But all the industrial ingenuity that great men have ever possessed would be absolutely futile unless the commodities they were employed in producing, or the services they were employed in rendering, satisfied tastes and wants existing in various sections of the community. The eliciting of these wants, or the development of these tastes, depends often on the previous supply of the products or services that minister to them. Thus the introduction of railways, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the electric light, preceded any popular demand for them; and many a great writer, according to the well-known saying, has to create the taste by which he is to be appreciated. But he could not create the taste, or, in other words, make it actual, unless it existed already in human nature as a potentiality, any more than the producers of electric light could make the general public anxious to have it in their houses if mankind at large entertained no wish whatever to do anything but sleep between the hours of sunset and sunrise. The wants and tastes, then, to which all production ministers, whether common to all men, like the desire for food, or developed by influences from without, like the desire for telegraphic accommodation, are, when once they are in existence, essentially democratic in their nature. They are not like the movements of a mason, who constructs under an architect’s order a cathedral with the design of which he has nothing at {240} all to do. They represent the uncontrolled promptings of the individual’s own nature, and they affect production, and dictate to the producers what they shall produce, because they represent a spontaneous similarity of taste amongst a multitude of individuals living under similar circumstances. Here we have the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory facts, that the power of the many over production is at once paramount and small.
Economic demand, though it owes most of its development to the few, is yet, when its development has taken place, fundamentally democratic in its nature. But, on the other hand, economic supply, which not only ministers to existing wants, but elicits new ones, tends ever more and more as civilisation advances to depend on the action of the few. For as wants increase there is required, in order to satisfy them, a growing elaboration in the methods and organisation of supply; and in proportion as supply becomes more and more elaborately organised, it becomes, from the necessities of the case, less and less democratic. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the only rich supplying class consisted of merchants, because the exchange of commodities, and the bringing them in the required quantities to the proper markets, was a process more complicated than the orginal processes of producing them. Production has now become quite as complicated as commerce; and a manufacturing aristocracy has developed itself equal in wealth to the commercial. {241}
But though supply thus depends on the domination of the few, and rises and falls with the ability with which that domination is exercised, it is itself at the same time under the domination of the many. Some industrial genius may make a colossal fortune by directing the labour of some thousands of men to the production (let us say) of a new species of beer; but his enterprise will succeed only because millions of men like the beer, and demand it under the direction of their own taste alone. The tastes of the many, of course, exhibit many varieties. Where a million men demand beer, another million will demand whisky; and there are many commodities, such as guns, golf balls, and cricket bats, the demand for which is confined to comparatively small classes. But the point here insisted on is, not that every member of the community demands the same commodities, but that whatever commodities are demanded, are demanded in each case in accordance with the spontaneous wishes of individuals, and that the total force of the demand is the cumulative result of a number of actions and desires which happen to be spontaneously similar. The commodities supplied to them have, in other words, to be accommodated to a genuinely democratic order; and if the consuming democracy does not consider them suitable, it virtually, by refusing to buy them, condemns them to be destroyed. Thus if we direct our attention to consumption, the few—the directors of industry—are the servants of the many; though if we direct {242} our attention, as we did previously, to production, the many, in the capacity of workers, are the servants or subjects of the few.
And now let us turn back to the domain of politics. We shall find that we do so possessed of a new clue to the true nature and extent of the powers of the many there. For we shall find that in civil government, just as in economic production, the process involved is a process of supply and demand; and that whilst there is a certain kind of political demand in respect of which the many are paramount, and act as a true democracy, their power in the business of supply is never more than partial, and is in most cases illusory.
The first point of which we must here take notice is this—that though the analogy between economic production and civil government is a genuine one, it is not to be found in the phenomena in which we should naturally be tempted to look for it. What we should naturally be inclined to do would be to take the demand for laws and policies as the counterpart to the demand for commodities, and the framing of such laws and the carrying out of policies as the counterpart to economic supply; the first of these, like the demand for commodities, being simple and spontaneous; the second difficult, like the manufacture of them. But in arguing thus we should be wrong.
