To set up in government some point over which you must not argue, is always very convenient to those who govern; and so you will note, throughout the world’s history, that the manipulators of government have always tried to impose some incontrovertible proposition as the basis on which their authority shall rest; and then, having done so, to get the strings of it into their own hands, and work it to their own convenience.
In the present day “majority rule” is the pretended fetich; a majority whose qualification is almost automatic, whose registration is all done for it by the party agents, and whose free and independent vote is brought up to the polling-booth very largely by the bribe of a free ride in a motor-car.
Scores of elections, that is to say, are turned by the indifferent voter, and on this sort of cookery recipe the moral products of majority rule are served up to us as “a dish fit for a king,” and as giving moral sanction to government. And whatever indigestion comes to us as the result of our swallowing it whole we are to sit down under. If the majority has decided, the matter (we are told) is beyond argument.
That is the fetich, the superstition on which, in theory, government rests to-day.
In other times there were other fetiches, quite as respectable. “The King can do no wrong,” was one of them. And we have had staged before our eyes, in due order, the divine right—or the divine sanction; it is all the same—of Kings, of Property, of Inheritance, of Slavery, and of War.
All these have been maintained as necessities of government—infallible doctrines, based on Scripture and the will of God.
Some of them present rather a battered front to-day. The fetich which has taken their place is the “Right of Majorities.”
We do not exactly say “Majorities can do no wrong.” But we do incline to say (often for the sake of a quiet life, and for no better reason) “Majorities must be allowed to do as they please.” And that means in effect—those must be allowed to do as they please who can pull the wires by which majorities are manipulated.
I need hardly remind you that to-day the wire-pullers are the statesmen, the leaders of party, who have secured more and more the control of the party-machine, and with it the control of the education of the electorate.
Having secured this control, they let loose upon you the astonishing doctrine that, if you have numbers, there you have your right cut and dried; that if you have not numbers your right (politically speaking) does not exist.