world. A century and more of political instability followed. At the opening of the Great War there was no important state in which political authority was as closely held in the hands of a few rulers as in 1776. Russia and Turkey were the last of the old world powers to curb their inherited autocracies. The former had taken the first step from absolute toward constitutional monarchy when the Czar summoned the Duma after the Revolution of 1905. The Ottoman Empire had introduced some of the forms of representative government after the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Outside of Europe the Emperor of Japan granted his subjects a constitution in 1889, and in China the Manchu dynasty fell after the Revolution of 1911. Even the Shah of Persia had begun to recognize the political aspirations of his people. Since the opening of the Great War the Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs have lost all their former authority. The Bourbons and Habsburgs have lost theirs, except in Spain. Though kings still reign in nearly a dozen of the European states, they do not govern. Their power has passed. to more capable hands. Their actual position was trenchantly characterized by Theodore Roosevelt, after he had visited nine so-called monarchs in their palaces, as that of a "kind of sublimated American vice-president," a position which he declared would be "appallingly dreary for a man of ambition and force." porary To-day no one who considers human affairs with a philo- Contemsophical eye can suppose that "men resign their own political sentiments and passions to those of their rulers," whatever restlessness be the actual number of the latter, with "implicit submission." During the American Revolution George the Third, who wished to be a real king and who did not have a philosophical eye, learned by hard experience how much 1 J. B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and his Time shown in his Letters, Vol. II, p. 211. more difficult it is to govern men than he and his minions. had expected. In the French Revolution Louis the Sixteenth learned the same lesson by even harder experience. Since then many an ambitious and forceful man has made the same bitter discovery which the great French patriot Danton is said to have voiced on his way to the guillotine: "Better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the government of men." In France alone since 1789 there have been no less than three different monarchies, two empires, and three republics. Altogether an even dozen of constitutions have been promulgated, the average life of which, till the establishment of the Third Republic, was less than eight years. The Third Republic has now endured for half a century, and its constitution has become one of the oldest in existence among the European peoples. Indeed —and this is a striking commentary on the political instability which has persisted elsewhere in Europe-the French constitution is the oldest of those which have suffered no substantial change since their original adoption. Italy, whose present constitution goes back to 1848, though it extended then to but a small part of the Italian people, did not establish manhood suffrage until 1912. Belgium, whose constitution goes back to 1831, did not establish equal manhood suffrage until the close of the Great War. Even in England, where the ship of state has ridden the political storms of the revolutionary era more steadily than on the continent of Europe, the government has been profoundly altered by a series of great enactments beginning with the Reform Act of 1832 and ending for the moment with the Parliament Act of 1911 and the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Among all the active independent states of the world none now carries on its government after the fashion prevailing when Washington first took the oath of office under the American Constitution. The nature of the changes which have been made and especially the extent to which the masses of the people have been admitted to a share in the government vary widely in the different countries. But everywhere the rulers of men have been forced to share their power more and more with the ruled. Everywhere man has submitted restlessly, if at all, to his chains. Nor is the end of the revolutionary era in sight. The The instability majority of the European peoples now live in states whose of authority governments have been violently overthrown since the C outbreak of the Great War. The oldest of the new creations, the Russian Soviet Republic, has endured for only five years, and its stability is yet uncertain. In the Empire that has seemed most firmly established, that of Great Britain, hereafter to be known as the British Commonwealth of Nations, the independence of South Africa, of Australia, and of Canada already exists in almost everything but name, and the Irish Free State enjoys the name as well as most of the substance of independence. The British have had to set Egypt free without formal reservations, and India has seethed with discontent. In Great Britain itself, as well as in France and Italy and Japan and other states whose governments might seem to have been most successful in recent years, the authority of the established rulers has been challenged by the leaders of newly organized groups of people within the state. The labor unions, the labor parties, the Socialists, the Communists, to mention only one series of new groupings, by recognizing leadership not provided for in the official organization of the state, have disturbed the balance of social forces, and threaten the established political equilibrium. The rulers of these states must work out a new adjustment in which these groups will find their proper place, or surrender their authority to those who can solve the problem. An illuminating illustration of this process is afforded by the recent history of Italy. Power slipped Permanence of the rule from the feeble grasp of rulers who had proved incapable of dealing with the disorders, which the Socialists and Communists had fomented, and was resolutely seized by the Fascisti. The course of politics since Hume's death has abundantly justified his surprise at the apparent submissiveness of the masses and the easiness with which they were governed by the few. The progress of democracy during the era of revolution of the few has compelled rulers to share their power more and more with the ruled. The extent to which this has been done has varied greatly in different states. One of the most instructive comparisons of states would show to what extent this has been done. Yet this progress has not tended greatly to enlarge the number of those who actively participate in the most important decisions of modern governments. That number remains comparatively small. This was most evident during the Great War. In England Lloyd George's War Cabinet contained at any one time only six or seven men. In France Briand organized a War Cabinet of similarly small dimensions. Although his successors in the conduct of the war, particularly Clemenceau, restored the practice of conducting the government through the instrumentality of the whole Council of Ministers, and even enlarged the Council, it may be suspected that the real seat of power was an inner circle composed of a few select men. In both these countries the representative bodies ratified the policy of the executives without much more than perfunctory discussion, in France perhaps to a less degree than in Great Britain. Even in the United States the most important decisions were made by the President with the advice, not of the regular Cabinet of ten, but of a special War Council comprising the heads of the most important war agencies. The American Congress was careful, as long as active belligerent operations continued, not to embarrass the executive in the conduct of the war by too critical scrutiny of his measures. In times of Bryce The phenomenon of government of the many by the The opinion few has been noted by many political philosophers. The wisest among those of modern times, Lord Bryce, in his presidential address to the American Political Science Association, attested its permanence in striking language. "The time-hallowed classification of forms of government divides them into Monarchies, Oligarchies, and Democracies. In reality there is only one form of government. That form is the Rule of the Few. The monarch is always obliged to rule by the counsel and through the agency of others, and only a small part of what is done in his name emanates from his mind and will. The multitude has neither the knowledge nor the time nor the unflagging interest that are needed to enable it to rule. Its opinions are formed, its passions are roused, its acts are guided by a few persons-few compared with the total of the voters -and nothing would surprise it more than to learn by how few." No witness is more competent to testify than Bryce, the author of the most adequate of all the many studies of modern democracy, and himself for a time one of the few who ruled the British Empire, the most numerous and most diversified aggregation of humanity the world has ever seen under a single government. 1 1 James Bryce, Relations of Political Science to History and Practice," American Political Science Review, Vol. III, p. 18. |