Now, as a matter of fact, in any civilised country the majority of the measures which the Government has to devise and carry out, however simple in appearance, are very far from simple in reality. Even when their details are few, the good or the bad effects of them are certain to depend on a great variety of circumstances, with regard to which ordinary faculties can form no independent judgment; and if ordinary men are to express any judgment on such measures at all which is not put into their mouths by others and then uttered by rote, these measures must be placed before them by talented interpreters and advocates, who will reduce the details to a real or apparent simplicity and invest their alleged results with charm and an air of certainty.[†] Accordingly, when we approach the {223} question from the point of view of the many, we do nothing but arrive at the same conclusion to which we were brought when we approached it from the point of view of the few. We arrive, that is to say, at the conclusion that, if we mean by government the devising, the passing, and the administration of this and of that measure, the genuine power of the many, even under the most popular constitution, becomes less and less in proportion as the greatness and the civilisation of the country increase. The voice of the many is heard as loudly as ever; but what guides the voice is not the personality that seems to utter it. What guides it is a handful of men, exceptionally active, though not always exceptionally wise. The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.
[†] This truth is strikingly illustrated by the history of the Home Rule agitation in Ireland. Whether Home Rule would be advantageous for the British Empire or for Ireland is a very complicated question, and the demand for it consequently never became genuinely popular until it was identified with the simplest of all aspirations—the non-payment of rent.
And here before pursuing the subject farther let us look back for a moment, and consider the point in our argument at which we have now arrived. We have seen, then, that in the domain of modern industrial activity the many, if we estimate the total produced in terms of value, produce only an insignificant portion of the total. We have seen that in the domain of intellectual and speculative progress the many literally produce or achieve nothing. We have seen that in the devising and administration of governmental measures the many are powerful in proportion as the issues are exceptionally simple—that is to say, in proportion as they are few and far between.
Now the reader may think that this brings us to {224} the end of our inquiry; but it only brings us to the beginning of what is really the important part of it. For though these conclusions, so far as they go, are absolutely true, they by no means dispose of the whole question which is before us, nor do they really reduce the social power of the many to such small dimensions as they at first sight seem to do. Thus speculative knowledge, though the many contribute nothing to its progress, itself contributes nothing to progress until the many are affected by it, and respond somehow to its stimulus; economic production, when regarded merely as an affair of quantity or as an accumulation of values—a process in which the part played by the many is humble—does not represent that process in its true social entirety; nor is civil government wholly an affair of measures which are devised, discussed, amended, demanded, opposed, carried, or rejected from year to year. We shall find, accordingly, that, in spite of what has just been said, there is room in social life for the operation of the genuine will of the many—of pure, spontaneous, and unadulterated democracy. We shall find that the power of this will, though it is in certain directions incalculably less than it is at present generally believed to be, is paramount in domains where its action is not generally recognised at all; and the nature of its action here will throw a remarkable light on the nature of all action which is in a true sense democratic. Of the domains of activity here referred to, the most important are those of religion and family life. {225}
Every religion, regarded as a body of doctrines and observances, with the special habits of mind and dispositions of the heart which are appropriate to them, which has ever influenced great masses of mankind, is mainly a result of pure democratic action. It is true that in the establishment of the great religions of the world another agency has played a great part also. In no other sphere has the influence of great individuals been so vast and so far-reaching as in this. The mere mention of such personages as Christ, Buddha, and Mahomet will make us realise that such is the case; and to these we may add the missionaries, saints, and theologians who have spread and explained the respective gospels entrusted to them, and given by their saintly lives examples of the value of their teaching. But whilst nowhere is the power of the few—of the very few—more conspicuous than in the domain of religion, nowhere is the power of the many more conspicuous also. No religion has ever grown, become established, and influenced the lives of men unless its doctrines and its spirit have appealed to those wants of the heart and soul which have been shared, to a degree approximately equal, by all members of the communities, nations, or races amongst whom the religion in question has become established.
The truth of this statement is not in the least invalidated if we apply it to a religion which we assume to have been supernaturally revealed. Indeed, the clearest example of its truth may be found in the phenomenon of Christianity. Whether we {226} attribute the doctrines of Christianity to a natural or a supernatural source, it will be equally plain in either case that they have found acceptance amongst men because there was something inherent in the nature of each individual Christian which naturally responded to them. Even the staunchest Protestant who takes his stand most exclusively on the Bible will be unable to deny that Protestant Christianity, as it exists, represents not merely an assent to a number of bare propositions uttered by Christ, or made with regard to Him by His disciples, but also the subjective interpretation given to these by each believer as he assents to them. Thus the doctrine of the Atonement would never have been accepted by men, it would never even have conveyed any meaning to them, if there had not been something in their nature corresponding to a sense of sin; and the universal effect which, for a time at least, this doctrine had on all the Western nations and on all classes alike, showed that this something which corresponded with the sense of sin was one of those characteristics in which all men were approximately equal, and that the acceptance of the doctrine was therefore a true act of democracy.
