Democracy

( Originally Published 1919 )

DEMOCRACY is not a form of government, it is government. Every other system is either a tyranny or a veiled form of anarchy. Only under democracy can the realities of existence be dealt with and turned to the service of mankind. Every other attempted government must deal with illusions. Admitting that government depends upon discipline, the only true discipline is self-discipline. If the possibility of that be removed, whatever appearance may be maintained, beneath it there can only be chaos.

A traveller journeying through that country which is most proud of being democratic, Great Britain, would perceive the impossibility of acknowledging the claim as he saw the huddled streets and houses in which for the most part the people live. He would know the impossibility of self-discipline in people denied beauty, air, health, privacy, social intercourse, civic pride; and condemned from week to week to a monotony of toil by which they are drilled into the uniformity of subservience. Much the same impression would be given one who should journey round the environs of Paris or take a trip by train across the industrial area of Belgium. What Verhaeren called the tentacular town sucks men in from the earth, gives them a new consciousness, but robs them of the vitality to use it; and government in the West depends entirely upon the linking up of these tentacular towns and the reduction of their populations to uniformity, so that they will in blind obedience acquiesce in the operations of those who, by intrigue, have gained control of the machinery of communication. A man lunching in the Midland Hotel, Manchester, or the Carlton at Johannesburg, can perceive no essential difference in his surroundings, and it makes no difference to him whether he buys furniture from Maple's in Tottenham Court Road or Maple's in Buenos Aires. Poor man or rich, white, yellow, brown or black, whatever energy he puts forth contributes to the growth of the tentacular towns and accelerates the means of communication between them. So far as the exchange of commodities is concerned internationalisation is complete, and it is characterless because it has been hastily accomplished at the cost of devitalising the proletariat. The invading Germans destroyed the Cloth Hall at Ypres, but they left intact the tentacular town of Lille.

There will be, there almost is, a world-chain of such towns, providing a method so vastly more expeditious of exchanging commodities and transferring work from one community to another that all others are demoded. What, then, was it that necessitated the sacrifice of so many millions of lives and the collapse of the greater part of Europe into famine and anarchy? Partly the discomfort of being deprived of old traditions, partly inability to shake off the remnants of patriarchal conceptions, but chiefly the mental confusion which imagined democracy to be a matter of the ballot, a purely political thing which admitted some element of reason into human affairs, but denied the operation of the conscience. The pressure of the industrial upon the political centres of the world had become intolerable, and the close bureaucratic power of London, Paris and Berlin had to be broken. To save themselves they opened the sluice-gates and let the industrial forces of Europe spend them-selves in the wasteful effort of the war. Ber-lin, with its alcove St. Petersburg, has been swept away, but London and Paris, linked now with New York, remain. The industrial centres will once more gather up their forces, only to have them checked and impeded by the new political group, which refuses to admit that democracy is more than a political system. To the pressure of steam power has been added that of electricity and oil, but the political group, as insensible to industrial pressure as to any kind of spiritual vision, takes the victory over Berlin as evidence of the rightness of its attitude, and refuses to amend or jettison a single one of its ideas. But the collapse of Berlin and St. Petersburg is not the victory of Paris, London and New York, it is the victory of industrialism fighting for democracy, and the first to reap its fruits will be the Germans and the Russians, who will become reconciled to the spirit of the East, while the Allied Nations will be still sullenly insurgent against political tyranny, wasting their efforts in the maintenance of armaments to defend ideas which have lost their validity. The removal of Berlin by itself means an immense saving of money to the German people and a vast gain in responsibility for their industrial centres, already far in advance of the British in self-government. If the world-community is to take shape in a series of tentacular towns linked together with railways, roads and air-routes, its health must depend upon the ease with which those towns can co-operate and respond to each others' needs. Administrative areas then will be determined by geography and not by race, by railways and ports and not by strategic considerations. Military ideas are maintained in London, Paris and New York (and possibly in Tokyo) entirely to serve the vested interests that have grown up round them, but the great industrial centres are of far more importance to society than the capitals, and these military ideas have lost their roots. The ideas that shall replace them have hardly begun to show above the surface, and the unhappy masses of humanity huddled together in the towns can only move by instinct, which at present bids them to go on working if only to avoid thinking. How, lacking ideas, can they think? They can only keep the machines running and trust to collective impulse to keep them from an insane revolt and a ruinous breach in the circulation of work upon which their lives depend. They know the vastness of the, power they have created, and they know the feebleness of the hands in which it rests. They know, too, that they must take the control into their own hands. But to do that they must have a common centre, a common law which all will obey, and a responsible executive. Rights and privileges from top to bottom of society must conform to du-ties, but to achieve all the nice adjustments necessary there must be rest from the daily drudgery of tending the machine, and there must be relief from the pressure of the tentacular towns, which must be rebuilt to let in air, the healing and creative work of Nature, beauty, form and proportion. The linking together of the towns gives the power and the wealth to remedy their disastrous influence, but it is taken and frittered away by the political centres maintaining useless and injurious forms of government, though the proletariat of the world knows in its heart that there are no forms of government, that there is only Government, and that Government is democracy, which alone admits of the application of the aristocratic principle, the rule of the best; for only democracy can liberate conscience, the power to choose between good and evil, and of the good to choose the best. Government in the past has depended upon the obliteration of conscience, either through open slavery, or by the threat of poverty, or in the rudimentary stage of industrialism by State education, which substitutes rough-and-ready instruction in certain ideas and conduct for the delicate process of nurturing the minds of children through the difficult years of the ripening of conscience. The rudimentary stages of industrialism are long past. The system can now be assimilated by a community without paying the heavy price that the Europeans have paid for it. The economic restoration of the devastated countries is a comparatively simple mat-ter. The terrible problem is how to repair the poverty of spirit of the leaders in industrialism. Must they, too, be brought to ruin before they can understand? Inertia, stagnation, indifference, are deadlier than famine and pestilence. When neither joy nor suffering can stir the hearts of the people the spirit cannot move among them, and their days are separate one from another, their lives are isolated and nothing can unite them. They are impervious to the achievement of the past and can hand on nothing to the future. They remain dull, stationary, parasitic upon humanity, which at last discards them and their works.

