National self-government, its growth and principles, the culmination of modern history

Front matter

Class XXSXt Book J4£l_

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Preface

The purpose of this book is twofold. In the first place, I have tried to provide a brief historical survey of the development of parliamentary institutions in the modern world, such as will put the ordinary citizen in possession of the facts which he requires if he is to form a sound judgment upon the working of the system in our own and other countries. In the second place, I have tried to use this historical survey as a means of elucidating the problems of self-government, the difficulties which it has to face, the conditions which are necessary for its success, and the ways in which it is affected by the characters and traditions of the various nations which have adopted it.

The book makes no pretence to be a scientific historical treatise on its subject. It is not systematic or exhaustive ; it includes few facts which are not, or ought not to be, pretty generally known ; it leaves almost untouched the development of the institutions of half the countries of Europe, and of all the new lands of the non-European world, excepting the United States ; not because these countries do not present features of great interest, but because I had to keep my book within reasonable compass, and the main points which I wished to elucidate seemed to be adequately illustrated in the countries I have selected for fuller treatment. On the

Til viii NATIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT

other hand, the book is not a text-book, or condensed compendium of established facts. I fear it contains more disquisition than narrative, more argument than fact. It is, in short, a political essay rather than a formal history ; an attempt at what may be called 'historical politics,' a blend of narrative and analysis.

Although I am very conscious of the defects of what I have written, I believe there is room, and need, for books of this type ; books which will aim at elucidating political problems in the light of their history, and especially of their recent history ; books designed for the use of the ordinary intelligent citizen who is neither an expert historian nor a professed political philosopher. It seems to me a strange thing that (so far as I am aware) there should be in English no book which tries to cover the ground I have attempted to survey. There are excellent analyses of the formal constitutional systems of the various modern States. There are admirable treatises on the working of the government of this country or that. There are useful summaries of modern political history which include the main facts about constitutional changes. But there does not, I think, exist any book which attempts in a clear and broad way to show how it has come about that the institutions of self-government have been adopted within a very short space of time in every land of Western civilisation, how historical circumstances have modified the forms which they have assumed, how these forms compare with one another in actual working, and how their development elucidates the problem of self-government, and the dangers against which it has to guard. I am not so foolish as

PREFACE ix

to imagine that I can, in so short a compass, have dealt satisfactorily with a theme so complex ; the most I can hope is that I may help some of my fellow-citizens to understand more clearly the political developments of the recent past, and therefore to approach with fuller understanding the political problems of the immediate future.

This book is in some sense a sequel or companion to two other books, Nationalism and Internationalism and The Expansion of Europe, in which I have attempted to apply the same method to other great political problems. The three volumes were originally intended to be printed together under the general title of The Culmination of Modern History, though this book and The Expansion of Europe have both been considerably expanded from their original form. All three took their rise from a lecture given a couple of years since, in which I tried to show to a popular audience how all the greatest political developments of the modern world were being brought simultaneously to a great test in the world-war. These main developments seem to me to be, first, the growth of the idea of nationality, which is the foundation of all the rest ; second, the growth of the idea of international co-operation and international law, which is the fulfilment, not the antithesis, of the first ; third, the growth of the theory and practice of self-government through representative institutions, which is only possible in States unified by the sense of nationality ; and, fourth, the expansion of the political influence of Europe, and of the political ideas to which Europe has given birth, over the non-European world. The relation between these

b

THE ORDEAL OF SELF-GOVERNMENT

When the future historian surveys the political state of the world as it was on the eve of the cataclysm of the Great War, he will record, as one of its most significant facts, that parliamentary institutions had become almost universal, either as the controlling factor, or at least as an important element, in the government of civilised states. With the institution of the Russian Duma in 1905 and of the Turkish Parliament in 1909, the only surviving non-parliamentary states of Europe had fallen into line with the rest during the decade immediately preceding the war ; outside of Europe not only all the American republics, and all the self-governing British colonies, but also the Japanese Empire, had adopted this characteristically Western mode of government, while even China and Persia had made experiments in the same direction. In every state except Britain and the communities which have sprung from her loins, these representative systems had been the product of the last hundred years, and in most cases of the last fifty or sixty years, immediately preceding the war ; and even in Britain it was only during the last half -century that the bulk of the people had obtained the franchise. Our historian will note that in every

A case these systems had been modelled, directly or indirectly, on the British system. And he will observe, perhaps with some surprise, that the only highly developed communities in the world in which this prevailing fashion had not been fully followed were those of India and Egypt, although both of these countries were under the control of the Mother of Parliaments herself ; and that the popular discontents which found expression in both of these countries largely turned upon the demand that they also should be endowed with the system of government now accepted as one of the marks of a civilised state. Both the universality of this movement towards the adoption of self-governing institutions, and the still surviving exceptions to it, will seem to our historian, we may be sure, to be highly significant. His conclusion will and must be that the necessity of an effective public control over, or co-operation in, the business of government had become with quite extraordinary rapidity an accepted principle of Western civilisation.

