VULGAR DEMOCRACY.
IF any one wants to study the genius of democracy when, in the most vulgar of all its forms, it saturates a clever man's mind, he should study Lord Randolph Churchill's letter to the president of the Blackpool Conservative Association —Mr. H. H. Wainwright—published on Wednesday last. What we have always meant by democracy is this,—that when the people have once decided what in the way of legislation or administration they think beneficial for themselves, they shall have the means of doing that on which they have decided, and trying for themselves whether it be good or bad. That involves, of course, the uselessness of perpetual tilting against permanent and deeply-rooted decisions of public opinion, and implies that men who cannot discover in themselves the force of imagination and passion needful to change the creed of multitudes, and yet cannot heartily acquiesce in that creed, should stand aside from public life. But it does not involve, and most emphatically ought not to involve, the willingness of leaders to resign the serious endeavour to lead the public on those moot questions which are not yet decided. On the con- trary, it ought to imply, in a healthy State, the most earnest efforts of all political leaders to compete with each other in dis- covering the best tests of political duty, and in recommending them to the consideration of the people. If ever we should arrive at a time in which the leaders of the people, instead of trying to form public opinion, by pointing out and insisting on the wisest and noblest policy to pursue, endeavour only to discover the direction in which public opinion, if left entirely to itself, will lazily crystallise, we shall certainly have arrived at a time of rapid political degeneration, in which even the elements for that "conflict for existence" which ensures the survival of the fittest opinion, will have ceased to be. If
ever the leaders, instead of pressing their own highest con- victions upon the people, simply say to themselves, To what conclusion will this people, if left to itself, be most likely to come? Whatever it be, that is the conclusion which I should wish beforehand to recommend to their acceptance,'—we shall despair of democracy. Democracy, to work well, implies high- minded leaders, who will strain all their powers to make opinion follow them in the lines which they think noblest. .So soon as democracy yields only leaders who, being them- -selves entirely indifferent to the line which political opinion should take, only endeavour to discover the line which it can be most easily induced to take, it will be doomed to a destiny of rapid deterioration and decomposition.
Well, Lord Randolph Churchill's letter to Mr. Wainwright suggests that he has hardly so much as even entertained the notion of trying to influence the course of opinion for the better,—that, on the contrary, he assumes it to be the very test of political shrewdness not to make that attempt, but to guess well the direction in which opinion, if left alone by the leaders, will be likely to run. Just take the following sentences, and consider what is implied in them. He is remarking upon the change in the Conservative view of Reform discernible "when I went to Oldham and Manchester in the autumn and
-winter of 1881." "I was particularly enjoined," he says, " by the leading gentlemen in those places not to say a word against the assimilation of the county and borough franchise ;" and his letter implies that, having got this "cue," it never once occurred to him to raise the smallest difficulty. Again, speak- ing of last auttimn,—" The Conservative leaders were sin- gularly reticent of their opinions, and I found myself (then, as now, a mere member of the rank and file of the party) obliged to go at length into this question before an Edinburgh audience, without having at my command any certain indication as to the course which the Conservative party would pursue." That he is bound to contribute even an individual impulse towards determining that course, never appears to enter his head. It is his business to follow the multitude, not to lead them. The view which in the recent emergency he took at a hazard, did not
appear to be very cordially received by the Edinburgh meeting, and was not echoed by hie Conservative colleagues at that meet- ing. And he assumes that this being so, it was as a matter of course natural and appropriate for him to take the hint, and fol- low the lead of so respectable a meeting of working-men. Again, —"In the ensuing period before the opening of Parliament, I ascertained from the ordinary sources of exact information that no unanimity of feeling on the subject of Parliamentary reform existed among our party ; that many borough Members, and particularly Lancashire Members, were positively in favour of the change, and that direct opposition in principle was only to be expected from a highly influential but numerically small
circle of Members representing county and borough con- stituencies of a rural character." This appears to have settled the question. It was not for Lord Randolph to cast in his lot with "a highly influential but numerically small number of Members representing county and borough constituencies of a rural character." His rule for himself was to swim with the stream, and not even to attempt to determine in which direction the stream should flow. " These things being so," he says, "I am sanguine that all impartial persons will agree that a frank and open departure from the position of strong resistance to Reform, which I had taken up in December, was not only pardonable, but incumbent on every practical politician." It is, then, " not' only pardonable, but incumbent " on a prac- tical politician to have no convictions of his own which he thinks it a duty to impress upon others I A practical politician has no business with convictions at all. It is only the multi- tude who may have convictions, which it is the duty of the practical politician to investigate, so. as to discover the relative strength of different opinions, and to form his own by the strongest. Lord Randolph avers that if he had found the political position on which he seems to have alighted by a kind of pure chance, at Edinburgh, to be "the position of the Conservative party generally," he would " certainly have adhered to it at any sacrifice ;" but as that was not the case, and as, indeed, he had come upon it by a sort of accident, what more natural and proper than that he should at once throw it over without a sigh ? We quite agree with him that opinions on which you chance in the way in which he appears to chance on his opinions, may be thrown over with- out a sigh ; but what astonishes us in his letter is that he evidently does not recognise any sort of test of the political rightness of an opinion except its prevalence amongst the party to which he belongs. Of any given opinion his sole test appears to be this How many electors who vote for the Conservative candidate hold it ?' If once he comes to think that more Conservative electors hold an opinion which he had not hitherto held, than hold the opinion which he had hitherto held, he at once exchanges the one opinion for the other. In fact, opinion for him no longer represents the bias of his own thought—much less the force of his own conviction, a word which he probably never uses, and does not understand—but the guess which he has formed, on more or less reliable evidence, as to the bias of other Conservatives' thoughts. A leader appears, in his mind, to be differentiated from a mere elector by this—that a leader has no right to views of his own, while an elector has ; the leader shows himself to be a leader by abjuring such luxuries, by substituting for them able computations of the number of persons of his own party who have views of their own, and by adhering to the views which appear to be in the majority. " Since December," he tells us, " I had, by the favour of the Conservatives in Birmingham, become a candidate for the Parliamentary representation of that immense constituency ; and undoubtedly in Birmingham there existed no serious difference between Liberals and Conserva- tives as to the propriety of the assimilation of the county and borough franchise." That clinched the matter. Lord Ran- dolph Churchill evidently feels that he owed it to the Con- servatives of "that immense constituency" to form his political mind on their model ; and he did so. From this time forth it may be assumed that Lord Randolph Churchill is a Conservative leader in this sense only,—that he thinks it his duty, not to lead the opinions of Conservatives at all, but only to divine for those whom he is supposed to lead which party amongst them is the more numerous, and to give that party the " frank " adhesion of his help. A better definition of a demagogue we would not wish for. For demagogue, though it ought to mean a leader of the demos, has always really meant a person led by the demos, who flatters it by telling it in better words what it thinks, and by recommending it to do what it would like to do.
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