By ALBERT RITCHIE. Governor of Maryland.
The political problem of the ages has always been how to reconcile the powers of government with the liberties of the individual. If we trace this effort historically, we find that through the centuries government has overwhelmed liberty, in that the freedom of the individual against despotic power has generally depended upon the benevolence of government itself. By and large there has been no sovereign power back of and independent of government, guaranteeing the individual immunity as of right against the excess of governmental authority, and protecting him in that immunity. As a result, governmental benevolence in the old world has recurrently developed into governmental despotism, intolerance and tyranny. In this country we sought to solve the problem by recognising behind government a sovereign power superior to government. This power was in the people, and we devised a governmental system whereby the liberties of the people no longer depended upon the grace or favour of governmental authority, but whereby governmental authority itself was granted and defined, circumscribed and limited by the sovereign people themselves. Now comes a contemporary European viewpoint which is both confusing and paradoxical. With an obvious upsurging of social democracy there comes also a declining faith in its political virtue. Socially and politically, democracy seems to mean one thing here, and something quite different there.
Monarchical Absolutism.
Mussolini, who personifies this viewpoint, may share our own democratic condemnation of monarchical absolutism, but he has a monarchical concept of popular sovereignty. He is perhaps the first dictator in history to formulate a philosophy of democratic autocracy, if such a thing can be conceived of. The masses, he is sure, cannot govern themselves intelligently, because they will follow foolish leaders or be exploited by corrupt ones; and representative government is doomed to failure, because it exhausts itself in building a village and so is incapable of building a nation. Like the Kaiser, he believes that the strong State can best be achieved by a sort of self-perpetuating governing class, which will function as guardian or trustee for the people in the selection of their law-making body, and in decreeing the customs and practices to which they must conform. "Liberty," Mussolini says, "never existed," and in place of a government with its powers defined and limited by a popular sovereignty which creates and controls it, he sets up a government which "governs for all, over the heads of all, and if necessary, against all."
Adequacy of Political System.
I pass the very obvious point that if this view of government had prevailed in pre-Revolutionary Colonial days, and our American forefathers had submitted to it, then there would have been no War of Independence, and no United States of America to-day. Perhaps even Mussolini and the Kaiser would not insist that the British Government knew better than we did what destiny was good for us, and that we had no right to demand and win freedom to govern ourselves. So merely to state what would have been the result of their governmental theories over here may be sufficient to refute them so far as their applicability to this country is concerned. "However this may be, I am convinced that nothing could so chill our national spirit, or check our prosperity and the progressive solution of our political problems, as to have our leaders or our people, or the growing youth of our land, lose faith in the workings of popular government, or in the adequacy of our political system, or fail to realise that the revolutionary ideas now prevalent abroad are wholly foreign to the genius of our people.
Definition of Democracy.
We need not concern ourselves with any analysis of the nature of sovereignty, nor with any abstract definition of democracy. Suffice it to say that democracy, in its broadest aspect, is not a form of government, but a social and political ideal, which contemplates a society of equals in the sense that each person contributes an integral something which goes to make up the common life ; a society in which no one can avoid his share of responsibility for the interest and welfare of all, and in which every one shall have an equal opportunity for self-development according his capacity. Democracy distinctly does not contemplate a society after the Fascist or Communist idea, in which the individual members, instead of having the free opportunity to develop themselves according to their free choice, are told from above what they are to do, and have their parts in life assigned to them in a way that submerges personality. Now, it need not be urged that a government of the Mussolini type, with the people subservient to it instead of it subservient to the people, must necessarily be malign. It may indeed be admitted that given a high order of wisdom, integrity and good luck, you may sometimes, for the moment at least, get a stronger government that way than you can by popular ballot. But it by no means follows that you can get a better government, because even a bad government that is free may be better than a good government that is self-perpetuating and breeds within itself the germs of despotism and tyranny.
Trend to Dictatorships in Europe.
In Europe the very word "government" means to the average man something different from what it means to us. There they have always had a governing class, and political power as well as political opinion have usually been the power and opinion of that class. Then there is another European condition which, while possibly transitory, is too vital now to be overlooked. Ten years after a war fought to end wars and make the world safe for democracy, we see not only the new-born Governments of the Old World, but to a considerable extent the older Governments too, turning from parliamentary forms of democratic expression back to the rule of dictators. With kingdoms and dynasties and principalities gone, with Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs and Romanovs either dead or in exile, the realities of popular government have not taken their places. We may as well admit that this result is an amazing one, but it would be a superficial view indeed that accepted it as a permanent stage in the progress or evolution of government.
Huge Public Debts.
I have no thought to dwell in any detail upon the war-worn condition of Europe when peace finally came, or upon the giant task of restoring order out of chaos. The story is familiar enough, and the difficulties of reconstruction too recent or contemporaneous to need accounting. The hang-over of war waste and extravagant expenditure, huge public debts, undetermined international obligations, an inflated currency, unbalanced budgets, upset markets, industry diverted into abnormal channel, widespread unemployment, industrial unrest, an economic structure entirely out of joint— such were the conditions which the countries of Europe had to face and remedy before they could take their place again in the normal progress of history.
Economic Order Restored.
Perhaps the task may have been one, in some countries may still be one, for the autocrat or dictator, just as the task of winning the war was undoubtedly one for the autocrat or dictator. Wars are won by the sweep of driving leadership, and driving leadership may be necessary, too, for the scarcely less herculean task of restoring economic order. The philosopher Hegel said that nothing can be considered as settled historically until it repeats itself. If so, then certainly the chronicles of history show that after every great war there has been a recoil to much the same kind of dictatorship that the world is witnessing to-day in some of the countries of Europe. After the Persian wars— Pericles. After the Peloponnesian wars — Philip of Macedon. After the Punic wars— Caesar. After the collapse of Rome — Charlemagne. After the Wars of the Roses — the Tudor dynasty. After the English Civil War — Cromwell. After the French Revolution—Napoleon. My point here is that in the sweep of history this may be but a temporary and passing condition in Europe, which may be only an interruption of progress towards ultimate popular sovereignty.
Insurmountable Difficulties.
Turn now to our own country, where of course the war caused no economic upset or disarrangement even faintly comparable to that in Europe. Here, the story is an altogether different one. Here, popular sovereignty is not a dream or a distant hope, but a political reality which finds expression every day and whose organisation and growth can be clearly traced. With us democracy is no new doctrine evolved by political science or by legerdemain, but an actuality achieved through evolutionary processes. We did not secure it by the grace of kings. Nobody conferred it on us. Our Constitution itself did not create it, but we had it "ab initio," and it created our Constitution. Let me go back for a moment, because this is important. Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit of the London (or Virginia) Company, and his associates who crossed the Atlantic, may have regarded it all as a great adventure, as some believe, but the form their adventure took was to establish in the New World those principles of representative democracy which they could not establish in the Old World so long as James I, with his ideas of divine right, ruled there. Gradually and in the face of difficulties almost insurmountable, the great experiment proved its worth, and long years before the founding fathers of the Republic came, men who craved freedom and liberty thronged to our coast— the Plymouth fathers to Massachusetts, the Calverts to Maryland, Roger Williams to Rhode Island, Oglethorpe to Georgia, William Penn to Pennsylvania— and here on virgin soil their new-born spirit took root and flourished.
Colonial Democracy.
Thus the Constitution became a living institution and the expression of our political life and mind. Its strength was the strength of the American spirit. It did not spring from the brains of the extraordinary men who gave it form and body, but from the heart and experience and ideals of the long years of a colonial democracy striving to become a nation. So in passing judgment on governmental systems at home and abroad it is important to remember the evolutionary character of our own system. This represents, it is true, many compromises and adjustments needed to meet conflicting requirements and ideals, it even reflects some of the fears and dangers of democracy itself, and all this has helped to make it workable and effective. But its vitality does not spring from these facts alone. Its abiding strength lies in the fact that it was born of the people, blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh, and gave expression to the traditions, ideals and free spirit that animated them in their century old efforts for self-government. Pessimists and critics, to be sure, can find defects enough in our system of government, and indeed we need not venerate it unduly or hold it sacrosanct, for after all it has successfully met the tests and crises of our national existence for nearly a century and a half, and this alone should silence callow criticism and foolish fears as to its future. It has changed and been changed with changing times, and not always for the best, but the cardinal fact is that it works, and has worked from the very beginning. Let us see if this is not so.
