By John Jay Chapman
When two men are fighting and agree that they will stop at sundown, we have government. Their consent is government. Their memory of that consent is an institution. There never was a government of any kind or for any purpose that did not rest upon the consent of the governed; but the means by which the consent is obtained have varied. The consent records the extent to which the individuals are alike. It is only by virtue of similarity in the governed that government exists. On a ship, all men are alike in their danger of being drowned, and they consent to dictation from the captain for the welfare of all. The aim of the despot is to keep the population alike in their need of him or their fear of him. After the French Revolution, the entire French people were alike both in their desire for order and in their lack of training in self-government. A dictator was inevitable. Gouverneur Morris, whose experience in America qualified him to judge, saw the matter clearly as early as 1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by the two opposite means of giving them social order and foreign war. Henry V. kept himself on top in England by waging war in France. Seward in 1861 thought to unite the people of the United States by declaring war against everybody in Europe. The German Emperor is sustained to-day by the popular fear of France and Russia. It makes no difference what foolishness he commits; so long as that fear predominates he will be absolute.
For the converse proposition is also true, that in so far as people are like-minded, they must be ruled by a single mind. A hundred Malays cannot establish a representative government. They must have a boss. The population of Russia can only be ruled by a Czar. So also whenever under any form of government all the people want one thing, one man does it. The reasons for it are invented afterwards, and “war powers” are found to justify the proclamation setting the slaves free.
The extent to which people are similar to each other will be recorded in their institutions; in fact, those institutions are nothing but dials of similarity. For this reason any popular national institution gives you the nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, any consent has a tendency to modify the future because he or it is advertised and established. It is a factor in the consciousness of every individual. It is the conservative. It tends to affect the conduct and mind of every one, for any one coming in contact with it must conform or resist. It is a challenge to the individual. It impinges upon him. The thing changes daily in his mind, and occupies now more, now less, of his activities. In cases where his whole external conduct has been absorbed by one such power we have absolute rule, religious or military, and a uniform population. If there be a single predominating power which has not yet completely conquered, we have in some form or another a record of its growth by a tendency toward absolutism.
The American people have been growing strikingly uniform, owing to their one occupation,—business, their one passion,—a desire for money. They are divided by their system of politics into two great categories, and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, little nodes of power representing this identity of consciousness in each of the two great categories of the population, Republicans and Democrats. If you could cut open the consciousness of one thousand Americans and examine it with a microscope, you could set up our government with great ease.
Let us concede for the sake of argument that the full development of individual character and intellect is the aim of life.
Now in so far as individuals are developed, they differ from each other. We ought then to be distressed by any identity whatever found in the heads of individuals examined; and greatly distressed by the reign of the same passion manifested in the one thousand American organisms. You would say, ‘If this thing goes on, a dictator is absolutely certain,’ and then you would remember that you had heard a business man remark at the Club the evening before, that he would welcome a dictator as a cheap practical way out of it.
Let us now suppose you to examine one thousand English heads. The first thing you would notice would be that the number was not large enough to give reliable results. Certain types would be manifest, but the special variations would be so striking as to cloud your conclusions. In all these heads there would be spots of a density nowhere found in America, but the spontaneous variations outside and round about them would be magnificent. You would say, “These spots represent different kinds of conservatism. This one is reverence for the church, that one for the army, a third for the judiciary. They represent prejudice, but they also represent stability, a stability that is the resultant of a thousand positive and various forces. These spots hold England together and give scope to free government. The world never has done and never can do better than this. These individuals are developed. The line of force of one man passes through one institution, that of the next man through the next. No force, no passion, can make them all alike at any one time. They are anchored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid and free in the present. The only hope for freedom in the individual lies in the existence of different sorts of institutions.”
It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college of Jesuits is a protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that to have free government you must encourage institutions—and you will be wrong.
The fundamental reason why you are wrong is that these beneficent institutions are what is left of the activity of people who believed in them for their own sake. You can no more imitate one of them, or catch the power of one of them, than you can set up a king here to repel an invasion. You yourself believe in individualism. Go straight for that, and leave it to erect its bulwarks in what form it may.
