Chapter XIX
The True Democracy

Democracy is the rule of an interacting, interpermiating whole.
The present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believed in the people were thinking of working-men only. A man said to me once, "I am very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a working-man." What in the world has that to do with democracy? Democracy is faith in humanity, not faith in "poor" people or "ignorant" people, but faith in every living soul.
Democracy does not enthrone the working-man, it has nothing to do with sympathy for the "lower classes"; the champions of democracy are not looking down to raise any one up, they recognize that all
men must face each other squarely with the knowledge that the give- and-take between them is to be equal.

The enthusiasts of democracy to-day are those who have caught sight of a great spiritual unity which is supported by the most vital trend in philosophical thought and by the latest biologists and social psychologists. It is, above all, what we have learnt of the psychical processes of association which makes us believe in democracy. Democracy is every one building the single life, not my life and others, not the individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the individual which _is_ the state, the
state which _is_ the individual. "When a man's eye shall be single" -- do we quite know yet what that means? Democracy is the fullest possible acceptance of the single life.

Thus democracy, although often considered a centrifugal tendency, is rather a centripetal force. Democracy is not a spreading out: it is not the extension of the suffrage -- its merely external aspect -- it is a drawing together; it is the imperative call for the lacking parts of self. It is the finding of the one will to which the will of every single man and woman must contribute. We want woman to vote not that the suffrage may be extended to women but that women may be included in the suffrage: we want what they may have to add to the whole. Democracy is an infinitely including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinct for wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal
relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations.
Democracy is really neither extending nor including merely, but creating wholes.

This is the primitive urge of all life. This is the true nature of man. Democracy must find a form of government that is suited to the nature of man and which will express that nature in its manifold relations. Or rather democracy is the self-creating process of life appearing as the true nature of man, and through
the activity of man projecting itself into the visible world in fitting form so that its essential oneness will declare itself.
Democracy then is not an end, we must be weaving all the time the web of democracy.

The idea of democracy as representing the all-will; gives us a new idea of aristocracy. We believe in the few but not as opposed to the many, only as included in all. This makes a tremendous change in political thought. We believe in the influence of the good and the wise, but they must exert their influence within the social process; it must be by action and reaction, it must be by a subtle permeation, it must be through the sporting instinct to take back the ball which one has thrown. The wise can never help us by
standing on one side and trying to get their wisdom across to the unwise. The unwise can never help us (what has often been considered the most they could do for the world) by a passive willingness for the wise to impose their wisdom upon them. We need the intermingling of all in the social process. We need our imperfections as well as our perfections. So we offer what we have -- our unwisdom our imperfections -- on the alter of the social process, and it is only by this social process that the wonderful
transmutation can take place which makes of them the very stuff of which the Perfect Society is to be made. Imperfection meets imperfection, or imperfection meets perfection; it is the _process_ which purifies, not the "influence" of the perfect on the imperfect. This is what faith in democracy means. Moreover, there is the ignorance of the ignorant and the ignorant of the wise; there is the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the ignorant.
Both kinds of ignorance have to be overcome, one as much as the other; both kinds of wisdom have to prevail, one as much as the other.

In short, there is not a static world for the wise to influence.
This truth is the blow to the old aristocracy. But we need the wise within this living, moving whole, this never-ceasing action and interaction, and this truth is the basis of our new conception of aristocracy. Democracy is not opposed to aristocracy -- it includes aristocracy.

As biology shows us nature evolving by the power within itself, so social psychology shows us society evolving by the power of its own inner forces, of _all_ its inner forces. There is no passive material within it to be guided by a few. There is no dead material in a true democracy.

When people see the confusion of our present life, its formlessness and planlessness, the servile following of the crowd, the ignorance of the average man, his satisfaction in his ignorance, the insignificance of the collective life, its blindness and its hopelessness, they say they do not believe in democracy.
But this is not democracy. The so-called evils of democracy -- favoritism, bribery, graft, bossism -- are the evils of our lack of democracy, of our party system and the abuses which that system has brought into our representative government. It is not democracy which is "on trial," as is so often said, but it is we ourselves who are on trial. We have been constantly trying to see what democracy meant from the point of view of institutions, we have never yet tried to see what it meant from the point of view of men.

