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The History Of England - A Study In Political Evolution
English Democracy
by Pollard, A. F.
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The modern national state is the most powerful political organism ever
known, because it is the conscious or unconscious agency of a people's
will. Government is no longer in England the instrument of a family or
a class; and the only real check upon its power is the circumstance
that in some matters it acts as the executive committee of one party
and is legitimately resisted by the other. Were there no parties, the
government would be a popular despotism absolutely uncontrolled.
Theoretically it is omnicompetent; parliament--or, to use more
technical phraseology, the Crown in Parliament--can make anything law
that it chooses; and no one has a legal right to resist, or authority
to pronounce what parliament has done to be unconstitutional. No Act of
Parliament can be illegal or unconstitutional, because there are no
fundamental laws and no written constitution in this country; and when
people loosely speak of an Act being unconstitutional, all that they
mean is that they do not agree with it. Other countries, like the
United States, have drawn up a written constitution and established a
Supreme Court of Judicature to guard it; and if the American
legislature violates this constitution by any Act, the Supreme Court
may declare that Act unconstitutional, in which case it is void. But
there is no such limitation in England upon the sovereignty of
parliament.
This sovereignty has been gradually evolved. At first it was royal and
personal, but not parliamentary or representative; and medieval kings
had to struggle with the rival claims of the barons and the church. By
calling in the assistance of the people assembled and represented in
parliament, the monarchy triumphed over both the barons and the church;
but when, in the seventeenth century, the two partners to this victory
quarrelled over the spoils, parliament and not the crown established
its claim to be the real representative of the state; and in the cases
of Strafford, Danby, and others it even asserted that loyalty to the
king might be treason to the state. The church, vanquished at the
Reformation, dropped more and more out of the struggle for sovereignty,
because, while the state grew more comprehensive, the church grew more
exclusive. It was not that, after 1662, it seriously narrowed its
formulas or doctrines, but it failed to enlarge them, and a larger and
larger proportion of Englishmen thus found themselves outside its pale.
The state, on the other hand, embraced an ever-widening circle of
dissent; and by degrees Protestant Nonconformists, Roman Catholics,
Quakers, Jews, Atheists, Mohammedans, believers, misbelievers, and
unbelievers of all sorts, were admitted to the fullest rights of
citizenship. State and church ceased to correspond; one became the
whole, the other only a part, and there could be no serious rivalry
between the two.
The state had to contend, however, with more subtle and serious
attacks. This great Leviathan, as Hobbes called it, was not at first a
popular institution; and it frightened many people. The American
colonists, for instance, thought that its absolute sovereignty was too
dangerous a thing to be left loose, and they put sovereignty under a
triple lock and key, giving one to the judicature, one to the
legislature, and a third to the executive. Only by the co-operation of
these three keepers can the American people loose their sovereignty and
use it to amend their constitution; and so jealously is sovereignty
confined that anarchy often seems to reign in its stead. There was,
indeed, some excuse for distrusting a sovereignty claimed by George III
and the unreformed British parliament; and it was natural enough that
people should deny its necessity and set up in its place Declarations
of the Rights of Man. Sovereignty of Hobbes's type was a somewhat novel
conception; men had not grasped its possibilities as an engine of
popular will, because they were only familiar with its exploitation by
kings and oligarchs; and so closely did they identify the thing with
its abuses that they preferred to do without it altogether, or at least
to confine it to the narrowest possible limits. Government and the
people were antagonistic: the less government there was, the less harm
would be done to the people, and so a general body of individualistic,
laissez-faire theory developed, which was expressed in various
Declarations of the Rights of Man, and set up against the "paternal
despotism" of the eighteenth century.
These Rights of Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the first
French Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and their
successor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government and
over-government, between individualism and socialism has continued to
this day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed in
possession prefer a policy of laissez faire; they are all for
Liberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing whatsoever
they like with what they are pleased to call their own. But those who
have little to call their own, and much that they would like, prefer
strong government if they can control it; and the strength of
government has steadily grown with popular control. This is due to more
than a predatory instinct; it is natural, and excusable enough, that
people should be reluctant to maintain what is no affair of theirs; but
even staunch Conservatives have been known to pay Radical taxes with
comparative cheerfulness when their party has returned to power.
