William Gayley Simpson on the Fallacy and Failure of Popular Government
[Excerpt from Ch. X of, Which Way Western Man? (1078)]
Historically speaking, I believe there was no nation that could ever subsist on Democracy. This lesson will have to be learned under penalties. England will either have to learn it, or England will cease to exist among nations.
– Thomas Carlyle
There were three principles promulgated by the Republicans [the French revolutionists] which to him were profound absurdities. The first was the doctrine of equality; not simply of quality in the eye of the law (that he accepted), but of absolute equality.
The second revolutionary principle was the doctrine of government by the people. He believed in no such governmental power. Even when you kill the king, he says, you do not know how to rule in his place…. He pointed to the fate of France as a lesson both to governors and the governed, but more even for the latter than the former. The rulers were destroyed, but who was there to protect the Many against the Many? The Mob became the tyrant… What wonder then if he felt repulsion to all the Apostles of Freedom, when on close scrutiny he found they all sought nothing but license? …
The third revolutionary principle was, that political freedom is necessary to man … through life we find him insisting on the fact that no man can be free; the only freedom necessary is that which enables each to go about his business in security, to rear house and children, to move unconstrained in his small circle.
– G. H. Lewes—The Life and Works of Goethe
In this chapter and the next I want to make it clear what I understand by democracy, on the one hand, and by aristocracy, on the other, and what are the considerations that slowly undermined and finally overthrew my belief in the former, and massed themselves in my mind in support of the latter. The lapse of another twenty-odd years since I first declared myself on this issue, together with the opportunities they brought me for further observation, study and reflection, has only clarified and more deeply entrenched my conviction that no people can make a great record except as it is guided by the aristocratic principle.
Many men would be inclined to ask, Why bother to write on this subject? And the question has considerable point if one believes not only that the issue is already decided against me, but that we are traveling away from everything aristocratic just as fast as the ever-quickening tempo of “modern progress” can carry us. And indeed I am very much of that mind myself. Populace is unquestionably in the saddle. The article by Mr. B.F. Wilcox, “All Men Are Created Equal,” in The Friend’s Intelligencer of November 29th, 1941, only states, with the usual assortment of truths, half-truths, and ignorant lies, what is the almost universal persuasion not merely of the masses on the street, but as well of politicians and statesmen, of journalists, editors, playwrights and radio commentators, and even of preachers, poets and professors. All men are equal. And the inevitable fruit of this doctrine is that mass-man takes over.
Furthermore, even our children will not live to see a world in which men generally will again look for guidance to any aristocratic principles. Our scientists and engineers go on talking about the “bigger and better” things of all sorts with which their technics and industrialism are soon to favor us. But, in my judgment, little of their dreams will come to pass. Even if technics did fulfill its promise, what would it signify but the ascendancy of mechanism over man, bigger and better machines but ever smaller and meaner men, ever less capacity for that aspiration and stern self-discipline that form the root of the aristocratic—in short, the smothering of nobility under a rank growth of rabble values?
But for reasons that I shall undertake to set forth in a future chapter, I believe our technics is not going to fulfill itself. It is not, as everybody seems to take for granted, to go on and on to its ever greater marvels. The stark fact is that even we as a people, not to speak of our technics, are already very near the end of our run—not merely the United States but the whole White man’s world, and the White man himself. The two world wars were a “roaring plunge into barbarism.” We long ago moved into an era of mass-deception, wholesale betrayal, and naked brute force, in which aristocratic values will be regarded increasingly as a luxury few can afford. We shall soon be locked in a struggle for sheer survival, and shall hardly escape catastrophe. Perhaps Russia will continue to avoid direct open confrontation with us, but if so we shall only the more certainly be maneuvered into yet a third world war, in which the Communist-instigated and Communist-led colored hordes of virtually the entire Earth will press upon us from every side, and at the same time our defense will be sabotaged and paralyzed by Communist traitors planted at key points within our walls. Sooner or later, in one way or another, our gates will be forced and our city put to the torch and sword. Our civilization will go up in flames, and the proud White man who created it, who for long thought himself (and virtually was) invincible, will have to bend his neck to a yoke in order to live. Spengler foresaw with the eye of clairvoyance when he predicted starkly that our “machine-technics will end … and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten—our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon.”
And lest anyone be minded to answer lightly that, if it came to the worst and were an issue of life or death, we could surely save ourselves by resort to the atom bomb, let me declare my conviction that the use of the atom bomb has always been under pretty firm control, and that those who control it can be depended upon to see that it is not used to destroy the world that they are determined to rule, and to enjoy the benefits of ruling by exploiting. For precisely this reason, I did not long share the general alarm over the prospects of a nuclear holocaust. I soon saw, rather, that fear of the bomb was being deliberately whipped up, to the point of hysteria, in order to stampede the sheep into the corral of world government. And today it is sheer fantasy to suppose that the bomb will ever be used to save us, the White peoples, especially those of Europe and the U.S., who together form the last serious obstacle to the manipulators’ advance to their goal, and who were long ago marked for destruction.
We are now about to pass into eclipse. The blackest hour in our history is almost upon us. But even in the hours of my darkest brooding over the onrushing tragedy I am sustained by a hope—perhaps even a faith—that no possible conquest of the White peoples will ever permanently break their strength. Into their humiliation and their agony they will carry their most ancient traditions, the glory of their past, and their memories of the days when their whole world was shaped by their deep instinctive belief in the superior man, and their destinies guided by the noblest and strongest among them. In time, thus, they will awake to a realization of the mistakes that brought them low, and at last see clearly that one of the most ruinous of these was the doctrine of human equality, and the practice of popular government that grew out of it. And as their vision clears and their faith returns, they will spit their contempt and disgust upon the doctrine of equality, and in their new-found strength rise up to grapple with their conqueror, and overthrow him. And then, as they once again lift their eyes to the heights, new heights, higher than they ever looked to before, and begin to cast about them to set their course, they will vow ever to search out the best men among them to be their leaders.
It is out of some such hope and faith as this that I have set myself to write this chapter and the next. But one may well doubt whether there is anything I can add concerning the respective merits of democracy and aristocracy that has not already been said by Aristotle, Plato, and Confucius—by Lecky, Arnold, Stephen, Maine, Carlyle, Ruskin, Burke, and Nietzsche; by Mairet, Cram, Irving Babbitt, Ortega y Gasset, and—not least—by Ludovici. Indeed, I shall hardly attempt to add anything new. It will be enough for me if I can hold up their arms in the struggle for a nobler man, if I can faithfully pass on the lighted torch that I have received at their hands. Aristotle remarked in the third century B.C. that “almost all things have already been found out.” But he added that “some have been neglected, and others which have been known have not been put in practice.” And verily it will suffice me if I, a man facing modern conditions, until near the middle of his life steeped in the democratic tradition and still as before devoted to the truest good of his fellows, may but bring again to light some of those ancient truths. They are truths that we democratic moderns, with our conceit of our superiority to all bygone ages, have looked down upon because they belonged to the past, and have neglected until we have lost memory of their existence and have almost lost power to comprehend and to apply them. We have slighted and ignored those truths to our great loss and to our exceeding bitter woe. Verily, it will suffice me well if I can but help to light again in the lighthouses of my kind the flame of that ancient wisdom, fueled from the deepest and oldest human experience, on which the greatest peoples in all parts of the world have ever placed their supreme reliance, to guide them safely past the rocks and shoals of life and bring them into port.
