The Rise of the Democracy
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THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRACY
by
JOSEPH CLAYTON
Author of "Leaders of the People" "Bishops as Legislators," etc. etc.
With Eight Full-Page Plates
Cassell and Company, Ltd.
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1911
All Rights Reserved
[Illustration: KING JOHN GRANTING MAGNA CHARTA
From the Fresco in the Royal Exchange, by Ernest Normand.
_By permission of Messrs. S. Hildesheimer & Co., Ltd._]
PREFACE
This short account of the rise of political democracy is necessarily but an
outline of the matter, and while it is not easy to define the exact limits,
there is no difficulty in noting omissions. For instance, there is scarcely
any reference to the work of poets or pamphleteers. John Ball's rhyming
letters are quoted, but not the poems of Langland, and the political songs
of the Middle Ages are hardly mentioned. The host of political pamphleteers
in the seventeenth century are excluded, with the exception of Lilburne and
Winstanley, whose work deserves better treatment from posterity than it
received from contemporaries. Defoe's vigorous services for the Whigs are
unnoticed, and the democratic note in much of the poetry of Burns, Blake,
Byron and Shelley is left unconsidered, and the influence of these poets
undiscussed. The anti-Corn Law rhymes of Ebenezer Eliot, and the Chartist
songs of Ernest Jones were notable inspirations in their day, and in our
own times Walt Whitman and Mr. Edward Carpenter have been the chief singers
of democracy. But a whole volume at least might be written on the part the
pen has played in the struggle towards democracy.
Again, there is no mention of Ireland in this short sketch. A Nationalist
movement is not necessarily a democratic movement, and the Irish
Nationalist Party includes men of very various political opinions, whose
single point of agreement is the demand for Home Rule. In India and Egypt
the agitation is for representative institutions. Ireland might, or might
not, become a democracy under Home Rule--who can say?
The aim of the present writer has been to trace the travelled road of the
English people towards democracy, and to point out certain landmarks on
that road, in the hope that readers may be turned to examine more closely
for themselves the journey taken. For the long march teems with adventure
and spirited enterprise; and, noting mistakes and failures in the past, we
may surely and wisely, and yet with greater daring and finer courage,
pursue the road, not unmindful of the charge committed to us in the
centuries left behind.
J.C.
HAMPSTEAD,
_September, 1911._
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The British Influence--"Government of the People, by the People, for the
People"--The Foundations of Democracy--British Democracy Experimental not
Doctrinaire--Education to Democracy
CHAPTER I
THE EARLY STRUGGLES AGAINST THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWN
The Great Churchmen--Archbishop Anselm and Norman Autocracy--Thomas a
Becket and Henry II.--Stephen Langton and John--The Great Charter
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATION
Democracy and Representative Government--Representative Theory First found
in Ecclesiastical Assemblies--The Misrule of Henry III.--Simon of Montfort,
Leader of the National Party--Edward I.'s Model Parliament, 1295--The
Nobility Predominant in Parliament--The Medieval National Assemblies--The
Electors of the Middle Ages--Payment of Parliamentary Representatives--The
Political Position of Women in the Middle Ages--No Theory of Democracy in
the Middle Ages
CHAPTER III
POPULAR INSURRECTION IN ENGLAND
General Results of Popular Risings--William FitzOsbert, 1196--The Peasant
Revolt and its Leaders, 1381--Jack Cade, Captain of Kent, 1450--The Norfolk
Rising under Ket, 1549
CHAPTER IV
THE STRUGGLE RENEWED AGAINST THE CROWN
Parliament under the Tudors--Victory of Parliament over the Stuarts--The
Democratic Protest: Lilburne--Winstanley and "The Diggers"--The Restoration
CHAPTER V
CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT--ARISTOCRACY TRIUMPHANT
Government by Aristocrats--Civil and Religious Liberty--Growth of Cabinet
Rule--Walpole's rule--The Change in the House of Lords--"Wilkes and
Liberty"
CHAPTER VI
THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA
The Witness of the Middle Ages--The "Social Contract" Theory--Thomas
Hobbes--John Locke--Rousseau and French Revolution--American
Independence--Thomas Paine--Major Cartwright and the "Radical
Reformers"--Thomas Spence--Practical Politics and Democratic Ideals
