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Title: Democratic Times Author: Dora Marsden Date: 1914 Language: en Topics: egoism, democracy, The Egoist Source: Retrieved on 09/26/2021 from https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr520316/ Notes: Originally published in The Egoist Volume I Number 7 (April 1, 1914). Title is unofficial and derived from the text.
It will be quite clear to many persons if we point the sequence out to
them, why in these democratic times an indiscretion is more
discreditable to a man and more embarrassing to his party than the most
staggering of "crimes." In a household where correct conduct is "not to
scandalise these my little ones," the little ones being children, pious
women and men with idealised minds, it would be the role of the devil
himself to speak as the plain blunt person, without regard to the
"doctrine." With his entrance in that household life would thereafter
and for ever be different. Sin would have entered: the frank innocence
would be gone: and the shifty eyes which know evil from good left
behind. And this is exactly what happens in the democratic community
when a governor is indiscreet, His indiscretion undermines his creed,
because it undermines his creed's Assumptions—the pillars upon which the
fabric of democratic society rests.
---
It is not the custom to discuss politicians in The Egoist, or in the
accepted way, their works. Our present unusual course in discussing
Colonel Seely's recent political exploits must be explained by the fact
that Colonel Seely's conduct was just now politically irregular: and
concerning a politician it is not possible to make a more serious
allegation than that. To be regular is the first and last word of a
politician's creed; he may traverse no least convention without custom's
warrant: nor raise the least whisper of inquiry into current and popular
dicta. To act otherwise is, politically, to reach the giddiest pinnacle
of the immoral at a bound. Therefore Colonel Seely, politically
speaking, at this moment commands the fascinating regard an ordinary
person would turn upon a Dr. Crippen or a Jack-the-Ripper.
---
He has questioned a democratic Assumption, and this being a democratic
age a democratic Assumption is Sacred. That his conduct has serious
consequences from the point of view of democrats, all—his friends and
foes alike—will readily allow. They agree that democratic stability is
threatened, that the democratic basis of society is being undermined.
Naturally enough and obviously to be expected. If there be removed only
one prop of a four-legged bench there can be no surprise if the board
lists in the direction of the missing leg. How much more then if two
legs; and so forth. No wonder that when a democratic government attacks
two democratic assumptions in the course of ten days or so, the
democrats—the eloquent women, idealistic men, the labour party and the
poor, all these little ones should be scandalised. They are in fact in
imminent danger of falling off their democratic basis, platform,
what-not, and of being shot on to their own feet. Even if their platform
admits of being propped up by some adventitious stump and they are able
to maintain the lofty and erect attitude, it will never be quite the
same after so undignified a scramble. Never the same sense of security,
unquestioned stability, after so nasty a shock. "Doubt, hesitation and
pain, forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, Never glad,
confident morning again."
---
The two legs of the democratic platform which have just become ricketty
with too much unregarding inquiry have both to do with the Army only in
the first instance. In their consequence they involve the entire
democratic community. The first concerns the purely mechanical admixture
of units whose covering label would suggest that it is a single unitary
compound: the Army; the second concerns the recognition of a difference
between the "People" and the "Army": both questions which would never be
raised by an Authority which knew its strong card to be Assumption.
Now the correct democratic assumption is first that the Army is an
abstraction. It is the ultimate instrument for the expression of "The
People's" will. It is highly improper to regard it as a collection of
individuals whether high or low, greater simple. It is the "Means of
Coercion": automatic sequence of the willed intention of the
Representatives of The People, carrying it into effect involuntarily and
of necessity as the nerves and muscles of a healthy person put into
effect their owner's will. It is a "Service": its function is to serve:
"It's not to reason why, but to do—and die" if need be. That is the
"correct" attitude of the Army in the democratic polity: the "Fighting
Arm of the Body politic." Colonel Seely questioning members of this
force whether they are willing to serve and if not willing bidding them
resign, is from the democratic point of view as much in order as a navvy
would be who before scooping up his spadeful puts it to his elbow-joint
whether it means to work or not, and if not, giving it orders to resign.
A highly improper proceeding. If the shovelling is to be done the
elbow-joint has got to work: the navvy does not propose scooping up the
shingle with his brain-pan: and the six hundred gentlemen who "govern"
us do not personally undertake the task of coercing any reluctant
obedience. The annex of a coercing Arm must be attached to the governing
office and must work automatically, so that if three hundred odd
gentlemen of the brand of Mr. Thomas, Mr. John Ward, Mr. Henderson, Mr.