From this, let it be understood from the outset that I do not propose to take my readers on any spin through romantic heavens on the wings of high-flown theory. I have less and less respect for what can be woven only on the warp of idealism with the shuttle of speculation. All our efforts need to be guided by the lessons of actual human experience, the record of which we find in history. I have thus learned that any new institution, if it is to accomplish its end, must be mostly old. I cannot escape the conclusion that if any institution works well, it is because it was founded on sound principles and serves its purpose. Thousands of years ago, Confucius noted that “if those in authority have not the confidence of the people, government of the people is impossible.” And all history proves that no people will bear indefinitely a yoke that severely galls them. From which it would seem fair to conclude that the mere longevity of any society, the mere fact that it lasted a long time, is evidence that on the whole it met satisfactorily the basic needs of the people who lived in it. A necessary preliminary, therefore, for any approach to a just evaluation of the comparative merits and defects of democracy and aristocracy is a long perspective of historical knowledge. Those especially who have merely inherited their political philosophy as most people inherit their religious bias, have need to acquaint themselves not only with the thought of its outstanding critics, but with those arrangements by which the longest-lasting and culturally most significant societies have undertaken, in the period of their greatest health and creativeness, to meet those fundamental needs of men that are as old as time and as unalterable as the Earth we live on. For while it is true that history never repeats itself, “it is about equally true,” as Irving Babbitt reminds us, “that history is always repeating itself.” And from a study of history, we may discover that among the great peoples certain fundamental patterns of social organization consistently reappear. The reason for this becomes apparent as close and honest observation of ourselves and others, and a searching study of history and of psychology, lead us to a knowledge of human nature. It is on this, ultimately—on the texture, reaches, and limits of human nature—that I would found my entire position.
This is not, I say again, to be any gush of pretty theory. Least of all is it to be another “blueprint of an ideal society,” such as many people like to play with. I see too clearly that no sound society comes into existence that way. It is not at all like a prefabricated house, which is made in a factory and put together by mechanics where and when you will. Rather, it grows out of the blood and nature of a particular people, rooted in a particular piece of ground, and perhaps reflecting the very climate that prevails there. To a degree, every society is unique. To a given people at a given time there is probably only one kind possible. Professor Edward A. Freeman said well that “neither the Greeks in any other land nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were.” Neither race alone, nor its setting alone, can account for the outcome, but the two together in their interactions. And yet, running through the life of all the peoples who have left a great mark behind them, one finds certain perduring all-determining principles, which formed the scaffolding from which they worked to complete their tower, and without which no people can be expected to reach a like height of greatness. In this chapter, I wish to keep these principles, founded on human nature and confirmed in historical record, clearly before us.
Before any judgment can be rendered between the respective claims of democracy and aristocracy, it is necessary to settle in our minds what is the primary object of social organization, what are the primary responsibilities that any government must undertake to meet.
The primary end for which any people creates a government and social forms is to meet the needs of its life. It wills to preserve itself, and, like every healthy organism, to develop, to grow, and to expand. These are necessities inseparable from any living thing. But a people’s will is not toward the preservation and increase of any abstract “existence,” but rather of themselves, of their own kind, of the peculiar character and values by which they are distinguished from other peoples, and apart from which they could not be aware of themselves as an entity or come into existence as a people. It is a will not only to live and to live more fully and largely, but to live in a particular way, their own way, the way that through long ages has proven itself the means best suited to their nature for attaining their ends. Their whole effort will be shot through with a determination to embody and to establish these characteristic ways of facing the universe, of maintaining and advancing themselves against their enemies, in social forms that will not only last long but be satisfying to their taste and instinct. Mere stability is often said to be the primary object of any people’s social organization. But it seems to me this can never be enough. A healthy people wills not only to last long, but to be itself a long time. In Ludovici’s phrase, it wills to preserve its identity.
It is as a result of this attitude that we witness the well-attested and intense conservatism of the great majority of men. Every healthy people has hated, and feared, and resisted the constant readjustment necessitated by continual change. When change goes beyond a certain point it causes what has been well called “cultural shock.” Even though it be sanctified as “progress,” a people can no more thrive under it than can a tree that is planted one place today only to find itself dug up and planted somewhere else tomorrow. And since every people’s distinctive character is rooted in its hereditary factors (that is, as we say, in its blood) as well as in its tradition, its resistance to change will inevitably erect barriers against the indiscriminate mixture of its blood with that of aliens. Yet will it encourage such controlled and well-considered change as may be required for the increase of its strength, provided always such change be kept within the limits set by its need to preserve its identity. For a people’s sense of identity, the distinguishing something by which it knows itself as an entity apart from other peoples, is the secret inner spring of its existence, which at once gives that people its characteristic shape, direction, and drive. Let it lose this, and, everything else regardless, it must fall to pieces. No people is left any choice about it. Either it must preserve its distinctive character, or it must cease to be a people.
From this, it should be clear that the primary object to be sought by every healthy society and to be conserved by every sound and responsible government is something very different from the materialistic absorption in raising the standard of living of the masses. To be sure, the welfare of the people is of the utmost vital importance and is sought inevitably, even though incidentally, in every society in a state of health, in its pursuit of the primary end of its existence. But this primary end is, ultimately, a spiritual thing. For the very ability to appreciate it and to serve it depends upon capacity to recognize the spiritual quality inherent in character, to choose it in preference to lower values, and to love it enough to be willing to sacrifice oneself for it.
It would seem that thus far we ought all to be in agreement. But it may be that some of my readers will reject my statement of the end for which any significant society must exist. If so, the difference between us might be traceable to our different reading of history, a difference that it might be mutually helpful to explore; but I suspect that it would spring rather from a difference of taste. And here is a gulf that cannot be bridged. He who can face either his own life or that of his kind without an ineluctable concern for quality, without an insatiable desire and a relentless demand that it ever go upward, by that one fact immediately places himself, to my way of thinking, in the class of “mass-man,” of “mob,” of those whose every word and very look and bearing reveal that they lust only after comfort and security and pleasure, and who resent and ever ask to be excused from any demand upon them for self-discipline or for austerity of living. With such people there is no use in our attempting to make common cause. When one calls white what another calls black, it is time to part company.
But with those who find congenial my statement of the proper aims with which any healthy society must organize its life, I am now ready to take up the fundamental question underlying both this chapter and the next. That is: To whom should we with most confidence entrust the direction of affairs in society, and how should we go about finding such men and placing them at the helm? Democracy, under which control passes into the hands of common men, most men, and ultimately of “mass-man,” is one answer. Aristocracy, with or without monarchy, which aims to entrust control and direction to men of superior character and ability, is another. Let us proceed first to examine the claims of the former.
“Democracy” is a term commonly used very loosely. Properly, it designates a particular form of government. In terms of Aristotle’s famous threefold classification, it is a government of the state not by the One, nor by the Few, but by the Many—that is, as usually conceived, by the majority of the entire people. It has been called “inverted Monarchy,” which suggests a pyramid stood on its apex—with a rather precarious balance, one would suspect. More loosely, the term may even refer to a way of thinking or feeling favorable to the rule or the welfare of the common people, the “demos,” the lower part of the nation as a whole. It has no necessary connection with representation, which is a modern device born of the attempt to extend democratic practice to states too large to admit of personal participation in government. But it assumes active interest, initiative, and responsibility on the part of the ordinary man.
The movement of the people to get the government into their own hands seems always to be connected with, and to follow upon the heels of, the failure of some aristocratic form of government to fulfill the function that was its traditional duty to fulfill and long had fulfilled. Until my next chapter I put off the question which form of aristocratic government is best calculated to care for the common people, and indeed to ensure the well-being of the entire nation. But let it be said immediately, that once any aristocracy, whether nobility or monarchy, has ceased to father the people and to be their protector, it has failed in one of its original, primary, and inalienable responsibilities, and has ceased to justify its existence.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of the democratic movement in England. The people lost faith in the lords as their protectors only when the lords began to identify themselves with the rising capitalist exploiters, and joined with them in draining the life out of the people. The main drive behind the people’s move for political power lay in their sheer and desperate misery. Since it seemed that the lords would not provide for their welfare, they must needs undertake to provide for it themselves. It may be questioned whether their effort was according to wisdom, but it was certainly understandable and justifiable. And in view of our nearness to the undeniable and infamous failure of this aristocracy, from which most of us have formed all the impression of aristocracy that we have, it is easy to understand also the prevalence of the opinion that “though individuals may refrain from exploiting a privilege for their own advantage … no class ever does so for long.” Yet history seems to challenge this pronouncement. It is certain that some aristocracies have lasted for very long periods—that of Venice, for instance, nearly a thousand years; and that of Egypt perhaps three thousand. A Communist, with his one-track mind and narrow prepossessions, may be ready to explain all such as systems of exploitation maintained by the sword. But such a doctrine, however useful to revolutionary propaganda, is not supported either by the experience or the good sense of mankind. The truth is, to quote Ortega y Gasset, that “there is no ruling with janissaries. As Talleyrand said to Napoleon: ‘You can do everything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them.’ And to rule is not the gesture of snatching at power, but the tranquil exercise of it. In a word, to rule is to sit down, be it on the throne, the curule chair, the front bench, or the bishop’s seat. The State, in fine, is the state of opinion, a position of equilibrium.” And thus we “arrive at a formula which is the well-known, venerable, forthright commonplace: there can be no rule in opposition to public opinion.” For in the long run, regardless of the form government takes, it is the people who decide.
