IV The Contradiction and the Outcome T HREE general conclusions were reached in the preceding chapters. A survey of six great systems of political philosophy supports the proposition that there is a vital relation between the forms of state and the distribution of property, revolutions in the state being usually the results of contests over property. A study of the evolution of government in western civilization during many centuries shows the recognition of economic classes in the creation of political organisms. Finally, modern equalitarian democracy, which reckons all heads as equal and alike, cuts sharply athwart the philosophy and practice of the past centuries. Nevertheless, the democratic device of universal suffrage does not destroy economic classes or economic inequalities. It ignores them. Herein lies the paradox, the most astounding political contradiction that the world [89] has ever witnessed. Hence the question arises: Has political democracy solved the problem of the ages, wrung the answer from the sphinx? Is it a guarantee against the storms of revolution? Does it make impossible such social conflicts as those which tore ancient societies asunder? Does it afford to mankind a mastery over its social destiny? To ask these questions is to answer them.1 Nothing was more obvious in the thinking of western civilization before the outbreak of the World War than dissatisfaction with political democracy. Equally obvious was the discontent with representative government based on the doctrine of abstract numbers and civic equality. Whether one went into the countryside of Oregon or strolled along Quai d'Orsay, one heard lively debates over "the failure of representative government." The initiative and referendum and recall-direct government -more head counting on the theory of numbers and abstract equality, such was the answer of the Far West to the riddle. Europe had another answer, or rather many other answers. Indeed, John Stuart Mill, in his work on representative government published in 1859, nearly ten years before the radical suffrage 1 This lecture has been re-written since the close of the World War, but the main conclusions have not been altered. measure of 1867, sensed grave dangers ahead. He utterly rejected the theory that political democracy would inevitably avoid those acts of selfishness and arbitrary power that had characterized monarchies and oligarchies and aristocracies. "Looking at democracy in the way in which it is commonly conceived," he said, "as the rule of the numerical majority, it is surely possible that the ruling power may be under the dominion of sectional or class interests pointing to conduct different from that which would be dictated by impartial regard for the interest of all. . . . In all countries there is a majority of poor, a minority who, in contradistinction, may be called rich. Between these two classes, on many questions, there is a complete opposition of interest. We will suppose the majority sufficiently intelligent to be aware that it is not to their advantage to weaken the security of property, and that it would be weakened by any act of arbitrary spoliation. But is there not considerable danger lest they should throw upon the possessors of what is called realizable property and upon larger incomes, an unfair share, or even the whole of the burden of taxation; and having done so, add to the amount without scruple, expending the proceeds in modes supposed to conduce to the profit and advantage of the labouring class?" Mill then goes on to cite other examples of the possible abuse of political power in the interests of the economic classes. His solution of the problem was a balance of classes and the introduction of minority or proportional representation. "If the representative system could be made ideally perfect," he said, “and if it were possible to maintain it in that state, its organization should be such that these two classes, manual labourers and their affinities on one side, employers of labour and their affinities on the other, should be, in the arrangement of the representative system, equally balanced, each influencing about an equal number of votes in Parliament." more rational minority in each class should then hold the balance. "Assuming that the majority of each class, in any differences between them, would be mainly governed by their class interests, there would be a minority of each in whom that consideration would be subordinate to reason, justice, and the good of the whole; and this minority of either joining with the whole of the other, would turn the scale against any demands of their own [92] The majority which were not such as ought to prevail." Whether this solution is fanciful or sound need not detain us now. The point is that this learned and sincere friend of democracy, writing at the middle of the nineteeth century, believed that the introduction of "numerical democracy" had not solved and could not solve the most fundamental of all contradictions: namely the contests over property and the distribution of wealth that accompany the development of civilization. Indeed Mill's Indeed Mill's very solution, minority representation, in effect was designed to re-introduce, without rigid legal divisions, the scheme of class representation which had been for centuries the basis of all parliamentary systems. On the significance of this it is not necessary to comment. Long after Mill's day a group of continental writers, Leon Duguit, Charles Benoist, and Albert Schaeffle, for example, declared the system of artificial territorial divisions and numerical majorities to be a sham and a delusion, and advocated the frank and legal recognition of commerce, industry, property, professions, and crafts in the constitution of the representative system. They held that the |