THE VALUE OF DEMONSTRATIONS.
A" DEMONSTRATION " like that of Saturday last in Hyde Park has in it something that is impressive to politicians, though it is exceedingly difficult to define in what the impressiveness consists. A mass meeting, even when it is as orderly and respectable as this one was, is after all only a mob, and the contempt of statesmen for mob guidance is instinctive and incurable. Nobody even pretends to be enlightened by the oratory heard at a demonstration, and of discussion in such a gathering there is and can be no trace. In England, indeed, even the pretence of it has been abandoned, and the "proceedings " are usually all cut-and-dried beforehand. The speakers are preachers, not debaters, and the audience as little expect to hear them contradicted or refuted as if they were in church, where in our time even an exclamation of dis- approval is regarded with strong disfavour. Nor can it fairly be said that it is the display of numbers which gives the mass meeting its weight,for the numbers who stay away, and therefore presumably do not sympathise, are infinitely greater. A hundred and forty thousand people sounds like a great many, but it is not a fortieth of the population of the real " London," and probably not a sixth of the throng which is attracted by any popular spectacle like a procession with the King in it. Nor, finally, can it be alleged that a mass meeting is constitutionally entitled to respect. On the contrary, the gathering and its object are directly opposed to the first principles of representative government, the essence of which is that the body of the people shall winnow itself in order that the Supreme Council may represent their matured, and not their.hasty, judgment, and may arrive at decrees only after full and contentious deliberation. There is no kind of effort to winnow a " demonstration," which may be composed in great part of indifferent spectators, and always includes thousands of persons to whom crowding is for various reasons acceptable, or who enjoy any holiday, or who secretly hope that in a vast gathering some exciting incident will occur. In the old Reform meetings, it is true, the majority being unen- franchised, the audience might fairly have said that but for mass meetings they would be dumb ; but the present suffrage admits everybody who cares much to be admitted, and his silence in no way interferes with the effectiveness of his vote.
Nevertheless, it is certain that great and successful " demonstrations " do influence most politicians. Those who agree with their particular objects are encouraged by them, seeing, as it were, the faces of many friends; and those who disagree are, unless the question at issue in- volves the conscience, just a little cowed, recognising, as it were, that their opponents are many and decided. The greatest effect of all, however, we are convinced, is pro- duced through a certain revelation of opinion. Free countries are governed in the last resort by opinion, but their rulers sometimes find opinion hard to ascertain. The fault of those who rule through the ballot-box is that they are silent till the ballot-boxes are opened. No one even in America knows for certain whether a President is approved by the -majority ; in France the decision of the peasantry is often unknown to the Ministry of the Interior, with all its resources for espionage, till the very day of the election ; and even in England, and in our own time, an election has struck the most acute and experienced judges as a sort of thunderclap. The parties in Parliament seem to Cabinets organised bodies, which take orders from their superiors rather than from the people. The popular speakers destroy their own weight and power of reflecting the popular mind by absurd exaggeration. The Press is usually much divided, and occasionally, though not often, is completely out of touch with the voters. In such circumstances a great demonstration has some of the effect of a flash of lightning, which, though it yields no continuous light, reveals for a moment this and that which were till the cloud broke hidden in darkness. The Ministers concerned may be quite unalarmed. They may still be supported by a great majority. But they recognise as concrete forces opposed to them which before seemed shadowy, almost unreal, or already disappearing in the distance. They see where they did not see, and like men cured of blindness, very' often in their momentary inability to measure dis- tance they exaggerate all the forms so suddenly made risible. At all events, they are impressed; and though the degree of impression varies with individual temperaments, it is probable that all rulers are more sensitive than other men to loud sounds from below. It is said that Kings in particular feel a few hisses more than the profusest demon- strations of loyalty ; and though English Ministers profess not to " keep their ears to the ground," they hearken to the reports of men who do, and who are useful, though they sometimes mistake the rumble of a, dray for the warning of an earthquake.
Demonstrations, therefore, we conceive, though hardly defensible by argument, have a. certain utility in polities, and one wonders whether popular instinct will ever dis- cover a method of demonstrating less clumsy and stupid than a mass meeting. That hinders industry, worries and irritates the police, and might in very conceivable air- cumstances produce lamentable catastrophes. A stampede in a mass meeting is an awful business, as we all realised at the last Russian Coronation, and why an English crowd so seldom stampedes is to the great policemen still a problem unexplained. The rush of a frightened horse last Saturday might have cost a hundred lives. Many easier methods might be suggested ; but they would not be acceptable to leaders proud of their gifts of speech, and we suppose there will be no change in our time, for the comitia were held two thousand years ago, and though the comitia exercised legal authority, those who attended them still constituted a mass meeting, and were emphatically a mob. We fancy we must wait for the Referendum, which will come some day, before mass meetings cease to be held ; and meanwhile the English method of dealing with them is a wonderful testimony to our countrymen's possession of political sense. We hold them seldom, and except as regards inconvenient localities—Trafalgar Square, for instance, or the neighbourhood of Parliament—when they become nuisances, we never prohibit them. We leave their leaders to organise themselves, we treat their banners with amused respect, and though we have them watched by regi- ments of police, their function is to facilitate rather than repress. As to arresting the speakers, we should as soon arrest Members of Parliament. We regard them, in short, as safety-valves, an attitude of self-control to which Con- tinental Ministers apparently find it hard to rise, and the consequence is that a great demonstration in England is seldom more dangerous or more difficult to manage than the still more numerous crowd on a Derby Day.
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