Democracy is government by faith, and for lack of faith it is not attempted, though the state of the world, even the physical discomfort of the people, cry out that it should be admitted. Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk, Eisner at Berne, Wilson in Paris, have all laid it down as the inevitable form of society to which the nations must submit; but unhappily France, England and America, all communities suffering under the tyranny of economic power, believe themselves to be democratic, and, indignant that other communities do not see eye to eye with them, denounce them as anarchic, refuse to treat with them, starve them, deprive them of trade and the opportunity of trading. It is precisely their use of economic power that proves them undemocratic, but to this they are blind. Their spokesmen are eloquent in praise of democracy, but qualify it with nationalism. But qualified democracy is nothing. As well speak of qualified poetry. The spirit of democracy, like that of poetry, can be coloured but not confined by nationality.

The politicians of the victorious Allies are like a man standing on his hose-pipe and cursing everybody in his garden because no water is forthcoming. It is his own foot that wants removing.

Unfortunately, however, the greater the urgency of the need for admitting that a change has come about, the stiffer the obstinacy with which it is refused. The fight of the manufacturers against the landed aristocracy is a small thing compared with that of the proletariat against the manufacturers clinging to the antiquated methods of government of the aristocracy. Such methods are lavish and recklessly expensive, and the proletariat very properly wants to know why the laws of economy should not apply to them, since their immunity makes those laws too stringent in their application to domestic life. The manufacturers also wanted to know this while they were fighting, but directly the fight was over they adopted for their business corporations the immorality which had been the privilege of the powerful political combinations which con-ducted, or misconducted, the affairs of humanity. Uncontrolled power is corrosive, and it has been proved by bitter experience that political control by means of the vote does not provide a sufficient check, and indeed has only aggravated power by making it possible for rulers to throw responsibility on to the ruled. Acting only through political machinery, public opinion cannot be brought into operation swiftly enough, because without connecting machinery the minds of the people cannot link political cause with industrial and domestic effect. They realise the connection in time, but always too late. Parliamentary institutions could exercise some control over the economic power of a landed aristocracy, but with-out democratic control in industry they are impotent in the face of that of manufacturers and undertakers, who, operating internationally, can present a national Parliament with an accomplished fact and leave it to placate its electors as best it can. An international Parliament is now a necessity, but by itself can only aggravate the evils of the capitalistic system. It can only function properly if it is made democratic by devolution and the fusion of political and industrial institutions. Other-wise the increasing pressure of industrialism, acting as a blind and undirected force, will crash its way through to achieve in the end hideously and destructively what might be accomplished patiently with foresight and enthusiasm the reconstruction of society to conform outwardly to what in essence it is: Democracy.

