Mankind in the Making

It will be argued that this enumeration of American and British defects is a mere expansion of that familiar proposition of the logic textbooks, “all men are mortal.” You have here, says the objector, one of two alternatives, either you must draw your administrators, your legislators, your sources of honour and reward from a limited, hereditary, and specially-trained class, who will hold power as a right, or you must rely upon the popular choice exercised in the shop and at the polling booth. What else can you have but inheritance or election, or some blend of the two, blending their faults? Each system has its disadvantages, and the disadvantages of each system may be minimized by education; in particular by keeping the culture and code of honour of your ruling class high in the former case and by keeping your common schools efficient in the latter. But the essential evils of each system are – essential evils, and one has to suffer them and struggle against them, as one has to struggle perpetually with the pathogenic bacteria that infest the world. The theory of monarchy is, no doubt, inferior to the democratic theory in stimulus, but the latter fails in qualitative effect, much more than the former. There, the objector submits, lies the quintessence of the matter. Both systems need watching, need criticism, the pruning knife and the stimulant, and neither is bad enough to justify a revolutionary change to the other. In some such conclusion as this most of the English people with whom one can discuss this question have come to rest, and it is to this way of looking at the matter that one must ascribe the apathetic acquiescence in the British hereditary system, upon which I have already remarked. There is a frank and excessive admission of every real and imaginary fault of the American system, and with the proposition that we are on the horns of a dilemma, the discussion is dismissed.

But are we indeed on the horns of a dilemma, and is there no alternative to hereditary government tempered by elections, or government by the ward politician and the polling booth? Cannot we have that sense and tradition of equal opportunity for all who are born into this world, that generous and complete acknowledgment of the principle of promotion from the ranks that is the precious birthright of the American, without the political gerrymandering, the practical falsification, that restricts that general freedom at last only to the energetic, and that subordinates quality to quantity in every affair of life? It is evident that for the New Republican to admit that the thing is indeed a dilemma, that there is nothing for it but to make the best of whichever bad thing we have at hand, that we cannot have all we desire but only a greater or a lesser moiety, is a most melancholy and hampering admission. And, certainly, no New Republican will agree without a certain mental struggle, without a thorough and earnest inquiry into the possibility of a third direction.

This matter has two aspects, it presents itself as two questions; the question first of all of administration, and the question of honour and privilege. What is it that the New Republican idea really requires in these two matters? In the matter of administration it requires that every child growing up in a state should feel that he is part owner of his state, completely free in his membership, and equal in opportunity to all other children – and it also wants to secure the management of affairs in the hands of the very best men, not the noisiest, not the richest or most skilfully advertised, but the best. Can these two things be reconciled? In the matter of honour and privilege, the New Republican idea requires a separation of honour from notoriety; it requires some visible and forcible expression of the essential conception that there are things more honourable than getting either votes or money; it requires a class and distinctions and privileges embodying that idea – and also it wants to ensure that through the whole range of life there shall not be one door locked against the effort of the citizen to accomplish the best that is in him. Can these two things be reconciled also?

I have the temerity to think that in both cases the conflicting requirements can be reconciled far more completely than is commonly supposed.

Let us take, first of all, the question of the reconciliation as it is presented in the administration of public affairs. The days have come when the most democratic-minded of men must begin to admit that the appointment of all rulers and officials by polling the manhood, or most of the manhood, of a country does not work – let us say perfectly – and at no level of educational efficiency does it ever seem likely to work in the way those who established it hoped. By thousands of the most varied experiments the nineteenth century has proved this up to the hilt. The fact that elections can only be worked as a choice between two selected candidates, or groups of candidates, is the unforeseen and unavoidable mechanical defect of all electoral methods with large electorates. Education has nothing to do with that. The elections for the English University members are manipulated just as much as the elections in the least literate of the Irish constituencies. [Footnote: There is a very suggestive book on this aspect of our general question, The Crowd, by M. Gustave le Bon, which should interest any one who finds this paper interesting. And the English reader who would like a fuller treatment of this question has now available also Ostrogorski’s great work, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties.] It is not a question of accidentals, but a question of the essential mechanism. Men have sought out and considered all sorts of devices for qualifying the present method by polling; Mills’s plural voting for educated men will occur to the reader; Hare’s system of vote collection, and the negative voting of Doctor Grece; and the defects of these inventions have been sufficiently obvious to prevent even a trial. The changes have been rung upon methods of counting; cumulative votes and the prohibition of plumping, and so on, have been tried without any essential modification of the results. There are various devices for introducing “stages” in the electoral process; the constituency elects electors, who elect the rulers and officers, for example, and there is also that futile attempt to bring in the non-political specialist, the method of electing governing bodies with power to “co-opt.” Of course they “co-opt” their fellow politicians, rejected candidates, and so on. Among other expedients that people have discussed, are such as would make it necessary for a man to take some trouble and display some foresight to get registered as a voter or to pass an examination to that end, and such as would confront him with a voting paper so complex, that only a very intelligent and painstaking man would be able to fill it up without disqualification. It certainly seems a reasonable thing to require that the voter should be able at least to write out fully and spell correctly the name of the man of his choice. Except for the last, there is scarcely any of these things but its adoption would strengthen the power of the political organizer, which they aim to defeat. Any complication increases the need and the power of organization. It is possible to believe – the writer believes – that with all this burthen of shortcomings, the democratic election system is still, on the whole, better than a system of hereditary privilege, but that is no reason for concealing how defective and disappointing its practical outcome has been, nor for resting contented with it in its present form. [Footnote: The statement of the case is not complete unless we mention that, to the method of rule by hereditary rulers and the appointment of officials by noble patrons on the one hand, and of rule by politicians exercising patronage on the other, there is added in the British system the Chinese method of selecting officials by competitive examination. Within its limits this has worked as a most admirable corrective to patronage; it is one of the chief factors in the cleanhandedness of British politicians, and it is continually importing fresh young men from outside to keep officialdom in touch with the general educated world. But it does not apply, and it does not seem applicable, to the broader issues of politics, to the appointment and endorsement of responsible rulers and legislators, where a score of qualities are of more importance than those an examination can gauge.]