The demand for laws and policies is, as we have seen already, by no means a simple thing, like the demand, let us say, for a particular kind {243} of beer; nor is it the true counterpart to such a demand; for the beer is demanded for its own sake, but laws and policies are not. They are demanded for the sake of certain results on social life which, by various processes of reasoning, those who demand them have been led to believe that they will produce; and it is the results of laws and policies, not the laws and policies themselves, which are in the political sphere what commodities are in the economic, and for which alone the demand is purely and genuinely democratic. The multitudes of men who were led to demand the abolition of the corn laws were not led to do so because the actual process of abolishing them was profitable or pleasurable in itself, but because they believed it would mean a larger loaf on their breakfast-tables. It was in the demand for the loaf that the many were spontaneously unanimous, and expressed their own views, not those of anybody else. Their unanimity in demanding the measure was produced by the arguments of an intellectual oligarchy, and could not have been produced without them. Thus whilst the demand for the larger loaf was equivalent to a demand for a particular kind of beer, the demand for the law was equivalent to a demand that the brewer should employ some novel appliances for brewing, with the merits of which they were acquainted only through the puffs and explanations of the patentee.
There is therefore a great difference between political demand and economic. Economic demand {244} is single; political demand is double; and whilst one part of political demand—namely, the demand for social results—corresponds with economic demand, or the demand of the consumer for commodities, the other part of political demand—namely, the demand for particular measures—does not correspond with economic demand at all, but is, on the contrary, in contrast to it. For when workmen’s wives buy some particular make of calico for their husband’s shirts, or when cyclists buy some particular kind of tyre for their bicycles, they do so because they approve of the qualities which those goods manifest when in use; not because they approve of the machinery by which the goods were made. But in politics, although there is likewise a demand for political goods, as such,—for social security, personal prosperity, and so forth,—of which each man is naturally his own judge, just as those who use them are of the tyres or calico, and although statesmen and governments are frequently supported by the nation, not because they have carried this measure or that, but because the political goods supplied by them are on the whole satisfactory, yet the political demand which is supposed to be the special characteristic of democracies is not a demand for the completed goods, but a demand that this or that patent shall be used in the hope of producing them.
Now political patents are most of them highly complicated devices; the action of all of them is dependent on a complication of circumstances; and they {245} are always the work of a special class of inventors. They never represent the spontaneously similar ideas of the mass of ordinary men, any more than the machinery used in a great brewery represents the spontaneously similar ideas of the happy and united customers whom a spontaneously similar taste leads to the same tied house. All that the many can do with regard to these political patents is to listen to the accounts of them given by the patentees, their agents, and their travellers, and to make the best choice they can between a number of different contrivances which they have had no share in devising, and which they only partially understand. They are, indeed, in much the same position in which that portion of the public would be placed which travels habitually between London and Glasgow, if it were asked to decide by its votes which of five kinds of reversing gear should be made use of on the London and North-Western engines. If this question had really to be decided by vote, the public might so far instruct itself by lectures from the competing inventors as to give votes for this contrivance or for that; but the very grounds on which its choice was formed would be obviously supplied to it by others; its choice would be limited by the number of the contrivances before it, and the part spontaneously played by it in the whole transaction would be small. And yet, as has just been said, it is the making of a choice of this kind that is regarded as being, in the domain of politics, typically, if not exclusively, the exercise of {246} the power of the many. The result is that, whilst the many do in reality exert, through their spontaneously similar demand for certain social results, an influence on legislation which in certain respects is paramount, the political theorist, neglecting this fact altogether, confines himself to asserting their power in the demand for political means—the kind of demand in respect of which they are most influenced by others.
Now what, let us ask, is the explanation of this fact? How does it come that in government a power is attributed to the many which is, even by recent socialists, not attributed to them in economic production? The reason is that over the processes of economic production the many can exercise no control at all, but that over the devising of governmental measures they can exercise some, which, though absolutely small, is yet, by comparison, large.
Thus, for instance, though the structure and manufacture of watches is in one sense determined by the many, because the manufacture of those watches only can be continued permanently which satisfy the many, and which the many will consent to buy, it would be impossible for any watchmaker to produce good watches at all if his workmen were constantly required to be altering or readjusting the escapements in order to introduce some “dodge” devised by any man in the street. But in politics this is not the case. The influence of the men in the street, though it can exert itself through {247} exceptional men only, and is consequently not wholly their own, does continually make itself felt in law-making as it does not make itself felt in watchmaking; and yet the conduct of government is not rendered impossible, whereas the making of the watches would be. Indeed, in very many cases it is not even rendered unsatisfactory.