The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
of the conflict one would have thought that even your politician must
acquire some judgment from so much vivid and informing experience. Not
a bit of it! It went off him like so much water off a duck’s back, and
you may hear him to-day, six years after the Armistice, peddling the
same inanities as he peddled in 1913.
The second thing I noticed was the alarming difference between
politicians and the soldiers in the sense of reality. I say alarming
because, after the war, Europe, instead of continuing the rule of
soldiers as it should have done, returned to its vomit; and the
miserable parliamentary figures of the old degraded day put on again
costume and grease-paint, filed back upon the stage, and began to
play their old antics as though nothing had happened. The French, who
ought to know better (for they have found parliaments out), behaved
disgracefully in this matter. You may take up any French newspaper
to-day, and find yourself appalled with the recurrence of such names
as Caillaux, Briand, Herriot, Loucheur, who ought never to have been
mentioned again after such an experience as the Great War.
Italy has done better: but only under the stress of a threatened
dissolution. Society in Italy had to reach the point of acute peril
before that reaction took place which saved the country; but what
a fine reaction it was, not only in its virtues, but, what is more
important, in its spirit! What a strong critical sense Italy has shown!
What intelligence in rejection of sophistry, and what virility in
execution! May it last! But will it last? Even in Italy?
Everything good in this world is doomed to perish, and I cannot tell
how long this excellent experiment will stand, or whether it will take
firm root, and make Italy all that it desires to be, and all that
Italy should be—seeing the strength of the blood, the industry, the
intelligence, and the warmth of all that people. But, at any rate, it
is good to visit a society still under such an impulse, and to feel
that, in one section of Europe at least, things are going well.
I made a sort of pilgrimage to see Mussolini, the head of the movement,
and I wrote about him for the Americans. I had the honour of a long
conversation with him alone, discovering and receiving his judgments.
What a contrast with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian!
What a sense of decision, of sincerity, of serving the nation, and
of serving it towards a known end with a definite will! Meeting this
man after talking to the parliamentarians in other countries was like
meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon
with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean
village after compulsory draughts of marsh water in the mosses of the
moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.
One thing, however, struck me in his comments which was, as I thought,
extreme and ill-founded; and that was his complete contempt for all
majorities. Mussolini laid it down to me that the conception of
majority government is as ridiculous as it is immoral, and should be
fiercely combated as a lie and an evil _in itself_. I do not agree; it
seems to me that the rational basis of majority government stands firm
upon certain conditions.
The right of a majority to rule is, indeed, an absurd doctrine as
we hear it commonly stated. I do not mean the doctrine of majority
government under what is called ‘the representative system,’ for that
is not majority government at all: it is mere oligarchy in the hands
of an intriguing caucus, and perhaps as base a form of oligarchy as
mankind has ever tolerated. I mean real majority government; the
reference of a question to the body of the governed, and the taking
of a decision according to the superior number of votes recorded on
the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ side. Such a test used as a universal decider is
ridiculous. What would a majority vote do with bimetallism, or the
appointment of admirals? But there are conditions in which a decision
by majority is just, and they are surely these:
(1) When the question arises from a homogeneous community; (2) when
there is an active popular demand for its settlement; (3) when the
matter under discussion is reasonably familiar to all; (4) when it
concerns all, or nearly all, directly, and in much the same degree; (5)
when the majority is substantial.
You must be dealing with a homogeneous community—for in one made up of
various races, or fundamentally different religions, a majority means
nothing towards a decision. It is a mere affirmation of discord. You
must have a real and popular demand for a decision, and it must proceed
from the people themselves: not from a body claiming the right to frame
the question: a vote on matters of no popular interest—as a vote on
Welsh disestablishment in North London, or on mining regulations in
Brighton—is a manifest abuse. Even on a burning matter, discussed
by, known to, and affecting all, no small majority can possibly be
decisive, or make an accord—for a half is not the general will. But
when a community of one stuff votes by a large majority in favour of
something they both understand and desire, and that something close to
their own lives, then that majority is of true effect.
Under those conditions the moral argument for majority government
seems to me unanswerable, for under those conditions you have the will
of the community really expressed by the majority. Now the community
is ultimately sovereign; for if the community be not sovereign, what
else can claim sovereignty? It is the old dilemma of Suarez, the great
Jesuit doctrine, as absolutely secure as a mathematical conclusion;
ultimately, the community is sovereign. But unless these conditions are
present, and unless all of them are present, the majority is _not_ the
community, and to call it so is either a delusion or a trick. It is
always immoral, usually fatuous, and occasionally disastrous.
