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Typos — p. 27: whereever [= wherever]; p. 29: solemly [= solemnly]; p. 30: whethere [= whether]


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II
Divine Right of Majorities

Thus, we know of three great peoples — the Jews, the ancient Hindus, and the Chinese — who lasted for centuries as patriarchal monarchies, or as political orphans repeatedly succoured and led only by their higher men, without once having in fair times or foul stooped to the alternative of mob-majority voting for their government. At no time did any of them take for granted what Westerners accept as a Law of Nature — that mob-majority judgments have a Divine Right to prevail. And everything points to the conclusion that, no matter how grave their political plight might have become, they would never have fallen to the intellectual level of a Rousseau or a Locke by conceding such a right.
        Nor is it easy to think of any sound reasons which could have induced Western people to believe majority judgments as necessarily right. In a body of experts belonging to no matter what faculty, a majority judgment would have a prescriptive right to prevail because it would represent a greater weight of informed opinion.
        But the only possible reason for accepting a majority's ruling when that majority consists of a heterogeneous epicene crowd, not qualified to form authoritative judgments on any matter whatsoever, is that if it chose to compel acceptance of its opinion, it could do so by sheer force. As Sheldon Moss acknowledged over seventy years ago, "The practice of deferring to a majority is simply that of giving way in time and by decent ceremonial to those who would have their own way if they chose to take it." (The Science of Politics, 1890, Chap. VI). In other words, to claim that majorities should prevail is to accept the principle that Might is Right. They represent superior Might and we allow them to prevail so as to spare ourselves the pain of cracked skulls and other injuries if we had to fight it out. As Edward Jenks maintained in 1902, "a fiction

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was gradually adopted by which we assumed that there had been a fight and that one party had gained the victory, and so it became the custom to settle the matter by counting heads instead of breaking them." (A History of Politics, p. 151).
        The acceptance and support of majority rule by Liberals, can, therefore, only be due either to their imbecility which prevents them from recognising the odious principle on which it rests, or else to their perfidy, which enables them to condemn the practical application of this principle by others whilst claiming the right to apply it themselves. For they were always the first indignantly to denounce a German Kaiser, or an Italian or Teutonic Dictator who dared to act as if Might really were Right.
        Besides, it is notorious that everywhere on Earth, the wise, intelligent, and discriminating members of the community always constitute the minority. So that Majority Rule must in any case mean Government by the least able and least gifted elements in every population. Can we wonder then, that whereever to-day Democracy is established things go from bad to worse and that chaos and anarchy are becoming universal?
        But, if this really is so, the belief in the Divine Right of Majorities and in their unlimited authority is (as Spencer pointed out eighty years ago), even less rational and therefore less justified than the belief in the Divine Right of God-appointed kings; and as he says, turns out to be merely a political superstition even less consistent than the latter.
        Thus, he concludes: "The assumed divine right of parliaments and the implied divine right of majorities are superstitions." (Man versus The State, 1884, Chap.: The Great Political Superstition).
        Even, however, as a pure superstition, the Divine Right or Kings is not quite as imbecile as the Divine Right of Majorities. For it is easy to imagine, and even to discover in world history, alleged "God-appointed" rulers with endowments far surpassing those of their leading subjects, and whose right to prevail was therefore consistent with a lofty code of spiritual values. But the Divine Right of Majorities can have no such justification. It is always nakedly materialistic and destitute of qualitative factors.
        It is too often forgotten that the decree of power wielded by dominant personalities or groups that can command ap-

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proval, is always commensurate with their quality, and that if it is to be gladly accepted, any increase in their power will always be contingent on a corresponding increase in their quality. There is no exception to this rule. Hence, as Aristotle maintained, "aristocracies are mostly destroyed . . . from virtue not being properly joined to power." (Politics II, Bk. V. Chap. VIII, 1307a).
        But how does one estimate the quality or virtue of an anonymous unidentifiable voting mob? If Lord Vansittart was right when in 1958 he wrote of the political happenings to date: "Our elections have become auctions, where the best bidder won" (The Mist Procession, Chap. 10), we have a picture of an electorate moved only by self-interest and destitute of public spirit. Could any ruler, royal or aristocratic, similarly motivated, hope to retain his power? And yet, when given the opportunity to vote, how can an ill-informed, unqualified moo be expected to do otherwise than consult their own interests? What other political criterion have they? The very spread of vandalism and of wanton destructiveness to-day, affecting chiefly public property, alone indicates that, when confronted by political issues, the populace is unlikely to be prompted by any public-spirited impulses; and the faulty psychology which assumed that they would be so prompted, is among the worst of the romantic errors committed by democratic political philosophy.
        Thus, even if it be conceded that both royal and noble rulers often act as the electorate always do, at least they can be caught red-handed and deposed. But, as we have seen, no such treatment of a mob-majority can ever be possible. Their political crimes defy both detection and correction.
        Very rarely, if ever, moreover, do political philosophers recognise that the value of mob-majority judgments is not only dependent on the knowledge and average intelligence possessed by a populace, important though such qualities undoubtedly may be, but also and above all on their quality as human organisms. And it is now more than ever important to take such factors into account in view of the enormous amount of morbidity that prevails in modern populations. The statistics showing the vast numbers of people annually hospitalised in our society, owing either to physical or mental illness, can leave us in no doubt that our present mobs, both high and low, display a formidably high incidence of subnormality and

