The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large
Part Ii
I
MONARCHY
“Among the most primitive races tribal authority is exercised almost universally in the democratic form of general council, while governments representing the monarchical principle are almost entirely absent among peoples usually relegated to the lowest group. We regard this as a very remarkable fact concerning primitive social organization, and it has in most cases only been mentioned in passing in theoretical literature.”
Sir Harry Johnston in his The Uganda Protectorate emphasizes the democratic, majoritarian, nonmonarchical structure of the social setup of Central African Pygmees and Dr. S. T. van der Bij in his carefully prepared Onstaan en eerste ontwikkeling van den oorlog comes implicitly to similar conclusions.
The democratic character of early, primitive civilizations has also been acknowledged by Sylvester A. Sieber, S.V.D., and Franz H. Mueller, M.C.S., in their standard work The Social Life of Primitive Man (St. Louis: Herder, 1941), on pp. 38–42.
It is not in vain that Disraeli called Monarchy in Coningsby (Book V, Ch. 8) a government which “requires a high degree of civilization.” “It needs the support of the free laws and manners, and of a widely diffused intelligence. . . . An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called a representative government,” he wrote.
“I made the assertion that there is no doubt but that modern royalty as a whole has been decidedly superior to the average European in capacity; and we may say without danger of refutation, that the royal breed, considered as a unit, is superior to any other one family, be it that of noble or commoner. I have no wish to modify this extreme statement.” (From: The Influence of Monarchs, 1913.)
He continues later on in the same book: “The best argument in favor of the real and inherent nature of the intellectual gifts of royalty and their average superiority when judged as a single breed comes from thinking in proportion ratios. If all questions are set aside except the total within a group, a striking fact is brought out. In Heredity in Royalty I showed that out of a total of 823 royal persons there were about twenty of the intellectual eminence of Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, William the Silent, Eugene of Savoy, etc. Let this proportion (1 to 40) be compared with the number of great men who arise out of a total population at any period or in any country and the contrast is astonishing. There have not been at most more than 200 men of such unquestioned genius born in any of the nations, England, France, Germany or America, during their entire history. Each has had a population of 20, 5O, or 100 million or more, yet only a 100 or 200 of such great geniuses have been produced. The differences are overwhelming. The chances in favor of royalty are several 100,000 times as great. In other words, the average prince throughout modern times has a small chance of becoming a man of genius. There has only been one chance in 40, but this is more than a 100,000 times as good as the chances for an average child of average parents.”
Professor Woods was rather critical and narrow in using the term “genius.” He seems to have a certain antipathy for the great Catholic rulers. He also adds quite rightly that the percentage of mental cases among royalty is higher than the average. (4 per cent instead of 2 per cent — the same proportion as among the closer relatives of geniuses.)
About the interrelationship between Catholic Church and Monarchy, see, “On the Monarchical character of the Church,” Tanquerey, Synopsis Totius Theologiae dogmaticae, Vol. I, Tournay, 1899, pp. 463, 464.
“Clearly.”
“And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy from oligarchy — I mean, after a sort?” — Plato, Republic, Book VIII, trans, by Jowett.
“It has been attempted to give ancestors to modern democracy: ancient democracies, the urban or peasant democracies of the Middle Ages. These are only pictures acquired by a newly rich to adorn his château; he may take on the name but he is not of the same house.”
Yet the influence of the Antique Republic was undoubtedly very strong in the case of the American Republic of the Founding Fathers, less so in the case of modern America.
In an ideal monarchy there must be a real mutual affection between monarch and people, an affection similar to that between parents and children. Durability is another characteristic of this affection in an ideal form. When Queen Astrid of Belgium died in 1935 the people cried in the streets of Brussels.
“Terrible is the Czar-Animal, but even more terrible is the Animal-People.” — Myerezhkovski, The 14, December.
