The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

“England, England, how I prayed for England!” — St. Vincent de Paul.

The power of the English nobility was weakened through the War of the Roses and the subsequent centralism and absolutism of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet a new aristocracy arose fortified by the plunder and loot of convents and monasteries. They supplanted the old families, and the seventeenth century offers us the spectacle of a gradual retreat and decrease of monarchical power before the onslaught of a plutocratic aristocracy, determined to transform England into a republic in every respect but in name.

In the centuries between the Great Charter and World War II the English aristocracy was forced to give up many important positions. Thirty years ago there was, even in connection with the reform of the House of Lords, an antiaristocratic agitation strongly expressed in the election posters, but the sentiments which were aroused in this campaign went only skin deep. Today it is practically impossible for a peer to become Prime Minister, and thus we might speak about disabilities going together with titles. England is an amazing and paradoxical country; there are, in spite of the great emphasis upon “democracy,” all indications of the existence of an aristocratic and oligarchic rule, yet this generally recognized fact caused little if any human resentment among the lower classes. There are actually a few dissatisfied, ambitious people among the middle classes who have a personal grudge against the old school tie and the reverses in the present war have made their protests appear louder than they are. It may be argued that these sentiments expressed are rather antiplutocratic than antiaristocratic. Yet the tacit and genuine, human acceptance of aristocratic or at least upper class leadership gives Britain the right to call itself a “democracy” without being one in reality. Hierarchic feelings always were very strong in England, but the extreme elasticity of the class system has always mitigated the apprehensions if aroused. Nowhere are classes more receptive to new elements, nowhere is it easier to rise socially, yet nowhere are the differences between the classes so marked as in England (with the exception of India and certain sections of the United States). Prewar Alpine Austria or Germany, Spain or even Poland were socially more democratic. Neither has any country in the world an Upper House made up solely of the lords and the bishops of the state Church. The Upper House of Hungary, a country notoriously “reactionary,” has a large nonaristocratic majority and representatives of the Jewish faith (not to mention the Lutherans and Calvinists).3

It is worth while pondering over the fact that England, the country with the maximum of liberty in Europe, has the greatest social inequalities, while Germany and Soviet Russia, the fortresses of egalitarianism, have the least liberty.

There was in England not only a tacit acceptance of the class system but also a real admiration of the upper ten — an admiration which permeated all other classes. Nowhere else in the world would socialist papers print descriptions of the dresses worn at the Royal Garden Party, and people will always prick up their ears if they hear a “strange” accent unavoidably betraying social background. Each class admires the “next higher” class and the members of the lowest classes have still the consolation that they might rise by virtue of their abilities to a higher station in life. England is a country of amazing careers; she abounds in self-made men and yet she is not and never will be ochlocratic unless her days of decline set in. The man who has risen from the gutter to the exalted position of a peer will surprisingly seldom be snubbed by his colleagues in the House of Lords, but he may not get the full recognition by those in the lower stations of life. The thought of the fabulous rise of his father or grandfather, on the other side, will cause very little distress to the present bearer of the title.4

A title does not mean everything in England. But the “blue blood” will always remain a factor in the British nobility. The Continental as well as the American frequently forget that a simple name does not always indicate, in England, a simple origin. A Herr Hitler could not possibly be a direct legitimate male descendant of a duke or prince, but Mr. Churchill counts the dukes of Marlborough as his direct ancestors.

About the public school — not to be confused with the American public school — one must show a little more healthy skepticism. In its spirit it is ordinarily herdist and bourgeois and not in vain are the Communists such fervent admirers of a collective boarding school education which separates child and adolescent from the family. Eton is one of the few schools with a personal touch where the bourgeois hatred against the boy, who dares to be different, is reasonably absent.

The public school is, in spite of its bourgeois undertone, nevertheless a class institution. Out of 615 members of the House of “Commons” over 400 are former public school boys. Of these 104 come from Eton alone. In the United States it would be an unheard of thing to see the Congress packed by one sixth of — let us say — Groton boys. Yet the papers in England commented very favorably upon the fact that Eton contributed so heavily to the burden of popular representation and not even the Daily Herald attacked Baldwin when he declared, immediately after his appointment to Downing Street, that he was going to pack his cabinet almost exclusively with Old Harrovians. He did not keep his promise though. The choice of the average voter is, as one can see, frequently only between an Old Etonian, an Old Harrovian, or an Old Wickhamist — these candidates being provided by committees who pick out those most likely to attract the masses.5 Even the Labor Party has an ever increasing amount of ex-public school boys among their local and national leaders.

