Part 2 — CHAPTER II

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change not only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our political institutions.

I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which produced the constitutions under which most civilised nations now live, was inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked, representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of the conditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have been itself a mistake?

Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditional democratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting again from the beginning, and considering what are the ends representation is intended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to good government.

The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essence< of a representative government is that it depends on the periodically renewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and the degree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance of accomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by a majority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey.

To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an experience of government without consent larger than any other that has ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. The Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about a thousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensures that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of government; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern.

What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom the Anglo-Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion depends even more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not on things as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. The avowed tactics of our empire in the East have therefore always been based by many of our high officials upon psychological and not upon logical considerations. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, we blow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our rights in dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference to 'the moral effect upon the native mind.' And, if half what is hinted at by some ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religious antipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if not encouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintain our dominant position.

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method of securing consent.

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than anything else which can be substituted for it. And representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In England at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in constituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given to the representative, variation is possible.

In England itself, though great political inventions are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable tendencies.

A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex process by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not in the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of securing them by regulation.

But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a long series of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of the jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is produced has been more and more completely controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the essential feature of the trial.

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case. They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual of the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolled inferences of the human brain. The 'said I's,' and 'thought I's,' and 'said he's,' which are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are here banished on the ground that they are 'not evidence,' and witnesses are compelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations of sight and hearing.

At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree of economy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do not make good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order that popular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may not be unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing class or person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced to death or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of a jury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are now taken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by special fitness for their task.

In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine the tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear upon electors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practise open bribery the whole system of representation would break down at once. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several generations on the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was the serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of 1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definite bargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavish expenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personally popular, and create an impression that his connection with the constituency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 therefore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candidate at a parliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and later Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties after death, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paid for by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, no election meeting may be held in a building where any form of food or drink is habitually sold, although that building may be only a Co-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room.

A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituency for three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which the voters were every day further removed from the state of mind in which serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Now no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to effective political reasoning.

Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of political impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those 'acts of a man's life which concern his duty to others,' to which Mill refers—the paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of one's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense. Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the excitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one's opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of one's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the canvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it is a promise.

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign in favour of 'proportional representation,' in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing system of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-member constituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them—the Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals—have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large constituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester with its eight seats being given as an example.

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their readers to recognise.

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, 'to us,' as they were 'in themselves.' But an ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'to him' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told.

The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each constituency, i.e. by meetings and canvassing and the distribution of 'election literature.' Lord Courtney's proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day.

These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them.

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative 'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French scrutin de liste. The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates. Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers.

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord Courtney's proposed system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the two systems until the votes are counted.

To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan will soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests, will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting to see whether the growing substitution of the new quantitative and psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about elections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they will adopt the transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered elections, while retaining single-member constituencies, and therewith the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the whole of his constituents.

A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of the electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency. The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902 the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural Parish Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally' of the canvassers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid but irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of match-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemed to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable us to improve it.

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public houses could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness. It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of asserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whose hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who have just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibility half consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of small effect.

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of unspoilt impulse.

If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed come. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among those who profit, and those who suffer by them. But no one who is near to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation.

A mere numerical increase in the number of persons in England who are interested in politics would indeed itself introduce a new and difficult political factor. The active politicians in England, those who take any part in politics beyond voting, are at present a tiny minority. I was to speak not long ago at an election meeting, and having been misdirected as to the place where the meeting was to be held, found myself in an unknown part of North London, compelled to inquire of the inhabitants until I should find the address either of the meeting-hall or of the party committee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at last a cabman on his way home to tea told me that there was a milkman in his street who was 'a politician and would know.' There are in London seven hundred thousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by the man who is in the best position to know that it would be safe to say that less than ten thousand persons actually attend the annual ward meetings of the various parties, and that not more than thirty thousand are members of the party associations. That division of labour which assigns politics to a special class of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neighbours as well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far in most other parts of England as in London. But in no county in England, as far as I am aware, does the number of persons really active in politics amount to ten per cent. of the electorate.

There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to be true. The English Elementary Education Act was passed in 1870, and the elementary schools may be said to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those who entered them, being six years old, at that date are now aged thirty-four. The statistics as to the production and sale of newspapers and cheap books and the use of free libraries, show that the younger working men and women in England read many times as much as their parents did. This, and the general increase of intellectual activity in our cities of which it is only a part, may very probably lead, as the social question in politics grows more serious, to a large extension of electoral interest. If so, the little groups of men and women who now manage the three English parties in the local constituencies will find themselves swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on taking some part in the choice of candidates and the formation of programmes. That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process by which the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local party association are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled, as many of the American States have been compelled, to pass a series of Acts for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties. The ordinary citizen would find then, much more obviously than he does at present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not only the marking of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an active share in that work of appointing and controlling party committees from which many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an instinctive dread.

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the members and candidates may be drawn from the class of 'hustling' company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of working-class life. During the last twenty years I have been associated, for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English political working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real to them. It is, for instance, the 'class-conscious' working men who, in England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrors of a general European war. But as their number and responsibility increase they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as to the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a large scale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is very difficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of an expansive temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds them—and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue therefore which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured tolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware of the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and receive help, and very unwilling to 'do' any man 'out of his job.' His parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a home with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read, things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy for him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his daily life.

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising that things whose existence we infer from reading are as important as the things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a list of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications of the man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the man whom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding on an improvement with complete impartiality as between the district one knows of on the map and the district one sees every morning. If a representative elected to govern a large area allows personal acquaintance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaintance and liking will he schemed for and exploited by those who have their own ends to gain. The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, where the interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from the inefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of the known official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed; as well as in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance the dimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimate sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen.

The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, very great in the parliamentary Labour Party. The working men who have been sent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked intelligence and morale and of considerable political experience. But the success or failure of any scheme aiming at social equality will depend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which the working classes must necessarily send men of less exceptional ability and experience. I have never myself served on an elected local body the majority of whose members were weekly wage earners. But I have talked with men, both of working-class and middle-class origin, who have been in that position. What they say confirms that which I have inferred from my own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level of enthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with a difficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing with sectional interests and official discipline.

The early history of the co-operative and trade-union movements in England is full of pathetic instances of this kind of failure, and both movements show how a new and more stringent ideal may be slowly built up. But such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, and must be part of the conscious organised thought of each generation if it is to be permanently effective.

Those difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed out by the opponents of democracy. But if democracy is to succeed they must be frankly considered by the democrats themselves; just as it is the engineer who is trying to build the bridge, and not the ferry-owner, who is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate the strain which the materials will stand. The engineer, when he wishes to increase the margin of safety in his plans, treats as factors in the same quantitative problem both the chemical expedients by which he can strengthen his materials and the structural changes by which the strain on those materials can be diminished. So those who would increase the margin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire except to arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength of the individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually increased by moral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving or extending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy as may prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength.