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On Democracy
On Democracy
Inaugural Address on Assuming the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland
Institute, Birmingham, England, 6 October, 1884
He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into
the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance - wheel
which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in
his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity
with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose being is
that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one
abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the
elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is
certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict
of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had,
feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is
expounding it. And in a world of daily - nay, almost hourly - journalism,
where every clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody
else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point - blank and
at the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or on
what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every inconceivable
display of human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all
those commonplaces which furnish the permitted staple of public discourse that
there is little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one - stringed
instrument on which we have been thrumming so long. In this desperate
necessity one is often tempted to think that, if all the words of the
dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous
juxtapositions and combinations that made tolerable sense were picked out and
pieced together, we might find among them some poignant suggestions towards
novelty of thought or expression. But, alas! it is only the great poets who
seem to have this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase,
this infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said
before, and said over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will be apt
to think that observation has on most points of general applicability said its
last word, and he who has mounted the tower of Plato to took abroad from it
will never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of speculation. Where
it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one`s peace, why add to the
general confusion of tongues? There is something disheartening, too, in being
expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind
were an hour - glass, that need only be shaken and set on one end or the
other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty minutes with decorous
exactitude. I recollect being once told by the late eminent naturalist,
Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first lecture as professor (at
Zurich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed
three quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, and glancing
anxiously from time to time at the watch that lay before him on the desk.
"When I had spoken a half hour," he said, "I had told them everything I knew
in the world, everything! Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly
"and I have done nothing else ever since. "Beneath the humorous exaggeration
of the story I seemed to see the face of a very serious and improving moral.
And yet if one were to say only what he had to say and then stopped, his
audience would feel defrauded of their honest measure. Let us take courage by
the example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines increases as
the area of their land in vineyards is diminished.
To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the undelayable year
has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this
place, where so many wiser men have spoken before me. Precluded, in my quality
of national guest, by motives of taste and discretion, from dealing with any
question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me wisest, or at any
rate most prudent, to choose a topic of comparatively abstract interest, and
to ask your indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks on a matter
concerning which I had some experimental knowledge, derived from the use of
such eyes and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such
report as I had been able to win from them. The subject which most readily
suggested itself was the spirit and the working of those conceptions of life
and polity which are lumped together, whether for reproach or commendation,
under the name of Democracy. By temperament and education of a conservative
turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers saw
with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change (to me a
sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. The testimony of
Balaam should carry some conviction. I have grown to manhood and am now
growing old with the growth of this system of government in my native land,
have watched its advances, or what some would call its encroachments, gradual
and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an ear - witness to the
forebodings of wise and good and timid men and have lived to see those
forebodings belied by the course of events, which is apt to show itself
humorously careless of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a
sagacious old gentleman say in 1840 that the doing away with the property
qualification for suffrage twenty years before had been the ruin of the State
of Massachusetts; that it had put public credit and private estate alike at
the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd years
later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her sometimes
nearly three for one to keep her faith, and that while suffering an
unparalleled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain the unity and
self - respect of the nation.
If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it
certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that wielded it were
untrained to its use. There the election of a majority of the trustees of the
public money is controlled by the most ignorant and vicious of a population
which has come to us from abroad, wholly unpractised in self - government and
incapable of assimilation by American habits and methods. But the finances of
our towns, where the native tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are
discussed and settled in a public assembly of the people, have been in general
honestly and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a
majority of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not so often the
recklessness as the moderation of public expenditure that surprises an old -
fashioned observer. "The beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial
Wisdom. "Why, in the name of all former experience, doesn`t he ride to the
Devil?" Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and
became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last thing we
need be anxious about is property. It always has friends or the means of
making them. If riches have wings to fly away from their owner, they have
wings also to escape danger.
I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your
storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are
enabled to do this because, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford
to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make
of it than to export it in return for the paupers which some European
countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same
skill in the manufacture of them? But bad weather is not the worst thing that
is laid at our door. A French gentleman, not long ago, forgetting Burke`s
monition of how unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole people, has
charged us with the responsibility of whatever he finds disagreeable in the
morals or manners of his countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent
witness would only go into the box and tell us what those morals and manners
were before our example corrupted them! But I confess that I find little to
interest and less to edify me in these international bandyings of "You`re
another."
