A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP.

[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE

New York Times.] THOUGH it suffers from an inadequate title, this is an able, brilliant, and suggestive book. If one must add that it is also inconclusive, and so disappointing, that is chiefly

because of the greatness of the subject and because it is perpetually dealing with the incommensurables and un- defmables of human experience. Yet when this excuse

has been admitted to the full, the book must still be pro- nounced to be only half made.

Perhaps the best analogy I can find to explain what I mean by this is to take the common and yet always deeply moving drama of the hayfield. That drama opens with the uncut

field of flowers and grass nodding to the wind in a gay hut at the moment useless profusion. Then the mowing machine gets to work, and the grass and the flowers lie in ruin in their long swathes. Then the haymakers come on the scene,

and the hay is first tossed and spread, and then raked together in long, grey, green waves. Next comes the cocking, soon little castles of hay arise all over the field, waiting to be finally gathered into the great haystack which will perform a hundred useful functions. It will give food for cows and oxen, sheep and horses, and so keep men and women alive and in vigour with the vitamines of milk, beef, and mutton. Well, Mr. Babbitt has reached the last stage but one. His field is full of well-piled haycocks, but they wait for him or another to gather them into the great and useful haystack.

It is good work, but not a finished work. The cutting of the grass was excellently done. Though we pity many of the flowers of philosophy and social science that lie dead or half dead in the swathes, we know that it was necessary that they should perish. The tossing of the former writers and their works literally from China to Peru, from Babylon to Boston, from Athens to London, was not only necessary, but often affords excellent sport and delight. The collecting of the long waves of green into haycocks was a hard but useful piece of work, and has been done and re-done with lavish toil. Some of the haycocks have no doubt been found to be faulty, because they were damp and rank.

These Mr. Babbitt knocks over and spreads about to be re-made, or else throws the musty grass away altogether and adds any good stuff that may finally remain over to some other cock. The Rousseau cock suffers specially badly in this process.

Whilst we await the final process of the hay harvest, the carting and building of the stack, let us walk through what Milton calls the " tedded field." Dropping my metaphor— always a dangerous, if attractive, guide in the work of exposi- tion—I cannot refrain from making a preliminary salute to Mr. Babbitt for his learning and his memorable use of quotation. He is a master of the art. Almost every sentence is but- tressed or illuminated by the actual words of some philosopher or critic of society. Now it is Confucius who is laid under contribution, now Rousseau, now Burke, now Wordsworth, and, of course, again and again Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. He calls in turn to Mei-ti or Mencius, Marcus Aurelius or John Marshall, Mills or Montesquieu, Goethe or Grotius, and" puts them on" as a skilful huntsman calls to his hounds.

As a kind of general motto or text for his book the author has taken the following four quotations :—

" Such legislation (against private property) may have a specious appearance of benevolence ; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody else's friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, . . . which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause—the wickedness of human nature.—' Aristotle : Politics,' 1263b, 11.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, • the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that Men of intemperate Minds cannot be free.—' Burke : Lotter to a member of the National Assembly.'

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism or unlimited sovereignty or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor—equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and, in every respect diabolical.—'John Adams: Letter to Thomas' Jefferson (13th November, 1815).1

Den einzelnen Verkehrtheiten des Tags sollte man immer nur, grosse weltgeschichtliche Masson entgegensetzen.—' Goethe : Sprfiche.' "

These are excellent for his purpose, and for all purposes. Still, I think that they might have ken very usefully rein- forced by the great passage in Troilus and Cressida on Appetite. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, paints for us an appalling picture of a state of society in which Appetite, that is, the indulgence of lust, not merely in one, but in every form, has free play, and is uncontrolled by what Mr. Babbitt calls "standards of conduct," but which might have been better called the charities of life. Shakespeare gives us only one specific application, but in doing so he has given us one of the most soul-shaking lines in all his works :— " And the rude son should strike his father dead." But I had better quote it in its text The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre, Observe degree, priority and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.

But when the planets, In evil mixture, to disorder wander, What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of States Quite from their fixure ! 0! when degree is shak'd, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authenti,,k place ?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark ! what fficrord follows ! Each thing moots In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead : Force should be right ; or rather, right and wrong (Between whose endless jar justice resides)

Should lose their names, and so should justice, too.

Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite ; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And, last, eat up himself."