There is much of the past that it is desirable to preserve the slowly developed instinctive observance of order, the social sense, care for good manners, traditions of scholarship and urbanity. Refusal to yield to the pressure of industrialism and the crying needs of the proletariat can only mean the destruction of the good with the bad and the reduction of society to the bare machinery of existence, a means of providing food, clothes and shelter. But humanity is so constituted that without the quality of ecstasy it cannot even fulfil efficiently its rudimentary functions. Ecstasy is the moving force of evolution, the breaking of the chrysalis into the butterfly. Without it life is aimless and intolerably hideous. In the dead-lock that has arisen between political and industrial institutions human beings everywhere are being starved of ecstasy. The dragging misery of life creates in every individual a hard shell that makes him impervious to every other. Ecstasy lives in the soul of humanity, but not in the single separate soul of the individual to whom it is communicated through the love of his fellows. It is the creeping tragedy of modern life that the powers of love in men and women are denied their sustenance from the soul of humanity, because they are cramped and stifled in communities engaged in a deadly and futile rivalry that ends in mutual destruction, when they should be joined together in the sole aim of achieving mutual elevation.

Change is so slow as to be hardly perceptible, but there are times when its accumulated effect has to be admitted and dealt with consciously. Slow though change may be, it is swifter than the minds of men who invent tools, engines and social machinery to over-take it and never quite succeed. Increasing consciousness of change has produced a frenzy of invention, and still men lag behind because they have not yet learned that the world they live in is a spiritual structure, a soul in which an infinite number of souls are built together, that life and death are but architectonic principles, and that the great building of the soul is contained in and inspired with infinite love.

In this great building, blind to its majestic beauty, they huddle into corners, creep away from the light, defile and abuse themselves and each other, and every now and then bring themselves to such a pitch of misery that they must move, must come into the light, must see the light in each other's eyes, and thereby something of the beauty amid which they are privileged to dwell. They perceive form and colour, and they desire them above all things for the ecstasy they bring, and in that ecstasy a new age is born. The remnants of the old are cast away, and for a space they can live freely in accordance with perceived design : the various elements of their existence fall into their places and are locked together to give them the energy with which to live, and to explore the soul of humanity from which comes wealth indivisible and inexhaustible,

Love in this differs from gold and clay
That to divide is not to take away.

The great effort of the early years of the nineteenth century was not in vain, though for so long it has seemed to be thwarted into sterility. The practical sense of humanity, knowing what rare treasure was unearthed, set about to reorganise society, that this treasure might admit ecstasy to the life of every day when at last drudgery could be kindled into work.

For that it was necessary to break down barriers, the beaver-dams that men had built against the rich waters of the creative will; it was necessary to destroy old faiths, old systems, immemorial habits. Men became a race of rodents, gnawing away until the house they dwelt in came tumbling about their ears. It was necessary for them to be banded together in a stern monotony of toil; but it is necessary no longer, because the destructive labours to which they were committed are at an end, ceased indeed a generation ago. Destruction is best wrought in separation: for it is grim work, only to be wrought with a fixed will, holding in abeyance the fluid and infinitely supple creative will of humanity. For men living as they should there should never be any necessity for a will so fixed. It is forced on them by the indolence of the generations, for when the creative will is admitted to human activity it brings destruction with its creation exactly as it does in Nature. In the long process of sophistication men lose the wisdom that they share with birds and beasts and trees.

They cannot rest content with unconscious wisdom, for it brings no sufficient ecstasy. Men must be conscious.

At long last and after generations of tragedy they have achieved that. The revelation of its possibility passes from soul to soul, East and West, and to make ready for it the great common life of democracy is prepared. Society is explored, understood, charted exactly as the earth has been : its barriers and checks and injurious controls are removed, and conscious men everywhere begin to demand the right to exercise their conscience in everything they do, in their public and in their private lives, that the ecstasy without which life is a bitter confinement of the spirit may freely move from soul to soul, and from heart to heart.

No power, no interest, can resist this growing impulse which will have society reconstituted in accordance with its structure and with universal law. The petty laws of expediency of the various communities that have been and are so reluctant to relinquish their selfishness will break before it like ice in the spring thaw; for this impulse has given men a new knowledge. The scientific discovery of fact is not enough for them. They know now that no fact is discovered until it shines as a symbol, and except with shining symbols they will not build. It is for this that the grey-faced pro letariat is waiting. Unscrupulous men may act on dull and unrelated facts to their apparent profit and real hurt, but men in the mass can only move, can only act under inspiration. They have now the impulse towards democracy, but no vision of it, because democracy can only be won by men when Man to them becomes a symbol of the God who lives in every moment of life. Man for men is the key symbol, the solvent of the facts that have been unearthed by science. With the use of that symbol facts can be related, and their validity can be tested. Those that shine as symbols can be used for action, while those that remain dead and dull can be rejected as half-truths or mistaken conclusions. Man, with all his varied powers, his desires, passions and the three logics of his being, spirit, mind and heart, is a democracy governed by the aristocratic principle, his conscience, which selects his best and noblest, and keys his forces and capacities up to that, and in the fullness of time Man cannot but make Society in his own image.