Let us consider now the type of nation which from our present point of view is the most interesting, the type which approximates most nearly to a solution of the problem of civilisation, to the reconciliation of individuality with collectivity, to the synthesis of individualist and collectivist ideals; that in which the rights and wills of individuals are not forcibly subordinated to those of the State by the power of a governing class, and in which the deliberative side of the national mind is well developed and effective.
Such are in a certain degree the French, but still more the British and the American nations. In the two latter countries the rights of the individual are made supreme over all other considerations, the welfare of the whole is only to be advanced by measures which do not override individual wills and rights; or, at least, the only power which is admitted to have the right in any degree to override individual wills is the will of the majority. In such a nation the greatest efforts are concentrated on the perfection of the deliberative organisation, by means of which the general mind may arrive at collective judgment and choice of means and may express its will. A vast amount of time and energy is devoted to this deliberative work; while the executive organisation, by which its decisions have to be carried into effect, is apt to be comparatively neglected and hence imperfect.
These two complementary features of such states we see well exemplified here and in America[99]; where the amount of time, money, and effort spent upon the deliberative processes and the elaboration of the organisation through which they are effected is enormously greater than in other nations. And, in spite of the energy expended on deliberative processes and on the elaboration of their organisation, the interests of the nation as a whole are not at present forwarded in a manner at all comparable with those of such a State as Germany. Nevertheless, such national actions as we do achieve are far more truly the expression of the national will; and, if the national mind is to be developed to a high level, this vast expenditure of energy, which to some impatient spirits seems wasteful and useless, must go on.
As was said in a former chapter, such collective deliberation of modern nations is only rendered possible by the great facilities of communication we enjoy; telegraph, post, and railway, and especially the press. The ancients saw truly enough that, with their limited means of communication, the higher form of state-organisation must be restricted to a small population of some thousands only—the City-State.
It is important to note that not only do modern facilities of communication render possible a truly collective mental life for the large Nation-States of the present age; but that these modern conditions actually carry with them certain great advantages, which tend to raise the collective mental life of modern nations to a higher level than was possible for the ancient City-State, even though its members were of high average capacity and many of them of very great mental power, as in Athens.
The assembly of citizens in one place for national deliberation rendered them much more susceptible to those less desirable peculiarities of collective mental life which characterise simple crowds; particularly, the excess of emotional excitement, increased suggestibility, and, hence, the ease with which the whole mass could be swayed unduly by the skilful orator. In the modern nation, on the other hand, the transmission of news by the press secures a certain delay, and a lack of synchronism, in its reception by different groups and individuals; and it secures also a certain delay in the action and reaction of mind on mind, which gives opportunity for individual deliberation. Also the sympathetic action of the mass mind on the individual mind is in large part indirect, rather than direct, representative rather than perceptual, and therefore less overwhelming in its effects. These conditions greatly temper the violence of the emotional reactions and permit of a diversity of feeling and opinion; an opposed minority has time to form itself and to express an opinion, and so may temper the hasty and emotional reaction of the majority in a way that is impossible in a general assembly.
A further advantage of the large size of nations may arise from the fact that actual decision as to choice of means for effecting national action has to be achieved by means of representatives who come together in one place. Representative government is not merely an inferior substitute for government by general assembly; it is superior in many respects. If each representative were a mere delegate, an average specimen of the group he represents, chosen by lot and merely charged to express their will, this feature would modify the crude collective mental processes in one important respect only; namely, it would counteract to some extent that weakening of individual responsibility which is characteristic of collective mental action. But, in addition to this, internal organisation, in the form of tradition and custom, comes in to modify very greatly the collective process.
We see such modifying influence very clearly in the election of the English House of Commons and in the methods of its operations. Owing partly to a natural tendency, partly to a fortunate tradition, the people do not elect just any one of themselves to serve as a delegate or average sample of the mass; but as a rule they choose, or try to choose, some man who displays special capacity and special qualifications for taking part in the national deliberations. In so far as they are successful in this, their representatives are able men and men to whose minds the social consciousness, the consciousness of the whole people, of its needs and tendencies and aspirations, is more fully and clearly present than to the average mind. They are also in the main men of more than average public spirit. Hence it is not unknown that a purely working class constituency, being offered liberal, conservative, and labour candidates, instead of choosing the labour man, one of themselves, gives him only a small fraction of the total votes. Then, within the body of representatives, this process, by which greater influence is given to the abler men, to those whose minds reflect most fully the whole people, is carried further still. A small group of these men exerts a predominant influence in all deliberations; and not only are they in the main the best qualified (for they only attain their leading positions by success in an intense and long continued competition) but they are put in a position in which they can hardly fail to feel a great responsibility resting upon them; and in which they feel the full force of political traditions. The deliberative organisation of the American nation illustrates, when compared with our own, the importance of these traditions; for its lesser efficiency is largely due to the absence of such traditions, and to the fact that their system banishes from the House of Representatives its natural leaders and those on whom responsibility falls most heavily.
