Part 1 (2/2)

BRITISH DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENTAL, NOT DOCTRINAIRE

Resistance to royal absolutism, culminating in the acknowledged ascendancy of Parliament and the triumphant aristocracy of 1688, was never based on abstract principles of the rights of barons and landowners, but sprang from the positive, definite conviction that those who furnished arms and men for the king, or who paid certain moneys in taxation, were ent.i.tled to be heard in the councils of the king; and the charters given in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--from Henry I. to Henry III.--confirmed this conviction. The resistance to the Stuarts was still based on the conviction that direct taxation conferred political privileges, but now the claim to speak in the great council of the realm had become a request to be listened to by the king, and pa.s.sed rapidly from that to a resolution that the king should have no money from Parliament if he refused to listen. The practical inconvenience of a king altogether at variance with Parliament was held to be sufficient justification for getting rid of James II., and for hobbling all future kings with the Bill of Rights.

The dethronement of aristocracy in favour of democracy has proceeded on very similar lines. The ma.s.s of English people were far too wretched and far too ignorant at the end of the eighteenth century to care anything about abstract ”rights of man,” and only political philosophers and a few artisans hoped for improvement in their condition by Parliamentary reform.

Agricultural England accepted the rule of landowners as an arrangement by providence. It was the industrial revolution that shattered the feudal notions of society, and created a manufacturing population which knew nothing of lowly submission to pastors and masters. A middle-cla.s.s emerged from the very ranks of the working people. The factory system brought fortunes to men who a few years earlier had been artisans, and to these new capitalists in the nineteenth century the aristocracy in power was as irksome as the Stuarts had been to the Whigs. If, as the Whigs taught, those who paid the taxes were ent.i.tled to a voice in the government, then the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to Parliament. It seemed monstrous that places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham had no one in the House of Commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants.

The manufacturer wanted Parliamentary representation because he hoped through Parliament to secure the abolition of the political disabilities of Nonconformists, and to get financial changes made that would make the conditions of trade more profitable. And he felt that it would be better for the country if he and the cla.s.s he represented could speak freely in Parliament.

The workman wanted the vote because he had been brought to believe that, possessing the vote, he could make Parliament enact laws that would lighten the hards.h.i.+ps of his life. The whole of the manufacturing cla.s.s--capitalist and workman alike--could see by 1820 that the House of Commons was the instrument of the electorate, and that to get power they must become electors. (Yet probably not one per cent. of them could express clearly any theory of popular sovereignty.) The old Whig families, kept out of office by the Tories whom George III. had placed in power, and who now controlled the House of Commons, supported reform and the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the middle cla.s.s because they saw no way of getting back into power except by a new electorate and a redistribution of Parliamentary seats. At the beginning of the twentieth century the landowner, still Whig, though now, as a general rule enrolled with the Unionist Party, has not been excluded from political power, but the representatives of the middle-cla.s.s and of the working people are predominant in the House of Commons. The claim of the House of Lords to reject the bills of the Commons has been, in our time, subjected to the criticism formerly extended to the royal prerogative, and an Act--the Parliament Act--has now been pa.s.sed which formally requires the Lords to accept, without serious amendment, every Bill sent up from the Commons in three successive sessions.

The transition from monarchy to aristocracy in England was brought about at the price of civil war. In many countries democracy has been born in revolution, and the birth pains have been hard and bitter. But in England in the nineteenth century democracy was allowed to come into being by permission of the aristocracy, and has not yet reached its full stature. It is true that violence, bloodshed, loss of life, and destruction of property marked the pa.s.sage of the great Reform Bill; that more than once riots and defiance of law and order have been the expression of industrial discontent; but on the whole the average Englishman is content to wait for the redress of wrongs by Parliamentary action. Women have quite recently defied the law, refused to pay taxes, and made use of ”militant methods” in their agitation for enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. But the women's plea has been that, as they are voteless, these methods have been necessary to call attention to their demands. Democratic advance has often been hindered and delayed by government, and by a national disinclination from rapid political change; but as the character of government has changed with the changed character of the electorate and the House of Commons, so resistance to democracy has always been abandoned when the advance was widely supported, and further delay seemed dangerous to the public order.

The House of Lords is thus seen to yield to the popular representatives in the House of Commons, and the government, dependent on the House of Commons, to listen to the demand of women for enfranchis.e.m.e.nt.