“Moreover, if a State is to be built out of this dust of individuals, then — and most logically, as the individual as such is, as I have said, only a part — the individual will be completely annexed to the social whole, will no longer exist except for the city, and we shall see individualism culminate quite naturally in the monarchic tyranny of a Hobbes, the democratic tyranny of a Rousseau, or the tyranny of the ‘Providence State’ and the ‘God State’ of a Hegel and his disciples.
“Let us say that the Christian City is as fundamentally anti-individualist as it is fundamentally personalist.” — Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers.
N.B. “Person” comes from per se! The word “individual” signifies the last indivisible fragment of a whole.
The efforts of Leftists of the “humanitarian” wing to abolish legislation against sodomy come from the same ideological background. (F.S.C.)
Democracy is for him the child of liberalism, the French Revolution, the Glorious Revolution transplanted to Paris. The Platonic idea that democracy develops from oligarchy which in its turn derives from aristocracy has probably influenced him deeply. Liberalism is for Gonzague de Reynold doomed to end in democracy: “Democracy therefore will devour liberalism, whose child it is. Liberalism from the beginning on felt that it would have to be the victim. Liberalism is generous and therefore weak. Democracy is jealous and therefore strong. Socialism is tyrannical and therefore powerful.”
Yet he adds later on: “Liberalism is instinctively opposed to the system of majority.” The same idea can be found in Professor Louis Rougier’s La Mystique démocratique, Paris, 1929.
How can we account for such a relatively considerable difference of opinion between him and Dawson, two contemporary European Catholic thinkers? Dawson has probably before his mind the aristocratic libertinarianism originating from the Magna Charta. (“Liberty has always been an aristocratic ideal,” he says in Beyond Politics). Thus he puts less stress on the later, additional element of bourgeois, Manchesterian liberalism with its strong materialistic aspects and its Diesseitsoptimismus inspired by the French Philosophers. This optimism in regard to this word and to human nature is the reaction against the Lutheran despair about the alleged total wretchedness of man and the Calvinistic despair about man’s helplessness in the grip of predestination. There is nothing more truly Catholic than the healthy thirst for liberty blended with piety and real humility. (Otherwise it degenerates into some form of anarchy.) Gonzague de Reynold sees liberalism as the ism or organized philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, while Dawson turns his eye to the deep-rooted British sentiment. From their own points of view one can say that both are right. It is merely surprising that two such Continentals like Ortega y Gasset and the Bulgar Petko Staïnov take the Dawsonian view about the issue.
Petko Staïnov wrote his Competence and Democracy (Kompetentnost i Narodovlastiё) in 1923. He came to his conclusions independently from Ortega y Gasset who distinguishes between Liberalism and Democracy.
Something similar had been expressed by Montesquieu almost 200 years ago in his De l’esprit des lois (Book XI, Ch. II).
W. H. Chamberlin in his The World’s Iron Age, New York, 1941, pp. 46–47, joins the ranks of those who resisted the confusing of the terms liberalism and democracy valiantly.
Gonzague de Reynold also makes the very necessary distinction between democracy and demophily (the love and respect of the rulers and “higher” classes for the “lower” social layers). Émile Faguet in his Cult of Incompetence emphasized this before him.
A similar idea has been expressed by Guglielmo Ferrero: “Before the French Revolution, wars scarcely affected the masses. They were fought out between sovereigns — the emperor, the kings, or the aristocratic republics which were still numerous in the eighteenth century — between ruling classes few in numbers, homogeneous, cultured, and refined. These classes could fight each other without excessive animosity; they could recognize that the enemy’s cause was as righteous as their own; they could wage war as a game, respecting its rules even when it would be more advantageous to break them; and admit defeat as soon as it became too dangerous to keep on. Today it is the people who fight. . . . This mass cannot keep up the efforts of a war unless it is fired by some passion common to it all. A nation at war must therefore hate the enemy, which means that it must be convinced that it is defending the most righteous of causes against the most infamous aggression; that it represents innocent Right fighting against Evil armed with the most diabolical of long-premeditated designs.” — Guglielmo Ferrero, Peace and War (London: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 57–58, trans, by Bertha Pritchard.