A multiplication of institutions then serves two contradictory purposes. It limits the individual, creates black spots of prejudice and unreason in him; but on the other hand it encourages a free development of the individual outside of those spots. It creates types, and types are mutually protective. This is only another way of saying that free government results from a segregation of the government into provinces, which cannot all be captured, at one time, by one force.
The highly intelligent and artificial separation of our government into the branches of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial was in a sense an attempt to get free government by the erection of independent institutions. But these were never strong enough to create types (we have hardly the type of judge among us); and certainly no attachment to any part, but the sacredness of the entire system, has preserved it. It was the sentiment attaching to the single idea of a central government.
It is to institutions that the consent to be governed is given. The consent is always a highly complex affair. It implies a civilization. It is qualified, limited, infinitely diversified, and is in every case regulated by historic fact. For instance, under a limited monarchy, it is a consent to be governed by a particular dynasty after special ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, subject to such and such customs,—each and all existing in the imagination of the subject. For government is entirely a matter of the imagination, and it is inconceivable that it should ever be anything else. The English have spent two centuries in impressing the imagination of India with the vision of English power. A violation by the government, no matter how strong, of the popular imagination, an assumption of power in a field not yet subdued, always brings on riots. The Persians resented furiously the creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sultan had to rescind it. The Americans threw the tea into the harbor.
The forms and modes by which government is carried on are the record of things to which people have consented, and hence become important, become symbols so identified with power that almost all historical writing deals with them as entities. The power of the symbols in any case varies inversely to the power of the people for self-government, that is, to the average differentiation between individuals; or to put the thing the other way, the extent to which a man will permit another to rule him depends upon his incapacity to rule himself.
The great unifying forces have always been regarded as dangers to free government. War makes a nation a unit. It cannot be conducted by individualism. Religion condenses power. That is the reason why our ancestors were so afraid of a State church. Commerce has generally been thought a blessing because commerce gives scope to individualism. It enriches and educates. Yet commerce itself may bring in tyranny. Witness Venice. Commerce has centralized our government. Anything that affects everybody’s mind with the same appeal strengthens government and makes for unity. A nation only exists by virtue of such general appeals. It is inside of and subordinate to this general unity of feeling that individualism must go on. The rulers of mankind are men who have got control of the symbols, of the institutions, which stood in the imagination of the people as most important, and who by manipulating them extended their range over the popular imagination. Or to put the thing a little differently, the passions of the people are reflected in ever-changing institutions. The people seize a man and force him to do their bidding and rule them in such manner as to assuage their passions. They make a saint out of Lincoln, and a devil out of Torquemada.
If a man seems to be a great man, and seems to be leading the people, it is because he knows the people better than they know themselves. There was never a people yet that did not in this sense govern themselves, being themselves governed by the resultant of their dominant passions. The Southern Pacific Railroad has for years owned the State of California as completely as if it had bought it from a tyrant who ruled over a population of slaves. It was done by the purchase of votes. In so far as virtue shall regain predominance in the breast of the voter and set him free, virtue will replace money in the voting, and set free the State.
Universal suffrage is a mode and a symbol. Under certain conditions of education people must have it. Under others they cannot have it. But whether they have it or not, they will be ruled by their ruling passion, and if this renders them alike in character, their government will be a tyranny. If the reign of the passion be tempered, the reign of the tyrant will be tempered. Express the thing in terms of human feeling (and what else is there?) and universal suffrage is seen as a quantité négligeable.
It is thus apparent that there is no institution that cannot easily be made to operate to a contradictory end. The criminal courts here have been used to collect debt. There is no wickedness to which the enginery of the Christian Church has not at one time or another been lent. The passions of a period run its institutions as easily as a stream turns any sort of a mill. To-day the United States Senate is a millionaires’ club. To-morrow the Stock Exchange may become a church.
Now what is an institution?
