The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force, and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it. Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course of time it succeeds, and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little better than the old, sometimes worse.
How shall one judge whether the new régime is better or worse? Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction; but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.
I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American country—Guatemala, I think—which showed 130 revolutions in less than a hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much, some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang. Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace" revolutions.
But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today, reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then move backward nearly as far.
We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that change does not necessarily mean progress from any rational or moral point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge, and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the population than before the change took place?
You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.
Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of written history we can trace a real development in human society. I think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain. This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to undertake.
CHAPTER LII
THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION
(Discusses the series of changes through which human society has passed.)
We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being, the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems. Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are complicated and subtle.