof, sternly tested inParliament, of character and ability; the majestic andorderly progress which resulted from the effort ofparties to discover national need as the path to victorythe clear-cut division between them which made theconfusion of coalition abhorrent to both sides; thewillingness of the governing class to take the newleaders, as they arose, within the charmed circle sothat novi homines like the Chamberlains stood upon a


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 33footing hardly less secure than that of an ancient familylike the Cecils, once they had arrived; the self-confidence which could allow the amplest criticism ofthe system's foundations so that the most revolutionaryexilesEngels, Marx, Kxopotkincould live unham-pered in its midst ; the achievement of a civil servicealmost free from the evil of patronage, remarkablyneutral, magnificently efficient, and capable ofavoidingthe excesses of continental bureaucracythese arevirtues which no one, regarding alternative experience,has the right to consider with any feelings save thoseof admiration.What was the reason for the success ofparliamentary

democracy? In the main, it may be suggested, it wasdue to two principal causes. The period of its con-solidation was one of continuous and remarkableeconomic expansion ; it became associated, accordingly,in men's minds with outstanding material progress.The standard of life increased for every class ; and mostof the important questions which were debatedthefranchise, education, public health, the regulation ofwomen's and children's labour, the place of churchesin the stateadmitted of a fairly simple solution. Moreimportant, perhaps, was the fact that the two mainparties in Parliament were agreed about the funda-mentals of political action. After the triumph of freetrade, there was hardly a measure carried to thestatute-book by one government which could notequally have been put there by its rivals. If the Liberalscarried free trade, the Tories gave the trade unionstheir charter of emancipation. If the Liberals were

G


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34 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISresponsible for the Reform Act of 1832, the Toriescarried that of 1867; and 1884 was a compromisebetween them. Each shares in the credit for the reformoflocal government. Each laid a great foundation-stonein the structure of national education. Neither inforeign nor in imperial policy would it be easy to finddifferences between them of a thoroughgoing char-acter ; even over Ireland the distinction between them,as the ultimate solution made clear, was one ofdegreerather than of kind.

Broadly, that is to say, the two parties were in unityover the kind of state they wanted. There was littledifference in their social composition. If the Torymembers were slightly more aristocratic than theirrivals. Liberal cabinets tended to contain a somewhatmore emphatic representation of the aristocracy. TheMiners' Federation might contribute a small numberof working-men members, like MacDonald and Burt,to the ranks of liberalism ; but the Tories could claimthat their greatest leader, Disraeli, understood thesocial problems of the time with an insight to whichGladstone could never pretend. Both parties were insubstantial agreement upon the vital importance ofliberal individualism, especially in the industrial realmboth refused to see the state as more than a supple-mentary corrective of the more startling deficiencies ofindividual execution. Both, that is to say, were confidentthat the establishment of liberty of contract made itunnecessary to examine that principle in the contextof equality. They could afford their differences ofopinion because, as in the relationships of a family.


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 35these were based upon those substantial identities ofoutlook which make compromise possible at all pivotalpoints.This happy condition continued until the emergence

ofnew issues neither ofthe historic parties had foreseen.After the 'eighties of the last century the industrialsupremacy of Great Britain was no longer unchallenge-able ; and demands began to be made by the working-class which neither party was prepared to admit intoits programme. The rise of Fabian socialism, the birthof the Independent Labour Party, the increasingabsorption of the trade unions in political issues, meantthe end of the Victorian compromise. A new outlookwas being born, of which the principles were incom-patible with the laissez-faire state. Before the war thesurplus wealth at the disposal of British capitalism wasstill great enough to enable the older parties to fightfor the support of their new, but weak, rival by theoffer of social legislation. They tacitly abandonedlaissez-faire for the social service state in order to evadediscussion of the central issue of economic power. Theyadopted, and began to pay the price for, socialisticmeasures without attempting to face that problem ofthe ownership and control of economic power which isthe root problem of equality.Nothing shows the change better than the difference

in the levels of taxation between the Victorian and theEdwardian epochs. In 1874 Mr. Gladstone couldconsider the abolition of the income-tax as the basis ofhis electoral campaign. Forty years later, income-tax,super-tax, and death duties were not only at a figure


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36 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISwhich would have horrified the Victorian financier,their products were expended upon objects which nevercame within his purview. The state was no longerconceived as an umpire in what Sir Henry Mainecalled "the beneficent private war which makes oneman strive to climb on the shoulders of another andremain there through the law of the survival of thefittest."^ The state had become an instrument fortransferring income from the rich to the poor in thehope ofmaking life adequate for these ; it was a methodof redressing the worst inequalities which resulted fromthe "beneficent private war." The survival of the fittesthad been replaced by mutual aid. The gospel of"ransom" was being preached with a vengeance.Yet anyone who analyses the defence of the new

policy will find it suffused with an apologetic temper.The positive state has arrived, but it is permitted entryupon the condition that it does not become too positive.It must not touch the essential outlines of the historicstructure; the basic sources of power must still beentrusted to private hands. The sociahst dream of acommunity in which the motive of private profit isreplaced by that of public service is still regarded, byLiberal and Conservative alike, as inadmissible. And,in this aspect, the experience of the war is exceedinglysuggestive. For four years its necessities made the stateeverything and the individual nothing. Enormousexpenditure could be undertaken, wide schemes ofreconstruction could be planned, in the belief, born ofthe national unity begotten ofstruggle for survival, that

* Popular Government (and edition), p. 50.