CHAPTER VII
PARLIAMENTARY REFORM AND THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF THE PEOPLE
The Industrial Revolution--The Need for Parliamentary Reform--Manufacturing
Centres Unrepresented in Parliament--The Passage of the Great Reform
Bill--The Working Class still Unrepresented--Chartism--The Hyde Park
Railings, 1866--Household Suffrage--Working-class Representation in
Parliament--Removal of Religious Disabilities: Catholics, Jews and
Freethinkers--The Enfranchisement of Women
CHAPTER VIII
DEMOCRACY AT WORK
Local Government--The Workman in the House of Commons--Working-class
Leaders in Parliament--The Present Position of the House of Lords--The
Popularity of the Crown--The Democratic Ideals: Socialism and Social
Reform--Land Reform and the Single Tax
CHAPTER IX
THE WORLD-WIDE MOVEMENT: ITS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS
East and West--Tyranny under Democratic Forms--The Obvious Dangers--Party
Government--Bureaucracy--Working-Class Ascendancy--On Behalf of Democracy
LIST OF PLATES
KING JOHN GRANTING MAGNA CHARTA
MAGNA CHARTA--A FACSIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
SIR JOHN ELIOT
JOHN HAMPDEN
THE GORDON RIOTS
THE RIGHT HON. JOHN BURNS, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. D. LLOYD GEORGE, M.P.
THE PASSING OF THE PARLIAMENT BILL IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS
THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRACY
INTRODUCTION
THE BRITISH INFLUENCE
Our business here is to give some plain account of the movement towards
democracy in England, only touching incidentally on the progress of that
movement in other parts of the world. Mainly through British influences the
movement has become world wide; and the desire for national
self-government, and the adoption of the political instruments of
democracy--popular enfranchisement and the rule of elected
representatives--are still the aspirations of civilised man in East and
West. The knowledge that these forms of democratic government have by no
means at all times and in all places proved successful does not check the
movement. As the British Parliament and the British Constitution have in
the past been accepted as a model in countries seeking free political
institutions, so to-day our Parliament and our Constitutional Government
are still quoted with approval and admiration in those lands where these
institutions are yet to be tried.
The rise of democracy, then, is a matter in which Britain is largely
concerned; and this in spite of the fact that in England little respect and
less attention has been paid to the expounders of democracy and their
constructive theories of popular government. The notion that philosophers
are the right persons to manage affairs of state and hold the reins of
Government has always been repugnant to the English people, and, with us,
to call a man "a political theorist" is to contemn him. The English have
not moved towards democracy with any conscious desire for that particular
form of government, and no vision of a perfect State or an ideal
commonwealth has sustained them on the march. Our boast has been that we
are a "practical" people, and so our politics are, as they ever have been,
experimental. Reforms have been accomplished not out of deference to some
moral or political principle, but because the abuse to be remedied had
become intolerable. Dissatisfaction with the Government and the conviction
that only by enfranchisement and the free election of representatives can
Parliament remove the grounds of dissatisfaction, have carried us towards
democracy.
GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE
We have been brought to accept Abraham Lincoln's famous phrase, "Government
of the people, by the people, for the people," as a definition of
democracy; but in that acceptance there is no harking back to the early
democracies of Greece or Rome, so beloved by the French democrats of the
eighteenth century, who, however, knew very little about those ancient
states--or any vain notion of restoring primitive Teutonic democracy.
The sovereign assemblies of Greece--the Ecclesia of Athens, and the Apella
of Sparta--the Comitia Centuriata of Rome, have no more resemblance to
democracy in the twentieth century than the Witenagemot has to the British
Parliament; and the democracy which has arisen in modern times is neither
to be traced for its origin to Greece or Rome, nor found to be evolved from
Anglo-Saxon times. The early democracies of Athens and Sparta were confined
to small states, and were based on a slave population without civic rights.