It is a custom which receives an assent because it is a custom. Man has always been ruled by custom. The notion that there was a time when disputes were settled by fighting, and that arbitration came in as a matter of convenience, stands on the same sort of footing as Rousseau’s social contract. It is an academic jeu d’esprit. In looking back over history all we see is custom, and farther back, still custom. All the fighting of savages is regulated by custom and always has been regulated by custom. Nay, the bees and the ants are ruled by custom. The idea of custom is the one idea that the genius of Kipling led him to see in the jungle.
Now what is at the bottom of all this regard for custom? At the bottom of custom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is both selfish and unselfish, but it makes a great difference whether we regard him primarily as one thing or the other. The scientists, owing to their study of the lower animals, have tried to explain man on the selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery of him. They say “He must eat or die; therefore, he must be primarily egoistic.” And they attempt to explain progress by the expanding of egoism to include, first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, and finally mankind. Society according to them is a convention of egoism, a compromise, a joint-stock company. Religion is a matter of ghosts and ancestor worship, not fully explained yet. Note that this whole view depends upon a dogma that man must be primarily selfish because he must eat. It is fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man absolutely selfish could not survive. Man absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly. The individuals would support each other.
But let us start square and remember that it is a question of science. Take the other hypothesis. The horse runs in herds and propagates his species because he is fond of the species. Incidentally he gets protected. It is through the illusion that he loves his fellows that his own welfare is secured. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom, self-protection the result.
It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen that Democracy is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They perish.
The regard that every custom receives from the individual who supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral law, the element is the same. It is reverence. It is respect. It is self-surrender.
But reverence may become intensified into fear. The imagination of the worshipper curls over like a wave. It looks back at him and frightens him, and when this happens we call it Superstition. The pain of it, like all pain, like the distress of insanity, comes wholly from the fact that it is a self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man in every stage of his culture is liable to this disease. Want of food or tyranny, bad water or bad government, brings on this trouble. Every country and every age shows forms of it: and very naturally, the savage who is subject by reason of hardships to many diseases, shows terrible forms of this disease of superstition. This is the chief fact that the scientists have seen in the savage. These savants, holding the egoism of man as their major thought, have through their ignorance of human nature been led to base their explanation of the religion of mankind upon a disease of the savage.
The opposite explanation stares them in the face. We all know in a general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of man. Give two men the New Testament—and each man sees himself in it, and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious; the altruistic emotion has not been expended in intercourse with his fellows, and it accumulates. This book then, by focussing the altruism in each individual of many generations of men, by being perpetually rediscovered, by existing as a constant force differentiating individuals and so undoing the tyranny of institution after institution founded upon itself, gradually got itself enacted into international law, into custom, into sentiment, and into municipal rule, and has been on the whole the controlling force in Western Europe during the last eighteen centuries. Its symbols express the constant factor in human nature. It is only in so far as a book does this that it is remembered at all.
Of course, when a custom arises it is turned on the instant into something that can be used by egoism, and here comes the pivot of the matter. Custom renders men similar to each other. The letter killeth. But the letter does much more than kill. It educates, it trains, it transmits. Hence the two contradictory functions of an institution which we found at work in England, the one to educate, the other to limit.
In studying the effect of institutions upon the individual, the whole hierarchy of nature must be reviewed at once. We have nothing to guide us in our study of the animals except our knowledge of man, but we have much to find in that study which will enlarge and illustrate that knowledge. Every naturalist and every sociologist should receive his preliminary training in the political arena, and every politician in the greenhouse and the menagerie.
Let us look at the social life of the ants.
The ant seems to show a stage of progress in which the individuals have grown alike through a slavish observance of certain institutions. It is certain that the ant is a ritualistic being, formal, narrow, intolerant, incapable of new ideas or private enterprise. He hates any one differing from himself, whether more or less virtuous. He would regard any suggested improvement in the arrangement of his house as a sacrilege. He works constantly for the public with a devotion that nothing but religious zeal can explain, and is in his own limited way completely happy. But the tyranny of public opinion, the subserviency to a State church goes far to make him contemptible.