Lastly, the existence of two traditionally opposed parties ensures that every important step shall be fully discussed. The traditional division into two parties, which from one point of view seems so irrational, nevertheless exerts very important and valuable influences, of which the chief is that it prevents the assembly of legislators becoming a mere psychological crowd easily swayed to a decision by collective emotion and skilful suggestion; for each suggestion coming from the one party acts by contra-suggestion upon the other and provokes an opposition that necessitates discussion[100].
In these two ways, then;—first, through the culmination of national deliberation among a selected group of representatives, among whom again custom and tradition accord precedence and prestige to the natural leaders, the most able and those in whose consciousness the nation, in the past, present and future is most adequately reflected; secondly, by means of the party system, which ensures vigorous criticism and full discussion of all proposals, under a system of traditional conventions evolved for the regulation of such discussions;—in these two ways the principal vices of collective deliberation are corrected, and the formal deliberations and decisions of the nation are raised to a higher plane than the collective deliberations of any assembly of men lacking such traditional organisation could possibly attain. The part played by unwritten tradition in the working of the British constitution is of course immense, as for example, the existence and enormous prestige of the cabinet, and the tradition that a party coming into power must respect the legislation of the party previously in power. Without this last, representative government, or at any rate the party system, would be impossible. The smooth working of the system depends entirely upon the influence of these and similar traditions which exist only in the minds of men. Or, take as another example, the tradition of absolute impartiality on the part of the Speaker and of loyal acceptance of his rulings by every member of the House; or the tradition which distinguishes sharply between political and private relations, in virtue of which the parties to a most bitter political strife may and very generally do remain in perfectly friendly private relations.
These and other such traditions, which secure the efficient working of the organisation for national deliberation, all rest in turn upon a traditional and tacit assumption—namely, the assumption that both parties are working for the good of the nation as they conceive and understand it, that both parties have this common end and differ only in their judgment as to the means by which it can best be achieved. They rest also on the traditional and tacit admission that one’s own judgment, and that of one’s party, may be mistaken, and that in the long run the legislation which any party can effect is an expression of the organised national mind and is therefore to be respected. It is this acquiescence in accomplished legislation in virtue of this tacit assumption which gives to the decisions of Parliament the status, not merely of the expression of the will of a bare majority, but of the expression of the will of practically the whole nation. Underlying the stability of the whole system, again, is the tradition, sedulously fostered and observed by the best and leading minds, that the _raison d’être_ and purpose of the representative parliament is to organise, and to give the most complete possible expression to, the national mind and will; and that no constitutional change or change of procedure is justifiable unless it tends to the more complete realisation of these objects.
In virtue of these traditions our Parliament and Press constitute undoubtedly the best means for effecting organisation of the national mind in its deliberative aspect that has yet been evolved; and we should remember this when we feel inclined to gird at the ‘great talking shop,’ at the slowness of its procedure and at the logical absurdities of the two-party system; and, above all, we should realize how valuable and worthy of conservation are these scarcely formulated traditions, for they are absolutely essential to its efficiency. It is just because the efficiency of the deliberative organisation of a nation depends upon the force of such traditions, that, though it is possible to take the system of parliamentary representation and establish it by decree or plebiscite in a nation which has hitherto had no such deliberative organisation, it is not possible to make it work smoothly and efficiently amongst such a people. Hence, although almost every civilised nation has done its best to imitate the British system of parliamentary government, hardly any one has made a success of it; and, in nearly all, it is in constant danger of being superseded by some more primitive form of government—one need only mention Mexico, Portugal, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary. In all these countries, and even in America, there seems to be already a not very remote possibility of the supersession of parliamentary government by a dictatorship—a process which has actually occurred in many of the municipal governments of America, and the fear of which has constantly checked the smooth working of the parliamentary system in France.
