Jerome K. Jerome - "Idle Ideas in 1905"

Robert Bloomfield - "May Day With The Muses"

Azel Ames - "The Mayflower and Her Log, v2"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1595"

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Books: Public Opinion

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That system, whenever it was competent and honest, had to assume that
no man could have more than a very partial experience of public
affairs. In the sense that he can give only a little time to them,
that assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But
ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give
little attention to public questions, but that the attention available
would have to be confined to matters close at hand. It would have been
visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and
complicated events could conceivably be reported, analyzed, and
presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made
by an amateur. That time is now in sight. There is no longer any doubt
that the continuous reporting of an unseen environment is feasible. It
is often done badly, but the fact that it is done at all shows that it
can be done, and the fact that we begin to know how badly it is often
done, shows that it can be done better. With varying degrees of skill
and honesty distant complexities are reported every day by engineers
and accountants for business men, by secretaries and civil servants
for officials, by intelligence officers for the General Staff, by some
journalists for some readers. These are crude beginnings but radical,
far more radical in the literal meaning of that word than the
repetition of wars, revolutions, abdications and restorations; as
radical as the change in the scale of human life which has made it
possible for Mr. Lloyd George to discuss Welsh coal mining after
breakfast in London, and the fate of the Arabs before dinner in Paris.

For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the
range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political
ideas. There have, of course, been plenty of men who did not realize
that the range of attention was the main premise of political science.
They have built on sand. They have demonstrated in their own persons
the effects of a very limited and self-centered knowledge of the
world. But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and
Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists,
speculation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see
the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head.




CHAPTER XVII

THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY

1

THAT groups of self-centered people would engage in a struggle for
existence if they rubbed against each other has always been evident.
This much truth there is at any rate in that famous passage in the
Leviathan where Hobbes says that "though there had never been any time
wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another,
yet at all times kings and _persons_ of _sovereign authority
because_ of their _independency_, are in continual jealousies
and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons
pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another..." [Footnote:
_Leviathan_, Ch. XIII. Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as
concerning their Felicity and Misery.]

2

To circumvent this conclusion one great branch of human thought, which
had and has many schools, proceeded in this fashion: it conceived an
ideally just pattern of human relations in which each person had well
defined functions and rights. If he conscientiously filled the role
allotted to him, it did not matter whether his opinions were right or
wrong. He did his duty, the next man did his, and all the dutiful
people together made a harmonious world. Every caste system
illustrates this principle; you find it in Plato's Republic and in
Aristotle, in the feudal ideal, in the circles of Dante's Paradise, in
the bureaucratic type of socialism, and in laissez-faire, to an
amazing degree in syndicalism, guild socialism, anarchism, and in the
system of international law idealized by Mr. Robert Lansing. All of
them assume a pre-established harmony, inspired, imposed, or innate,
by which the self-opinionated person, class, or community is
orchestrated with the rest of mankind. The more authoritarian imagine
a conductor for the symphony who sees to it that each man plays his
part; the anarchistic are inclined to think that a more divine concord
would be heard if each player improvised as he went along.

But there have also been philosophers who were bored by these schemes
of rights and duties, took conflict for granted, and tried to see how
their side might come out on top. They have always seemed more
realistic, even when they seemed alarming, because all they had to do
was to generalize the experience that nobody could escape. Machiavelli
is the classic of this school, a man most mercilessly maligned,
because he happened to be the first naturalist who used plain language
in a field hitherto preempted by supernaturalists. [Footnote: F. S.
Oliver in his _Alexander Hamilton_, says of Machiavelli (p. 174):
"Assuming the conditions which exist--the nature of man and of
things--to be unchangeable, he proceeds in a calm, unmoral way, like a
lecturer on frogs, to show how a valiant and sagacious ruler can best
turn events to his own advantage and the security of his dynasty."] He
has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who
ever lived. He truly described the technic of existence for the
self-contained state. That is why he has the disciples. He has the bad
name chiefly because he cocked his eye at the Medici family, dreamed
in his study at night where he wore his "noble court dress" that
Machiavelli was himself the Prince, and turned a pungent description
of the way things are done into an eulogy on that way of doing them.

