BOOKS.
THE LIMITS OF PURE DEMOCRACY.* Mn. MALLOCK'S very able and interesting book on the nature and limits of pure democracy would have been welcome at any time, but it is doubly welcome at this moment, when masses of men in every European country are perplexed by sophistries and when the largest country of all is trying to ruin itself by practising Socialist principles. Mr. Mallock tells us that his book was nearly finished before the Russian Revolution with its amazing developments. supplied a new set of facts to confirm his philosophic conclusions. He has, however, been able to clinch his argument with the Russian evidence, as furnished in particular by the well-known English Socialist Mr. A. M. Thompson last summer. The latest Bolshevik programme, read to the Russian Constituent Assembly before that Assembly with its anti-Bolshevik majority was dissolved by violence in a curiously undemocratic manner, proclaimed as its object the " destruction of the parasitic classes," and the arming of the workers alone " to secure to the working masses all the fullness of power and to eliminate all possibility of re-establishing the power of exploiters." Mr. Mallock's book might serve as a commentary on that text, which condenses into a phrase the dense clouds of rhetoric and sentiment emitted by Socialists in all countries through many a long year since the days of Marx. With democracy as a principle of government Mr. Mallock has no quarrel. He is far too acute a thinker not to see that the democratic rule, commonly so called, which prevails in all the Allied countries is the only possible rule for the future, and that the Prussian autocracy which we are fighting is a dangerous anachronism. But democracy, like every other human institution, has its limitations, and it is with these that the author is concerned.
In regard to political democracy, Mr. Mallock has no difficulty in showing that the resonant phrases in current use about govern- ment by the will of the people do not bear close analysis. The will of the people can be, and is, expressed in regard to fundamental questions, such as the preservation of order, or momentary questions, such as the declaration of war against Germany. But there is no general will in respect of temperamental questions, such as Prohibition, or in respect of the many composite problems, such as Free Trade or anti-aircraft defence, which occupy most of the time of a Government. To form the will of the Many on matters such as these is the task of the Few, by means of the " Art of Political Incendiarism," or the " Art of Political Stimulation," or the " Art of Popular Exposition." That is to say, political democracy involves the co-existence of a political oligarchy, without which it would dissolve into chaos. " Oligarchs need not be men dis- tinguished by wealth or station, or by any of the advantages possessed by a small class only. The officials of a trade union, who order a strike or prohibit it, may be oligarchs just as truly as a senate of hereditary peers or any elected chamber packed with aristocratic landlords." Indeed, the Labour movement everywhere is markedly oligarchical in character, and Marx and Lassalle, as Mr. Mallock reminds us, were veritable autocrats in the direction of the Socialist Party. Bakunin, the Russian Anarchist who announced that ".the chariot of revolution was rolling, and gnashing its teeth as it rolled," held that the manual labourers should not be allowed- to vote on the affairs of his party. M. Lenin seems to take a similar view. There is, indeed,
• The limite of Pure Democracy, By W. H. Mao& London : Chapman and Rah. Ws. net.)
a general agreement that in the modern complex State the Many must be guided by the Few in determining all but the simple questions which every one can understand. Mr. Mallock proceeds to inquire whether the same principle does not hold good in industrial and social life. The theory of industrial democracy is, of course, based on the Marxian doctrine that all economic wealth is the product of manual labour, that all manual labour is of equal value, and that the employers or capitalists are mere parasites who, as the Bolsheviks propose, can be eliminated without affecting industry itself. This theory, as Mr. Mallock shows, might apply to primitive man in a lake-village, or even, with modifications, to the slave labour of ancient Rome, but it is wholly untrue as applied to the modern industrial *odd. • The Industrial Revolution, with the application of machinery to industry and the rise of vast factories employing thousands of workers, was not carried out by the manual labourer, but was the outcome of intellectual effort such as had never before been exerted on manufactures. The more intelligent modern Socialists have admitted that • the Few, with " a natural monopoly of industrial or business ability," have transformed industry, and have tried to explain the fact away by a vague reference to society. They have clouded the issue to further their demand for a redistribution of the products of industry. The Socialist hypothesis is that " the rich," over and above the income due to their ability, take an " enormous " share of the products of the workers' toil. Mr. Mallock is at pains to show from irrefutable statistics, such as the British Census of Production and American returns, that this often-repeated assertion is wholly untrue. In 1907 the British national income was about 2,100 millions, and of this wages, salaries, and professional earnings amounted to 1,700 millions, wages alone equalling 1,300 millions. Half the remaining 400 millions, from stocks, shares, and rents, had been earned and saved by the owners, an& only about 200 millions had been inherited. American statistics of 1910 showed that there, as well as here, incomes under £500 made up three-fourths of the whole national income, and that the total income of the men with over £5,000 a year did not exceed from six to eight per cent. of the national income :- " A ' recovery by the people ' at the beginning of the twentieth century of all incomes which exceed £1,000 per head would have meant for the American workman a rise in wages at the rate of a penny-halfpenny in the shilling, and would have meant for his British comrade a rise of about a farthing less."