State against State.
After the Revolutionary War there almost instantly arose in this country a condition akin to what followed the World War in some of the countries of Europe and threatened in others. The thirteen original States, sovereign and independent at last, fell apart. State was allied against State, class against class, interest against interest. So desperate was the situation that, as Madison wrote Edward Pendleton, some leading minds were advocating a monarchy, while the bulk of the people probably preferred a partition of the Union into three more practicable and energetic governments. Then, none too soon, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, and out of the travail of that convention our system of government emerged, and it united the thirteen discordant States into a Federal Republic, and has held them indivisible ever since.
Triumph of Liberty in New World.
Can one ask more practical demonstration of the effectiveness of our form of government than this? If so, another one, equally obvious, is at hand, for soon our hard won popular sovereignty was subjected to as determined a test as was ever conceived by a group of autocratic rulers believing in the divine right of kings. The Russian Czar, the Prussian King, the Austrian Emperor and the French King combined with the purpose of stamping our popular liberty in the western world. They called themselves the Holy Alliance. The spirit of liberty which had established itself in America was rising to the surface elsewhere, too. It was rising in Poland, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain, and these monarchs sought to crush by the might of their enslaved peoples. In South America, Spain had lost her colonies and these had set up their own forms of Government. The Russian Czar, the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor were to send their combined forces across the seas in order to restore these republics to the Spanish King.
Armed Conflict.
Then democratised England proposed to the United States— both just emerged from their second armed conflict in less than half a century — an alliance to preserve the independence of the republics of South America, and thus, as Jefferson wrote, "make our hemisphere one of freedom" and "emancipate at one stroke a whole continent." This was not effected, because the despotic purpose of the Holy Alliance was dashed to earth by the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine with the approval and support of Great Britain, and thus it was that the power of autocracy was checked and overthrown by the spirit of liberty and popular sovereignty which two peoples had established as their governmental creed. Thus the American form of popular government began in effectiveness and success, and thus from the adoption of the first twelve amendments, which may properly regarded as part of it, it continued for more than a century with no single change save the three political amendments which reflected the results of the battle-fields of the Civil War.
Greatest Country on Earth.
Under it we have emerged from small beginnings into what we believe is the greatest country on earth. During this long period the sail-boat became the ocean liner, the stage coach became the trans-continental railway. Morse gave us the telegraph. Bell the telephone, and the Wrights conquered the air. Steam ushered in the marvellous era of machine production, followed now by an era of mass production on an undreamed of scale, and electricity and power have wrung new wealth from the treasure house of nature and hold the possibilities of a world remade. And all of this under a government dependent not only upon the theory but upon the actuality of popular sovereignty! So much for what democracy in America has achieved. Now for a few other considerations. One may well ask, what autocrat or dictator at his best ever did more than bring order out of chaos for a while? Did any of them ever work for the interests of all in the long run? And however benevolent and wise, have they not almost always yielded to the urge of personal ambition, or become the source of oppression and injustice, from which there lay no appeal, or burdened some classes for the benefit of others, and thus stifled the free play of individual enterprise?
No Guarantee.
