Human Nature in Politics Part 11

These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be a.s.signed to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them.

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable ent.i.ty like the American 'ticket' and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative 'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the const.i.tuency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French _scrutin de liste_. The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates.

Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers.

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party a.s.sociation, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.

Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his Munic.i.p.al Representation Bill in the House of Lords,[78] contrasted his proposed system with that used in the London Borough Council elections, according to which a number of seats are a.s.signed to each ward and the voter may give one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number of candidates. It is true that the electoral machinery for the London Boroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of America. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how to vote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were six seats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was told by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not one of which I remembered to have seen before. If there had been one seat to be filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enough about one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote; and the local party committees would have known that I and others would do so. Bach party would then have circulated a portrait and a printed account of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had a strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I could not give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteen candidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. I therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who voted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket.' If for any reason the party committee put, to use an Americanism, a 'yellow dog' among the list of names, I voted for the yellow dog.

[78] April 30, 1907.

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different marks from my party card. On the a.s.sumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord Courtney's proposed system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the two systems until the votes are counted.

If the sole object of an election were to discover and record the exact proportion of the electorate who are prepared to vote for candidates nominated by the several party organisations Lord Courtney's scheme might be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a longer experience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidate nominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that a parliament of well-selected members who represent somewhat roughly the opinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selected members who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quote Lord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, a reflection of the community.'[79]

[79] Address at Stockport, p. 11.

To Lord Courtney the multi-member const.i.tuency, which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan will soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests, will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting to see whether the growing subst.i.tution of the new quant.i.tative and psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about elections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they will adopt the transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered elections, while retaining single-member const.i.tuencies, and therewith the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the whole of his const.i.tuents.

A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of the electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency.

The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902 the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural Parish Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.

In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral concentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility. In Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quant.i.tative mistake in psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the Philadelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallel columns of party 'tickets,' contained some four hundred names. The resulting effects on the _personnel_ of Philadelphian politics were as obvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however, concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of the elected boards and officials, and the subst.i.tution for them of a single elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, and whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to all the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by his nominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to subst.i.tute a quant.i.tative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election (or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to themselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. Lord Robert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that term, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "will of the people,"'[80] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should not defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so that he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrel between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public control of the methods of producing political opinion by the subst.i.tution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national excitement.

[80] _Times_, June 25, 1907.

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general intellectual att.i.tude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally'

of the canva.s.sers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid but irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered, having been s.n.a.t.c.hed away in carriages or motors from the making of match-boxes, or b.u.t.ton-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public house, or, since it was Sat.u.r.day evening, from bed. Most of them seemed to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable us to improve it.

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public houses could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness.

It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of a.s.serting themselves even in the presence of the canva.s.ser, whose hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who have just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibility half consciously a.s.sociated with the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of small effect.

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of unspoilt impulse.

If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed come. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among those who profit, and those who suffer by them. But no one who is near to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation.

A mere numerical increase in the number of persons in England who are interested in politics would indeed itself introduce a new and difficult political factor. The active politicians in England, those who take any part in politics beyond voting, are at present a tiny minority. I was to speak not long ago at an election meeting, and having been misdirected as to the place where the meeting was to be held, found myself in an unknown part of North London, compelled to inquire of the inhabitants until I should find the address either of the meeting-hall or of the party committee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at last a cabman on his way home to tea told me that there was a milkman in his street who was 'a politician and would know.' There are in London seven hundred thousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by the man who is in the best position to know that it would be safe to say that less than ten thousand persons actually attend the annual ward meetings of the various parties, and that not more than thirty thousand are members of the party a.s.sociations. That division of labour which a.s.signs politics to a special cla.s.s of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neighbours as well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far in most other parts of England as in London. But in no county in England, as far as I am aware, does the number of persons really active in politics amount to ten per cent. of the electorate.

There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to be true. The English Elementary Education Act was pa.s.sed in 1870, and the elementary schools may be said to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those who entered them, being six years old, at that date are now aged thirty-four. The statistics as to the production and sale of newspapers and cheap books and the use of free libraries, show that the younger working men and women in England read many times as much as their parents did. This, and the general increase of intellectual activity in our cities of which it is only a part, may very probably lead, as the social question in politics grows more serious, to a large extension of electoral interest. If so, the little groups of men and women who now manage the three English parties in the local const.i.tuencies will find themselves swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on taking some part in the choice of candidates and the formation of programmes.

