Equality, Page 2

  CHAPTER II.

  WHY THE REVOLUTION DID NOT COME EARLIER.

  Absorbed in our talk, we had not heard the steps of Dr. Leete as heapproached.

  "I have been watching you for ten minutes from the house," he said,"until, in fact, I could no longer resist the desire to know what youfind so interesting."

  "Your daughter," said I, "has been proving herself a mistress of theSocratic method. Under a plausible pretext of gross ignorance, she hasbeen asking me a series of easy questions, with the result that I see asI never imagined it before the colossal sham of our pretended populargovernment in America. As one of the rich I knew, of course, that we hada great deal of power in the state, but I did not before realize howabsolutely the people were without influence in their own government."

  "Aha!" exclaimed the doctor in great glee, "so my daughter gets up earlyin the morning with the design of supplanting her father in his positionof historical instructor?"

  Edith had risen from the garden bench on which we had been seated and wasarranging her flowers to take into the house. She shook her head rathergravely in reply to her father's challenge.

  "You need not be at all apprehensive," she said; "Julian has quite curedme this morning of any wish I might have had to inquire further into thecondition of our ancestors. I have always been dreadfully sorry for thepoor people of that day on account of the misery they endured frompoverty and the oppression of the rich. Henceforth, however, I wash myhands of them and shall reserve my sympathy for more deserving objects."

  "Dear me!" said the doctor, "what has so suddenly dried up the fountainsof your pity? What has Julian been telling you?"

  "Nothing, really, I suppose, that I had not read before and ought to haveknown, but the story always seemed so unreasonable and incredible that Inever quite believed it until now. I thought there must be some modifyingfacts not set down in the histories."

  "But what is this that he has been telling you?"

  "It seems," said Edith, "that these very people, these very masses of thepoor, had all the time the supreme control of the Government and wereable, if determined and united, to put an end at any moment to all theinequalities and oppressions of which they complained and to equalizethings as we have done. Not only did they not do this, but they gave as areason for enduring their bondage that their liberties would beendangered unless they had irresponsible masters to manage theirinterests, and that to take charge of their own affairs would imperiltheir freedom. I feel that I have been cheated out of all the tears Ihave shed over the sufferings of such people. Those who tamely endurewrongs which they have the power to end deserve not compassion butcontempt. I have felt a little badly that Julian should have been one ofthe oppressor class, one of the rich. Now that I really understand thematter, I am glad. I fear that, had he been one of the poor, one of themass of real masters, who with supreme power in their hands consented tobe bondsmen, I should have despised him."

  Having thus served formal notice on my contemporaries that they mustexpect no more sympathy from her, Edith went into the house, leaving mewith a vivid impression that if the men of the twentieth century shouldprove incapable of preserving their liberties, the women might be trustedto do so.

  "Really, doctor," I said, "you ought to be greatly obliged to yourdaughter. She has saved you lots of time and effort."

  "How so, precisely?"

  "By rendering it unnecessary for you to trouble yourself to explain to meany further how and why you came to set up your nationalized industrialsystem and your economic equality. If you have ever seen a desert or seamirage, you remember that, while the picture in the sky is very clear anddistinct in itself, its unreality is betrayed by a lack of detail, a sortof blur, where it blends with the foreground on which you are standing.Do you know that this new social order of which I have so strangelybecome a witness has hitherto had something of this mirage effect? Initself it is a scheme precise, orderly, and very reasonable, but I couldsee no way by which it could have naturally grown out of the utterlydifferent conditions of the nineteenth century. I could only imagine thatthis world transformation must have been the result of new ideas andforces that had come into action since my day. I had a volume ofquestions all ready to ask you on the subject, but now we shall be ableto use the time in talking of other things, for Edith has shown me in tenminutes' time that the only wonderful thing about your organization ofthe industrial system as public business is not that it has taken place,but that it waited so long before taking place, that a nation of rationalbeings consented to remain economic serfs of irresponsible masters formore than a century after coming into possession of absolute power tochange at pleasure all social institutions which inconvenienced them."

  "Really," said the doctor, "Edith has shown herself a very efficientteacher, if an involuntary one. She has succeeded at one stroke in givingyou the modern point of view as to your period. As we look at it, theimmortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, away backin 1776, logically contained the entire statement of the doctrine ofuniversal economic equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to itsmembers individually. You remember how the words run:

  "'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are createdequal, with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rightsgovernments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from theconsent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomesdestructive of these rights it is the right of the people to alter or toabolish it and institute a new government, laying its foundations on suchprinciples and organizing its powers in such form as may seem most likelyto effect their safety and happiness.'

