Promoting Good Citizenship
Dr. Samuel Johnson, being once asked how he came to have made a blunder in his famous English Dictionary, is reported to have answered, “Ignorance, Sir, sheer ignorance.” Whoever has grown old enough to look back over the wasted opportunities of life—and we all of us waste more opportunities than we use—will be apt to ascribe most of his blunders to sheer indolence. Sometimes one has omitted to learn what it was needful to learn in order to proceed to action; sometimes one has shrunk from the painful effort required to reflect and decide on one’s course, leaving it to Fortune to settle what Will ought to have settled; sometimes one has, from mere self-indulgent sluggishness, let the happy moment slip.
The difference between men who succeed and men who fail is not so much as we commonlysuppose due to differences in intellectual capacity. The difference which counts for most is that between activity and slackness; between the man who, observing alertly and reflecting incessantly, anticipates contingencies before they occur, and the lazy, easy-going, slowly-moving man who is roused with difficulty, will not trouble himself to look ahead, and so being taken unprepared loses or misuses the opportunities that lead to fortune. If it be true that everywhere, though perhaps less here than in European countries, energy is the exception rather than the rule, we need not wonder that men show in the discharge of civic duty the defects which they show in their own affairs. No doubt public affairs demand only a small part of their time. But the spring of self-interest is not strong where public affairs are concerned. The need for activity is not continuously present. A duty shared with many others seems less of a personal duty. If a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand other citizens are as much bound to speak, vote, or act as each one of us is, the sense of obligation becomes to each of us weak. Still weaker does it become whenone perceives the neglect of others to do their duty. The need for the good citizen’s action, no doubt, becomes then all the greater. But it is only the best sort of citizen that feels it to be greater. The Average Man judges himself by the average standard and does not see why he should take more trouble than his neighbours. Thus we arrive at a result summed up in the terrible dictum, which reveals the basic fault of democracy, “What is Everybody’s business is Nobody’s business.”
Of indolence, indifference, apathy, in general, no more need be said. It is a sin that easily besets us all. We might suppose that where public affairs are concerned it would decrease under the influence of education and the press. But several general causes have tended to increase it in our own generation, despite the increasing strength of the appeal which civic duty makes to men who are, or if they cared might be, better informed about public affairs than were their fathers.
The first of these causes is that manners have grown gentler and passions less angry. A chief duty of the good citizen is to be angry whenanger is called for, and to express his anger by deeds, to attack the bad citizen in office, or otherwise in power, to expose his dishonesty, to eject him from office, to brand him with an ignominy which will prevent his returning to any post of trust. In former days indignation flamed higher, and there was little tenderness for offenders. Jehu smote the prophets of Baal. Bad ministers—and no doubt sometimes good ministers also—were in England beheaded on Tower Hill. Everywhere punishment came quicker and was more severe, though to be sure it was often too harsh. Nowadays the arm of justice is often arrested by an indulgence which forgets that the true aim of punishment is the protection of the community. The very safeguards with which our slower and more careful procedure has surrounded trials and investigations, proper as such safeguards are for the security of the innocent, have often so delayed the march of justice that when a conviction has at last been obtained, the offence has begun to be forgotten and the offender escapes with a trifling penalty, or with none. This is an illustration of the principle that asrighteous indignation is a valuable motive power in politics, the decline in it means a decline either in the standard of virtue or in the standard of zeal, possibly in both.
Another cause may be found in the fact that the enormous growth of modern states has made the share in government of the individual citizen seem infinitesimally small. In an average Greek republic, he was one of from two to ten thousand voters. In England or France to-day he is one of many millions. The chance that his vote will make any difference to the result is so slender that it appears to him negligible. We are proud, and justly proud, of having adapted free government to areas far vaster than were formerly thought capable of receiving free institutions. It was hoped that the patriotism of the citizen would expand with the magnitude of the State. But this did not happen in Rome, the greatest of ancient republics. Can we say that it has happened in the modern world? Few of us realize that though our own share may be smaller our responsibility increases with the power our State exerts. The late Professor Henry Sidgwickonce travelled from Davos in the easternmost corner of Switzerland to the town of Cambridge in England and back again to deliver his vote against Home Rule at the general election of 1886, though he knew that his own side would have a majority in the constituency. Those who knew applauded, his opponents included, but I fear that few of us followed this shining example of civic virtue.