This is the worst that an institution can do. The individual is crushed. The primeval reverence for custom seen in the ants has crystallized without getting developed and specialized into its higher form of reverence for the individual ant. He is a type of arrested development.
The natural history of religion is then to be sought in a reverence for custom that gradually specializes itself into a regard for the individual. If these things are true, the advancement of any civilization may be measured by the extent in which the rights of individuals are held sacred. And this is what we have always been taught.
Government was in its origin indistinguishable from religion, and down to the latest day of time, the fluctuating institutions of man will record this kinship between ritual and law.
The scientists, in trying to explain religion and progress as the result of an egoism gradually expanding itself to a regard for mankind, have been pulling at the wrong end of the cocoon. The thread unwound a bit and then broke; unwound again and again broke. They were puzzling themselves over a conception fundamentally unscientific and at war with their own first principles.
The genesis of the emotions proceeds like other developments from the simple towards the complex. The notion that the egoism of man gradually expanded so as to include the whole human race in a love which was in reality a love of himself, assumes that this large love is the sum of lesser loves. It fixes the attention on the objects of human feeling, and not upon the character of the feeling itself. This character is the thing to be studied. When we contrast the religious and social feelings of the civilized man with those of the savage we see the same specialization and complexity in the emotions themselves which is traceable in any higher development. The forms, arguments, theories, customs by which the feeling is expressed, show an ever-increasing refinement of sympathy. We are not approaching a general and vague emotion built up out of lesser regards for particular people. We are approaching a stage of differentiation, of analysis, a stage of the personal application of that same altruism which appears in its lower form as blind worship and self-abasement before some fetich. The utility of this emotion, in whatever stage of its development, is a consideration that may justify it to the philosopher, but which is not the primum mobile in the breast of him that has it. The whole history of man shows that progress comes in the shape of an increasing tender-heartedness which can give no lucid account of itself, because it is an organic process.
The learned classes are apt to approach a problem in its most difficult form. Out of travellers’ tales about man in the South Sea Islands, the sociologist evolves a theory of religion. Take up a book on the natural history of religion and you will find enough learned citations about the Hurons and the Esquimaux and the Thibet tribes to furnish the library of Pantagruel. Now the regard of a savage for his idol is a very obscure question of psychology. Ten years of youth spent among a tribe would not be too long a period in which to lay the foundations for an intelligent guess at the facts, let alone their significance.
Meanwhile, the actual genealogy of our own religious feelings is neglected as too familiar. Yet the spiritual history of that race which gave Europe many of its religions, is better known than any other history of a like antiquity. The point of view and feeling about life which has given us our own experience of religion was developed in the Jew. The Old Testament is the place in which to study the growth and meaning of the only religious feeling that we are sure we understand. The history of the Jews is the history of a single overpowering emotion which appears in its two forms,—so identical in content that you may often find them both in the same sentence, both in the same verse of Isaiah or Psalm of David,—prostration before the Lord of Hosts, compassion for the poor and the oppressed. This passion of altruism which gave the prophets their terrible power is the legacy of the Jew to the world. The emotion of self-abasement and self-sacrifice and the emotion of love towards others, are one thing. This, in its lower forms, leads to self-mutilation and incantations; in its higher forms, it becomes embodied by the prophetic fury of great poets into the idea of a Messiah who shall be both savior and sacrifice. There is only one passion at work in all these great protagonists of human nature, in Nathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and in the innumerable prophets who confronted the arbitrary power of the kings. These men stood for righteousness and showed an intensity of moral courage which nothing but compassion has ever engendered, and nothing but faith has ever expressed. The rags and the self surrender, the purity and the power, the belief that they spoke not of themselves but for the Lord, have been the same in all ages. It is impossible to feel compassion in this degree and not express it in this manner. All just anger is compassion. The terrible wrath of these men is as comprehensible as their hymns or their triumph. There is no child that reads Isaiah whose nature does not respond to him, because the course of feeling in him is true to life. Between the Old Testament and the New we see a perfectly coherent development of the same passion of the same race into its higher kind. Both forms of it have changed. In the New Testament the love has become specialized into that particular and especial regard for the soul of each individual man for which we have no counterpart; and the prostration, the adoration for God the Father, the identification of the individual with God the Father, has received expression in forms which one can refer to but not describe. The kingdom of heaven is within you.