That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process by which the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local party a.s.sociation are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled, as many of the American States have been compelled, to pa.s.s a series of Acts for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties.

The ordinary citizen would find then, much more obviously than he does at present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not only the marking of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an active share in that work of appointing and controlling party committees from which many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an instinctive dread.

But the most important difficulties raised by the extension of political interest from a very small to a large fraction of the population would be concerned with political motive rather than political machinery. It is astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed that individual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics, a.s.sumed, without realising the nature of their own a.s.sumption, that the representative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community.[81] At present there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination and sympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for the general good. But every organiser of elections knows that the supply is never more than sufficient, and payment of members, while it would permit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would also make it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective. The concentration both of administrative and legislative work in the hands of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is making the House of Commons yearly a less interesting place; and members have of late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the _personnel_ of the House should seriously deteriorate.

[81] E.g. James Mill, _Essay on Government_ (1825), 'We have seen in what manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of an interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely, by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties'

(p. 27).

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the members and candidates may be drawn from the cla.s.s of 'hustling'

company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of working-cla.s.s life. During the last twenty years I have been a.s.sociated, for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English political working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real to them. It is, for instance, the 'cla.s.s-conscious' working men who, in England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrors of a general European war. But as their number and responsibility increase they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as to the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a large scale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is very difficult for him to choose his a.s.sociates. If he is of an expansive temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds them--and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue therefore which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured tolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware of the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and receive help, and very unwilling to 'do' any man 'out of his job.' His parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a home with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read, things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy for him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his daily life.

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising that things whose existence we infer from reading are as important as the things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a list of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications of the man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the man whom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding on an improvement with complete impartiality as between the district one knows of on the map and the district one sees every morning. If a representative elected to govern a large area allows personal acquaintance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaintance and liking will he schemed for and exploited by those who have their own ends to gain. The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, where the interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from the inefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of the known official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed; as well as in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance the dimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimate sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen.

The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, very great in the parliamentary Labour Party. The working men who have been sent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked intelligence and morale and of considerable political experience. But the success or failure of any scheme aiming at social equality will depend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which the working cla.s.ses must necessarily send men of less exceptional ability and experience. I have never myself served on an elected local body the majority of whose members were weekly wage earners. But I have talked with men, both of working-cla.s.s and middle-cla.s.s origin, who have been in that position. What they say confirms that which I have inferred from my own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level of enthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with a difficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing with sectional interests and official discipline.

One is told that on such a body many members feel it difficult to realise that the way in which a well-intentioned man may deal with his own personal expenditure, his continued patronage, for instance, of a rather inefficient tradesman because he has a large family, or his refusal to contest an account from a dislike of imputing bad motives, is fatal if applied in the expenditure of the large sums entrusted to a public body. Sometimes there are even, one learns, indications of that good-humoured and not ill-meant laxity in expending public money which has had such disastrous results in America, and which lends itself so easily to exploitation by those in whom the habit of giving and taking personal favours has hardened into systematic fraud. When one of the West Ham Guardians, two years ago, committed suicide on being charged with corruption, the _Star_ sent down a representative who filled a column with the news. 'His death,' we were told, 'has robbed the district of an indefatigable public worker. County Council, Board of Guardians, and Liberal interests all occupied his leisure time.' 'One of his friends' is described as saying to the _Star_ reporter, 'You do not need to go far to learn of his big-souled geniality. The poor folks of the workhouse will miss him badly.'[82] When one has waded through ma.s.ses of evidence on American munic.i.p.al corruption, that phrase about 'big-souled geniality' makes one shudder.

[82] _Star_, November 28th, 1906.

The early history of the co-operative and trade-union movements in England is full of pathetic instances of this kind of failure, and both movements show how a new and more stringent ideal may be slowly built up. But such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, and must be part of the conscious organised thought of each generation if it is to be permanently effective.

Those difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed out by the opponents of democracy. But if democracy is to succeed they must be frankly considered by the democrats themselves; just as it is the engineer who is trying to build the bridge, and not the ferry-owner, who is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate the strain which the materials will stand. The engineer, when he wishes to increase the margin of safety in his plans, treats as factors in the same quant.i.tative problem both the chemical expedients by which he can strengthen his materials and the structural changes by which the strain on those materials can be diminished. So those who would increase the margin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire except to arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength of the individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually increased by moral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving or extending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy as may prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength.

