BOOKS.
MR. LECKY ON DEMOCRACY.*
[CONCLUDING NOTICE.]
LAST week we considered some of the more general aspects of Mr. Lecky's new work, and the views indicated by the author with regard to the bearing of democracy upon the dignity and efficiency of Parliaments and the character of politicians. But any notice of this book would be quite in- adequate which did not take some account of the series of elaborate essays it contains on other movements and tendencies of our times, and the extent to which they cross, merge, or run parallel with the stream of democracy- These essays embrace a treatment of the question of Nationalities, Socialism, Trade-Unions and other Labour questions, Religions Liberty, and Woman questions, besides a miscellaneous but interesting chapter on legislation • Democracy and Liberty. By William Ecirard Hartpole Lecky. 2 Tole. London: Loogmans, Greer, and Co.
dealing- with the keeping of Sunday, gambling, the sale of intoxicating drink, and marriage and divorce. It would be difficult to speak too highly of the learning or the skill ex- hibited in these treatises. Ranging, as they do, over the events of a century or more, in many countries and in the most varied departments of human interest, they present a succession of readily intelligible and richly informing views of the lines on which civilised humanity has been and is moving.
The two chapters on Socialism and Labour questions, for example, afford an admirably compact and consecutive review of the course of thought and legislation in those spheres. They illustrate, in particular, very perspicuously the sharp con- flict between some of the leading principles and tendencies of the French Revolution and those which distinguish the most advanced and even the most revolutionary of the thinkers of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This conflict has been obscured by the fact that confiscation on a great scale seems a feature common to the earlier and the later schools of subversive thought. But, as Mr. Lecky acutely points out, " there is a distinction to be drawn between the confiscation of great masses of property and the establish- ment of principles essentially inconsistent with the existence of property. There was much confiscation in the abolition of feudal rights, and gigantic confiscations followed the political proscriptions and the emigrations; but it was the object of the legislator to divide the confiscated land as much as pos- sible, and the abolition of the feudal laws gave to the greatly increased number of small proprietors, both in fact and in law, an unrestricted and undivided ownership. In this way the Revolution multiplied a class who clung with extreme tenacity to the idea of private property in land." That class constitutes the Old Guard of resistance to any movement aiming at the enforcement of the views of Karl Marx, Henry George, or Gabriel Deville. The last-named writer, who translated Marx's Capital into French, appears to be one of the most vigorous, direct, and unabashed advocates of public plunder that our age has produced. In his opinion the concentration of so much property nowadays in the hands of -commercial and manufacturing companies affords peculiar facilities for capturing it in the name of the proletariat. "It is only necessary," he observes, " to destroy the title-deeds, shares, or obligations, treating these dirty doe u ments as waste- paper. The collective appropriation of capital will thus be at once realised, without any disturbance in the mode of pro- duction." The National Debt of France is, under M. Deville's scheme, to be simply blotted out, although it is very largely held by persons of small means. But the small peasant-pro- prietors are felt to constitute a very serious obstacle, and M. Deville has an elaborate plan for bribing them into acquiescence while the larger landowners are dealt with, after which reflection on the advantages flowing from collective ownership of the soil, strongly stimulated by the compe- tition of the lands seized and managed by the State, are expected to reduce them to a more or less cheerful surrender of their holdings into the hands of that beneficent Pro- vidence, under which they will receive suitable wages as cultivators. To do justice, however, to M. Deville's intelli- gence, it must be acknowledged that he relies upon force, and not upon universal suffrage, to secure the triumph of his ideas, and that the suppression of religion and marriage is -deemed necessary to prepare the way for the successful struggle.
