In America the failure of the machinery was a double one. First, the central colonial administration in Westminster had been allowed to grow in the hit-or-miss fashion Anglophiles have long regarded as the height of political wisdom. In this crisis, however, muddling through clearly was not enough. The attempted reform in colonial administration after the Seven Years’ War only made matters worse, as did Turgot’s attempted reforms in France, since it was carried out in a series of advances and retreats, cajolings and menaces, blowings-hot and blowings-cold. Second, within most of the colonies the machinery of government had never been properly adjusted to the frontier. The newer western regions of many colonies complained that representation, courts, administrative areas, were rigged in favor of the older seaboard settlements.
The breakdown of Czarist administration is now so much a commonplace that one is tempted to suspect that it has been a bit exaggerated. Looking at the decades preceding 1917--for in all these countries we have been considering the background of the revolutions and not their actual outbreaks--it seems possible to maintain that the government of Russia in peacetime, at least, was perhaps a bit more of a going concern than the other governments we have been studying. From Catherine the Great to Stolypin a great deal of actual improvement can be seen in Russian government. But one thing is clear from the hundred years preceding 1914. Russia could not organize herself for war, and failure in war had, especially in 1905, brought with it a partial collapse of the machinery of internal administration. We must be very careful here to stick to facts and to avoid judgments which have so insinuated themselves into our awareness of Russia that we regard them as facts. It may be that there is some wild oriental element in the Russian soul that makes Russians both incompetent and submissive politically, subject, however, to fits of alcoholic rebellion. This soul is certainly very hard to observe scientifically; and even in literature one may hesitate to label Dostoevski more Russian than Turgenev, who seems far from wild, oriental, drunken or mystic. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that the Russian _governmental_ breakdown, clear in 1917 or even 1916, was by no means clear, say, in 1912.
Finally, one of the most evident uniformities we can record is the effort made in each of our societies to reform the machinery of government. Nothing can be more erroneous than the picture of the old regime as an unregenerate tyranny, sweeping to its end in a climax of despotic indifference to the clamor of its abused subjects. Charles I was working to “modernize” his government, to introduce into England some of the efficient methods of the French. Strafford is in some ways but an unlucky Richelieu. George III and his ministers were trying very hard to pull together the scattered organs of British colonial government. Indeed, it was this attempt at reform, this desire to work out a new colonial “system,” that gave the revolutionary movement in America a start. In both France and Russia, there is a series of attempted reforms, associated with names like Turgot, Malesherbes, Necker, and Stolypin. It is true that these reforms were incomplete, that they were repealed or nullified by sabotage on the part of the privileged. But they are on the record, an essential part of the process that issued in revolution in these countries.
_III. The Desertion of the Intellectuals_
So far we have fixed our attention on the machinery of economic and political life, and have tried to distinguish signs of any approaching breakdown. Let us now turn to the state of mind--or better, feeling--of various groups within these societies. First we may ask the question, does the disorganization of the government find a counterpart in the organization of its opponents? We shall have later to deal with what are nowadays well known as “pressure groups,” men and women organized in societies with special aims, societies which bring all sorts of pressure--from propaganda and lobbying to terrorism--to the attaining of their aims. Such societies in one form or another are apparently a constituent part of all modern states and the mere fact of their existence cannot be taken as a symptom of revolution, or we should have to regard the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations as signs of a coming second American revolution. There seems to be no simple and sole test to determine when and under what conditions the existence of pressure groups may be taken as a symptom of approaching political instability. The pre-revolutionary decades in our four societies do show, however, an intensity of action on the part of pressure groups, an action more and more directed as time goes on towards the radical alteration of existing government. Certain groups, indeed, begin to go beyond lobbying and propaganda, begin to plan and organize direct action, or at least a supplanting of the government in some dramatic way.
In America the merchant’s committees organized to resist measures for imperial control did a great deal of quite modern pressure-group work, from straight propaganda to stirring up popular demonstrations and to intercolonial co-operation through resolutions, conferences, and so on. They form the prelude to those efficient revolutionary cells, the correspondence committees Sam Adams handled so well in the 1770’s. Similar organizations are to be found lower down the social scale, where they edge over into boisterous tavern parties. In many of the colonies, the legislatures could be used for pressure-group work against the imperial government in a way not possible in the other societies we are studying. The New England town meeting provided a ready-made framework for this kind of agitation.
In France, the work of Cochin has shown how what he calls the _sociétés de pensée_, informal groups gathered together to discuss the great work of the Enlightenment, gradually turned to political agitation and finally helped steer elections to the Estates-General of 1789. Though the official school of historians in the Third Republic has always distrusted such notions, it is difficult for an outsider not to feel that Cochin has put his finger on the essential form of group action which turned mere talk and speculation into revolutionary political work. Freemasonry, even French Republican historians admit, had a place in the preparation of the revolution. Masonic activity in eighteenth-century France was clearly no dark plot, but it certainly was far from being purely social, recreational, or educational. Almost all the ambitious nobles and bankers, almost all the intellectuals, were freemasons. Even at the time, clerical conservatives were shocked at what they considered the subversive aspects of freemasonry.
In Russia, societies of all degrees of hostility to things as they were had long flourished. Nihilists, anarchists, socialists of all stripes, liberals, westernizers, and anti-westernizers, expressed themselves in various ways from bomb-throwing to voting at Duma elections. One gathers from a consideration of the last years of the Czarist regime that the diversity and cross-purposes of its opponents did much to keep that regime in the saddle. Certainly the Russian revolution had plenty of advance publicity, and the role of pressure groups in its preparation is singularly clear.
England here is a less clear case. Nevertheless there are definite indications of systematic opposition of merchants and some of the gentry to measures like Ship Money, and the parliamentary majorities which were rolled up against Charles after the period of personal government were the product of embryo pressure groups, as a glance at the very prolific pamphlet literature of the time will show. Moreover, the English revolution was the last of the great social overturns within the active domination of specifically Christian ideas. In a sense, the pressure groups most obvious in seventeenth-century England are simply the Puritan churches, and especially the churches called Independent. Their very existence was as much a menace to Charles as was that of the Bolshevik party to Nicholas.
It must be noted that some of these pressure groups, the American merchant’s committees, the French _sociétés de pensée_ and freemasons, for instance, would not in the heyday of their action have admitted they were working for a revolution, certainly not for a violent revolution. What perhaps separates them from pressure groups like the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations--which we can surely agree are not to be taken as symptomatic of revolution--is their basic aim at a radical change in important political processes. Thus the American merchants were really aiming to reverse the whole new imperial policy of Westminster; the French who prepared the elections to the Third Estate were aiming at a new “constitution” for France. On the other hand, some of the Russian organizations were from the very start violently revolutionary; but these were not the important elements in the Russian situation from 1905 to 1917, any more than the antinomians or anarchistic religious sects were in England before 1639.