Without this contrast, the doctrine of the tripartite classification of men might destroy all possibilities of a practical democracy. If the Unthinking are the majority, how can democracy be trusted? This contrast, furthermore, serves to illuminate a further problem: the paradoxical necessity of an all-powerful government which the people are able to control.
If this distinction is accepted in the establishment of a democracy, what will the consequences be?[133]
In the first place, the masses who rule will not necessarily govern. Within the framework of a democratic constitution, they will be able to express their wishes, and make those wishes effective; but it will be impossible for them to interfere in the personnel of government, whether merely administrative or in the highest positions. It will be forever impossible that a “swine-representative” should be elected, or that one of those transient epochs of carpet-baggery, which appear from time to time in most Western democracies, should corrupt the government. By means of the popular rights of initiative, referendum, election and recall, the people will be able to control their government in the broad sweep of policy. The government will be beyond their reach insofar as petty political interference, leading to inferiority or corruption, is concerned.
In the second place, the benefits of aristocracy will be obtained without its cost. The government will be made up of men especially fit and trained to govern. There will, hence, be no difficulty in permitting the government to become extraordinarily powerful in contrast with Western governments. Since the masses will be able to choose between a wide selection of able leaders, the democracy will be safeguarded.
Sun Yat-sen regarded this as one of the cardinal points in his doctrines. In retaining the old Chinese idea of a scholar class and simultaneously admitting Western elective and other democratic techniques, he believed that he [pg 109] had found a scheme which surpassed all others. He saw the people as stockholders in a company, and the administrators as directors; he saw the people as the owner of an automobile, and the administrators as the chauffeur.
A further consequence of this difference between the right of voting and the right of being voted for, but one to which Sun Yat-sen did not refer, necessarily arises from his postulation of a class of geniuses leading their followers, who control the unthinking masses. That is the continuity which such a group of ideological controllers would impart to a democracy. Sun Yat-sen, addressing Chinese, took the Chinese world for granted. A Westerner, unmindful of the background, might well overlook some comparatively simple points. The old system, under which the Empire was a sort of educational system, was a familiar feature in the politics which Sun Yat-sen criticized. In arguing for the political acceptance of inequality and the guarantee of government by a select group, Sun was continuing the old idea of leadership, modifying it only so far as to make it consistent with democracy. Under the system he proposed, the two great defects of democracy, untrustworthiness and lack of continuity of policy, would be largely eliminated.
The Democratic Machine State.
Throughout pre-modern Chinese thought there runs the idea of personal behavior and personal controls. The Chinese could not hypostatize in the manner of the West. Looking at men they saw men and nothing more. Considering the problems and difficulties which men encountered, they sought solutions in terms of men and the conditioning intimacies of each individual's life. The Confucian Prince was not so much an administrator as a moral leader; his influence, extending itself through imitation on the part of others, was personal and social rather than [pg 110] political.[134] In succeeding ages, the scholars thought of themselves as the leaven of virtue in society. They stressed deportment and sought, only too frequently by means of petty formalities, to impress their own excellence and pre-eminence upon the people. Rarely, if ever, did the scholar-official appeal to formal political law. He was more likely to invoke propriety and proceed to exercise his authority theoretically in accordance with it.
Sun Yat-sen did not feel that further appeal to the intellectual leaders was necessary. In an environment still dominated by the past, an exhortation for the traditional personal aspect of leadership would probably have appeared as a centuries-old triteness. The far-seeing men, the geniuses that Sun saw in all society, owed their superiority not to artificial inequality but to natural inequality;[135] by their ability they were outstanding. Laws and customs could outrage this natural inequality, or conceal it behind a legal facade of artificial inequality or equally artificial equality. Laws and customs do not change the facts. The superior man was innately the superior man.