The Rise of the Democracy Part 1

The Rise of the Democracy.

by Joseph Clayton.

PREFACE

This short account of the rise of political democracy is necessarily but an outline of the matter, and while it is not easy to define the exact limits, there is no difficulty in noting omissions. For instance, there is scarcely any reference to the work of poets or pamphleteers. John Ball's rhyming letters are quoted, but not the poems of Langland, and the political songs of the Middle Ages are hardly mentioned. The host of political pamphleteers in the seventeenth century are excluded, with the exception of Lilburne and Winstanley, whose work deserves better treatment from posterity than it received from contemporaries. Defoe's vigorous services for the Whigs are unnoticed, and the democratic note in much of the poetry of Burns, Blake, Byron and Sh.e.l.ley is left unconsidered, and the influence of these poets undiscussed. The anti-Corn Law rhymes of Ebenezer Eliot, and the Chartist songs of Ernest Jones were notable inspirations in their day, and in our own times Walt Whitman and Mr. Edward Carpenter have been the chief singers of democracy. But a whole volume at least might be written on the part the pen has played in the struggle towards democracy.

Again, there is no mention of Ireland in this short sketch. A Nationalist movement is not necessarily a democratic movement, and the Irish Nationalist Party includes men of very various political opinions, whose single point of agreement is the demand for Home Rule. In India and Egypt the agitation is for representative inst.i.tutions. Ireland might, or might not, become a democracy under Home Rule--who can say?

The aim of the present writer has been to trace the travelled road of the English people towards democracy, and to point out certain landmarks on that road, in the hope that readers may be turned to examine more closely for themselves the journey taken. For the long march teems with adventure and spirited enterprise; and, noting mistakes and failures in the past, we may surely and wisely, and yet with greater daring and finer courage, pursue the road, not unmindful of the charge committed to us in the centuries left behind.

J.C.

HAMPSTEAD, _September, 1911._

THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRACY

INTRODUCTION

THE BRITISH INFLUENCE

Our business here is to give some plain account of the movement towards democracy in England, only touching incidentally on the progress of that movement in other parts of the world. Mainly through British influences the movement has become world wide; and the desire for national self-government, and the adoption of the political instruments of democracy--popular enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and the rule of elected representatives--are still the aspirations of civilised man in East and West. The knowledge that these forms of democratic government have by no means at all times and in all places proved successful does not check the movement. As the British Parliament and the British Const.i.tution have in the past been accepted as a model in countries seeking free political inst.i.tutions, so to-day our Parliament and our Const.i.tutional Government are still quoted with approval and admiration in those lands where these inst.i.tutions are yet to be tried.

The rise of democracy, then, is a matter in which Britain is largely concerned; and this in spite of the fact that in England little respect and less attention has been paid to the expounders of democracy and their constructive theories of popular government. The notion that philosophers are the right persons to manage affairs of state and hold the reins of Government has always been repugnant to the English people, and, with us, to call a man "a political theorist" is to contemn him. The English have not moved towards democracy with any conscious desire for that particular form of government, and no vision of a perfect State or an ideal commonwealth has sustained them on the march. Our boast has been that we are a "practical" people, and so our politics are, as they ever have been, experimental. Reforms have been accomplished not out of deference to some moral or political principle, but because the abuse to be remedied had become intolerable. Dissatisfaction with the Government and the conviction that only by enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and the free election of representatives can Parliament remove the grounds of dissatisfaction, have carried us towards democracy.

GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE

We have been brought to accept Abraham Lincoln's famous phrase, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," as a definition of democracy; but in that acceptance there is no harking back to the early democracies of Greece or Rome, so beloved by the French democrats of the eighteenth century, who, however, knew very little about those ancient states--or any vain notion of restoring primitive Teutonic democracy.

The sovereign a.s.semblies of Greece--the Ecclesia of Athens, and the Apella of Sparta--the Comitia Centuriata of Rome, have no more resemblance to democracy in the twentieth century than the Witenagemot has to the British Parliament; and the democracy which has arisen in modern times is neither to be traced for its origin to Greece or Rome, nor found to be evolved from Anglo-Saxon times. The early democracies of Athens and Sparta were confined to small states, and were based on a slave population without civic rights.