As a single illustration of the way in which the conditions we have been considering affect the collective acts of the nation, consider what happened at the time of the Russian outrage in the North Sea during the Russo-Japanese war. When a Russian fleet fired upon our fishing boats doing considerable damage to them, the means of communication were sufficiently developed among us to allow of the action and reaction of all on each which produces the characteristic results of collective mental action, the exaltation of emotion, the suggestibility, the sense of irresponsible power; and, in the absence of the deliberative organisation which, by concentrating influence and responsibility in the hands of a few of the best men, controlled and modified this collective action, we should have rushed upon the Russian fleet and probably have brought on a general European war. The control and counteraction of this kind of outburst of collective emotion and impulsive action is one of the heaviest responsibilities of those to whom predominant influence is accorded.
It is only in virtue of the strong organisation of the national mind resting upon these long traditions of parliamentary government, that at such a time control of the popular emotion and impulse is possible. And the weaker and less efficient is such traditional organisation, the more does any such incident tend to provoke a collective manifestation which approximates in its uncontrollable violence and unconsidered impulsiveness to the behaviour of an unorganised crowd. Hence governments, where the democratic principle is acknowledged but the traditional organisation is less strong, are constantly in danger of having their hands forced by some outburst of popular passion—as in France.
It is worth noting that, when Aristotle inveighed against democracy as an evil form of government, the only form of democratic government he had in mind was government by the voices of a mob gathered together in one place and lacking all the safeguards which, as we have seen, render our British national deliberations so much superior to those of a mere crowd of persons of equally good average capacity and character.
But it is not only in the formal deliberations of the nation that internal organisation, resting on tradition, secures the predominance of the influence of the best and ablest minds. The same is true of all national thought and feeling. There exists in every great nation the vague influence we call public opinion, which is the great upholder of right and justice, which rewards virtue and condemns vice and selfishness. Public opinion exists only in the minds of individuals (for we have rejected, provisionally at least, the conception of a collective consciousness); yet it is a product not of individual, but of collective, mental life. And it has in any healthy nation far higher standards of right and justice and tolerance than the majority of individuals could form or maintain; that is to say, it is in these respects far superior to an opinion which would be the mere resultant or algebraic sum of the opinions of all the living individuals. In reference to any particular matter its judgment is far superior to that of the average of individuals, and superior probably in many cases to that which even the best individuals could form for themselves.
How does public opinion come to be superior to individual and to average opinion? There seems to be something paradoxical in the statement.
The fact is of the utmost importance; for public opinion is the ultimate source of sanctions of all public acts, the highest court of appeal before which every executive act performed in the name of the nation must justify itself. If public opinion were merely the immediate expression of the collective feelings and judgments of an unorganised mass of men, its verdicts would be (as we have seen) inferior to those of the average individuals, whereas, as a matter of fact, its expressions are much superior to those of the average individuals.
The influence of public opinion is especially clear and interesting in its relations to law. In this country it is not made by law, but makes law. Where law is imposed and long maintained by the authority of despotic power, it will of course mould public opinion; but, in any progressive highly organised nation, law and the lawyers are always one or two or more generations behind public opinion. The most progressive body of law formally embodies the public opinion of past generations rather than of the generation living at the time.
The fact of the superiority of public opinion is generally admitted and various explanations are current, for the most part very vague and incomplete. There is the mystical explanation embodied in the dictum that the voice of the people is the voice of God. A rather less vague explanation is that adopted by Mr Beattie Crozier[101] (among others). It is said that the average man carries within him a germ of an ideal of justice and right, and that he applies this to the criticism or approval of the actions of other men; though he often fails to apply it to his own actions, because, where his own interests are concerned, he is apt to be the sport of purely egoistic impulses.
But this explanation is only partially true. It represents the average man as more hypocritical than he really is, and as falling farther below the standards he acknowledges than he actually does fall. It leaves unexplained the fact that he has this sentiment for an ideal of justice and right; and it proceeds on a false assumption as to the nature of the problem, in assuming that men judge the actions of other men by higher standards than those which they apply to their own conduct; whereas this is by no means generally true.
Is it, then, that superior abilities, which enable a man to gain prestige and to impress his ideas and sentiments upon his fellow men and so to influence public opinion, are commonly combined with a natural superiority of moral sentiment, with a love of right and a hatred of injustice? There may be some degree of such natural correlation of superior abilities with superior moral qualities, but the supposition seems very doubtful; and certainly, if it exists, it is not sufficient to account for the elevation of public opinion. We frequently see consummate ability combined with most questionable moral sentiments, as in Napoleon and many other historic personages.
