IV
The growth of the democratic ideal is bound up with the acceptance of the freedom of the mind in all its consequences—even at the risk of some disorder; and the difficulty which political democracy is apt even in normal times to find in conforming to this view is due to the fact that it has not yet perceived the logic of its own first principles. This in its turn is at least to some extent to be accounted for by the survival in democracies of mediæval conceptions of authority. We do not need to take into account those doctrines of authority which are begotten of the divine right of kings and are now clearly at their last gasp. The divine right of kings is, however, assumed to have fallen upon democratic governments; and though they may not exercise authority for the same ends as an autocrat of the old style, yet they conceive of it as operating in the same way. Theoretically, authority in democracies is exercised in the interests of social justice; but we still suppose that the discipline of social justice must be imposed upon men from without.
Apparently the assumption underlying the authoritarian position is that human nature is incurably anarchic, that it is its instinctive tendency to be wayward and disruptive, and that there is no remedy for this state of things except that of putting it in a cage, of surrounding it with a fine mesh of arrests, checks and restraints. This view may owe something of its modern strength to the theological doctrine of the total depravity of human nature—a dogma no longer held by sane people. We know that if we do hold a doctrine of original sin it must be held together with the no less true doctrine of original goodness. But the authoritarian is theologically orthodox; man to him is a born rebel, a natural anarchist; he holds that he is organically antisocial; and there is therefore nothing to do with him but to treat him like a wild animal and put him behind bars. It is of course possible to subdue anarchy in this way, and to produce some kind of order—for a time. But it should be observed that what happens is that liberty is not so much disciplined as denied; and as it appears to be the inherent, and incurable tendency of authority to feed upon itself and to grow fat, the natural consequence is the progressive destruction of liberty. The historical reaction from the excess of authority is a violent revulsion to wild and bloody anarchy; and over against authority, the only hope of liberty is to divide and to keep it divided.
As a matter of fact in democratic communities, there is a curious discrepancy between theory and practice; and—somewhat unusually—our practice is better than our theory. The mediæval doctrine of authority still haunts our political and social thinking; but there are few people in a democratic community who behave themselves only when and because there is a policeman about. The whole structure of law (of which the policeman is the symbol) rests upon the proposition that it is possible to define and to enforce those moral obligations which are essential to the cohesion and the order of the community, those things which members of a society must do or abstain from doing if the society is to hold together at all. Law does not do more than state the lowest common terms of social duty. It does not cover “the whole duty of man.” The maximum of legal obligation is the minimum of moral obligation. That is why the law does not touch ordinary folk—except, of course, in formal adjustments of affairs of business or property. In the region of personal conduct, law is for decent folk in normal times a pure irrelevancy. We not only keep the law but we to some degree transcend it, and we do so without thinking about it. The policeman has no terrors for us because we do not approach his frontiers; and he has terrors only for the wilful social misfit whose native anarchy is still untamed. Law, that is, imposes the discipline of social justice only upon the exceptional case, the individual who is contemptuous or negligent of his social duty. Upon the great majority of people it is imposed from within—sometimes indeed by the fear of public opinion, but chiefly by a more or less effective social sense. We are free from the law not because we take care not to break it, but because a higher principle has lifted us outside and beyond its bounds. Our righteousness truly exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, that is, of the legal mind; and that is because a higher principle of righteousness is at work within us. This higher principle of righteousness is of course no other than our own independent and energised sense of social obligation. The degree to which it is effectual may and does vary in different persons; but it is not to be questioned that democracy exists because of the increasing efficiency of the inward sense of social obligation in its members. Its further development is contingent upon the measure in which this inner constraint supersedes coercive machinery as the organ of social justice.
It is, of course, better for men to live under law than in anarchy. What we have to understand concerning law and its machinery is that it is a stage in the evolution of social order and in our education into true freedom. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the law itself may become a real hindrance to this process. Just because law is a definition of obligation, it tends to be regarded as fixing the outmost limits of social duty; and whatsoever we do beyond these limits ranks as work of supererogation. That is bad enough; but worse may happen. One may suppose that outside these limits, any kind of conduct is admissible; and law, despite its intention, may therefore arrest the growth of the social sense. The social sense, that is, is expected to operate up to frontier line defined by the law; beyond that point, it is not called upon to act. We require to introduce into men’s minds a different conception of law from that popularly current. It is the office of the law to make itself superfluous; and its administration requires not a superstitious veneration of its majesty or a pedantic respect for its letter, but humanity and common sense. The law is overmuch conceived as our gaoler; properly understood, it is, as St. Paul said of the Mosaic Law, our “schoolmaster.” But so long as we talk about “vindicating” the law more than reclaiming the offender—as the legal mind is apt to do—so long will men tend to regard the law not as a stepping-stone to higher things, but as an irksome restraint; and while we indulge in tall talk about the majesty of the law, we make law-abidingness “the law and the prophets,” and jeopardise our chance of effecting that increasing enfranchisement of the social sense in which alone is the hope of the democratic ideal.
