Folketing

“ To the rich he gave offices and dignities; to the poor he gave the right of suffrage, whereby in the framing of laws, the election of magistrates, the making of war or peace, the forming of treaties and alliances, and in all that regarded either religious or civil policy, they should have an equal voice with the rich, and, being much the greater in number, their class could overbalance the other three, though out of their class could no nomination be made to any office of honor or profit. ”

“ Who can estimate the benefit which would come from merely making our Government what it purports to be—government by the people? The initiative, the referendum, the recall, the short ballot, direct primaries, and proportionate representation are all designed to transfer power from rings and bosses to the people themselves. ”

“ Shall the Commons have a 'double representation,' that is to say, have as many members as the Noblesse and Clergy united? Shall the States-General, when once assembled, vote and deliberate, in one body, or in three separate bodies; 'vote by head, or vote by class,'—ordre as they call it? These are the moot-points now filling all France with jargon, logic and eleutheromania. ”

“ If we are to rely upon that feeling of the people—if we are to adopt this measure because it is the pleasure of the people, and because they are attached to the Government of King, Lords, and Commons, why do we not, at once, adopt the measure which we know the people prefer—I mean radical reform; that is to say, universal suffrage, vote by ballot, and annual parliaments? ”

“ If the people are a crowd capable of nothing but imitation, what is the use of all the direct government we are trying to bring about, how can a “crowd” be considered capable of political decisions? Direct government gives to every one the right to express his opinion. The question is whether that opinion is to be his particularist opinion or the imitation of the crowd or the creation of the group. The party has dominated us in the past chiefly because we have truly believed the people to be a crowd. ”

“ Why, the very triumphs you have spoken of—the triumphs achieved out of doors—by reformers, have been the salvation of this country. They are your glory and exultation at the present moment. But is this not a most cumbrous machine?—a House of Commons, by a fiction said to be the representatives of the people, meeting here and professing to do the people's work, while the people out of doors are obliged to organise themselves into leagues and associations to compel you to do that work? ”

“ In the struggle between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians in the seventeenth century, the two most elementary parties into which a nation can be divided, and which in every community exist in a more or less developed state, came into inevitable contest. The principles of authority on the one side and of liberty on the other were opposed in the most direct manner. These two ideas are both essential to the existence of society and to the exercise of the functions of government ”

“ The government, he said, had striven to smooth difficulties, to allay passions, to avoid everything that would excite or stimulate, to endeavour to bring men to work together, to rise above mere sectional views, to eschew all extremes, and not to make their own narrow choice the model of the measure they were presenting to parliament, but to admit freely and liberally into its composition those great influences which were found swaying the community. ”

“ What has often occurred is, that certain questions have been debated and agitated for by people outside before they have found organized support inside Parliament. But the history of the formation and discussion of social and political ideas in the community at large, would be at once too extensive and too indefinite for our present purpose, which is to ascertain not how ideas originate, but how certain classes of them obtain expression in policy and law. ”

“ The Meaning of Party Government.—Why should there be two parties instead of one in order that the people should be able to govern themselves? To answer this question we must start at the beginning, and consider what is the problem of popular government. The best definition is that it is to promote the general welfare—to reconcile or average the real interests of all sections of the community. Now, if the people could all agree what is best in the interests of all, unity of action might certainly be obtained; but even then the problem would not be solved, for the people are not infallible. ”

“ It’s all very fine for ‘the gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease,’ to say God-speed to the march of Liberal opinions in other lands; but let them remember that our own institutions took centuries to grow and to consolidate, and were often shaken and menaced, and only at length firmly established by the force of public opinion, which finds its exponent in aristocratic institutions,—a hereditary peerage and a popular assembly, nearly four-fifths of which is aristocratic. ”

“ We may attempt with a people more lethargic to obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. ”

“ In England party leaders through their speeches in Parliament and before their constituents in great part determine what the people shall think on important questions of the day, though there, doubtless more than in Germany, the opinion of the leaders is modified by what they think the people are likely to wish for. Especially is this tendency evident in late years on questions of policy where the labor vote is likely to be felt in parliamentary action. ”

“ How men behave in crowds, and the relation of the crowd conception of politics to democracy, will be considered in later chapters. While I recognize that men are more often at present under the laws of the crowd than of the group, I believe that progress depends on the group, and, therefore, that the group should be the basis of a progressive social psychology. The group process contains the secret of collective life, it is the key to democracy, it is the master lesson for every individual to learn, it is our chief hope for the political, the social, the international life of the future. ”

“ The parties, and especially the various groups within the parties, are generally known by the names of their leaders, these denominations not implying any definite political principle or Government programme. It is, moreover, far from edifying that the personal element should so frequently distort political discussion. ‘The introduction of modern forms of state organization has not been followed by the democratization of all social institutions.... The masses of the people have remained all but completely outside political life. ”