Thirdly, the highest, because the most difficult, duty of a citizen is to fight valiantly for his convictions when he is in a minority. The smaller the minority, and the more unpopular it is, and the more violent are the attacks upon it, so much the louder is the call of duty to defend one’s opinions. To withstand the “ardor civium prava iubentium”—to face “the multitude hasting to do evil”—this is the note and the test of genuine virtue and courage. Now this is, or seems to be, a more formidable task the vaster the community becomes. It is harder to make your voice heard against the roar of ocean than against the whistling squall that sweeps down over a mountain lake.
Lastly, there has been within the last century a great accession to our knowledge of nature, a more widely diffused and developed interest in literature and art as well as in science. This development, in itself fraught with laudable means of enjoyment, has had the unforeseen yet natural result of reducing the interest in public affairs among the educated classes, while the ardour with which competitions in physical strength and skill are followed has in like manner diverted the thoughts and attention of the less educated—and indeed, not of them alone but of many also in a class from whom better things might have been expected. Politics, in fact, have nowadays to strive against more rival subjects attracting men’s eyes and minds than they had before scientific discovery and art, and above all, athletic sports, came to fill newspapers and magazines.
But so far from being less important than they were, politics are growing in every country more important the wider the sphere of governmental action becomes. Nevertheless, even in England, which is perhaps slightly lessaddicted to this new passion for looking on at and reading about athletic competitions than are North America and Australia, a cricket or football match or a horse-race seems, if one may judge by the eager throngs that snatch the evening newspapers, to excite more interest in the middle as well as in the richer and in the upper section of the poorer classes than does any political event.
How to overcome these adverse tendencies is a question which I reserve till the last of these lectures. Meantime, let us look at some of the forms in which indifference to the obligations of citizenship reveals itself.
The first duty of the citizen used to be to fight, and to fight not merely against foes from another State, but against those also who, within his own State, were trying to overturn the Constitution or resist the laws. It is a duty still incumbent on us all, though the existence of soldiers and a police force calls us to it less frequently. The omission to take up arms in a civil strife was a grave offence in the republics of antiquity, where revolutions were frequent, as they are to-day in some of the statesof Latin America. When respectable people stayed at home instead of taking sword and spear to drive out the adherents of an adventurer trying to make himself Tyrant, they gave the adventurer his chance: and in any case their abstention tended to prolong a civil war which would end sooner when it was seen which way the bulk of the people inclined. There was accordingly a law in some of the Greek republics that every citizen must take one side or the other in an insurrection. If he did not, he was liable to punishment. I have not heard of any one being indicted in England or the United States for failing to discharge his legal duty to join in the hue and cry after a thief, or to rally to the sheriff when he calls upon theposse comitatusto support him in maintaining law and order. But possibly an indictment would still lie; and in England we have within recent times enrolled bodies of special constables from the civil population to aid in maintaining public tranquillity.
More peaceful times have substituted for the duty of fighting the duty of voting. But even in small communities the latter duty has beenoften neglected. In Athens the magistrates used to send round the Scythian bowmen, who acted as their police, to scour the streets with a rope coloured with vermilion, and drag towards the Pnyx (the place of assembly), citizens who preferred to lounge or to mind what they called their own business, as if ruling the State was not their business. So in modern Switzerland some cantons have enacted laws fining those who, without reasonable excuse, neglect to vote.1This is the more remarkable because the Swiss have a good record in the matter of voting, better, I think, than any other European people. Such a law witnesses not to exceptional negligence but to an exceptionally high standard of duty. In Britain we sometimes bring to the polls at a parliamentary election eighty, or even more than eighty, per cent of our registered electors, which is pretty good when it is remembered that the register may have been made up eleven months earlier, so that many electors are sure to have moved elsewhere. At elections for local authorities a much smaller proportion vote; and I fancy, though I have nofigures at hand, that in France, Belgium, and still more in Italy the percentage voting at all sorts of elections is less than in Switzerland or in Britain. The number who vote does not perfectly measure the personal sense of duty among electors, because an efficient party organization may, like the Scythian bowmen, sweep voters who do not care but who can be either driven to the polls or paid to go. Unless it is money that takes the voters there, it is well that they should go; for it helps to form the habit.