There was not even a conception that slaves might or should take part in politics, and the slaves vastly outnumbered the citizens. Modern democracy does not tolerate slavery, it will not admit the permanent exclusion of any body of people from enfranchis.e.m.e.nt; though it finds it hard to ignore differences of race and colour, it is always enlarging the borders of citizenship. So that already in the Australian Commonwealth, in New Zealand, in certain of the American States, in Norway, and in Finland, we have the complete enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of all men and women who are of age to vote.

Apart from this vital difference between a slave-holding democracy and a democracy of free citizens--a difference that rent the United States in civil war, and was only settled in America by democracy ending slavery--ancient democracy was government by popular a.s.sembly, and modern democracy is government through elected representatives. The former is only possible in small communities with very limited responsibilities--a parish meeting can decide questions of no more than strictly local interest; for our huge empires of to-day nothing better than representative government has been devised for carrying out the general will of the majority.

As for the early English Witenagemot, it was simply an a.s.sembly of the chiefs, and, though crowds sometimes attended, all but the great men were the merest spectators. Doubtless the folk-moot of the tribe was democratic, for all free men attended it, and the English were a nation of freeholders, and the slaves were few--except in the west--and might become free men.[1]

The shire-moot, too, with its delegates from the hundred-moots, was equally democratic. But with feudalism and the welding of the nation, tribal democracies pa.s.sed away, leaving, however, in many places a valuable tradition of local self-government.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY

A steady and invincible belief that those who maintain the defence of the country and pay for the cost of government should have a voice in the great council of the nation, and the conviction that effective utterance can be found for that voice in duly chosen representatives, are the foundations on which democracy has built. Democracy itself comes in (1) when it is seen that all are being taxed for national purposes; and (2) the opinion finds acceptance that responsibilities of citizenship should be borne by all who have reached the age of manhood and are of sound mind.

To sketch the rise of democracy in England is to trace the steady resistance to kings who would govern without the advice of counsellors, and to note the growing determination that these counsellors must be elected representatives. Only when the absolutism of the Crown is ended and a Parliament of elected members has become the real centre of government, is it possible, without a revolution, for democracy to be established.

Much of this book is given up, then, to the old stories of kingly rule checked and slowly superseded by aristocracy. And all the old attempts at revolution by popular insurrection are again retold, not only because of the witness they bear to the impossibility in England of achieving democracy by the violent overthrow of government, but because they also bear witness to the heroic resolution of the English people to take up arms and plunge into a sea of troubles rather than bear patiently ills that were unseemly for men to endure in silence. Popular insurrection failed, but over and over again violence has been resorted to in the resistance to tyranny, and has been justified by its victory. If Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, and Robert Ket are known as beaten revolutionaries, Stephen Langton, Simon of Montfort, and John Hampden are acclaimed as patriots for not disdaining the use of armed resistance.

The conclusion is that a democratic revolution was not to be accomplished in England by a rising of the people, but that forcible resistance even to the point of civil war was necessary to guard liberties already won, or to save the land from gross misgovernment. But always the forcible resistance, when successful, has been made not by revolutionaries but by the strong champions of const.i.tutional government. The fruit of the resistance to John was the Great Charter; of Simon of Montfort's war against Henry III., the beginning of a representative Parliament; of the war against Charles, the establishment of Parliamentary government. Lilburne and his friends hoped that the civil war and the abolition of monarchy would bring in democracy, though democracy was never in the mind of men like Hampden, who made the war, and was utterly uncongenial to Cromwell and the Commonwealth men. But the sanct.i.ty of monarchy received its death-blow from Cromwell, and perished with the deposing of James II.; and there has been no resurrection. To the Whig rule we owe the transference of political power from the Crown to Parliament. Once it is manifest that Parliament is the instrument of authority, that the Prime Minister and his colleagues rule only by the permission and with the approval of the House of Commons, and that the House of Commons itself is chosen by a certain number of electors to represent the nation, then it is plain that the real sovereignty is in the electors who choose the House of Commons. As long as the electors are few and consist of the great landowners and their satellites, then the const.i.tutional government is aristocracy, and democracy is still to come.

And just as discontent with monarchy, and its obvious failure as a satisfactory form of government, brought in aristocracy, so at the beginning of the nineteenth century discontent with aristocracy was rife, and a new industrial middle-cla.s.s looked for "Parliamentary reform," to improve the condition of England.