Government was gradually made the affair of the people by the series of
Reform Acts extending from 1832 to 1885; and it is no mere accident
that this half-century also witnessed the political emancipation of the
British colonies. Nor must we forget the Acts beginning with the repeal
of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and Roman Catholic Emancipation
(1829), which extended political rights to men of all religious
persuasions. These and the Franchise Acts made the House of Commons
infinitely more representative than it had been before, and gave it its
conclusive superiority over the House of Lords. Not that the Peers
represent no one but themselves; had that been true, the House of Lords
would have disappeared long ago. In reality it came to embody a fairly
complete representation of the Conservative party; and as a party does
not need two legislative organs, the House of Lords retired whenever
the Conservatives controlled the House of Commons, and only resumed its
proper functions when the Liberals had a majority. Hence its most
indefensible characteristic as a Second Chamber became its strongest
practical bulwark; for it enlisted the support of many who had no
particular views about Second Chambers in the abstract, but were keenly
interested in the predominance of their party.
The restraint thus imposed by the House of Lords upon popular
government checked the development of its power and the extension of
its activity, which would naturally have followed upon the acquisition
by the people of control over the House of Commons and indirectly over
the Cabinet. Other causes co-operated to induce delay. The most
powerful was lack of popular education; constitutional privileges are
of no value to people who do not understand how they may be used, or
are so unimaginative and ill-disciplined as to prefer such immediate
and tangible rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation to
their football club or local charity, or a gracious word from an
interested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in the
direction of national government. This participation is, in fact, so
minute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, that
a high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and the
Education Acts of 1870 and 1889 were indispensable preliminaries to
anything like a real democracy. A democracy really educated in politics
will express views strange to our ears with an emphasis of which even
yet we have little conception.
Other obstacles to the overthrow of the rule of laissez faire
were the vested interests of over-mighty manufacturers and landlords in
the maintenance of that anarchy which is the logical extreme of Liberty
and Property; and such elementary measures of humanity as the Factory
Acts were long resisted by men so humane as Cobden and John Bright as
arbitrary interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive
bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed to
be no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as that
primitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the life
of man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean," and that it might as
urgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such a
remedy was reinforced by crude analogies between a perverted Darwinism
and politics. Darwin's demonstration of evolution by means of the
struggle for existence in the natural world was used to support the
assumption that a similar struggle among civilized men was natural and
therefore inevitable; and that all attempts to interfere with the
conflict between the weak and the strong, the scrupulous and the
unscrupulous, were foredoomed to disastrous failure. It was forgotten
that civilization itself involves a more or less conscious repeal of
"Nature," and that the progress of man depends upon the conquest of
himself and of his surroundings. In a better sense of the word, the
evolution of man's self-control and conscience is just as "natural" as
the gratification of his animal instincts.
The view that each individual should be left without further help from
the state to cope with his environment might be acceptable to landlords
who had already obtained from parliament hundreds of Inclosure Acts,
and to manufacturers whose profits were inflated by laws making it
criminal for workmen to combine. They might rest from political
agitation and be thankful for their constitutional gains; at any rate
they had little to hope from a legislature in which working men had
votes. But the masses, who had just secured the franchise, were
reluctant to believe that the action of the state had lost its virtue
at the moment when the control of the state came within their grasp.
The vote seems to have been given them under the amiable delusion that
they would be happy when they got it, as if it had any value whatever
except as a means to an end. Nor is it adequate as a means: it is not
sufficient for a nation by adult suffrage to express its will; that
will has also to be carried into execution, and it requires a strong
executive to do so. Hence the reversal of the old Liberal attitude
towards the royal prerogative, which may be best dated from 1872, when
Gladstone abolished the purchase of commissions in the army by means of
the royal prerogative, after the proposed reform had been rejected as a
bill by the House of Lords. No Liberal is likely in the future to
suggest that "the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing,
and ought to be diminished"; because the prerogative of the crown has
become the privilege of the people.
The Franchise Acts had apparently provided a solution of the old
antithesis of Man versus the State by comprehending all men
in the state; and the great value of those reforms was that they
tended to eliminate force from the sphere of politics. When men could
vote, there was less reason in rebellion; and the antithesis of Man
versus the State has almost been reduced to one of Woman versus the
State. But representative government, which promised to be ideal when
every man, or every adult, had a vote, is threatened in various
quarters. Its operations are too deliberate and involved to satisfy
impatient spirits, and three alternative methods of procedure are
advocated as improvements upon it. One is the "direct action" of
working men, by which they can speedily obtain their objects through a
general or partial strike paralyzing the food supply or other national
necessities. This is obviously a dangerous and double-edged weapon, the
adoption of which by other sections of the community--the Army and
Navy, for instance, or the medical profession--might mean national
dissolution.