I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of
offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that really
includes all the rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World with what
seems to be thought the entirely new disease of Democracy. It is generally
people who are in what are called easy circumstances who can afford the
leisure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and these experience an
immediate alleviation when once they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse
it by. There is something consolatory also, something flattering to their
sense of personal dignity, and to that conceit of singularity which is the
natural recoil from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace, in thinking
ourselves victims of a malady by which no one had ever suffered before.
Accordingly they find it simpler to class under one comprehensive heading
whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their taste, their interests, or
what they suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as
physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross - grained fellows lay
their ill - temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment, and, if it
be, is America answerable for it? Even if she were, would it account for the
phylloxera, and hoof - and - mouth disease, and bad harvests, and bad English,
and the German bands, and the Boers, and all the other discomforts with which
these later days have vexed the souls of them that go in chariots? Yet I have
seen the evil example of Democracy in America cited as the source and origin
of things quite as heterogeneous and quite as little connected with it by any
sequence of cause and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It has been
at work for centuries, and we are more conscious of it only because in this
age of publicity, where the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a
grievance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are
more noticeable on the surface than in those dumb ages when there was a cover
of silence and suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo Navagero, speaking of the
Provinces of Lower Austria in 1546, tells us that "in them there are five
sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of these
last no account is made, because they have no voice in the Diet."^1
[Footnote 1: Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still another
even more helpless class, the servile farm - laborers. The same witness
informs us that of the extraordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as
much in proportion to their estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and
Burghers together. Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own
valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no
voice, ("Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti," Serie I., tomo i., pp. 378,
379, 389.)]
Nor was it among the people that subversive or mistaken doctrines had
their rise. A Father of the Church said that property was theft many centuries
before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the
inventor of national workshops, and of the theory that the State owed every
man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the first organized Democracy? A
few centuries ago the chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then
the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work was religious, and
produced the Reformation. Even in that, far - sighted persons like the Emperor
Charles V. saw the germ of political and social revolution. Now that the chief
end of man seems to have become the keeping of the body alive, and as
comfortably alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly political and
social. But there had also been social upheavals before the Reformation and
contemporaneously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race. The
Reformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing. Formerly
the immense majority of men - our brothers - knew only their sufferings, their
wants, and their desires. They are beginning now to know their opportunity and
their power. All persons who see deeper than their plates are rather inclined
to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the sores of Lazarus have a poison
in them against which Dives has no antidote.
There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great and prosperous
Democracy on the other side of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the
aspirations and political theories of men in the Old World who do not find
things to their mind; but, whether for good or evil, it should not be
overlooked that the acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak.
Every successive swarm that has gone out from this officina gentium has, when
left to its own instincts - may I not call them hereditary instincts? -
assumed a more or less thoroughly democratic form. This would seem to show,
what I believe to be the fact, that the British Constitution, under whatever
disguises of prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. England, indeed,
may be called a monarchy with democratic tendencies, the United States a
democracy with conservative instincts. People are continually saying that
America is in the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this means only
that a clearer conception of human claims and human duties is beginning to be
prevalent. The discontent with the existing order of things, however, pervaded
the atmosphere wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus,
seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of
America. I say wherever the conditions were favorable, for it is certain that
the germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous field for their
development and noxious activity unless where the simplest sanitary
precautions have been neglected. "For this effect defective comes by cause,"
as Polonius said long ago. It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that
what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then
only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not the insurrections of
ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence: -
"The wicked and the weak rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion."
Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much
heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine
need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and secular tradition
through which in a normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the
extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when the
reasonable and practicable are denied that men demand the unreasonable and
impracticable; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the
impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor. No;
the sentiment which lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am
speaking always of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a form of government; for
this was but the outgrowth of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is
merely an expression of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be
a controlling hand, in the management of their won affairs. What is new is
that they are more and more gaining that control, and learning more and more
how to be worthy of it. What we used to call the tendency or drift - what we
are being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things - has for some
time been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in arguing with
the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on
your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to
encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the
brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway
train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be
sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory. Our
disquiet comes of what nurses and other experienced persons call growing -
pains, and need not seriously alarm us. They are what every generation before
us - certainly every generation since the invention of printing - has gone
through with more or less good fortune. To the door of every generation there
comes a knocking, and unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor and his
wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder. It
turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes to come in out of the
cold. The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. "Who`s there, in the
name of Beelzebub?" he mutters. Not a change for the better in our human
housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it,
- have not prophesied with the alderman that the world would wake up to find
its throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the contrary, wakes up,
rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes about its business as if
nothing had happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition of slavery,
trade unions, at all of these excellent people shook their heads despondingly,
and murmured "Ichabod." But the trade unions are now debating instead of
conspiring, and we all read their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that
they are learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties of
practical legislation.
