Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

In these essays, which look towards a new social synthesis, I find myself involved in somewhat artificial subdivisions. Industrial, social and political forces all react one upon another, and the complete social product is the result of the interplay of these forces, coördinated and vitalized by philosophy, education and religion. To isolate each factor and consider it separately is apt to result in false values, but there seems no other way in which the subject, which is essentially one, may be divided into the definite parts which are consequent on the form of a course of lectures. In considering now the political estate of the human social organism it will be evident that I hold that this must be contingent on many elements that reveal themselves in a contributory industrial system, in the principles that are embodied in social relationships, and in the general scheme of such a working philosophy of life as may predominate amongst the component parts of the synthetic society which is the product of all these varied energies and the organic forms through which they operate.

Political organization has always been a powerful preoccupation of mankind, and the earliest records testify to its antiquity. The regulation of human intercourse, the delimiting of rights and privileges, protection of life and property, the codifying of laws, vague, various and conflicting, the making of new laws and the enforcing of those that have taken organic form; all these and an hundred other governmental functions, appeal strongly to the mind and touch closely on personal interests. It is no wonder that the political history of human society is the most varied, voluminous and popular in its appeal. At the present moment this problem has, in general, an even more poignant appeal, and no rival except the industrial problem, for in both cases systems that, up to ten years ago, were questioned only by a minority (large in the case of industry, small and obscure in the case of government) have since completely broken down, and it is probable that a political system which had existed throughout the greater part of Europe and the Americas for a century and a half, almost without serious criticism, has now as many assailants as industrialism itself.

The change is startling from the "Triumphant Democracy" period, a space of time as clearly defined and as significant in its characteristics as the "Victorian Era." Before the war, during the war, and throughout the earlier years of the even more devastating "peace," the system which followed the ruin of the Renaissance autocracies, the essential elements in which were an ever-widening suffrage, parliamentary government, and the universal operation of the quantitative standard of values, was never questioned or criticised, except in matters of detail. That it was the most perfect governmental scheme ever devised and that it must continue forever, was held to be axiomatic, and with few exceptions the remedy proposed for such faults as could not possibly escape detection was a still further extension of the democratic principle. Even the war itself was held to be "a war to make the world safe for democracy." It is significant that the form in which this saying now frequently appears is one in which the word "from" is substituted in place of the word "for." It is useless to blink the fact that there is now a distrust of parliamentary and representative government which is almost universal and this distrust, which is becoming widespread, reaches from the Bolshevism of Russia on the one hand, through many intermediate social and intellectual stages, to the conservative elements in England and the United States, and the fast-strengthening royalist "bloc" in France.

In many unexpected places there is visible a profound sense that something is so fundamentally wrong that palliatives are useless and some drastic reform is necessary, a reform that may almost amount to revolution. Lord Bryce still believes in democracy in spite of his keen realizations of its grievous defects, because, as he says, hope is an inextinguishable quality of the human soul. Mr. Chesterton preaches democracy in principle while condemning its mechanism and its workings with his accustomed vigour; the Adamses renounce democracy and all its works while offering no hint as to what could consistently take its place with any better chance of success, while the royalists excoriate it in unmeasured terms and preach an explicit return to monarchy. Meanwhile international Bolshevism, hating the thing as violently as do kings in exile, substitutes a crude and venal autocracy, while organized labour, as a whole, works for the day when a "class-conscious proletariat" will have taken matters into its own hands and established a new aristocracy of privilege in which the present working classes will hold the whip-hand. Meanwhile the more educated element of the general public withdraws itself more and more from political affairs, going its own way and making the best of a bad job it thinks itself taught by experience it cannot mend.

It is useless to deny that government, in the character of its personnel, the quality of its output, the standard of its service and the degree of its beneficence has been steadily deteriorating during the last century and has now reached, in nearly every civilized country, a deplorably low level. Popular representatives are less and less men of character and ability; legislation is absurd in quantity, short-sighted, frivolous, inquisitorial, and in a large measure prompted by selfish interests; administration is reckless, wasteful and inefficient, while it is overloaded in numbers, without any particular aptitude on the part of its members, and in a measure controlled by personal or corporate interests. The whole system is in bad odour for it is shot through and through with the greed for money and influence, while the cynicism of the professional politician and the low average of character, intelligence and manners of the strata of society that increasingly are usurping all power, work towards producing that general contempt and aversion that have become so evident of late and that are a menace to society no less than that of the decaying institution itself.

Confronted by a situation such as this, the natural tendency of those who suffer under it, either in their material interests or their ideals, is to condemn the mechanism, perhaps even the very principles for the operation of which the various machines were devised. Some reject the whole scheme of representative, parliamentary government, and, failing any plausible substitute, are driven back on some form of the soviet, or even government by industrial groups. Those that go to the limit and reject the whole scheme of democracy are in still worse plight for they have no alternative to offer except a restored monarchy, and this, the terminus ad quem of their logic, their courage will not permit them to avow.

It is a dilemma, but forced, I believe, by the fatal passion of the man of modernism for the machine, the mechanical device, the material equivalent for a thing that has no equivalent, and that is the personal character of the constituents of society and the working factors in a political organism. There was never a more foolish saying than that which is so frequently and so boastfully used: "a government of laws and not of men." This is the exact reversal of what should be recognized as a self-evident truth, viz, that the quality of the men, not the nature of the laws or of the administrative machine, is the determining factor in government. You may take any form of government ever devised by man, monarchy, aristocracy, republic, democracy, yes, or soviet, and if the community in which this government operates has a working majority of men of character, intelligence and spiritual energy, it will be a good government, whereas if the working majority is deficient in these characteristics, or if it makes itself negligible by abstention from public affairs it will be a bad government. There is no one political system which is right while all others are wrong. The monarchy of St. Louis was better than the Third Republic, as this is better than was the monarchy of Louis XV. The aristocracy of Washington was better than the democracy of this year of grace, as this in itself is better than the late junker aristocracy of Prussia. You cannot substitute a machine in place of character, you cannot supersede life by a theory.

This does not mean that the form of government is of no moment, it is of the utmost importance for I cannot too often insist that the organic life of society is the resultant of two forces; spiritual energy working through and upon the material forms towards their improvement or—when this energy is weak or distorted—their degeneration; the material forms acting as a stimulus towards the development of spiritual energy through association and environment that are favourable, or towards its weakening and distortion when these are deterrents because of their own degraded or degrading nature. If it is futile to look for salvation through the mechanism, it is equally futile to try to act directly and exclusively on the character of the social constituents in the patient hope that their defects may be remedied, and the preponderance of character of high value achieved, before catastrophe overtakes the experiment. Life is as sacramental as the Christian religion and Christian philosophy; neither the spiritual substance nor the material accidents can operate alone but only in a conjunction so intimate that it is to all intents and purposes—that is, for the interests and purposes of God in human life—a perfect unity. However completely and even passionately we may realize the determining factor of spiritual energy as this manifests itself through personal character, however deeply we may distrust the machine, we are bound to recognize the paramount necessity of the active interplay of both within the limits of life as we know it on the earth, and therefore it is very much our concern that the machine, whether it is industrial, political, educational, ecclesiastical or social, is as perfect in its nature and stimulating in its operations as we are able to compass.

In the present liquidation of values, theories and institutions we are bound therefore to scrutinize each operating agency of human society, to see wherein it has failed and how it can be bettered, and the problem before us now is the political organism.