And when Mussolini, or any other dictator like him, leaves the scene, what then? I will not debate the question whether Italy has needed this strong hand temporarily. Even if it has, there is no guarantee, there is indeed no probability, that another man of equal force and ability will arise to carry on the constructive part of his work. If he carries it on for his own life time, he may still be followed by a group which will take a purely selfish view of their enormous powers, and exploit the very people he would protect from the like danger under a democracy. Or he may be followed by men so weak that the pendulum will swing back again toward disintegration. Pericles destroyed the great court of Areopagus, which vetoed legislation that violated the liberty of the Athenian people, and then came his personal rule of Athens for a third of a century. He exercised his despotic power with wisdom and moderation, but he had no successor. His death ended the brilliant period in Greek history, and soon the political centre of the world moved westward and the empire of Rome began. Likewise there was no successor to govern the world Alexander the Great had conquered, and when Napoleon reached the zenith of his power, the question that troubled him most was how to fortify and make permanent the political structure he had erected. History shows how utterly futile his efforts were.
Self-Imposed Tyranny.
Thus the work of any dictator, no matter what its value, may be undone at any time by his death. Is it not better to cling to a system of popular participation, in which the swings of the pendulum from left to right, from liberalism to conservatism and back again, are not violent and accompanied by Fascist tyranny on the one hand, or by the French and Russian reigns of terror on the other hand? It is true that in democracy, as in autocracy, individual liberty may be abridged in many ways, sometimes necessarily, sometimes unnecessarily, or even foolishly and unjustifiably. But when this happens in a democracy we do not bend the suppliant knee to any ruler. Here is the essence of popular sovereignty. If there be tyranny, it is at least the self-imposed tyranny of a free acting or of an acquiescing majority. I believe it was Lord Bryce who said that democracy furnishes a political master key that can unlock every door, and John Stuart Mill long ago said that if the rights and interests of individuals in a democracy are disregarded, it is because they are not disposed to stand up for them. That representative government should sometimes fail to express adequately the will of the people is not so important as it is that the popular will, within sound constitutional limitations, should be free to act and that it should have the machinery to put its action into effect.
The Power of Public Sentiment.
Popular sovereignty functions not only through our machinery of government, but equally through the effective force and play of public opinion upon government. And just here we meet another criticism from our despotic friends. They talk much about mob psychology, the inefficiency and incapability of the herd, and the wrong standards of mass instinct. They have been talking that way ever since man first strove for freedom, and the truth is they do not see the woods for the trees. The instinct of the masses may be sounder than the instinct of the politically self-anointed. In fact there is usually an element of sound sense and true instinct in every mass movement. Lincoln's apothegms about the wisdom of the people and about fooling them are political truisms. I believe he was right when he said, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."
Governmental Corruption.
Because public sentiment so often seems non-existent, or quiescent, or sterile, or foolish, or difficult to understand, we both underrate it and overrate it. It may be passive and apparently impotent to-day, and be all-powerful to-morrow. Let an ambitious State Department, for instance, imagine that our manifest destiny points to the need of an imperial navy, and we see public opinion rise overnight and assert the effective sovereignty of the people. Let governmental corruption reveal that it is not confined to isolated miscreants and public opinion, as I believe we are about to see, will quickly operate as a political force. There may for a time be acquiescence in the evils of excessive officialdom or bureaucratic control, but let the advocates of these things go too far, let them approach legislative or executive autocracy, and public opinion will become an effective check. Yet public opinion seems to be precisely the factor that your Kaiser or your autocrat never understands, although history reveals that every great reform or political step forward has always sprung from the people — from the lower and humbler classes. Men like Jefferson may have formulated principles, but it has been the masses that gave them the impulse of life.
Deadening Influence upon Character.
Nor must we overlook the deadening influence of a dictatorship upon character. One man or one group of men manages the entire affairs of a people grown or coerced into political and mental passiveness. The individual has no voice or potentiality in his own destiny. Everything is decided for him by a superior will he is required to obey. Jefferson said, "the freedom and happiness of man are the sole objects of all legitimate government.” Man's happiness requires that his worth and dignity and character be accentuated and developed. If this be the high end of human institutions, then certainly it can best be attained by cultivating in man the qualities of self-reliance, self-respect, self-control and self-discipline, and by giving him a consciousness of that equality with all other men that can come only from regarding himself as a determining factor and force in his political and civic life. It can never be attained by hampering and dwarfing man's healthy growth through the palsying effect of a paternalism ruling and directing him from above.