  "Is it possible, Julian, to imagine any governmental system less adequatethan ours which could possibly realize this great ideal of what a truepeople's government should be? The corner stone of our state is economicequality, and is not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequatepledge of these three birthrights--life, liberty, and happiness? What islife without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life but aright to an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men befree who must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-menand seek their bread from the hands of others? How else can anygovernment guarantee liberty to men save by providing them a means oflabor and of life coupled with independence; and how could that be doneunless the government conducted the economic system upon which employmentand maintenance depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right ofall to the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as itdepends at all on material facts, is not bound up with economicconditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit ofhappiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic equality?"

  "Yes," I said, "it is indeed all there, but why were we so long in seeingit?"

  "Let us make ourselves comfortable on this bench," said the doctor, "andI will tell you what is the modern answer to the very interestingquestion you raise. At first glance, certainly the delay of the world ingeneral, and especially of the American people, to realize that democracylogically meant the substitution of popular government for the rule ofthe rich in regulating the production and distribution of wealth seemsincomprehensible, not only because it was so plain an inference from theidea of popular government, but also because it was one which the massesof the people were so directly interested in carrying out. Edith'sconclusion that people who were not capable of so simple a process ofreasoning as that did not deserve much sympathy for the afflictions theymight so easily have remedied, is a very natural first impression.

  "On reflection, however, I think we shall conclude that the time taken bythe world in general and the Americans in particular in finding out thefull meaning of democracy as an economic as well as a politicalproposition was not greater than might have been expected, consideringthe vastness of the conclusions involved. It is the democratic idea thatall human beings are peers in rights and dignity, and that the sole
justexcuse and end of human governments is, therefore, the maintenance andfurtherance of the common welfare on equal terms. This idea was thegreatest social conception that the human mind had up to that time everformed. It contained, when first conceived, the promise and potency of acomplete transformation of all then existing social institutions, one andall of which had hitherto been based and formed on the principle ofpersonal and class privilege and authority and the domination and selfishuse of the many by the few. But it was simply inconsistent with thelimitations of the human intellect that the implications of an idea soprodigious should at once have been taken in. The idea must absolutelyhave time to grow. The entire present order of economic democracy andequality was indeed logically bound up in the first full statement of thedemocratic idea, but only as the full-grown tree is in the seed: in theone case, as in the other, time was an essential element in the evolutionof the result.

  "We divide the history of the evolution of the democratic idea into twobroadly contrasted phases. The first of these we call the phase ofnegative democracy. To understand it we must consider how the democraticidea originated. Ideas are born of previous ideas and are long inoutgrowing the characteristics and limitations impressed on them by thecircumstances under which they came into existence. The idea of populargovernment, in the case of America as in previous republican experimentsin general, was a protest against royal government and its abuses.Nothing is more certain than that the signers of the immortal Declarationhad no idea that democracy necessarily meant anything more than a devicefor getting along without kings. They conceived of it as a change in theforms of government only, and not at all in the principles and purposesof government.

  "They were not, indeed, wholly without misgivings lest it might some timeoccur to the sovereign people that, being sovereign, it would be a goodidea to use their sovereignty to improve their own condition. In fact,they seem to have given some serious thought to that possibility, but solittle were they yet able to appreciate the logic and force of thedemocratic idea that they believed it possible by ingenious clauses inpaper Constitutions to prevent the people from using their power to helpthemselves even if they should wish to.

  "This first phase of the evolution of democracy, during which it wasconceived of solely as a substitute for royalty, includes all theso-called republican experiments up to the beginning of the twentiethcentury, of which, of course, the American Republic was the mostimportant. During this period the democratic idea remained a mere protestagainst a previous form of government, absolutely without any newpositive or vital principle of its own. Although the people had deposedthe king as driver of the social chariot, and taken the reins into theirown hands, they did not think as yet of anything but keeping the vehiclein the old ruts and naturally the passengers scarcely noticed the change.

  "The second phase in the evolution of the democratic idea began with theawakening of the people to the perception that the deposing of kings,instead of being the main end and mission of democracy, was merelypreliminary to its real programme, which was the use of the collectivesocial machinery for the indefinite promotion of the welfare of thepeople at large.

  "It is an interesting fact that the people began to think of applyingtheir political power to the improvement of their material condition inEurope earlier than in America, although democratic forms had found muchless acceptance there. This was, of course, on account of the perennialeconomic distress of the masses in the old countries, which prompted themto think first about the bearing any new idea might have on the questionof livelihood. On the other hand, the general prosperity of the masses inAmerica and the comparative ease of making a living up to the beginningof the last quarter of the nineteenth century account for the fact thatit was not till then that the American people began to think seriously ofimproving their economic condition by collective action.

