V
GOVERNMENT
When two men are fighting and agree that they will stop at sundown, we have government. Their consent is government. Their memory of that consent is an institution. There never was a government of any kind or for any purpose that did not rest upon the consent of the governed; but the means by which the consent is obtained have varied. The consent records the extent to which the individuals are alike. It is only by virtue of similarity in the governed that government exists. On a ship, all men are alike in their danger of being drowned, and they consent to dictation from the captain for the welfare of all. The aim of the despot is to keep the population alike in their need of him or their fear of him. After the French Revolution, the entire French people were alike both in their desire for order and in their lack of training in self-government. A dictator was inevitable. Gouverneur Morris, whose experience in America qualified him to judge, saw the matter clearly as early as 1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by the two opposite means of giving them social order and foreign war. Henry V. kept himself on top in England by waging war in France. Seward in 1861 thought to unite the people of the United States by declaring war against everybody in Europe. The German Emperor is sustained to-day by the popular fear of France and Russia. It makes no difference what foolishness he commits; so long as that fear predominates he will be absolute.
For the converse proposition is also true, that in so far as people are like-minded, they must be ruled by a single mind. A hundred Malays cannot establish a representative government. They must have a boss. The population of Russia can only be ruled by a Czar. So also whenever under any form of government all the people want one thing, one man does it. The reasons for it are invented afterwards, and “war powers” are found to justify the proclamation setting the slaves free.
The extent to which people are similar to each other will be recorded in their institutions; in fact, those institutions are nothing but dials of similarity. For this reason any popular national institution gives you the nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, any consent has a tendency to modify the future because he or it is advertised and established. It is a factor in the consciousness of every individual. It is the conservative. It tends to affect the conduct and mind of every one, for any one coming in contact with it must conform or resist. It is a challenge to the individual. It impinges upon him. The thing changes daily in his mind, and occupies now more, now less, of his activities. In cases where his whole external conduct has been absorbed by one such power we have absolute rule, religious or military, and a uniform population. If there be a single predominating power which has not yet completely conquered, we have in some form or another a record of its growth by a tendency toward absolutism.
The American people have been growing strikingly uniform, owing to their one occupation,—business, their one passion,—a desire for money. They are divided by their system of politics into two great categories, and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, little nodes of power representing this identity of consciousness in each of the two great categories of the population, Republicans and Democrats. If you could cut open the consciousness of one thousand Americans and examine it with a microscope, you could set up our government with great ease.
Let us concede for the sake of argument that the full development of individual character and intellect is the aim of life.
Now in so far as individuals are developed, they differ from each other. We ought then to be distressed by any identity whatever found in the heads of individuals examined; and greatly distressed by the reign of the same passion manifested in the one thousand American organisms. You would say, ‘If this thing goes on, a dictator is absolutely certain,’ and then you would remember that you had heard a business man remark at the Club the evening before, that he would welcome a dictator as a cheap practical way out of it.
Let us now suppose you to examine one thousand English heads. The first thing you would notice would be that the number was not large enough to give reliable results. Certain types would be manifest, but the special variations would be so striking as to cloud your conclusions. In all these heads there would be spots of a density nowhere found in America, but the spontaneous variations outside and round about them would be magnificent. You would say, “These spots represent different kinds of conservatism. This one is reverence for the church, that one for the army, a third for the judiciary. They represent prejudice, but they also represent stability, a stability that is the resultant of a thousand positive and various forces. These spots hold England together and give scope to free government. The world never has done and never can do better than this. These individuals are developed. The line of force of one man passes through one institution, that of the next man through the next. No force, no passion, can make them all alike at any one time. They are anchored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid and free in the present. The only hope for freedom in the individual lies in the existence of different sorts of institutions.”
It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college of Jesuits is a protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that to have free government you must encourage institutions—and you will be wrong.
The fundamental reason why you are wrong is that these beneficent institutions are what is left of the activity of people who believed in them for their own sake. You can no more imitate one of them, or catch the power of one of them, than you can set up a king here to repel an invasion. You yourself believe in individualism. Go straight for that, and leave it to erect its bulwarks in what form it may.