I


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 37all things could be made new after the war. Therailways were to be nationalised ; there was to be a newpartnership between capital and labour; vast educa-tional schemes were to give to the children ofthe massesa new equality of opportunity. The "comradeship ofthe trenches" was to bring a new England into being.

Ideal and reality proved very different. After thebrief post-war boom, Great Britain settled into thatsteady industrial depression of which a decade has notseen the end. Great strikes, culminating in the GeneralStrike of 1926, were the order of the day. There wasno nationalisation of the railways, and most of theschemes of reconstruction were pigeon-holed. TheLiberal Party suffered a great eclipse; its supportersshowed a growing tendency to ally themselves witheither Labour or the Tories. The latter adopted adespairing policy of economic nationalism. Labour,brought twice to office within five years, though in eachcase without a majority, went in for large-scale andcostly measures of social reform of a type which,though evading any fundamental issues, pressed heavilyon the side of taxation, upon hard-driven businessmen. The price of its expedients was intensified by thereturn to the gold standard (which hit the exporttrades) and the short-term loan policy of the City ofLondon which fastened British credit to the perilousstructure of continental finance. When the May reportof 1 93 1 revealed the dubious position of the BritishBudget, with the inevitable consequence of furtherheavy taxation, the Labour Government was confrontedwith a demand for economies which would, had they


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38 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISbeen accepted, have cut the ground from under theirsocial philosophy. They were driven from power, andtheir rivals, headed by their own late leaders, took theirplace as a Coalition Government. Amid circumstancesof financial panic the coalition obtained, at the generalelection of 1931, the largest majority in the history ofparliamentary democracy.The crisis of 1931 is worth reflecting upon for a

number ofreasons.^ It drove Liberals and Conservativesinto an alliance which has, in its essentials, all theappearance ofpermanence ; for at least half the Liberalmembers of Parliament accepted the necessity of tariffreformhitherto their main line of divisionand allaccepted the government's policy on international andimperial relations. On all domestic issues the CoalitionGovernment moved drastically to the right; economyat the expense ofthe social servicesthe recognition, ina word, that the policy of concessions had gone toofarwas the pivot of its policy. The Labour Party,simultaneously, moved with equal fervour to the left.For the first time in its history it was driven to recognisethat compromise with capitalism was impossible. Itadopted a policy of which the central purpose was adirect assault upon the foundations of economic power.National ownership and control of the banks, the land,power, transport, the mines, investment, and industrieslike cotton and iron and steel under governmentcontrol, these were put in the forefront of its pro-gramme. It proposed to use the normal mechanics of' See my Constitution and the Crisis (1932) for a full discussion of itsmeaning.

^


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 39the constitution for its purposes; it was not, at leastconsciously, in any sense a revolutionary party. But theexperience of 1931 led it deliberately to abandon itsbeliefin "the inevitability ofgradualness." It announcedthat the transference to the state of the key economicpositions must immediately follow upon its next con-quest of the electorate. It is worth noting, moreover,that within the ranks both of the Coalition and itsopponents there were dissident groups which foundtheir respective policies too tame to suit the circum-stances of the time.What is the meaning of this evolution? Two

considerations immediately suggest themselves. Thegrowth of socialism, the concessions in reform whichhad to be made to that growth, challenged thefoundations of a capitalist society. The immediate,though only half-conscious, result was that the divisionbetween the capitalist parties was closed, and theyconfronted Labour as effectively a single entity. Menwho had been lifelong opponents on small issues nowfound themselves in agreement on large ones. As soon,that is, as the basis of the Victorian compromise waschallenged, it was the identity in fundamentals, andnot the differences in minutiae, between the makers ofthat compromise which became significant. Meanwhileits opponent had reached a doctrinal position in whichits accession to power would involve a denial of thefundamental basis upon which the compromise hadbeen made. For the first time in British history sincethe Puritan Rebellion parties confronted one anotherwith respective ways of life which looked to wholly