So much of the future historian's judgments we may securely anticipate, because we have thus far attributed to him only a statement of undeniable facts. And there is a further judgment which we may perhaps as confidently expect him to make. He will record that the Great War was the first really severe test to which the modern system of representative government had been exposed in most of the states affected by it, and that the ideal of self-government, equally with the ideals of nationalism and internationalism, was on its trial in this gigantic conflict. What we cannot yet venture to anticipate is his verdict on the results of the great ordeal. Will he have to say that the system of government by

THE ORDEAL OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 3

public discussion and under public control broke down under the ordeal and proved its inefficiency, at any rate for the purposes of war ; that the states which emerged with most success were those in which popular control had been only formal, a mere mask covering the operations of an efficient centralised power ; and that as a result of the war even the nations in which self-governing institutions seemed most deeply rooted had been driven in self-defence to change their systems ? Or will he record that on the whole the struggle proved a triumph for the system of popular government, and firmly and finally established it as the governing principle of all civilised states ? Or will his verdict perhaps be a mixed one ? Perhaps he will conclude that in some cases the modern system proved its strength and efficacy, and in others not : that it answered every call better than could have been foretold in those communities which were, by reason of the training and habits of their citizens, capable of using freedom nobly, and of imposing willingly upon themselves a discipline almost as effective as that elsewhere imposed by authority ; that in other communities it broke down and led to disastrous results because the mass of citizens were not awake to their responsibilities, having been endowed with political power before they were ready for it ; and that in yet other cases the tragedies and agonies of the war were to be attributed, not to the deficiencies of popular government, but to the fact that popular government had been unreal, and that the members of these communities had not been allowed to exercise such a share in common affairs as their training and capacities would have justified.

Although it is impossible as yet to anticipate the final verdict of history upon these momentous questions, since the great ordeal will not end with the war, and the problems of reorganisation during the generation following the war will afford a yet more acute and searching test, it is equally impossible and dangerous to avoid thinking about them. And the only profitable way of thinking about them is to co-ordinate and analyse, so far as we can, the experience we have had of the working of the institutions of self-government. That experience has been as yet, for the greater part of the world, very brief indeed, and the conditions have been changing with such amazing rapidity while we have acquired it that no one is justified in proclaiming very sweeping or dogmatic conclusions. But at least it has been sufficiently varied in its range, and in the case of the British communities sufficiently lengthy, to entitle us to form reasoned opinions.

The ordeal of a great war is a far more searching test for the institutions of self-government than it is for those of open or veiled autocracy, just because the institutions of self-government, by their very nature, are manifestly designed primarily for a normal state of peace. The conduct of affairs by persuasion and agreement is obviously inconsistent with a state of war, in which force takes the place of persuasion, and compulsion of agreement. Self-government involves continual compromise, and compromise must always imply a certain sacrifice of efficiency. That is the inevitable price which must be paid for liberty, even in times of peace. It is a price worth paying if it secures the real participation of the whole community in responsibility for the common welfare ; but it inevitably forms a handicap in war. And if a self-governing state acquits

THE ORDEAL OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 5

itself, in such an ordeal as that through which we are passing, with anything like the resolution, self-discipline and fixity of purpose, which are so much more easily attained in a state organised on an autocratic basis, the demonstration which will thus be given of the value of self-government will obviously be all the more cogent.

A state which has organised itself primarily for war, and which has willingly submitted itself to the rigid discipline of a military autocracy mainly in the hope of victory, must, if it is to justify these sacrifices, achieve nothing less than complete triumph. A nation which has organised itself primarily for peace, and which has with its eyes open accepted the risks and the inefficiencies of a system of government by discussion for the sake of the moral values to be derived from it, will justify itself if it only succeeds in defending its existence ; nay, it will not be finally condemned even by defeat. For although the doctrine of power becomes meaningless and futile in the hour of defeat, and no man can believe that Might is Right except when Might is on the side of the causes which he holds dear, the doctrine of liberty becomes only more sacred in disaster, and more capable of appealing to the heroic in men.