If an aristocracy has lasted long, therefore, it is the natural and just inference that it enjoyed the confidence and loyalty of the people. It fulfilled a necessary and vital function in a way so satisfactory as to make the people secure and contented. On the other hand, history makes it no less evident that aristocracies have failed and given place to democracies. But does this, really, prove anything more than that aristocracies are like most everything else in that, with the lapse of time, they tend to wear out, or because of fatal mistakes finally break down? It surely does not prove aristocracies essentially unsound either in theory or in practice. On the contrary, history as I read it, supports my conviction that aristocracy is the form a great people’s life tends to take in its period of health, that it is under this form its greatness is achieved and longest maintained, that democracy appears only when its vitality has begun to break, and that the very advent of democracy therefore is a symptom of its sickness and a portent of its approaching dissolution.
That the people should attempt to take power into their own hands and themselves make provision for their own welfare, when their right and proper help has failed them and no other help is to hand, is, I repeat, understandable enough and even justifiable enough. But I am convinced that the mass of the people, being what they are, and for the most part can only remain, are incompetent even to make provision for their own welfare according to wisdom. Moreover, in their effort to center the entire organization of society around this end, they are likely to sacrifice the ultimate worth of their life as a people and even to open the gates to catastrophe. It may seem very clever of Bernard Shaw to say, “The great purpose of democracy is to prevent your being governed better than you want to be governed.” But a little thought shows this to be nothing but glib and dangerous nonsense. In reality, no people can be governed too well. They can be governed too much, but never too wisely. They can never afford to dispense with the very best government that they can get. Upon good government depends not only the health and happiness of the people, but also their historical significance. For lack of it, they may even be brought to extinction. If by some prescience it could be certainly known that only by the most gifted government could the suffering and humiliation of a national disaster be averted, then even the commonest of the common people would have the wit to choose to be ruled by those deemed most competent and most to be relied upon to ensure such government. And doubtless, it has been an instinct of this very sort, and nothing less, that has supported every true aristocracy that has ever existed. The people have believed that under their aristocracy they were better provided for than they could ever provide for themselves. Nevertheless, the feeling that prevails today, be it sound or false, is that the vital and necessary ends for which social organization exists can be served best by the people themselves.
In the modern situation, there is one outstanding reason for this in addition to the breakdown of all healthy aristocracy. This is the fact, stressed by the eminent economist Werner Sombart, that after a very slow growth over a period of twelve hundred years, the population of Europe in the one century between 1800 and 1914, leaped from 180 to 460 millions! The figures given by Professor S. J. Holmes of the University of California, are in essential agreement, and add that in somewhat less than this time the population of the United States increased from 6 million to 77 million, twelve-and-a-half fold. The stage of civilization was thus filled and overfilled with a mass of newcomers who arrived with such suddenness that the cultural institutions of society were unable to assimilate them, and in such millions that their very numbers created a power pressure that has proved irresistible. They swarm everywhere and occupy places formerly belonging only to the elite (of one sort or another), not because of any superiority of character or intelligence, or even of mere training, but solely because of sheer mass weight. It has been what Rathenau called the “vertical invasion of the barbarians.” Probably, it was a phenomenon unprecedented in history.
However, account for the modern democratic movement as we may, we must reckon with the fact. And we have now reached the point in this chapter when we must examine its claims. Let us begin by looking at democracy’s record. The examples most commonly and confidently adduced are those of ancient Greece, and modern England, France, and the United States.
Yet the record need not detain us very long. In the case of Greece, it may be questioned whether the government of Athens, even in the days of Pericles, can justly be called a democracy at all. To be sure, enthusiasts make large and not unimpressive claims. T. R. Glover, for instance, in his Democracy In The Ancient World, says:
“It was a government of citizens met in an assembly, where, without Presidents, ministers, ambassadors or representatives, they themselves governed. They created a beautiful city and a law-abiding people; they united the Greek world or a large part of it; they defeated the Persian Empire in all its greatness and drove the Persian from the sea. They made an atmosphere where genius could grow, where it could be as happy as genius ever can, and where it flowered and bore the strange fruit that has enriched the world forever.”
Elsewhere, he points out that the citizenry who did all this were a widely varied lot, of all kinds and grades; and yet that they carried democratic practice so far as to discard election in favor of choice by lot, and threw open the highest public office to all citizens alike excepting only quite unpropertied laborers; and the offices of lawmaker and judge, even to these.
To any sage statesman experienced in the ways of the multitude, such an achievement, as is here claimed for democracy, seems to border on the miraculous. But before we can render judgment we must look at the other side of the picture. All historians of the period, and even special pleaders like Glover and Agard, have to recognize that the entire democratic superstructure was built upon a huge substratum of slavery; “Perhaps one-tenth of the total population had political rights,” says Agard. And Glotz, an authority on the economic life of the period, concludes, “Greek democracy cannot dispense with slaves, and is never anything but a wider aristocracy.” (This, though said justly enough as regards Athens and its slavery, reveals what, to my mind, is a gross misconception of aristocracy.) Moreover, the wealth to provide its citizens with leisure and to adorn its Acropolis with monuments of art, was largely drawn, after a method so contrary to democratic theory but so typical of democratic record, from the imperialism it established over the subject cities of the Aegean islands and the nearby Asiatic mainland. Yet for all this, the resulting democracy was so unstable, marked by such excesses and errors of judgment, that it was saved for a while from the disintegration and disaster that early overtook it, only by the fact that for over a generation it was guided by the statesman Pericles, who did not come from the common people but from an old family of the Athenian nobility. This was clear even to Thucydides, a contemporary, who remarked that “although in name a democracy” Athens “was virtually a government by its greatest citizen.” Even with the help of Pericles’ genius, its life was very brief—well under one hundred years. Its final ignominious failure was the precursor of the like failure of every similar attempt in the ancient world. The age closed with democracy completely discredited.
Such was the status of democracy in the eyes of thoughtful men on the eve of the French Revolution. For at least seventeen centuries there had been an all but universal movement toward kingship. Says Henry Sumner Maine, whose title to speak with authority could hardly be surpassed,
“… the opinion that Democracy was irresistible and inevitable, and probably perpetual, would … have appeared (in the late eighteenth century) a wild paradox. There had been more than 2,000 years of tolerably well-ascertained political history, and at its outset, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, were all plainly discernible. The result of a long experience was, that some Monarchies and some Aristocracies had shown themselves extremely tenacious of life … But the democracies which had risen and perished, or had fallen into extreme insignificance, seemed to show that this form of government was of rare occurrence in political history, and was characterized by an extreme fragility… Whenever government of the Many has been tried, it has ultimately produced monstrous and morbid forms of government by the One, or of government by the Few.”
And even of the period that has followed the French Revolution, while he is not a little impressed by the United States as the single exception to an almost unbroken record of democratic failure, he says that since the days when the Roman Empire began to break down, “there has never been such insecurity of government as the world has seen since rulers became delegates of the community.”