  "During the negative phase of democracy it had been considered asdiffering from monarchy only as two machines might differ, the generaluse and purpose of which were the same. With the evolution of thedemocratic idea into the second or positive phase, it was recognized thatthe transfer of the supreme power from king and nobles to people meantnot merely a change in the forms of government, but a fundamentalrevolution in the whole idea of government, its motives, purposes, andfunctions--a revolution equivalent to a reversal of polarity of theentire social system, carrying, so to speak, the entire compass card withit, and making north south, and east west. Then was seen what seems soplain to us that it is hard to understand why it was not always seen,that instead of its being proper for the sovereign people to confinethemselves to the functions which the kings and classes had dischargedwhen they were in power, the presumption was, on the contrary, since theinterest of kings and classes had always been exactly opposed to those ofthe people, that whatever the previous governments had done, the peopleas rulers ought not to do, and whatever the previous governments had notdone, it would be presumably for the interest of the people to do; andthat the main use and function of popular government was properly onewhich no previous government had ever paid any attention to, namely, theuse of the power of the social organization to raise the material andmoral welfare of the whole body of the sovereign people to the highestpossible point at which the same degree of welfare could be secured toall--that is to say, an equal level. The democracy of the second orpositive phase triumphed in the great Revolution, and has since been theonly form of government known in the world."

  "Which amounts to saying," I observed, "that there never was a democraticgovernment properly so called before the twentieth century."

  "Just so," assented the doctor. "The so-called republics of the firstphase we class as pseudo-republics or negative democracies. They werenot, of course, in any sense, truly popular governments at all, butmerely masks for plutocracy, under which the rich were the real thoughirresponsible rulers! You will readily see that they could have beennothing else. The masses from the beginning of the world had been thesubjects and servants of the rich, but the kings had been above the rich,and constituted a check on their dominion. The overthrow of the kingsleft no check at all on the power of the rich, which became supreme. Thepeople, indeed, nominally were sovereigns; but as these sovereigns wereindividually and as a class the economic serfs of the rich, and livedat their mercy, the so-called popular government became the merestalking-horse of the capitalists.

  "Regarded as necessary steps in the evolution of society from puremonarchy to pure democracy, these republics of the negative phase mark astage of progress; but if regarded as finalities they were a type farless admirable on the whole than decent monarchies. In respect especiallyto their susceptibility to corruption and plutocratic subversion theywere the worst kind of government possible. The nineteenth century,during which this crop of pseudo-democracies ripened for the sickle ofthe great Revolution, seems to the modern view nothing but a drearyinterregnum of nondescript, _faineant_ government interveningbetween the decadence of virile monarchy in the eighteenth century andthe rise of positive democracy in the twentieth. The period may becompared to that of the minority of a king, during which the royal poweris abused by wicked stewards. The people had been proclaimed assovereign, but they had not yet assumed the sceptre."

  "And yet," said I, "during the latter part of the nineteenth century,when, as you say, the world had not yet seen a single specimen of populargovernment, our wise men were telling us that the democratic system hadbeen fully tested and was ready to be judged on its results. Not a few ofthem, indeed, went so far as to say that the democratic experiment hadproved a failure when, in point of fact, it seems that no experiment indemocracy, properly understood, had as yet ever been so much asattempted."

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

  "It is a very sympathetic task," he said, "to explain the slowness of themasses in feeling their way to a comprehension of all that the democraticidea meant for them, but it is one equally difficult and thankless toaccount for the blank failure of the philosophers, historians, andstate
smen of your day to arrive at an intelligent estimate of the logicalcontent of democracy and to forecast its outcome. Surely the verysmallness of the practical results thus far achieved by the democraticmovement as compared with the magnitude of its proposition and the forcesbehind it ought to have suggested to them that its evolution was yet butin the first stage. How could intelligent men delude themselves with thenotion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time hadexhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing the titleof the executive of a nation from king to President, and the name of thenational Legislature from Parliament to Congress? If your pedagogues,college professors and presidents, and others who were responsible foryour education, had been worth their salt, you would have found nothingin the present order of economic equality that would in the least havesurprised you. You would have said at once that it was just what you hadbeen taught must necessarily be the next phase in the inevitableevolution of the democratic idea."

  Edith beckoned from the door and we rose from our seat.

  "The revolutionary party in the great Revolution," said the doctor, as wesauntered toward the house, "carried on the work of agitation andpropaganda under various names more or less grotesque and ill-fitting aspolitical party names were apt to be, but the one word democracy, withits various equivalents and derivatives, more accurately and completelyexpressed, explained, and justified their method, reason, and purposethan a library of books could do. The American people fancied that theyhad set up a popular government when they separated from England, butthey were deluded. In conquering the political power formerly exercisedby the king, the people had but taken the outworks of the fortress oftyranny. The economic system which was the citadel and commanded everypart of the social structure remained in possession of private andirresponsible rulers, and so long as it was so held, the possession ofthe outworks was of no use to the people, and only retained by thesufferance of the garrison of the citadel. The Revolution came when thepeople saw that they must either take the citadel or evacuate theoutworks. They must either complete the work of establishing populargovernment which had been barely begun by their fathers, or abandon allthat their fathers had accomplished."