XI
THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY
Democracy is the rising star, mounting clear and bright over falling kingdoms and toppling empires. Crowns are going cheap in the market to-day, and the divine right of kings is a broken weapon flung in the mud of the world's scorn and picked up as a toy for Punch to provoke laughter. The old nobility is losing its ancient charter to sit exclusive in the high places of honour, and the common people--the new caste--are coming into possession and power. The working-man must be tailored to the grand part he plays in history. He will feel uneasy perhaps wearing his first new dress suit--it will worry him like a misfit. But clothes add splendour to our common lot. With the salvation of the country dependent on his nod he must cast the stodgy cloth cap that clowns his head on bank holidays and nod heroically to the admirers who retinue his movements.
Democracy is the unknown god it will be fashionable to worship when the war is over. Now we are all wasting ink and paper and taxing our small brains prophesying what the world will be like in the flowering-time of peace, when everybody will become deliriously happy, wise, and good. We shall move more cautiously then, like a cat stepping circumspectly over broken glass on top of the garden wall. We will make no mistakes, as we did in the feckless past, bringing us not only bleeding feet, but wounded hearts. There must be no party politics in the land as there used to be when politicians sold their country to buy their party into power, and sold themselves to keep the power which they had bought. Everyone will want to do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour will want to do good to himself, and so social reform now and henceforth is the compelling idea that holds the public fancy.
But no two social reformers think alike or advance the same doctrines of reform, although the same idea dominates the mind of all the doctrinaires. An idea is an abstract, invisible, impalpable, thing that enters into the mind of man naked and unadorned. Before exposing this naked idea to public observation it must be clothed and attractively dressed. Confusion comes in with the clothes. Fashions in clothes differ so that the same idea differently dressed appears to be a different object. However, it is not. Ideas do not differ: it is the expression of them that differs. It is when you clothe your idea with words and deck it in literary plumage that the mischief stalks in and divergent opinions clash and confound us.
We all believe in Utopia, but none of us hold the clue to the high road that gallops straight into it. We take trial trips over new ground and get sloughed up on false trails. Plato and Socrates, Francesco d'Assisi and Philip Sydney, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have each been famous architects of Utopia in the dim dreamland of the past, and each propounded his own scheme as being the very healthiest and happiest earthly paradise ever constructed for man to dwell in. They all have some aims and ends in common, considering thoughtfully the welfare of the people bodily and morally: but the distinctive personality of the architect slyly creeps in, and on the rock of personal vanity they split into rival factions and a general quarrel ensues, rending the best-laid schemes man ever devised for the emancipation of the human race. And so the egg of social reform gets addled before it is hatched, and alas! the glittering city of ten thousand joys for mankind to dwell in recedes farther and farther into the sweet dreamland of the future.
One architect of Utopia proposes to upbuild the city of Human Happiness by hand labour. Brick by brick it is to rise in colossal proportions and flowering beauty. He starts with the individual as the foundation and finishes with the individual as top-stone. He works by gradual and peaceful process to attain his splendid purpose. His method of work is unpopular because it is slow.
Another architect proposes to work by machinery, and to force it to a hasty finish. Organization and legislation are the instruments of torture proposed for the rapid promotion of his purpose. Human society--social and industrial--is stricken with fell disease, which can be cured promptly by Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council. By this drastic method the "organic welfare" of society is to be builded while you wait. The State is to be organized, thought is to be organized, the will is to be organized, and happiness is to be organized, and nothing of consequence is to be left unorganized; while the mere individual is to be wiped from the map as an unnecessary dot of disfigurement upon it. Wealth is to be handled by a new and better process; wealth is to be conscripted, which means one man is to make it and another man is to take it. Labour is not to be dealt with as a marketable commodity. It is an insult to the dignity of labour to measure a man's work and pay him exactly what his day's toil is worth in the market. The working-man is a member of the universal brotherhood, and needs elbow-room in the community to spread himself. He must have the wages he hankers after, and when too weary to work a pension granted from the State to make comfortable his latter end. In fact in Utopia every man, woman, and child claims sufficient income independent of work, and the State must be Paymaster-General.
Alas! universal happiness on these idealistic lines of compulsion and greed is like an echo. It answers your call but does not come. Socialism makes no progress in saving men; it has eyes to see man's misery, but no hands to lift him out of it.
The longer I live the more I am convinced that this great and vital problem of social regeneration is to be engineered only by slow gradations and with infinite patience and gentleness. Society is composed of dense masses and millions of frail, erring human beings, and to schedule a sudden inrush of perfect laws on the statute-book will not breed an improved strain of perfect citizens who can live up to the pose of perfection. You cannot legislate selfishness and weakness and greediness and vice out of human nature quickly, as you wring dirty water out of a wet sponge; neither can you pump purity and patience and brotherly love into humanity by Act of Parliament, and out of such shoddy material weave an ideal State in one round of the clock. Perfect laws are scarce as perfect men. Laws will grow better as we grow better--gradually. Laws and men act and react upon one another in mystic collusion. The great incoming tide of righteousness which shall fill all things will fill them. You cannot complete and furnish the top floor of the Palace of Humanity before you have laid the foundation solidly and deep on the rock of righteousness.