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abnormality. In mental illness alone, as Captain S. W. Roskill, R.N. has pointed out, the situation is already disquieting. "Never", he says, "has mental illness been so common, and all the efforts of the psychiatrists and psychologists appear to do little to cure or mitigate it." (The Art of Leadership, Chap. IV).
        Can there be anybody to-day sufficiently romantic and frivolous to suppose that, in these circumstances, the right of mob-majority judgments to prevail, can have any other than a detrimental effect on the way of life of the nation? There may be no choice at the present moment — that is to say, we may nave nowhere else to turn for governmental authority, than this ill informed, unqualified mob, riddled with abnormalities of all kinds. But this should not mean that it would be hopeless to try to rear an élite, to replace that which we have lost. For, as Froude aptly remarked over ninety years ago, "The growth of popular institutions in a country originally governed by an aristocracy implies that the aristocracy is not any more a real aristocracy." (Essay on Progress). Or, as Nietzsche put it some years later, "What is best shall rule; what is best will rule! And where the teaching is different the best is lacking." (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1882. III, xii, 21).
        How then can we most wisely deal with the situation created by the lack of the best?
        In any similar difficulty arising out of a deficiency in domestic or business-life, the obvious solution would be, first to discover the cause of the lack and then to seek the most effective means of remedying it. And this was more or less the policy adopted by the few wise civilisations the world has so far seen. But it is the very last to appeal to the essentially Liberal-minded, who, unaccountably lured by the primitive political improvisations of ancient Greece and Rome, misled by false psychological principles and obsessed by a mystical faith in the fundamental goodness of Man, fondly imagine that the enthronement of mobs can adequately and satisfactorily fill the gap caused by an empty throne and the evanescence of a national élite.
        If ever a generation of men should arise, wiser and more wide awake than the present bunch representing our "Establishment", what will they think of an Age which was capable of solemly building their political institutions on a belief in the Divine Right of Majorities, whilst at the same time looking

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down with scorn on people who could believe in the miraculous therapeutic effect of saintly relics and the magic of guardian angels?
        Never to have thought of trying to mend what had been faulty in Kingship and Aristocracy, or of asking themselves whethere these régimes had failed because of their shortcomings as institutions, or merely because of shortcomings in the men who had tried to run them; but pessimistically to have believed themselves competent and gifted enough to replace them by means of new-fangled and half-baked political substitutes of their own devising this was the fundamental error of Liberal thought from the beginning. And at bottom it was an error rooted in false psychology, compounded of over-weaning self-esteem. For if they overlooked nothing else in connection with rulership, the Liberals certainly forgot that it included the enormously difficult task of setting a good Tone to the national life, and this it was soon found the vast majority of the people were unable to do.
        As we shall see in the sequel, even prominent Liberals and ardent democrats have begun to appreciate this fatal flaw in their calculations, and have recently initiated a scheme for the restoration and rehabilitation of a properly qualified élite, at least in England.
        The fact that in both England and France, but especially in the latter country, members of the fast declining élite, scions of the oldest and noblest families, as de Tocqueville and others have shown, often flirted with Liberal ideas and, long before the outbreak of the French Revolution, were shallow enough to see in their own loss of prestige and power, not any censure on their past conduct, but only evidence of the radical unsoundness of aristocracy as an institution, in no way invalidates the claims here made. For the stupid stammerings of a moribund are no argument in favour of what he defends, and mankind was doomed to learn by bitter experience alone the fallacies of the Liberal doctrine.
        They were bound ultimately to discover that only the best of their species can by virtue of their instinctive good taste, sound judgment and wholesome example, act as safe life-guides to their contemporaries, and when the darkness and chaos of general anarchy at last becomes intolerable and Western mankind at the end of its tether seeks for a saviour, it may well

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be that it will find confirmed what Professor G. Catlin tentatively suggested some fifteen years ago.
        "It may be", he said, "that science will show that only the man in health, of a good stock and nature, nurtured on a good diet physical and emotional, free from anxiety and with his natural confidence unbroken — the natural aristocrat — is capable of the highest excellence, mental and spiritual and of raising the level of civilisation itself." (A History of the Political Philosophers, Chap. III, 5).

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