CHAPTER XI

TOWARD DEMOCRACY

SWEEPING plans of reform are in discredit with a great many people; for it is claimed, with some show of justice, that no change is worth anything except a change in the human heart. Yet this is only one side of the truth; good institutions make good men, as surely as good men make good institutions. Every English thinker of the last generation saw that, till the millennium should come, the mere attempt to regenerate individuals would never renovate society. As soon as individuals are regenerated, they set to work to alter conditions, and a new collective conscience must express itself not only through personal action, but in new social organization of the collective life.

Toward some ideal of social reconstruction our fathers were all feeling their way in the dark. Perhaps the chief value of their tentative thought to us is that we may see in it the genesis of our own. That is the best conviction for the present toward which the depths of the past have moved. On the surface of any period lie presumptions, assumptions enow, the lazy foam of opinion left by the receding breakers of the past. Beneath are profounder instincts of mind and spirit, stir

ring in seeming isolation, yet irresistibly drawn into one current of tendency. Find these, and they carry us onward to that future of the last generation which is the present of our own.

The most important of these currents in our century we shall find if we look for the attitude of our fathers toward democracy. At the beginning of the Victorian age, this attitude was by no means a foregone conclusion. Democracy the whole civilized world was indeed facing; but America alone among the great nations had accepted it, and her example through this epoch was not, as we have seen, especially reassuring to Europe. Many of the most ardent protests against social and industrial injustice, many of the most radical utterances made, came from men who were stanch monarchists and aristocrats, and who often indeed thought that they saw in the progress of democracy the chief reason for the misfortunes and anomalies of the times. "A king given, an aristocracy given," wrote Frederick Denison Maurice in 1852, "and I can see my way clearly to call upon them to do the work which God has laid upon them: to repent of their sins, to labor that the whole manhood of the country may have a voice, that every member of Christ's body may be indeed a free man. But reconstitute society upon the democratic basis, -treat the sovereign and the aristocracy as not intended to rule and guide the land, as only holding their commissions from us, and I anticipate nothing but a most accursed sacerdotal rule, or a military despotism." Such dark anticipations

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were by no means peculiar to this gentle and deepsouled man. Carlyle and Ruskin, neither disciples nor masters of the "Christian Socialists," were one with them in their utter distrust of that new popular power which seemed invading the world. A ship trying to round Cape Horn in bad weather by vote of the sailors instead of by will of the captain, a troop of unbridled horses kicking their heels and scampering where they would, are the contemptuous figures under which democracy appears to Carlyle. That individual folly multiplied, — and the English nation appeared to him ten million of men mostly fools," — could result in collective wisdom was an idea which seemed to him to carry its own refutation. No book, perhaps, had done so much as his "French Revolution" to bring home to the public the breathless sense of the invasion of the modern world by the People; but the revolutionary drama, as conceived by him, centres in retribution rather than in prophecy, and all the marvelous eloquence and power of the book hail, as it were, the breaking of a thunderstorm rather than the coming of the dawn. Through all his later books, recognition blends curiously with terror, and repudiation of the democratic idea alternates with reluctant welcome in a way that suggests a mind struggling with a current which it finds impossible to stem, but to which it will not yield. "Alas, on this side of the Atlantic and on that, Democracy, we apprehend, is forever impossible."1 But again: "Uni

1 Latter Day Pamphlets, "The Present Time."

versal democracy, whatever we may think of it, has declared itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we live." And finally, society des. perately placed on the horns of the dilemma: "How in conjunction with inevitable democracy, indispensable sovereignty is to exist; certainly it is the hugest question ever heretofore propounded to mankind!" 1

Carlyle's bitter scorn has its salutary gift for us, if it serve only to awaken a challenge and a question at the heart of our too often shallow optimism. For we Americans take the word democracy lightly upon our lips; but really to believe and accept it, not with the excitement of the Fourth of July orator, but with the ardent, solemn consecration that may mean sacrifice, is the most tremendous test of faith in God and man, and in man's power to attain the God-like, that has ever been imposed on a bewildered and helpless humanity. Belief in democracy is the last demand of idealism. We are not likely to forget this: we whose national Credo must be spoken in the presence of the seething throngs of the outcasts of Europe. To look our national situation squarely in the face and say that the cure for democracy is more democracy requires a reverential trust toward humanity at large such as only the mystic who avoids men has in the past been able to hold with any degree of steadiness. To make such trust the prevailing mood of the statesman who guides men will need more than one generation.

1 Past and Present, book iv. ch. i. "Aristocracies."

But however one may explain the position of Carlyle, whatever value, indeed, one may feel that it still holds for us, the inconsistency of the old seer led him to disastrous conclusions. Teufelsdröckh in the wilderness could exclaim with Novalis: "We touch Heaven when we lay our hands upon a human body," and could meditate with holy rapture on the sacredness of human nature and the brotherhood of man. Teufelsdröckh in the world, elbowing, jostling, observing his brothers, found enthusiasm less easy, and was inclined to despise the race very much as Swift had done before him. Long ago, Mazzini, a man of less provincial outlook and less intermittent idealism than Carlyle, pointed out that the great Scotchman's fear of democracy sprang from a profound distrust of human nature. His contradictory vibrations between a mystic reverence for man and an instinctive contempt for men make him interesting as a figure of transition; but they show more clearly than any other features of his teaching that his real power lay rather in flashes of feeling than in steady thought, and they naturally lead to the harsh and painful attitude of his later years. For with imperative craving to revere, with perception that all which had insured reverence in the past was dying or doomed, with scant faith in the possibilities of humanity at large, Carlyle fell back on the demand for heroes; and, when spiritual heroes seemed lacking, took the most obvious refuge open to him and exalted mere force and might. The impulse grew upon him, till the man who abhorred