LECKY ON DEMOCRACY1

WHAT is Democracy? Sometimes it is the name for a form of government by which the ultimate control of the machinery of government is committed to a numerical majority of the community. Sometimes, and incorrectly, it is used to denote the numerical majority itself, the poor or the multitude existing in a state. Sometimes, and still more loosely, it is the name for a policy directed exclusively or mainly to the advantage of the labouring class. Finally, in its broadest, deepest, most comprehensive, and most interesting sense, Democracy is the name for a certain general condition of society, having historic origins, springing from circumstances and the nature of things; not only involving the political doctrine of popular sovereignty, but representing a cognate group of corresponding tendencies over the whole field of moral, social, and even of spiritual life within the democratic community. Few writers have consistently respected the frontier that divides democracy as a certain state of society, from democracy as a certain form of government. Mill said of the admirable Tocqueville, for instance, that he was apt to ascribe to Democracy consequences that really flowed from Civilisation. Mr. Lecky is constantly open to the same criticism.

Whether we think of democracy in the narrower or the wider sense whether as another name for universal suffrage, or as another name for a 1 Democracy and Liberty. By W. E. H. Lecky. Two vols. Longmans, 1896.

particular stage of civilisation - it equally stands for a remarkable revolution in human affairs. In either sense it offers a series of moral and political questions of the highest practical importance and the most invigorating theoretical interest. It has shaken the strength and altered the attitude of the churches, has affected the old subjection of women and modified the old conceptions of the family and of property, has exalted labour, has created and dominated the huge enginery of the Press, has penetrated in a thousand subtle ways into the whole region of rights, duties, human relations, and social opportunity. In vain have men sought a single common principle for this vast movement. Simplification of life; the sovereignty of the people, and the protection of a community by itself; the career open to the talents; equality and brotherhood; the substitution of industrialism for militarism; respect for labour :-such are some of the attempts that have been made to seize in a phrase the animating spirit of the profound changes through which the civilised world has for a century and more been passing, not only in the imposing institutions of the external world, but in the mind and heart of individual man.

We can hardly imagine a finer or more engaging, inspiring, and elevating subject for inquiry, than this wonderful outcome of the extraordinary industrial, intellectual, and moral development that has awakened in the masses of modern society the consciousness of their own strength, and the resolution, still dim and torpid, but certain to expand and to intensify, to use that strength for new purposes of their own. We may rejoice in democracy, or we may dread it. Whether we like it or detest it, and whether a writer chooses to look at it as a whole or to investigate some particular aspect of it, the examination ought to take us into the highest region of political thought, and it un

doubtedly calls for the best qualities of philosophic statesmanship and vision.

If so much may be said of the theme, what of the season and the hour? In our own country, at any rate, the present would seem to be a singularly propitious time for the cool and scientific consideration, by a man trained in habits of systematic reflection, of some of the questions raised by Mr. Lecky's title. The English electorate has called a halt to all projects of constitutional reform. The great orator and statesman who has for a generation been the organ and inspirer of popular sentiment in this kingdom, has quitted the stage of public activity. Of the two historic political parties, though one is for the moment entrenched behind a strong parliamentary majority, yet neither feels perfectly secure against deep internal transformation, nor perfectly easy about the direction which that transformation may take. Victors and vanquished alike ostentatiously proclaim their supreme devotion to the cause of social reform, though the phrase is vague and its contents uncertain and indefinite. The extreme wing of what styles itself the Labour party, the Socialist party, or the Collectivist party, has for the hour suffered a signal repulse. Yet nobody with an eye in his head believes that the accommodation of old social institutions to a state of society in which the political centre of gravity has finally shifted, is a completed task, or that the gravest problems involved in that task are not left outstanding and inexorable.

Such a period as this is just the time, one would think, for a political philosopher to take stock of institutions; to trace their real working under the surface of external forms; to watch for subtle subterranean changes, to classify tendencies, to consider outlying or approaching difficulties, to seek solutions, and to do all these things with as much precision, directness, definiteness, as the highly

complex nature of the subject will permit. Precision and directness are not at all the same thing as dogma. As Tocqueville has well said, the books that have done most to make men reflect, and have had most influence on their opinions and their acts, are those where the author has not thought of telling them dogmatically what they ought to think, but where he has set their minds on the road that leads to the truths in point, and has made them find such truths as if by their own effort.

If the theme is lofty, and the hour favourable, what of our teacher? Mr. Lecky has been removed from the distractions of active life, and though this has on the one hand the drawback of keeping him ignorant of many of the vital realities of his subject, it might on the other hand have been expected at least to keep him free from its passions. He has large stores of knowledge of other times and other countries, and he has been accustomed to expatiate upon the facts so accumulated, in copious and impartial dissertations. He might seem to be justified in his belief that studies of this sort bring with them kinds of knowledge, and methods of reasoning, "that may be of some use in the discussion of contemporary questions." In other fields he has shown qualities of eminent distinction. From him, if from any living writer, we should have expected firm grasp of his great subject, unity of argument, reflective originality, power, depth, ingenuity; above all, the philosophic temper. In every one of these anticipations it is melancholy to have to say that deep disappointment awaits the reader.

First of all, a word or two as to the form. Mr. Lecky has never been remarkable for skill in handling masses of material. Compare him, for instance, with Montesquieu: he will admit that the thought of the comparison is not uncomplimentary. Montesquieu subordinates the exposition of facts to the generalisation; detail and generalisation are firmly

welded together; illustration never obscures nor blocks the central idea; two or three energetic strokes of the brush bring a mass of fact into true colour, light, and relation; in short, Montesquieu is a master of the art of composition. In these volumes it is very different. Great quantities of fact are constantly getting into the way of the argument, and the importation of history breaks the thread of discussion. The contents of an industrious man's note-books are tumbled headlong down, like coals into the hold of a Tyne collier. I hesitate to pronounce these great quantities of fact irrelevant, because it is not easy to disentangle the author's thesis, to detect his general point of view, or to find a clue through the labyrinth of promiscuous topic and the jungle of overgrown detail. It is impossible to be sure what is relevant and what is not. With the best will in the world, and after attentive and respectful perusal, we leave off with no firm and clear idea what the book is about, what the author is driving at, nor what is the thread of thought that binds together the dozen or score pamphlets, monographs, or encyclopaedic articles of which the work is composed. Organic unity is wholly absent; it is a book that is no book. You might as well hunt for the leading principle of what is known in parliamentary speech as an Omnibus Bill. There is a pamphlet of forty pages on that novel and refreshing theme, the Irish Land Question. Thirty pages are filled with the minutiae of Local Veto. Five-and-forty pages go to the group of questions relating to the Marriage law: we have Roman concubinatus, early Christian marriage, the action of the Council of Trent, the case of Lord Northampton in the time of Edward the Sixth, and so forth through all the ages, down to the deceased wife's sister of the day in which we live, and the ex-Lord Chancellor who declared that, if marriage with the sister of a deceased wife ever became