One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against
the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was
denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race
that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the
purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a
race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their
noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe,
has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion. We drove them into a
corner, but they had their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have it
sooner or later. They made their corner the counter and banking - house of the
world, and thence they rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance.
Your grandfathers mobbed Priestley only that you might set up his statue and
make Birmingham the headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it said
sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if that made matters clearer;
but can any one point us to an age that was not? If he could, he would show us
an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before us,
is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points are right
so that the train may not come to grief. For we should remember that nothing
is more natural for people whose education has been neglected than to spell
evolution with an initial "r." A great man struggling with the storms of fate
has been called a sublime spectacle; but surely a great man wrestling with
these new forces that have come into the world, mastering them and controlling
them to beneficent ends, would be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if
there were it would be only a better school of manhood, a nobler scope for
ambition. I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less
the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and
consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of
mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men`s conceptions of life,
and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct - to endanger the
rights of property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the
charges lies in the habit it has of making itself generally disagreeable by
asking the Powers that Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the
powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condition to give a
satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way
discomfited by it.
Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really
is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain
thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness,
whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing
more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil,
but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own
merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual
motion in politics any more than in mechanics. President Lincoln defined
democracy to be "the government of the people by the people for the people."
This is a sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrangement.
Theodore Parker said that "Democracy meant not `I`m as good as you are,` but
`You`re as good as I am.`" And this is the ethical conception of it, necessary
as a complement of the other; a conception which, could it be made actual and
practical, would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political
and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from
the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for
answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever
breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true gentleman.
The characters may be easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between them.
A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that
"One knocked at the Beloved`s door, and a voice asked from within `Who is
there?` and he answered `It is I.` Then the voice said, `This house will not
hold me and thee`; and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the
desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he returned and
knocked again at the door; and again the voice asked `Who is there?` and he
said `It is thyself;` and the door was opened to him." But that is idealism,
you will say, and this is an only too practical world. I grant it; but I am
one of those who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis
till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought that a democracy was
possible only in a small territory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy
strictly defined, for in such all the citizens decide directly upon every
question of public concern in a general assembly. An example still survives in
the tiny Swiss canton of Appenzell. But this immediate intervention of the
people in their own affairs is not of the essence of democracy; it is not
necessary, nor indeed, in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr.
Lincoln`s definition would fairly enough apply have existed, and now exist, in
which, though the supreme authority reside in the people, yet they can act
only indirectly on the national policy. This generation has seen a democracy
with an imperial figurehead, and in all that have ever existed the body
politic has never embraced all the inhabitants included within its territory,
the right to share in the direction of affairs has been confined to citizens,
and citizenship has been further restricted by various limitations, sometimes
of property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and sex.
The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or
intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was
inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has
been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result
of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had a
profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of
breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new
system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would
as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on
the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their
thought and experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the
value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability.
They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and
many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed. The day of
sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic affirmations or fine - drawn analyses
of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn. This was a practical
question, and they addressed themselves to it as men of knowledge and judgment
should. Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to
the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular
discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way
of the people`s will, but of their whim. With few exceptions they probably
admitted the logic of the then accepted syllogism, - democracy, anarchy,
despotism. But this formula was framed upon the experience of small cities
shut up to stew within their narrow walls, where the number of citizens made
but an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion was
reverberated from house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till
every impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular
assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob,
all the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of law.^2
[Footnote 2: The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this trooping
of emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The effect of
Darwinism as a disintegrator of humanitarianism is also to be reckoned with.]
Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for a
widely scattered population and for States already practised in the discipline
of a partial independence. They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous
advantages. The material they had to work upon was already democratical by
instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by more than a century`s
schooling in self - government. They had but to give permanent and
conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to their
new institutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, they
had a great help and safeguard in their federal organization. The different,
sometimes conflicting, interests and social systems of the several States made
existence as a Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on a constant
practice of moderation and compromise. The very elements of disintegration
were the best guides in political training. Their children learned the lesson
of compromise only too well, and it was the application of it to a question of
fundamental morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that
compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary
expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in
statesmanship.
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