Macdonald and others take their seats in the People's House, they need
merely say to the Wellingtons, Nelsons, Kitcheners, Goughs, and all the
men under these: "Go," and they go; "Come," and they come.
As we have said, this is the first democratic assumption, and it should
never have been put in a position to be riddled: its place is among the
sacred. A veritable scourge for the democratic back is Colonel Seely.
---
Intoxicated by the rashness of his betters no doubt, Mr. John Ward, one
of the Labour Little Ones, hacks into a second leg: another Assumption
upon which the democratic plank rests. He sacrilegiously raises an issue
"The Army versus the People." For the maintenance of the democratic
argument, Mr. Ward must assume that Army and People are One: they are an
Organic Whole, to give the correct phrase. It is highly improper,
irregular, immoral for a democrat to' assume that they are other; he
wars against his own household in allowing even for a moment that they
are two entities capable of existing outside each other as opposing
forces: as the claims of the cart might be pitted against those of the
horse. A true democratic governor must manage to remain on completely
harmonious terms with the Army if he cares for the health of his system.
To raise an issue with it is like raising an issue between the blood and
the blood corpuscles. The one only postulates the other. For consider
what would happen if an issue such as this short-sighted democrat dream
of, could be raised: what would it mean? For the "people'' to deal with
the "Army" it would be compelled merely to secrete from itself
another—Army. It is impossible for a "People" to quarrel with an "Army."
Only an Army can quarrel with an Army. The "people" will be unduly
flattering themselves if they imagine they can quarrel with the "Army."
A rabble headed by a Parliament cannot have a quarrel: their limits
outside "bounce" are talking and making crosses on paper, added to a
little surreptitious "ragging" practised on the non-comprehending. The
fact is that when the shattering of the Unity of the People of which
these democrats made a beginning when they agreed to recognise a
distinction among the People by opposing to it the Army moves on to
completion, both the Army and People will be pulverised into units—a
consummation of affairs which Democracy of all forms of Authority will
be the most loth to recognise. There will be no entity—"The People":
only people; no Army—only soldiers, and quarrels will continue to be
settled just as the soldiers—the fighters—care to settle them. Above all
forms of government Democracy has been contemptible because its
exponents have endeavoured to instil a belief that those of the "people"
who are not soldiers can remain non-fighters and retain regard. It has
worked on the credulous silliness and faint-heartedness of the "people"
to persuade them they are "governed" but only with their own consent: it
knows their stupidity goes to such lengths that it would be
intelligence's labour lost to explain to them the little omission
whereby the obtaining of their consent is overlooked. The lot of them
are asked to pick between certain Joneses and Browns, certain Smiths and
Robinsons, who ostensibly are to govern them willy-nilly, though in
reality these governors when chosen could scarcely present a creditable
battalion amongst them: these governors of the governed are in turn
governed by those who have the power to resist and coerce them.
When the so-called governors are faced with such a resistance,
government of the people, by the people, for the people, reveals itself
in a jingling incantation, serviceable only to put the already too, too
small intelligence of the people under arrest. They are told they are
governed "democratically": for some strange reason, to put it like that
flatters them: presumably and ludicrously enough it gives them an
impression of equality with their superiors. The pride which recognises
its own limits and the intelligence which knows itself governed by these
is beyond them. They try to claim in a clasp of equality the hand which
obviously to any not hypnotised by flattery stretches out towards them
to cuff them into doing its bidding. They flatter themselves "they
submit to 'law' which is equal for all and which is voluntarily made and
voluntarily accepted." That the so-called laws which their elected
mannikins put into currency, are, according to the measure of their
competence, a restraint, a burden or a command; a bagatelle, an
irrelevance, something to mock at, break, or ignore according to their
power, is beyond their comprehension. Democrats tell them "All are equal
before the law" and they are a democrat, therefore things must be so and
in spite of evidence.
It is this oppressed, powerless, yet credulous host "The People" which
in the name of democracy flatters itself it is going to govern. Colonel
Seely, inadvertently no doubt, has just been the means of producing some
exquisite fun out of the indignation of the democrats which rage in the
name of People and Parliament. Mr. Ward and other stalwarts of the
People sound for all the world like the frog in the fable whom
misleading flatterers had led to believe she was the Queen of Song.