There is one feature of Democracy’s record that, in view of the modern situation, calls for more attention. It is commonly assumed that democracy is opposed to dictatorship. But nothing is farther from the facts. The history of democracy makes it unmistakable that some form of one-man tyranny is the end to which popular government has usually led. Athenian democracy is followed by Alexander; the French Republic, by Napoleon. As Christopher Dawson remarked, “The truth is, unpalatable though it may be to modern ‘progressive’ thought, that democracy and dictatorship are not opposites or mortal enemies, but twin children of the great Revolution.” Democracy’s very ineptitude, its very failure to solve the host of problems that always pile up under its uncertain and wobbly hand, finally brings a nation, as our own U.S. in this 1973, to the point where it is threatened with a breakdown of all law and order and seems to stand on the very verge of dissolution. In such a fearsome extremity, a man on horseback is seen by the mass of the people, and welcomed, as the only means left of saving the country from disaster. Precisely this explains the rise of Hitler. I do not see how anyone can read such a book as Arthur Bryant’s Unfinished Victory, with its sympathetic apprehension of the German people’s really desperate plight, and not come to recognize that some strong man or other, such as Adolf Hitler, was the only salvation left to her. One may not like totalitarianism—I myself hate it, but if one can put oneself in another’s place and imagine what it means to have to find some way to keep afloat or die, then one is forced to face the stark fact that when it really is a matter of life or death, be it for a man or for a nation, almost any means will be seized upon if it promises life. Nevertheless, this has little to do with aristocracy as I conceive it. To become an acceptable dictator a man must bear upon him too many of the marks of populace. But I will allow that, after democracy, the emergence of a dictator may, in the end, prove to have been at least a step toward conditions in which the seeds of a genuine aristocracy could germinate and grow.
In this last, however, we have digressed a bit from the examination of democracy’s record, to which we had addressed ourselves. This we must now continue.
There are two items in the record that might give the critic pause. One of these is the success of the United States. The other is French Revolutionary theory, which for the first time undertook to place its claims above the reach of any record and to found them on natural, inborn, abstract, and imprescriptible right. Each of these demands some further attention from us. First, let us examine the reputed success of our democracy. What substance is there in it? And how is it to be accounted for?
First of all, the government of the United States has lasted for nearly two hundred years. To be sure, this is not very long as compared with the length of life of many aristocracies and monarchies. And an experiment in government, especially one that is a departure from best-established precedent, can hardly be pronounced a success until it has, at the least, held together for several centuries. Despite our growth, therefore, and our wealth, our preeminence in industrialism and our hegemony (of a sort) in world affairs, I must hold that the country is still young and that no final judgment can yet be rendered. Nevertheless, let it be admitted, two hundred years is a sizable block of time. No other democratic government, certainly none confronting the complexity of problems arising in a modern country of great size, can equal it.
How are we to account for this unprecedented success of a popular government? First of all, by pointing out that it never has been truly popular. An Athenian citizen of the days of Pericles would have refused to allow that it was a democracy, since the ordinary American citizen does not directly participate in government at all. Indeed, it is a matter of common knowledge among historians that the founders of this country wished to prevent the people from having much to say in the direction of affairs. They wished the government to have a stability greater than they believed possible if it were too closely dependent on anything so uninformed and so excitable and fickle as public opinion. They therefore created a strong executive, gave him the power to be a real ruler, and fixed his term of office long enough to make him independent of the changing moods of the popular mind. Stability was sought, likewise, in the age of senators, in their length of office, and in the power entrusted to them. Also, the whole electoral system made the ordinary citizen at least twice-removed from any actual participation in the government. He was given little to do but say Yes or No to each of several men put up for office by political machines.
And for final and completely conclusive evidence of “how far remote from anything like democracy our political system is,” to quote Mr. Albert J. Nock, “one need only cite the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established judicial control over legislation. It vested the supreme political authority in a small oligarchy [the U.S. Supreme Court. W.G.S.]. The members of this oligarchy are not elected; they are appointed; the people have no semblance of choice in the matter. They are, moreover, appointed for life, and are wholly irresponsible; their acts cannot be brought under any kind of review. Excellent as this system may be, it is manifestly a long way from democratic.” The long and the short of it is that, if French revolutionary theory was the mother of our government, its father was hard-headed realistic English political experience. The resemblance of the American president to the English king has often been noted. Except for the fact that the American offices of president and senator were nonhereditary and their terms limited, the founders of the Constitution made their government as much as possible like the English government of the 18th century, a period when the English King and House of Lords still had real power.
That is to say, insofar as our American democracy has succeeded, perhaps it has been because it has not been very democratic.
But to what extent has it succeeded? To what extent has it actually met the needs for which, as we have seen, every healthy people organizes its life? It has held together a fairly long time, yes, but has it preserved the health and happiness of the people, has it preserved our distinctive character, has it enabled us as a people to achieve any true or lasting significance among the peoples of the Earth? Has it provided us with a statesmanship that gives promise of ensuring even any long-continued existence? My understanding of the facts compels me to answer No. Even a hundred years ago John Quincy Adams, who had every reason to wish to pronounce the American experiment a success, had to bemoan its failure. Though not fully a democracy, it was far too much a democracy to prove sound.
Almost from the start our fair country became par excellence the land of the quick return. It had been endowed with an unimaginable virgin wealth of natural resources. But it lay wide open to be raped by the hand of anyone who had an eye for gain, and whose cunning, energy, and daring for getting it out was not hampered by conscience or by any concern for the welfare of the country as a whole. What ensued was the plundering of a continent unparalleled in human history. The waste of natural resources was beyond the power of any mind to describe or even to conceive. The aim everywhere was to squeeze out of one’s holding every ounce of profit possible, and then to move on to a place where one could squeeze again. Everything was shaped remorselessly to the advantage of those who could pile dollar upon dollar, regardless of how they were got. Gain became God, the great god Moloch, into whose cavernous maw of waste and destruction the priests of finance ruthlessly shoveled the welfare of the entire people, both the fate of the living and the destiny of those yet to come.
Along about 1880, in order to multiply and to magnify the opportunities for quick and easy gain through the exploitation of cheap labor, the froth of the rising tide of populace in southeastern Europe was allowed to begin spilling over into America, and thus gradually to adulterate its blood, alter its character, break down its traditions, and clog the working of its vital institutions. The total drift of affairs in the nation generated destructive forces beyond the power of the people to resist or to avert. Gradually they were pried and torn off the land and herded into cities, and there were tied to desks and machines in jobs that have had little meaning for them and which they hate, and where, for all their steam-heated flats and pressed Sunday clothes, their multiplied gadgets and “conveniences,” their cars and movies and television and the rest of it, their lot is in many ways more degrading than that of chattel slaves. The end result has been a measurable decline in stamina, in intelligence, in self-reliance, and generally in substantial character. Today we simply are not the same people, nor the same kind and caliber of people, as those who founded and early guided the country. The people generally have been debauched and besotted, and ground down into sand heaps of mean little nothings. At last, we too have a proletariat, like that of Rome in the period of the Empire, and like Rome we too have come to buying our rabble off from tearing our world to pieces, by resort to free bread and circuses. Only, we call it “welfare” and TV.
But money-making has gone on apace. Machines have multiplied apace. And the men who have made them and owned and controlled them have climbed higher and higher. The trader, the middle man, the commercial man, who uses his hands only to turn over deal after deal and out of each one to squeeze money—above all, the financiers and big bankers, whose aim is even to make money out of nothing, and who, as we shall see, have perfected means for doing precisely this on a colossal scale and doing it invisibly withal—these men, whom aristocratic societies have commonly placed low, if not at the very bottom, our democracy has allowed to come to the top. And whoever sits on top is inevitably looked up to, and emulated, until his example permeates the whole society. In consequence, the people are corrupted. Even our countryside has been fouled and infected by the spirit of the city. Everybody, like the financiers, pants after money, easy money, the “fast buck,” a chance to get something for nothing. Men are measured by the amount of money that they have. It is the common assumption that a man without money must be a nobody. Almost every man, too, has his price, like every thing. Our whole living is saturated with money valuations: conversation, books, papers, radio talks, politics, statecraft, church work—everything. One can hardly sit in a city subway car without being forced to close one’s eyes to keep them from being defiled and one’s mind invaded by the lies and baseness of the advertisements that plaster the walls wherever one can look. This is what we have made of America under our democracy—to my mind, a spiritually loathsome place. No wonder that Arabs, met some years ago in conference, exclaimed that they “did not want the incredible American way of life.”