CHAPTER III

OFFICIAL THOUGHT

It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under any conceivable system of representation cannot do the whole work of government themselves.

If all elections are held in single member const.i.tuencies of a size sufficient to secure a good supply of candidates; if the number of elections is such as to allow the political workers a proper interval for rest and reflection between the campaigns; if each elected body has an area large enough for effective administration, a number of members sufficient for committee work and not too large for debate, and duties sufficiently important to justify the effort and expense of a contest; then one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best number of men and women to be elected by the existing population of the United Kingdom--or rather less than one to every two thousand of the population.[83]

[83] I arrive at this figure by dividing the United Kingdom into single member parliamentary const.i.tuencies, averaging 100,000 in population, which gives a House of Commons of 440--a more convenient number than the existing 670. I take the same unit of 100,000 for the average munic.i.p.al area. Large towns would contain several parliamentary const.i.tuencies, and small towns would, as at present, be separate munic.i.p.al areas, although only part of a parliamentary const.i.tuency. I allow one local council of 50 on the average to each munic.i.p.al area.

This proportion depends mainly on facts in the psychology of the electors, which will change very slowly if they change at all. At present the amount of work to be done in the way of government is rapidly increasing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, the number of elected persons available for each unit of work must tend to decrease. The number of persons now elected in the United Kingdom (including, for instance, the Parish Councillors of rural parishes, and the Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, larger than my estimate, though it has been greatly diminished by the Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1902. Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers are still somewhat uneconomically distributed it represents a smaller actual working power than would be given by the plan which I suggest.

On the other hand, the number of persons (excluding the Army and Navy) given in the Census Returns of 1901 as professionally employed in the central and local government of the United Kingdom was 161,000. This number has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing rate, and consists of persons who give on an average at least four times as many hours a week to their work as can be expected from the average elected member.

What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, of twenty-three thousand elected, and, say, two hundred thousand non-elected persons? To begin with, ought the elected members be free to appoint the non-elected officials as they like? Most American politicians of Andrew Jackson's time, and a large number of American politicians to-day, would hold, for instance, as a direct corollary from democratic principles, that the elected congressman or senator for a district or State has a right to nominate the local federal officials. There may, he would admit, be some risk in that method, but the risk, he would argue, is one involved in the whole scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy as a whole are greater than its disadvantages.

Our political logic in England has never been so elementary as that of the Americans, nor has our faith in it been so unflinching. Most Englishmen, therefore, have no feeling of disloyalty to the democratic idea in admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency of officials to depend upon the personal character of individual representatives. At the General Election of 1906 there were at least two English const.i.tuencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) which returned candidates whose personal unfitness had been to most men's minds proved by evidence given in the law courts. Neither const.i.tuency was markedly unlike the average in any respect. The facts were well known, and in each case an attempt was made by a few public-spirited voters to split the party vote, but both candidates were successful by large majorities. The Borough of Croydon stands, socially and intellectually, well above the average, but Mr. Jabez Balfour represented Croydon for many years, until he was sentenced to penal servitude for fraud. No one in any of these three cases would have desired that the sitting member should appoint, say, the postmasters, or collectors of Inland Revenue for his const.i.tuency.

But though the case against the appointment of officials by individual representatives is clear, the question of the part which should be taken by any elected body as a whole in appointing the officials who serve under it is much more difficult, and cannot be discussed without considering what are to be the relative functions of the officials and the representatives after the appointment has taken place. Do we aim at making election in fact as well as in const.i.tutional theory the sole base of political authority, or do we desire that the non-elected officials shall exert some amount of independent influence?

The fact that most Englishmen, in spite of their traditional fear of bureaucracy, would now accept the second of these alternatives, is one of the most striking results of our experience in the working of democracy. We see that the evidence on which the verdict at an election must be given is becoming every year more difficult to collect and present, and further removed from the direct observation of the voters.

