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.