If life could be made mechanical, our method would be correct, but as mechanics is creature and life its superabounding creator, such method is wholly wrong. When people say that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy, they usually mean that while, we have some "popular" institutions, we have not enough, and that when we get enough "popular" institutions, our inadequacies will be met. But no form is going to fulfil our needs. This is important to remember just now, with all the agitation for "democratic control." You cannot establish democratic control by legislation: it is not democratic control to allow the people to assent to or refuse a war decided on by diplomats; there is only one way to get
democratic control -- by people learning how to evolve collective ideas. The essence of democracy is not in institutions, is not even in "brotherhood"; it is in that organizing of men which makes most sure, most perfect, the bringing forth of the common idea. Democracy has one task only -- to free the creative spirit of man.
This is done through group organization. We are sometimes told that democracy is an attitude and must grow up in the hearts of men. But this is not enough. Democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving the will of the people. For this reason the study of group psychology is a necessary preliminary to the study of democracy. Neither party bosses nor unscrupulous capitalists are our undoing, but our own lack of knowing how to do things together.

The startling truth that the war is bringing home to many of us is that unity must be something more than a sentiment, it must be an actual system of organization. We are now beginning to see that if you want the fruits of unity, you must _have_ unity, a real unity, a cooperative collectivism. Unity is neither a sentiment nor an intellectual conception, it is a psychological process produced by actual psychic interaction.

How shall we gain a practical understanding of this essential unity of man? By practicing it with the first person we meet; by approaching every man with the consciousness of the complexity of his needs, of the vastness of his powers. Much is written of the power of history and tradition in giving unity to a community or nation. This has been overemphasized. If this were the only way of getting unity, there would be little hope for the future in America, where we have to make a unity of people with widely
differing traditions, and little hope for the future of Europe where peace is unthinkable unless the past can be forgotten and new ties made on the basis of mutual understanding and mutual obligation. To have democracy we must live it day by day.
Democracy is the actual commingling of men in order that each shall have continuous access to the needs and the wants of others.
Democracy is not a form of government; the democratic soul is born within the group and then it develops its own forms.

Democracy then is a great spiritual force evolving itself from men, utilizing each, completing his incompleteness by weaving together all in the many-membered community life which is the true
Theophany. The world to-day is growing more spiritual, and I say this not in spite of the Great War, but because of all this war has shown us of the inner forces bursting forth in fuller and fuller expression. The Great War has been the Great Call to humanity and humanity is answering. It is breaking down the ramparts to free the way for the entrance of a larger spirit which is to fill every single being by interflowing between them all. France, England, America -- how the beacon lights flash from one to the other -- the program of the British Labor Party, the speeches of our American President, the news of the indomitable courage of France -- these are like the fires in Europe on St. John's Eve, which flash their signals from hill-top to hill-top. Even the school children of France and America write letters to each other. American men and women are working for the reconstruction of France as they would
work for the reconstruction of their own homes -- and all this because we are all sharing the same hope. A new faith is in our hearts. The Great War is the herald of another world for men. The coming of democracy is the spiritual rebirth. We have been told that our physical birth and life are not all, that we are to be born again of water and the spirit. Not indeed of _water_ and spirit, but of _blood_ and spirit, are the warring children of men, a groaning, growing humanity, coming to the Great Rebirth.

Chapter XX
The Growth of Democracy in America

The two problems of democracy to-day are: (1) how to make the individual politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the steady growth towards individualism.
The hope of democracy rests on the individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the development of social consciousness, or that democracy is the development of individualism; until we have become in some degree socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It is
not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the individual.

From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray, involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the individual to society, and
gave us the false political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century, fostered by Bentham's ideas of individual happiness, by
the _laissez-faire_ of the Manchester school and the new industrial order, by Herbert Spencer's interpretation of the recent additions to biological knowledge, by Mill, etc., the doctrine of "individual
rights" became more firmly entrenched. Government interference was strenuously resisted, "individual" freedom was the goal of our desire, "individual" competition and the survival of the fittest the accredited method of progress. The title of Herbert Spencer's book, "The Man versus the State," implies the whole of this false political philosophy built on an unrelated individual.