Is polling really essential to the democratic idea? That is the question now very earnestly put to the reader. We are so terribly under the spell of established conditions, we are all so obsessed by the persuasion that the only conceivable way in which a man can be expressed politically is by himself voting in person, that we do all of us habitually overlook a possibility, a third choice, that lies ready to our hands. There is a way by means of which the indisputable evils of democratic government may be very greatly diminished, without destroying or even diminishing – indeed, rather enhancing – that invigorating sense of unhampered possibilities, that the democratic idea involves. There is a way of choosing your public servants of all sorts and effectually controlling public affairs on perfectly sound democratic principles, without ever having such a thing as an election, as it is now understood, at all, a way which will permit of a deliberate choice between numerous candidates – a thing utterly impossible under the current system – which will certainly raise the average quality of our legislators, and be infinitely saner, juster, and more deliberate than our present method. And, moreover, it is a way that is typically the invention of the English people, and which they use to-day in another precisely parallel application, an application which they have elaborately tested and developed through a period of at least seven or eight hundred years, and which I must confess myself amazed to think has not already been applied to our public needs. This way is the Jury system. The Jury system was devised to meet almost exactly the same problem that faces us to-day, the problem of how on the one hand to avoid putting a man’s life or property into the hands of a Ruler, a privileged person, whose interest might be unsympathetic or hostile, while on the other protecting him from the tumultuous judgments of a crowd – to save the accused from the arbitrary will of King and Noble without flinging him to the mob. To-day it is exactly that problem over again that our peoples have to solve, except that instead of one individual affair we have now our general affairs to place under a parallel system. As the community that had originally been small enough and intimate enough to decide on the guilt or innocence of its members grew to difficult proportions, there developed this system of selecting by lot a number of its common citizens who were sworn, who were then specially instructed and prepared, and who, in an atmosphere of solemnity and responsibility in absolute contrast with the uproar of a public polling, considered the case and condemned or discharged the accused. Let me point out that this method is so universally recognized as superior to the common electoral method that any one who should propose to-day to take the fate of a man accused of murder out of the hands of a jury and place it in the hands of any British or American constituency whatever, even in the hands of such a highly intelligent constituency as one of the British universities, would be thought to be carrying crankiness beyond the border line of sanity.

Why then should we not apply the Jury system to the electoral riddle?

Suppose, for example, at the end of the Parliamentary term, instead of the present method of electing a member of Parliament, we were, with every precaution of publicity and with the most ingeniously impartial machine that could be invented, to select a Jury by lot, a Jury sufficiently numerous to be reasonably representative of the general feeling of the community and sufficiently small to be able to talk easily together and to do the business without debating society methods – between twenty and thirty, I think, might be a good working number – and suppose we were, after a ceremony of swearing them and perhaps after prayer or after a grave and dignified address to them upon the duty that lay before them, to place each of these juries in comfortable quarters for a few days and isolated from the world, to choose its legislator. They could hear, in public, under a time limit, the addresses of such candidates as had presented themselves, and they could receive, under a limit of length and with proper precautions for publicity, such documents as the candidates chose to submit. They could also, in public, put any questions they chose to the candidates to elucidate their intentions or their antecedents, and they might at any stage decide unanimously to hear no more of and to dismiss this or that candidate who encumbered their deliberations. (This latter would be an effectual way of suppressing the candidature of cranks, and of half-witted and merely symbolical persons.) The Jury between and after their interrogations and audiences would withdraw from the public room to deliberate in privacy. Their deliberations which, of course, would be frank and conversational to a degree impossible under any other conditions, and free from the dodges of the expert vote manipulator altogether, would, for example, in the case of several candidates of the same or similar political colours, do away with the absurdity of the split vote. The jurymen of the same political hue could settle that affair among themselves before contributing to a final decision.