1This example has, I believe, been followed in Belgium.
1This example has, I believe, been followed in Belgium.
Another form of civic apathy is the reluctance to undertake civic functions. In England this is not discoverable in any want of candidates for Parliament. They abound, though sometimes the fittest men prefer ease or business success to public life. But seats upon local authorities and especially upon municipal councils and district councils, seldom attract the best ability of the local community. In English and Scottish cities the leading commercial, financial, and professional men do not often appear as candidates, leaving the work to persons who are not indeed incompetent, beingusually intelligent business men, but whose education and talents are sometimes below the level of the functions which these bodies discharge. No great harm has followed, because our city councillors are almost always honest. Local public opinion is vigilant and exacting, so a high standard of probity is maintained. But municipalities have latterly embarked on so many kinds of new work, and the revenues of the greater cities have so grown, that not merely business capacity and experience, but a large grasp of economic principles is required. This is no less true here in America, yet I gather that here it is found even more difficult than in Europe to secure the presence of able administrators in city councils.
A man engaged in a large business who takes up municipal work may doubtless find that he is making a pecuniary sacrifice. But if he has already an income sufficient for his comfort, may it not be his best way of serving his fellow-men?
Many such men do serve as governors or trustees of educational or other public institutions which make nearly as great a demand ontheir time as the membership of a public body would. Others, in Europe, if less frequently here, give to amusement much more of their leisure than the needs of recreation and health require. This is often due rather to thoughtlessness than to a conscious indifference to the call of duty.
Some of your political reformers have dwelt on the difficulties which party organizations, specially powerful in the United States, place in the way of educated and public-spirited men seeking to enter politics. There may be truth in this as regards the lower districts of the larger cities, but one can scarcely think it generally true even of the cities. More frequently it is alleged that the work of local politics is disagreeable, bringing a man into contact with vulgar people and exposing him to misrepresentation and abuse.
This is an excuse for abstention which ought never to be heard in a democratic country. If politics are anywhere vulgar, they ought not to be suffered to remain vulgar, as they will remain if the better educated citizens keep aloof. They involve the highest interests of thenation or the city. The way in which they are handled is a lesson to the people either in honesty or in knavery. The best element in a community cannot afford to let its interests be the sport of self-seekers or rogues. Moreover, the loss by maladministration or robbery, large as it may sometimes be, is a less serious evil than is the damage to public morals. If those who have the manners and speak the language of educated men refuse to enter practical politics, they must cease to complain of a want of refinement in politics. In reality, good manners are the best way in which to meet rudeness; and he who is too thin-skinned to disregard abuse confesses his own want of manliness. The mass of the people, even those who are neither educated nor fastidious, know honesty when they see it, and discount such abuse. When a man is firm and upright, nothing better braces him up and fits him to serve his country than to be attacked on the platform or in the press for faults he has not committed. It puts him on his mettle. It toughens his fibre. It gives him self-control and teaches him how to do right in the waywhich is least exposed to misrepresentation. It nerves his courage for the far more difficult trials which come when friends as well as opponents censure him because honour and obedience to his conscience have required him to take an unpopular line and speak unwelcome truths. A little persecution for righteousness’ sake is a wholesome thing.
The deficient sense of civic duty, though most frequently noted in the form of a neglect to vote, is really more general and serious in the neglect to think. Were it possible to have statistics to show what percentage of those who vote reflect upon the vote they have to give, there would in no country be found a large percentage. Yet what is the worth of a vote except as the expression of a considered opinion? The act of marking a ballot is nothing unless the mark carries with it a judgment, the preference of a good candidate to a bad one, the approval of one policy offered the people, the rejection of another. The citizen owes it to the community to inform himself about the questions submitted for his decision, and weigh the arguments on each side; or if the issue beone rather of persons than of policies, to learn all he can regarding the merits of the candidates offered to his choice.
