_IV. The Role of Force_
A final uniformity to be discerned in these first stages of our revolutions is perhaps the clearest and most important of all. In each revolution there is a point, or several points, where constituted authority is challenged by the illegal acts of revolutionists. In such instances, the routine response of any authority is to have recourse to force, police or military. Our authorities made such a response, _but in each case with a striking lack of success_. Those of the ruling class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved signally unable to make adequate use of force. Let us first look at the facts.
In England there was no considerable standing army, and of course nothing like a modern police force. Indeed, the question of control over what standing army there was had been one of the big issues between the first two Stuarts and their Parliaments. The Crown had been obliged to quarter its soldiers on private citizens in order to keep any kind of army together, and this quartering was one of the grievances most strongly held against Charles I. When a Scotch army crossed the border, Charles was obliged to call the Long Parliament to get money to buy this armed force off. When the actual break between Royalists and Parliamentarians drew near, both sides tried to constitute an armed force. Charles had the benefit of a devoted noble officer-class, and enough tenant-followers of noblemen and gentry to constitute what was by far the strongest armed force controlled by the government, or conservatives, or party-in-power side in any of our four revolutions. Yet the Civil War proved that he didn’t have enough good soldiers, in comparison with the human resources available to the Parliament. Charles was beaten in the first instance because he lacked decisive military power.
Similarly in the American revolution, neither the American Tories nor the British armies were quite strong enough, as in the actual event they used their armed strength to suppress the revolutionists. Notably in the earlier stages, the British undertook to introduce what they knew to be unpopular governmental changes with what now seems an amazing disregard of police necessities. No doubt the long tradition of British loyal self-government made it hard for a British colonial administrator to conceive of any other methods. But the fact remains that these forces in North America in 1775 were quite inadequate to enforce authority. How many more men than Gage actually did have would have been necessary to keep royal order in Massachusetts Bay is a matter of guesswork, of perhaps unprofitable history-in-the-conditional. It is, however, unduly complimentary to rugged Yankee love of independence to suppose that no armed force could have been large enough to have controlled Massachusetts. Had there been a Napoleon instead of a Gage, there would perhaps have been a different end to the fighting. Whether such a policy of repression would not ultimately have produced a successful revolution anyway is a matter we are not called upon to discuss. What does concern us is the simple fact that in America also an important initial failure of the government was its failure to use force adequately and skillfully.
Louis XVI had in 1789 a fairly trustworthy armed force. His French troops were perhaps open to propaganda by the patriots. But he had important household troops, mercenaries recruited from foreign peoples, chiefly Swiss and German, and not accessible to French agitators. That the Swiss would die for him, or for their duty, was proved three years later at the storming of the Tuileries. He had, especially in the artillery, a capable set of officers, most of whom could be relied upon at this stage. Yet at the decisive moment, the rioting in Paris in July, he and his advisers failed to use the military. Again we edge into history-in-the-conditional, but one cannot avoid wondering what would have happened had a few disciplined troops with street guns attempted the reduction of Paris in July, 1789. Napoleon was later to show that such a force could readily beat down civilian resistance, and this fact was to be amply confirmed in 1848 and 1871. Louis might have failed. But the point is that he didn’t even try. Once again a government has failed to make adequate use of force.
Petrograd in 1917 is the most perfect example of this important role of the military and the police. Everyone, from Czarist to Trotskyite, admits that what turned somewhat chaotic and aimless street demonstrations into a revolution was the failure of the elaborate government plan to restore order in Petrograd. And that plan failed because at the critical moment the soldiers refused to march against the people, but regiment by regiment came over instead to join them. Again, such is the advantage which a disciplined force with modern artillery possesses over even the most inspired civilian revolutionists, there can be little doubt that if the Cossacks and a few of the famous regiments of the line, the Preobrazhensky, for instance, had been warmly loyal to the government, even the somewhat incompetent rulers of Petrograd could probably have put down the disturbance. Whether another and worse riot was not inevitable within a few months under existing conditions of failure in war is not a matter that concerns us here.
This striking failure on the part of the rulers to use force successfully is not, however, likely to be an isolated and chance phenomenon. Indeed, it seems intimately bound up with that general ineptness and failure of the ruling class we have noticed in a previous chapter. Long years of decline have undermined the discipline of the troops, bad treatment has given the private soldiers a common cause with civilians, the officers have lost faith in the conventional and stupid military virtues. There is no co-ordinating command, no confidence, no desire for action. Or if there are some of these things, they exist only in isolated individuals, and are lost among the general incompetence, irresolution, and pessimism. The conservative cause--even the cause of Charles I--seems a lost cause from the start. The American case is somewhat different. Here we have an inept _colonial_ government, but not an inept native ruling class.
We can then with some confidence attribute the failure of the conservatives to use force skillfully to the decadence of a ruling class. After all, we are dealing with fairly large groups of the kind we are accustomed to treating as subjects for sociological generalization. When, however, we attempt to bring the four crowned heads of our societies under some such general rule, we can hardly help feeling that we have no adequate statistical basis. Yet Charles I, George III, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II display such remarkable similarities that one hesitates to call in chance as an explanation. Trotsky confidently asserts that a decaying society will inevitably head up into the kind of incompetence displayed by these monarchs. We dare not display quite as much confidence, but we must bring forward these uniformities in the behavior of four men as a valid part of our observed uniformities. At any rate their being what they were had an important part in that process through which the revolutionists won their preliminary and decisive victories over incompetent authority.
At the very least, one can discern in all these monarchs mistakes which point to their lack of a reasonably objective thing, the technical skill necessary to rule men. If a baseball player strikes out consistently over a long stretch of games, and fields badly, it may be because of poor eyesight, or family troubles, or a lot of other reasons, but the simple fact remains that he is a poor ball-player. Our four kings were poor kings, though they were all good family men, men on the whole whom we should probably list as good, or at least as well-meaning. Nicholas was petty and jealous, as well as ignorant and superstitious, and by conventional Christian moral standards probably the worst of the lot. But he was far from being a cruel tyrant. Louis was kindly, well-meaning, but singularly unsuited to affairs of state. Both men were deficient intellectually, were very much under the domination of determined, passionate, proud, and ignorant wives, and both have left diaries which display amazing parallels in obtuseness. Louis went hunting on Bastille Day and in his diary records “Nothing”; Nicholas in a similar crisis records “Walked long and killed two crows; had tea by daylight.”
We cannot here go into the fascinating subject of the personalities of all these monarchs. George III was high-minded, stupid, and stubborn, which is a very bad combination indeed in a ruler. Charles is humanly the most attractive of the four; there is a sound basis for the romantic legend woven around him. But he was a bad king for a number of reasons, of which the chief were perhaps first an almost complete inability to understand what was going on in the hearts and heads of those of his subjects commonly called Puritans--and this emphatically includes the Scotch Calvinists--and, second, a tendency to high-minded intrigue. In politics, high-mindedness and intrigue are much safer if kept decently apart. This much, in summary, we may conclude about our kings. However much they differed as men, they were alike in being wholly unable to make effective use of force, even had they possessed it, at the first stages of the revolution.