This Jury might have certain powers of inquest. Provision might be made for pleas against particular candidates; private individuals or the advocates of vigilance societies might appear against any particular candidate and submit the facts about any doubtful affair, financial or otherwise, in which that candidate had been involved. Witnesses might be called and heard on any question of fact, and the implicated candidate would explain his conduct. And at any stage the Jury might stop proceedings and report its selection for the vacant post. Then, at the expiration of a reasonable period, a year perhaps, or three years or seven years, another Jury might be summoned to decide whether the sitting member should continue in office unchallenged or be subjected to a fresh contest.

This suggestion is advanced here in this concrete form merely to show the sort of thing that might be done; it is one sample suggestion, one of a great number of possible schemes of Election by Jury. But even in this state of crude suggestion, it is submitted that it does serve to show the practicability of a method of election more deliberate and thorough, more dignified, more calculated to impress the new generation with a sense of the gravity of the public choice, and infinitely more likely to give us good rulers than the present method, and that it would do so without sacrificing any essential good quality whatever inherent in the Democratic Idea. [Footnote: There are excellent possibilities, both in the United States and in this Empire, of trying over such a method as this, and of introducing it tentatively and piecemeal. In Great Britain already there are quite different methods of election for Parliament existing side by side. In the Hythe division of Kent, for example, I vote by ballot with elaborate secrecy; in the University of London I declare my vote in a room full of people. The British University constituencies, or one of them, might very readily be used as a practical test of this jury suggestion. There is nothing, I believe, in the Constitution of the United States to prevent any one State resorting to this characteristically Anglo-Saxon method of appointing its representatives in Congress. It is not only in political institutions that the method may be tried. Any societies or institutions that have to send delegates to a conference or meeting might very easily bring this conception to a practical test. Even if it does not prove practicable as a substitute for election by polling, it might be found of some value for the appointment of members of the specialist type, for whom at present we generally resort to co-option. In many cases where the selection of specialists was desirable to complete public bodies, juries of educated men of the British Grand Jury type might be highly serviceable.] The case for the use of the Jury system becomes far stronger when we apply it to such problems as we now attempt to solve by co-opting experts upon various administrative bodies.

The necessity either of raising the quality of representative bodies or of replacing them not only in administration but in legislation by bureaucracies of officials appointed by elected or hereditary rulers, is one that presses on all thoughtful men, and is by no means an academic question needed to round off this New Republican theory. The necessity becomes more urgent every day, as scientific and economic developments raise first one affair and then another to the level of public or quasi-public functions. In the last century, locomotion, lighting, heating, education, forced themselves upon public control or public management, and now with the development of Trusts a whole host of businesses, that were once the affair of competing private concerns, claim the same attention. Government by hustings’ bawling, newspaper clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more impotent, and unless we are prepared to see a government de facto of rich business organizers override the government de jure, or to relapse upon a practical oligarchy of officials, an oligarchy that will certainly decline in efficiency in a generation or so, we must set ourselves most earnestly to this problem of improving representative methods. It is in the direction of the substitution of the Jury method for a general poll that the only practicable line of improvement known to the present writer seems to lie, and until it has been tried it cannot be conceded that democratic government has been tried and exhaustively proved inadequate to the complex needs of the modern state.

So much for the question of administration. We come now to a second need in the modern state if it is to get the best result from the citizens born into it, and that is the need of honours and privileges to reward and enhance services and exceptional personal qualities and so to stir and ennoble that emulation which is, under proper direction, the most useful to the constructive statesman of all human motives. In the United States titles are prohibited by the constitution, in Great Britain they go by prescription. But it is possible to imagine titles and privileges that are not hereditary, and that would be real symbols of human worth entirely in accordance with the Republican Idea. It is one of the stock charges against Republicanism that success in America is either political or financial. In England, in addition, success is also social, and there is, one must admit, a sort of recognition accorded to intellectual achievement, which some American scientific men have found reason to envy. In America, of course, just as in Great Britain, there exists that very enviable distinction, the honorary degree of a university; but in America it is tainted by the freedom with which bogus universities can be organized, and by the unchallenged assumptions of quacks. In Great Britain the honorary degree of a university, in spite of the fact that it goes almost as a matter of course to every casual Prince, is a highly desirable recognition of public services. Beyond this there are certain British distinctions that might very advantageously be paralleled in America, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, for example, and that really very fine honour, as yet untainted by the class of men who tout for baronetcies and peerages, the Privy Council.

