Promoting good citizenship

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Of indolence, indifference, apathy, in general, no more need be said. It is a sin that easily besets us all. We might suppose that where public affairs are concerned it would decrease under the influence of education and the press. But several general causes have tended to increase it in our own generation, despite the increasing strength of the appeal which civic duty makes to men who are, or if they cared might be, better informed about public affairs than were their fathers.

The first of these causes is that manners have grown gentler and passions less angry. A chief duty of the good citizen is to be angry when anger is called for, and to express his anger by deeds, to attack the bad citizen in office, or otherwise in power, to expose his dishonesty, to eject him from office, to brand him with an ignominy which will prevent his returning to any post of trust. In former days indignation flamed higher, and there was little tenderness for offenders. Jehu smote the prophets of Baal. Bad ministers—and no doubt sometimes good ministers also—were in England beheaded on Tower Hill. Everywhere punishment came quicker and was more severe, though to be sure it was often too harsh. Nowadays the arm of justice is often arrested by an indulgence which forgets that the true aim of punishment is the protection of the community. The very safeguards with which our slower and more careful procedure has surrounded trials and investigations, proper as such safeguards are for the security of the innocent, have often so delayed the march of justice that when a conviction has at last been obtained, the offence has begun to be forgotten and the offender escapes with a trifling penalty, or with none. This is an illustration of the principle that as righteous indignation is a valuable motive power in politics, the decline in it means a decline either in the standard of virtue or in the standard of zeal, possibly in both.

Another cause may be found in the fact that the enormous growth of modern states has made the share in government of the individual citizen seem infinitesimally small. In an average Greek republic, he was one of from two to ten thousand voters. In England or France to-day he is one of many millions. The chance that his vote will make any difference to the result is so slender that it appears to him negligible. We are proud, and justly proud, of having adapted free government to areas far vaster than were formerly thought capable of receiving free institutions. It was hoped that the patriotism of the citizen would expand with the magnitude of the State. But this did not happen in Rome, the greatest of ancient republics. Can we say that it has happened in the modern world? Few of us realize that though our own share may be smaller our responsibility increases with the power our State exerts. The late Professor Henry Sidgwick once travelled from Davos in the easternmost corner of Switzerland to the town of Cambridge in England and back again to deliver his vote against Home Rule at the general election of 1886, though he knew that his own side would have a majority in the constituency. Those who knew applauded, his opponents included, but I fear that few of us followed this shining example of civic virtue.

Thirdly, the highest, because the most difficult, duty of a citizen is to fight valiantly for his convictions when he is in a minority. The smaller the minority, and the more unpopular it is, and the more violent are the attacks upon it, so much the louder is the call of duty to defend one’s opinions. To withstand the “ardor civium prava iubentium”—to face “the multitude hasting to do evil”—this is the note and the test of genuine virtue and courage. Now this is, or seems to be, a more formidable task the vaster the community becomes. It is harder to make your voice heard against the roar of ocean than against the whistling squall that sweeps down over a mountain lake.

Lastly, there has been within the last century a great accession to our knowledge of nature, a more widely diffused and developed interest in literature and art as well as in science. This development, in itself fraught with laudable means of enjoyment, has had the unforeseen yet natural result of reducing the interest in public affairs among the educated classes, while the ardour with which competitions in physical strength and skill are followed has in like manner diverted the thoughts and attention of the less educated—and indeed, not of them alone but of many also in a class from whom better things might have been expected. Politics, in fact, have nowadays to strive against more rival subjects attracting men’s eyes and minds than they had before scientific discovery and art, and above all, athletic sports, came to fill newspapers and magazines.

But so far from being less important than they were, politics are growing in every country more important the wider the sphere of governmental action becomes. Nevertheless, even in England, which is perhaps slightly less addicted to this new passion for looking on at and reading about athletic competitions than are North America and Australia, a cricket or football match or a horse-race seems, if one may judge by the eager throngs that snatch the evening newspapers, to excite more interest in the middle as well as in the richer and in the upper section of the poorer classes than does any political event.

How to overcome these adverse tendencies is a question which I reserve till the last of these lectures. Meantime, let us look at some of the forms in which indifference to the obligations of citizenship reveals itself.

The first duty of the citizen used to be to fight, and to fight not merely against foes from another State, but against those also who, within his own State, were trying to overturn the Constitution or resist the laws. It is a duty still incumbent on us all, though the existence of soldiers and a police force calls us to it less frequently. The omission to take up arms in a civil strife was a grave offence in the republics of antiquity, where revolutions were frequent, as they are to-day in some of the states of Latin America. When respectable people stayed at home instead of taking sword and spear to drive out the adherents of an adventurer trying to make himself Tyrant, they gave the adventurer his chance: and in any case their abstention tended to prolong a civil war which would end sooner when it was seen which way the bulk of the people inclined. There was accordingly a law in some of the Greek republics that every citizen must take one side or the other in an insurrection. If he did not, he was liable to punishment. I have not heard of any one being indicted in England or the United States for failing to discharge his legal duty to join in the hue and cry after a thief, or to rally to the sheriff when he calls upon the posse comitatus to support him in maintaining law and order. But possibly an indictment would still lie; and in England we have within recent times enrolled bodies of special constables from the civil population to aid in maintaining public tranquillity.

More peaceful times have substituted for the duty of fighting the duty of voting. But even in small communities the latter duty has been often neglected. In Athens the magistrates used to send round the Scythian bowmen, who acted as their police, to scour the streets with a rope coloured with vermilion, and drag towards the Pnyx (the place of assembly), citizens who preferred to lounge or to mind what they called their own business, as if ruling the State was not their business. So in modern Switzerland some cantons have enacted laws fining those who, without reasonable excuse, neglect to vote.[1] This is the more remarkable because the Swiss have a good record in the matter of voting, better, I think, than any other European people. Such a law witnesses not to exceptional negligence but to an exceptionally high standard of duty. In Britain we sometimes bring to the polls at a parliamentary election eighty, or even more than eighty, per cent of our registered electors, which is pretty good when it is remembered that the register may have been made up eleven months earlier, so that many electors are sure to have moved elsewhere. At elections for local authorities a much smaller proportion vote; and I fancy, though I have no figures at hand, that in France, Belgium, and still more in Italy the percentage voting at all sorts of elections is less than in Switzerland or in Britain. The number who vote does not perfectly measure the personal sense of duty among electors, because an efficient party organization may, like the Scythian bowmen, sweep voters who do not care but who can be either driven to the polls or paid to go. Unless it is money that takes the voters there, it is well that they should go; for it helps to form the habit.

[1] This example has, I believe, been followed in Belgium.