Even so, it is difficult to regard the views thus illustrated as being anything more than the ravings of criminal lunacy. Mr. Lecky, however, is evidently unable to put them at all tightly aside. It is difficult," he thinks, "to reflect without a shudder on the fact that in the two foremost nations on the European Continent," the programme of Continental Socialism, as exemplified in the writings of Marx and Deville, " has been accepted by many hundreds of thousands of voters, that it has taken deep root in all the great centres of German and French civilisation, and that it is represented in the Legislature of each of these great countries by a powerful Parliamentary group," the strength of which has in each case greatly increased in late years. The same movement has made con- siderable advances in other European countries, notably in Belgium and Italy. " In Spain and Russia also," says Mr. Lecky, " it has appeared, sometimes in the form of Collectivism, and perhaps more frequently in the form of Anarchism. Its teaching has evidently permeated great masses of men with something of the force, and has assumed something of the character, of a new religion, rushing in to fill the vacuum where old beliefs and old traditions have decayed." We are not at all prepared to deny the gravity of the facts adduced by Mr. Lecky with regard to the spread of the profession of subversive doctrines, but it seems to us that the sentences last quoted show that too much importance may easily be attached to the exact tenour of those doctrines. For, as a matter of fact, Collectivism and Anarchism embody principles the meat absolutely opposed to one another, the former involving the most despotic control on the part of the State over individual lives, and the latter implying the absolute negation of such control. The truth is, we imagine, that there is very little reasaned assent to either set of doctrines, and that the great majority of votes given for persons pro- fessing them represent little more than profound discontent on the part of the voters concerned with their own lot in
life and readiness to applaud and support anybody who holds out hopes of bringing about, by any means, a division
of this world's goods more agreeable to them. Many Col- lectivists, we believe, and many Anarchists would recoil from the attempt to push their professed principles into practice if the opportunity offered. For the rest, there have always been in every country a certain fraction of the population who were ready to seek for their own advantage in public trouble. There is such a fraction still. Democratic institutions give them opportunities of openly asserting that readiness with impunity ; but for our part we firmly believe that there is hardly any, if any, European country in which the over- whelming preponderance of strength, whether in the ballot- box or, if need be, on the field, will not lie permanently on the side of common-sense and the Ten Commandments. But, of course, there are Socialists and Socialists, and there are large numbers of persons, both in this country and abroad, who, without any real desire for anything in the shape of collective ownership of land and the means of production, arc eager to bring about very far-reaching changes in the existing social and economic order. And, as has been above remarked, it is important to notice—what is shown so clearly in Mr. Lecky's book—that many of the changes sought for involve a reversal of principles supposed to be established at the time of the French Revolution and by the earlier English Radicals, as essential parts of the democratic creed, and are in the nature of a return to customs and laws of mediaival origin. Such, for example, is the case with regard to the demand for the establishment of guilds put forward in Aus- tria and other countries, — guilds to one or other of which it shall be compulsory to belong as a condition of practising the callings concerned. Such, in essence, are the prescription by law of a minimum wage sought by many Socialists on the Continent, including not a few Roman Catholics of high position in Church or State; and the maximum legal limit of daily work urged widely by Trade-Unionists in England, and secured at the instance of the same class by the Legislatures of Victoria and New Zealand. Measures of this character are in direct opposition, not only to the teaching of our own philosophical Radicals of the school of Grote and the Mills, but to the general prin- ciples and practice of the French Revolution, of which it was a conspicuous achievement to emancipate industry, by "enabling every man to carry his labour whither he pleased, to make his own terms, and to enjoy the full fruits of his own industry."
It is a startling reversal of aim with which we are thus presented, and one lesson to which the contrast points is the necessity of avoiding hasty conclusions as to the tendencies of democratic institutions. That the tide appears to be setting now towards a contraction of personal liberty in the commercial and industrial field must be acknowledged ; but it is at least conceivable that within another century, or perhaps a much shorter period, a powerful reaction towards freedom may have asserted itself. Already the elaborate and severe restrictions upon the rights of landlords, created by successive Acts of the Imperial Par- liament in Ireland, have produced, as Mr. Lecky points out, a widespread agreement that the dual ownership thus set up is an unsound system which cannot last, and that the true end of agrarian statesmanship must be the extension of absolute o vnersbip to as many as possible of the occupiers of the soil.
So it may not impossibly happen that the pressure of foreign competition, when carried successfully beyond a certain point by the aid of excessive legislative or Trade- Union interference with the action of home capitalists, may lead to a quick and practical recognition that the system of regulation has gone too far, that the normal motives for individual initiative cannot safely be dis- pensed with, and that the old political economy must be recalled from the planet Saturn. Democracy may try experi- ments of a more or less doubtful character, but we see no reason to suppose that it will pursue them when they have proved, or are obviously likely to prove, failures. Mr. Lecky clearly recognises the encouragement to be drawn from the steadily progressive diffusion of property and the growth, both positive and relative, in this country of that section of the working-classes who " are fully aware of the true conditions of industrial success, and who have no desire to separate themselves by a class warfare from the bulk of their fellow - countrymen." To that growth "the long practice of public life" has contributed, together with " the evident desire of all Parliaments and Govern- ments for many years to meet the legitimate demands of the working-classes," the spread of education, and the ex- perience of the happy results of co-operative effort and of the prudent action of the older Trade-Unions. Even soy Mr. Lecky does not feel by any means easy in mind as to the future of democratic England, in the absence of any written Constitution protecting property and contracts and in view of the growth of Socialism in all countries, and the " manifest and rapid decline in the character of public men." We think, as we said last week—and the alarming phrase just quoted illustrates our meaning—that Mr. Lecky takes a needlessly gloomy view of the natural developments of democracy, at least in the political sphere, and tends in that connection to generalise from insufficient data. To us the outlook is more cheerful than it appears to be to him. But he has abundantly earned by his profound study of national affairs during the last and the present century the right to advise his fellow-countrymen. Great weight attaches to his counsel, and his words of warning at the close of his chapter on Labour questions, as to the dangerous social in- fluence of fortunes acquired by unworthy means and lavished in extravagant personal indulgence and display, claim to be placed on record at the conclusion of our notice of his valuable book :—" In these things law can do little, but apinion can do much. A sterner judgment of ill-gotten wealth, and of luxurious, vicious, or merely idle lives, a higher standard of public duty, and something more of that ' plain living,' which is the usual accompaniment of high thinking,' are the best remedies that can be applied."
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