Let us take one case more. A man is hanging by a rope which is fastened to a spike of rock, and is looking for samphire or birds’ eggs on the face of a sheer cliff. It is suddenly perceived by some of his friends on the summit that the rope is frayed a yard or two above his head. They are anxious for his safety; and if any one asked them why, they would answer, Because his life depends on the rope not breaking. Let us suppose, however, that the rope is perfectly strong, but that the spike of rock, it is attached to shows signs of being about to fall. The man’s friends in that case will explain {212} their anxiety by saying that his life depends not on the rope but on the rock. In either case it would literally depend on both, and on a thousand other things beside; but in either case one cause only is mentioned, or calls for mention, and that is the cause whose cessation or continuance is doubtful. For similar reasons, and in a similar sense, great men are said to be the causes of all that is done or produced in the communities to which they belong, beyond a certain minimum which, even when not insignificant, is stationary; for though the efforts of the average men are essential to the production of this addition to the minimum, just as they are to the production of the minimum itself, there is no question of their efforts coming to an end unless the men come to an end also; whereas the activities of the great men require special circumstances for their development, and constitute the only productive force which modern democratic activity practically tends to paralyse, or at all events diminish or impede.
But there is yet another method, still more necessary to be described, by which we are able to differentiate the respective products of these two classes of men—a method which will assist us not only to assign to each a certain portion of one joint effect, but also to particularise many of the elements of which each portion is composed. This method will be explained more fully in the following chapter, but it will be well to give a general and preliminary explanation of it here. It is founded on the two {213} following propositions, which, when once they have been considered, will be seen to be self-evident. Whatever the many contribute to the social conditions of a community, either in the way of industrial production or of the formation of habits and sentiments, consists of effects produced by those traits or faculties of human nature in which all members of that community are approximately and practically equal. Thus the fact that all men are alike obliged to eat, and that all parents as a rule have a preference for their own offspring, are facts which determine much in the conditions of all societies. On the other hand the social effects which are produced exclusively by the few are effects produced by certain traits and faculties which, though possibly possessed in a rudimentary state by all men, are appreciably and efficiently developed in the persons of the few only. The dramas of Shakespeare, though in a sense they are eminently national, could never have been produced had Shakespeare possessed no gifts except such as were possessed at the time by the English nation at large. The discoveries of Newton, the inventions of Watt and Stephenson, similarly were produced by powers that were indefinitely above the average. It is needless to say that they could not have been produced otherwise. If we will but reflect carefully on obvious truths like these, we shall see that civilisations are woven out of two kinds of materials, the one originating in traits common to the community generally, the other in traits confined to a {214} more or less numerous minority; and even when the two are most closely woven together we shall be able to follow out and identify the different threads, which never can lose the trace of their different and opposite origins.
CHAPTER II THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF PURELY DEMOCRATIC ACTION, OR THE ACTION OF AVERAGE MEN IN CO-OPERATION.
The great-man theory as held by the conventional historian, and expressed by Carlyle and others in those vehement formulas which have so justly excited the ridicule of Mr. Herbert Spencer, errs not because it emphasises the fact that the great man is the sole cause of progress in the sense that no progress could have taken place without him, but because it ignores the fact that the ordinary men of his time, being the tools with which he works, or the instrument on which he plays, the result is conditioned not only by his capacities, but by theirs; just as the kind of music that can be produced by a pianist is determined not only by his own skill, but by the character of the piano also. Writers like Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, and with him the whole school of socialists, impressed by the obvious fact that the many do something, never pause to inquire what they do, or how much they do, or how little, but rush to the conclusion that {216} the many do everything. This conclusion is even more meaningless than the doctrine which it is intended to contradict. The many do something, and they do what is of extreme importance; but its importance is strictly limited, and is indeed only intelligible through its limitations, just as the character of a profile is intelligible only through its outlines. The object, therefore, of the sociological inquirer must be to discover precisely what these limitations are. The methods by which the discovery is to be made have been already indicated. Let us now go on to apply them. They are of two kinds. One consists of an examination of what, in any domain of activity, the many would produce, if the influence of the few were absent. The other consists in an examination of the kind of faculties which the production of such or such a result implies. If these faculties are common to all, we say the result is produced by the many; if the faculties are rare, we say it is produced by the few.
The practical validity of both these kinds of reasoning is shown by the following imaginary, but not impossible case. A hundred Russian workmen, all of them loyal to the Czar, are employed by a citizen of Moscow to enlarge a subterranean cellar, and another hundred are employed to fill it with heavy wine-cases. A week after the work is completed the Czar is driving outside, and, as he passes the citizen’s house, is killed by an explosion from below. The so-called cellar was a mine, the wine-cases were filled with dynamite. Now if all {217} those who were concerned in the production of this catastrophe were tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played by the workmen would be sharply separated from that played by the man employing them; and that, though they no doubt would have contributed something to the result, they would have contributed nothing to its essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that if the designed and attained result had been not criminal, but beneficent, the elements in it that made it glorious would be the product of the man who planned and intended it, and not of the workmen who blindly obeyed his orders, neither knowing nor caring what the result would be. Let us take another case of a somewhat different character. When a spontaneous cheer bursts from a thousand people, the volume of sound is obviously the unadulterated product of the many. On the other hand, when a thousand people with ordinarily good voices are so trained and organised as to sing a chorus out of Israel in Egypt, the peculiar qualities which render the sounds produced by them valuable, obviously imply the existence of the musical genius of Handel, or in other words, faculties which belong to hardly one man in a million, and are thus the product not of the many, but of one.