“Obviously there is no room in such a society for liberty, as it has been understood in the past. For liberty is not the right of the mass to power, but the right of the individual and the group to achieve the highest possible degree of self-development. Hence liberty has always been an aristocratic ideal and it is no accident that England, the home of parliamentary institutions and political liberties, should also have been the European state which possessed the strongest and most unbroken tradition of aristocratic government.
“It is a survival of the vestiges of this aristocratic tradition which, in spite of the progress of democracy and social uniformity, renders English society so recalcitrant to totalitarian ideas. A pure democracy which sets equality above every other social value can adapt itself to a totalitarian organisation as easily as a pure autocracy; but a totalitarian aristocracy has never existed, and though the English state may well lose what remains of its aristocratic institutions, it cannot divest itself of the values and ideas that were developed by this political tradition without a loss of national character, in other words, without losing its own soul.”
And later he adds: “What the nondictatorial states stand for today is not liberalism but democracy, a very different thing, as the old liberals themselves recognized and as their last representative Croce still points out today. Liberalism stands for the rights of the individual and the freedom of private opinion and private interests while democracy stands for the rights of majority and the sovereignty of public opinion and the common interest.”
114 “These facts have been lost sight of, on account of the merciless propaganda of the French revolutionists, who desired to blacken as much as they could the system they were bent on destroying. But no intelligent man now can see anything more in that period of philosophical madness than the summit of a movement that finally broke down feudalism, not to liberate man, but to force him into the arms of a rising factory system. He became free — but only to sell his toil at a sacrifice of privilege, and for a bare subsistence wage. It is notorious that at the time the factory system arose, when France and England were warring for commercial supremacy, wages were lower than they had been for centuries, considering their purchasing power. It was only after prolonged labor conflicts that conditions again approximated ancient levels. The story of the state of English labor at the close of the eighteenth century is almost incredible, and yet the ancestors of this wretched class had been the yeomanry of Merrie England.” — James H. Wood, Democracy and the Will to Power (New York: Knopf, 1921), pp. 164-165.
Further reference material:
On liberty and equality:
John J. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, New York, 1853, p. 56.
On liberty, the Constitution and majoritism: Ibidem, p. 60.
On the importance of numerical majorities in primitive societies: Ibidem, pp. 61–62.
On monarchy and Aristocracy: Ibidem, p. 82.
On the constitutional character of monarchy and aristocracy: Ibidem, p. 83.
On the antithesis between liberty and equality (or democracy).
Luis Legaz y Lacambra, Introducción a la teoria del Estado Nacionalsindicalista, Barcelona, 1940, p. 49.
Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1924, p. 745.
Radbruch, Rechtsphilosophie, Leipzig, 1932, pp. 66 ff.
About the “democratic” and libertinarian aspects of monarchy:
Salvador de Madariaga, Hernán Cortés, New York, 1941, pp. 40–41.
On regionalism and federalism in France:
Carlton Hayes, A Generation of Materialism (1871–1900), New York, 1941, pp. 279–280.
On the position of the Japanese emperor:
W. H. Chamberlin, “Who Are the Japanese,” American Mercury, No. 218, Feb., 1942.
On the militarization of Japan through modernity and “democracy”:
Cf. Ernest O. Hauser, “Are Japanese People?” in Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 16, 1940.
About Catholic and state corporativism:
Paul Vignaux, “Catholic and State Corporativism” in The Review of Politics, 1942
(January, April, and July).
On nationalism and patriotism:
Miguel de Unamuno, Vérités arbitraires, Paris, pp. 190–191.
On monarchy, aristocracy, and republic:
Lucien Romier, Explication de notre temps, Paris, 1925, pp. 195, 241–242.
An exact prophecy of the present war: Ibidem, p. 275.
About Francis II of Austria and Napoléon:
Guglielmo Ferrero, Pouvoir, New York, 1942, p. 122.
On a typical seventeenth-century opinion on monarchy:
Bossuet, Oeuvres Completes, Paris, 1836, Töme X, pp. 328–335.