That modern philanthropy which has been overcoming the world during the last century and has put a spirit of religion into politics, is expressed in ten thousand dogmas and formulas. These things are the hieroglyphics of the most complex period in history, but they all read Love.
The love of man for his fellows is the substantial content of every ideal, of every reform. In so far as any political cry is valuable, it represents this and nothing more. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, The Declaration of Independence, Utilitarianism, Fourierism, Socialism, Prohibition, Christian Science and the Salvation Army carry the same message; and it is only because of this truth, and in spite of the fact that it is always wrapped up in every kind of falsehood, that they move the world forward. Take socialism. This thing is the logical outcome of the passion of pity at work in men who believe that the desire for property is the controlling factor in human arrangements. The selfishness of the individual has been assumed as a fundamental law in that school of thought, which has been dominating all our thought, and which we habitually accept as final. It receives support from a superficial view of human nature, and time out of mind has been the belief of shallow people. But the great intellect and the great labor of the socialists have been unable to make any impression upon the mind of a man. We know that their reasoning is foolish. It is to the heart that their appeal is made. Bellamy’s book sells by the hundred thousand to tender-hearted people. It is a plea for humanity. It is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The function of Socialism is clear. It is a religious reaction going on in an age which thinks in terms of money. We are very nearly at the end of it, because we are very nearly at the end of the age. Some people believe they hate the wealth of the millionaire. They denounce corporations and trusts, as if these things had hurt them. They strike at the symbol. What they really hate is the irresponsible rapacity which these things typify, and which nothing but moral forces will correct. In so far as people seek the cure in property-laws they are victims of the plague. The cure will come entirely from the other side; for as soon as the millionaires begin to exert and enjoy the enormous power for good which they possess, everybody will be glad they have the money.
Socialism was useful, but as a theory it was fated from the beginning, because its prophets and saints are themselves spurred on by a different motive from that which they evoke in others. They offer us a religion that assumes that human nature is other than it is, a religion not based upon self-sacrifice, and so not based upon an appeal to primary passion, a religion beseeching us to make other people comfortable. Now the only motive which will make men labor for the comfort of others, is a belief that this is the quickest way of saving their souls. If souls are to be saved only through their own unselfish activity, then it is a lie to hold up property as a goal. The laboring man can be made happy only by the same means as the merchant. They must be saved together. The matter of the physical support of the individual follows in the wake of a regard for his soul, but never precedes it. The awakening of the spirit of individualism will bring support to the artisan by bringing in hand work. The machine work with which we have been content represents a loss of religion in the buyer proportionate to the selfishness of the times. No system based on thrift will displace it, but any movement based on self-sacrifice will tend to correct it. While socialism is worrying out the proof that a wise distribution of property will bring in virtue and happiness, other and directer formulations of the truth will have seized the spirits of men and saved the people.
The balance of altruism in the people of a country, preserved in the form of practical self-control (no matter under what name), gives the wealth and power of the country.
Good government then consists in customs which differentiate people. They represent a permission to each man to be different from his neighbor. They are the record of what once was love, and now is law.
Bad government consists in institutions which render men similar through some self-interest, some superstition.
Let us take a few examples at random from history, and see whether everything of permanent value to the race is not merely a different form of expression for the same ideal.