Another method is the Referendum, by which important decisions adopted
by parliament would be referred to a direct popular vote. This proposal
is only logical when coupled with the Initiative, by which a direct
popular vote could compel parliament to pass any measure desired by the
majority of voters; otherwise its object is merely obstructive. The
third method is the supersession of parliament by the action of the
executive. The difficulties which Liberal measures have experienced in
the House of Lords, and the impossibility of the House of Commons
dealing by debate with the increasing complexities of national
business, have encouraged a tendency in Liberal governments to entrust
to their departments decisions which trench upon the legislative
functions of parliament. The trend of hostile opinion is to regard
parliament as an unnecessary middleman, and to advocate in its stead a
sort of plebiscitary bureaucracy, a constitution under which
legislation drafted by officials would be demanded, sanctioned, or
rejected by direct popular vote, and would be discussed, like the
Insurance Bill, in informal conferences outside, rather than inside,
parliament; while administration by a vast army of experts would be
partially controlled by popularly elected ministers; for socialists
waver between their faith in human equality and their trust in the
superman. Others think that the milder method of Devolution, or "Home
Rule all round," would meet the evils caused by the congestion of
business, and restore to the Mother of Parliaments her time-honoured
function of governing by debate.
Parliament has already had to delegate legislative powers to other
bodies than colonial legislatures; and county councils, borough
councils, district councils, and parish councils share with it in
various degrees the task of legislating for the country. They can, of
course, only legislate, as they can only administer, within the limits
imposed by Act of Parliament; but their development, like the
multiplication of central administrative departments, indicates the
latest, but not the final, stages in the growth and specialization of
English government. A century and a half ago two Secretaries of State
were all that Great Britain required; now there are half-a-dozen, and a
dozen other departments have been added. Among them are the Local
Government Board, the Board of Education, the Board of Trade, the Board
of Agriculture, while many sub-departments such as the Public Health
Department of the Local Government Board, the Bankruptcy Department of
the Board of Trade, and the Factory Department of the Home Office, have
more work to do than originally had a Secretary of State. It is
probable, moreover, that departments will multiply and subdivide at an
ever-increasing rate.
All this, however, is merely machinery provided to give effect to
public opinion, which determines the use to which it shall be put. But
its very provision indicates that England expects the state to-day to
do more and more extensive duty for the individual. For one thing the
state has largely taken the place of the church as the organ of the
collective conscience of the community. It can hardly be said that the
Anglican church has an articulate conscience apart from questions of
canon law and ecclesiastical property; and other churches are, as
bodies, no better provided with creeds of social morality. The Eighth
Commandment is never applied to such genteel delinquencies as making a
false return of income, or defrauding a railway company or the customs;
but is reserved for the grosser offences which no member of the
congregation is likely to have committed; and it is left to the state
to provide by warning and penalty against neglect of one's duty to
one's neighbour when one's neighbour is not one individual but the sum
of all. It was not by any ecclesiastical agitation that some humanity
was introduced into the criminal code in the third decade of the
nineteenth century; and the protest against the blind cruelty of
economic laissez faire was made by Sadler, Shaftesbury, Ruskin,
and Carlyle rather than by any church. Their writings and speeches
awoke a conscience in the state, which began to insist by means of
legislation upon humaner hours and conditions of labour, upon decent
sanitation, upon a standard of public education, and upon provision
being made against fraudulent dealings with more helpless fellow-men.
This public conscience has inevitably proved expensive, and the expense
has had to be borne either by the state or by the individual. Now, it
might have been possible, when the expense of these new standards of
public health and comfort began to be incurred, to provide by an heroic
effort of socialism for a perpetuation of the individualistic basis of
social duty. That is to say, if the state had guaranteed to every
individual an income which would enable him to bear his share of this
expense, it might also have imposed upon him the duty of meeting it, of
paying fees for the education of his children, for hospital treatment,
for medical inspection, and so forth. But that effort was not, and
perhaps could not, in the existing condition of public opinion, be
made; and the state has therefore got into the habit of providing and
paying for all these things itself. When the majority of male adults
earn twenty shillings or less a week, and possess a vote, there would
be no raising of standards at all, if they had to pay the cost. Hence
the state has been compelled step by step to meet the expense of
burdens imposed by its conscience. Free education has therefore
followed compulsory education; the demands of sanitary inspectors and
medical officers of health have led to free medical inspection, medical
treatment, the feeding of necessitous school children, and other
piecemeal socialism; and, ignoring the historical causes of this
development, we are embarked on a wordy warfare of socialists and
individualists as to the abstract merits of antagonistic theories.
