PG73755.B00627
Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd. The helter-skelter strivings of an endless number of social atoms can never give us a fair and ordered world. It may be true that we have lived under the domination either of individuals or of crowds up to the present time, but now is the moment when this must be deliberately challenged. The party boss must go, the wise men chosen by the reform associations must go, the crowd must be abandoned. The idea of the All has gripped us—but the idea has not been made workable, we have yet to find the way. We have said, “The people must rule.” We now ask, “How are they to rule?” It is the technique of democracy which we are seeking. We shall find it in group organization.

PG73755.B00628
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PG73755.B00629
Footnote 67:

PG73755.B00630
Arcos, Romains and Vildrac are the chief of these. Romains, who has written “La Vie Unanime,” is the most interesting for our present purpose, for his togetherness is so plainly that of the herd:

PG73755.B00631
... “quelle joie De fondre dans ton corps [le ville] immense oú l’on a chaud!”

PG73755.B00632
Here is our old friend, the wild ox, in the mask of the most civilized (perhaps) portion of our most civilised (perhaps) nation. Again

PG73755.B00633
“Nous sommes indistincts: chacun de nous est mort; Et la vie unanime est notre sépulture.”

PG73755.B00634
Footnote 68:

PG73755.B00635
Other results of the increased reading of newspapers and magazines are that large questions are driving out trivial interests (I find this very marked in the country), and the enormous amount of publicity now given everything finds a channel to the public through the press. The reports of commissions, like the Industrial Relations Commission, the surveys, like the Pittsburgh Survey, the reports of foundations, like the Russell Sage, the reports of the rapidly increasing bureaus of research, like the New York Municipal Bureau, all find their way to us through the columns of our daily or weekly or monthly. Therefore we have more material on which to found individual thinking.

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PG73755.B00637
XIX

PG73755.B00638
THE TRUE DEMOCRACY

PG73755.B00639
--------------

PG73755.B00640
DEMOCRACY is the rule of an interacting, interpermeating whole. The present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believed in the people were thinking of working-men only. A man said to me once, “I am very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a working-man.” What in the world has that to do with democracy? Democracy is faith in humanity, not faith in “poor” people or “ignorant” people, but faith in every living soul. Democracy does not enthrone the working-man, it has nothing to do with sympathy for the “lower classes”; the champions of democracy are not looking down to raise any one up, they recognize that all men must face each other squarely with the knowledge that the give-and-take between them is to be equal.

PG73755.B00641
The enthusiasts of democracy to-day are those who have caught sight of a great spiritual unity which is supported by the most vital trend in philosophical thought and by the latest biologists and social psychologists. It is, above all, what we have learnt of the psychical processes of association which makes us believe in democracy. Democracy is every one building the single life, not my life and others, not the individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the individual which _is_ the state, the state which _is_ the individual. “When a man’s eye shall be single”—do we quite know yet what that means? Democracy is the fullest possible acceptance of the single life.

PG73755.B00642
Thus democracy, although often considered a centrifugal tendency, is rather a centripetal force. Democracy is not a spreading out: it is not the extension of the suffrage—its merely external aspect—it is a drawing together; it is the imperative call for the lacking parts of self. It is the finding of the one will to which the will of every single man and woman must contribute. We want women to vote not that the suffrage may be extended to women but that women may be included in the suffrage: we want what they may have to add to the whole. Democracy is an infinitely including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinct for wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations. Democracy is really neither extending nor including merely, but creating wholes.

PG73755.B00643
This is the primitive urge of all life. This is the true nature of man. Democracy must find a form of government that is suited to the nature of man and which will express that nature in its manifold relations. Or rather democracy is the self-creating process of life appearing as the true nature of man, and through the activity of man projecting itself into the visible world in fitting form so that its essential oneness will declare itself. Democracy then is not an end, we must be weaving all the time the web of democracy.

PG73755.B00644
The idea of democracy as representing the all-will gives us a new idea of aristocracy. We believe in the few but not as opposed to the many, only as included in all. This makes a tremendous change in political thought. We believe in the influence of the good and the wise, but they must exert their influence within the social process; it must be by action and reaction, it must be by a subtle permeation, it must be through the sporting instinct to take back the ball which one has thrown. The wise can never help us by standing on one side and trying to get their wisdom across to the unwise. The unwise can never help us (what has often been considered the most they could do for the world) by a passive willingness for the wise to impose their wisdom upon them. We need the intermingling of all in the social process. We need our imperfections as well as our perfections. So we offer what we have—our unwisdom, our imperfections—on the altar of the social process, and it is only by this social process that the wonderful transmutation can take place which makes of them the very stuff of which the Perfect Society is to be made. Imperfection meets imperfection, or imperfection meets perfection; it is the _process_ which purifies, not the “influence” of the perfect on the imperfect. This is what faith in democracy means. Moreover, there is the ignorance of the ignorant and the ignorance of the wise; there is the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the ignorant. Both kinds of ignorance have to be overcome, one as much as the other; both kinds of wisdom have to prevail, one as much as the other.