One must yet add in all fairness that this elite — of birth rather than of intellect — is well aware of the current public opinion. They are actually clercs in the sense formulated by Julien Benda. Though they cannot extricate themselves completely from the prejudices and vested interests of their class, history can scarcely refrain from giving the verdict that they have honestly striven to serve the public good and the general will. But sometimes, as, for instance, in the case of Hoare-Laval6 plan, one would rather have seen them following their own judgment than the general will.

We come here to the painful chapter of British foreign policy. It was always a weak spot of England. Britain’s policy toward continental affairs suffered from two shortcomings: its general tendency as well as its inconsistency. The latter is the result of the Parliamentary changes which also affected the foreign policy to such an extent that Britain was called “perfidious Albion.” The defects in the general tendency are largely due to psychological reasons; shortsightedness, wrong speculations, lack of intuition and phantasy, a total misunderstanding of the continental psyche are just some of the characteristics. Neither foe nor friend was ever treated in the proper way. Neither France, nor the Germanies, nor Russia, nor Spain was ever properly evaluated. And the reason for these blunders and hesitations is the lack of the thing the Germans call Einfühlungsvermögen, the ability to slip into the skin of somebody else and to look at the world with his eyes. The result was that England was great in feeding vipers in her bosom, while alienating her best potential friends.

The basic reason for this psychological shortcoming has to be found in England’s insularity and isolation, which is not predominantly of a geographical nature. The Scandinavian peninsula is to all practical purposes also an island; the fact that Scandinavia is connected with the European continent through the desolate boulders and glaciers of Lapland in the far north does not alter the necessity of approaching Sweden and Norway over a lesser or larger stretch of water. Neither was England insular during the Middle Ages when the channel proved to be no barrier for English thought entering the Continent or continental ideas conquering England. In spite of miserable communications European unity was never as strong as during the centuries preceding the discovery of America.

It was the fact that England of all European countries alone had a religion for itself — the Church of England. Europe resounded, after the reformers appeared, with the unending din of theological quarrels between Rome, Byzantium, Geneva, and Wittenberg. England which broke away from the Church, which had shaped the cultural and political face of the Continent, was now even spared the military and theological struggle between the Church and the heresies. England turned its face toward the seas and the very beating of England’s heart, hitherto synchronized with that of the great Continent, adopted another rhythm. England, like no other European country, had its own Shintō, its own creed, and national messianism as well as total isolation were inevitable consequences of the willful cutting of the spiritual ties.

England’s hope and England’s strength is thus diversity. This diversity is even stronger in Scotland and Ireland,10 which are more mountainous, more clannish, more divided in violently antagonistic spheres of interest. Scotland, besides the Eastern Alp area, is the only region in Europe where the national dress is still worn by the upper classes who in other countries have a disdain for “peasant costumes.”

There are certainly grave social injustices to be found in the United Kingdom. In certain regions conditions can be found which cry to heaven for vengeance and have to be remedied.11 But all precautions should be taken lest this process of rendering social justice become an excuse for a totalitarian and identitarian transformation of British social and political life. It is decidedly not Low’s asinine Colonel Blimp who is a real threat to Britain but Strube’s petty bourgeois “Little George” (a ratlike edition of Mr. Milquetoast) who would not be too discriminating in choosing another color for his shirt, like his German counterpart Herr Munkepunke with the fat neck and the bellowing voice, of the Fliegende Blätter. Neither the mining towns, nor the palaces or the farm yards menace the Occident, but Suburbia. And Suburbia stands for equality which destroys true society. Inequality is exactly Britain’s strength and guarantee that “Britons never will be slaves.”

The end of all hierarchy is the end of Britain. If Britain would follow the lead of Mr. H. G. Wells, the great prophet of Suburbia, visualizing the ultimate victory of ants or termites over humanity, the very end of Britain would be a foregone conclusion. But Britain is not a nation of shopkeepers as it is generally assumed; the shopkeeper complex is rather the dismayed discovery of aristocrats who suddenly became aware with horror of the commercialization of their country. The surprising amount of commercial spirit in the (older) English aristocracy is also due to the determination to survive under whatever circumstances.

Such an attitude has its dangers if one keeps in mind that a class might lose its own soul. The inclusion of persons in the rank of nobility on account of their wealth,12 through an (indirect) buying of arms and titles, is another source of the plutocratization of the aristocracy and nobility.

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13 The Magna Charta may be a “democratic document” if we consider the change from monarchy to aristocratic oligarchy a step toward democracy. Such a view is nevertheless entirely unjustified. Democracy in a social sense is usually far stronger in absolute monarchies (Russia, for instance) than in aristocratic Republics (Genoa, Venice, etc.). The only “democratic” features of Magna Charta are the restrictions imposed upon the Jews.