There was not even a conception that slaves might or should take part in
politics, and the slaves vastly outnumbered the citizens. Modern democracy
does not tolerate slavery, it will not admit the permanent exclusion of any
body of people from enfranchisement; though it finds it hard to ignore
differences of race and colour, it is always enlarging the borders of
citizenship. So that already in the Australian Commonwealth, in New
Zealand, in certain of the American States, in Norway, and in Finland, we
have the complete enfranchisement of all men and women who are of age to
vote.
Apart from this vital difference between a slave-holding democracy and a
democracy of free citizens--a difference that rent the United States in
civil war, and was only settled in America by democracy ending
slavery--ancient democracy was government by popular assembly, and modern
democracy is government through elected representatives. The former is only
possible in small communities with very limited responsibilities--a parish
meeting can decide questions of no more than strictly local interest; for
our huge empires of to-day nothing better than representative government
has been devised for carrying out the general will of the majority.
As for the early English Witenagemot, it was simply an assembly of the
chiefs, and, though crowds sometimes attended, all but the great men were
the merest spectators. Doubtless the folk-moot of the tribe was democratic,
for all free men attended it, and the English were a nation of freeholders,
and the slaves were few--except in the west--and might become free men.[1]
The shire-moot, too, with its delegates from the hundred-moots, was equally
democratic. But with feudalism and the welding of the nation, tribal
democracies passed away, leaving, however, in many places a valuable
tradition of local self-government.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY
A steady and invincible belief that those who maintain the defence of the
country and pay for the cost of government should have a voice in the great
council of the nation, and the conviction that effective utterance can be
found for that voice in duly chosen representatives, are the foundations on
which democracy has built. Democracy itself comes in (1) when it is seen
that all are being taxed for national purposes; and (2) the opinion finds
acceptance that responsibilities of citizenship should be borne by all who
have reached the age of manhood and are of sound mind.
To sketch the rise of democracy in England is to trace the steady
resistance to kings who would govern without the advice of counsellors, and
to note the growing determination that these counsellors must be elected
representatives. Only when the absolutism of the Crown is ended and a
Parliament of elected members has become the real centre of government, is
it possible, without a revolution, for democracy to be established.
Much of this book is given up, then, to the old stories of kingly rule
checked and slowly superseded by aristocracy. And all the old attempts at
revolution by popular insurrection are again retold, not only because of
the witness they bear to the impossibility in England of achieving
democracy by the violent overthrow of government, but because they also
bear witness to the heroic resolution of the English people to take up arms
and plunge into a sea of troubles rather than bear patiently ills that were
unseemly for men to endure in silence. Popular insurrection failed, but
over and over again violence has been resorted to in the resistance to
tyranny, and has been justified by its victory. If Wat Tyler, Jack Cade,
and Robert Ket are known as beaten revolutionaries, Stephen Langton, Simon
of Montfort, and John Hampden are acclaimed as patriots for not disdaining
the use of armed resistance.
The conclusion is that a democratic revolution was not to be accomplished
in England by a rising of the people, but that forcible resistance even to
the point of civil war was necessary to guard liberties already won, or to
save the land from gross misgovernment. But always the forcible resistance,
when successful, has been made not by revolutionaries but by the strong
champions of constitutional government. The fruit of the resistance to John
was the Great Charter; of Simon of Montfort's war against Henry III., the
beginning of a representative Parliament; of the war against Charles, the
establishment of Parliamentary government. Lilburne and his friends hoped
that the civil war and the abolition of monarchy would bring in democracy,
though democracy was never in the mind of men like Hampden, who made the
war, and was utterly uncongenial to Cromwell and the Commonwealth men. But
the sanctity of monarchy received its death-blow from Cromwell, and
perished with the deposing of James II.; and there has been no
resurrection. To the Whig rule we owe the transference of political power
from the Crown to Parliament. Once it is manifest that Parliament is the
instrument of authority, that the Prime Minister and his colleagues rule
only by the permission and with the approval of the House of Commons, and
that the House of Commons itself is chosen by a certain number of electors
to represent the nation, then it is plain that the real sovereignty is in
the electors who choose the House of Commons. As long as the electors are
few and consist of the great landowners and their satellites, then the
constitutional government is aristocracy, and democracy is still to come.
