Towards the Great Peace | Page 6

the
personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of the

United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.
The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes
with it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically
different in their antecedents, their protagonists, their modes of
operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the
creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of the
old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same milieu that was
responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain of
the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and
finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at
the expense of the great mass of their blood-brothers, others of the
same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting
in new schemes, of government, which would take all power away
from the class that had hitherto exercised it and fix it firmly in the
hands of the emancipated proletariat. This new model was called then,
and is called now, democracy. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish
between democracy of theory and democracy of method. Perhaps I
should have used a more lucid nomenclature if I had simply
distinguished between republicanism and democracy, for this is what it
amounts to. The former is as old as man, and is part of the "passion for
perfection" that characterizes all crescent society, and is indeed the
chief difference between brute and human nature; it means the
guaranteeing of justice, and may be described as consisting of abolition
of privilege, equality of opportunity, and utilization of ability.
Democracy of method consists in a variable and uncertain sequence of
devices which are supposed to achieve the democracy of ideal, but as a
matter of fact have thus far usually worked in the opposite direction.
The activity of this movement synchronizes with the pressing upward
of the "the masses" through the dissolving crust of "the classes," and
represents their contribution to the science of political philosophy, as
the contribution of the latter is current "political economy."
It will be perceived that the reaction of the new social force in the case
of industrial organization is fundamentally opposed to that which
occurred in the political sphere. The one is working steadily towards an
autocratic imperialism and the "servile state," the other towards the
fluctuating, incoherent control of the making and administering of laws
by the untrained, the uncultivated, and the generally unfit, the issue of

which is anarchy. The industrial-commercial-financial oligarchy that
dominated society for the century preceding the Great War is the result
of the first; Russia, today, is an exemplar of the second. The working
out of these two great devices of the new force released by the
destructive processes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, simultaneously though in apparent opposition, explains why,
when the war broke out, imperialism and democracy synchronized so
exactly: on the one hand, imperial states, industry, commerce, and
finance; on the other, a swiftly accelerating democratic system that was
at the same time the effective means whereby the dominant imperialism
worked, and the omnipresent and increasing threat to its further
continuance.
A full century elapsed before victory became secure, or even proximate.
Republicanism rapidly extended itself to all the governments of
western Europe, but it could not maintain itself in its primal integrity.
Sooner here, later there, it surrendered to the financial, industrial,
commercial forces that were taking over the control and direction of
society, becoming partners with them and following their aims,
conniving at their schemes, and sharing in their ever-increasing profits.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century these supposedly
"free" governments had become as identified with "special privilege,"
and as widely severed from the people as a whole, as the autocratic
governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they
failed consistently to match them in effectiveness, energy and
efficiency of operation.
For this latter condition democracy was measurably responsible. For
fifty years it had been slowly filtering into the moribund republican
system until at last, during the same first decade of the present century,
it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it,
whatever its outward form, whether constitutional monarchy, or
republic, essentially democratic. So government became shifty,
opportunist, incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist,
beyond a certain point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat
to destroy, not alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the
very government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and
organized and administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very
fabric of society itself.

Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social
force were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical
justification