14 The greater affinity of the Tories toward Catholicism is due to their patriarchal tradition of loyalty and their stronger sense of hierarchy. Yet this is far from implying that the Whigs were by their very nature more akin to the ideas of the Reformation. Magna Charta and its libertinarian spirit antecedes that development by many centuries.

15 We have no information whether the two Jewish Rabbis in the Hungarian Upper House continued their membership under the present German controlled regime.

16 See the novel Christmas Holiday, by Somerset Maughan which describes a very typical case of the social rise of an English family from suburban gardeners to titled aristocrats.

17 Thus the member of parliament is not the personification of his constituency and his voters, like the ochlocratic “leader,” but a man who rather embodies a projection of aristocratic values.

18 The defeat of the Hoare-Laval plan through general elections necessitated the employment of sanctions against Italy and resulted in the total annexation of Abyssinia by Italy. The sanctions drove Italy into the arms of Germany. Mr. Eden is thus the Father of the Axis. The establishment of the Axis was the death warrant for Austria. The fall of Austria brought the total encirclement of the Czechoslovak republic. This encirclement forced the issue at Munich. Munich deprived the purely Czech parts of the republic of natural defenses which thus led to the events of March, 1939, and to the establishment of the protectorate over Slovakia. The occupation of Slovakia made Poland defenseless, depriving her of the last section of border which might have been left without protection.

The reader is advised to check these facts on a map. The borders of 1919 were indeed drawn in such a fashion that the loss of only one single country involved the breaking down of the whole artificial building.

Sir Charles Petrie in his twenty Years’ Armistice and After (London, 1940), expresses a similar idea and emphasizes the fact that Sir Austen Chamberlain saw clearly the danger (p. 165). Yet he traces the disastrous development back to the building of the Westwall, not to the sanctions. Both made western intervention impossible. Yet the Westwall was far from being ready in March, 1938. The real blow was struck by Eden and the peace balloteers.

19 There is also such a thing as North American insularism.

20 Which, of course, infected by the terroristic ideas of the French Revolution, was too blindly confiding in mere power; the Holy Alliance was doomed by the lack of a dynamic appeal and the emphasis on “don’ts” rather than on constructive ideas.

21 A similar view, though slightly less outspoken can be found in Douglas Jerrold’s excellent small book Britain and Europe 1900–1940, London, 1941. Proof of Britain’s miserable statesmanship (and not of an alleged basic immorality) is the fact that most decent causes in Europe have been cleverly linked up by the National Socialists directly or indirectly with their revolutionary war. The freedom of Croatia, the freedom of Slovakia, the Hungarian revision, the Bulgarian revision, the return of Bessarabia (to Rumania), the Finnish revision and territorial claims, the “liberation” of the Baltic states, the destruction of communism, the Spanish counterrevolution. Yet it is equally characteristic of the National Socialists, though adopting just causes, that they have always made them serve their own ends and this insincerity has affected all individual arrangements; thus the “liberation” of the Baltic states ended in their subjugation, the revision of Hungarian claims resulted in untenable and impossible borders, the whole Danubian solution as inaugurated by Berlin bears clearly the stamp of the Divide et Impera. The borders of Slovenia or the maritime share of Croatia have been allotted in a most cynical mood, the Hungarian-Slovakian relationship is perfectly hopeless. We do not even mention the disadvantages of the “New Order” for Poland because the will for destruction was here evident from the beginning.

22 Scotland has the advantage of a far better educational system than England. Every good educational system is highly “democratic” in its social and financial aspects but brutally aristocratic in its scholastic standards.

Ireland suffers particularly from the fact that its Second Estate has to supplement a non-Catholic First Estate. We have there a similar situation as in feudal-clerical-democratic French Canada.

23 See MacArthur and Long’s No Mean City, a terrifying, dramatized description of the slums in Glasgow (London, 1936).

24 In most parts of Europe titles were only given for achievements in the administration, the army and navy, in arts, sciences, and education. The richest German with many civil merits was merely given a knighthood (Krupp), Maurice Maeterlinck on the other hand was made a count.

