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and given me the benefit of many helpful criticisms and suggestions: Mr. Hector M. Holmes of the Massachusetts Bar, and Prof. Robert H. Lord, and Mr. Eugene P. Chase, my colleagues. It is doubtless unnecessary to add that none of them is responsible for any of the opinions which I have expressed on various controversial matters relating to the nature of the modern commonwealth and of the ends it is designed to serve.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.

A. N. HOLCOMBE.

May 9, 1923.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF

THE MODERN COMMONWEALTH

"How are we to secure the best direction of human affairs and the maximum of willing COoperation with that direction? This is ultimately a complex problem in psychology, but it is absurd to pretend that it is an insoluble one."

-H. G. WELLS:

"The Outline of History"

THE FOUNDATIONS OF
THE MODERN COMMONWEALTH

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT

1

the few

"NOTHING appears more surprising to those who con- The rule of sider human affairs with a philosophical eye," wrote a British philosopher of the eighteenth century, "than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”

However surprising this observation may have been to thinking men like Hume, it seemed at the middle of the eighteenth century to be supported by the facts. In England political authority lay in the hands of the King in Parliament. That body then comprised in addition to the King some seven hundred persons, divided between the Houses of Lords and Commons. The leaders of that body ruled the British Empire. Not one man in a hundred in Great Britain voted for members of Parliament, and elections came only after long intervals. A greater number of Englishmen shared in the conduct of affairs to a limited extent by occasional service on juries, but the mass of the people were passive spectators of their government. Their part was to pay the taxes, serve in the wars, and obey the laws like dutiful subjects. Such was the government of the British Empire when the great French political philosopher, Montesquieu, pronounced that government the most

1 David Hume, "Of the First Principles of Government," in his Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political, No. iv.

I

The submissiveness of

the many

The shifting

of power

free and the best the world had ever seen. In the principal other states of the world the disparity in numbers between the rulers and their subjects was even more striking than in Great Britain. In France an absolute monarch, aided by a handful of male and female courtiers and clerks, ruled with apparent ease over a much greater population than the British. The same phenomenon appeared in the other world powers of that period, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Turkey. Everywhere, as Rousseau presently exclaimed, man was in chains.

Man, moreover, showed little inclination to break his chains. Hume was struck not only by the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, but also by "the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers." In England there had been no serious political disturbance since the expulsion of King James the Second in 1688. In France the Bourbon monarchy had encountered no notable resistance since the time of the Fronde. In Spain and in Austria, Bourbons and Habsburgs, in Prussia and in Russia, Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs, in Turkey the Sublime Porte, could boast, as Louis the Fourteenth of France was alleged to have boasted: "L'état, c'est moi." If the sovereign was not actually the state, his courtiers at least were more than ready to let him think that he was. Men had tamely submitted so long to be taxed without their consent, conscripted, subjugated in war and exploited in peace, that none but those "with a philosophical eye" could expect anything else.

But the masses of mankind were not content to remain the passive spectators of their governments. In the year of Hume's death the American Declaration of Independence inaugurated a new era. In 1789 the Revolution broke out in France, and the ancien régime fell with a crash that shook the foundations of society throughout the civilized

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