Here Shakespeare, as Fuller would have said, has predis- covered Mr. Babbitt's book and painted with an almost unbearable poignancy our author's warning of what must be the result of following Rousseau rather than Burke—that roughly, though I admit very roughly, is the quintessence of his book.

The introduction to Democracy and Leadership is a very able piece of work in itself ; but it does not make the haystack, or even afford a very competent guide through the haycocks— to return for a moment to my metaphor. The opening pages, it is true, look as if they were going to be a guide, but their promise is not fulfilled. I hope that when I say this nobody will think that I am trying to detract from the interest or the value of the book. Again, I think it was probably impossible under the conditions of his work for Mr. Babbitt on the present occasion to do more than he has done. Here are the opening

sentences to which I have referred

According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially with the relations between capital and labour. In that ease, one is tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem. This book is only one of a series in which I have been trying to bring out these deeper implications of the modern movement. Though devoted to different topics, the volumes of the series are yet bound together by their common preoccupation with the naturalistic trend, which goes back in some of its main aspects at least as far as the Renaissance, but which won its decisive triumphs over tradition in the eighteenth century. Among the men of the eighteenth century who prepared the way for the world in which we are now living I have, hero as

elsewhere in my writing., given a pro-eminent place to Rousseau. It is hard for anyone who has investigated the facts to deny him this pre-eminence, even though one should not go so far as to say with Lord Acton that 'Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle, or Cicero, or Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who over lived.' The great distinction of Rousseau in the history of thought, if my own analysis be correct, is that he gave the wrong answers to the right questions. It is no small distinction even to have asked the right questions. Rousseau has, at all events, suggested to me the terms in which I have treated my present topic. He is easily first among the theorists of radical democracy. He is, also, the most eminent of those who have attacked civilization. Moreover, he has brought his advocacy of democracy and his attack on civilization into a definite relation- ship with one another. Herein he seems to go deeper than those who relate democracy, not to the question of civilization versus barbarism, but to the question of progress versus reaction. For why should men progress unless it can be shown that they are progressing towards civilization ; or of what avail, again, is progress if barbarism is. as Rousseau affirms, more felicitous ? "

There follows on this a notable passage in which, after quoting the special praise which Confucius bestowed on his favourite disciple, who was "always progressing and never came to a standstill," Mr. Babbitt reaches one of the essential features of his book. It is, that to the man of the nineteenth century progress meant material progress. "He seems to have assumed, so far as he gave the subject any thought at all, that moral progress would issue almost automatically from material progress." Unfortunately, as he points out, the thing is not nearly as simple as that. "Progress according to the natural law must, if it is to make for civilization, be subordinated to some adequate end ; and the natural law does not in itself supply this end." As the result of the blindness of the greater part of mankind to this truth we have endowed ourselves with "the type of man who deems himself progres- sive and is yet pursuing power and speed for their own sake, the man who does not care where he is going, as someone has put it, provided only he can go there faster and faster." And then Mr. Babbitt " commits " an epigram—as Gibbon might have put it—Conf. Gibbons's saint "committed a miracle." He tells us that "this book in particular is devoted to the most -unpopular of all tasks—a defence of the veto power." That is a dangerous but not entirely true, though brilliant, statement. It ignores the fact that dolus latet in generalibus- all generalizations are liable to error. An epigram is by its nature a generalization. Still, how could I, as a believer in the veto of the Referendum as essential to democratic govern- ment, fail to clasp such an epigram and such a volume to my heart ?

After the epigrammatic epitome of his book which I have just quoted, Mr. Babbitt proceeds as follows :— "Not the least singular feature of the singular epoch in which we are living is that the very persons who are least willing to hear about the veto power are likewise the persons who are most certain that they stand for the virtues that depend upon its exercise— for example, peace and brotherhood. As against the expansionists of every kind, I do not hesitate to affirm that what is specifically human in man and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain. The affirmation of this quality of will is nothing new : it is implied in the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members. In general, the primacy accorded to will over intellect is Oriental. The idea of humility, the idea that man needs to defer to a higher will, came into Europe with an Oriental religion, Christianity. This idea has been losing ground in almost exact ratio to the decline of Christianity. Inas- much as the recognition of the supremacy of will seems to me imperative in any wise view of life, I side in important respects with the Christian against those who have in the Occident, whether in ancient or modern times, inclined to give the first place either to the intellect or the emotions. I differ from the Christian, how- ever, in that my interest in the higher will and the power of veto

it exercises over man's o 'ye desires is humanistic rather than religious. I am concernerr other words, less with the meditation in which true religion always culminates, than in the mediation or observance of the law of measure that should govern man in his secular relations."