In his most infamous chapter [Footnote: _The Prince_, Ch. XVIII.
"Concerning the way in which Princes should keep faith." Translation
by W. K. Marriott.] he wrote that "a prince ought to take care that he
never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the
above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who hears and
sees him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and
religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this
last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by
the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come
in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really
know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the
opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them;
and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is
not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.... One prince of
the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything
else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and
either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and
kingdom many a time."

That is cynical. But it is the cynicism of a man who saw truly without
knowing quite why he saw what he saw. Machiavelli is thinking of the
run of men and princes "who judge generally more by the eye than by
the hand," which is his way of saying that their judgments are
subjective. He was too close to earth to pretend that the Italians of
his day saw the world steadily and saw it whole. He would not indulge
in fantasies, and he had not the materials for imagining a race of men
that had learned how to correct their vision.

The world, as he found it, was composed of people whose vision could
rarely be corrected, and Machiavelli knew that such people, since they
see all public relations in a private way, are involved in perpetual
strife. What they see is their own personal, class, dynastic, or
municipal version of affairs that in reality extend far beyond the
boundaries of their vision. They see their aspect. They see it as
right. But they cross other people who are similarly self-centered.
Then their very existence is endangered, or at least what they, for
unsuspected private reasons, regard as their existence and take to be
a danger. The end, which is impregnably based on a real though private
experience justifies the means. They will sacrifice any one of these
ideals to save all of them,... "one judges by the result..."

3

These elemental truths confronted the democratic philosophers.
Consciously or otherwise, they knew that the range of political
knowledge was limited, that the area of self-government would have to
be limited, and that self-contained states when they rubbed against
each other were in the posture of gladiators. But they knew just as
certainly, that there was in men a will to decide their own fate, and
to find a peace that was not imposed by force. How could they
reconcile the wish and the fact?

They looked about them. In the city states of Greece and Italy they
found a chronicle of corruption, intrigue and war. [Footnote:
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention...
and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been
violent in their deaths." Madison, _Federalist_, No. 10.] In
their own cities they saw faction, artificiality, fever. This was no
environment in which the democratic ideal could prosper, no place
where a group of independent and equally competent people managed
their own affairs spontaneously. They looked further, guided somewhat
perhaps by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to remote, unspoiled country
villages. They saw enough to convince themselves that there the ideal
was at home. Jefferson in particular felt this, and Jefferson more
than any other man formulated the American image of democracy. From
the townships had come the power that had carried the American
Revolution to victory. From the townships were to come the votes that
carried Jefferson's party to power. Out there in the farming
communities of Massachusetts and Virginia, if you wore glasses that
obliterated the slaves, you could see with your mind's eye the image
of what democracy was to be.

"The American Revolution broke out," says de Tocqueville, [Footnote:
_Democracy in America,_ Vol. I, p. 51. Third Edition] "and the
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in
the townships, took possession of the state." It certainly took
possession of the minds of those men who formulated and popularized
the stereotypes of democracy. "The cherishment of the people was our
principle," wrote Jefferson. [Footnote: Cited in Charles Beard,
_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy._ Ch. XIV. ] But the
people he cherished almost exclusively were the small landowning
farmers: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,
if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar
deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which
He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the
face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is
a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example."

However much of the romantic return to nature may have entered into
this exclamation, there was also an element of solid sense. Jefferson
was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer
to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other
human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence
off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the
farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to
those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these
logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign
commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory
of any form of government that was not centered in the small
self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked
that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough,
in reality, to defend ourselves against every invader, we might enjoy
an eternal rusticity and live, forever, thus apathized and vulgar
under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference." [Footnote:
_Op. cit_., p. 426.]

4

The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisting of an ideal
environment and a selected class, did not conflict with the political
science of his time. It did conflict with the realities. And when the
ideal was stated in absolute terms, partly through exuberance and
partly for campaign purposes, it was soon forgotten that the theory
was originally devised for very special conditions. It became the
political gospel, and supplied the stereotypes through which Americans
of all parties have looked at politics.

That gospel was fixed by the necessity that in Jefferson's time no one
could have conceived public opinions that were not spontaneous and
subjective. The democratic tradition is therefore always trying to see
a world where people are exclusively concerned with affairs of which
the causes and effects all operate within the region they inhabit.
Never has democratic theory been able to conceive itself in the
context of a wide and unpredictable environment. The mirror is
concave. And although democrats recognize that they are in contact
with external affairs, they see quite surely that every contact
outside that self-contained group is a threat to democracy as
originally conceived. That is a wise fear. If democracy is to be
spontaneous, the interests of democracy must remain simple,
intelligible, and easily managed. Conditions must approximate those of
the isolated rural township if the supply of information is to be left
to casual experience. The environment must be confined within the
range of every man's direct and certain knowledge.