And now let us turn to the actual facts of life, and the kinds of activity on which progress and civilisation depend, and let us apply our two analytical methods to these. It is needless to repeat, after what has been said in a previous chapter, that it is {218} impossible, in a case like this, to examine social activity as a whole. Such activity is of various kinds, and each must be dealt with separately. Let us begin, then, with two—the activity of economic production, and the activity which results in the growth of speculative knowledge. The first affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering what it would shrink to were the influence of the few absent. The second affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering the nature of the faculties which the production of the result implies.
To begin with production, then, let us take the case of the United Kingdom, and consider the amount per head that was annually produced by the population a hundred years ago. This amount was about £14. At the present time it is something like £35, and the purchasing power of money has so increased with the cheapening of commodities, that the excess of the latter sum over the former is far greater than it seems. Now, if we attribute the entire production of this country, at the close of the last century, to common or average labour (which is plainly an absurd concession), we shall gain some idea of what the utmost limits of the independent productivity of the ordinary man are; for the ordinary man’s talents as a producer, when directed by nobody but himself, have, as has been said already, not appreciably increased in the course of two thousand years, and have certainly not increased {219} within the past three generations. The only thing that has increased has been the concentration on the ordinary man’s productive talents of the productive talents of the exceptional man. The talents of the exceptional man, in fact, have been the only variant in the problem; and, accordingly, the minimum which these talents produce is the total difference between £14 and £35. This sum is no mere piece of fanciful ingenuity. Parts of it are being done daily before our eyes, and its practical character is being shown in the most conclusive manner, when the profits of a business decline on the death of some head or partner, or when some declining town is restored to its old prosperity by some man of industrial genius, who starts in it some new manufacture.
And now let us pass from industrial activity to intellectual, and apply to this our second method of analysis. Of purely intellectual results, or, as Mill calls them, “advances in speculative knowledge,” the most striking examples are to be found in the mathematical sciences. To the advances made in these it is not only certain but obvious, that the many have contributed nothing, because even of that section of mankind which has some mathematical aptitude the majority are unable even to appreciate them completely when they are made; much less do they possess the powers to make them. No one would contend that the books of Euclid are the result of the faculties possessed by every average school-boy, or of the kind of man into which the average school-boy grows. We may indeed dismiss {220} purely intellectual progress as the domain in which the efficiency of the many stands absolutely at zero.
Let us pass now to the domain of political government, and consider to what extent the faculties of the many, as distinct from those of the few, are capable of operating there. This inquiry resolves itself mainly into the question of how much the many can do to direct the activity of the few, the activity of the few being presupposed; but it will be well to consider first how much, if anything, the many can accomplish, or the faculties of ordinary men can accomplish, without any assistance from exceptional faculties whatsoever. In the domain of politics, which is here meant to include all organised action of a public and political character, as well as the making and the administration of laws, the only positive functions or actions which can be performed by the co-operation of the average faculties of men, or by absolute and unadulterated democracy, are very simple destructive actions and the formulation of, and the insistence on, very simple demands. Of the destructive actions referred to we shall find an excellent example in the lynching of a negro who has outraged some white American girl, or in such an act as the burning of the Tuileries by the communists. In each of these actions the feelings of those who take part in it are as nearly as possible identical. In the first, all of the men are equal in their sense of righteous indignation; in the second, they are all equal in their feeling of blind rebellion; and no special skill is in either case {221} required by any one of them. It is true that even in such cases as these there will most probably be leaders, of some sort, but they will be leaders by accident, and the others will be their comrades rather than their subordinates. Of the simple demands which the many can formulate and insist upon unaided, we may take as an example a demand for the abolition of a tax which distresses in an obvious way multitudes of men equally; or a demand for the continuance of a war, in which the issues at stake are sufficiently apparent to anybody who can read a newspaper. The protest against the tax by the multitudes of men whom it harasses, and the national demand, when it arises, for the continuance of such a war, are phenomena which are absolutely democratic. They are each the sum of a number of spontaneous feelings and reasonings. They do not require any leader to stimulate them; and all who contribute to their force do so in an equal degree.
But the moment we come to cases of any complexity the situation changes. If the negro’s guilt could be established only by inference, the lynchers would have to be convinced of it by some clever advocate. If the lynching itself were a matter of extreme difficulty, the lynchers would require to be commanded by the boldest and shrewdest of their number. If the tax protested against were indirect, if its injurious effects were hard to detect and realise, and if it were capable of being represented as less injurious than any other, men of exceptional {222} activity and exceptional sharpness would be required to rouse the sufferers to a perception of what caused their suffering. In other words, democracy, the many, or the faculties possessed by the many, are incapable of initiation in any complex matter, or of carrying out any course of complex action when initiated; and we may sum up the case by saying that all corporate action in politics is less and less purely democratic in proportion as the questions dealt with are less and less simple.