“ How, indeed, could it be otherwise, when it was sought to transplant a delicate system, hallowed by conventions and dependent for its success upon the election of a special class of representatives, among a community necessarily ruled by men who had little experience of public life? ”

“ All constitutional governments, of whatever class they may be, take the sense of the community by its parts — each through its appropriate organ; and regard the sense of all its parts, as the sense of the whole. They all rest on the right of suffrage, and the responsibility of rulers, directly or indirectly. On the contrary, all absolute governments, of whatever form, concentrate power in one uncontrolled and irresponsible individual or body, whose will is regarded as the sense of the community. ”

“ The desire that Parliament shall be the exponent of the whole people, not merely of a majority, is true Democracy. But Democracy commonly abandons that position and allies itself with the selfish interests of a single class. ”

“ This social and economic transformation can be brought about by political action, through the election of a government inspired by the ideal of a Co-operative Commonwealth and supported by a majority of the people. ”

“ He had studied the House of Commons till he knew it as a player knows his instrument—studied it collectively, for it has a collective character, and studied the men who compose it: their worse rather than their better side, their prejudices, their foibles, their vanities, their ambitions, their jealousies, above all, that curious corporate pride which they have, and which makes them resent any approach to dictation. ”

“ It is our business to lay down certain principles and propositions of policy, and we have to present to the suffrage of the people, men for the highest offices of the Republic, who, if elected, are to carry those principles and propositions into a living reality. ”

“ Thus, regardless of the absence of any material power by which its conclusions were to be enforced, the Assembly, in the intervals between its stormy debates on the politics of the hour, traced with philosophic thoroughness the consequences of the principles of personal liberty and of equality before the law, and fashioned the order of a modern society in which privileges of class, diversity of jurisdictions, and the trammels of feudalism on industrial life were alike swept away. ”

“ Still another form of political control, used with perhaps greater skill by Great Britain than by any other country, is what may be called parliamentarism—the use of talk and discussion to delay action, to tire or split opposition, to exhaust the energy of resentment and discontent, to divert or confuse men’s minds. ”

“ Fair Sire, you are not the strongest; therefore, instead of ordering, request, pray, entreat, if necessary. To that end convoke a national assembly, States General, composed of prelates, seigneurs and bourgeois or townsmen, jointly deputed. In our days, fair Sire, we must reckon with the townsmen, that bourgeois class that has succeeded in emancipating itself. ”

“ It is with this view that we have introduced popular suffrage, that we give everyone a vote, or aim at giving it, as the highest political perfection.
We turn to Plato and we find: 'In a healthy community there ought to be some authority over every single man and woman. No person—not one—ought to act on his or her judgment alone even in the smallest trifle. ”

“ Recently the Social Democracy illustrated its activity and accentuated its energy in a whole series of events, the congresses at Copenhagen and Magdeburg, the Moabit disturbances, the successful elections piling up one upon the other, a bold and growing opposition to the imperial will. ”

“ All that constitutes the proper organization of societies, whether you consider them as territory, commune, state, as country, every political, financial, social matter, depends on universal suffrage and obeys it; the smallest atom of the smallest moral question defies it. ”

“ The last vestige of personal government and of the divine right of rulers disappears; the House of Commons becomes the ruling power in England; and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the suffrage, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the men who shall represent them.
Social UnrestSecond, because it is an age of democracy, it is an age of popular education, of religious tolerance, of growing brotherhood, and of profound social unrest. ”

“ It clearly implies that the community is divided by a difference of opinion, not only on ordinary matters and points of current administration, but on some question of fundamental character and of paramount importance. Nothing less can make the submission of the individual intellect and conscience to party discipline rational or moral. In the absence of such a question, party is faction, the ruin of all commonwealths. ”

“ The entrance of the working class and of the Socialists into Parliament marks the transference of power from the House of Commons directly to the mass of the people. Public opinion is now the real active force in legislation, and the lawmakers are eager to know what "the man in the street" and the "man with the hoe" are thinking. ”

“ But the form of our government is such, that every measure that bears upon the public [112] or private interest of every citizen, is decided by public sentiment. All laws and regulations in civil, or religious, or social concerns, are decided by the majority of votes. And the present is a time when every doctrine, every principle, and every practice which influences the happiness of man, either in this, or in a future life, is under discussion. ”

“ These different orders of men are the elements of whose mixture the political body is generally formed; each draws to its side some part from the mass of the people. The people themselves are a party upon occasion; and numbers of men, however classed and distinguished, become, by their jarring pretensions and separate views, mutual interruptions and checks; and have, by bringing to the national councils the maxims and apprehensions of a particular order, and by guarding a particular interest, a share in adjusting or preserving the political form of the state. ”

“ Society will never yield one inch without resistance, and few reformers live long enough to receive the thanks of those whom they have reformed. Mill's unsolicited election to Parliament was a triumph not often shared by social reformers ”