Art. 7.-THE SEARCH FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT.

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SELF-GOVERNMENT is the Mecca of the moral individual. And as such it is-more or less-intelligible. For government of the person by the person (but do not let us say for the person) is possible so long as the person is quite sure that he is a person. Even so, it is not an easy ideal to grasp. For to suppose that a self requires to be governed by itself implies a belief that the word individual' is a misnomer; inasmuch as a self consists, as Plato would have it, of better and worse elements, the former of which should completely dominate the latter; or, as the psychologist will have it, of instincts and reason, the latter of which may have a constitutional be monarchy over the former. If an individual were really an individual, one and indivisible, he could not govern himself. He could be governed by somebody else or not governed at all; but he could not so split himself up into parts that one element in the self should govern another. Self-government is not an easily intelligible ideal for the me individual, but it is not wholly meaningless, for most of us can, if we like, discern a self to govern and a self t to be governed.

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But to-day self-government is as much the ideal of terat society as of the individual. The people who inhabita certain areas of the globe want to be self-governing; the people who pursue the business of getting a living by similar means want to be self-governing. And of course it is axiomatic that any association of f persons formed for a definite object-whether the Pre-197 vention of Cruelty to Children, or the Overthrow of the Capitalist System-should be within wide limits selfgoverning bodies. Self-government is a plural as well as a singular conception; it is identified with the government of the people, for the people, by the people, no matter how many of the people there may happen to be. But self-government as the ambition of society is a great deal more difficult to understand than self-government as the religion of an individual. For, on the one hand, any real self-government in societies of the dimensions of those to which we are accustomed offends against that principle of specialisation, by which alone (for our

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sins) we are enabled to keep going economically; and in the second place social self-government implies a social self, just as much as individual self-government implies an individual self. On this last rock the democratic ship splits on every voyage; and every such disaster is marked by the wreckage of cynicism and disillusionment that bestrews the course of democracy.

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Consider the first point. Democracy, as its name implies, is not native to our people or (which is much more important) to our civilisation. Like so much else in our thought, our institutions and our outlook, it is Greek in origin. It has been said that there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek. It might as well have been said that there is nothing in this world which so much hinders movement as the homage paid to the Greek idea. Democracy was born in a city-state. Democracy according to the Greeks may be best, for under it the people rules. The Athenians, so they said, considered a man who took no active part in public affairs as something worse than merely idle. And so they might. Those whom a city-state admitted to citizenship at all may have enjoyed some real approach to self-government. Even this, however, has doubtless been exaggerated by the sentimentality of later ages. is certain at any rate that the narrow interpretation of citizenship excluded from a share in the government of the communal self the great majority of the dwellers within the city's borders. Still it is probably only in the city-states of classical antiquity that the idea of social self-government has been realised in anything approaching a logical form. Such realisation is only perfectly attained when the butcher, the baker, and the candlestickmaker compose both the self who governs and the self who is governed; when nobody presumes to specialise in the representation of the popular will. For it is only in that case that we have anything comparable to the selfgoverned individual who is at the same time John Brown, the governor, and John Brown, the governed. But to expect that democracy should be the same yesterday, today, for ever; the same for a population of 50 or 100 millions living in a small island, or spread over a great continent; the same in the industrialised as in the agricultural state; the same in a steam-driven as

in a horse-drawn civilisation-to expect this is to be guilty of a serious lack of historical perspective. True political democracy would imply to-day the conduct at least of legislation, if not of administration, by all the inhabitants of the State. The cruelties of economics, however, compel merciless specialisation; and the selfgovernment of 50 million people is a ludicrous abstrac tion. Were we each and all to act as the fifty-millionth member of a governing body, starvation would soon i bring the numbers of the body into a more reasonable compass. And even if it were not so, it is still doubtful how far such an arrangement would result in true selfgovernment. A committee of fifty millions of people would only exhibit on the grand scale that with whichz we are familiar enough on the scale of a committee of five-the dominance of the one or two people who have the capacity and the will to get through the work.