Popular participation in government is in natural accord with the essential Western ideas of Liberty, and of Rational Law reflecting the public conscience * ; and for that reason it is only in Western communities that any advance towards it has ever been made. But this is not to say that Liberty and Rational Law can only exist, or will even under all conditions thrive best,

1 See the first essay in Nationalism and Internationalism, which discusses these ideas, and was designed as an introduction to the whole series of essays of which the present volume is a part.

under its shelter. To make such a claim would be to deny the value of all that has been achieved for civilisation in most of the great states of the world. The most nearly perfect systems of Rational Law that have ever been created were due to the Roman Empire and to the autocracy of Napoleon ; and it is certain that the British rule has given to India a far more just and unvarying system of law than could ever have been devised by a body representing a majority among the many conflicting races, castes, and religions of India, even if such a body could ever have been formed. Again, liberty of conscience, liberty of thought, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, liberty of action may exist in the highest practicable degree under a non-popular government, as they do to-day in India ; on the other hand, they may be, and sometimes have been, denied by representative governments, as in modern Hungary.

Nevertheless it is the natural tendency of all peoples among whom the seminal ideas of Western civilisation have taken root to strive towards self-government, and accordingly the history of Europe is full of experiments in that direction. But most of them, interesting as they are in themselves, have little or no bearing upon the problems of government of the great modern states. The little city-republics of ancient Greece and of mediaeval Italy, Germany and Flanders were on so small a scale that they afford practically no guidance for the government of the nation-state. The most essential feature of their system was the direct participation of all citizens in the main functions of government, and this was only possible when they could all assemble in a single market-place, and all have some acquaintance at least with the leading members of the

THE ORDEAL OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 7

community. So Aristotle held that no state could be healthy which had more than ten thousand citizens ; and Rousseau, with the model of Geneva in his mind, could maintain that democracy was impossible in a large state, and that the system of representation was a denial of its very essence. Monarchy was in his view the only efficient method of government for a very large state, and he would probably have approved for nation-states the system of the first and third Napoleons — the system of government by an autocrat, supported by frequent plebiscites by universal suffrage.

But there is one respect in which the experience of the small city-states, where every citizen directly and constantly shared in the work of government, concurs with the experience of the great modern states wherein any such participation is impossible. Both alike point to certain essential conditions without which government by discussion and agreement must be impossible or disastrous in its results. These conditions are two.

In the first place, the mass of active citizens who take a share in the direction of affairs must be in some degree educated, not merely in the formal sense, though that is important, but still more in the sense of having been trained in the practice of co-operation in common affairs. No community can become self-governing whose members are not capable of appreciating the complexity of political issues, or have not learnt by practical experience the need for compromise, for give-and-take, for the loyal acceptance of results arrived at after discussion, and for the willing subordination of self ; and these things can only be acquired by training. Where these qualities are lacking, the institution of the forms of self-government must lead either to anarchy, or to the enthronement of unscrupulous intriguers who play upon the ignorance of the voters and their lack of political intelligence. It was only in the most highly educated society of the ancient world, Athens, that even city-democracy ever became a reality ; and even there it was insecure, disturbed, and short-lived. The creation of this political aptitude among a people is not to be easily or rapidly brought about. It takes time. The best system of school-instruction is by itself quite insufficient to produce it. Only the formed habit of co-operation and discussion in minor matters can bring it fully into being, and the number of societies whose conditions of life have made it easy for its citizens to acquire this habit has been small.

The second condition of the successful working of self-government is that there must exist a real unity of sentiment in the community which attempts it. When a community is divided by deep and irreconcilable antipathies, by the unconquerable distrust and dislike of one element in it for another, discussion becomes futile and agreement impossible, and the attempt at self-government leads only to anarchy. Even in the city-state this condition often existed, and Aristotle recognises it as fatal to civic health in his discourses on what he calls Gravis — meaning by that phrase neither more nor less than fundamental disunity of sentiment among the citizens. Yet in the city-state unity of sentiment was comparatively easy to create, for the citizens dwelt together within the same ring-wall, discussed public affairs together in the market-place, knew their leaders by sight and voice, saw their common needs and their common dangers at close quarters. In the great modern state unity of sentiment is indeed a hard thing to create.

