Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

Now every student of history knows that in the past majorities, more especially manipulated majorities—or their counterpart force majeure—have done great crimes.

But we do not to-day maintain that those majorities had a “right” to sack cities, to violate women, to massacre, to exterminate, and to bring others into subjection. The most we say is that these happenings are an extreme, and, under some circumstances, an inevitable expression of certain bad elements in human nature. Is it not, then, perfectly absurd to imagine that under internal and domestic conditions all such bad elements have departed from majorities; and that a consensus of vice, of self-indulgence, of unfairness, of a desire for domination, may not spread through very large sections of the community, even through whole peoples where the opportunity so to indulge is accorded—especially if it be accorded by law or embodied as a State doctrine?

Clearly, therefore, there must be some limitation or check imposed upon the so-called “rights” of majorities; and some of them may be limitations which those majorities would not choose for themselves, but will, all the same, submit to without revolt if they are properly rubbed home! One of the essential conditions for majority rule (if it is to carry with it any moral sanction at all) is that it must be ready to submit to the same conditions which it imposes upon others; and that it must not set up qualification, or prohibition from qualification, without any liability of that prohibition falling upon itself. It must make the liability fairly equal.

The specious excuse and justification for government by majority, as put forward by the materialists, is that, latent, within it, lies the physical force of the nation. (I may say, in passing, that the physical force of the nation lies latent in every form of government which secures the assent of the governed; and only ceases to be latent when some of it gets on to its hind-legs and insists on another form of government; and to be effective, that “some of it” need not always be a majority.)

But it is no use talking of physical force being the basis and the moral justification of majority rule—it is no use invoking the physical force argument—unless your majority is also prepared to go to the trouble of exercising it and paying the price for exercising it. And the main phenomenon of our present form of government by majority is that the majority won’t take any trouble at all; that, taken in the bulk, they care very little, and won’t put themselves to inconvenience—certainly won’t risk physical discomfort and pain—unless government has very seriously incommoded them by damaging or by neglecting their interests.

If the physical force basis is to be your full sanction of government—if that is really your argument—then that basis, that sanction, is possessed equally by king or despot, so long as he has his organisation at his command. There are his numbers, obeying him just as, with us, M.P.’s, 700 strong, obey the party-whips, often against their principles, but from no physical compulsion whatever.

What the preachers of physical force seem to ignore in arguing about the basis of government, is the aim of government. What, in the minds and consciences of those who believe in government, is government aiming for? Is its aim only to keep order or to be just? Does it seek to repress humanity to the utmost extent, or to develop it? To wrap its talents in a napkin, or to make it spiritually a ruler of cities?

What is humanity out for? To what is it evolving? What has been its impulse, its motive force in pressing for, and in extracting from reluctant authorities Representative Government, with its accompanying symbol—the voice of the majority?

It has been seeking humane government—in the belief, surely, that the nearer you get to really humane government the more will unrest and revolt and crime cease; and, by the consequent reduction of the police and of the forces of repression now needed, repay the State a hundred-fold for the liberties it has established. And majority rule is merely a device to get nearer to humane government, to open up the mind of man to his own humane possibilities, and to develop his trust in others by reposing trust in him. The more you spread government as an organization of the people themselves, the more humane, upon that working basis, are likely to be its operations—on one condition: that such organisation of the people, whatever its numbers, submits to the operation of its own laws and shares equally in the conditions which it imposes—that, if it provides a qualification for citizenship, it provides also the means for all to qualify.

Now this brings us to the relative duties of those who govern and of those who are governed; and, whereas, fundamentally their duty is the same, in one important respect it differs. In each case, broadly and fundamentally, their duty is toward their neighbour—to do to him as they would he should do unto them. That axiom, rightly carried out, covers all the law and the prophets, being greater than either; nay, if it were rightly and universally carried out, the law and the prophets might safely be shelved. Law merely exists as an expedient, because men have not yet learned thoroughly to do, or even to wish to do, their duty toward their neighbour; and as law is an imperfect thing, only existing because of, and only applicable to, imperfect conditions, the law and its upholders are not, and never can be, a perfect expression of that duty which is mutually owed by all. Law is only an expedient for averting greater evils which might, and probably would, take place without it in our present very imperfect stage of human development.