While the House of Commons completes its a.s.sertion of political supremacy, and insists on the absolute responsibility of the chosen representatives of the electorate, the agitation for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women is the reminder that democracy has yet to widen its borders. Progress to democracy in the last one hundred years is visible not only in the enlarged number of enfranchised citizens, but in the general admission that every extension of the franchise has been to the public good; not only in the fact that men of all cla.s.ses and trades now have their representatives in Parliament, but in the very wide acknowledgment that women without votes cannot get that attention by members of the House of Commons that is given to male electors. That the majority of electors have expressed a decided opinion that the power of the House of Lords should be curtailed, as the power of the monarchy has been curtailed, and that the decisions of the House of Commons are only to be corrected by the House of Commons, is evidence that under our obviously imperfect Parliamentary system the will of the electors does get registered on the Statute Book.

EDUCATION TO DEMOCRACY

Apart from the direct political education to democracy, it is well to note the other agencies that have been at work, preparing men and women for the responsible task of national self-government.

In the Middle Ages the religious guilds and the trade guilds, managed by their own members, gave men and women a training in democratic government.

The parish, too, was a commune, and its affairs and finances were administered by duly elected officers.[2]

But the guilds, with their numerous almshouses and hospitals, were all suppressed early in Edward VI.'s reign, and their funds confiscated. As for the parish, it was shorn of all its property, save the parish church, in the same reign, and its old self-governing life dwindled away to the election of churchwardens.

It was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century that the working cla.s.ses, by the formation of trade unions, once more took up the task of education in self-government. From that time onward, through trade unions, co-operative societies, and friendly societies, with their annual conferences and congresses, a steady training in democracy has been achieved; and our Labour Party of to-day, with its Members of Parliament, its members of county and district councils, and its Justices of the Peace, would hardly have been possible but for this training. Other agencies may be mentioned. The temperance movement, the organisation of working-men's clubs, and the local preaching of the Nonconformist Churches--particularly the Primitive Methodist denomination--have all helped to educate workmen in the conduct of affairs, and to create that sense of personal responsibility which is the only guarantee of an honest democracy.

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY STRUGGLES AGAINST THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWN

THE GREAT CHURCHMEN

We are far from any thoughts of democracy in the early struggles against the absolutism of the Crown. The old love of personal liberty that is said to have characterised the Anglo-Saxon had no political outlet under Norman feudalism. What we note is that three Archbishops of Canterbury were strong enough and brave enough to stand up against the unchecked rule of kings, and the names of these great Archbishops--Anselm, Thomas a Becket, and Stephen Langton--are to be honoured for all time for the services they rendered in the making of English liberties. Not one of the three was in any sense a democrat. It is not till the latter part of the fourteenth century that we find John Ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering for the first time in England a democratic doctrine. Anselm, Becket, and Langton did their work, as Simon of Montfort, and as Eliot and Hampden worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of an intolerable autocracy. All along in English history liberties have been gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when the powers of the Crown had been made subject to Parliament that it was possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, for Parliament itself to become converted from an a.s.sembly of aristocrats to a governing body that really represented the nation.

But in considering the rise of democracy we can no more omit the early struggles against the absolutism of the Crown than we can pa.s.s over Simon of Montfort's Parliament, or the unsuccessful popular revolts, or the war with Charles I., or the Whig revolution of 1688. They are all incidents of pre-democratic days, but they are all events of significance. Democracy is no new order of society, conceived in the fertile mind of man; it has been slowly evolved and brought to birth after centuries of struggle, to be tried as a form of government only when other forms are outgrown, and cease to be acceptable.

All the great men--heroic and faulty--who withstood the tyranny of their day, not only wrested charters from kings, they left a tradition of resistance; and this tradition has been of incalculable service to a nation seeking self-government. It is easy to dismiss the work of Anselm and Becket as mere disputes between monarch and Churchman, to treat lightly the battle for the Great Charter as a strife between king and barons. Just as easy is it to regard the Peasant Revolt of the fourteenth century and Jack Cade's rebellion in the fifteenth century as the tumults of a riotous mob.

The great point is to see clearly in all these contests, successful and unsuccessful, the movement for liberty, for greater security and expansion of life in England, and to note that only by a stern endurance and a willingness not to bear an irksome oppression have our liberties been won.

In the winning of these liberties we have proved our fitness for democracy, for a government that will allow the fullest measure of self-development.

Now, what was it that Anselm contended for, first with William II. and then with Henry I.?

ARCHBISHOP ANSELM AND NORMAN AUTOCRACY

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