Wise Leadership.
It is said with truth that wise leadership is essential to wise government, that particularly is this so in the case of a representative government, but that such governments are not always productive of the most capable political leadership. Lord Bryce commented on this at length in his "American Commonwealth." No one will contend that our democracy has not produced great leaders, and if, as James M. Beck says in his recent book on the Constitution, contemporary history shows a decay in this regard, at least it can be affirmed that our leaders are selected under a system which gives all classes in the community the opportunity of choosing them, and the opportunity of turning them out if popular dissatisfaction is great enough. If it be said that under a democracy the people are liable to be exploited, I answer that under an autocracy they are likewise liable to be exploited, with the additional evil that the exploitation would be legalised through the dictator's legalised control. But in a democracy the issue can always be placed before the electorate at the next election, and the people can turn the Ins out and put the Outs in.
Democracy a Force for Peace.
There is at least one other asset of popular sovereignty, and it is very vital. If the record of democratic nations does not show an altogether clean slate in the matter of aggression, still it cannot be denied that autocracy and dictatorship tend to war rather than to peace. The people lack the agencies of democratic government for the expression and dictation of their own will, and must respond to the will of their rulers. All history shows this, and the danger of it to the peace of the world. Were not the military autocracies of Germany and Russia peculiarly menacing to world peace before 1914? Does not Mussolini personify the chief anxiety for the peace of Europe now? Indeed our own war of Independence was forced upon us not so much because the English people wanted it, as because the English King and ministry decreed it. Men like Burke and Pitt and Fox reflected the views of a great part of the English population, but their voice was politically inarticulate and unheeded. When English rule was overthrown, it fell not alone before the onslaught of American troops, but also before the opposition of the people at home which finally made itself effective. And this popular opposition and the war's reaction, by the way, did much to secure self-government in England's colonial empire.
Struggle for Armament.
On the other side of the picture, consider the continuous peace for more than a century between the United States and our neighbour Canada. The struggle for armament between these two countries was stopped by mutual agreement after the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, and ever since the border line between them has been no more a line of division than a line of friendship. There are no forts on either frontier, no warships on the Great Lakes. May not the reason be that in neither country do the people respond to the power of a dictatorial government superimposing upon them its will and ambitions, but that in both countries the Government, functioning through popular sovereignty, though in different forms, responds to the will of the people, whose ideals and wishes are for friendship and for peace? To-day problems galore crowd upon us, those growing out of industrialism and urbanism, the increase of wealth, the inequality of its distribution, the assimilation of immigrants, agrarian questions, the concentration of power, the abridgement of individual liberty, and what not. Many of these may show anti-democratic tendencies, but neither the problems themselves nor the difficulties they involve are due to defects in our governmental system or to the inability of popular sovereignty to function. The way out is not to be found in autocratic government. Indeed, I venture the assertion that at least some of the major ills in American politics have arisen from the failure to observe some of the principles of our governmental system, such, for instance, as the balance between State and National powers and the basic doctrine of local self-government.
Solution of Problems.
After all, it is actual experience that counts most, and whatever its defects the great American experiment is popular sovereignty has had amazing success. It is the oldest written form of government in the world to-day. It has resolved the problems of our past, even those which threatened national disintegration, and its mechanism can resolve the problems of our present and of our future. This is not a static world, and what is needed is not cynicism, but a just faith born of the accomplishments of the past. If the path of progress through democracy and liberalism is slow, if it must be tested out by the experience of trial and error, at least the path thus offered is the only one that is safe. If gradual processes are inevitable for democratic ideals, at least these processes are onward and upward. We have shown in this country that political liberty can be made a political reality ; that freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of self-determination, of self-government are more than abstract ideas. All this is proof that popular sovereignty is not a myth, that expression is better than suppression. Here the people have shown that they can govern themselves, and that they can produce leaders who will love justice and do justice, and who will serve their nation both faithfully and wisely even though they be only servants and not rulers.
Catholic Advocate (Brisbane, Qld. : 1928,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article258733303
No comments:
Post a Comment