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40 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISantithetic ends. Between a capitalism which sought topreserve the motive of private profit as the keystone ofthe arch, and did not propose to allow the essentialsources of economic power to pass from private owner-ship, and a socialism which denied the validity ofeitherpremise, it did not appear that there was the possibilityof a new compromise. Changes of government, in sucha perspective, would mean upon each occasion aconstitutional revolution, the strains and stresses ofwhich would, as Lord Balfour predicted with sombre-ness,^ test to the uttermost the flexibility of the Englishpolitical scheme.And, in this context, it is worth while to consider for

a moment the similar evolution in other countries.America apart, it is notable that in European countriesparliamentary democracy has had nothing like thesuccess which attended it in the home of its origin. InGermany, in the pre-war period, it never attained thatelementary stability which depends on the dominationof the army by the civil power. The Reichstag of theold empire was rather a competitor for authority thana participator in it. The Chancellor could not governwithout some measure of reliance upon the legislativeassembly, but his power was always, especially inforeign affairs, largely independent of it. Even moreimportant, the socialists, who were always the effectivesource of opposition to the government, never attaineda fully recognised status in the community; it wasalways realised that their attainment of office would* Introduction to his edition of Bagehot's English Constitution(1927), p. xxiii.


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 4Imark a revolution in the tempo of affairs. In the post-warperiod, all the conditions of internal stability whichare required to lay the foundations of parliamentarismwere absent. No party could attain an effective majorityin the Reichstag. A mass of groups lived together inmore or less uneasy coherence, none being able, as agovernment, to live by its principles, and all administra-tions being dependent upon their power to rule byemergency decree. The differences between Germanparties were ofso ultimate a character that, on essentialmatters, each was prepared to fight rather than giveway. Parliamentary government, in a word, was in-capable of solving the problems of post-war Germany.In Italy, if the character of the evolution is different,

the results are the same. Between the major groups inthe Italian pre-war parliament differences of essentialprinciple were not evident to the outside observer.Governments differed from one another in personsthey did not differ in purposes. The disillusion of thewar led to a socialist revolt against the bourgeoisregime. Premature in time, and badly organised, it ledto the counter-revolution from which the Fascist stateemerged. This, in its essence, was a simple denial of allthe principles of parliamentary government. The realcentre ofpower was neither in the electorate nor in thelegislative assembly; it resided in the Fascist Party,which was in fact a naked dictatorship basing itself inpart upon the support nfthp Italian irid^^^^^^'^i in partupon its ability to pay its way by obtaining loans fromabroad. It displayed, despite its proud boast of a newtheory of the state, all the characteristic features of a


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42 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISRenaissance tyranny a foundation in Caesarism, aspirited foreign policy to draw attention from domesticgrievance, vast expenditures upon public works, drasticpublic safety laws which ignored all the usual principlesofcriminal justice, the violent stifling, even to the pointof murder, of all organised opposition, a rigorouscensorship of the Press. It is difficult to discover anyunderlying principle in the Fascist regime except thedubious one of raison (Tetat, and its ideology dependedupon the momentary temper of its dictator. Behindhim, in an uneasy alliance of which the effective termswere unrevealed, stood Italian capital. But nothingcan be predicted ofthe Italian system except its obviousimpermanence. Like all dictatorships which rest upona person instead of a principle, it has been unable todiscover the secret of stable continuity; and only abrilliant and successful foreign policy can save it fromultimate attack from within.The parliamentary history of France has a character

all its own. Until the Third Republic, no regime after1815 lasted for more than twenty-five years. If thesystem was built upon a narrow franchise, it resultedin revolution ; if built upon a wide one, it emergedinto dictatorship. The chiefevents ofthe Third Republicdo not suggest the arrival at stability. ConstitutionaHsmbarely survived the Dreyfus case and the Separation.When those crises had been passed, preoccupation withthe coming war with Germany enabled every govern-ment to postpone serious consideration of the socialquestion. The French Chamber has never had agovernment with a coherent majority; but the groups


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 43into which it has been divided have at least been ableto join hands in their opposition to socialism. And inthe post-war period what has emerged in France is theintensity of this opposition. The French governmentalparties, whether of the Right or of the Left, have hadat bottom no other preoccupation than the con-solidation o their gains from the Treaty of Versailles.To that end they have pursued a policy in whichultimate European conflict is inherent; to that end,also, they have postponed all necessary reforms. Thegrowing feature of French life is the scepticism of theparliamentary system. No one can say that any otherregime attracts adherents in any numbers. One cansay that a socialist majority in France would raiseultimate issues about the form of state. One can sayalso that another war would bring the edifice ofparliamentarism crashing to the ground. The Frenchpeople, in the technical sense of that word, wantspeace; it would not continue to entrust its destiny toa system dominated by interests unable to maintain it.