On the values of even an absolute monarchy:
Guglielmo Ferrero, Pouvoir, New York, 1942, p. 52.
On “federalism” from a Christian point of view:
Dr. Eugen Stamm, citing Constantin Frantz in his preface to Constantin Frantz’ Deutschland und der Föderalismus, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1921, p. x.
On the antagonism between liberty and centralism:
M. Bakounin, Oeuvres, Tôme I, Paris, 1907, pp. 11–12.
On the insincere socialism of the Poles:
Ibidem. Tôme II, Paris, 1907, p. 172.
On the “international” outlook of monarchs:
Professor Albert Guérard cites in his The France of Tomorrow the advisers of Alexander I of Russia (p. 34): Nesselrode, a German born in Portugal, baptized an Anglican, Stackelberg, a Baltic-German, Stein, a West-German, Kotzebue, a Central-German, Capo-d’Istria, a Greek-born in Austria, Czartoryski, a Pole, La Harpe (Swiss), Pozzo di Borgo, a French of Italian-Corsican origin, the Due de Richelieu (a Frenchman), Madame de Krüdener (German-Swiss), and Madame de Staël (French-Swiss).
II
PARLIAMENTARISM AND REPUBLICANISM
“But Don Pio,” I should ask timidly, “whom do you understand by Europeans?”
“Then Baroja would answer gravely: ‘At times I think that the Alps and the Pyrenees are the only European parts of Europe. Above them I see Asia and below them Africa.’”
“To which Unamuno would murmur dreamily: ‘And I should not be ashamed to be African, yes, as African as Tertullian and Augustine.’”
“The Party denied the free will of the individual — and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives — and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil — and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced — and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.” — Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (Macmillan: New York, 1941), pp. 257–258.
The popularity which the theory of evolution soon enjoyed on the Continent as well as in England is amply explained by Werner Sombart in his last work, Vom Menschen. He writes: “Don’t let us be surprised with Uncle Eberhard in Fontane’s book when he says: ‘I can well remember the times, when the monkey business came into fashion, when some people declared, that a certain Orang-Utang was our grandfather. You should have seen it, how everybody seemed delighted. When we were still convinced to have been created by God, no fuss was made, but when the monkeys got in vogue, they danced as the Jews of old before the Ark of Covenant.’”
The inroads made by atheism were only possible after the Protestant prelude. The Protestant religions besides their inherent “protest” are mainly characterized by their decreasing depositum fidei. This decrease is an important element in the bourgeois attitude toward integral Christianity. Bernhard Groethuysen in his “Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France” (Vol. I), gave a brilliant analysis of this process.
Friedrich Nietzsche follows the same idea in Beyond Good and Evil when he says: “The democratic idea proceeds toward the fabrication of a human type fit for slavery in the most delicate sense of the word. Every democracy is simultaneously an involuntary institution for the breeding of tyrants in every sense of the word, even in the spiritual sense.”
Further reference material:
On party rule:
Orestes Brownson, Works, Volume XVIII, p. 141.
Bede Jarrett, O.P., Social Theories of the Middle Ages, Boston, 1926, p. 28. (Partyrule being considered as hostile to liberty.)
On the pseudo-socialistic implications of Darwinism:
Émile Zola, Germinal, Paris, II Vol., p. 179.
III
WORLD WAR I
This observation has to be taken cum grano salis. A commentator and columnist once expounded the theory that every Protestant nation has an innate demand for political liberties while Catholic nations stand for authority, discipline, and suppression. Somebody mentioned Prussia and Belgium and the conversation drifted quickly to other subjects.
There is a very good and short summing up of the arguments against Germany’s (and William II’s) war guilt in the excellent book of the German Socialist Dr. Arthur Rosenberg: Die Entstehung der deutschen Republik, Berlin, 1930, pp. 66–67. (Published under the title, The Birth of the German Republic, in a translation by Ian Morrow by the Oxford University Press, London, 1931.) The catastrophical policy of Ludendorff during the war is brilliantly described.