The true explanation is, I submit, to be found in the basal fact that the moral sentiments are essentially altruistic, while the immoral and non-moral sentiments are in the main self-regarding[102]. Hence, the person who has great abilities but is lacking in moral sentiments and altruism applies his abilities to secure his personal satisfactions and aggrandisement; and, in so far as he aims at affecting the minds of others, he tries only to secure their obedience to his commands and suggestions, to inspire them with deference, admiration, fear and awe, and to evoke an outward display of these feelings. But, as to the ideas and sentiments of the people in general, save in so far as they affect his own gratification, he cares nothing. Accordingly we never find great abilities deliberately, consistently and directly applied to the degradation of public opinion and morals, save occasionally in relation to some particular end. And we find few or no great works of literature and art deliberately aiming at such degradation.
But with those persons in whom great abilities are naturally combined with moral disposition the case is very different. The moral disposition is essentially altruistic; it is concerned for the welfare of others, of men in general. Hence such a man deliberately applies his abilities to influence the minds of others. The exertion of such influence is for him an end in itself. He seeks and finds his chief satisfaction in exerting an influence, as wide and deep as possible, over the minds of men; not merely in evoking fear or admiration of himself, but in inspiring in them the same elevated sentiments and sympathies which he finds within himself.
For this reason such men as G. F. Watts, Carlyle and Ruskin exert a much greater and more widespread and lasting influence over the minds of men than do equally able men who are devoid of moral disposition; for the former make the exertion of this influence their chief end, while the others care not at all about the state of public opinion and the minds of the mass. Still less does the non-moral man of great ability strive with all his powers to make others act upon base motives like his own and to degrade their sentiments; rather, he sees that he can better accomplish his selfish ends if other men are unlike himself and are governed by altruistic sentiments; and he sees also that he can better attain his ends if he does lip-service to altruistic ideals; and he is, therefore, apt to exert whatever direct influence he has over the sentiments of men in the same direction as the moral leaders, praising the same actions, upholding in words the same ideals. In this way the men of great abilities, but of immoral or non-moral character, actually aid the moral leaders to some extent in their work; whereas under no conditions is the relation reversed; the moral leaders never praise or acquiesce in bad actions, but always denounce them and use their influence against them.
It follows that, in a well organised nation, public opinion, which is formed and maintained so largely by the influence of leading personalities, will usually be more in conformity with the sentiments of the best men than of the average man, will be above rather than below private opinion. For, if the bad and the good men of exceptional powers were equal in numbers and capacity, the sum of their influences tending directly to exalt public opinion would be enormously greater than the sum of their influences tending to degrade it; and, as a matter of fact, the influence for good of a few altruistic leaders is able to outweigh the degrading influences of a much larger number of purely selfish men of equally great capacities, and is able to maintain a high standard of public opinion.
We have distinguished a formal and an informal organisation of the national deliberative processes, the latter expressing itself as public opinion. These two organisations co-exist and are, of course, not altogether independent of one another; yet they may be to a considerable extent independent; though the more intimate the functional relations and the greater the harmony between them, the healthier will be the national life.
We may note in passing an interesting difference in respect to organisation of the national mind between the English and the American peoples, a difference which illustrates this relative independence of the formal and informal organisations.
In England both the formal and informal organisations have achieved a pretty good level; in both cases the best minds are enabled to exert and have long exerted a dominant influence; and the interaction between the two organisations is very intimate. But in America, while the informal organisation expressed in public opinion seems to be very highly developed, the formal organisation is much inferior; it has not yet such traditions as give the greatest influence to the best minds and embody the effects of their influence. And the better Americans tend to value lightly the formal organisation, to take no part in the working of it, deliberately to ignore it, and to rely rather upon public opinion to repress any evils when they are in danger of reaching an intolerable development.
Both in the formal organisation of the national mind, which is the parliamentary or other national assembly, and in the informal organisation which is public opinion, we see, then, that (in the nation of higher civilisation at least) organisation results in a raising of the collective mental process above the level of the average minds, because it gives a predominant influence to the best minds who form and maintain the traditions, especially the moral traditions; and these press upon the minds of all members of the community from their earliest years, moulding them more or less into conformity with themselves, fostering the better, repressing the purely egoistic, tendencies.