I shall discuss later the crisis in the French institu-tional scheme. Here it is enough to note that it existsand that it goes to the root of things. When we turn toAmerica, now the classic home of large-scale capitalism,the parlous condition of representative democracy isnot less evident. America, like Great Britain, has livedfor effective purposes, under a two-party system forover a hundred years; dissident major groups havearisen, like the Progressive Party in 1912, but they havealways been ultimately absorbed into the historicorganisations. The Socialists, no doubt, have maintained


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44 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISa separate existence for a long period, but, in thepeculiar economic conditions of America, they haveexerted no real influence on events. The essence of theAmerican party conflict has been an absence of anyreal distinction between the rival claimants for power.On the whole, the Republicans have been moredirectly associated with Wall Street, federal centralisa-tion, a higher tariff; but these have been so muchmatters of degree that they do not obscure the essentialfact of a real identity of interest between the parties.Like Liberals and Conservatives in Great Britain, theyhave been able to quarrel peacefully about minormatters because they were in agreement upon thefundamental way of American life. Internal develop-ment for the benefit of big business; the export ofcapital for the same advantage; the real sources ofpower outside its formal holders^this has been thepermanent characteristic of American history since1787. The nature ofthe evolution was largely concealedbecause, until the fiUing-up of the West, the resourcesof America seemed vast enough to prevent the emer-gence of the European social problem. But, once thelast frontier had been crossed, it became the obviousdestiny of America to repeat the classic evolution ofEuropean capitalism in a more intense form.To repeat it, but with greater difficulties to confront.

America has been for so long a frontier civilisation thatits communal psychology, as Mr. Leonard Woolf hashappily termed it, has remained intensely individualisteven in an age where the primary assumptions ofindividualism were obsolete. It has lived under a


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 45constitution so organised as to minimise the power ofpopular will and to confront it with a body ofsafeguardsfor the rights of private property which has made itdifficult to enact even the most elementary forms ofsocial legislation. Until quite recently, moreover, thestate, in its European substance, has hardly beennecessary in American life ; with the result that popularinterest has never been deeply concentrated upon itsprocesses. Now, when a state is necessary, the Americanpeople lacks that sense of its urgency which cangalvanise it into rapid and effective action. It has beenso long tutored to believe that individual initiative isalone healthy that it has no appreciation of the planewhich must be reached in order to make individualinitiative significant.The defects of the American political scheme are, to

the outsider, little less than startling. The Congressionalsystem seems based upon principles so checked andbalanced against one another that they paralyse thepower to act. The states are historical entities ; butindustrial development has largely deprived them ofeffective reality as governmental units. City government,for nearly a century, has been a dismal failure ; citieslike Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, resemble, intheir internal governance, rather the British municipalposition before 1835 than the possibilities of modernadministrative technique. The public business, save inperiodic movements for reform, has been no one'sbusiness in an orderly and coherent way. There hasnever, as in England, been a strong and widespreadtrade union movement whose political philosophy


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46 DEMOCRACY IN CRISIScanalised the will of the masses into political channelsthe average American was too certain that he wouldclimb out of his class to be willing to build organicexpression of its purposes. Opportunities were so great,until a quite recent period, that the acceptance of thebusiness man as the highest type of civilisation washardly questioned. Private profit was assumed to bethe foundation of public good, and the great figures ofAmerican industry assumed, for the man in the street,the proportions of national heroes.

Yet, as soon as crisis came, it was obvious that thecentral American problem was no different from thatof the European. It was the problem of planning theuse of American resources for the total good of thecommunity when the power to control them for privatebenefit was protected by the amplest constitutionalsafeguards any people has ever devised. The problemwas rendered the more intense by the fact that longprosperity had persuaded the average man that theConstitution was as nearly sacrosanct as any suchinstrument might be. The disproportion in Americabetween the actual economic control and the formalpolitical power is almost fantastic ; what Senator Roothas called the "invisible government" of Americaexercised an authority not attained in any Europeancountry. The intellectuals might criticise passionately;the trade unions might formulate programmes ofadjustment ; the liberals might insist upon the necessityof creative experiment. Here and there a radicalgroup, like the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota,might attempt the conquest of political authority. The


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 47whole system was too firmly geared to the philosophyof individualism for a more positive outlook to beeffective in any short space of time. There is in Americaa wider disillusionment with democracy, a greaterscepticism about popular institutions, than at anyperiod in its history.One other point about America is worth making.

Only once beforein the Civil Warhave its politicalinstitutions been tested in a crisis. It was then discoveredthat the abyss between the advocates and the opponentsof slavery was too profound to be bridged by com-promise, and a bloody conflict was necessary to resolvethe issue. It is worth remark that the antagonism ofinterests to-day is not less momentous. Banking, power,oil, transport, coal, all the essential services upon whichthe public welfare depends are vested interests inprivate hands ; and the divorce between ownership andcontrol is more complete than in any other country.The legal formulae of the Supreme Court make anassault upon the economic privileges of the few at thebest a dubious adventure. Yet the American democracyis more remote from mastery in its own house thanthose of any country upon the European continent. Isit likely, without a drastic change in the AmericanConstitution, that such a mastery can be attained?And what evidence is there, among the class whichcontrols the destiny of America, of a will to make thenecessary concessions? Is not the execution of Saccoand Vanzetti, the long and indefensible imprisonmentof Mooney, the grim history of American strikes, theroot of the answer to that question?