BRITISH DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENTAL, NOT DOCTRINAIRE

Resistance to royal absolutism, culminating in the acknowledged ascendancy of Parliament and the triumphant aristocracy of 1688, was never based on abstract principles of the rights of barons and landowners, but sprang from the positive, definite conviction that those who furnished arms and men for the king, or who paid certain moneys in taxation, were ent.i.tled to be heard in the councils of the king; and the charters given in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--from Henry I. to Henry III.--confirmed this conviction. The resistance to the Stuarts was still based on the conviction that direct taxation conferred political privileges, but now the claim to speak in the great council of the realm had become a request to be listened to by the king, and pa.s.sed rapidly from that to a resolution that the king should have no money from Parliament if he refused to listen. The practical inconvenience of a king altogether at variance with Parliament was held to be sufficient justification for getting rid of James II., and for hobbling all future kings with the Bill of Rights.

The dethronement of aristocracy in favour of democracy has proceeded on very similar lines. The ma.s.s of English people were far too wretched and far too ignorant at the end of the eighteenth century to care anything about abstract "rights of man," and only political philosophers and a few artisans hoped for improvement in their condition by Parliamentary reform.

Agricultural England accepted the rule of landowners as an arrangement by providence. It was the industrial revolution that shattered the feudal notions of society, and created a manufacturing population which knew nothing of lowly submission to pastors and masters. A middle-cla.s.s emerged from the very ranks of the working people. The factory system brought fortunes to men who a few years earlier had been artisans, and to these new capitalists in the nineteenth century the aristocracy in power was as irksome as the Stuarts had been to the Whigs. If, as the Whigs taught, those who paid the taxes were ent.i.tled to a voice in the government, then the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to Parliament. It seemed monstrous that places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham had no one in the House of Commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants.

The manufacturer wanted Parliamentary representation because he hoped through Parliament to secure the abolition of the political disabilities of Nonconformists, and to get financial changes made that would make the conditions of trade more profitable. And he felt that it would be better for the country if he and the cla.s.s he represented could speak freely in Parliament.

The workman wanted the vote because he had been brought to believe that, possessing the vote, he could make Parliament enact laws that would lighten the hardships of his life. The whole of the manufacturing cla.s.s--capitalist and workman alike--could see by 1820 that the House of Commons was the instrument of the electorate, and that to get power they must become electors. (Yet probably not one per cent. of them could express clearly any theory of popular sovereignty.) The old Whig families, kept out of office by the Tories whom George III. had placed in power, and who now controlled the House of Commons, supported reform and the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the middle cla.s.s because they saw no way of getting back into power except by a new electorate and a redistribution of Parliamentary seats. At the beginning of the twentieth century the landowner, still Whig, though now, as a general rule enrolled with the Unionist Party, has not been excluded from political power, but the representatives of the middle-cla.s.s and of the working people are predominant in the House of Commons. The claim of the House of Lords to reject the bills of the Commons has been, in our time, subjected to the criticism formerly extended to the royal prerogative, and an Act--the Parliament Act--has now been pa.s.sed which formally requires the Lords to accept, without serious amendment, every Bill sent up from the Commons in three successive sessions.

The transition from monarchy to aristocracy in England was brought about at the price of civil war. In many countries democracy has been born in revolution, and the birth pains have been hard and bitter. But in England in the nineteenth century democracy was allowed to come into being by permission of the aristocracy, and has not yet reached its full stature. It is true that violence, bloodshed, loss of life, and destruction of property marked the pa.s.sage of the great Reform Bill; that more than once riots and defiance of law and order have been the expression of industrial discontent; but on the whole the average Englishman is content to wait for the redress of wrongs by Parliamentary action. Women have quite recently defied the law, refused to pay taxes, and made use of "militant methods" in their agitation for enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. But the women's plea has been that, as they are voteless, these methods have been necessary to call attention to their demands. Democratic advance has often been hindered and delayed by government, and by a national disinclination from rapid political change; but as the character of government has changed with the changed character of the electorate and the House of Commons, so resistance to democracy has always been abandoned when the advance was widely supported, and further delay seemed dangerous to the public order.

The House of Lords is thus seen to yield to the popular representatives in the House of Commons, and the government, dependent on the House of Commons, to listen to the demand of women for enfranchis.e.m.e.nt.