Napoleon is a type of selfishness. The focus of his almost illimitable intelligence fell within himself. He was so self-centred that he did not precipitate all the passion which supported him upon an idea. He did much, but he could not transcend the laws of psychology or escape the insecurity they dealt him out. He was a great reactionary, living in an age of progress, a great egoist in an age of altruism, a great criminal. The whole of Europe had hardly strength enough to shut him up. He went down finally, and yet before he went down, he had stood for civilization in every country he touched by establishing law. He gave France his code and his bureaux, things greater than his dynasty. He made use of the enlightenment, the expert intellect of France to establish order, and became a great educator through his institutions, his genius for administration. His worshippers are so struck with this side of his character that they forgive him his crimes. For our admiration is chained to the educator. Every great man is a great educator, and there is no greatness but this. The great man represents, draws out, projects, and establishes the non-self-regarding part, the intellectual apparatus of others, and those who do it by the establishment of law and order receive their tribute as civilizers. The saints serve the same end. They speak a language different from that of the law-givers, yet their function is the same. The part a man plays in the formal government of his times depends on circumstance. It seems to be governed by the ratio of his altruism to that of his contemporaries. People will not tolerate a man who is too good or too bad. Had Napoleon lived in an age of retrogression, very likely he would have died upon the throne. Had he been less self-seeking than he was, had he possessed for instance the imagination of Washington, very likely the French would have deposed him sooner, but in the end the memory of him would have educated France.
For this is the work of heroes. Where a leader has ideas that are more unselfish than those of his time, he is deposed, poisoned, or ridiculed, and his value as an educational force may be increased by any of these things. Socrates deliberately kept out of politics for many years, knowing that if he took part, his sense of justice would lead to his execution, and fearing to throw away his life; he finally expended it with such ability as to make every atom count. The scholars have not understood his Apology because they could not fathom the instinct of the agitator. It is the same with the martyrs, with the Quakers in Puritan New England, with the Anti-Slavery people. Their conduct was governed by the truest understanding of how to draw out and develop the conscience of others. The man who dies for his country does no more.
Another gigantic educator was Bismarck. To have welded the squabbling principalities of Germany into an Empire within a lifetime is one of the achievements of history. But Bismarck held the trump card. He had a cause to serve. His early work must have been his strongest; for since the war with France, patriotism has become the curse of Germany. It is caked into fanaticism, and is being used by autocracy to ruin intellect. This is the mystical yet relentless punishment for the element which was not patriotism but thrift in their conduct. The Germans must be great and unified and recover Alsace for their honor. But what did they want with the French milliards? They mulcted France to spare their pockets, and fastened upon themselves the personal hatred of the French peasant, which gives them William II. for a ruler. They looked upon property as power. Had they seen clearly that power is nothing but sentiment, they would have sown peace.
One reason why Holland lost her supremacy was because she came to regard money as power. She grasped the symbol. For a decline sets in as soon as selfishness has reached such a point that any of these symbols are worshipped. Witness Spain, where the gold of Peru ruined the Spaniards by making them individually selfish.
In the long run virtue and vice contend over national wealth, the first collecting, the second dissipating. Witness Cuba. Witness Ireland. China is wrecked by private greed. In the last analysis it is a matter of personal virtue.
The magnificent intellect and self-control epitomized in Roman Government, took centuries to perish. Is it a wonder these people conquered the world?
The United States has been held together by English virtue, and there was so much of it in the race, that a few generations of money-changers could not ruin us. We had, not only the creed, but the beliefs of English liberty. The future of England depends upon her perception of this truth that power is sentiment. The Venezuela trouble showed her that her selfish conduct in 1861 made her empire in 1896 insecure. The spread of England’s empire has been due to a practice in dealing with the imagination of others. Establish by force, develop by the organized altruism of good government, protect by display of force.
This system will not apply here. We are the youngest nation and the most naif. We are at the mercy of wise or unwise treatment. But we can no more be fooled than a child. No display of force could touch our imagination or do more than irritate us. Our feelings must be directly engaged by means not known to diplomacy or to international166 law. Let England take a high tone. She must not only seem but be unselfish towards us, and she will master the globe.
There is one result from the fact that government is a matter of imagination which is wholly satisfactory. Once set up a scheme of things which people approve of and it remains. We shall not have good government in the United States till the people get over their personal dishonesty; but when we do get it, it will last without effort. It will be harder to destroy than the spoils system. Vigilance will be needed constantly, but action rarely. The mere announcement of an abuse will correct it.