"Shall not 'The People' remain paramount?" How "shall" they "remain"
what they have never been? If in order to trade upon the fact that the
people are gullible it has served many persons' purposes, to tell them
so, their misinformation does not alter the actual relation one iota:
comfortable, shiftless, timid, the "People," the "Masses" remain what
they have always been—the servants of those who are, or who are
connected with those, sufficiently acute to understand their points.
That there is one law for the rich and another law for the poor is a
very inadequate way of putting the matter: there is a law for each man
individually, be he rich or poor, which is the resultant of all his
powers: his strength, charm, skill, intelligence, daring: the sum of his
total worth and what it secures is a man's just dues.
If then democrats are rash enough to drag into the arena of discussion
the mixed bundles labelled Army and People, scrutiny of their contents
is likely to reveal what their credulity least expects. Consider the
Army bundle for a first instance. Unfortunately for democracy, its main
structure is built up of men: not screws and pulleys which the working
of a lever will set in motion. Second, being so, it is composed of men
having different qualities: men who are "soldiers" and men who are
"people": men who can fight and who dare to fight and relish it: and men
of the people who have so little fight in them that having failed to
hold their own among the civilians outside its ranks have drifted into
the Army in preference to the workhouse and prison. The Army comprises
the cream of an order which is very well able to fight for itself and
the dregs of an order which long ago has become so removed from reality
that it has ceased to understand the necessity for competent
self-defence. At a juncture of importance they are likely to act after
their kind: the acknowledgment that they were so likely was Colonel
Seely's indiscretion: he should have remembered that the democrats'
strong card is assumption: he should have assumed that officers would
act like democrats: that they would behave as the "ranks" can safely be
relied upon to behave: as automata: obeying promptly as by the reflex
action of an involuntary nerve. The democrat Mr. Ward with a sob in his
throat pointed out how the ranks, noble and heroic, would shoot down
Boers with whom they were in complete sympathy merely at the word of
command: how they would turn their rifles on their whilom pals: workers
in distress. Of course they would: having no judgment of their own they
would shoot down their own mothers if the nod were given them. It is the
difference, Mr. Ward, between a democrat and the other thing.
---
And Mr. Thomas, the secretary of the Railway Servants' Union, was so
stirred out of the democratic assumption by the spectacle of failure in
the automatic obedience of officers to the orders of the House of Talk
as to broach the possibility of suggesting to his union that they should
spend the half million they have saved up, not on a week's holiday
called a "Strike," but—incredible and horrible to a democrat—on rifles.
Of course he won't. He would swoon at the image of a respectable
working-man holding a rifle: but his own small and private
assumption—that to carry his suggestion into effect would be
objectionable to the people whom his wild words were meant to affect, is
worth noting. Mr. Ward imagines that he and his like would be more
offensive as rivals in a position to command respect than they are at
present in their position of smug ineffectualness, arrogant yet
impotent, heads addled and swollen with demagogues' flattery, hands
innocent of all evidence of substantiation. We believe he makes a
mistake. It is not the prospect that they may be the means of increased
might to the feeble which makes the demagogues detestable: it is the
offensive mixture of oil and bounce which endeavours by scoring a verbal
advantage in the terms of current piety to effect a readjustment of
powers which they would never dream of putting to the test of genuine
comparison.
It is the making Claim by Right to that which they are incapable of
securing by Might: the attempt to carry through the exchange by shouting
and pious incantation which makes the democratic advocacy offensive. The
democrats are sweedlers: from no point of view to be recognised as on a
level of estimable equality with highway robbers who are gentlemen by
comparison.