Mr. Mallock then shows that the vast increase of the national income from £20 per head in 1801 to £47 per head in 1907 was due to changes in the process of production effected by the intelligent Few. But for these changes, our national income would be 900 millions, instead of 2,100 millions. The balance of 1,050 millions, deducting interest on foreign investments, has in fact been produced by a very small minority ; the efficiency of the ordinary unskilled labourer is very much what it has always been in other ages, and cannot have improved in the past century. " The Mind of the larger employers was the primary producer of an income of some 1,050 million pounds, added to an income which would otherwise have been 900 millions only." The question arises, why then does Mind content itself with only 250 millions, or less than a fourth of the extra income gained by its efforts ? Mr. Mallock answers that the directing mental workers have recognized the assistance of their subordinate mental workers, who have an income of 180 millions, and have largely increased the pay of the manual workers irepro - portion to their ability, so that manual labour took 620 millions of the extra income due primarily to Mind. These facts, which we have not space to elucidate fully, dispose of the Marxian theory, as educated Socialists admit. Mr. Mallock then follows up the alternative doctrine of Social, as opposed to Industrial, Democracy, with its insistence on the rights of man, as a human being, to a full share of all that is produced, whether he has worked or not. This doctrine has been submitted to experiment in at least eighty cases, from the Shakers of 1774 down to Lane's " New Australia " and Cosine in Paraguay, and it has failed everywhere, as it will fail in Russia, because it is.based on an inversion of the facts of human nature, and assumes in every citizen an altruism that is so incredible as to be absurd.
Mr. Mallock is not content with negative criticism. The best and most suggestive chapters of his book are those in which he en- deavours to extract the truth latent in the philosophy of economic. discontent. He defines the ideal minimum wage, which would pro- mote the industrial security that both employers and employed really desire. The " right to work," as Mill pointed out, can be recognized in full only by a State which is empowered to limit the number of the workers. Mr. Mallock devotes a special chapter to " The Right to Respect "—the right of every man, however poor, to be treated with courtesy and consideration by his employer or his employer's foreman, instead of being regarded as a mere item in a mass of labour. The demand for " The Right to Rise " or for equality, of opportunity—Napoleon's " career open to talent "- leads Mr. Mallock to emphasize the well-known fact, illustrated anew every day, that the Trade Unionists who call for democratic equality are also the first to insist on their own privileges as skilled workmen. No sane man would wish to put obstacles in the way of the poorest lad whose genius impels him upward. Mr. Mallock then proceeds to elaborate his rational economic system, based of course on the principle that every one must do his best. " All the capital of the world might be divided in equal shares amongst everybody ; but if the human race at large did no work for a week, everybody at the end of a week would be either dead or dying." That is an immutable law which not even Bolsheviks can alter. " All modern wealth, in proportion as it is great, is essentially arti- ficial and precarious," especially in a complex industrial nation like our own. Mr. Mallock urges that much of the vague and senti- mental unrest which disturbs society is the product of ignorance and false teaching, and might be dissipated by a correct popular education, such as, we may add, his own admirable book would afford. The stupid fallacies of Marx and Henry George have been swallowed by countless honest folk, who were attracted by the clever and dogmatic presentation of doctrines which will not bear analysis. And if the appeal to reason does not suffice, the teaching of experience—such as the awful object-lesson that we see in Russia —must be left to have its effect. Mr. Mallock's excellent work, thoughtful, temperate, and witty, demonstrates convincingly that class warfare, or revolution against the bourgeoisie, the " con- trolling persons," or the " exploiters," as they are variously termed, must be fatal to the Many as well as to the Few. " Democracy only knows itself through the co-operation of oligarchy." The interests of employers and employed, of the intellectual class and those who work with their hands, are really identical, and unless all classes co-operate harmoniously, the community cannot prosper.
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