Human Nature in Politics Part 10

CHAPTER II

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change not only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our political inst.i.tutions.

I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which produced the const.i.tutions under which most civilised nations now live, was inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked, representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of the conditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have been itself a mistake?

Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditional democratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting again from the beginning, and considering what are the ends representation is intended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to good government.

The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essence of a representative government is that it depends on the periodically renewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and the degree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance of accomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by a majority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey.

The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representative democracy was a mistake, raises the preliminary question whether the consent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of good government. To this question Plato, who among the political philosophers of the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of a modern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered, No. To him it was incredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleeting shadows of popular opinion. He proposed, therefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his Republic should live under the despotic government of those who by 'slaving for it'[65] had acquired a knowledge of the reality which lay behind appearance. Comte, writing when modern science was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the same proposal. Mr. H.G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous speculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia which is the result of the forcible overthrow of representative government by a voluntary aristocracy of trained men of science. He appeals, in a phrase consciously influenced by Plato's metaphysics, to 'the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible world....'[66] There are some signs, in America as well as in England, that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both pa.s.sionately in earnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in their experience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-blooded manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians, turn 'back to Plato'; and when once this question is started, neither our existing mental habits nor our loyalty to democratic tradition will prevent it from being fully discussed.

[65] [Greek: douleusanti te ktesei autou] (_Republic,_ p. 494).

[66] Wells, _A Modern Utopia_, p. 263. 'I know of no case for the elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers....'

Wells, _Antic.i.p.ations_, p. 147.

To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an experience of government without consent larger than any other that has ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. The Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about a thousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensures that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of government; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern.

Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, however carefully selected and trained, must still inhabit 'the ostensible world.' The Anglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours--when he is toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or famine-prevention--may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science which is far removed from the jealousies and superst.i.tions of the villagers in his district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by his efficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on life which decides his choice of ends; and the Anglo-Indian outlook on life is conditioned, not by the problem of British India as history will see it a thousand years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in the little government stations, with their trying climates, their narrow society, and the continual presence of an alien and possibly hostile race. We have not, it is true, yet followed the full rigour of Plato's system, and chosen the wives of Anglo-Indian officials by the same process as that through which their husbands pa.s.s. But it may be feared that even if we did so, the lady would still remain typical who said to Mr. Nevinson, 'To us in India a pro-native is simply a rank outsider.'[67]

[67] _The Nation_, December 21, 1907.

What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom the Anglo-Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion depends even more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not on things as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. The avowed tactics of our empire in the East have therefore always been based by many of our high officials upon psychological and not upon logical considerations. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, we blow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our rights in dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference to 'the moral effect upon the native mind.' And, if half what is hinted at by some ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religious antipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if not encouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintain our dominant position.

The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore one that would exist at least equally in Plato's corporate despotism as in the most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating pa.s.sage in his essay on _The First Principles of Government_, says: 'It is ... on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and the most popular.'[68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat then becomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, or religious, or social hatred, or the l.u.s.t for foreign war, with less scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic State.

[68] Hume's _Essays_, chap. iv.

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that the loyalty of the subject-cla.s.ses in his Republic should be secured once for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach a religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell their people 'one magnificent lie';[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effect on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease which it was intended to cure.

[69] [Greek: gennaion ti en pseudomenous] (_Republic_, p. 414).

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method of securing consent.

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than anything else which can be subst.i.tuted for it. And representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging ent.i.ty, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In England at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of the male s.e.x above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in const.i.tuencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, s.e.x, qualification, and const.i.tuency, as well as in the political power given to the representative, variation is possible.

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by Fenelon and Helvetius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of const.i.tutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but where the machinery of British parliamentary government would not work. In Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary local const.i.tuencies only two per cent, of those ent.i.tled to vote go to the poll.[70] As long as that is the case representative government is impossible. A slow process of education might increase the proportion of voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, who understand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, to discover other methods by which the vague desires of the native population can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made in some measure to depend on them.

[70] _Times_, January 6, 1908.

The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an 'advisory Council of Notables';[71] with the possible result that we may be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealings with the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in our regulation of factory labour.

[71] Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 885.

In England itself, though great political inventions are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable tendencies.

A series of laws have, for instance, been pa.s.sed in the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex process by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not in the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of securing them by regulation.

The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing it with the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has taken place in the conditions under which that decision is formed which is expressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.[72] The various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters beyond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jury together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in England might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did in Athens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jury might have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hired advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the _Private Orations_ of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the witnesses should burst into pa.s.sionate weeping than that they should tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. If such an inst.i.tution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would have taken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own version of the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reserved for the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of the prisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly party vote.

[72] See, _e.g._, Stephen, _History of the Criminal Law_, vol. i. pp.

260-72.

But in the English jury trial it has come to be a.s.sumed, after a long series of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of the jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is produced has been more and more completely controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the essential feature of the trial.

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case.