We have to face the fact that true self-government is a will-o'-the-wisp not to be caught by the industrialised hands of our over-populated communities. To seize it, we must violate the fundamental laws of economics by which we are imprisoned. If the materialistic interpretation of history means that the limits to the varieties of political or social development are rigidly confined by economic necessity, then it is at once an incontrovertible and a pitiless doctrine. It is this doctrine which 'puts a stopper on' 19th- or 20th-century democracy. By specialisation we live, and specialisation is the denial of true self-government. And this is a matter of democracy itself, not of democratic mechanics. We have immensely improved our democratic machinery; we have by education and so forth no less improved the material of Demos, the governor and the governed. But these measures do not go to the heart of the problem. A century ago we believed in this country that the will-o' the-wisp could be caught by the extension of the political franchise. That extension was won, step by step and not without bloodshed, by the devotees of the democratic idea. The disillusionment that followed the partial concessions of the first Reform Act gathered momentum in the Chartist agitation. Democracy was still unattained because the franchise was not universal, secret, or everywhere of equal value, because Parliaments lived long

enough to become unrepresentative, and because membership of Parliament was a whole-time job without a salary. A century has seen the concession of all but one of the main points of the Charter. Equally has it brought home to us that disillusionment with the first fruits of democracy is typical of disillusionment with its riper harvest. There is perhaps no disappointment more bitter than the disappointment with the working of democracy that is coming over the people of this and other countries. Improvements of democratic machinery have not sufficed, and it is questionable whether even with the last refinement of proportional representation they ever will suffice, to conceal the fact that selfgovernment is not realised unless all the governed selves in the plural are identical with the no less plural governing selves.

If the will of each were the will of all, then there might be a possibility that representative government, even in a large community, would be self-government. In that case the general will could and would be expressed. But as things are there is no General Will; there is no social self-only a number of conflicting wills and inharmonious selves. Meanwhile, the development of democratic theory and practice has been a search for the social self. True self-government lies where the rainbow ends. But the creation of a fictitious self brings a bastard self-government ready to hand. In our pursuit of democracy we have subjected ourselves to the tyranny of a succession of such bastards. In so doing, we work a double evil. We shatter the faith of believers in true self-government, and we degrade a great idea.

To begin with, we personify the State, and persuade ourselves that democracy is attained when the democratic idea is embodied in a democratic political constitution. It is easy to see how this abstract social Self was created, and equally easy to see that in its primitive form it may not have been pernicious. A and B, who are just emerging from the pastoral stage of human development, have an idea that life would be considerably more restful if instead of perpetually roving from place to place in search of new pastures, they should assist Nature's efforts to maintain her children by some simple operations of tillage. A and B, being pushful men, like most originators

of ideas, instil this notion into C and D and a host of others, who, like most hosts, are at once suggestible and apathetic. Y and Z perhaps hold diverse opinions and stick fast to them; but it is always only too easy to coerce the Ys and Zs of society. So at the instigation of A and B the tribe settle down in a choice spot and village life begins. In process of time the village becomes a village community, at least dimly conscious of itself and zealous for its own welfare. Skirmishes are undertaken and ordinances made for the good of the village, and the whole ordering of life assumes a more social aspect.

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As long as a village is a village there is nothing very pernicious in its members becoming conscious of it as an end to be promoted. Nor perhaps is the danger very great when the village has blossomed into a city-state. The city-state is still so small that its tyranny is hardly likely to be worse than the autocracy of a petted child. Athens is personified, and her citizens are bidden to regard her with an affection so intense that the language of sex-love is actually employed to describe it. Even so the social self is not unduly fictitious. But it has in it the makings of a false god. Multiply your city-state by a large enough number, and you have not Athens, but Leviathan-the modern State. The patriotism of the citizen, at once an idea and an ideal, develops into that orgy of modern State worship which represents an idea incarnate in a tyrant's form, and which springs from our passionate desire to conceive society as a personal self. Athens may not be very different from the Athenians; but the connexion between Britannia and the Britons becomes daily more and more obscure. We are, in fact, just emerging from a period of the rankest idolatry-idolatry of the political State. Tom, Dick, and Harry are bullied or cossetted, ordered to insure their health or provided gratis with a costly and inadequate education, because these things promote the good of the State of which through no fault of their own they were born members. But the organ of this State is a government which Tom, Dick, and Harry rightly regard as wholly external to themselves. It governs them; they do not govern it; nor can it be said that the democratic State as we know it embodies anything that can be called self-government. Individuals in the mass are