But during the latter part of the nineteenth century there began to grow up, largely through the influence of T.H. Green, influenced in his turn by Kant and Hegel, an entirely different theory of the state. The state was now not to be subordinate to the individual, but it was to be the fulfillment of the individual. Man was to get his rights and his liberty from membership in society. Green had at once a large influence on the political thought of England and America, and gradually, with other influences, upon practical politics. The growing recognition of the right and duty of the state to foster the life of its members, so clearly and unequivocally expressed in the social legislation of Lloyd George, we see as early as the Education Act of 1870, the Factory Act of 1878 (which systematized and extended previous Factory Acts), and the various mines and collieries acts from 1872.

I do not mean to imply that the growing activity of the state was due entirely or mainly to the change of theory in regard to the individual and the state; when the disastrous results of _laissez-faire_ were seen, then people demanded state regulation of industry. Theory and practice have acted and reacted on each
other. Some one must trace for us, step by step, the interaction of theory and practice in regard to the individual and his relation to society, from the Middle Ages down to the present day [1].

1. Also the development of the relation of individualistic theories to the rise and decline of the doctrines regarding the national state.

What has been the trend of our development in America?
Particularism was at its zenith when our government was founded. Our growth has been away from particularism and towards a true individualism [2].

2. I do not wish, however, to minimize the truly democratic nature of our local institutions.

It is usual to say that the framers of our constitution were individualists and gave to our government an individualistic turn.
We must examine this. They did safeguard and protect the individual in his life and property, they did make the bills of rights an authoritative part of our constitutions, they did make it possible for individuals to aggrandize themselves at the expense of society, their ideal of justice was indeed of individual not of
social justice. And yet all this was negative. The individual was given no large positive function. The individual was feared and suspected. Our early constitutions showed no faith in men: the Massachusetts constitution expressly stated that it was not a government of men. The law of the land was embodied in written documents with great difficulty of amendment just because the people were not trusted. As we look at the crudities of the Declaration of Independence, as we examine our aristocratic state
constitutions, as we study our restricted federal constitution, as we read the borrowed philosophy of our early statesmen, we see very little indication of modern democracy with its splendid faith in man, but a tendency towards aristocracy and a real lack of individualism on every side.

To be sure it was at the same time true that the government was given no positive power. Every one was thoroughly frightened of governments which were founded on status and resulted in arbitrary
authority. The executive power was feared, therefore it was so equipped as to be unequal to its task; the legislative power was feared, so the courts were given power over the legislatures, were
allowed to declare their acts valid or invalid; the national government was feared, therefore Congress was given only certain powers. Power was not granted because no man and no institution was trusted. The will to act could not be a motive force in 1789, because no embodiment of the will was trusted; the framers of our constitutions could not conceive of a kind of will which could be trusted. Fear, not faith, suspicion not trust, were the foundation of our early government. The government had, therefore, no large formative function, it did not look upon itself as a large social power. As the individual was to be protected, the government was to protect. All our thinking in the latter part of the eighteenth century was rooted in the idea of a weak government; this has been thought to show our individualism [1].

1. While it is true that there were undemocratic elements in the mental equipment and psychological bent of our forefathers, and it is these which I have emphasized because from them came our immediate development, it is equally true that there were also sound democratic elements to which we can
trace our present ideas of democracy. Such tracing even in brief form there is not space for here.

But our government as imagined by its founders did not work [2].

2. It became at once evident that a government whose chief function was to see that individual rights, property rights, state rights, were not invaded, was hardly adequate to unite our colonies with all their separate instincts, or to meet the needs of a rapidly development continent. Our national government at once adopted a constructive policy. Guided by Hamilton it assumed constructive powers authority for which could be found in the constitution only by a most liberal construction of its terms. When Jefferson, an antinationalist, acquired Louisiana in 1803, it seemed plain that no such restricted national government as was first conceived could possibly work.

Our system of checks and balances gave no real power to any department. Above all there was no way of fixing responsibility.
A condition of chaos was the result. Such complicated machinery was almost unworkable; there was no way of getting anything done under our official system. Moreover, the individual was not satisfied with his function of being protected, he wanted an actual share in the government. Therefore an extra-official system was adopted, the party organization. The two chief reasons for this adoption were: (1) to give the individual some share in government, (2) to give the government a chance to carry out definite policies, to provide some kind of unifying power.

What effect has party organization had on the individual and on government? The domination of the party gives no real opportunity to the individual: originality is crushed; the aim of all party organization is to turn out a well-running vote machine. The party is not interested in men but in voters -- an entirely different matter. Party organization created artificial majorities, but gave to the individual little power in or connection with government.
The basic weakness of party organization is that the individual gets his significance only through majorities. Any method which looks to the fulfilment of the individual through the domination of
majorities is necessarily not only partial but false. The present demand that the nation shall have the full power of the individual is the heaviest blow that party organization has ever received.

