adherents — towards which the multitude continues to be unconditionally the passive object.[1] "Popular self-determination" is a courteous figure of speech — in reality, under a universal-inorganic franchise, election has soon ceased to possess its original meaning. The more radical the political elimination of the matured old order of Estates and callings, the more formless and feckless the electoral mass, the more completely is it delivered into the hands of the new powers, the party leaders, who dictate their will to the people through all the machinery of intellectual compulsion; fence with each other for primacy by methods which in the end the multitude can neither perceive nor comprehend; and treat public opinion merely as a weapon to be forged and used for blows at each other. But this very process, viewed from another angle, is seen as an irresistible tendency driving every democracy further and further on the road to suicide.[2]
The fundamental rights of a Classical people (demos, populus) extended to the holding of the highest state and judicial offices.[3] For the exercise of these the people was "in form" in its Forum, where the Euclidean point-mass was corporeally assembled, and there it was the object of an influencing process in the Classical style; namely, by bodily, near, and sensuous means — by a rhetoric that worked upon every ear and eye; by devices many of which to us would be repellent and almost intolerable, such as rehearsed sob-effects and the rending of garments;[4] by shameless flattery of the audience, fantastic lies about opponents; by the employment of brilliant phrases and resounding cadenzas (of which there came to be a perfect repertory for this place and purpose) by games and presents; by threats and blows; but, above all, by money. We have its beginnings in the Athens of 400,[5] and its appalling culmination
- ↑ That the mass all the same feels itself as freed is simply another outcome of the profound incompatibility between megalopolitan spirit and mature tradition. Its acts, so far from being independent, are in inward relation with its subjection to money-rule.
- ↑ The German Constitution of 1919 — standing by virtue of its date on the verge of the decline of democracy — most naïvely admits a dictature of the party machines, which have attracted all rights into themselves and are seriously responsible to no one. The notorious system of proportional election and the Reichslist [see Ency. Brit., 1922 Supplement, II, 249. — Tr.] secures their self-recruitment. In place of the "people's" rights, which were axiomatic in the Frankfurt Constitution of 1848, there is now only the right of parties, which, harmless as it sounds, really nurses within itself a Cæsarism of the organizations. It must be allowed, however, that in this respect it is the most advanced of all the constitutions. Its issue is visible already. A few quite small alterations and it confers unrestricted power upon individuals.
- ↑ And legislation, too, was bound up with an office. Even when, as a formality, acceptance or rejection by an assembly was requisite, the law in question could be brought in only by an official; for example, a Tribune. The constitutional demands of the masses, therefore (which in any case were mostly instigated by the real power-holders), expressed themselves in the issue of the elections to office, as the Gracchan period shows.
- ↑ Even Cæsar, at fifty years of age, was obliged to play this comedy at the Rubicon for his soldiers because they were used to it and expected it when anything was asked of them. It corresponds to the "chest-tones of deep conviction" of our political assemblies.
- ↑ But the Cleon type must obviously have existed also in contemporary Sparta, and in Rome at the time of the Consular Tribunes.