Naturally, while all this was going on, we have produced little significant culture. Probably, it is safe to say that there is no cultural field in which we have not played second fiddle to Europe. It has been Europe, with its survivals of feudalism, that has ever been the source of original and fertile ideas. We have but imitated, and usually imitated but poorly. Even the great centers of pure science have been chiefly Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and London. Our scientists have been mostly of the practical variety, hired, like the engineers, to serve the owners of the machines, the money-grabbers.
Indeed, our leaders have not even ensured our long existence. Our statesmen, for the most part, have been too amateurish, too untrained and inexperienced, and at the best have changed too frequently, to give us grasp and elevation of policy, or even to maintain its consistency and continuity. Indeed, again and again, in the events that determined our part in the Second World War, and unmistakably and at a breath-taking pace during the years since, we have been committed to paths that lead (and one must suspect, were intended to lead) to destruction. The predominance of some vengefulness in our councils, of some apparently alien and positively anti-American influence, has prevented the adoption of any policy that put the welfare of the U.S. firmly first. Instead, we look back over twenty-five years in which our country has been consistently betrayed—from within. Out of a desire utterly to blot out Germany, long the West’s best bulwark against the East, we have steadily helped to build up Russia into a colossus whose tyranny (as those who are fully informed now know very well) is more brutal, and whose designs far more diabolical and ruinous, than any that ever were charged against Germany.
As an instance of the sort of betrayal that I have in mind, I may mention that after the war was over, American forces were deliberately withdrawn to the Elbe, and the Communist army thereby permitted to overrun all of Eastern Europe and fasten its grip on the throat of Berlin. Never in all history, not even at Tours in 732 or at Vienna in the 17th century, had Europe so fallen under the heel of the alien East. The primary treachery may have been Roosevelt’s and that of his Communist adviser Alger Hiss, in the secret agreement that they made with Stalin at Yalta, but Truman surely shares their guilt for putting their treason into effect. And Eisenhower no less. It has been said in the latter’s defense that, if he had refused to obey Truman’s order, he would have made himself liable to court-martial. But Westbrook Pegler spoke truly, and like an American and a man, when he declared his doubt whether any court-martial could have been found to condemn him, and that in any case he might better have accepted execution at the hands of a firing squad than to have taken any part in such a monstrous and fatal betrayal of his country, and of all his own kind, in Europe.
As if this were not enough, within the next few years our agents (General Marshall among them) had completed a like betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek and a surrender of all China into the hands of its Communists. This was in sheer disregard of the warning to Western statesmen by the distinguished British geopolitician Sir Halford Mackinder, of a generation before, that he who ruled the East of Europe commanded the Heartland, that he who ruled the Heartland commanded the World-Island (i.e., the land block consisting of Europe, Asia and Africa), and that he who ruled the World-Island commanded the world. Mackinder’s dictum was confirmed in Lenin’s enunciation of major Communist policy in which he declared that the fate of the world would be decided, in the end, by the way China went. And this Communist capture, one after another, of the Earth’s places of supreme strategic importance (there are, of course, others that I have not mentioned) begins to take on a really lurid prospect as we recall, first, the well-known Communist plan to inflame, to finance, to arm, and to direct the teeming colored millions of the world against the West; and, secondly, that our prevailing democracy, with its Money Power’s consuming lust for gain, has been leading us for the past fifty years into the monumental stupidity of opening the scientific and industrial secrets of our power to the backward peoples of the whole world, above all to the crowded millions of the Orient, who undeniably have the wit and the energy to copy us well. When at last they burst their boundaries and sweep down upon us like a prairie fire, they will come armed with our own weapons.
I could go on to give countless further instances in support of my charge that the United States has been consistently betrayed. And it is not too much to say that the chief instrument in the steady advance of the Communist Empire, since the close of the Second World War, has been our own Department of State. The inner meaning of it all, for the purposes of our present examination, is that democracy is seen to be exactly that political system which provides the best opportunities for alien enemies and traitors to encyst themselves in the entire body of our people, and there to work under cover for our destruction. It turns out that most of the efforts to run the traitors down, the really big traitors, lead to the door of the International Money Power. And, in the end, we are forced to the conclusion that the Money Power always proves to be any people’s supreme enemy and, further, that democracy is totally lacking in the kind of power necessary to put the Money Power into shackles. This stands, unalterably, as its supreme and final indictment.
However, while I purpose to keep my eye on the major factors and to steer clear of details, I wish also to avoid picturing the situation as more simple than it really is. I know well that there is usually a tangled complex of forces and influences to be unraveled before one can say which factor is paramount. So far as historical explanation is concerned, I am ready to allow, for instance, that much of the evil I now have my finger on might be traced to the Puritanism which, according to Werner Sombart, had so large a part in creating the accursed high-finance capitalism that plagues and poisons every people it touches. But this Puritanism not only launched the rising class of British traders, industrialists and bankers on their wanton and ruinous rampage through “Merrie England” in quest of profit, it was also instrumental in overthrowing English monarchy, traditionally the guardian of the people’s liberty and welfare. It was this change that Disraeli had in mind when he said, through the mouth of his hero in Sybil, “As the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the People have disappeared; until at length the Sceptre has become a pageant, and its subject has degenerated again into a serf.” I know, as a matter of established historical fact, that the most heartless indifference to the lot of the English wageworkers and their most ruinous exploitation came not during the long centuries when the English king really ruled, but after the day when belief in kingship had begun to die, after the victory of anti-monarchial forces had affirmed the doctrine that governments serve the community, after a succession of reverses to the aristocracy had made it clear that rule lay, and would lie increasingly, in the hands of “the people.” The system of gain grew side by side with the system of parliamentary government. But, indeed, it is only the old story: in ancient Athens as in modern England and America, democracy is associated with the rise of the Money Power, and with slavery and imperialism. And it has led to disaster.
But after all, even if democracy had not proved so well suited to providing secure and comfortable accommodation for traitors, what good reason is there, on the very face of things, to expect that democracy could ever provide a people with really sound and elevated direction? Even if machinery had ever been devised for registering the judgment of the people on any great issue, what would be the worth of the judgment after we had it? Said Carlyle, “Can it be proved that, since the beginning of the world, there was ever given a universal vote in favour of the worthiest man or thing? … The worthiest, if he appealed to universal suffrage, would have but a poor chance. John Milton, inquiring of universal England what the worth of Paradise Lost was, received for an answer, five pounds sterling … And when Jesus Christ asked the Jews what he deserved, was not the answer, death on the gallows?”
The most vital issues of the State, both foreign and domestic, require for their sound consideration an amount of background and detailed knowledge that is beyond the reach of all but a few. I believe that about such issues most men do not know anything, do not care anything, and not only lack the intelligence requisite to find out anything, but lack also the discernment and the character to give their judgment any value. It is then a waste of time, and folly, to register their opinion or to give it much consideration. Nor do we better matters by accumulating the judgments of many such men. Witlessness remains witless whether multiplied by one or by a million. You do not get wisdom by counting numskulls. What you do get is a downward pull toward mediocrity, arising from the catering for the votes of commonplace people, in order to obtain office or to stay in it. Even the Communist Harold Laski, in his article on the necessity of an elite in a democratic society, to which I referred in a previous chapter, admits that “it is legitimate to doubt whether the kind of aristocracy we require can be discovered among elected persons.” The tendency, rather, arising from the dependence of election on popular appeal, is to put into office a man who himself is but a varnished incarnation of populace. In such a man, the high ends of sound social organization are quite lost to sight. Even if he were aware what they are, he would not know how to go about achieving them. As a rule, he knows only the small, nearsighted, rule-of-thumb ambidexterity of the political schemer, the ambitious clamberer to power. It is not out of such men as this that we can get the wisdom and the rule to lift a people to heights of greatness, or even to maintain their existence, let alone to preserve that identity from which existence derives all its significance.