It is mainly a battle of phrases, in which few pause to examine what
their opponents or they themselves mean by the epithets they employ. In
the sense in which the individualist uses the term socialist, there are
hardly any socialists, and in the sense in which the socialist uses the
term individualist, there are practically no individualists. In reality
we are all both individualists and socialists. It is a question of
degree and not of dogma; and most people are at heart agreed that some
economic socialism is required in order to promote a certain amount of
moral and intellectual individualism. The defect of so-called economic
individualism is that it reduces the mass of workers to one dead level
of common poverty, in which wages, instead of increasing like capital,
barely keep pace with the rise of rent and prices, in which men occupy
dwellings all alike in the same mean streets, pursuing the same routine
of labour and same trivial round of relaxation, and in which there
seems no possibility of securing for the individual adequate
opportunities for that development of his individuality by which alone
he can render his best service to the community.
That service is the common end and object towards which men of all
parties in English history have striven through the growth of conscious
and collective action. A communist has maintained that we are all
communists because we have developed a common army, a common navy, and
a common national government, in place of the individualistic forces
and jurisdictions of feudal barons. We have, indeed, nationalized these
things and many others as well, including the crown, the church, the
administration of justice, education, highways and byways, posts and
telegraphs, woods and forests. Even the House of Lords has been
constrained to abandon its independence by a process akin to that
medieval peine forte et dure, by which the obstinate individualist
was, when accused, compelled to surrender his ancient immunity and
submit to the common law; and this common control, which came into
being as the nation emerged out of its diverse elements in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and slowly gathered force as
it realized its strength under the Tudors, has attained fresh momentum
in the latest ages as the state step by step extended to all sorts and
conditions of men a share in the exercise of its power.
This is the real English conquest, and it forms the chief content of
English history. It is part of the triumph of man over the forces of
nature and over himself, and the two have gone hand in hand. An English
state could hardly exist before men had made roads, but it could no
more exist until they had achieved that great victory of civilized
government by which a minority agrees for the sake of peace to submit
to the greater number. Steam and railways and telegraphs have placed
further powers in the hands of men; they have conquered the land and
the sea and the air; and medical science has built up their physique
and paved the way for empire in tropical climes. But while he has
conquered nature, man has also conquered himself. He has tamed his
combative instincts; he has reduced civil strife to political combats,
restrained national conflicts by treaties of arbitration, and subdued
private wars to judicial proceedings; it is only in partially civilized
countries that gentlemen cannot rule their temper or bend their honour
to the base arbitrament of justice. He looks before and after, and
forgoes the gratification of the present to insure against the
accidents of the future, though the extent to which the community as a
whole can follow the example of individuals in this respect remains at
the moment a test of its self-control and sense of collective
responsibility.
Whether this growth of power in the individual and in the state is a
good or an evil thing depends on the conscience of those who wield it.
The power of the over-mighty subject has generally been a tyranny; and
all power is distrusted by old-fashioned Liberals and philosophic
Anarchists, because they have a traditional suspicion that it will fall
into hostile or unscrupulous hands. But the forces of evil cannot be
overcome by laissez faire, and power is an indispensable weapon
of progress. A powerless state means a helpless community; and anarchy
is the worst of all forms of tyranny, because it is irresponsible,
incorrigible, and capricious. Weakness, moreover, is the parent of
panic, and panic brings cruelty in its train. So long as the state was
weak, it was cruel; and the hideous treason-laws of Tudor times were
due to fear. The weak cannot afford to be tolerant any more than the
poor can afford to be generous. Cecil thought that the state could not
afford to tolerate two forms of religion; to-day it tolerates hundreds,
and it laughs at treason because it is strong. We are humanitarian, not
because we are so much better than our ancestors, but because we can
afford the luxury of dissent and conscientious objections so much
better than they could. Political liberty and religious freedom depend
upon the power of the state, inspired, controlled, and guided by the
mind of the community.
Last of all, through this power man has acquired faith, not in
miraculous intervention, but in his capacity to work out his own
destinies by means of the weapons placed in his hands and the dominion
put under his feet. He no longer believes that the weakest must go to
the wall, and the helpless be trampled under foot in the march of
civilization; nature is no longer a mass of inscrutable, iron decrees,
but a treasury of forces to be tamed and used in the redemption of
mankind by man; and mankind is no longer a mob of blind victims to
panic and passion, but a more or less orderly host marching on to more
or less definite goals. The individual, however, can do little by
himself; he needs the strength of union for his herculean tasks; and he
has found that union in the state. It is not an engine of tyranny, but
the lever of social morality; and the function of English government is
not merely to embody the organized might and the executive brain of
England, but also to enforce its collective and coordinating
conscience.
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