Part 10 (1/2)
A hundred years later, John Ball and his fellow agitators preached a gospel of social equality that inspired the Peasant Revolt. But communism was the goal of the peasant leaders in 1381, and freedom from actual oppression the desire of their followers. No conception of political democracy can be found in the speeches and demands of Wat Tyler.
In the sixteenth century Robert Ket in Norfolk renewed the old cries of social revolution, and roused the countryside to stop the enclosures by armed revolt. And again the popular rising is an agrarian war to end intolerable conditions, not a movement for popular government.
THE ”SOCIAL CONTRACT” THEORY
The theory of a pact or contract between the Government and the people became the favourite a.s.sumption of political writers from the sixteenth century onward, and it was this theory that Rousseau popularised in his ”Social Contract,” the theory, too, which triumphed for a season in the French Revolution.
The theory is, of course, pure a.s.sumption, without any basis in history, and resting on no foundation of fact. It a.s.sumes that primitive man was born with enlightened views on civil government, and that for the greater well-being of his tribe or nation he deposited the sovereign authority which belonged to himself, in a prince or king--or in some other form of executive government--retaining the right to withdraw his allegiance from the government if the authority is abused, and the contract which conferred sovereignty violated. It was not maintained that the contract was an actually written doc.u.ment; it was supposed to be a tacit agreement. The whole theory seems to have sprung from the study of Roman law and the const.i.tutions of Athens and Sparta. Nothing was known of primitive man or of the beginnings of civilisation till the nineteenth century. The Bible and the cla.s.sical literature of Greece and Rome are all concerned with civilised, not primitive, man, and with slaves and ”heathens” who are accounted less than men. The ”sovereign people” of Athens and Sparta became the model of later republican writers, while the choosing of a king by the Israelites recorded in the Old Testament sanctioned the idea, for early Protestant writers, that sovereignty was originally in the people.
The Huguenot Languet, in his _Vindiciae contra Tyrannos_ (1579), maintained on scriptural grounds that kingly power was derived from the will of the people, and that the violation by the king of the mutual compact of king and people to observe the laws absolved the people from all allegiance.[72]
The Jesuit writers, Bellarmine and Mariana, argued for the sovereignty of the people as the basis of kingly rule; and when the English divines of the Established Church were upholding the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the Spanish Jesuit, Suarez, was amongst those who attacked that doctrine, quoting a great body of legal opinion in support of the contention that ”the prince has that power of law giving which the people have given him.” Suarez, too, insists that all men are born equal, and that ”no one has a political jurisdiction over another.” Milton, in his ”Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” (1649), had taken a similar line: the people had vested in kings and magistrates the authority and power of self-defence and preservation. ”The power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright.” Hooker, fifty years earlier (1592-3), in his ”Ecclesiastical Polity,” Book I., had affirmed the sovereignty or legislative power of the people as the ultimate authority, and had also declared for an original social contract, ”all public regiment of what kind soever seemeth evidently to have risen from deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful.” Hobbes made the social contract a justification for Royal absolutism, and Locke, with a Whig ideal of const.i.tutional government, enlarged on the right of a people to change its form of government, and justified the Revolution of 1688. The writings of Hobbes and Locke have had a lasting influence, and Locke is really the source of the democratic stream of the eighteenth century. It rises in Locke to become the torrent of the French Revolution.
But Huguenots and Jesuits, Hooker and Milton--what influence had their writings on the ma.s.s of English people? None whatever, as far as we can see. Milton could write of ”the power” of ”the people” as a ”natural birthright,” but the power was plainly in Cromwell's army, and ”the people”
had no means of expression concerning its will, and no opportunity for the a.s.sertion of sovereignty. Lilburne and the Levellers held that democracy could be set up on the ruins of Charles I.'s Government, and the sovereignty of the people become a fact; and with a ready political instinct Lilburne proposed the election of popular representatives on a democratic franchise. Cromwell rejected all Lilburne's proposals; for him affairs of State were too serious for experiments in democracy; and Lilburne himself was cast into prison by the Commonwealth Government.
Lilburne's pamphlets were exceedingly numerous, and his popularity, in London particularly, enormous. He was the voice of the unrepresented, powerless citizens in whom the republican theorists saw the centre of authority. The one effort to persuade the Commonwealth Republic to give power to the people was made by John Lilburne, and it was defeated. The Whig theory that an aristocratic House of Commons, elected by a handful of people, and mainly at the dictation of the landowners, was ”the People,”
triumphed. The bulk of the English people were left out of all account in the political struggles of Whigs and Tories, and democracy was not dreamed of till America was free and France a republic. The industrial revolution compelled the reform of the British House of Commons, and democracy has slowly superseded aristocracy, not from any enthusiasm for the ”sovereign people,” but from the traditional belief that representative government means the rule of the people.
Precedent, not theory, has been the argument for democracy in England.
THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679)
The writings of Hobbes are important, because they state the case for absolute rule, or ”a strong government,” as we call it to-day. Hobbes was frankly rationalist and secular. Holding the great end of government to be happiness, he made out that natural man lived in savage ill-will with his fellows. To secure some sort of decency and safety men combined together and surrendered all natural rights to a sovereign--either one man, or an a.s.sembly of men--and in return civil rights were guaranteed. But the sovereignty once established was supreme, and to injure it was to injure oneself, since it was composed of ”every particular man.” The sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. Whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though Hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular a.s.semblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. Civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy--the very things that induced men to establish sovereignty. Only when the safety of the state was threatened was rebellion justifiable.
At bottom, the objection to the theories of Hobbes is the same objection that must be taken to the theories of Locke and Rousseau. All these writers a.s.sume not only the fiction of a social contract, but a _static_ view of society. Society is the result of growth: it is not a fixed and settled community. Mankind proceeds experimentally in forms of government. To Hobbes and his followers, security of life and property was the one essential thing for mankind--disorder and social insecurity the things to be prevented at all cost. Now, this might be all very well but for evolution. Mankind cannot rest quietly under the strongest and most stable government in the world. It will insist on learning new tricks, on thinking new thoughts, and if it is not allowed to teach itself fresh habits, it will break out in revolt, and either the government will be broken or the subjects will wither away under the rule of repression.
Hobbes may be quoted as a supporter of the rule of the Stuarts, and equally of the rule of Cromwell. Every kind of strong tyranny may be defended by his principles.
In the nineteenth century Carlyle was the finest exponent of ”strong”
government, and generally the leaders of the Tory party have been its advocates, particularly in the att.i.tude to be taken towards subject races.
JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704)
Locke, setting out to vindicate the Whig Revolution of 1688, rejects Hobbes' view of the savagery of primitive man, and invents ”a state of peace, goodwill, mutual a.s.sistance and preservation”--equally, as we know to-day, far from the truth. Locke's primitive men have a natural right to personal property--”as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property”--but they are as worried and as fearful as Hobbes' savages. So they, too, renounce their natural rights in favour of civil liberty, and are happy when they have got ”a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected on it.”
According to Hobbes, once having set up a government, there was no possible justification for changing it--save national peril; and a bad government was to be obeyed rather than the danger of civil war incurred.
But Locke never allows the government to be more than the trustee of the people who placed it in power. It rules by consent of the community, and may be removed or altered when it violates its trust. Hobbes saw in the break-up of a particular government the dissolution of society. Locke made a great advance on this, for he saw that a change of government could be accomplished without any very serious disturbance in the order of society or the peace of a nation. Hobbes did not believe that the people could be trusted to effect a change of government, while Locke had to justify the change which had just taken place in 1688.
Only when we have dropped all Locke's theories of primitive man's happiness, and the social-contract fiction, does the real value of his democratic teaching become clear, and the lasting influence of his work become visible.
Mankind is compelled to adopt some form of government if it is to sleep at nights without fear of being murdered in its bed, or if it wishes to have its letters delivered by the postman in the morning. As the only purpose of government is to secure mutual protection, mankind must obey this government, or the purpose for which government exists will be defeated.
But the powers of government must be strictly limited if this necessary consent of the governed is to continue, and if the government has ceased to retain the confidence that gives consent, then its form may be changed to some more appropriate shape.
Now all this theory of Locke's has proved to be true in the progress of modern democracy. It was pointed out that the danger of his doctrine--that a nation had the right to choose its form of government, and to change or adapt its const.i.tution--lay in the sanction it gave to revolution; but Locke answered that the natural inertia of man was a safeguard against frequent and violent political changes, and as far as England was concerned Locke was right. The average Englishman grumbles, but only under great provocation is he moved to violent political activity. As a nation, we have acknowledged the right of the majority to make the political changes that have brought in democracy, and we have accepted the changes loyally.
Occasionally, since Locke, the delay of the government in carrying out the wishes of the majority has induced impatience, but, generally, the principle has been acted upon that government is carried on with the consent of the governed, and that the Parliamentary party which has received the largest number of votes has the authority from the people to choose its ministry, and to make laws that all must obey.
The power of the people is demonstrated by the free election of members of Parliament, and, therefore, democracy requires that its authority be obeyed by all who are represented in Parliament. There is no social contract between the voter and the government; but there is a general feeling that it is not so much partic.i.p.ation in politics as the quiet enjoyment of the privileges of citizens.h.i.+p that obliges submission to the laws. The extension of the franchise was necessary whenever a body of people excluded from the electorate was conscious of being unrepresented and desired representation. Otherwise the consent of the voteless governed was obviously non-existent, and government was carried on in defiance of the absence of that consent.
It is not Locke's theories that have guided politically the great ma.s.ses of the people, for Locke's writings have had no very considerable popularity in England. But it has happened that these theories have influenced the conduct of statesmen, and with reason, since they offer an explanation of political progress, and constrain politicians to act, experimentally indeed, but with some reasonable antic.i.p.ation of safety to the nation.