We are afraid of being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers or election leaflets for our knowledge, and we have therefore come to value, even if for that reason only, the existence of a responsible and more or less independent Civil Service. It is difficult to realise how short a time it is since questions for which we now rely entirely on official statistics were discussed by the ordinary political methods of agitation and advocacy. In the earlier years of George the Third's reign, at a time when population in England was, as we now know, rising with unprecedented rapidity, the question of fact whether it was rising or falling led to embittered political controversy.[84] In the spring of 1830 the House of Commons gave three nights to a confused party debate on the state of the country. The Whigs argued that distress was general, and the Tories (who were, as it happened, right) that it was local[85]. In 1798 or 1830 the 'public' who could take part in such discussions numbered perhaps fifty thousand at the most. At least ten million people must, since 1903, have taken part in the present Tariff Reform controversy; and that controversy would have degenerated into mere Bedlam if it had not been for the existence of the Board of Trade Returns, with whose figures both sides had at least to appear to square their arguments.

[84] Bonar's _Malthus_, chap. vii.

[85] _Hansard_, Feb. 4th, 5th, 6th, 1830.

If official figures did not exist in England, or if they did not possess or deserve authority, it is difficult to estimate the degree of political harm which could be done in a few years by an interested and deliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for the personal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, for instance, that our Civil Service were either notoriously inefficient or believed to be dominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent 'currency agitation' should suddenly spring up. A powerful press syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring that the privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserve are 'strangling British Industry.' The contents bills of two hundred newspapers denounce every day the 'monopolists' and the 'gold-bugs,' the 'lies and shams' of the Bank Returns, and the 'paid perjurers of Somerset House.' The group of financiers who control the syndicate stand to win enormous sums by the creation of a more 'elastic' currency, and subscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincere paper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of the professional economists. A vigorous and well-known member of parliament--a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, or some one loosely connected with the Labour movement--whom everybody has. .h.i.therto feared and no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at the head of the movement, denounces the 'fossils' and 'superior persons' who at present lead Conservative and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and, with the help of the press syndicate and the subscription fund of the 'Free Money League,' begins to capture the local a.s.sociations, and through them the central office of the party which is for the moment in opposition, Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were opposed only by counter-electioneering, might not succeed, even although its proposals were wholly fraudulent and its leaders so ignorant or so criminal that they could only come into power by discrediting two-thirds of the honest politicians in the country and by replacing them with 'hustlers' and 'boodlers' and 'grafters,' and the other species for whom American political science has provided names? How is the ordinary voter--a market-gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter--to distinguish by the help of his own knowledge and reasoning power between the various appeals made to him by the 'Reformers' and the 'Safe Money Men' as to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the note issue--the 'ten per cent.' on the blue posters and the 'cent. per cent.'

on the yellow? Nor will his conscience be a safer guide than his judgment. A 'Christian Service Wing' of the Free Money League may be formed, and his conscience may be roused by a white-cravatted orator, intoxicated by his own eloquence into something like sincerity, who borrows that phrase about 'Humanity crucified on a cross of gold' which Mr. W.J. Bryan borrowed a dozen years ago from some one else. In an optimistic mood one might rely on the subtle network of confidence by which each man trusts, on subjects outside his own knowledge, some honest and better-informed neighbour, who again trusts at several removes the trained thinker. But does such a personal network exist in our vast delocalised urban populations?

It is the vague apprehension of such dangers, quite as much as the merely selfish fears of the privileged cla.s.ses, which preserves in Europe the relics of past systems of non-elective government, the House of Lords, for instance, in England, and the Monarchy in Italy or Norway.

Men feel that a second base in politics is required, consisting of persons independent of the tactics by which electoral opinion is formed and legally ent.i.tled to make themselves heard. But political authority founded on heredity or wealth is not in fact protected from the interested manipulation of opinion and feeling. The American Senate, which has come to be representative of wealth, is already absorbed by that financial power which depends for its existence on manufactured opinion; and our House of Lords is rapidly tending in the same direction. From the beginning of history it has been found easier for any skilled politician who set his mind to it, to control the opinions of a hereditary monarch than those of a crowd.

The real 'Second Chamber,' the real 'const.i.tutional check' in England, is provided, not by the House of Lords or the Monarchy, but by the existence of a permanent Civil Service, appointed on a system independent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and holding office during good behaviour. If such a service were, as it is in Russia and to a large extent in India, a sovereign power, it would itself, as I argued in the last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulating opinion. But the English Civil servants in their present position have the right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity of making their will, by fair means or foul, prevail.