Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry
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George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man
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Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument
against it is twofold. It is said that, though much in the theory of
democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large
lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that
they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. The
operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring
knowledge and skill, and it has no limits. In state affairs education
should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests,
especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular
control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify
the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they
will retain deciding power. But is this so? or if there be some truth in
the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and
reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the special
sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage
makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the
case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and
sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of
society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of
view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and
bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or
deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those
wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and
the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally,
a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not
its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect
human life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is a
better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it
from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from
political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what
is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses?
Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally
diffused. Education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It is
not synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men,
and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it.
Intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man applies
it, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating,
comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man;
for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters which
touch his own interests, widely shared. The school of life embodies a
compulsory education that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in the
main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting masses of men,
the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competent
to deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, though
highly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure of
things, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, at
a less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mild
forms. Besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that are
required to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. The
sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is really
limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfish
struggle of material interests in a vast and diversified State.
Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the
people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy
once put into operation. The capacity of the people to judge the event
in the long run must be allowed. But does broad human experience,
however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that
right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy
itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? I
am not well assured that it is not so. The masses have been long in
existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed
that through
"old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain."
The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers,
sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in
others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are
vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal
conditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, intelligence works in
precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in
other parts of life. They listen to those they trust who, by
neighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual
share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund of
information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion and
their instruments in the policy they adopt. These leaders may be called
demagogues. They may be thought to employ only resources of trickery
upon dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is a shallow
one, and not justified by facts. It is right in the masses to make men
like themselves and nigh to them, especially those born and bred in
their own condition of life, their leaders, in preference to men,
however educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not embodiments of
the social conditions, needs, and aspirations of the people in their
cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and to allow these men,
so chosen, to find a leader among themselves. Such a man is a true chief
of a party, who is not an individual holding great interests in trust
and managing them with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own
superior brain; he is the incarnation, as a party chief, of other brains
and wills, a representative exceeding by far in wisdom and power
himself, a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, have
their governmental life. No doubt he has great qualities of sympathy,
comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to become
a chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of public
support, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, which
store themselves in him. Such the leaders of the people have always
been.
If this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of power
rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the
result with more determining force--be apparently crude in its early
stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of
social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever masses of men are
entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur?
in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it
is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodist
movement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement,
world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort of
characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic
politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those that
belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving masses
of men upward into more noble ranges. Men of the people lead, because
the people are the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, however
well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply in
the popular soil. Literary education, it must never be forgotten, is not
specially a preparation for political good judgment. It is predominantly
concerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate political
consequence--with books generally, science, history, language, technical
processes and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity of
life not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political.
Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of political
system, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly or
peculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics,
unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing from
their pursuits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with ideas
in a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas which are in reality
as much a part of life as of thought; and the method of dealing with
these vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty of
its own.
It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated class as a
whole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been on
the side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary
era the class was not--though it is now coming to be--a germinating
element in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius which
foresees the times to come and develops principles by which they come;
it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property and
ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them is
deeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable,
enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative of
the past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a
note of despair. I do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutions
have come from below, from the masses and their native leaders, however
they may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some
welcome in aristocrats. The power of intellectual education as an
element in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which is
less than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and
arrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection with
love or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, or
selfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with the
field of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in the
popular life. Intelligence, in the form of high education, can make no
authoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, as
a rule, its successful examples in character. The suffrage, except as by
natural modes it embodies the people's practical and general
intelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives of
themselves whom it elects to serve the State, need not look to high
education as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading
in matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expert
knowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but in
so far as it is separable from the business of the State, and stands by
itself in a class not servants of the State and mainly critical and
traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because of
any superiority of judgment it may allege. In fact, education has
entered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power,
in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, and
the enfranchisement of education, if I may use the term, is rather a
democratic than an aristocratic trait. Education, high education even,
is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the
older systems. But in a democracy it remains true, that so far as
education deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, and
enter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own.
There, least of all, does it need privilege. Education is one inequality
which democracy seems already dissolving.
