The Public Philosophy > Chapter I. The Obscure Revolution > Internal Revolution in the Democracies
A vigourous critic of democracy, Sir Henry Maine, writing in 1884 just as England was about to adopt general manhood suffrage, observed that 'there could be no grosser mistake' than the impression that 'Democracy differs from Monarchy in essence.'
For the tests of success in the performance of the necessary and natural duties of a government are precisely the same in both cases. These natural and necessary duties have to do with the defense and advancement abroad of the vital interests of the state and with its order, security, and solvency at home. Invariably these duties call for hard decisions. They are hard because the governors of the state must tax, conscript, command, prohibit; they must assert a public interest against private inclination and against what is easy and popular. If they are to do their duty, they must often swim against the tides of private feeling.
The hardness of governing was little realized in the early 1900's. For more than half a century, while democracy was making its historic advance, there had been a remarkable interlude during which the governments rarely had to make hard decisions. Since Waterloo there had been no world war, and after the American Civil War only a few short and localized wars. It was a time of expansion, development, liberation; there were new continents to be colonized and there was a new industrial system to be developed. It seemed as though mankind had outlived the tempests of history. The governments --which were increasingly democratic, liberal and humane -- were spared the necessity of dealing with the hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of constitutional order and revolution. They could be concerned with improvements, with the more and more and the better and better. Life was secure, liberty was assured, and the way was open to the pursuit of private happiness.
In this long peace, the liberals became habituated to the notion that in a free and progressive society it is a good thing that the government should be weak. For several generations the West had flourished under governments that did not have to prove their strength by making the hard decisions. It had been possible to dream, without being rudely awakened, that in the rivalry of the diverse interests all would somehow come out for the best. The government could normally be neutral and for the most part it could avoid making positive judgments of good and bad and of right and wrong. The public interest could be equated with that which was revealed in election returns, in sales reports, balance sheets, circulation figures, and statistics of expansion. As long as peace could be taken for granted, the punic good could be thought of as being immanent in the aggregate of private transactions. There was no need for a governing power which transcended the particular interests and kept them in order by ruling over them.
All this was only, as we now know, a daydream during a brief spell of exceptionally fine weather. The dream ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Then we knew that the Age of Progress had not reformed the human condition of diversity and conflict; it had not mitigated the violence of the struggle for survival and domination.
In fact, the violence was intensified and extended as never before. The expansion and development during the peaceful decades had wrought, as Graham Wallas pointed out on the eve of the war, 'a general change of social scale,' and that change of scale had revolutionary consequences. The forty years which separated the Franco-Prussian War from the First World War were, says John U. Nef, 'in terms of material welfare ...the most successful years in history ...In little more than one generation the world's population grew by almost as much as it had grown during the untold generations which separate Adam, the first man, from Newton, the first man of science of the seventeenth century. According to the enterprising calculations of Colin Clark, the real income per person gainfully employed improved 75 percent or more from 1870 to 1914 while the hours of work were substantially reduced in the wealthier countries of Western Europe ...and in North America.'
Because of the increase in the population, in the volume of production, and in the destructiveness of weapons, the war which brought to an end the Age of Progress had, says Nef, 'none of the limiting features of the warfare which had been characteristic of Newton's age. Europe could now afford enormous armies, could replenish and supply them again while the fighting proceeded. More money was needed to kill than ever before, but the money required turned out to be small in comparison with the money that could be raised (with the help of refined advances in the use and manipulation of credit), and in relation to the quantity of munitions which money and credit could buy.' All this meant that when war broke out again, the advanced nations had become, as Nickerson says, 'capable of sacrifices so irrationally great that the bleeding victor would faint upon the corpse of his victim.'
The strain of the war worked up a menacing popular pressure upon the weak governments. We can, I think, point to 1917 as the year when the pressure became so strong that the institutional framework of the established governments broke under it. The strain became unbearable. 1917 was the year of the two Russian revolutions. It was the year of the American involvement which brought with it the declaration of the Wilsonlan principles. For Italy it was the year of Caporetto. For Austria-Hungary it was the beginning of the end under the successor of Francis Joseph. For Germany it was the year of the July crisis and of the need of the Prussian monarchy to listen to the Reichstag and its demand for a negotiated peace. For France it was the year of the mutinies, and for Britain the year of mortal peril from the submarine. In eastern and central Europe tortured and infuriated masses brought down the historic states and the institutions of the old regime. In western Europe and in North America the breakthrough took the form - if I may use the term - of a deep and pervasive infiltration. Behind the facade, which was little changed, the old structure of executive government with the consent of a representative assembly was dismantled--not everywhere and not in all fields, but where it mattered the most--in the making of high policy for war and peace.
The existing governments had exhausted their imperium- their authority to bind and their power to command. With their traditional means they were no longer able to carry on the hyperbolic war; yet they were unable to negotiate peace. They had, therefore, to turn to the people. They had to ask still greater exertions and sacrifices. They obtained them by 'democratizing' the conduct and the aims of the war: by pursuing total victory and by promising total peace.
In substance they ceded the executive power of decision over the strategical and the political conditions for concluding the war. In effect they lost control of the war. This revolution appeared to be a cession of power to the representative assemblies, and when it happened it was acclaimed as promising the end of the evils of secret diplomacy and the undemocratic conduct of unpopular wars. In fact, the powers which were ceded by the executive passed through the assemblies, which could not exercise them, to the mass of voters who, though unable also to exercise them, passed them on to the party bosses, the agents of pressure groups, and the magnates of the new media of mass communications.
The consequences were disastrous and revolutionary. The democracies became incapacitated to wage war for rational ends and to make a peace which would be observed or could be enforced.