The assembly of citizens in one place for national deliberation rendered them much more susceptible to those less desirable peculiarities of collective mental life which characterise simple crowds; particularly, the excess of emotional excitement, increased suggestibility, and, hence, the ease with which the whole mass could be swayed unduly by the skilful orator. In the modern nation, on the other hand, the transmission of news by the press secures a certain delay, and a lack of synchronism, in its reception by different groups and individuals; and it secures also a certain delay in the action and reaction of mind on mind, which gives opportunity for individual deliberation. Also the sympathetic action of the mass mind on the individual mind is in large part indirect, rather than direct, representative rather than perceptual, and therefore less overwhelming in its effects. These conditions greatly temper the violence of the emotional reactions and permit of a diversity of feeling and opinion; an opposed minority has time to form itself and to express an opinion, and so may temper the hasty and emotional reaction of the majority in a way that is impossible in a general assembly.
A further advantage of the large size of nations may arise from the fact that actual decision as to choice of means for effecting national action has to be achieved by means of representatives who come together in one place. Representative government is not merely an inferior substitute for government by general assembly; it is superior in many respects. If each representative were a mere delegate, an average specimen of the group he represents, chosen by lot and merely charged to express their will, this feature would modify the crude collective mental processes in one important respect only; namely, it would counteract to some extent that weakening of individual responsibility which is characteristic of collective mental action. But, in addition to this, internal organisation, in the form of tradition and custom, comes in to modify very greatly the collective process.
We see such modifying influence very clearly in the election of the English House of Commons and in the methods of its operations. Owing partly to a natural tendency, partly to a fortunate tradition, the people do not elect just any one of themselves to serve as a delegate or average sample of the mass; but as a rule they choose, or try to choose, some man who displays special capacity and special qualifications for taking part in the national deliberations. In so far as they are successful in this, their representatives are able men and men to whose minds the social consciousness, the consciousness of the whole people, of its needs and tendencies and aspirations, is more fully and clearly present than to the average mind. They are also in the main men of more than average public spirit. Hence it is not unknown that a purely working class constituency, being offered liberal, conservative, and labour candidates, instead of choosing the labour man, one of themselves, gives him only a small fraction of the total votes. Then, within the body of representatives, this process, by which greater influence is given to the abler men, to those whose minds reflect most fully the whole people, is carried further still. A small group of these men exerts a predominant influence in all deliberations; and not only are they in the main the best qualified (for they only attain their leading positions by success in an intense and long continued competition) but they are put in a position in which they can hardly fail to feel a great responsibility resting upon them; and in which they feel the full force of political traditions. The deliberative organisation of the American nation illustrates, when compared with our own, the importance of these traditions; for its lesser efficiency is largely due to the absence of such traditions, and to the fact that their system banishes from the House of Representatives its natural leaders and those on whom responsibility falls most heavily.
Lastly, the existence of two traditionally opposed parties ensures that every important step shall be fully discussed. The traditional division into two parties, which from one point of view seems so irrational, nevertheless exerts very important and valuable influences, of which the chief is that it prevents the assembly of legislators becoming a mere psychological crowd easily swayed to a decision by collective emotion and skilful suggestion; for each suggestion coming from the one party acts by contra-suggestion upon the other and provokes an opposition that necessitates discussion[100].
In these two ways, then;—first, through the culmination of national deliberation among a selected group of representatives, among whom again custom and tradition accord precedence and prestige to the natural leaders, the most able and those in whose consciousness the nation, in the past, present and future is most adequately reflected; secondly, by means of the party system, which ensures vigorous criticism and full discussion of all proposals, under a system of traditional conventions evolved for the regulation of such discussions;—in these two ways the principal vices of collective deliberation are corrected, and the formal deliberations and decisions of the nation are raised to a higher plane than the collective deliberations of any assembly of men lacking such traditional organisation could possibly attain. The part played by unwritten tradition in the working of the British constitution is of course immense, as for example, the existence and enormous prestige of the cabinet, and the tradition that a party coming into power must respect the legislation of the party previously in power. Without this last, representative government, or at any rate the party system, would be impossible. The smooth working of the system depends entirely upon the influence of these and similar traditions which exist only in the minds of men. Or, take as another example, the tradition of absolute impartiality on the part of the Speaker and of loyal acceptance of his rulings by every member of the House; or the tradition which distinguishes sharply between political and private relations, in virtue of which the parties to a most bitter political strife may and very generally do remain in perfectly friendly private relations.