But the clearest illustration of the truth thus insisted on is to be found, not amongst the varying and conflicting doctrines of Protestantism, which represent theoretically the direct result of the revealed truths of the Bible on each believer individually, but in Christianity as represented by the Church of Rome. According to ordinary Protestant opinion, {227} the doctrines of the Church of Rome represent a structure built up by the misguided ingenuity of priests, and imposed by them on a credulous and passive laity; but so far, at all events, as the more important doctrines are concerned, the very reverse is the case really. It has been the world of ordinary believers that has imposed its beliefs on the priests; not the priests that have imposed them on the world of ordinary believers. Let us take, for instance, the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, or the beliefs implied in the cultus of the Virgin Mary. That the sacramental elements were actually the body and blood of Christ, that the Redeemer who died on the cross for each individual sinner entered under the form of these elements into each sinner’s body—entered bearing the stripes on it by which the sinner was healed, and mixing with the sinner’s blood the divine blood that had been shed for him—this was the belief of the common unlettered communicant long before priests and theologians had, by the aid of Aristotle, explained the assumed miracle as a process of transubstantiation; and longer still before their philosophic explanation was, by the ratification of any general Council, given its place amongst the definite teachings of the Church. Similarly, the devotion to the Virgin Mary first sprang up amongst the mass of believers naturally, because the idea of God’s mother, with all her motherly love, with all her virgin purity, and with all her human sorrows allied so closely to omnipotence, touched countless hearts {228} in a way which was in all cases practically similar; just as the offer of a helping hand would make a similar appeal to each one of a multitude of men drowning. The official teaching of the Church with regard to the Virgin’s sinlessness, and the degree of worship which is her due, has been the work, no doubt, of the few, not of the many—of priests, of theologians, of Councils, of the spiritual aristocracy; but the doctrines which they have thus defined have been no more fabricated by themselves than the wines, good or bad, which a peasantry have made for centuries, are made by the chemist of to-day, who at last undertakes to analyse them.
It has been said that the part which democracy plays in the development of religion is shown us by the Church of Rome with greater distinctness than it is by any other great communion of believers; and the reason is that no other great communion of believers shows us with so much precision the part played by an aristocracy, and thus leaves the part played by democracy with so sharply defined a frontier. The Roman Church alone is in possession of a complete machinery by which all the pious opinions of the whole body of its members—the opinions which have spontaneously shaped themselves in the minds of innumerable Christians as the result of a multitude of independent spiritual experiences, and which, when sufficiently manifested, have been studied by various theologians, and reduced by them to logical and coherent forms—shall be finally submitted to one great representative {229} Council. This Council considers how far they are consistent with doctrines already defined, and with one another, and how far, explicitly or implicitly, there is any warrant for them in the Scriptures. It ends with rejecting some, whilst others are reconciled and affirmed by it; and then these last are added to the authoritative teachings of the Church. But the Council, with the Pope included in it, is nothing more than a lens by which the rays originating in the democracy of the faithful are focalised and made to transmit a clear and coherent picture; and the Roman Catholic religion, regarded as a body of doctrines which have actually influenced the spiritual lives of men, is a magnified picture, projected, as it were, upon the sky, of those secret but common elements of the human mind and heart, in virtue of which all men are supposed to be equal before God, and which unite the faithful into one class, instead of graduating them into many.
This analysis of what may be called the natural history of Catholicism may be thought, perhaps, to have little appreciable connection with those social or sociological problems which at present agitate the world, and give to the theory of democracy its main practical interest. But neither Catholicism nor religion at large has been referred to here for its own sake. They have been referred to because the case of religion affords a singularly clear illustration of the essential nature of democratic action generally, because it helps us to understand that action in the affairs of ordinary life, and {230} because it shows us very vividly how democracy, as a political power, operates outside the domain to which it is popularly supposed to be confined.[†]
[†] The political power of the religious beliefs of a community can be seen at a glance when we consider our own government of India. Our government there, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a government of the few, not a government of the many; and yet the religion or religions of the many impose limitations on our legislators as stringent as any that could be imposed on them by any number of formal mandates.