How many voters really trouble themselves to do this? One in five? One in ten? One in twenty?
It may be asked, How can they do it? What means have they of studying public questions and reaching just conclusions? If the means are wanting, can we blame them if they do not think? If they feel they do not understand, can we blame them if they do not vote? In every free country the suffrage is now so wide that the great majority of the voters have to labour for their daily bread. In most European countries many are imperfectly educated. In the rural districts they read with difficulty, see either no newspaper or one which helps them but little, lead isolated lives in which there are scanty opportunities for learning what passes, so that the best they can do seems to be to ask advice from the priest, or the village schoolmaster, or take advice from their landlord or their employer. In the northern parts of the United States and also in Canada, thenative population has indeed received a fair instruction, and reads newspapers; but the mass of voters is swelled by a crowd of recent immigrants, most of whom cannot read English and know nothing of your institutions.
Broadly speaking, in modern countries ruled by universal suffrage the Average Citizen has not the means of adequately discharging the function which the constitution throws upon him of following, examining, and judging those problems of statesmanship which the ever-growing range of government administration and the ever-increasing complexity of our civilization set before him as a voter to whom issues of policy are submitted.
As things stand, he votes, when he votes, not from knowledge, but as his party or his favourite newspaper bids him, or according to his predilection for some particular leader. Unless it be held that every man has a natural and indefeasible right to a share in the government of the country in which he resides, the ground for giving that share would seem to be the competence of the recipient and the belief that his sharing will promote the general welfare. Soone may almost say that the theory of universal suffrage assumes that the Average Citizen is an active, instructed, intelligent ruler of his country.2The facts contradict this assumption.
2It may no doubt be argued that even if he is not competent, it is better he should be within than without the voting class. But this was not the ground generally taken by those who brought in universal suffrage.
2It may no doubt be argued that even if he is not competent, it is better he should be within than without the voting class. But this was not the ground generally taken by those who brought in universal suffrage.
Does this mean that widely extended suffrage is a failure, and that the Average Man is not a competent citizen in a democracy?
This question brings us to reflect on another branch of civic duty not yet mentioned. Besides the civic duties already described of Fighting, Voting, and Thinking, there is another duty. It is the duty of Mutual Help, the duty incumbent on those who possess, through their knowledge and intelligence, the capacity of Instruction and Persuasion to advise and to guide their less competent fellow-citizens. No sensible man ought ever to have supposed that under such conditions as large modern communities present, the bulk of the citizens could vote wisely from their own private knowledge and intelligence. Even in small cities, such as was Sicyon in the days of Aratus, or Boston inthe days of James Otis, the Average Man needed the help of his more educated and wiser neighbours. While communities remained small, it was easy to get this help. But now the swift and vast growth of states and cities has changed everything. Private talk counts for less when the richer citizens dwell apart from the poorer; their opportunities of meeting are fewer, and there is less friendliness, if also less dependence, in the relation of the employed to the employer. Public meetings do not give nearly all that the Average Man needs, not to add that being got together to present one set of facts and arguments and deliberately to ignore the other, they do not put him in a fair position to judge. Besides, the men who most need instruction are usually those who least come to meetings to receive it.
To fill this void the newspapers have arisen,—organs purporting to supply the materials required for the formation of political opinion. Whatever the services of the newspaper in other respects, it has the inevitable defect of superseding, with most of those who read it, the exercise of independent thought. The newspaper—Ispeak generally, for there are some brilliant exceptions—is, in Europe even more than here, almost always partisan in its views, often partisan in its selection of facts or at least in its way of stating them. Presenting one side of a case, addressing chiefly those who are already adherents of that side, putting a colour on the events it reports,—it serves up to the reader ideas, perhaps only mere phrases or catchwords, which confirm him in his prepossessions, and by its daily iteration makes him take them for truths. Seldom has he the leisure, still more seldom the impulse or the patience, to scrutinize these ideas for himself and form his own judgment. He is glad to be relieved of the necessity for thinking, because thinking is hard work. Indolence again! The habit of mind that is formed by hasty reading, and especially by the reading of newspapers and magazines in which the matter, excellent as parts of it often are, is so multifarious that one topic diverts attention from the others, tends to a general dissipation and distraction of thought. It is a habit which tells upon us all and makes continuous reflection and a criticalor logical treatment of the subjects deserving reflection more irksome to us in the full sunlight of to-day than it was to those whom we call our benighted ancestors.