THE ORDEAL OF SELF-GOVERNMENT S

It has, in fact, been created only by one force — by what we call the national spirit ; and this is the supreme significance of the growth of the national spirit in Europe, that it alone has made self-government on the national scale possible. The only communities in Europe or in the world in which self-government has been successfully applied are those in which the national spirit is dominant. Where it is once firmly rooted, the national spirit can not merely survive, but can even turn to good ends, differences of party, creed and class. For these differences produce a deepened sincerity and a greater pith and force in discussion, so long as those who hold them are thinking primarily of the welfare of the nation as a whole, and so long as the mass of men can continue to believe that their opponents (however mistaken) are genuinely desirous of national advantage as they conceive it, and not merely of sectional advantage. But where the national spirit does not exist — where the state consists of acutely hostile national groups, each permanently suspicious of the others, and some of them aiming merely at the establishment of their racial ascendancy — self-government in any real sense cannot exist ; and if its institutions are established, their effect will either be nullified by the clash of conflicting and irreconcilable factions (as in Austria), or they will afford to the better organised master-race the means of imposing its ruthless dominion upon its recalcitrant subjects, as in Hungary. The unifying force of the national spirit is indeed the only factor which has yet been discovered that can make self-government as real a thing in the large state as it was in the little city-state. It was because England was the first of the European nations to become conscious of her nationhood that she was also the first to work out a practicable system of national self-government. It was also because the English people had obtained some training in the practice of self-government on the petty scale of the village, the town and the county, and later of the trading company, the trade union and the co-operative society, that they were able to show the continuous political aptitude which alone enabled their system of national self-government to establish itself and to enlarge its range.

It is with the development of representative self-government on the national scale that we are concerned in this essay ; and if we are to understand the conditions of its well-being it is necessary to survey in outline the processes by which it has been brought into being, how it has worked under various conditions, and how the states in which it has been made effective compare with those in which it has been little more than a form.

II The Medieval Estates And The Repre- Sentative Parliament

The rudiments of a representative system arose, in

most of the countries of western Europe, out of the

conditions of feudalism ; and its source is to be found

in the courts of feudal princes, which their chief tenants

were bound to attend, and in which these tenants found

a means of ensuring that the conditions of the feudal

contract were not interpreted to their disadvantage. As

it was impossible for the whole body of minor feudal

lords to attend, the custom grew up during the twelfth

century (perhaps it was borrowed from the Church) of

allowing them to act through representatives. In this

system the lower grades of the feudal hierarchy — the

small freeholders and the semi-servile peasantry — had,

of course, no part. But the two elements in a mediaeval

state which were in some degree independent of the

feudal hierarchy, the great corporations of the Church,

and the semi-autonomous merchants of the towns, could

be, and in nearly all Western countries presently were,

worked into the scheme. Thus arose the Three Estates

of the Nobles or feudal tenants, the Church, and the

Towns ; in some cases the lesser nobles, acting through

their representatives, formed an additional estate. These

Estates claimed the right to be consulted on any change

in the customs by which the rights and duties of their

castes were defined, and on any modification in the

n customary dues which they were called upon to pay. Hence legislation and taxation came to be regarded as falling to a varying and undefined extent within the province of the Estates in nearly all the countries of western Europe, and out of this system, under favourable conditions, a parliamentary system could grow up.

In actual fact, however, the Estates did not develop into a true national parliament in any country except England, and this for several reasons.

In most cases the Estates were purely provincial organisations, very jealous of their provincial ' rights ' and ' liberties,' and they therefore became actual obstacles in the way of national unity, which was represented, in most countries, solely by the person and authority of the king and his officials. This was the case, for example, in Spain, where the Cortes or Estates of Castile and (still more) of Aragon had acquired during the mediaeval period a remarkable degree of power. When Spain became a united kingdom, the overthrow of the provincial estates formed part of the process of unification, and their purely provincial patriotism provided excuses for the high-handed autocracy of Charles v. and Philip n. In the Netherlands Charles v. tried to give some unity to the disconnected provinces which he had inherited by setting up a States-general for them all, but the existence of this body was at first resented by the local patriotism of the provinces. In France the Crown tried the same device during the fourteenth century ; but the States -general (as this common assembly was called) showed themselves so grasping of power and so unpatriotic during the wars with England that the kings summoned them as little as possible, and were probably supported by popular opinion in doing so. It was the