Moreover, the very machinery of democratic processes has opened the door to the manipulation and domination of society by a rich clique, which is what we have in America today. Even John Stuart Mill, for all his championship of democracy, recognized and admitted this evil. “Democracy thus constituted does not even attain its ostensible object, that of giving the powers of government in all cases to the numerical majority. It does something very different: it gives them to a majority of the majority, who may be, and often are, but a minority of the whole.” And Egon Friedell remarks in his Cultural History Of The Modern Age, that this “fallacy of every democracy, clearly seen already in Herodotus when he said that the majority was taken as the whole, was elevated in Greece to an all-consuming delusion.” But Athens was not more deceived by it or more certainly its victim than we are in America.
Furthermore, the practice of majority rule provides the basis for the worst sort of tyranny. From the will of the king or a body of nobles there can be an appeal to the people, but where the people themselves are conceived as the real government, and where there is belief that rightness attaches to mere numbers, then when numbers reach a majority there can be no appeal. And no limit can be set to the majority’s power, or even to its right, to coerce the minority. As a last resort, a ruling house or a body of lords can be thrown out by revolution, but this possibility is removed when a government knows that it has on its side not only legal authority but also irresistible force. “This is the reason,” said Mr. Dermot Morrah, “why the tyranny of the few over the many is always subject to limits; that of the many over the few has none.” Indeed, it is this that makes democracy so superb a schooling for the dictatorship to which it always succumbs. The would-be tyrant has but to win a mass following, and the people will both accept and assist his most ruthless elimination of his opponents.
One of the most demoralizing results of democracy is its dissipation of responsibility. When a law derives from a king or an aristocracy, the king or the nobles have to stand for it before the nation. And their sense of this responsibility creates a restraining and steadying influence as inescapable as it is socially valuable. For they know that in the long run the very continuance of their position and their rule depends upon their providing such government as to command, at the least, the respect and the confidence of the people. But under the ballot system responsibility has been so comminuted and dispersed that there is hardly any of it left. The fragments of it are shifted so easily and plausibly from one man’s shoulders to another’s that it cannot successfully be laid on anyone. But power without responsibility is ruinous to all good government.
At this point, we may end our examination of democracy on the basis of its record, and turn now to study the claims of the French revolutionists. These claims they undertook so to establish on abstract, innate, imprescriptible right that the zealot minds that follow them are rendered nearly impervious to evidence that their theories have failed in practice and are contradicted by the record of human experience. In disregard of all reason and all evidence to the contrary, they only reply that men are born equal and born free, and that any social arrangement that denies their equality or takes away their freedom is necessarily and unalterably wrong. Their ideas may be false, and founded ultimately on nothing deeper or more solid than vanity, but that has not prevented their spread until they have unbalanced men’s sense of values all over the Earth and have unhinged the hallowed and proved institutions by which men of all ages have made their societies secure.
Probably, the man most responsible for the spread of the idea that men are born free and equal was Rousseau. Lord Acton went so far as to declare that Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who ever lived. This may be overstatement, but I am inclined to think that the swollen idea of the worth and importance of the ordinary man, which is fast reducing our whole modern world to chaos, is not due so much to Jesus, as is commonly thought, but rather to Rousseau.
To me, Rousseau is disgusting and contemptible. But here I wish to deal not with the man but with his teaching. I must begin by repudiating completely the entire foundation on which his claims rest. It is nothing but a cobweb tissue of romantic fiction. I recognize no abstract or imprescriptible rights. As a distinguished biologist has said, men are born unequal and they remain so; and he might well have added, they are born conditioned, and they must remain conditioned, limited both from within and from without. “No man shall escape from what is within himself,” from what he has inherited from his ancestors; and no man can be a part of human society without accepting and fulfilling certain responsibilities and duties. Moreover, there is no evidence that any man has ever enjoyed any rights except when, individually or in combination with others, he has developed some kind of power sufficient to compel respect. Religions, political systems and moral ideals struggle for dominance like other things. That is, under their battle flags groups of men struggle for dominance. And if in the end they acquire rights, it means only that under the standard of certain ideas as a rallying point, they have developed a power to compel other men to yield them what they have demanded. The cries for liberty and equality are to be understood in precisely the same way, or they will not be understood at all.
Let us look into each of these ideas—first, that of liberty. Whose face is it that we may discern behind the cry for freedom? What kind of man? What does he want to be free from? And what free to do?
As we have just seen, no man can escape from the limits imposed by his own heredity: he cannot do more than he has the capacity to do, nor in the long run act contrary to his nature. A hack horse cannot win a race, nor can a race horse be made safe for grandma to drive to town. Neither, if a man is to enjoy any social life at all, can he escape the give-and-take and the acceptance of obligations that life with his fellows imposes.
It must be pointed out, too, that freedom in any true and deep sense is something that very few men can know. Only those rare souls who have won an inner transcendence over outer circumstances are truly free, only saints and seers and real philosophers. And these have commonly felt themselves to be free at all times, and in all places, and even (incredible as it may seem) under all circumstances. Thoreau knew himself free in jail. And there have been souls who have given evidence of their essential freedom even amidst the flames that were consuming their bodies. Yet even these are not free to do or not to do, after the fancy of the ordinary prater about liberty. Without raising the question of the freedom of the will, we must remind ourselves that it is precisely men of the loftiest spirit and supreme creative powers who are least “free to do what they feel like.” For them, life has no meaning and grows stale in their mouths, except as they live for something, something rare and lofty and beyond themselves. Their bent, their mission, their destiny, their need to lift the life of mankind, is the sternest, most exacting and unrelenting master, and gives them the most straitened, narrowest, and steepest path to follow—in an inner sense (it might even be said) under pain of death. They are the slaves of their quest. Yet—such is their nature, so beyond the understanding of the ordinary man—they would not have it otherwise. Inwardly, day and night, they are on their knees before their vision of the truth or beauty that drives them on.
Theirs, as I conceive it, is the only real liberty—the liberty of the man who is most completely possessed by what he is. And they wait on no man and on no government to give it to them. They win it. They take it. And no man, nor all men put together, can take it away from them.
Needless to say, it is not liberty of this kind that people mean when they clamour for freedom. It comes only at a price that they are unwilling to pay, higher than they have it in them to pay. Very few men can give their all for anything. To the eye of the ordinary mortal, such a liberty is too fantastic and intangible, of too dubious a reality or value, to entice him to any such complete devotion of himself. He passes it by in favor of a liberty that will promise more and cost less.
Probably, the object behind most of the clamor for liberty is political rights—the right to vote, the right to believe what one pleases, the right freely to express one’s opinion. Let us therefore look into this belief of the common man that these “civil liberties” are a jewel of great price. Let us see what enjoyment of these rights amounts to, what it has led to, and what are the prospects it holds for the future.
The ballot represents such a comminution of political power, even to its vanishing point, that I can but hold it in contempt. In view of the control of the political machines by Wall Street or by some similar clique with interests quite contrary to the good of the country as a whole, and because, as a result of the total electoral process, the men put up for office are usually so mediocre that no man of wisdom and character would care to be “represented” by any one of them, I have gradually come to feel that voting is about as useful as casting a chip into a puddle. Disraeli spoke of “that fatal drollery called representative government.” Certainly, to give people the idea that they are free because they have the ballot is nothing less than a fraud. Rather is the feeling of freedom thus engendered a means by which their essential slavery is hid from their eyes and the more securely fastened upon them. Behind this camouflage, a Plutocracy—one of the nastiest and basest of all forms of government—has been able to make the people its unwitting accomplice in their own degradation and in the most wanton and unprecedented exploitation of the natural resources upon which our entire future as a nation depends.
Nor do I feel differently about the right to “unlimited freedom of thought and discussion” that democracy stands for. But as background for what I want to say in reply, let me at this point interject a few observations.