They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual of the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury his first lesson in the fallibility of the un.o.bserved and uncontrolled inferences of the human brain. The 'said I's,' and 'thought I's,' and 'said he's,' which are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are here banished on the ground that they are 'not evidence,' and witnesses are compelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations of sight and hearing.

The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, if they are well-intentioned men, often find themselves giving, to their own surprise, perfectly consistent accounts of the events at issue. The barristers' tricks of advocacy are to some extent restrained by professional custom and by the authority of the judge, and they are careful to point out to the jury each other's fallacies. Newspapers do not reach the jury box, and in any case are prevented by the law as to contempt of court from commenting on a case which is under trial. The judge sums up, carefully describing the conditions of valid inference on questions of disputed fact, and warning the jury against those forms of irrational and unconscious inference to which experience has shown them to be most liable. They then retire, all carrying in their minds the same body of simplified and dissected evidence, and all having been urged with every circ.u.mstance of solemnity to form their conclusions by the same mental process. It constantly happens therefore that twelve men, selected by lot, will come to a unanimous verdict as to a question on which in the outside world they would have been hopelessly divided, and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions of fact so difficult as to leave the practised intellect of the judge undecided, will very generally be right. An English law court is indeed during a well-governed jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules of valid reasoning are ill.u.s.trated by experiment; and when, as threatens to occur in some American States and cities, it becomes impossible to enforce those rules, the jury system itself breaks down.[73]

[73] On the jury system see Mr. Wells's _Mankind in the Making_, chapter vii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where it is desirable that government should be supported by popular consent.

At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree of economy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do not make good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order that popular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may not be unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing cla.s.s or person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced to death or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of a jury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are now taken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by special fitness for their task.

In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine the tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear upon electors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practise open bribery the whole system of representation would break down at once. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several generations on the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was the serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of 1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definite bargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavish expenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personally popular, and create an impression that his connection with the const.i.tuency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 therefore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candidate at a parliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and later Acts, applying both to parliamentary and munic.i.p.al elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties after death, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paid for by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, no election meeting may be held in a building where any form of food or drink is habitually sold, although that building may be only a Co-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room.

The existing laws against Corrupt Practices represent, it is true, rather the growing purpose of the State to control the conditions under which electoral opinion is formed, than any large measure of success in carrying out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion of the expenditure at any English election is now incurred by bodies enrolled outside the const.i.tuency, and nominally engaged, not in winning the election for a particular candidate, but in propagating their own principles. Sometimes the candidate whom they support, and whom they try to commit as deeply as possible, would be greatly relieved if they withdrew. Generally their agents are an integral part of his fighting organisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election is covered by a special subscription made by him to the central fund. Every one sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clauses in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbid the employment of paid canva.s.sers, though no one as yet has put forward any plan for preventing it. But it is acknowledged that unless the whole principle is to be abandoned, new legislation must take place; and Lord Robert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a 'stringent and far-reaching Corrupt Practices Act.'[74] If, however, an act is carried stringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development of electoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new and hitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty of political appeal.

[74] _Times_, June 26, 1907.

A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any const.i.tuency for three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which the voters were every day further removed from the state of mind in which serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Now no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to effective political reasoning.

A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of the Ballot. Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful and public-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly or secretly? Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. Since men acted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and since landlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws against intimidation, to bring 'sinister' motives to bear upon voters whose votes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow as a corollary from utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole philosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiance till the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved the abandonment of the whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure and pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can be summed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, that even under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause which induce the ordinary citizen to vote. 'Once in a thousand times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may cross him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year's expenditure if the side he votes for wins.' He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. 'His motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter's frame of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it.' But ideas of right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our neighbours. 'Since then the real motive which induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an interested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decided is whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense of social duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when the act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. But this question is answered as soon as stated. When in every other act of a man's life which concerns his duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is the single case in which he will act better for being sheltered against all comment.'[75]

[75] Letter to the _Reader_, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J.S.M., quoted as Mill's by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, _Public Responsibility and Vote by Ballot_, pp. 89, 90.

Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of political impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those 'acts of a man's life which concern his duty to others,' to which Mill refers--the paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of one's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense.

Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canva.s.ser, the excitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one's opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of one's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the canva.s.ser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it is a promise.

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign in favour of 'proportional representation,' in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing system of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-member const.i.tuency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them--the Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals--have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large const.i.tuencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester with its eight seats being given as an example.

This system, according to Lord Courtney, 'will lead to the dropping of the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'[76] But the arguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at the a.s.sizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.

[76] Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics' Inst.i.tute, Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6.

The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Society mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society and through eight newspapers. 'The const.i.tuency,' we are told, 'was supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some of the main divisions of public opinion.'[77] The names were, in fact, Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law, and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected.

[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6.

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their readers to recognise.

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the intellectualist a.s.sumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, 'to us,' as they were 'in themselves.' But an ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'to him' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told.

The Proportional Representation Society seem to a.s.sume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is a.s.sumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each const.i.tuency, _i.e._ by meetings and canva.s.sing and the distribution of 'election literature.' Lord Courtney's proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary const.i.tuency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day.