Now consider, on the other hand, what party organization has done for the government. The powers of government moved steadily to political bosses and business corporations. Boss-rule, party domination and combinations of capital filled in the gaps in the system of government we inaugurated in the eighteenth century. The marriage of business and politics, while it has been the chief factor in entrenching the party system, was the outcome of that system, or rather it was the outcome of the various unworkabilities of our official government. The expansion of big business, with its control of politics, evasion of law, was inevitable; we simply had no machinery adequate to our need, namely, the development of a vast, untouched continent. The urge of that development was an overwhelming force which swept irresistibly on, carrying everything before it, swallowing up legal disability, creating for itself
extra-legal methods. We have now, therefore, a system of party organization and political practice which subverts all our theories. Theoretically, the people have the power, but really the government is the primaries, the conventions, the caucuses.
Officials hold from the party. Party politics became corrupt because party government was irresponsible government. The insidious power of the machine is due to its irresponsibility.

The evils of our big business have not come because Americans are prone to cheat, because they want to get the better of their fellows, because their greed is inordinate, their ambition domineering. Individuals have not been to blame, but our whole system. It is the system which must be changed. Our constitution and laws made possible the development of big business; our courts were not "bought" by big business, but legal decisions and business practice were formed by the same inheritance and tradition. The reformation of neither will accomplish the results we wish, but the nation-wide acceptance, through all classes and all interests, of a different point of view.

The next step was the wave of reform that swept over the country.
The motive was excellent; the method poor. The method was poor because the same method was adopted which these reform movements were organized to fight, one based on pure crowd philosophy. It was a curious case of astigmatism. The trouble was that the reformers did not see accurately what they were fighting; they were fighting essentially the nonrecognition of the individual, but they did not see this, so they went on basing all their own work on the non-appreciation of men. Their essential weakness was the weakness of the party machine -- all their efforts were turned to the voter not the man. Their triumphs were always the triumphs of the polls.
Their methods were principally three: change in the forms of government (charters, etc.), the nomination of "good" men to office, and exhortation to induce "the people" to elect them.

The idea of "good" men in office was the fetich of many reform associations. They thought that their job was to find three or four "good" men and then once a year to hypnotize the electorate to "do their duty" and put these men into office, and then all would go well if before another year three or four more good men could be found. What a futile and childish idea which leaves out of account the whole body of citizenship! It is only through this main body of citizenship that we can have a decent government and a sound life. That is, in other words, it is only by a genuine appreciation of the individual, of every single individual, that there can be any reform movement with strength and constructive power. The wide-spread fallacy that good officials make a good city is one which lies at the root of much of our thinking and insidiously works to ruin our best plans, our most serious efforts.
This extraordinary belief in officials, this faith in the panacea of a change of character, must go. If our present mechanical government is to turn into a living, breathing, pulsing life, it must be composed of an entire citizenship educated and responsible.

This the reform associations now recognize, in some cases partially, in some cases fully. The good government association of to-day has a truer idea of its function. The campaign for the election of city officials is used as a means of educating the mass of citizens: besides the investigation and publication of facts, there is often a clear showing of the aims of government and an enlightening discussion of method. Such associations have always considered the interests of the city as a whole; they have not appealed, like the party organization, to local sentiment.

I have spoken of the relation of the reform movement of the last of the nineteenth century to the body of citizenship. What was its relation to government? The same spirit applied to government meant patching, mending, restraining, but it did not mean constructive work, it had not a formative effect on our institutions. Against any institution that has to be guarded every moment lest it do evil, there is a strong a priori argument that it should not exist. This until recently has not been sufficiently taken into account. Now, however, in the beginning of the twentieth century, we see many evidences that the old era of
restraint is over and the constructive period of reform begun. We see it, for instance, in our Bureaus of Municipal Research; we see it in the more progressive sections of our state constitutional conventions. But the chief error of the nineteenth-century reformers was not that they were reactionary, nor that they were timid, nor that they were insincere, nor that they were hedgers.
They were wanting in neither sincerity nor courage. Their error was simply that they did not appreciate the value of the individual. Individualism instead of being something we are getting away from, is something we are just catching sight of.