These and other such traditions, which secure the efficient working of the organisation for national deliberation, all rest in turn upon a traditional and tacit assumption—namely, the assumption that both parties are working for the good of the nation as they conceive and understand it, that both parties have this common end and differ only in their judgment as to the means by which it can best be achieved. They rest also on the traditional and tacit admission that one’s own judgment, and that of one’s party, may be mistaken, and that in the long run the legislation which any party can effect is an expression of the organised national mind and is therefore to be respected. It is this acquiescence in accomplished legislation in virtue of this tacit assumption which gives to the decisions of Parliament the status, not merely of the expression of the will of a bare majority, but of the expression of the will of practically the whole nation. Underlying the stability of the whole system, again, is the tradition, sedulously fostered and observed by the best and leading minds, that the raison d’être and purpose of the representative parliament is to organise, and to give the most complete possible expression to, the national mind and will; and that no constitutional change or change of procedure is justifiable unless it tends to the more complete realisation of these objects.
In virtue of these traditions our Parliament and Press constitute undoubtedly the best means for effecting organisation of the national mind in its deliberative aspect that has yet been evolved; and we should remember this when we feel inclined to gird at the ‘great talking shop,’ at the slowness of its procedure and at the logical absurdities of the two-party system; and, above all, we should realize how valuable and worthy of conservation are these scarcely formulated traditions, for they are absolutely essential to its efficiency. It is just because the efficiency of the deliberative organisation of a nation depends upon the force of such traditions, that, though it is possible to take the system of parliamentary representation and establish it by decree or plebiscite in a nation which has hitherto had no such deliberative organisation, it is not possible to make it work smoothly and efficiently amongst such a people. Hence, although almost every civilised nation has done its best to imitate the British system of parliamentary government, hardly any one has made a success of it; and, in nearly all, it is in constant danger of being superseded by some more primitive form of government—one need only mention Mexico, Portugal, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary. In all these countries, and even in America, there seems to be already a not very remote possibility of the supersession of parliamentary government by a dictatorship—a process which has actually occurred in many of the municipal governments of America, and the fear of which has constantly checked the smooth working of the parliamentary system in France.
As a single illustration of the way in which the conditions we have been considering affect the collective acts of the nation, consider what happened at the time of the Russian outrage in the North Sea during the Russo-Japanese war. When a Russian fleet fired upon our fishing boats doing considerable damage to them, the means of communication were sufficiently developed among us to allow of the action and reaction of all on each which produces the characteristic results of collective mental action, the exaltation of emotion, the suggestibility, the sense of irresponsible power; and, in the absence of the deliberative organisation which, by concentrating influence and responsibility in the hands of a few of the best men, controlled and modified this collective action, we should have rushed upon the Russian fleet and probably have brought on a general European war. The control and counteraction of this kind of outburst of collective emotion and impulsive action is one of the heaviest responsibilities of those to whom predominant influence is accorded.
It is only in virtue of the strong organisation of the national mind resting upon these long traditions of parliamentary government, that at such a time control of the popular emotion and impulse is possible. And the weaker and less efficient is such traditional organisation, the more does any such incident tend to provoke a collective manifestation which approximates in its uncontrollable violence and unconsidered impulsiveness to the behaviour of an unorganised crowd. Hence governments, where the democratic principle is acknowledged but the traditional organisation is less strong, are constantly in danger of having their hands forced by some outburst of popular passion—as in France.
It is worth noting that, when Aristotle inveighed against democracy as an evil form of government, the only form of democratic government he had in mind was government by the voices of a mob gathered together in one place and lacking all the safeguards which, as we have seen, render our British national deliberations so much superior to those of a mere crowd of persons of equally good average capacity and character.