The democrat has understood what an analysis of public opinion seems
to demonstrate: that in dealing with an unseen environment decisions
"are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly they ought not to
be." [Footnote: Aristotle, _Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. IV.] So he
has always tried in one way or another to minimize the importance of
that unseen environment. He feared foreign trade because trade
involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they
produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to
have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of
self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real
world, he went passionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian
communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his
prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination,
Independence. Not one of these ideas carries with it any notion of
consent or community beyond the frontiers of the self-governing
groups. The field of democratic action is a circumscribed area. Within
protected boundaries the aim has been to achieve self-sufficiency and
avoid entanglement. This rule is not confined to foreign policy, but
it is plainly evident there, because life outside the national
boundaries is more distinctly alien than any life within. And as
history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally
to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated
their ideals. The most successful democracies, in fact, Switzerland,
Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and America until recently, have had
no foreign policy in the European sense of that phrase. Even a rule
like the Monroe Doctrine arose from the desire to supplement the two
oceans by a glacis of states that were sufficiently republican to have
no foreign policy.

Whereas danger is a great, perhaps an indispensable condition of
autocracy, [Footnote: Fisher Ames, frightened by the democratic
revolution of 1800, wrote to Rufus King in 1802: "We need, as all
nations do, the compression on the outside of our circle of a
formidable neighbor, whose presence shall at all times excite stronger
fears than demagogues can inspire the people with towards their
government." Cited by Ford, _Rise and Growth of American
Politics,_ p. 69.] security was seen to be a necessity if democracy
was to work. There must be as little disturbance as possible of the
premise of a self-contained community. Insecurity involves surprises.
It means that there are people acting upon your life, over whom you
have no control, with whom you cannot consult. It means that forces
are at large which disturb the familiar routine, and present novel
problems about which quick and unusual decisions are required. Every
democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible
with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of masses is such
that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather
blindly. This has not made non-resistants out of democrats, but it has
resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist aims. Even
when the wars are in fact wars of conquest, they are sincerely
believed to be wars in defense of civilization.

These various attempts to enclose a part of the earth's surface were
not inspired by cowardice, apathy, or, what one of Jefferson's critics
called a willingness to live under monkish discipline. The democrats
had caught sight of a dazzling possibility, that every human being
should rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations. With
what they knew of the art of government, they could, no more than
Aristotle before them, conceive a society of autonomous individuals,
except an enclosed and simple one. They could, then, select no other
premise if they were to reach the conclusion that all the people could
spontaneously manage their public affairs.

5

Having adopted the premise because it was necessary to their keenest
hope, they drew other conclusions as well. Since in order to have
spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self-contained
community, they took it for granted that one man was as competent as
the next to manage these simple and self-contained affairs. Where the
wish is father to the thought such logic is convincing. Moreover, the
doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes
true in the rural township. Everybody in a village sooner or later
tries his hand at everything the village does. There is rotation in
office by men who are jacks of all trades. There was no serious
trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the
democratic stereotype was universally applied, so that men looked at a
complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.

Not only was the individual citizen fitted to deal with all public
affairs, but he was consistently public-spirited and endowed with
unflagging interest. He was public-spirited enough in the township,
where he knew everybody and was interested in everybody's business.
The idea of enough for the township turned easily into the idea of
enough for any purpose, for as we have noted, quantitative thinking
does not suit a stereotype. But there was another turn to the circle.
Since everybody was assumed to be interested enough in important
affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody
was interested.

This meant that men formed their picture of the world outside from the
unchallenged pictures in their heads. These pictures came to them well
stereotyped by their parents and teachers, and were little corrected
by their own experience. Only a few men had affairs that took them
across state lines. Even fewer had reason to go abroad. Most voters
lived their whole lives in one environment, and with nothing but a few
feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their religious
training, and rumor to go on, they had to conceive that larger
environment of commerce and finance, of war and peace. The number of
public opinions based on any objective report was very small in
proportion to those based on casual fancy.

And so for many different reasons, self-sufficiency was a spiritual
ideal in the formative period. The physical isolation of the township,
the loneliness of the pioneer, the theory of democracy, the Protestant
tradition, and the limitations of political science all converged to
make men believe that out of their own consciences they must extricate
political wisdom. It is not strange that the deduction of laws from
absolute principles should have usurped so much of their free energy.
The American political mind had to live on its capital. In legalism it
found a tested body of rules from which new rules could be spun
without the labor of earning new truths from experience. The formulae
became so curiously sacred that every good foreign observer has been
amazed at the contrast between the dynamic practical energy of the
American people and the static theorism of their public life. That
steadfast love of fixed principles was simply the only way known of
achieving self-sufficiency. But it meant that the public opinions of
any one community about the outer world consisted chiefly of a few
stereotyped images arranged in a pattern deduced from their legal and
their moral codes, and animated by the feeling aroused by local
experiences.

Thus democratic theory, starting from its fine vision of ultimate
human dignity, was forced by lack of the instruments of knowledge for
reporting its environment, to fall back upon the wisdom and experience
which happened to have accumulated in the voter. God had, in the words
of Jefferson, made men's breasts "His peculiar deposit for substantial
and genuine virtue." These chosen people in their self-contained
environment had all the facts before them. The environment was so
familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking
about substantially the same things. The only real disagreements,
therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts. There was no
need to guarantee the sources of information. They were obvious, and
equally accessible to all men. Nor was there need to trouble about the
ultimate criteria. In the self-contained community one could assume,
or at least did assume, a homogeneous code of morals. The only place,
therefore, for differences of opinion was in the logical application
of accepted standards to accepted facts. And since the reasoning
faculty was also well standardized, an error in reasoning would be
quickly exposed in a free discussion. It followed that truth could be
obtained by liberty within these limits. The community could take its
supply of information for granted; its codes it passed on through
school, church, and family, and the power to draw deductions from a
premise, rather than the ability to find the premise, was regarded as
the chief end of intellectual training.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE

1

"IT has happened as was to have been foreseen," wrote Hamilton,
[Footnote: _Federalist,_ No. 15] "the measures of the Union have
not been executed; the delinquencies of the States have, step by step,
matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the
wheels of the national government and brought them to an awful
stand."... For "in our case the concurrence of thirteen distinct
sovereign wills is requisite, under the confederation, to the complete
execution of every important measure that proceeds from the Union."
How could it be otherwise, he asked: "The rulers of the respective
members... will undertake to judge of the propriety of the measures
themselves. They will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or
required to their immediate interests or aims; the momentary
conveniences or inconveniences that would attend its adoption. All
this will be done, and in a spirit of interested and suspicious
scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons
of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong
predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to
mislead the decision. The same process must be repeated in every
member of which the body is constituted; and the execution of the
plans framed by the councils of the whole, will always fluctuate on
the discretion of the ill-informed and prejudiced opinion of every
part. Those who have been conversant in the proceedings of popular
assemblies, who have seen how difficult it often is, when there is no
exterior pressure of circumstances, to bring them to harmonious
resolutions on important points, will readily conceive how impossible
it must be to induce a number of such assemblies, deliberating at a
distance from each other, at different times, and under different
impressions, long to cooperate in the same views and pursuits."

Over ten years of storm and stress with a congress that was, as John
Adams said, [Footnote: Ford, _op. cit._, p. 36.] "only a diplomatic
assembly," had furnished the leaders of the revolution "with an
instructive but afflicting lesson" [Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 15.]
in what happens when a number of self-centered communities
are entangled in the same environment. And so, when they went
to Philadelphia in May of 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of
Confederation, they were really in full reaction against the
fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democracy. Not only
were the leaders consciously opposed to the democratic spirit of
the time, feeling, as Madison said, that "democracies have ever
been spectacles of turbulence and contention," but within the
national frontiers they were determined to offset as far as they could
the ideal of self-governing communities in self-contained environments.
The collisions and failures of concave democracy, where men
spontaneously managed all their own affairs, were before their eyes.
The problem as they saw it, was to restore government as against
democracy. They understood government to be the power to make
national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation;
democracy they believed was the insistence of localities and classes
upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests
and aims.