THE COMING MASS-VOTE IN PARIS.
THERE is a real interest for the historian as well as the politician in the election which will be decided to-morrow by the four hundred thousand voters of the Department of the Seine. A mass-vote—and though Paris is only one Department of a great country, a collective decision by its electors has much of the importance of a mass-vote—is not only a great instrument of government, but is the new method of applying force so that it may supersede the old and formerly universal method of an appeal to arms. The mass of the people, when decided, may not be wise—Christians, even when Liberals, can never quite forget that cry for Barabbas—but they always possess physical force ; and there are occasions when differences run so deep, minds are so sealed to .persuasion, or arguments are so exhausted, that even in internal questions only force can decide. We all feel, even in this country, that on the question of Union or Disunion no reconciling course can be discovered ; that reasoning has reached its limit ; and that the ultimate decision must depend on the numbers of the convinced on either side,—that is, on brute force exhibited through other means than slaughter. On the Continent, and more especially in France, the cleavages between parties run much deeper, so deep that but for the mass-vote, and the silent resolution to exhibit force first of all in that way, in the hope that the minority will treat itself as beaten, and give up the contest, the streets of Paris would to-morrow run with blood. For that matter, they would so run to- day were it not for the secret dread of the magazine-rifle. The questions are, in fact, such as do not admit of com- promise, and are not seriously affected by argument. There can be no compromise between true Republicanism and Dictatorship ; there is no modus vivendi conceivable between peace and war ; nor can Opportunism ever form a working alliance with the Socialist Democracy. One party must for the time subdue the other ; and in the mass- vote, Europe has invented a method of subjugating a minority which, with all its imperfections, is a triumph of social skill. It may be ridiculed with the greatest ease ; it has imperfections of the most patent kind—for instance, there are questions like certain religious bitternesses, which are entirely outside its range, and which it never settles—but the most convinced Tory must acknow- ledge that it is a gentler and less destructive arbiter than an appeal to arms. Grant that it is a mere appeal to force—which is only true when the subject of quarrel is too deep for the popular mind—so is a civil war ; admit that a favourite orator may sway the decision wrongly, so may, in the alternative method, a soldier of genius or of fortune ; concede that the minority is beaten by unintelligent will, and so also it is when it submits to cannon. A crowd when clothed in its working dress may be idiotic, but so it is also when clothed in uniform. Nothing may be stupider than a Referendum, but does victory always follow the banner of the wise ? To have invented the mass-vote as a way of discovering truth might have been worthy of Laputa—we do not quite think so, because we hold that in the greatest crises democracy has often intuitions—but to have invented it as a substitute for civil war is a proof of sagacity which, if we could but trace it to an individual, would justify statues and festivals in his honour. Hardly any discovery in politics has done more to reduce the sum of human misery, and diminish that marvellous waste of his own accumulated resources which from the beginning has marked the history of man. He is always burning up some Alexandrian Library or other. Fancy destroying Roman Africa! Compared with the true method, which would be the appointment of the wisest as an Arbitration Committee, the mass-vote is the clumsiest and most brutal of expe- dients ; but compared with war, it is as refined a scheme as the cook's method of producing roast pig when con- trasted with that of Charles Lamb's Chinese.
The believers in universal peace, among whom we do not reckon ourselves, holding that there is a great deal of human nature still left in man, might find, we think, much stronger reasons for their hope than they do, in the decay of the habit of civil war. That decay has been much more complete within this century than is usually remembered. A civil war of the more horrible kind, that in which parties diffused over a whole State resort to slaughter everywhere, has hardly occurred, or has occurred in Spain alone. Everywhere else, actual war has been avoided, unless oue party has pre- dominated in one section so completely, that the war has taken upon itself a quasi-national character, and has therefore tended to become regular. The revolt of the Sonderbund in Switzerland in 1846, the revolt of Greece in the Turkish Empire in 1826, the re- volt of Hungary in the Hapsburg Dominion in 1848, the revolt of the Southern States of the Union in 1861, all assumed the character of international wars, and were civil wars only because one central authority claimed, and in all three cases enforced, obedience. Even the insurrection of the Parisian Commune, though horribly near the real thing, being accompanied by a struggle of classes dwelling habitually together, developed into the war of a great city against the Army of its State, and though marked by many murders and executions indistinguishable from massacres, was a vast improvement in the degree of its horror upon the old religious wars. There has been ever since then a marked advance, and we should say that while the tendency to war had, if anything, increased, the tendency to civil war had decidedly diminished. It may revive again, will revive if the future subject of quarrel is to be Socialism—that is, the right or no right of a man to earn and to keep all that he can—but apart from that, or the improbable outbreak of a war of religious, the drift of events is towards the extinction of civil war. Of course, much of that drift is due to what may be called a purely military cause, the prodigious and wholly unprecedented development in the mechanism of war, which, again, the • practice of conscription teaches everybody to understand. Human beings will not fight earthquakes, and to ask the population of a modern city to rise in insurrection again4 regular soldiers armed with the magazine-rifle and the machine-gun, is to ask them to fight the earthquake with pikes, or the tempest with bare hands. They will do it all the less because, having all been drilled, they all know what the want of scientific weapons means. If London were armed and drilled, she could not face adequate batteries on Hampstead and Sydenham, and must perforce submit the moment they are used. As a true civil war means in detail endless local insurrections, this change of itself diminishes the possibility of its occurrence, as does also the dependence of the majority of urban adults upon wages, which stop at once when disorder begins. Still, while fully recognising the power of these influences, we must ascr14■o something also to the " progress of society," to the habit of yielding to an adverse ballot, and to the growth of the understanding that a mass-vote, if only fairly taken, whether by a General Election, or a plebiscite, or a " refer- ence " on the special point, is the accepted and peaceful method of displaying irresistible force. That force has in many cases—in almost all moral cases—no more right to rule than a conquering army has ; but still, it has as much, and is as irresistible. It has, too, the additional weight that in a majority of cases the people have a right to manage their own affairs, and that the right to manage them includes of necessity the right to make mistakes. A sincere deine- crat must, we think, detest as well as despise General Boulanger's inordinate pretensions ; but no sincere democrat can deny that if the electors of France choose to be ruled by one representative instead of five hundred, they arc within their right. And no one, whatever his politics, who understands what civil war is, can doubt that for General Boulanger to be elected by vote instead of after a shower of bullets, is an advance, however short a one, in positive civilisation. The appeal may really be to force in either case, but the mass-vote is an application of force under regulations which protect humanity from much and long._ continued suffering.
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