PG73755.B00645
In short, there is not a static world for the wise to influence. This truth is the blow to the old aristocracy. But we need the wise within this living, moving whole, this never-ceasing action and interaction, and this truth is the basis of our new conception of aristocracy. Democracy is not opposed to aristocracy—it includes aristocracy.

PG73755.B00646
As biology shows us nature evolving by the power within itself, so social psychology shows us society evolving by the power of its own inner forces, of _all_ its inner forces. There is no passive material within it to be guided by a few. There is no dead material in a true democracy.

PG73755.B00647
When people see the confusion of our present life, its formlessness and planlessness, the servile following of the crowd, the ignorance of the average man, his satisfaction in his ignorance, the insignificance of the collective life, its blindness and its hopelessness, they say they do not believe in democracy. But this is not democracy. The so-called evils of democracy—favoritism, bribery, graft, bossism—are the evils of our lack of democracy, of our party system and of the abuses which that system has brought into our representative government. It is not democracy which is “on trial,” as is so often said, but it is we ourselves who are on trial. We have been constantly trying to see what democracy meant from the point of view of institutions, we have never yet tried to see what it meant from the point of view of men.

PG73755.B00648
If life could be made mechanical, our method would be correct, but as mechanics is creature and life its superabounding creator, such method is wholly wrong. When people say that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy, they usually mean that while we have some “popular” institutions, we have not enough, and that when we get enough “popular” institutions, our inadequacies will be met. But no form is going to fulfil our needs. This is important to remember just now, with all the agitation for “democratic control.” You cannot establish democratic control by legislation: it is not democratic control to allow the people to assent to or refuse a war decided on by diplomats; there is only one way to get democratic control—by people learning how to evolve collective ideas. The essence of democracy is not in institutions, is not even in “brotherhood”; it is in that organizing of men which makes most sure, most perfect, the bringing forth of the common idea. Democracy has one task only—to free the creative spirit of man. This is done through group organization. We are sometimes told that democracy is an attitude and must grow up in the hearts of men. But this is not enough. Democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving the will of the people. For this reason the study of group psychology is a necessary preliminary to the study of democracy. Neither party bosses nor unscrupulous capitalists are our undoing, but our own lack of knowing how to do things together.

PG73755.B00649
The startling truth that the war is bringing home to many of us is that unity must be something more than a sentiment, it must be an actual system of organization. We are now beginning to see that if you want the fruits of unity, you must _have_ unity, a real unity, a coöperative collectivism. Unity is neither a sentiment nor an intellectual conception, it is a psychological process produced by actual psychic interaction.

PG73755.B00650
How shall we gain a practical understanding of this essential unity of man? By practising it with the first person we meet; by approaching every man with the consciousness of the complexity of his needs, of the vastness of his powers. Much is written of the power of history and tradition in giving unity to a community or nation. This has been overemphasized. If this were the only way of getting unity, there would be little hope for the future in America, where we have to make a unity of people with widely differing traditions, and little hope for the future in Europe where peace is unthinkable unless the past can be forgotten and new ties made on the basis of mutual understanding and mutual obligation. To have democracy we must live it day by day. Democracy is the actual commingling of men in order that each shall have continuous access to the needs and the wants of others. Democracy is not a form of government; the democratic soul is born within the group and then it develops its own forms.

PG73755.B00651
Democracy then is a great spiritual force evolving itself from men, utilizing each, completing his incompleteness by weaving together all in the many-membered community life which is the true Theophany. The world to-day is growing more spiritual, and I say this not in spite of the Great War, but because of all this war has shown us of the inner forces bursting forth in fuller and fuller expression. The Great War has been the Great Call to humanity and humanity is answering. It is breaking down the ramparts to free the way for the entrance of a larger spirit which is to fill every single being by interflowing between them all. France, England, America—how the beacon lights flash from one to the other—the program of the British Labor Party, the speeches of our American President, the news of the indomitable courage of France—these are like the fires in Europe on St. John’s Eve, which flash their signals from hill-top to hill-top. Even the school children of France and America write letters to each other. American men and women are working for the reconstruction of France as they would work for the reconstruction of their own homes—and all this because we are all sharing the same hope. A new faith is in our hearts. The Great War is the herald of another world for men. The coming of democracy is the spiritual rebirth. We have been told that our physical birth and life are not all, that we are to be born again of water and the spirit. Not indeed of _water_ and spirit, but of _blood_ and spirit, are the warring children of men, a groaning, growing humanity, coming to the Great Rebirth.