The ever-increasing domination of our modern life by Science has created an obsession with the rational that has thrown our life quite out of balance. I surely do not need to argue here that I hold thought very important, but everlasting intellectual ferment and agitation is certainly not the end of human existence, nor is it of itself even a sign of a people’s health and vitality. I strongly suspect that endless and absolutely free-ranging debate and discussion only reflect uncertainty and insecurity deep in a people’s soul. It betrays weakness, division, and inner shakiness. Sound instinct and promise of destiny in a people always shows itself in unity and solidarity, and—let us remember this as absolutely fundamental—in a relentless drive toward what will ensure its survival, its close-knit growth, and the prolonged flowering of its own unique genius. And blessed will any people be which has leaders who clearly recognize that the surest means to such a state is racial homogeneity—likeness, compatibility, harmony, in all its constituent parts. Only by this can it acquire that thoroughly integrated unity, the seamless rock-hard solidarity and substance, that will enable it, in an hour of crisis, to stand up under the steady ruthless pounding of a powerful outside foe. And only by this, too, will it come to be filled in its domestic life with that sure faith in itself, that tranquillity of mind and heart, and that joy in existence, which are necessary for the richest pollination of its genius.
In prehistoric times, as my readers will doubtless recall, we found that the requisite homogeneity frequently came about in areas of natural isolation, such as islands, peninsulas, or closed river valleys: one thinks at once of Britain, Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Here the geographical situation tended toward the exclusion of the alien. But no people became a great people without that homogeneity on which the achievement of greatness seems invariably to depend. Where Nature did not provide it by herself, it had to be achieved by human intervention and arrangement. To achieve it, the Chinese built their Great Wall, 20 to 30 feet high, 15 to 20 feet wide, and nearly fifteen hundred miles long! long enough to reach from the Atlantic to the Mississippi! And in the fifth century B.C., under the leadership of the religious reformer Ezra, the old Hebrews began to undertake to accomplish under the threat of death what the Prophets had undertaken in vain to accomplish by exhortation and invective. Mixed marriages with gentiles were ruthlessly broken up; and through all the centuries since then the orthodox Jewish community has treated as a leper, indeed has treated as dead, any Jew who married a gentile. Even to this day, in the state of Israel, marriage between Jew and gentile is not legally possible. In the case of a country like the United States, if the original stock and its values are to survive, then all aliens, such as Negroes, Jews, and Orientals, will have to be put out and kept out. Immigration will have to be strictly limited to stocks most closely related, by blood and by tradition, to the stocks by which the country was originally founded. And then, among a people of like instincts and values, and under the impress of religious and moral teaching as largely as possible unified, the questions of gravest importance would be largely a matter about which there was general and prevailing agreement.
Doubtless, there must come periods of transition, in which for a people’s very life’s sake and destiny’s sake, its whole stock of ideas and its very foundations must be re-examined and reappraised. It was precisely such a task that Nietzsche set before himself in his Will To Power, the subtitle of which was “An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values.” But though on occasion such a task must be undertaken, it is most emphatically not a task at which everyone should feel free to try his hand. It is for those few men who have not only the capacity and training to think, and behind them the experience and habit of responsibility, but also the strength of character and the spiritual stability to sustain intellectual skepticism. But when, as a result of the democratic dogma, it is believed that everything which is right for one is permissible for all, when everyone is encouraged to question freely, and does question even those beliefs upon which a people’s very life has been founded, the notorious and inevitable result is that the great majority of minds are unhinged. They are left with no deep unshakable certainty on which to fasten and by which to steer, and in consequence fall into the demoralization in which the lack of any directing and sustaining certainty always ends. When a people as a whole no longer believes in anything, it falls to pieces. It must fall to pieces. For belief is the very foundation on which our life was built and the cement by which it is held together. Today we see the whole basis and cohesiveness of our life dissolving in skepticism. The democratic assertion of every man’s right to think for himself contained an acid that most minds were not, and are not, strong enough to withstand.
The right to free expression has had similar consequences. There are many matters, among them the problems most vitally affecting the welfare of any nation, upon which most people have no right to be heard, for the simple reason that they are beyond any ordinary man’s comprehension. And what people do not understand they should not talk about. They should not be allowed to talk about. This is only good sense. And whenever any upstart, with overweening presumption, ventures to air his opinions, it would be better for all concerned, better in the end even for him, if a rod were laid across his back, as in the case of Homer’s Thersites, or at least that he be laughed out of camp. But among us it is not so. Generations of belief in free speech and free press and of registering every man’s opinion pro and con, even that of every dolt and pauper, have made every smalltown newspaper editor ready to set up as an oracle, and any farm- or factory-hand ready to diagnose the evils of an economic and political system, and to advise remedies. A college speaker will express convictions that have behind them his best thought and ripest experience over a period of thirty or forty years, and students not yet out of their teens, who have not given such ideas so much as half an hour’s consideration in their entire lives, will forthwith stand up and contradict him to his face. The truth is, it strikes me, this cry for liberty has come to voice more than a demand for political rights: it reveals a strong disinclination to obey anybody or any thing. The past is disparaged as a time of darkness and unreasonable and unbearable restraint, in favor of the glorious present, in which each man may do what he feels like. “Why should we listen to the past? Is the present not more enlightened and advanced? Why should we listen to our great men? Who said there were any great men? Is not one as good as another? Why should we not, each of us, be a law unto himself?” Democracy, as I have come to see it, is always thus loose-tongued, loudmouthed, and weak-minded. It tends to produce a society of chattering magpies.
The results are twofold vicious. There is no more authority among us. And there is no reverence. Thus we cut ourselves off from all the light by which a people’s life can be soundly guided. The wisdom of their long past, as voiced in tradition, is contemptuously dismissed and forgotten; and the wisdom of the present, which might find a voice in its great men, is drowned in the roar and babble of the crowd. But without tradition no people’s life can be sound and stable. Most things vitally affecting their welfare cannot be everlastingly discussed. They must be done or avoided, as a rule—and until its leaders see good to modify the rules—for no better reason, in the mind of the common man, than that contained in the words “It is not done,” or, “This is the way we do.” And without the light on its path that can be shed only from its great men, any people must go on to disaster. Wisdom! Wisdom! Verily, for lack of wisdom the people walk in darkness, and must sooner or later walk into a trap, or over a cliff, or into a morass, or up a blind-alley. And in democracy the effort is to find light where it does not exist.
In all consideration of these political rights, it needs to be remembered that originally they were not intended for everybody. They were “won by aristocrats for aristocrats,” as Dermot Morrah would remind us. Magna Carta was forced from the hand of King John chiefly by his barons, and its privileges were to be exercised only by them or by their like. Similarly, in the case of the Bill of Rights of 1688. Even Voltaire, for all that he was eventually claimed by the Jacobins, “when he talked of liberty … was thinking only of the upper ten thousand. Speaking of the people, he said, ‘They will always remain stupid and barbarous; they are oxen who need a yoke, a whip, and hay.’” But what was won by nobles for the nobility is now claimed for everybody. The proletariat, who have done nothing to create culture, who cannot appreciate either what it cost or what it means, and who could do nothing to reproduce it if it were destroyed, swarms right into the lighted salon of civilization, and even sits itself down where before have sat only knights and kings. It is one of the results of the “inundation” of the masses for which democracy is so largely responsible. At last, the innermost meaning of all this cry for liberty stands revealed. It is the effort of the masses to possess the Earth for themselves.
The whole modern pressure for “liberty” needs to be met, to our way of thinking, by a recollection of three verities that are as lasting as human nature itself.
The first can hardly be stated better than it has been stated by Edmund Burke. “Society cannot exist,” he said, “unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” [Emphasis added.] Freedom cannot be given by any system or by any government. Free men make themselves free. In the long run, the measure of freedom that they enjoy in the world will be proportioned to their mastery over themselves.
Next, the zealots for freedom have omitted from their demands one of the most important conditions for its realization. There can be no real or essential freedom, such as I am concerned about, without the private ownership of property, of such kind and in such quantity as to establish the individual owner in economic independence of society. Of this, I shall have more to say when I come to write about Aristocracy.