• 3* About its confusion with liberty see the text concerning liberalism.
• 4* Charles A. and Mary R. Beard wrote: “As was said afterwards, the founders of the Republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin.” (America in Midpassage, New York, 1939, Vol. III, p. 922.) About the use of the word democratic between 1865 and the close of the century, see p. 923 of the same book.
• 5* Mob democracy is, needless to say, nearest to the concepts of St. Thomas. Thus by a play of circumstances their terminology is more accurate than that of some lowbrow Catholics.
• 6* The expression democracy in the notes, Appendix I, as used by American and foreign authorities, has its classical, standard meaning and is equivalent to the term ochlocracy in the text.
• 10* About the problem of “democracy” in relation to the popular representation in the United States. See pp. 247–248.
• 11* While man living in the old, traditional form of culture is a dreamer, modern, ochlocratic man is frequently the victim of illusions.
• 12* Cf. Bernard Fay’s excellent Freemasonry and Revolution. (Boston, 1935.)
• 13TO PUT in its right light and scientific context the technical word democracy is naturally our first task. Representative government as established in the United States is not synonymous with democracy. The Founding Fathers established a republic (res publica, politéia), not a democracy. And many of the Founders of the Constitution of this country have repeatedly emphasized this fact in so many words. Some of the best American minds have again and again called attention to this important fact and have protested loudly against the use of the term democracy for the fundamental laws of their country, which they respect and by which they abide.*
• 14We see, then, from the plurality of present-day connotations of democracy that it would be thoroughly unjustified to use the term “democracy” in any other sense than in the classical and universal one.* We may well agree that the mischief started by uneducated popularizers has already reached such proportions that a Hercules is needed to clean this Augian stable of popular misconceptions, false labels, and mispresented ideologies. Even some of the more intelligent writers have become a prey to popular pressure, and as modern intellectuals do not lead the masses any more, but follow them and subordinate their ideas and language to the demands of the market, the confusion has now reached its climax.
• 15Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.
• 16“Democracy” as an ideal of the Founding Fathers is equally denied by W. H. Hamilton and D. Adair in The Power to Govern (New York, 1937, p. 158). It must also be borne in mind that the protest against calling the Constitution democratic comes from historians of all groups, yet while Rightists praise lack of “democracy” in the Constitution, “Leftists” like Charles Beard* and H. Rugg are prone to condemn it outright.
• 17We have said before that it is difficult to find the exact reasons for the growing popularity of the word democracy and democratic taken from a dead language which is thoroughly nonunderstandable to 999 out of 1000 Americans. The decline of classical education in favor of progressive “self-realization” has favored the increased use of wrong labels. It is deplorable that even Catholics have become victims of this chaos in verbiage. They have naturally “their” democracy, the Leftists have “another one,”* and even Conservatives indulge in the worship of a thing called “democracy” with a thoroughly different content. The only way out would be to discard the label completely, restore it brutally to its pristine meaning, and to call the things hitherto covered by the label with their proper names.
• 18In order to denote the classical interpretation of democracy as well as its cultural concomitant we have chosen to use the word ochlocracy and — as its adjective — ochlocratic.* The Greeks used this expression strictly in the sense of mob rule, regardless whether these mobs created majorities or minorities. The selection is not a very happy one, and the reader is reminded that we understand under “mob” not the “lower classes,” but just the vast masses of inferior people which can be found everywhere; these products of a soulless culture and civilization who in their terrifying mediocrity are neither fish nor flesh, have neither face nor expression, neither wisdom nor knowledge, piety nor enthusiasm, faith nor charity, hatred nor love, those who go neither with the angels nor the devils and because of their lukewarmness will be spat out by our Lord on the day of reckoning.
• 19It is almost in the strictly classical sense of the Greek word ochlocracy, to which reference has just been made, that the United States Army Military Manual* defines democracy in Section IX, Lesson 9, on “Representative Government.” Having first described autocracy as resulting in “arbitrariness, tyranny, and oppression,” it goes on to what it considers the opposite extreme:
• 20While many may consider the government established by the Founding Fathers as a constitutional democracy, it is clear that no such idea entered into the mind of those from whom Americans derive their form of government, nor did these men give coloring to such an interpretation by their own actions.*
• 21We must furthermore always bear in mind that equality presupposes the perpetual application of force; equality after all is an unnatural condition — it is just as unnatural as a completely straight line, a geometrical plain, a perfect circle, distilled water, etc. It needs the intervention of human agencies who have to curtail and to stem the natural growth and development sometimes in the most brutal and cynical way. Docteur Guillotin, Procrustes, the mythological Hellenic bandit, and the magistrate of Strasbourg who decided during the French Revolution to demolish the tower of the medieval cathedral because it was higher than the surrounding houses, belong all to the same category. Dostoyevski, in his Possessed, has predicted accurately how an egalitarian superdemocracy would function. The Soviets have fulfilled this prophecy to the letter.
• 22The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain. Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society. These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
• 23The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain. Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society. These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
• 24It must furthermore be borne in mind that equality stands for monotony and not for harmony. A harmonious melody can only be established by different unidentical musical tones. These tones must be assembled and have to follow in a certain sequence; otherwise they will result in chaos and not in melody. Human society presupposes such an inequality and unity. Thibon has seen very clearly this issue which can only be solved in the sign of love.