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PG73755.B00653
XX

PG73755.B00654
THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

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PG73755.B00656
THE two problems of democracy to-day are: (1) how to make the individual politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the steady growth towards individualism. The hope of democracy rests on the individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the development of the social consciousness, or that democracy is the development of individualism; until we have become in some degree socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It is not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the individual.

PG73755.B00657
From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray, involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the individual to society, and gave us the false political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century, fostered by Bentham’s ideas of individual happiness, by the _laissez-faire_ of the Manchester school and the new industrial order, by Herbert Spencer’s interpretations of the recent additions to biological knowledge, by Mill, etc., the doctrine of “individual rights” became more firmly entrenched. Government interference was strenuously resisted, “individual” freedom was the goal of our desire, “individual” competition and the survival of the fittest the accredited method of progress. The title of Herbert Spencer’s book, “The Man versus the State,” implies the whole of this false political philosophy built on an unrelated individual.

PG73755.B00658
But during the latter part of the nineteenth century there began to grow up, largely at first through the influence of T. H. Green, influenced in his turn by Kant and Hegel, an entirely different theory of the state. The state was now not to be subordinate to the individual, but it was to be the fulfilment of the individual. Man was to get his rights and his liberty from membership in society. Green had at once a large influence on the political thought of England and America, and gradually, with other influences, upon practical politics. The growing recognition of the right and duty of the state to foster the life of its members, so clearly and unequivocally expressed in the social legislation of Lloyd George, we see as early as the Education Act of 1870, the Factory Act of 1878 (which systematized and extended previous Factory Acts), and the various mines and collieries acts from 1872.

PG73755.B00659
I do not mean to imply that the growing activity of the state was due entirely or mainly to the change of theory in regard to the individual and the state; when the disastrous results of _laissez-faire_ were seen, then people demanded state regulation of industry. Theory and practice have acted and reacted on each other. Some one must trace for us, step by step, the interaction of theory and practice in regard to the individual and his relation to society, from the Middle Ages down to the present day.[69]

PG73755.B00660
What has been the trend of our development in America? Particularism was at its zenith when our government was founded. Our growth has been away from particularism and towards a true individualism.[70]

PG73755.B00661
It is usual to say that the framers of our constitution were individualists and gave to our government an individualistic turn. We must examine this. They did safeguard and protect the individual in his life and property, they did make the bills of rights an authoritative part of our constitutions, they did make it possible for individuals to aggrandize themselves at the expense of society, their ideal of justice was indeed of individual not of social justice. And yet all this was negative. The individual was given no large positive function. The individual was feared and suspected. Our early constitutions showed no faith in men: the Massachusetts constitution expressly stated that it was not a government of men. The law of the land was embodied in written documents with great difficulty of amendment just because the people were not trusted. As we look at the crudities of the Declaration of Independence, as we examine our aristocratic state constitutions, as we study our restricted federal constitution, as we read the borrowed philosophy of our early statesmen, we see very little indication of modern democracy with its splendid faith in man, but a tendency towards aristocracy and a lack of real individualism on every side.

PG73755.B00662
To be sure it was at the same time true that the government was given no positive power. Every one was thoroughly frightened of governments which were founded on status and resulted in arbitrary authority. The executive power was feared, therefore it was so equipped as to be unequal to its task; the legislative power was feared, so the courts were given power over the legislatures, were allowed to declare their acts valid or invalid; the national government was feared, therefore Congress was given only certain powers. Power was not granted because no man and no institution was trusted. The will to act could not be a motive force in 1789, because no embodiment of the will was trusted; the framers of our constitutions could not conceive of a kind of will which could be trusted. Fear, not faith, suspicion not trust, were the foundation of our early government. The government had, therefore, no large formative function, it did not look upon itself as a large social power. As the individual was to be protected, the government was to protect. All our thinking in the latter part of the eighteenth century was rooted in the idea of a weak government; this has been thought to show our individualism.[71]

PG73755.B00663
But our government as imagined by its founders did not work.[72] Our system of checks and balances gave no real power to any department. Above all there was no way of fixing responsibility. A condition of chaos was the result. Such complicated machinery was almost unworkable; there was no way of getting anything done under our official system. Moreover, the individual was not satisfied with his function of being protected, he wanted an actual share in the government. Therefore an extra-official system was adopted, the party organization. The two chief reasons for this adoption were: (1) to give the individual some share in government, (2) to give the government a chance to carry out definite policies, to provide some kind of a unifying power.