And just as discontent with monarchy, and its obvious failure as a
satisfactory form of government, brought in aristocracy, so at the
beginning of the nineteenth century discontent with aristocracy was rife,
and a new industrial middle-class looked for "Parliamentary reform," to
improve the condition of England.
BRITISH DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENTAL, NOT DOCTRINAIRE
Resistance to royal absolutism, culminating in the acknowledged ascendancy
of Parliament and the triumphant aristocracy of 1688, was never based on
abstract principles of the rights of barons and landowners, but sprang from
the positive, definite conviction that those who furnished arms and men for
the king, or who paid certain moneys in taxation, were entitled to be heard
in the councils of the king; and the charters given in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries--from Henry I. to Henry III.--confirmed this
conviction. The resistance to the Stuarts was still based on the conviction
that direct taxation conferred political privileges, but now the claim to
speak in the great council of the realm had become a request to be listened
to by the king, and passed rapidly from that to a resolution that the king
should have no money from Parliament if he refused to listen. The practical
inconvenience of a king altogether at variance with Parliament was held to
be sufficient justification for getting rid of James II., and for hobbling
all future kings with the Bill of Rights.
The dethronement of aristocracy in favour of democracy has proceeded on
very similar lines. The mass of English people were far too wretched and
far too ignorant at the end of the eighteenth century to care anything
about abstract "rights of man," and only political philosophers and a few
artisans hoped for improvement in their condition by Parliamentary reform.
Agricultural England accepted the rule of landowners as an arrangement by
providence. It was the industrial revolution that shattered the feudal
notions of society, and created a manufacturing population which knew
nothing of lowly submission to pastors and masters. A middle-class emerged
from the very ranks of the working people. The factory system brought
fortunes to men who a few years earlier had been artisans, and to these new
capitalists in the nineteenth century the aristocracy in power was as
irksome as the Stuarts had been to the Whigs. If, as the Whigs taught,
those who paid the taxes were entitled to a voice in the government, then
the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to Parliament. It
seemed monstrous that places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham had no
one in the House of Commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants.
The manufacturer wanted Parliamentary representation because he hoped
through Parliament to secure the abolition of the political disabilities of
Nonconformists, and to get financial changes made that would make the
conditions of trade more profitable. And he felt that it would be better
for the country if he and the class he represented could speak freely in
Parliament.
The workman wanted the vote because he had been brought to believe that,
possessing the vote, he could make Parliament enact laws that would lighten
the hardships of his life. The whole of the manufacturing class--capitalist
and workman alike--could see by 1820 that the House of Commons was the
instrument of the electorate, and that to get power they must become
electors. (Yet probably not one per cent. of them could express clearly any
theory of popular sovereignty.) The old Whig families, kept out of office
by the Tories whom George III. had placed in power, and who now controlled
the House of Commons, supported reform and the enfranchisement of the
middle class because they saw no way of getting back into power except by a
new electorate and a redistribution of Parliamentary seats. At the
beginning of the twentieth century the landowner, still Whig, though now,
as a general rule enrolled with the Unionist Party, has not been excluded
from political power, but the representatives of the middle-class and of
the working people are predominant in the House of Commons. The claim of
the House of Lords to reject the bills of the Commons has been, in our
time, subjected to the criticism formerly extended to the royal
prerogative, and an Act--the Parliament Act--has now been passed which
formally requires the Lords to accept, without serious amendment, every
Bill sent up from the Commons in three successive sessions.