The further development of the democratic principle and the achievement of a genuine freedom would appear to be contingent upon the growth of the interior discipline of social justice with a consequent diminution in the influence of exterior legal sanctions. If society is to be regarded as in any sense truly organic, and if consequently its vitality is to be measured by its capacity for variation, it is plain that it must be released from the tendency to uniformity which is entailed in a “reign of law.” Augustine’s definition of liberty is pertinent here—Love God and do as you please, and translated out of the idiom of religion into that of sociology (which is like unto it) the rule runs: Love your neighbour and do as you please. Authoritarianism makes inevitably for regimentation; and while it may in this way repress the waywardness of individualism, it does so at the expense of that precious thing, individuality. The task of democracy is that of destroying individualism and of cultivating individuality. Liberty is the condition in which a man may be true to himself through everything, and may live out the logic of his own distinctive spiritual endowments. But because personality is essentially social, a man cannot be true to himself until he is in a true sense delivered from himself. An effectual social discipline is a necessary condition of a real liberty. It is not a check upon liberty but its indispensable concomitant. Without it, liberty overshoots its bolt and destroys itself.
But this relation is a mutual one. Not only does a social conscience safeguard and discipline liberty; but its own mating with liberty works for its liberation. We have seen how the influence of legalistic preconceptions tends to arrest the growth of the social conscience; how the school of law may become the prison of legalism. The social conscience is something more than a moral critic or invigilator; it has the quality of a creative energy; and once it is “free from the law,” it is for ever trying to outdo itself. It is indeed only an adventurous social conscience of this kind that will avail to overcome those distinctions of class which constitute the immemorial and multiform schism of our race. We have to work not only for the socialisation of liberty but also for the liberation of our social instincts; and this is to be done by an equal mating of liberty and the social conscience. This is, in the main, the office of the teacher and the preacher, but meantime a great deal is to be done by a systematic effort to multiply and develop those social contacts which already exist either actually or potentially.
The final reason for this mating is not merely to make room for dissent in the community. That, indeed, is only an incidental thing which serves to test the quality and extent of the community’s freedom. Freedom is necessary because it is the only condition under which creative self-expression becomes really possible. The human spirit must have independence and initiative if it is to be its whole self. It was not made for regimentation; it was made for a distinctive life of its own. But its very constitution tells us that if it is to attain to a fruitful freedom, it must achieve something besides freedom. The motto of a democracy resolute to live out the full implicates of its first principles must not be freedom alone, but freedom and fellowship.
Chapter VI.
THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP.
“We are members one of another.”—St. Paul.
“Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do on earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them; and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.
“Therefore I bid you not to dwell in hell but in heaven; or while ye must, upon earth, which is part of heaven, and forsooth no foul part.”—William Morris, The Dream of John Ball.”
“Sans d’égalité donc, point d’unité; sans liberté point d’égalité; mais point de liberté non plus sans des devoirs mutuels volontairement accomplis, c’est-a-dire accomplis par la volonté se portant d’elle-même et sans contrainte a tout ce qui produit l’union entre les êtres égaux; autrement chacun n’aurait d’autre règle que son intérêt, sa passion. Et du conflit de tant de passions, de tant d’intérêts opposés naîtraient aussitôt, avec la guerre, la servitude et la tyrannie. Or, l’obéissance libre au devoir est une obéissance d’amour; liberté lorsque l’amour s’affaiblit, la liberté décline même proportion. A la place de l’union volontaire et morale, dont il est le principle, la force, loi des brutes, opére une union purement matérielle.”—Lamennais, Affaires de Rome.
IT is usually assumed that the distinctively social end of life begins “after business hours.” There is, we say, “no room for sentiment in business,”—which is part of the intolerable price we pay for our subjection to the economic motive. In business the presumption is that we are all competitors; when business is over we are prepared to be friends. The formality and the insincerity of much social intercourse in our time—not to speak of its utter fruitlessness for any healthy human good—has its origins largely in the banishment of fellowship from the “business end” of life. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of wholesome human intercourse in modern life or that there are not genuine friendships between business competitors and between principals and subordinates in industry; but it is generally true that we conceive of commerce and industry as admitting of no extensive exercise of the humanities; and for this habit of mind we are punished by a deep impoverishment of life.
There is a sense in which the struggle for liberty may be regarded as being essentially a struggle to broaden the basis of human fellowship; and it is undoubtedly true that forms of privilege are the most prolific causes of social schism. No community possesses the conditions of real fellowship while it is (as modern communities are) divided into topdogs and underdogs, whether the topdogs be aristocrats or plutocrats, and the underdogs be serfs or wage-slaves. For the poison of privilege is apt to permeate the whole body; and an exploited class may itself be composed of exploiters. In our day the quest and the possession of pecuniary advantage has so grievously muddied the springs of fellowship that we live in a chronic temper of mutual suspicion and distrust. We do not constitute living societies; we are but collections of individuals who live together because we must, and come no nearer to each other than is necessary for the indispensable common operations of life. Lord Morley has pointed out that the business of the Irish Land League lay as much in adjusting feuds among its own members as in carrying on their common feud against the landlords. Within small circles there is, of course, much genuine friendly exchange and co-operation; there are holiday occasions when good temper and good fellowship rule; but for the rest, we chiefly live under jungle law.
It is essential to the creation of a living society that we should recognise that the principle of fellowship is a condition of the highest fruitfulness of human effort in every part of life. But fellowship in this connection means something more than the casual and superficial camaraderie of one’s leisure hours. It must be translated into concrete policies and into organised and sustained co-operation. In this sense its application to industry is one of the first conditions of its restoration in other regions and in other senses. Indeed, it may be regarded as the natural complement of that change in the worker’s status which we have seen to be impending. Free men will flow into fellowship as the cistern to the river; and the “democratic control” of industry is the name we give to the practice of fellowship in industry which is the clear sequel to the doctrine of partnership.
Mr. Sidney Webb, as we have seen, advocates the grant of a “constitution” to industry; but this proposal suffers from the inherent defect of the well-meaning experiments in co-partnership and profit-sharing of which there have been not a few in recent years. This defect is that all alike preserve the line of privilege. The benefits are granted as concessions from above; and generally as incentives to greater assiduity. There can be no objection to the granting of concessions from above so long as those who are above come down and stand on the same footing as those below. But so long as a vestige of the old differentiation of superior and inferior, of master and servant remains, not all the nominal co-partnership and profit-sharing in the world can satisfy the conditions of real partnership. While for instance the administrative and executive branches of an industry remain out of the sphere of co-partnership, the partnership is a polite fiction; and it is only by the passing of all the departments of an industry, administrative as well as operative, into the control of all who carry them on, that democratic conditions can be established. The theory of partnership implies an actual interest in and an actual control over all the divisions of an industry; and, while this does not imply that direction and leadership and the powers of discipline will not still be vested in individuals, these individuals will owe their position not to any antecedent privilege but to the will and consent of the workers as a whole.
On the surface there seems to be a danger lest such an arrangement may lead to an exclusive and particular fellowship within separate industries and therefore may militate against the larger fellowship of the community, a fellowship, that is, of producers against consumers. But it is not contemplated that the control of the workers—whether operative or administrative—shall be absolute over their industry. That will in turn be subject to the will of the commonwealth as a whole—this superior authority being made effective by such devices as the control of raw material. This particular danger may, however, be very easily exaggerated. After all, every producer is a consumer; and the co-operative societies have shown that it is possible to create a very fruitful fellowship of consumer and producer. Moreover, this is a danger which we imagine largely because we argue from existing conditions. It will be greatly diminished as the economic motive ceases to exercise its withering influence upon men.
But it stands to reason that men will do better and more faithful work under conditions which give them a direct interest in and control over their work. Both the quantity and quality of work suffer to-day because nothing is left to the worker’s sense of honour and responsibility. It is only a more or less irksome necessity to which the worker goes apathetically and from which he turns with relief. But convert it into a social task in which fellowship may be actually realised in a genuine participation in control, where management is an affair of common counsel and not of autocratic fiats, where the ideal of public service has superseded the purpose of private gain, and you set free potentialities both of quality and quantity of workmanship of which under the present demoralising conditions it is not possible to form a conception.
Clearly the reality of fellowship in industry must be validated by making every position of greater responsibility open to every worker; and appointment to such positions should be by choice of the workers. That the workers may be trusted to make good appointments is demonstrated by the sagacity which has generally been manifested in the selection of their Union leaders; and this is a far more certain guarantee of effective management than the present system which often assigns incompetent men to important positions on grounds of kinship or “influence.” It further goes without saying that a genuine partnership implies the right of withdrawal. A man must be free to choose his work and the place where he works. Freedom is of the very essence of fellowship. Anything of the nature of coercion or conscription would be deadly to the spirit which it is desired to create.