And the ideal organisation after which we ought to strive, is that which would give the greatest possible influence of this sort to the best minds, an influence which consists not in merely organising and directing the energies of the people in the manner most effective for material or even scientific progress, as in modern Germany; but one which, by moulding the sentiments and guiding the reasoning of the people in all matters, public and private alike, secures their consent and agreement and the co-operation of their wills in all affairs of national importance.
When such organisation is in any degree attained and a more or less consistent system of national traditions is embodied in the political, religious, literary, and scientific culture, which moulds in some degree the minds of all men, the national mind clearly becomes, as we said in an earlier chapter, a system of interacting mental forces which are not merely tendencies of the living members of the nation, but are also, in an even greater degree, the ideas and tendencies of the dead; and we see also that in such a people the national consciousness is most truly embodied, not in the minds of the average men, but in the minds of the best men of the time.
The term ‘public opinion’ is sometimes, perhaps generally, used in a looser and wider sense than the meaning implied in the foregoing pages. It is used in the looser sense by President Lowell in his _Public Opinion and Popular Government_. By ‘public opinion’ he seems to mean simply the algebraic sum or balance of individual opinions; he writes “the opinion of the whole people is only the collected opinions of all the persons therein[103].” In accordance with this view, he regards representative institutions as merely one means by which this sum of opinions may be collected and recorded. And he seems to be prepared to regard the ‘referendum’ or the ‘initiative’ in any of their forms, or other methods of direct legislation, as equally good methods, if only all individuals would take the trouble to register their votes upon every question proposed to them. He is aware, of course, that this can hardly be expected of persons who have other interests and occupations than the purely political, and that the direct methods are therefore impracticable as general methods of legislation. If it were true that representative institutions do and should merely collect and record the individual opinions of all members of the public, then it is obvious that each representative should be merely a delegate sent to record the votes of the majority of his constituents. Whereas, if representative institutions should, and in various degrees do, constitute the formal deliberative organisation of the national mind, through which national deliberation and judgment are raised to a higher plane than that of a mere crowd, it follows that the representative should exert his own powers of reasoning and judgment, aided by his special knowledge and equipment, by the special sources of information that he enjoys, in the light of the discussions in which he takes part, and influenced by all those political traditions whose force he experiences in exceptional fulness by reason of his priviledged position. President Lowell, in discussing the functions of the representative, does not decide in favour of the former view, as consistency should perhaps lead him to do; thereby showing that he is not wholly committed to the individualist view. He discusses the question whether the member of Parliament or Congress should regard himself as representing the interests of his constituents alone, or as concerned primarily and chiefly with the interests of the whole people; and he rightly inclines to the latter view. This is not quite the same distinction as that which is insisted upon in these pages. Even if each representative were concerned only for the welfare of the nation as a whole, yet so long as he regarded it as his sole function to vote as he believes the majority of the citizens would vote in any process of direct legislation, he would fall short of the highest duty which is laid upon him by his position—namely, not merely that of recording the opinion of the majority, but that of taking part in the organised deliberative activities of the national mind by which it arrives at judgments and decisions of a higher order than any purely individual, or algebraic sum of individual, judgments and decisions[104].
Public opinion, in the sense in which I have used the words in this chapter (which seems to me the only proper use of them) is, then, not a mere sum of individual opinions upon any particular question; it is rather the expression of that tone or attitude of mind which prevails throughout the nation and owes its quality far more to the influence of the dead than of the living, being the expression of the moral sentiments that are firmly and traditionally established in the mind of the people, and established more effectively and in more refined forms in the minds of the leaders of public opinion than in the average citizen. This tone of the national mind enables it to arrive at just judgments on questions of right and wrong, of duty and honour and public desert; though it may have little bearing upon such practical questions as bimetallism, tariff reform, or railway legislation. The current use of the term, in this country at least, does, I think, recognise that public opinion properly applies only to the sphere of moral judgments and can and should have no bearing upon the practical details of legislation. Public opinion is, both in its development and in its operations, essentially collective; it is essentially the work of the group mind. Its accepted standards of value are slowly built up under the influence of the moral leaders of past ages; and, in the application of those standards to any particular question, the influence of the moral leaders of the time makes itself felt. I have kept in mind in the foregoing pages the public opinion of the nation; but every community, every association, every enduring group has its own public opinion, which, though it is influenced by, and indeed is, as it were, a branch of, the main stem of national public opinion and is therefore of the same fibre and texture, has nevertheless its own peculiar tone and quality, especially in regard to the moral questions with which each group is specially concerned.