The transition from monarchy to aristocracy in England was brought about at
the price of civil war. In many countries democracy has been born in
revolution, and the birth pains have been hard and bitter. But in England
in the nineteenth century democracy was allowed to come into being by
permission of the aristocracy, and has not yet reached its full stature. It
is true that violence, bloodshed, loss of life, and destruction of property
marked the passage of the great Reform Bill; that more than once riots and
defiance of law and order have been the expression of industrial
discontent; but on the whole the average Englishman is content to wait for
the redress of wrongs by Parliamentary action. Women have quite recently
defied the law, refused to pay taxes, and made use of "militant methods" in
their agitation for enfranchisement. But the women's plea has been that, as
they are voteless, these methods have been necessary to call attention to
their demands. Democratic advance has often been hindered and delayed by
government, and by a national disinclination from rapid political change;
but as the character of government has changed with the changed character
of the electorate and the House of Commons, so resistance to democracy has
always been abandoned when the advance was widely supported, and further
delay seemed dangerous to the public order.
The House of Lords is thus seen to yield to the popular representatives in
the House of Commons, and the government, dependent on the House of
Commons, to listen to the demand of women for enfranchisement.
While the House of Commons completes its assertion of political supremacy,
and insists on the absolute responsibility of the chosen representatives of
the electorate, the agitation for the enfranchisement of women is the
reminder that democracy has yet to widen its borders. Progress to democracy
in the last one hundred years is visible not only in the enlarged number of
enfranchised citizens, but in the general admission that every extension of
the franchise has been to the public good; not only in the fact that men of
all classes and trades now have their representatives in Parliament, but in
the very wide acknowledgment that women without votes cannot get that
attention by members of the House of Commons that is given to male
electors. That the majority of electors have expressed a decided opinion
that the power of the House of Lords should be curtailed, as the power of
the monarchy has been curtailed, and that the decisions of the House of
Commons are only to be corrected by the House of Commons, is evidence that
under our obviously imperfect Parliamentary system the will of the electors
does get registered on the Statute Book.
EDUCATION TO DEMOCRACY
Apart from the direct political education to democracy, it is well to note
the other agencies that have been at work, preparing men and women for the
responsible task of national self-government.
In the Middle Ages the religious guilds and the trade guilds, managed by
their own members, gave men and women a training in democratic government.
The parish, too, was a commune, and its affairs and finances were
administered by duly elected officers.[2]
But the guilds, with their numerous almshouses and hospitals, were all
suppressed early in Edward VI.'s reign, and their funds confiscated. As for
the parish, it was shorn of all its property, save the parish church, in
the same reign, and its old self-governing life dwindled away to the
election of churchwardens.
It was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century that the working
classes, by the formation of trade unions, once more took up the task of
education in self-government. From that time onward, through trade unions,
co-operative societies, and friendly societies, with their annual
conferences and congresses, a steady training in democracy has been
achieved; and our Labour Party of to-day, with its Members of Parliament,
its members of county and district councils, and its Justices of the Peace,
would hardly have been possible but for this training. Other agencies may
be mentioned. The temperance movement, the organisation of working-men's
clubs, and the local preaching of the Nonconformist Churches--particularly
the Primitive Methodist denomination--have all helped to educate workmen in
the conduct of affairs, and to create that sense of personal responsibility
which is the only guarantee of an honest democracy.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
THE EARLY STRUGGLES AGAINST THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWN
THE GREAT CHURCHMEN
We are far from any thoughts of democracy in the early struggles against
the absolutism of the Crown. The old love of personal liberty that is said
to have characterised the Anglo-Saxon had no political outlet under Norman
feudalism. What we note is that three Archbishops of Canterbury were strong
enough and brave enough to stand up against the unchecked rule of kings,
and the names of these great Archbishops--Anselm, Thomas a Becket, and
Stephen Langton--are to be honoured for all time for the services they
rendered in the making of English liberties. Not one of the three was in
any sense a democrat. It is not till the latter part of the fourteenth
century that we find John Ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering
for the first time in England a democratic doctrine. Anselm, Becket, and
Langton did their work, as Simon of Montfort, and as Eliot and Hampden
worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of
an intolerable autocracy. All along in English history liberties have been
gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when
the powers of the Crown had been made subject to Parliament that it was
possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, for Parliament itself to
become converted from an assembly of aristocrats to a governing body that
really represented the nation.