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48 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISNor is there comfort in other directions. In Poland,

Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia, the pretence of parlia-mentary democracy has been abandoned. In Japanthe formal source of essential power is in the hands ofa military oligarchy. After ten years of a monarchistdictatorship, Spain has revived a parliamentaryregime; but no one could claim that it has yet dis-covered the conditions ofstability. The South Americanrepublics continue their unenviable record of casualrevolution, of which the causes, rather than the occa-sions, seem to be capable of interpretation. China is theprey of bandits without principle where it is not thebattleground of revolutionaries without authority.Turkey and Persia have changed from dictatorships onthe Eastern to dictatorships on the Western model.Only the British Dominions, Holland, Belgium, and theScandinavian countries remain, with Switzerland, atall firmly wedded to a parliamentary system. But theevolution of Canada is not unlikely to follow that oftheUnited States ; while the economic position of Australiamakes the persistence ofparliamentarism a matter uponwhich doubt is permissible. A country mortgaged toabsentee creditors cannot easily maintain a high stan-dard oflife forthe masses and continue to paythe intereston its debt abroad. If it defaults upon the debt, itsinternational position becomes dubious ; if it meets itsobligations, a high standard of life becomes inaccessibleto all save a small, wealthy class. Is it likely thatuniversal suffrage will produce the conditions uponwhich the security of capitalism depends? And is notthe continuance of parliamentary democracy in South


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 49Africa dependent, above all, upon the agreement ofBritish and Boer alike to unite in the exploitation ofblack labour. Is not its basis, like that ofAthens, rootedin slavery, with the important difference that it doesnot reproduce the gifts of Athens to the mind of theworld ?

IllWhat is the essence of the position thus revealed?PoUtical democracy developed in response to thedemand for the abrogation of privilege. In modernEuropean history its cause was the liberation of acommercial middle class from domination by a land-holding aristocracy. To free itself, that middle classformulated a body of liberal generalisations whichculminated in the widespread grant of universalsuffrage. Their underlying philosophy was the well-known Benthamite argument, that since each man in apolitical democracy was to count for one, and not morethan one, and since each was, on the whole, the bestjudge of his own interest, universal suffrage wouldpermit the translation of the majority will into thesubstance of legislation. Sinister interest, it was urged,belonged only to a few; privilege could not resist theonset of numbers. Representative democracy, on thebasis of equal and universal suffrage, would mean thecreation of a society in which the equal interest ofmenin the results of the social process would be swiftlyrecognised. The rule of democracy was to be the ruleof reason. The party which best grasped the purpose

D


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50 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISofthe electorate would win a majority in the legislature,and it would use the normal, constitutional forms togive effect to that purpose.The flaw in the argument was an obvious one. Itassumed the absolute validity ofthe form ofthe politicalstate regardless ofthe economic character ofthe societyit was supposed to represent. It did not see that eacheconomic regime gives birth to a political order whichrepresents the interests of those who dominate theregime, who possess in it the essential instruments ofeconomic power. In a feudal society, broadly speaking,sovereignty belonged to the owners ofland ; custom wasregistered, legislation was made, in their interest. In acapitalist society, quite similarly, sovereignty belongedto the owners of capital ; and custom was registered,legislation made, in their interest also. The simplesttest of this truth in any society is the analysis of theworking of the Courts. And if their decisions bescrutinised, it will always be found that, in the lastanalysis, they are inexplicable except upon the basis oftheir effort to defend the sovereignty of the owners ofeconomic power. The framework of a legal system isalways geared to that end. Liberty means libertywithin the law, and the purpose of the law is theprotection of some given status quo. Its substance isalways the result of a struggle to widen an existing basisof privilege. Those who share in this may on occasionbe tempted to the surrender of an occasional outworkthey have always defended to the last the possession ofthe inner citadel. |

It is in the perspective of these general truths that


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 5Ithe history of parliamentary democracy must be set.It has been successful in the difficult task of enablingthe outworks of the capitalist system to be surrenderedto its opponents ; it has at no point solved the centralproblem of the inner citadel's surrender. It has dis-covered ways and means of graceful compromise,wherever compromise has been possible; it has notproved that it forms the natural road to a newequilibrium when the differences between men areultimate. For we have to acknowledge the grim factthat, at the parting of the ways, men in the possessionof actual sovereignty choose to fight rather than toabdicate. In Great Britain, no doubt, the genius forcompromise has been peculiarly outstanding, thoughthat is most largely due to the fact that the ultimateissues have never been raised. In other Europeancountries this has not been the case, and a break withthe old legal order has invariably become imperativein order to find the necessary conditions of a newequilibrium. The power to compromise while com-promise is stiU possible is perhaps the rarest quality inhistory.And if the character of the struggle involved in the

historic process be analysed, its root will be foundalways to lie in the unending problem of equality.Those who are denied access to privilege seek to destroyprivilege. It may present itself under the most variousformsreligious, social, economic, political. It may beaccepted for a period as part of an order of nature ; theabolition of the prerogatives of the House of Lords washardly thinkable to the eighteenth century. Butj sooner