PG73755.B00664
What effect has party organization had on the individual and on government? The domination of the party gives no real opportunity to the individual: originality is crushed; the aim of all party organization is to turn out a well-running voting machine. The party is not interested in men but in voters—an entirely different matter. Party organization created artificial majorities, but gave to the individual little power in or connection with government. The basic weakness of party organization is that the individual gets his significance only through majorities. Any method which looks to the fulfilment of the individual through the domination of majorities is necessarily not only partial but false. The present demand that the nation shall have the full power of the individual is the heaviest blow that party organization has ever received.

PG73755.B00665
Now consider, on the other hand, what party organization has done for the government. The powers of government moved steadily to political bosses and business corporations. Boss-rule, party domination and combinations of capital filled in the gaps in the system of government we inaugurated in the eighteenth century. The marriage of business and politics, while it has been the chief factor in entrenching the party system, was the outcome of that system, or rather it was the outcome of the various unworkabilities of our official government. The expansion of big business, with its control of politics, evasion of law, was inevitable; we simply had no machinery adequate to our need, namely, the development of a vast, untouched continent. The urge of that development was an overwhelming force which swept irresistibly on, carrying everything before it, swallowing up legal disability, creating for itself extra-legal methods. We have now, therefore, a system of party organization and political practice which subverts all our theories. Theoretically the people have the power, but really the government is the primaries, the conventions, the caucuses. Officials hold from the party. Party politics became corrupt because party government was irresponsible government. The insidious power of the machine is due to its irresponsibility.

PG73755.B00666
The evils of our big business have not come because Americans are prone to cheat, because they want to get the better of their fellows, because their greed is inordinate, their ambition domineering. Individuals have not been to blame, but our whole system. It is the system which must be changed. Our constitutions and laws made possible the development of big business; our courts were not “bought” by big business, but legal decision and business practice were formed by the same inheritance and tradition. The reformation of neither will accomplish the results we wish, but the nation-wide acceptance, through all classes and all interests, of a different point of view.

PG73755.B00667
The next step was the wave of reform that swept over the country. The motive was excellent; the method poor. The method was poor because the same method was adopted which these reform movements were organized to fight, one based on pure crowd philosophy. It was a curious case of astigmatism. The trouble was that the reformers did not see accurately what they were fighting; they were fighting essentially the non-recognition of the individual, but they did not see this, so they went on basing all their own work on the non-appreciation of men. Their essential weakness was the weakness of the party machine—all their efforts were turned to the voter not the man. Their triumphs were always the triumphs of the polls. Their methods were principally three: change in the forms of government (charters, etc.), the nomination of “good” men to office, and exhortation to induce “the people” to elect them.

PG73755.B00668
The idea of “good” men in office was the fetich of many reform associations. They thought that their job was to find three or four “good” men and then once a year to hypnotize the electorate to “do their duty” and put these men into office, and then all would go well if before another year three or four more good men could be found. What a futile and childish idea which leaves out of account the whole body of citizenship! It is only through this main body of citizenship that we can have a decent government and a sound social life. That is, in other words, it is only by a genuine appreciation of the individual, of every single individual, that there can be any reform movement with strength and constructive power. The wide-spread fallacy that good officials make a good city is one which lies at the root of much of our thinking and insidiously works to ruin our best plans, our most serious efforts. This extraordinary belief in officials, this faith in the panacea of a change of charters, must go. If our present mechanical government is to turn into a living, breathing, pulsing life, it must be composed of an entire citizenship educated and responsible.

PG73755.B00669
This the reform associations now recognize, in some cases partially, in some cases fully. The good government association of to-day has a truer idea of its function. The campaign for the election of city officials is used as a means of educating the mass of citizens: besides the investigation and publication of facts, there is often a clear showing of the aims of government and an enlightening discussion of method. Such associations have always considered the interests of the city as a whole; they have not appealed, like the party organizations, to local sentiment.