While the House of Commons completes its a.s.sertion of political supremacy, and insists on the absolute responsibility of the chosen representatives of the electorate, the agitation for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women is the reminder that democracy has yet to widen its borders. Progress to democracy in the last one hundred years is visible not only in the enlarged number of enfranchised citizens, but in the general admission that every extension of the franchise has been to the public good; not only in the fact that men of all cla.s.ses and trades now have their representatives in Parliament, but in the very wide acknowledgment that women without votes cannot get that attention by members of the House of Commons that is given to male electors. That the majority of electors have expressed a decided opinion that the power of the House of Lords should be curtailed, as the power of the monarchy has been curtailed, and that the decisions of the House of Commons are only to be corrected by the House of Commons, is evidence that under our obviously imperfect Parliamentary system the will of the electors does get registered on the Statute Book.

EDUCATION TO DEMOCRACY

Apart from the direct political education to democracy, it is well to note the other agencies that have been at work, preparing men and women for the responsible task of national self-government.

In the Middle Ages the religious guilds and the trade guilds, managed by their own members, gave men and women a training in democratic government.

The parish, too, was a commune, and its affairs and finances were administered by duly elected officers.[2]

But the guilds, with their numerous almshouses and hospitals, were all suppressed early in Edward VI.'s reign, and their funds confiscated. As for the parish, it was shorn of all its property, save the parish church, in the same reign, and its old self-governing life dwindled away to the election of churchwardens.

It was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century that the working cla.s.ses, by the formation of trade unions, once more took up the task of education in self-government. From that time onward, through trade unions, co-operative societies, and friendly societies, with their annual conferences and congresses, a steady training in democracy has been achieved; and our Labour Party of to-day, with its Members of Parliament, its members of county and district councils, and its Justices of the Peace, would hardly have been possible but for this training. Other agencies may be mentioned. The temperance movement, the organisation of working-men's clubs, and the local preaching of the Nonconformist Churches--particularly the Primitive Methodist denomination--have all helped to educate workmen in the conduct of affairs, and to create that sense of personal responsibility which is the only guarantee of an honest democracy.

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY STRUGGLES AGAINST THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWN

THE GREAT CHURCHMEN

We are far from any thoughts of democracy in the early struggles against the absolutism of the Crown. The old love of personal liberty that is said to have characterised the Anglo-Saxon had no political outlet under Norman feudalism. What we note is that three Archbishops of Canterbury were strong enough and brave enough to stand up against the unchecked rule of kings, and the names of these great Archbishops--Anselm, Thomas a Becket, and Stephen Langton--are to be honoured for all time for the services they rendered in the making of English liberties. Not one of the three was in any sense a democrat. It is not till the latter part of the fourteenth century that we find John Ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering for the first time in England a democratic doctrine. Anselm, Becket, and Langton did their work, as Simon of Montfort, and as Eliot and Hampden worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of an intolerable autocracy. All along in English history liberties have been gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when the powers of the Crown had been made subject to Parliament that it was possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, for Parliament itself to become converted from an a.s.sembly of aristocrats to a governing body that really represented the nation.

But in considering the rise of democracy we can no more omit the early struggles against the absolutism of the Crown than we can pa.s.s over Simon of Montfort's Parliament, or the unsuccessful popular revolts, or the war with Charles I., or the Whig revolution of 1688. They are all incidents of pre-democratic days, but they are all events of significance. Democracy is no new order of society, conceived in the fertile mind of man; it has been slowly evolved and brought to birth after centuries of struggle, to be tried as a form of government only when other forms are outgrown, and cease to be acceptable.

All the great men--heroic and faulty--who withstood the tyranny of their day, not only wrested charters from kings, they left a tradition of resistance; and this tradition has been of incalculable service to a nation seeking self-government. It is easy to dismiss the work of Anselm and Becket as mere disputes between monarch and Churchman, to treat lightly the battle for the Great Charter as a strife between king and barons. Just as easy is it to regard the Peasant Revolt of the fourteenth century and Jack Cade's rebellion in the fifteenth century as the tumults of a riotous mob.

The great point is to see clearly in all these contests, successful and unsuccessful, the movement for liberty, for greater security and expansion of life in England, and to note that only by a stern endurance and a willingness not to bear an irksome oppression have our liberties been won.

In the winning of these liberties we have proved our fitness for democracy, for a government that will allow the fullest measure of self-development.

Now, what was it that Anselm contended for, first with William II. and then with Henry I.?

ARCHBISHOP ANSELM AND NORMAN AUTOCRACY