This is only one form of that supersession of the practice of thinking by the vice commonly called “the reading habit” which is profoundly affecting the intellectual life of our time. Yet as steady thinking was never really common even among the educated, the difference from earlier days is not so correctly described by saying that people think less than formerly, as by noting that while people read more, and while far more people read, the ratio of thinking to reading does not increase either in the individual or in the mass, and may possibly be decreasing. Intelligence and independence of thought have not grown in proportion to the diffusion of knowledge. The number of persons who both read and vote is in England and France more than twenty times as great as it was seventy years ago. The percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage.
The persons who constitute that percentage are, and must for the reasons already given continue for some time to be, only a fraction, in some countries a small fraction, of the voting population. But the fraction might be made much larger than it is. The citizens who stand above their fellows in knowledge and mental power ought to set an example, not only by themselves thinking more and thinking harder about public affairs than most of them do, but also by exerting themselves to stimulate and aid their less instructed or more listless neighbours. The voter, it is said, should be independent. Yes. But independence does not mean isolation. He must not commit his personal responsibility to the keeping of another. Yes. But personal responsibility does not mean the vain conceit of knowledge and judgment where knowledge is wanting and judgment is untrained.
Just as his religion throws upon every Christian the duty of loving his neighbour and giving practical expression to his love by helping his neighbour, succouring him in the hour of need, trying to rescue him from sin, seeking toguide his steps into the way of peace, so civic duty requires each of us to raise the level of citizenship not merely by ourselves voting and bearing a share in political agitation, but by trying to diffuse among our fellow-citizens whose opportunities have been less favourable, the knowledge and the fairness of mind and the habit of grappling with political questions which a democratic government must demand even from the Average Man. Democracy, they say, is based on Equality. But in no form of government is leadership so essential. A multitude without intelligent, responsible leaders whom it respects and follows is a crowd ready to become the prey of any self-seeking knave. Nor is it true that because men value equality they reject eminence. They are always glad to be led if some one, eschewing pretension and condescension, speaking to them with respect, but also with that authority which knowledge and capacity imply, will point out the path and give them the lead for which they are looking. To do this has now, in our great cities, become more difficult than it used to be, because men of different classes and different occupationsdo not know one another as well as they once did, and economic conflicts have made workingmen suspicious. But there are those in our English and Scottish cities who do it successfully, and I have never heard that it is resented. It is largely a matter of tact, and of knowing how to express that genuine sense of human fellowship which is commoner in the richer class than the constraint and shyness that are supposed to beset Englishmen sometimes allow to appear.
If you and we, both here and in Britain, are less active than we should be in this and other forms of civic work, the fault lies in our not caring enough for our country. It is easy to wave a flag, to cheer an eminent statesman, to exult in some achievement by land or sea. But our imaginations are too dull to realize either the grandeur of the State in its splendid opportunities for promoting the welfare of the masses, or the fact that the nobility of the State lies in its being the true child, the true exponent, of the enlightened will of a right-minded and law-abiding people. Absorbed in business or pleasure, we think too little of what our membershipin a free nation means for the happiness of our poorer fellow-citizens. The eloquent voice of a patriotic reformer sometimes breaks our slumber. But the daily round of business and pleasure soon again fills the mind, and public duty fades into the background of life. This dulness of imagination and the mere indolence which makes us neglect to stop and think, are a chief cause of that indifference which chokes the growth of civic duty. It is because a great University like this is the place where the imagination of young men may best be quickened by the divine fire, because the sons of a great University are those who may best carry with them into after life the inspiration which history and philosophy and poetry have kindled within its venerable walls, that I have ventured to dwell here on the special duty which those who enjoy these privileges owe to their brethren, partners in the citizenship of a great republic.