In the third place, liberty has been mistakenly conceived. I would have each man enjoy the utmost liberty in his private life, in relation to the things he is really concerned about and is competent to handle. I have in mind his home, his craft or other means of livelihood, local affairs, his friends, his church, and all the beauties of the world about him. But where he cannot measure up to responsibility he should not have privileges. In all matters relating to the welfare of society as a whole, he should be under the strictest direction from above.
Nor would this be any violation of the real essential freedom possible to him. Indeed, there would not necessarily result any loss of any freedom he feels or cares about, or any detriment to his health of body or contentment of mind and spirit, if he were even personally bound to another man, to obey his will and to serve him. I tell you this modern unwillingness to recognize another man as your superior grows out of nothing less than an unhealthy state of soul. It betrays the action of that poison which loosens all the tensions and bonds natural to men in their relation to one another. There are powers resident in some men that immediately impress me with their superiority and make it my very impulse to look up to them. He only reveals his spiritual poverty who declares that in his heart he bows down before no man—or else, a transcendent greatness such as comes only to the smallest fraction of men, only to a Zarathustra, who cannot find any greater than himself. Generally speaking, the healthy instinct is expressed by Carlyle when he declared, “No higher feeling than this admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man.” I agree heartily with Blake when he cried, “The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.”
Our whole society is sick because we have unlearned to feel reverence, and because we no longer have men who compel our reverence and before whom it is our instinct to bow down and whom we are proud to obey. Most men throw away their supreme worth and the deepest joy and satisfaction of which they are capable when they have no one greater than themselves to whom they can pledge a love and a loyalty unto death, and for whose sake they verily sacrifice themselves. Today, outside of friendship and the family, love and loyalty are almost unknown. We have only the cash-nexus of democracy, with everyone enjoying the “equal right” to exploit and to be exploited.
There is a passage in Ruskin’s Stones Of Venice that so clinches this point that I cannot forbear to quote it. “I know not if a day is ever to come,” he says,
“When the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when man will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty—liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulders; of the other, by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say, irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it … And therefore, in all ages and in all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the cause of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice.”
Liberty, however, is not really the cardinal doctrine of democracy. And indeed, as Justice Stephen and Sir Henry Sumner Maine had the insight to discern almost a hundred years ago, liberty is incompatible with equality. Give men freedom, and straightway it becomes only too apparent how unequal they are. And when this incompatibility finally proved itself in fact and forced the Russian revolutionists to choose between liberty and equality, they revealed themselves as the Earthlings that Voltaire declared the masses to be. They raised no dramatic cry of “Give me liberty or give me death.” Liberty meant less to them than their dinner pails. Above all they wanted security, even though it was to be realized only in the equality of state slaves. Let us now, therefore, look into the very heart of the revolutionist’s cry, the cry for equality. What is in it and behind it?
“All men are born equal,” is the cry. But are they? In what respect are they? On what grounds are they alleged to be? This assertion lunges desperately into the solid phalanx of all human experience. If we interpret the cry to mean equality of capacity, every one of us knows better. I have yet to meet a single man who did not deny any such belief in the practice of his everyday life. To be sure, the mind of the zealot will readily trace inequalities of wealth and education to injustice in the distribution of opportunities in youth, but there remain the bedrock inequalities of capacity due to age, sex, race and, above all, heredity. I shall have much to say about most of these matters in chapters that we are now approaching, but let me remark here that I know of no place in which these inequalities have been more carefully analyzed and weighed than in James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Ludovici’s False Assumptions Of ‘Democracy.’ In general, it needs to be reiterated that democracy, as was to be expected, has overemphasized the importance of environment, of the power of education and opportunity to improve. Justice Stephen remarks, trenchantly, “Society cannot make silk purses out of sows’ ears, and there are plenty of ears in the world which no tanning can turn even into serviceable pigskin.” He makes it very clear, too, what wrong and injury are done to woman, and what handicap is imposed upon her, by treating her in the struggle of life as though she were man’s “equal.” She is something other, and more, than man’s equal!
Even the interpretation of the slogan to mean “equality of opportunity,” when carefully taken to pieces, makes no sense. Inherited, inborn, and therefore inescapable inequality of capacity conditions everything—even the ability to benefit by opportunity. We are not dealing with the abstractions of mathematics but with the concrete actualities of human beings. What kind and degree of opportunity we should provide a feeble-minded individual, to help him most in his competition with one more gifted, no one can ever tell exactly. But this is certain: so long as the cry for “equality of opportunity” is raised in the faith that inequality among men can at last be smoothed out by improvement in the environment of those born botched or ill-favored, the effort to provide equality of opportunity will inevitably tend to create an injustice far more dangerous than denying it, because it will prove more socially costly—the injustice, namely, of failing to provide adequate opportunity to the comparatively few rare men of greatest capacity upon whose kind the welfare of any people chiefly depends.
The doctrine is sometimes interpreted as “equality before the law.” But this seems to me only the last resort of men who are struggling to find some meaning that is still tenable. That competent legal service should be within the reach of the poorest and lowliest man in the land, and that no man should be able by his wealth or position to escape the punishment he deserves, goes without saying. Yet even here justice would not be done by treating the big man and the little man as though they were equal. Rather, would true justice thereby be frustrated. For the same offense, punishment ought to fall more heavily on the man of larger gifts and more responsible position than on the common man of meager intelligence and narrow opportunities.
In the end, my examination of the doctrine of equality forces me to the conclusion that at bottom it is nothing but the envious and resentful cry of the inferior man against the superior, the battle cry by which he would rally other inferior men to his standard, and not only overthrow the rule of the superior but abolish all recognition of superiority, and thus establish a world favorable to those who are now weak, ugly, dull, and generally botched. It is basically a cry of insurrection.
The menace of it is twofold. In the first place, it is a denial of the need of leadership. But without leadership, and leadership of high order, no people can long hold together. How far its insidious poison has already worked to undo the instincts of modern man is evident in the fact that this mass movement toward equality is today being supported by many of the most gifted among us, men backed with the best family blood and tradition. These people, however sincere and well-intentioned, are actually blind and deluded traitors, not only to their own kind, but to the truest good of the whole people whose interest they profess to have at heart. They have betrayed the responsibility that they bear to maintain that some men are better than others, and that the best should rule—that the best must rule, or the whole people will hasten on to disaster.
In the second place, the doctrine of equality is essentially a repudiation of quality, for it is a denial of that differentiation apart from which quality cannot exist. The whole movement toward equality is part of the process by which the typical and normal texture and organic structure of a sound society breaks down into the mush of decay—loss of all distinctive size, shape, color, relationship, and function, into a meaningless mass. Thus it is a presage of the end. Yea, verily, in a way we have gone up among the nations of the world, as it were, in a day, like Assyria did. But like Assyria also we shall come down in a day. A scant one hundred and fifty years Assyria lasted. I can only doubt whether we shall last much longer. The pyramid will not stand on its head.
The evil results chiefly from the fact that the mere idea of equality was ever allowed to get abroad. Until Jacques’ poor head was turned with the fatuous notion that he was as good as anybody, he was content to take his place and fill it. And, provided that there were corrections and reforms, which at times were most certainly and urgently needed, he was better off then than he has been since. Nature has set limits against which the most romantic propaganda can only inflame men’s hopes and vanity in vain. The revolutionaries and liberals have only destroyed the traditional, just, and natural organization of society without accomplishing a jot. They have only turned everything upside down, and put on top those who belong on the bottom; and now those who formerly reposed on the bottom are approaching a very painful fall to the level on which they belong. For in the end, Nature will not be denied. Sooner or later gravitation will surely pull back the heavy mass to the bottom. But we cannot be sure that those who come to the top in any near future will be any nobility. Rather, shall we more likely have another one of those “monstrous and morbid forms of government by the One, or of government by the Few,” in which, as you will remember, Sir Henry Maine observed that democracy has always ended.
The most generous judgment that can be made of democracy is that it has been based on “too favorable an estimate of human nature.” That is to say, on an estimate too romantic, too unrealistic, and thus—too false. In short, democracy is a form of government that will not work and will not last because it lacks the basic requisite of all sound government that it shall fit the nature of man.