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52 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISor later, those excluded from privilege resent theirexclusion, and it is then only a matter of time beforethey attack it. And unless they can be convinced thatthe maintenance of the privilege is directly associatedwith their own good, the choice offered to the societyis always one between concession and violence.Anyone who considers the natural history of parlia-

mentary democracy in these terms will have nodifficulty in realising the crisis that is before it. Thepeople was taught by the ideology of its early triumphsthat the conquest of political power meant that theywould be masters ofthe state. They found, indeed, thathaving conquered it, the way lay open to acquisitionsunattainable under any other system. But they found,also, that to have won formal political power was notto have gained the mastery they sought. They realisedthat the clue to authority lay in the possession ofeconomic control. When they sought to move by theordinary constitutional means to its conquest as well,they found that the fight had to be begun all overagain. Not only was this the case, but the essentialweapons lay in their opponents' hands. The Courts, thePress, the educational system, the armed forces of thestate, even, in large degree, the bureaucracy, wereinstruments operating towards their defeat. If theymaintained law and order, they maintained that subtleatmosphere upon which the security of economicprivilege depended. If they sought its overthrow byviolence, in ordinary circumstances the organised powerof the state was on their opponents' side. If theybecame the government by the methods sanctioned in


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 53constitutional law, they found, first, that they couldnot count upon its instruments of action, and, second,that their opponents were not always prepared toobserve the traditions they themselves respected. Theydiscovered, in a word, that agreements peacefully todisagree could only be maintained when the subjectsof contention were not deemed valuable enough, byeither side, to justify resort to violence.

This may be put in another way. The IndustrialRevolution brought the middle classes to power, andthey evolved a form of statecapitalist democracywhich seemed most suited to their security. Capitalistdemocracy worked admirably so long as the environ-ment was stable enough to maintain the self-confidenceof its governing class. But inherent in it was a newstruggle for power. It offered a share in politicalauthority to all citizens upon the unstated assumptionthat the equality involved in the democratic ideal didnot seek extension to the economic sphere. The assump-tion could not be maintained. For the object ofpoliticalpower is always the abrogation of privilege ; and thatabrogation can only be postponed when the conquestsof the new regime are so great that it can offer aconstantly increasing standard of life to the masses.That happened in the nineteenth century, and parlia-mentary democracy then seemed to all but a fewprophets of woe to fulfil all the conditions of securitythe new governing class demanded. That class, how-ever, failed to foresee two things. It did not realisehow rapid would be the changes in environment dueto scientific discovery; how accelerated, therefore.


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54 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISwould have to be the adaptability of the politicalsystem to a new economic atmosphere. Nor did itunderstand that the association of nationalism withstatehood, the domination of both by the vestedinterests of the propertied class, would place technicalbarriers in the way of capitalist expansion at the verymoment when this was most necessary. The system,accordingly, faced the dilemma that at the verymoment, again, when its productive processes were attheir maximum power it could not solve the problemof distributive justice; to maintain itself, it had tolower the standard of life just when democraticexpectation looked to its dramatic expansion propor-tionately to the increase in productive power. Andsince that democratic expectation was accompanied bythe knowledge that political authority belonged to thepeople, it was wholly natural that they should seek tosolve the dilemma for themselves. They hoped, in aword, to solve the problem of political justice byobtaining possession ofthe sources ofproductive power.The disintegration of parliamentary democracy, if

this analysis is correct, is then due to the fact that theleaders of the class who dominate it cannot meet thedemands made upon them. The new class which hasarisen to political authority, dissatisfied with the resultsof the present state, seeks to reorganise it in its owninterest. The rise of a new class to political power isalways, sooner or later, synonymous with a socialrevolution ; and the essential characteristic of a socialrevolution is always the redistribution of economicpower. Here, it may be urged, is the centre of the


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 55malaise in representative democracy, the root of thecrisis it confronts. A new society is struggling to beborn within the womb of the old ; it finds the forms ofthat old society resist its effort at emergence. It is, Ithink, wholly natural that, if those forms should befound too inflexible to permit the easy birth of the neworder, an attempt should be made to break them.There is, I think, a quite special reason why, in a

crisis like our own, the dominant class should find itpeculiarly difficult itself to adapt its social forms tonew conditions. The type-person of this dominant classhas been the business man. He has been evolved in anenvironment which has made a genius for gettingmoney the outstanding feature of his character. To themoney-motive, as the most satisfactory measure of life,the business man has sacrificed everything. No doubthe has his code, but it is vital to realise that his codeis not one recognised as adequate by any other class inthe community. For him, all activities are referable tothe single standard of profit. For profit he buys andsells. He recognises no responsibility save the service ofprofit. If legislation seeks to curb his activities, he willdenounce it without stint; and, as the history ofAmerican statutes perhaps most notably makes clear,there is hardly any step he is not prepared to take inorder to secure its abrogation. Specialisation in money-making has, in fact, gone so far with the business manthat he is unable to understand the building of socialrelationships in which its attainment is not a primaryend. By making money the end of all things, he hasseparated himself from the power to co-ordinate the


