DEMOCRACY’S FAILURE

Patea Mail, Volume LIII, 15 April 1932, Page 2

DEMOCRACY’S FAILURE

THE GREATEST IN HISTORY. By ‘DemOcritus. ’ I assert that democracy is a failure. When Abraham Lincoln said after Gettysburg that he hoped that “Government of the people by the people and for the people’ ’ would not perish from the earth he used words which mean, shortly, democracy or popular control. Lincoln was always careful to warn the American people that the theory of democracy implied a moral, intelligent, and patriotic electorate. Aristocracy means (literally) government by the best. Fronde in ‘Oceania 7 said “I am no believer in democracy as a form of Government which can be of long continuance. It proceeds on the hypothesis that every individual citizen is entitled to an equal voice.in the management of his country, and individuals being infinitely unequal, bad and good, wise and unwise, and as rights depend on fitness to make use of them, the assumption is untrue and no institutions can endure which rest upon illusions.”

WHAT CONSERVATISM AIMS AT. Lord Lytton said “What conservatism aims at is not the maintenance of nobility, except so far as nobility forms an element in the grander organisation of aristocracy; it aims at preserving the general influence, both on laws and society, of the chief men or the best, whether in character, intelligence, property, or birth —taking property as one of the guarantees, but only as one, that give to a citizen a stake in the welfare of his country and the preservation of order. It is no part of conservative policy to buttress the peerage by exterior privilege. If conservatism were to seek by direct laws to strengthen the outward power of aristocracy, it would instantly defeat its own object. To elevate the masses in character and feeling to that standard which conservatism seeks in aristocracy —in other words to aristocratizc the community, so that the greatest liberty to the greatest number might not be the brief and hazardous effect of a sudden revolutionary law, but the gradual result of that intellectual power to which liberty is indispensable. To preserve the ancient framework of the State, but to renew it perpetually on its journey through time, by admitting any found worthy to inherit it. Such,” says Lord Lytton, ' ‘ is the policy of an enduring people who advance hardily but with caution by parallels from their old defences. ’ ’ CONSERVATISM DEFINED. Disraeli defined conservatism as a contract to preserve all that is best in the national character of sober sense and heritage. Mazzini’s view of aristocracy is as follows: “The sole aristocracy of to-day is the aristocracy of wealth, the sole aristocracy of to-mor-row will be the eternal, divine, beneficent aristocracy of intellect and virtue —at its highest, genius; hut that, like everything that descends from God, wiW rise from among the people and labour for the people.” Euripides was the critic of a democracy which he found good in theory but practically vicious. Socrates was put to death, nominally on a charge of impiety, but clearly on political grounds. Democracy loves mediocrity and hates real distinction. In one of his lucid articles Mr. Austin Hopkinson says: “Democracy is the attempt to dam the stream of evolution and even to make it run backwards, by refusing to merit of whatever kind its natural reward and by fostering inferiority of every sort. ” TCO MUCH LEGISLATION. “Already our supplies of fresh capital arc cut off by taxation, our customers arc being ruined by legislation and trade union restrictions, and our workmen arc toiling more than one day in each week, not for themselves, but to support those who do not work. The non-worker has the political power, and we workers have become his slaves, without hope of emancipation until we take courage in pur hands and kill or cure democracy. ” ECONOMIC CHAOS COMING. “On the one hand social reform, or mass corruption as it may be better named, is bringing about an economic chaos in which many of our people will be concerned more with obtaining enough to eat than with maintaining an outworn form of Government. On the other hand, the personnel of Parliament is rendering it less and less easy to feel any respect for that body.” THE RISE OF THE WINDBAG. They have marked the rise to power of the windbag, but know well that power ultimately rests, not with the talker or the crowd, but with the minority which is prepared to fight for what it believes to be true and right. Political interference with industry has brought economic ruin and has corrupted politics almost beyond cure. The workers still have a majority, but it is rapidly dwindling and will inevitably disappear. THE BEST SHOULD GOVERN. Coventry Patmore wrote: “All men arc born believers in aristocracy. Who is there, out of the House of Commons, who docs not hold the fundamental dogma of politics, that the best should govern? Modern democracy means nothing but the possession of the electric power by ignorant aristocrats: by those who desire that the best should govern, but who have no sufficient means of discovering the best.”

Even the proletariat aim at, or at least being thought of, as belonging to the aristocracy, and copy those whom they consider their superiors. Mr. Warwick Deeping in one of his books

makes the principal character say, "Democratic age, sirl But a handle is as much a handle as over. Your dustman has to be Mr. This and your bricklayer’s labourer Mr. That when they are mentioned in the local Press for getting run over when drunk or for growing a prize pumpkin. And the scullery maid is Miss So and So. Bosh, isn’t it? Better be a plain Bill Sykes or Nancy Lee. Mr. John Pybus! What use—what b use, as the vulgar would put it — is the ‘Mr.’ to me?”

HOMAGE TO EFFICIENCY,

Mr. Arnold White in "Efficiency and Empire” says: "The gentlefolk will always win in a crowd, whensoever they take the trouble, for aristocracy’s nothing more than the most efficient people in the nation, whose efficiency has been graded up by generations of training. Homage to efficiency is the secret of the respect paid by AngloSaxons to aristocracy. When efficiency goes out of the door, it is inevitable that Empire will fly out at the window.” "We need statesmen who fear posterity more than the opposition,” S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) said. "As it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of Government.” "A -Gentleman With a Duster” has expressed himself thus: "You sec how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it —low, vulgar meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at everything noble, refined, -and truly national. The multitude are always under the domination of some one feeling or view; whereas truth, and above all, practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide comprehension of the more and the less, the balance and the counterbalance.”

DEMOCRACY FIRST IN ONE'S OWN

HOME, “ There is indeed no champion of the democratic principle who applies it to matters which most closely touch his life or affect his vockct. Some of the trades union officials who are for ever demanding an uneconomic wage from over-taxed employers struggling to compete with less hampered rivals, pay their own clerks and underlings the scantiest possible wages and arc strongly averse from those underlings organising themselves to demand shorter hours and higher pay. All their glowing sympathy with the working man is for the working man employed by someone else, and all their boundless charity for this working man is at the expense of other people. Plutarch tells us. that some one advised Lycurgus (9th century 8.C.) to set up a democracy in Sparta, the Lacedaemonian made answer, “Pray do you first set up a democracy in your own house." NO AUTOCRAT NEEDED. In “National Unity" one reads that “Many people arc coming to believe that a succession of industrial crises and a continuous fall in the volume of our exports, must culminate in a grave if not a complete breakdown of our State mechanism. Others., convinced that democracy has been tried in the balance and found wanting, and that its increasing gravitation towards the subversive doctrine of Communism is an immediate menace to everything sound and sacred in human life, aver their belief that to avoid catastrophe we must have recourse, like Italy, to an autocrat. They (intelligent and patriotic people) say "that-democracy has made up its mind, and that nothing in the world can now prevent it from going its own road to perdition. I venture to suggest that the choice before England is not the alternative- of a Mussolini or Communism, and that it is possible to rid ourselves of the worst evils of the democratic principle without incurring any of the inconveniences and hazards of autocracy." To be continued.