Two New Books on Democracy
The Essentials of Democracy. By A. D. Lindsay, LL.D., Master of Balliol College, Oxford. (Oxford Press. 3a. 6d.) THESE two books, both of them owing their origin to lecture courses, are welcome additions to the post-War literature on democracy. As the Master of Balliol observes, whilst it is once more becoming the fashion for superior persons to sneer at democracy, there is no ground for the fear that other competing forms of government are likely to prove more successful. " The new deinocracy of Germany, the hopeful, alert democracies of the smaller States like Czechoslovakia and Estonia, above all, the application in the League of Nations of the principles of democratic government to inter- national relations are far more striking witnesses to the success of democracy than the repudiation by Italy and Spain of a democracy they never possessed are witnesses to its failure. It almost looks as though it was the success and not the failure of democracy which made men disillusioned with it . . Real democracy when experienced is such a thoroughly Satisfactory form of government that men are always trying to extend it and to give it more to do."
The War has, in fact, settled once and for all the question of principle which was undecided throughout the nineteenth century. It has made the world safe for democracy as against absolutism and other forms of privilege. The real problem with which these two books are concerned is not the justi- fication of democracy in itself but how to adjust it to the conditions of an age very different from that in . which its theories• were first propagated. Democracy, in other words, has to be made safe for the world of to-day.
The two books deal with this problem of adjustment in very different ways. The Master of Balliol, in the true spirit of an Oxford philosopher, devotes his main attention to certain difficulties involved in the democratic theory itself. Since his lectures were delivered at Swarthmore College, an institution with strong Quaker traditions, it is natural that he should go back to its religious origins in the sects which made the small independent congregation the Unit of government. Thanks to the Clarke Papers, he can carry us back to the great debate held on October 25th, 1647, at the Grand Council of Officers at Putney, between Cromwell and Ireton on the one hand and the Levelers on the other. Here, as he rightly points out, the two strains in the democratic theory are most vividly brought out—more vividly even than in the discussions between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in Russia two-and-a-half centuries later. When democracy is expressed in religious terms, whether Anabaptist or Marxian, it is impossible to adjust it to the everyday needs of government, and Cromwell's greatness, as Dr. Lindsay shoWs, was never better manifested than in his persuasive WI tolerant refutation of the Levellers' theory. " At such a meeting as this it has been said we should wait upon God and hearken to the voice of God speaking to every one of us. I confess it is a high duty but when anything is spoken as from God I think the rule is : Let the rest judge." No one can understand the English democratic tradition who does not go beyond Mill and the eighteenth century disciples of Rousseau to these seventeenth century controversies ; and it is because this strain, at once religious and practical, in English democracy is so little understood on the Continent that the intellectual contact between the British and Con- tinental progressive movements has been so precarious and the spirit of the Labour Party, in particular, so much misunderstood.
We have no space to dwell on the many interesting points. brought out in these five lectures, One brief observation may,
however, be made. Dr. Lindsay speaks of the way in which in the simple religious congregation it was the habit to take "the sense of the meeting" and points out how with the increase in the scale of democratic organization this has been superseded by voting and the rule of the majority. It is interesting to note that, at the other end of the scale, in the working of the League of Nations, where the unit is no longer a local sect but practically the entire world, the device of taking the sense of the meeting has been reintroduced, and has proved itself most effective. In this connexion the League of Nations can truly claim to be democratic, although it imposes no test on the form of government under which its members live.
Mr. Delisle Burns' book deals more directly with the actual problems, political, social, industrial and educational, of the present moment. His thesis is a simple one. Accepting the democratie System, he asks how it is to be made possible for the ordinary common elector, man or woman, to make his or her positive contribution of thought or action to the manifold problems in the public life of the day. As against the school of thought which holds that governments should be carried on by experts and that the common man should do no more than decide in principle between one very general form of policy and another, Mr. Delisle Burns pleads for an actual association of the common elector in the details of government. He bases his argument on the belief that the common man " has many abilities hitherto unused " from which such contribution could be made and that, in fact, he not only can rule but when given the opportunity takes a pleasure in so doing. He faces the objection that this involves a degree of intellectual power. attention and judgment, which has not been found among the mass of the population in previous ages, by asserting that the co-operative activities of the modern world have tended to bring out powers of reasoning and practical action which have hitherto been inhibited. " Owing to the growth of inter- national commerce, the common man finds his abilities more readily available and useful " : and, as he pithily puts it : more men think in cinemas than thought in mediaeval churches." The result of this stimulus to intellectual activity extends to the moral sphere : " a moral standard is operative which is quite different from that of the Middle Ages, whether in fourteenth century Europe or in twentieth century China."
One criticism may be brought against both these volumes. They state clearly enough the problem of democracy in the complex world of to-day and they indicate the general direction in which the adjustment between the older theory and present- day conditions must be sought. But in neither case do we come to close grips with the actual difficulties to which the upholders of the democratic principle are exposed both in government and in industry. The Master of Balliol, for instance, admits that business organization seems to have been more effective in the last few generations than political government and mentions the idea of the democratization of industry only to reject it. But he does not set before us a practical alternative. Nor does Mr. Delisle Burns really face such problems as have arisen, for instance, in the Trade Union movement when what was once a local self-governing unit and later a national self-governing association finds itself confronted with public responsibilities linking it up with the State itself. The history of the Trade Union movement, as of the Labour Party and, indeed, of the British Parliament in the last ten years, would afford a fascinating field for a detailed study of the adjustment of democratic theory to reality. We recom- mend it to one or both of these writers as the natural sequel
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