And if our institutions were founded on a false political philosophy which taught "individual rights," distorted ideas of liberty and equality, and thought of man versus the state, if our political development was influenced by a false social psychology which saw the people as a crowd and gave them first to the party bosses and next to the social reformers, our whole material development was dominated by a false economic philosophy which saw the greatest good of all obtained by each following his own good in his own way. This did not mean the development of individuals but the crushing of individuals -- of all but a few. The Manchester school of economics, which was bound to flourish extensively under
American conditions, combined with a narrow legal point of view, which for a hundred years interpreted our constitutions in accordance with an antiquated philosophy and a false psychology, to make particularism the dominant note in American life.

The central point of our particularism was the idea of being let alone. First, the _individual_ was to be let alone, the pioneer on his reclaimed land or the pioneer of industry. But when men saw that their gain would be greater by some sort of combination, then the _trusts_ were to be let alone -- freedom of contract was called liberty! Our courts, completely saturated with this philosophy, let the trusts alone. The interpretation of our courts, our corrupt party organization, our institutions and our social philosophy, hastened and entrenched the monopolistic age. Natural rights meant property rights. The power of single men or single corporations at the end of the nineteenth century marked the height
of our particularism, of our subordination of the state to single members. They were like _pate de foie gras_ made by the enlargement of the goose's liver. It is usual to disregard the goose. The result of our false individualism has been non- conservation of our national resources, exploitation of labor, and
political corruption. We see the direct outcome in our slums, our unregulated industries, our "industrial unrest," etc.

But egotism, materialism, anarchy are not true individualism.
To-day, however, we have many evidences of the steadily increasing appreciation of the individual and a true understanding of his place in society, his relation to the state. Chief among these are: (1) the movement towards industrial democracy, (2) the woman movement, (3) the increase of direct government, and (4) the introduction of social programs into party platforms. These are parallel developments from the same root. What we have awakened to now is the importance of every single man.

The first, the trend towards industrial democracy, will, in its relation to the new state, be considered later. The second, the woman movement, belongs to the past rather than to the present.
Its culmination has overrun the century mark and makes what is really a nineteenth-century movement seem as if it belonged to the twentieth. It belongs to the past because it is merely the end of the movement for the extension of the suffrage. Our suffrage related originally in many states on property distinctions; in New Hampshire there was a religious and property qualification, -- only Protestant tax-payers could vote. Gradually it became manhood suffrage, then the immigrants were admitted, later the negroes, then Colorado opened its suffrage to women, and now in thirteen states women have the full suffrage. The essence of the woman movement is not that women as women should have the vote, but that women as individuals should have the vote. There is a fundamental distinction here.

The third and fourth indications of the growth of democracy, or the increase of individualism (I speak of these always as synonymous) -- the tendency towards more and more direct government and the introduction of social programs into party platforms -- will be considered in the next chapter together with a third tendency in American politics which is bound up with these two: I refer to the increase of administrative responsibility.

The theory of government based on individual rights no longer has a place in modern political theory; it no longer guides us entirely in legislation but has yielded largely to a truer practice; yet it still occupies a large place in current thought, in the speeches of our practical politicians, in our institutions of government, and in America in our law court decisions. This being so it is important for us to look for the reasons. First, there are of course many people who trail along behind. Secondly, partly through the influence of Green and Bosanquet, the idea of contract has been slowly fading away, and many people have been frightened at its disappearance because Hegelianism, even in the modified form in which it appears in English theory, _seems_ to enthrone the state and override the individual [1].

1. These English writers to whom our debt is so large are not responsible for this, but their misinterpreters.

Third, the large influence which Tarde, Le Bon, and their followers have had upon us with their suggestion and imitation theories of society -- theories based on a pure particularism. The development
of social and political organization has been greatly retarded by this school of sociology. Fourth, our economic development is still associated in the minds of many with the theories of individual rights.

A more penetrating analysis of society during recent years, however, has uncovered the true conception of individualism hidden from the first within the "individualistic" movement. All through history we see the feeling out for the individual; there are all the false trails followed and there are the real steps taken. The
false trails led to the individual rights of politics, the_laissez-faire_ of economics and our whole false particularism.
The real steps have culminated in our ideas of to-day. To substitute for the fictitious democracy of equal rights and "consent of the governed," the living democracy of a united, responsible people is the task of the twentieth century. We seek now the method.