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56 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISinterests of society at any point where profit has to beforegone. In those circumstances, where the businessman, as the master of society, ought to be engaged inthe task of unifying disharmonies, his peculiar psycho-logy makes it impossible for him to understand theirsignificance. Unless his opponents can be bought off,the business man has no way, save conflict, of dealingwith them.That this is no unfair account is proved, I would

submit, by the relation of the business man to politics.It is, for instance, significant that in the whole historyof parliamentary democracy no great statesman in anycountry has been a business man. Like Bonar Law inEngland, Loucheur in France, they have often heldhigh, even the highest office ; but there is no evidenceof any who has attained the kind of influence over hiscontemporaries that came to men like Washington,Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck, or Cavour. The reason,I suggest, is the simple one that public opinion hasnever been able to accept the capitalist's claim to bethe trustee of public interest. It has always seen himfor what he is, a specialist in money-making. It hasnever really believed that he has a sense ofresponsibilityoutside the narrow limits of his class. He has neverregarded the law as a body of principles above thenarrow interests with which he has been concerned;he has always been willing, by fair means or foul, tosecure its interpretation for his special purposes. Nodoubt, in his own way, he has been thoroughly devotedand conscientious; there is no reason to doubt thesincerity of his identification of his private well-being


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 57with the public good. When, as in America, he hasbought judges, state governors, even the presidencyitself, he has done so in the belief that to make themthe pliable instruments of his purposes was the bestthing for the American people. He defended himself inthe only way he understood because he genuinelybeHeved in his divine right to rule.But the peculiar psychology of his special metier

prevented him from seeing how profound were itslimitations. If the justice of the Courts was the decisionsofhis justice, those who were denied equal participationin its benefits were bound in the long run to suspect itsquality. If the statutes of the legislature were hisstatutes, the fact that he was their author was boundsooner or later to be perceived. The people ofGermanymay not be profoundly versed in political science, butit cannot be kept from them that the government ofvon Papen has interests which are not coincident withthose of the German people. The little tradesman ofLyons may be imprisoned in a narrow routine, buteven he can see that the will of France and that of theComite des Forges are not the same thing. The averagetrade unionist may be misled once by an attack uponthe pound, but an economy campaign which seeks toreduce income-tax at the price of the schools andhousing and the unemployed soon opens his eyes. Heis bound to ask himself whether what he has been toldto regard as the rights of property do not conflict withhis own conception of social good, whether they are, infact, so inherent in the order of nature as he had beentaught to suppose. And once he distrusts the philosophy


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58 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISofthe business man, he is bound to distrust the businessman himself. The more strongly the latter defendshimself, the more bitterly he will be opposed, for inpolitics, as in nature, action and reaction are equal.Representative democracy in that situation has eitherto accommodate itself to a world in which the wantsof the business man are no longer predominant, orwhether for good or evil, it will cease to be eitherrepresentative or democratic.This is to say that the survival of parliamentarydemocracy, in anything like the form in which we haveknown it, depends upon the business man ceasing tobe a business man merely. He has to find ways ofgenerating the force by which its engines are operatedthrough motives wholly different from those uponwhich he has previously relied. It is not an easy taskit calls for a sagacity and an energy of the intelUgencefar beyond anything he has displayed in these criticalyears. He has to do so amidst circumstances ofunexampled challenge. It is not merely that he con-fronts, in an especially intense degree, the classicconflict of capital with labour organisations morepermeated with socialist ideals than at any previousperiod. It is not only, also, that, for the first time inthe modern world, doctrine antithetic to his own standsforth in the panoply of an armed state believingpassionately in its obligation to propagate its owndoctrine. It is not only, further, that the main figuresin literature and the arts combine increasingly to denythe system of values he has created.