That is excellent, sound sense and will, I believe, be to many minds a source of enlightenment and strength. But, indeed, the whole book does that, in spite of the inevitable inadequacy on which I have dwelt—perhaps with somewhat unfair reitera- tion. Still I was bound to say what I did, for nothing can do a book more harm or be more disenchanting than for a reviewer to raise the reader's hopes too high, as to make a suggestion that a book can square the circle, or evaluate II, or do anything else that is impossible.

The only portion of the book with which I have any real guarrel is its treatment of Democracy. I cannot help feeling that Mr. Babbitt here has been betrayed, like many another thinker before him, into denouncing an abstraction, not for its essential or inherent qualities, but because of certain of its manifestations. To- my mind, Democracy, or to put it in its simplest and best form, Government by the Will of the Majority, is a neutral thing. It can be bad, and it can be good, and it can hold a middle way between these two points. But it is useless to abuse Democracy merely because of its failures. The proper ground for preferring Democracy as the most acceptable form, of government is that of con- venience. All forms of government have some bad elements in them, and Democracy is only the best form—or lest I beg the question—the most convenient form, because it is likely to be the most stable and the one which carries in it the most legibly written sanction.

It is the form of government against which men have the least excuse for rebelling. It is a form of government which is always open, in theory at any rate, to progress and change. It is, in a word, the most plastic form of government. Further, it is the government which carries most consolation to those who are oppressed. The humblest man may dream of being able to convert his fellow men to his view or of getting them to understand his miseries, or the injustice from which he may be suffering. An aristocracy or an oligarchy offers no such hope, even in theory. When a man has to say of himself, "I am an Untouchable. I was not born a Brahmin. I shall never be a Brahmin," or again, if he says, "I am not a Roman citizen or an Athenian, but only a slave. I can never pass the great gulf between me and those who direct the affairs of the world," his mind is either flattened and sterilized, or else filled with so burning a sense of indignation that reason and judgment fly from him. It is the same when in the ease of an autocracy the wronged man or woman appeals to justice and the awful answer comes back that came from the Emperor Valentiaian

"Justice will never hear you. I am Justice."

Of course, Democracy does not ensure freedom or justice,, but it does ensure hope, and it makes a man feel that, at; any rate, he belongs to the community, to the thing which rules him, and that he is not wholly disinherited. That, is why democracies are stronger, tougher, and more potent ' in war than oligarchies or empires. They can make a call upon the men who compose the nation which can be made by no other form of government. Therefore, on the point of convenience in the widest sense Democracy is to be pre- ferred to every other form of government. It is the strongest at the moment, and in that sense the most crushing, but it is one always capable of alteration, and so of improvement, and also of alteration without revolution. Again, it is the one in which it is easiest to deprive men of power ; and power is the most demoralizing thing in the world. There- fore, its human repositories must always be filled with the sense of responsibility and trusteeship. Human beings must be given power or the world could not be governed ; but they must always know that they cannot prolong their power by themselves, and that they must seek the source of power in the people themselves. The people, in fine, should always have a veto on the will of the dictator, and this they can only get in a properly organized democracy. Therefore the hopes of the good, and even the fears of the wise, must rest on Democracy, though here again they must never turn Democracy into an idol. If they do, its special quality will be ruined. Democracy is the universal utility, the necessary thing, but not a thing to be adored or pompously personified., I am loth to leave Mr. Babbitt's exciting book with so much unsaid that I wanted to say ; but perhaps it is best.1 One is apt in this imperfect world not only to do too much, but to say too much and to write too much. Confucius had an ideal ruler called "Shun." Of him he said : "Shun was one who did nothing, yet governed well." Mr. Babbitt tells us that all Confucius meant here was to point out the, superiority of inner over outer action, for Shun could appar- ently, when necessary, take strong outer action. Shun was, in short, minding his own business. Yet, says Mr. Babbitt, thinking of the present age, "the time is rapidly approaching when everybody will be minding everybody else's business." Shun's example warns me to end this review, out of hand—" Dare to be a Shun" shall be my