By what right shall fifty-one men out of a hundred, who have no
particular taste for the drinking of tea, who, upon the whole, dislike
it, but not earnestly, forbid the other forty-nine to drink tea, when
those forty-nine feel tea-drinking to be a very necessity of their
lives? For what reason shall fifty-one men—of whom perhaps only one
knows anything upon the subject—outvote forty-nine—of whom perhaps
five know something of the subject? decide (for instance) upon the
annexation of an Asian islet? How can you trust fifty-one white men
to legislate for forty-nine black men, or, to put it more strongly,
fifty-one black men to legislate for forty-nine white? Who does not
know that in such a case only organised force could decide?
Mussolini’s reaction (as the Americans would call it) was, I think,
against the ludicrous abuse of the doctrine of majority, which has
brought Europe to its present pass; for there is nothing so wicked or
so senseless or so degrading but a majority (to the honour of our race
it is generally a sham majority) can be quoted in its favour.
There is a very deplorable instance of this to-day in French politics.
A small but active caucus in France hates the Christian religion. Its
members are afraid to make a frontal attack on that religion, because
such action would endanger their skins, but they will take any measures
which will, they think, indirectly weaken its influence. Particularly
do they desire to restrain the activity of the religious orders, and,
so far as they can, to prevent those orders from having any corporate
existence at all. The mass of the people are, in varying degrees,
attached both to their traditional religion and to the more popular and
active forms of the monastic institution: that is, the teaching and
nursing religious orders. The contemplative orders they do not come
in touch with. Most men and women in the nation would leave things
alone, and that with a bias towards religion. Very many are almost
indifferent. More, though preferring to go on as their forefathers
went on, do not put it—religion—in the forefront of their lives.
Many more think it of some importance, but are far more actively
concerned with their material interests. A small body, quite as small,
perhaps, as the anti-Christian caucus on the other side, are active
in defence of religion. After a wearisome, meaningless rite of making
marks on bits of paper, the said rite (confused by a hundred legal and
personal interests, and conducted by the wire-pulling inherent in all
such performances) throws up some five or six hundred members of a
parliament, nearly all of them intriguers moved by a petty appetite for
money or for notoriety, or both. Of these it may be that fifty-five out
of the hundred follow the anti-Christian caucus, and look to it for
salaries and jobs, forty-five are organised on the other side. Or the
numbers may be the other way. When the fifty-five turn up on one side,
the whole vast organisation of the religious orders in France (most of
which are beneficent, the rest certainly doing no harm) is suddenly
imperilled and shaken; its members are exiled, its goods are stolen and
spent riotously by the lowest sort of politicians and their hangers-on,
its accumulation of wealth dissipated and destroyed. Then another
chance majority comes along in four years, and offers a restoration
which can but only be most precarious: a restoration of their natural
rights to these infamously (and ridiculously) harassed men and women,
but a restoration liable to be ruined in another four years.
After the war there happened to be in the French Parliament a vague
uncertain majority more or less pledged to traditional things. The
politicians most prominent in that gang approached the Carthusians
who had been exiled, and had taken up a new home in Tarragona, and
offered them a chance of returning to the Grande Chartreuse. These
exiles very wisely refused, for they said: ‘How do we know that
after all the expenditure of reëstablishing ourselves in our ancient
foundation—venerable for centuries, peaceable, remote—we may not at
your next “elections,” as you call them, find ourselves turned out?’
They were very wise: but what a commentary upon a system of government!
Think of it! Here is a great House with its roots right back in the
beginnings of the Middle Ages, with its oaken traditions, its reserves
of strength available for itself and all men; doing nothing which
could be construed as perilous under any system of common morals,
either to the State or to any individual. Merely because a clique of
anti-Christians hates them, this doctrine of artificial majorities can
turn the whole community out of doors at a moment’s notice, exile its
members, loot its fortune.
Nor let it be said that these things happen only in countries like
France, to which the disease of parliaments is unnatural and of
alien importation; they happen in one form or another wherever the
parliamentary fraud is at work. In countries which have lost dogmatic
religion and have only vague opinion left, the parliamentary evil
takes another form, that of a perpetual restriction against common
liberties; or it takes the form of putting finance secretly within
the power of inferior men, who fill their pockets at the expense
of the commonwealth; or it takes the form of treason in time of
war—attempting to make peace with the enemy behind the back of the
people and their allies. Or it takes the form of saving the enemy after
his defeat. There is no form of parliamentary activity which is not
deplorable, save in aristocracies.
For, in aristocracies, which are, of their nature, governments by a
clique, a parliament—which is a clique—can be normal and natural. In
communities based on the idea of equality and of action by the public
will they are cancers, under which such nations always sicken and may
die.