All this is important enough ; but perhaps even more


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 59important is what has happened to the technicians whowere once so wholly under his own control. Thesignificance of the foundation of industrialism in thetechnical sciences seems to have escaped the businessman. As these sciences have developed, they havebecome organised into professions; they have createdwithin themselves a spirit of their craft, of which theessence is a refusal to be governed by the mere motivesof private gain. They display, in fact, standards, habits,purposes which escape the control of the business manbecause they are outside the range of the knowledgehis speciality confers upon him. Just as the lawyer andthe doctor have always been more than men who gaina living by the practice of law or medicine, so theengineer, the chemist, the architect, to take onlyobvious examples, have developed a sense of service toan ideal in which money-making has no necessary part.This is particularly and significantly true of theadministrator in modern government. His membershipof a profession relates him to purposes beyond himself,and he ceases, from the strength afforded him by thetradition in which he shares, to be commandeda Voutrance by men who would deny that tradition. So,not less significantly, with the teachers in the moderncommunity. The educational standards upon whichthey increasingly insist are coming to be born, not outof consideration for the taxable limits of the businessman's income, but out of the needs their materialreveals. The greater the development of professions, ina word, the greater hold upon the community has themotive of public service ; and the greater the hold of

I


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60 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISthat motive, the feebler is the claim ofthe business manto preserve his own antithetic standards. For while hemay continue to preach that the basis of public well-being is to be found in the predominance of themoney motive, there will be continually fewer peopleto believe him.

It is no doubt true that the revolt of the professionsagainst the standards of capitalist democracy is in itsinfancy, and it is true, also, that both professionahsmand expertise have their own special defects againstwhich precautions are necessary in the social interest.My point is simply the obvious one that in a realmpromoted by the business man for his own private dpurpose, another purpose develops wholly aHen from 'his own. And its whole ethos goes to augment thevolume of criticism directed against his way of Ufe. Totake only one example: no one has done more tobreak down the theory of inherent rights in the ownersof private property than government officials. Doctors,,engineers, surveyors, sanitary inspectors, by theircontinuous revelations of what those inherent rightsimply, revelations made in the interest of the standardsof their respective professions, have developed adoctrine of eminent domain which, little by little, theyhave forced upon the acceptance of successive govern-ments. So, also, it may be argued, the driving forcebehind the demand for a factory code has been lessthe pressure oforganised trade unions than the remark-able reports of the corps of factory inspectors who havegiven the point ofinescapable substance to the pressure.The true philosophy of capitalism in practice has been


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 6lmore frankly revealed by men unwedded to alternativedoctrine, not seldom, indeed, unconscious that theywere criticising its foundations, than has ever beendone by its opponents. It was upon the basis ofgovernment reports that Karl Marx drew up histerrible indictment.

IVThe spectacle that we are witnessing is, therefore, afamiliar one in substance even though the forms of itsexpression are new. The decay of our political systemis due to its failure to embody a new spirit differentfrom that which it was devised to contain. That newspirit brings with it its own sense of values, its affirma-tion of a plane of rights antithetic to the old. It is, likeits predecessor, a plea for variety in unity, a search fora new balance between order and freedom. Like itspredecessor, also, it seeks the means for the affirmationof individual personality. But its way of attaining itsends is wholly different from that which marked theprevious path.The error which was inherent in capitaHst democracy

was its atomic conception of social life. That error,regarded historically, was intelligible enough. It was aprotest against controls upon individual behaviourexercised in the name of a small oHgarchy whoseactions were rarely referable to rational principle. Itsexercise of authority made government itself seem anecessary evil. The more narrow the sphere of itsoperations, the greater, it was argued, would be the


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62 DEMOCRACY IN CRISISfreedom of citizens. Let a man, with the minimum ofcontrol, make the best of himself that he can, and theresult is bound to be social justice. It is not difficult torealise the appeal of the liberal state to religiousdissidents who saw in it only their opponents' in-strument of persecution. It is not difficult, either, torecognise its attraction for business men who saw in itsemergence an opportunity for action free from thetrammels of inefficiency and corruption. It is even easyto see the influence it exerted upon the masses whocould salute in its evolution the erosion of thoseprivileges ofwhich they had first-hand experience, andthe creation of those opportunities to which they hadpreviously been denied access. We can still assist inimagination at the fall of the Bastille and understandwhy, to generous minds, it could seem the greatestevent in the history of the world.But the liberal state, though it represented a definite

gain in social freedom upon any previous social order,was in fact no more than the exchange ofone privilegedclass for another. And its refusal to link political libertywith social equality had grave consequences. It broughtinto the control of authority a race of men whose ideaof good was built in the association of material successwith civic virtue. The "private war" of which SirHenry Maine spoke was for them morally beneficent.They equated effective economic demand with right.They argued that for the weaker to go to the wall wasa law of nature to which we were disobedient at ourperil. They forgot two vital needs in any socialphilosophy which seeks the character of permanence.


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THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 63It must always be able to show that the differencesbetween men to which it gives the force of lawmust be clearly explicable in terms of reason. Those,that is, who are excluded from its major benefits mustacquiesce in their exclusion as just. It must be able, inthe second place, generally to separate the impactof men upon society from their material positionas owners of property. Its idea of good must be, infact not less than in form, projected beyond thematerial plane.The liberal state failed to fulfil either ofthese canons.

The history of its emergence, indeed, synchronises wi

democracy in crisi - harold laski

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