What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, as
such, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the men
they trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. If the
suffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness and
ignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies not in a
guardianship of the people by the educated class, but in popular
education itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general
information which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that is
required for the comprehension of the great questions decided by
suffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions
into effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of
such schools and such means for the spread of political information as
have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other
than political ways. No force has been so great, except the discussion
of religious dogma and practice under the Reformation in northern
nations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. The
suffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about a
substitution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the
normal mode of dealing with important differences of view in State
affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and the
preservative of that great element of liberty, and progress under
liberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a
continuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as they
arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great an
accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itself
the right of revolution in a peaceable form under law. It is, moreover,
a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable of
receiving great masses of men and accustoming them to political thought,
free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in the
State, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and that
of the State. It is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is it
to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questions
which come before the suffrage for settlement are, in view of the whole
complex and historic body of the State, comparatively few; for society
and its institutions, as the fathers handed them down, are accepted at
birth and by custom and with real veneration, as our birthright,--the
birthright of a race, a nation, and a hearth. The suffrage does not
undertake to rebuild from the foundations; the people are slow to remove
old landmarks; but it does mean to modify and strengthen this
inheritance of past ages for the better accomplishment of the ends for
which society exists, and the better distribution among men of the goods
which it secures.
Fraternity, the third constituent of democracy, enforces the idea of
equality through its doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea of
liberty, which thus becomes more than an instrument for obtaining
private ends, is inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to its
exercise. Fraternity leads us, in general, to share our good, and to
provide others with the means of sharing in it. This good is
inexhaustible and makes up welfare in the State, the common weal. It is
in the sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, and
those expressions of the social conscience which we call moral issues,
generally arise, and enter more or less completely into political life.
In defining politics as, in the main, a selfish struggle of material
interests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, questions of a
higher order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, which
have in them a finer element; and, though it be true that government has
in charge a race which is yet so near to the soil that it is never far
from want, and therefore government must concern itself directly and
continuously with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higher
life has so far developed that matters which concern it more intimately
are within the sphere of political action, and among these we reckon all
those causes which appeal immediately to great principles, to liberty,
justice, and manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and in
our consciousness truly spiritual; and such a cause, preeminently, was
the war for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate of mankind under
democracy. In such crises, which seldom arise, material good is
subordinated for the time being, and life and property, our great
permanent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that which is
their great charter of value, as we conceive our country.
Yet even here material interests are not far distant. Such issues are
commonly found to be involved with material interests in conflict, or
are alloyed with them in the working out; and these interests are a
constituent, though, it may be, not the controlling matter. It is
commonly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material necessity is
required in any great political act, for politics, as has been said, is
an affair of life, not of free ideas; and without such a plain
authorization reform is regarded as an invasion of personal liberty of
thought, expression, or action, which is the breeding-place of
progressive life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion. In
proportion as the material interests are less clearly affected
injuriously, a cause is removed into the region of moral suasion, and
loses political vigour. Religious issues constitute the extreme of
political action without regard to material interests, wars of
conversion being their ultimate, and they are more potent with less
developed races. For this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere of
fraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social institutions
and habits, which political action may sometimes favour as in public
charities, but which usually rely on other resources for their support.
On occasions of crisis, however, a great idea may marshal the whole
community in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so championed
under democracy is the spiritual right of man.
But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in that
principle of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in that
substitution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, which
democracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the
authority of a delegated and representative liberty. Persuasion, in its
moral form, outside of politics,--which is so largely resorted to in a
community that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even,
with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man and
decreed by him out of his own soul,--need not be enlarged upon here; but
in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and will
necessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, since
law thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itself
no longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it
is adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny,
recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as that
has historically been. But outside of this refinement of thought in the
analysis, the fact that the normal attitude of any cause in a democracy
is that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before it
can impose itself as the will of the State on its citizens, marks a
regard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highest
consequence in State affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit
upon the rest of life.
That portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, and
remains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the nature
of society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best
preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all in
turn. Those rights are more respected under democracy than in any other
form of government. The important question here, however, is not the
conduct of the State toward an opposition in general, which is at one
time composed of one element and at another time of a different element,
and is a shifting, changeable, and temporary thing; but of its attitude
toward the more permanent and inveterate minority existing in class
interests, which are exposed to popular attack. The capital instance is
property, especially in the form of wealth; and here belongs that
objection to the suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the effect
that, since the social will has no limits, to constitute it by suffrage
is to give the people control of what is not their own. Property,
reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the great source of
inequality in the State and the continuer of it, and gives rise
perpetually to political and social questions, attended with violent
passions; but it is an institution common to civilization, it is very
old, and it is bound up intimately with the motive energies of
individual life, the means of supplying society on a vast scale with
production, distribution, and communication, and the process of taking
possession of the earth for man's use. Its social service is
incalculable. At times, however, when accumulated so as to congest
society, property has been confiscated in enormous amounts, as in
England under Henry VIII, in France at the Revolution, and in Italy in
recent times. The principle of paramount right over it in society has
been established in men's minds, and is modified only by the
social conviction that this right is one to be exercised with the
highest degree of care and on the plainest dictates of a just necessity.
Taxation, nevertheless, though a power to destroy and confiscate in its
extreme exercise, normally takes nothing from property that is not due.
It is not a levy of contributions, but the collection of a just debt;
for property and its owners are the great gainers by society, under
whose bond alone wealth finds security, enjoyment, and increase,
carrying with them untold private advantages. Property is deeply
indebted to society in a thousand ways; and, besides, much of its
material cannot be said to be earned, but was given either from the
great stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, conferring privilege,
or from the overflowing increments of social progress. If it is
naturally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if it has to be
subjected to control, if its duties have to be thrust upon it
oftentimes, it has such powers of resistance that there need be little
fear lest it should suffer injustice. Like education, it has great
reserves of influence, and is assured of enormous weight in the life of
the community. Other vested interests stand in a similar relation to the
State. These minorities, which are important and lasting elements in
society, receive consideration, and bounds are set to liberty of dealing
adversely with them in practice, under that principle of fraternity
which seeks the good of one in all and the good of all in one.
Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficiently
indicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund public
education as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great
element of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into all
parts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme and
the organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in a
mutual understanding and regard. It has established, too, protection in
the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the
rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for their
own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation
of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all
children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its
salutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, established
toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in
general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith
in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending
democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of
reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,--a respect that
awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,--which as
a constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized.
The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end
and summary, to secure justice among mankind. Justice is the most sacred
word of men; but it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its social
instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in
the mass. It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms; its
knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of
the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the main
a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent,
applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for
the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to
a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall
be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it may
be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of
difficulties. This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches.
Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it
sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one
rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on
the broad scale. Those matters which make individual justice
impossible,--especially the element of personal responsibility in
wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to
motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such
considerations,--law ignores in the main question, however it may admit
them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, as
circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large part of
responsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters little
into the law's survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack of
this rude world." Death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for
the protection of society, not for reformation, though the philanthropic
element in the State may use the period of imprisonment with a view to
reformation; nor in the history of the punishment of crime, of the
vengeance as such taken on men in addition to the social protection
sought, has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of its
enemies than they were in their attack, or shown any eminent justice
toward its victims in the sphere of their own lives. It is a terrible
and debasing record, up to this century at least, and uniformly
corrupted those who were its own instruments. It was the application of
force in its most material forms, and dehumanized those upon whom it was
exercised, placing them outside the pale of manhood as a preliminary to
its work. The lesson that the criminal remains a man, was one taught to
the law, not learned from it. On the civil side, likewise, similar
reservations must be made, both as regards its formulation and
operation. The law as an instrument of justice is a rough way of dealing
with the problems of the individual in society, but it is effective for
social ends; and, in its total body and practical results, it is a
priceless monument of human righteousness, sagacity, and mercy, and
though it lags behind opinion, as it must, and postpones to a new age
the moral and prudential convictions of the present, it is in its
treasury that these at last are stored.
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