A Preface to Politics | Page 6

some abstract idea of justice
or liberty. These frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an
historical commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to
burst the frame apart. Then a new one is constructed.
Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine
conception of government. It is probably the most important instance
we have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to
human affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking
simply at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world
a more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a
machine which would preserve its balance without the need of taking
human nature into account? What other explanation is there for the
naïve faith of the Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature,
and judiciary; in the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by
balancing it with vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact
that power upsets all mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the
natural leaders seems to have illuminated those historic deliberations.
The Fathers had a rather pale god, they had only a speaking
acquaintance with humanity, so they put their faith in a scaffold, and it
has been part of our national piety to pretend that they succeeded.
They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth
Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The
Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was
constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a
sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As
Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off
against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which
Newton might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism
of the heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of
government suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to
have been a dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the
conservatives of their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual
way of opportunist radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the

fire of their youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt
whether they would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit
of Tom Paine expressed itself in logical formulæ as inflexible to the
pace of life as did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant
which burrows beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and
reactionary to the spiritual habits of a period.
If you look into the early utopias of Fourier and Saint-Simon, or better
still into the early trade unions, this same faith that a government can
be made to work mechanically is predominant everywhere. All the
devices of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are
simply attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not
long stay diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies
that they worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some
arrangement, hoping against experience that a government freed from
human nature will automatically produce human benefits. To-day
within the Socialist Party there is perhaps the greatest surviving
example of the desire to offset natural leadership by artificial
contrivance. It is an article of faith among orthodox socialists that
personalities do not count, and I sincerely believe I am not
exaggerating the case when I say that their ideal of government is like
Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the acting is to be done by a row of
supermarionettes. There is a myth among socialists to which all are
expected to subscribe, that initiative springs anonymously out of the
mass of the people,--that there are no "leaders," that the conspicuous
figures are no more influential than the figurehead on the prow of a
ship.
This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves
a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of
humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all
individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to
blot out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That
there is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it
briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not
justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we
distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent

sovereign.
Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances.
Because it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty
faith that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life
these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do