There are certain points in this question that are too often overlooked. In the first place, honours and titles need not be hereditary; in the second, they need not be conferred by the political administration; and, in the third, they are not only – as the French Legion of Honour shows – entirely compatible with, but they are a necessary complement to the Republican Idea.

The bad results of entrusting honours to the Government are equally obvious in France and Great Britain. They are predominantly given, quite naturally, for political services, because they are given by politicians too absorbed to be aware of men outside the political world. In Great Britain the process is modified rather than improved by what one knows as court influence. And in spite of the real and sustained efficiency of the Royal Society in distinguishing meritorious scientific workers, the French Academy, which has long been captured by aristocratic dilettanti, and the English Royal Academy of Arts, demonstrate the essential defects and dangers of a body which fills its own gaps. But there is no reason why a national system of honours and titles should not be worked upon a quite new basis, suggested by these various considerations. Let us, simply for tangibleness, put the thing as a concrete plan for the reader’s consideration.

There might, for example, be a lowest stage which would include – as the English knighthood once included – almost every citizen capable of initiative, all the university graduates, all the men qualified to practice the responsible professions, all qualified teachers, all the men in the Army and Navy promoted to a certain rank, all seamen qualified to navigate a vessel, all the ministers recognized by properly organized religious bodies, all public officials exercising command; quasi-public organizations might nominate a certain proportion of their staffs, and organized trade-unions with any claim to skill, a certain proportion of their men, their “decent” men, and every artist or writer who could submit a passable diploma work; it would be, in fact, a mark set upon every man or woman who was qualified to do something or who had done something, as distinguished from the man who had done nothing in the world, the mere common unenterprising esurient man. It might carry many little privileges in public matters – for instance, it might qualify for certain electoral juries. And from this class the next rank might easily be drawn in a variety of ways. In a modern democratic state there must be many fountains of honour. That is a necessity upon which one cannot insist too much. There must be no court, no gang, no traditional inalterable tribunal. Local legislative bodies, for example, – in America, state legislatures and in England, county councils, – might confer rank on a limited number of men or women yearly; juries drawn from certain special constituencies, from the roll of the medical profession, or from the Army, might assemble periodically to nominate their professional best, the Foreign or Colonial Office might confer recognition for political services, the university governing bodies might be entrusted with the power – just as in the middle ages many great men could confer knighthood. From among these distinguished gentlemen of the second grade still higher ranks might be drawn. Local juries might select a local chief dignitary as their “earl,” let us say, from among the resident men of rank, and there is no reason why certain great constituencies, the medical calling, the engineers, should not specify one or two of their professional leaders, their “dukes.” There are many occasions of local importance when an honourable figure-head is needed. The British fall back on the local hereditary peer or invite a prince, too often some poor creature great only by convention – and what the Americans do I do not know, unless they use a Boss. There are many occasions of something more than ceremonial importance when a responsible man publicly honoured and publicly known, and not a professional politician, is of the utmost convenience. And there are endless affairs, lists, gatherings, when the only alternative to rank is scramble. For myself I would not draw the line at such minor occasions for precedence. A Second Chamber is an essential part of the political scheme of all the English-speaking communities, and almost always it is intended to present stabler interests and a smaller and more selected constituency than the lower house. From such a life nobility as I have sketched a Second Chamber could be drawn much as the Irish representative peers in the House of Lords are drawn from the general peerage of Ireland. It would be far less party bound and far less mercenary than the American Senate, and far more intelligent and capable than the British House of Lords. And either of these bodies could be brought under a process of deliberate conversion in this direction with scarcely any revolutionary shock at all. [Footnote: In the case of the House of Lords, for example, the process of conversion might begin by extending the Scotch and Irish system to England, and substituting a lesser number of representative peers for the existing English peerage. Then it would merely revive a question that was already under discussion in middle Victorian times, to create non-hereditary peerages in the three kingdoms. The several Privy Councils might next be added to the three national constituencies by which and from which the representative peers were appointed, and then advisory boards might be called from the various Universities and organized professions, and from authoritative Colonial bodies to recommend men to be added to the voting peerage. Life peers already exist. The law is represented by life peers. The lords spiritual are representative life peers – they are the senior bishops, and they are appointed to represent a corporation – the Established Church. So a generally non-hereditary functional nobility might come into being without any violent break with the present condition of things. The conversion of the American Senate would be a more difficult matter, because the method of appointment of Senators is more stereotyped altogether, and, since 1800, unhappily quite bound up with the political party system. The Senate is not a body of varied and fluctuating origins into which new elements can be quietly inserted. An English writer cannot estimate how dear the sacred brace of Senators for each State may or may not be to the American heart. But the possibility of Congress delegating the power to appoint additional Senators to certain non-political bodies, or to juries of a specific constitution, is at least thinkable as the beginning of a movement that would come at last into parallelism with that in the British Empire.]