Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

Let us examine them.

The problem of government is to protect the individuals in a community against each other, and to protect them all against the rest of the world. The power to interfere and the power to represent must be lodged somewhere, and the question is how to arrange it so that this power shall not be turned against the people. Democracy solves it by election. Let the people choose their rulers. Instantly every man is turned into a custodian, a part of him is dedicated to the public. He is prevented by fundamental theory of law from being absolutely selfish. Corrupt him how you will, deflect him, play upon him, degrade, deceive him, you cannot shut him off from this influence. The framework of government makes continuous appeal to the highest within him. It draws him as the moon draws the sea. This appeal is one to which the organic nature of man responds, as we have seen. For man is an unselfish animal. The law of his nature is expressed in the framework of government. The arrangement shows a wisdom so profound that all historical philosophy grows cheap before it.

If you jump from the study of psychology straight into the theory of democracy, you see why it was that the allegiance to the ideas of the United States Constitution endured through slavery, through the carpetbag era, through the Tweed ring. It was not the letter, but the spirit which was inextinguishable.

It has taken a century of pamphlets to break down the distinctions between men based upon orders of nobility, property, creed, etc. Fifteen minutes of psychology would have levelled men and set them upon the same footing as that upon which they walk into a hospital.

The creature man is by this system dealt with so simply as he had not been dealt with since the birth of Christ. It must be conceded that the thing could not even have been tried, except with a people familiar with the distinctions between legislative, executive, and judicial power, criminal and civil law, etc. Altruistic impulse would not have sufficed to execute itself. But the divisions and forms of thought expressive of that altruism already existed, and were in operation, as we have seen.

It is thought that the peculiar merit of Democracy lies in this: that it gives to every man a chance to pursue his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow men. This is by the law of his being his only chance for happiness. You cannot find a man who does not know this. If you examine the consciousness of any typical minion of success, you will find that his source of inward content lies in a belief that his success has benefited somebody—his kindred, his townsfolk—mankind.

The concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger and not the safety of Democracy; for Democracy contemplates that every man shall think first of the State and next of himself. This is its only justification. In so far as it is operated by men who are thinking first of their own interests and then of the State, its operation is distorted.

Democracy assumes perfection in human nature. In so far as an official or a voter is corrupt, you will have bad government. Or to put the same thing in another way, all corruption is shown up as a loss of the power of self-government. The framework of government lies there exposed in all its parts like a vast and complex dial, recording with the nicety of a scientific instrument every departure from virtue of the human beings whose lives, whose standards, whose very thoughts are registered against it. When selfishness reaches a certain point, the machine stops. Government by force comes in. We have had railroad riots and iron foundry riots. In Denver not many months ago thirty thousand people, or about one-fifth of the population, engaged in a carnival of destruction and raided a picnic given by the Cattle Association. These ebullitions, which look like mania, are nothing but an acute form of blind selfishness, due to the education of a period in which everything has been settled by an appeal to the self-interest of the individual. The Bryanism, with which we must all sympathize, is nothing but a revolt on the part of the poorer classes against the exploitation of the country by the capitalist, due to pension laws, tariffs, trusts, etc. “Something must now be done for me,” says the laboring man, and the mine owner says “Silver.” The appeal is by a little manipulation worked up into a craze, with the result that property is unsafe. The craze is a craze of mistaken selfishness. One of the weapons with which the richer classes fought it was corruption. They fed the element which was devouring them. There is talk of bayonets, and it is true that either bayonets or public spirit must in such cases be the issue. We cannot have property at the mercy of a mob, and if any single state like Colorado were separated from the rest, and the spirit of unreason should possess it utterly, government by force would ensue. Elections would be superseded, and property would improvise some mode of practical government which every intelligent man would back. The danger of an episode of this sort is that it interrupts the course of things. It is revolution. It is the breakdown of democracy, and tends to perpetuate the conditions of incompetence out of which the crisis arises. Fortunately the country is so large that one State holds up the next. No community would tolerate a state of siege for more than six months, and the State would return to educational methods, weaker but alive.

A military imposition of order is then the extreme case. But the Boss system is the halfway house in the breakdown of free government. In the Boss system we have seen a lack of virtue in the people show itself in the shape of a government, in fact autocratic, but in form republican. Here again the loss in the power of self-government is apparent.

But there is no departure from civic virtue which can get by unnoticed. Take the case of a voter who submits to having his street kept dirty because he fears that a protest would make him disagreeably conspicuous. Here also the loss of power of self-government is traceably recorded. So much selfishness—so much filth.