---
Supposing then for the moment that through a misunderstanding the
Ward-Thomases of the community should slide into the position of the
intelligent, and advise the "arming" of their invertebrate unions. What
then? Anarchy and the subversion of Society? Pas du tout, messieurs. The
structure which threatens to come rattling down about their ears is not
"Society" but a particular Conception of Society. We are in sight of the
break-up of a Verbal System—not of the loosening of the ties of
affection and common-sense as between men and men. Society itself is not
based on any Conception whatsoever, it is based on the inborn
predilections and instincts of individuals. When these instincts break
through the overlying Verbiage and reveal themselves for what they are
the "Stability of Society" is unaffected. For whatever these instincts
are Society is and will be. That their character confounds the
authenticity of some wordy interpretation of these instincts affects the
stability of Society as little as an accidental error in the set of the
angle of the axis in a pedagogue's globe would affect the sequence of
the seasons. Summer will follow Spring although his little model make
the poles lie on the equator. And human nature will get on as well when
the blight of obedience has been chased from the miners' and
railwaymen's unions and the rank-and-file of the Army, as well as from
the sensitive ranks of the officers: even let us hope—a jolly sight
better. When the assumption that we all obey is shattered, the sense of
responsibility for self-defence returns, and a nerveless "People" will
be galvanised into an Army, a consummation greatly to be desired by all
save doctrinaire non-combatants, and even these suspicious-looking
gentry would be forced into a position which would enable them to clear
themselves of the charge of cant. To be non-combatants in a community
which claims to have its combats waged by an arm worked by an
involuntary nerve can be called a stoicism only by supererogation: its
virtue is after the event: though doubtless in a military community they
would be tolerated in a protected area as a luxury. Their desire not to
fight would be defended by others fighting to make its fulfilment
possible: even as at present: only their smug aspect might be removed.
---
The democratic armoury is of course not exhausted when "Society in
Danger" fails to set things in a blaze. There is still "The horror of
Civil War." Yet there is much to be said in favour of a gala-performance
of 'Civil War. A depressing Civil War is always with us, with its
depressing effect due to its drab, furtive, hugger-mugger manner. No
guns, no bands, no uniforms, swords, excitements, adventures, or
thrilling bravery. Just a sordid, mean pressure: hunger, monotony,
dreariness, squalor, filth, bailiffs, policemen, judges, jailors and
hangsmen. Just for the tinsel on it there is much to be said for Civil
War. Moreover Civil War would tend to put all questions to a trial of
strength, and when such a test rises uppermost, even the feeblest must
look to his resources. Moreover if existent moral conduct has done its
hypnotic work: men of the poorer sort are dazed by the constant keeping
in tune with the existent moral incantations. "Thou shalt not steal,"
good enough on the lips of rich men, makes tragedy on those of the poor.
Civil War, with its different and far healthier proprietary "morality,"
would trouble the orderly waters, and to fish in them would come easier
for a mechanised people than "fishing" is in face of an order malignant
but nevertheless mesmeric. Civil War Would furnish a springing board for
the "poor" to open up new "lines" of "order." There are indeed more
things to be made out in favour of Civil War than for the bastard
variety which is being waged now. It would break lightly into the
established order of things, which has too thoroughly in the minds of
those who submit to it, assumed the immutable character of the
progression of the sun and the stars.
---
This Carson campaign capped by the Seely incident and the dissolution of
assumptions which this last puts into the melting-pot is going to prove
the high-water mark of modern democracy. In England since Disraeli's
time, the dominant classes have allowed the anti-democratic argument to
go by default: no doubt because they lacked the brains to establish it.
Since, with one name or another—Tory-democrats, Conservative Working-men
— innocuous flirtations with popular democracy have been going on; it
has been necessary for the 'classes' to wait until opportunity made it
possible for their instinct to instruct their intellect. Truculent
temper is now explaining to a dilatory intellect why democracy won't
wash. It will not now take long for them to get the hang of the
argument: to see through the windy wordy business: this latter-day Cult
of Humanity, the Rights of Man and all that is made to go with them. By
challenging the conception of the Unity of the People—or rather by
egging the government on to make the challenge —the supporters of Ulster
resistance have snipped the one verbal thread which, broken, lets the
entire democratic creed run down like a broken chain-stitch. In this
common Unity, the people are One and Equal: rendering an equal obedience
and receiving equal rights. Split the Unity, question the obedience and
you disperse the Equality. With "Unity" questioned the criterion
vanishes: the supreme dispenser of favours is confronted with a rival:
the seat of Authority is confused and Rights are the vainest of things
when Authority is called in question, Rights, Equality, Obedience,
Unity, these four are the pillars of democracy. They are bound up in
this last Unity; and who now seriously discusses Unity? Who seriously
discusses Democracy? None. It is a dead issue. A little picturesque
"strongman" play will doubtless be enough to divert the vagrant
attention of the mob and so save the government and the politicians'
salaries: but for democracy itself a quiet conversational scrutiny—far
removed from oratory—will already have been begun: and before it has
gone far modern democracy will have found its place in the list of
Forgotten Causes.