MEDIEVAL ESTATES AND PARLIAMENT 13

easier for the king to adopt this policy, because the provincial estates still survived in many of the provinces : they survived, indeed, in the provinces known as the fays d'etat down to the French Revolution. How great an obstacle these provincial estates formed to the growth of a strong state was perhaps most clearly illustrated in the case of Prussia : one of the main tasks of the Great Elector, the real founder of the greatness of the Hohenzollern monarchy, was the destruction of the privileges claimed by the provincial estates in the various scattered districts of his realm. In many countries, as, for example, in Austria, these provincial estates survived into the eighteenth or even into the nineteenth century. But they had become meaningless forms, reduced to impotence by the growth of royal autocracy. Only in England were there no provincial estates ; only in England were these assemblies from the first national and not provincial in scope, and even in England there was at some moments a danger that they might be provincialised, as when Edward i. summoned separate meetings for the north and for the south. More important, only in England did the Estates develop into a real parliament, by becoming representative not merely of sharply defined castes or privileged classes {i.e. of estates in the strict sense), but of the whole community.

For the second great defect of the Estates was that their members were definitely the representatives of legally organised and unalterable castes. In all countries save England the class of nobles or feudal landholders was sharply cut off from other classes, and was a strictly defined hereditary caste, all of whose descendants possessed the privileges of nobility, which could be acquired by no one else except by special grant from the Crown.

In England the lesser nobles, or minores iarones, were from an early date merged in the class of knights, most of whom were not ' barons ' or immediate tenants of the Crown ; and the class of knights in its turn was identified with the mass of ordinary landholders by the provision by which everybody possessing a certain amount of land, on whatever tenure, was required to assume the obligations of knighthood. Above all, the knights (whether minor barons or not) found their chief sphere of activity in that characteristic English institution, the shire court, to which there is no real parallel in any other country ; and in the work of the shire court they mingled on more or less equal terms with the whole body of freemen who were entitled to attend it. So when the English national estates were first summoned, in the thirteenth century, it was not the minor barons who were asked to send representatives, but the shire courts, in which all landholders, however humble, might be present ; and the knights of the shire were from the first not representatives of a defined grade in the feudal hierarchy, but representatives of the ' community ' of the shire.

Nor were the boroughs sharply defined groups of privileged merchants, as in other countries. The boroughs also shared in the work of the shire court, to which they sent representatives. Most of them were very modest rural market towns, to whose trading rights the neighbouring landholders were very commonly freely admitted. Their principal interest, the wool trade, was one in which the landholding class was equally concerned. And so it came about that there was no sharp distinction between the communities of the shires and the communities of the boroughs ; men of the knightly class could naturally be elected as representatives for

MEDIEVAL ESTATES AND PARLIAMENT 15

the boroughs ; and both groups could take their places side by side in a single House of Communes or Communities. Hence in place of two estates, an estate of minor barons and an estate of privileged merchants, each forming a sharply defined class, England developed a single parliamentary assembly, the members of which were not elected solely by members of their own class, but by the whole ' communities ' of the shire and the borough.

Even in the other estates the same melting down of the lines of division between castes is to be seen. The clerical estate as a whole early ceased to take any part in the national parliament, preferring to maintain its own separate convocation, which dealt only with ecclesiastical affairs ; and although the great churchmen sat in the House of Lords, they sat not solely as churchmen, but largely as landholders. Finally, not even the greatest barons, who enjoyed hereditary seats in the House of Lords, formed a sharply defined caste as in other countries. In France, or Germany, or Italy all the sons of a Count were Counts, all the sons of a Baron Barons. In England the sons of the greatest nobles — even their eldest sons — were regarded by the law as commoners ; the rights of peerage, though hereditary, were purely personal ; younger sons and their descendants ranked with the knightly class, or might even drift into trade. Thus the caste system which grew out of feudalism in other countries never became really established in England ; and this made it possible for the Estates to develop rapidly into a genuine national parliament. The existence of a rigid and firmly established system of castes or classes in a country is, indeed, essentially incompatible with the effective working of popular representative government. It is possible that the caste system of social organisation may be the best for a given people, as Treitschke argued that it was the best for Germany ; but if that is so, and if the people habitually act as if it were so, the possibility of real popular government becomes very slight, for the accepted dominant castes will continue to control all power even if the forms of popular government are established.