Hoffman Nickerson writes in the Armed Horde about civilians in enemy countries during the wars prior to the French Revolution: “While the professional troops were performing their miracles of endurance and valor, civilians went to and fro freely between their own country and the one with which it happened to be at war. During the Seven Years’ War, a man of letters like Sterne could go from England to Paris, frequent Diderot and Holbach, be cheered by admirers of his character of Uncle Toby, and attend theatricals at Frontignac among an English colony there without troubling in the least over his citizenship in a hostile state. So little was Europe then troubled by the existence of war.”
About Germany’s reaction to the peace proposals see Kühlmann und die päpstliche Friendensaktion von 1917, by Friedrich Meinecke, Berlin, 1928. (On R. v. Kühlmann’s ideas about the peace cf. op cit., p. 21.)
Cf. also Philippe Amiguet, Zita, Princesse de la Paix; and La Vie du Prince Sixte de Bourbon.
Lloyd George was not better informed. All had been said about Clémenceau, his prodigious ignorance and about everything else which did not concern romantic history or interior French politics. — Cf. Henri Pozzi, Les Coupables.
“Nevertheless there is a real distinction between professional and temporary fighting men. The professional form a guild or corporation of their own, distinct from other citizens. They fight from disciplined habit. Their esprit de corps is not unlike a strongly developed school or college spirit. Their sense of honour of arms has much in common with that of a clergyman who will not disgrace his cloth or a good workman who would be ashamed to do a bad job. Thus they are ordinarily obedient instruments of the governments which pay them. The French Foreign Legion or the United States Marines have fought in many quarrels about the merits of which their individual members cared little. They need no violent emotions to make them fight. It has been well said that the grenadiers of Maria Theresa did not have to be told that Frederick the Great was a Sodomite, or those of Frederick that Maria Theresa, ate babies.” — Hoffman Nickerson, The Armed Horde, New York, 1940.
The wartime Prime Minister who visited Adolph Hitler added: “I have never seen a happier people than the Germans. Hitler is one of the greatest of the many great men I have ever met.”
Yet Mr. Lloyd George spoke on October 28, 1937, on Spanish “Democracy” in favor of the “loyalists.”
“The author has tried in vain to get from Mr. Lloyd George an authentic statement whether he had uttered the view that Germany could not possibly be dismembered like Austria-Hungary because she was a ‘Protestant’ power. Mr. Lloyd George declared through his secretary that he was too busy to answer the question with a straight affirmation or denial.”
(Lloyd George, asked why he was so violent a partisan of the Spanish Republic . . . replied with a twinkle: “I always line up on the side against the priests.” — Virginia Cowles in her “Looking for Trouble,” London, 1941 (Hamish Hamilton), p. 107.
Mr. Wilson had an excuse for not permitting such a thing. In the Letters of Franklin Lane (ed. by A. W. Lane and L. H. Hall), we find the following passage: “Theoretically, the President said, German-Austria should go to Germany, as all were of one language and one race, but this would mean the establishment of a great central Roman-Catholic nation which would be under the control of the Papacy, and would be particularly objectionable to Italy.”
If the Catholic element of the Germanies would have been thus strengthened a victory of the National Socialist at the elections would have been spared. The history of Europe would have taken another course.
This is also the view of F. A. Hermens in Democracy or Anarchy, Notre Dame, South Bend, 1941. As to British anti-Austrian sentiments we have to refer largely to the “liberal” tradition. (Cf. Gladstone’s election speech on March 17, 1880.)
René Schickelé in his Die Grenze (Berlin, 1932, p. 146) quotes Anatole France saying in the summer of 1918: “Well, yes. we are going to defeat Germany. Yet for that purpose we will have made use of the whole world. Even if Germany is beaten she will be proud of having withstood the whole world and never is there going to be a people feeling so drunk and exalted by its own defeat.
“If the coming peace is not going to give birth to the United States of Europe it will remain a mere armistice and everything is going to start all over again.”
This increase of prestige was mainly notable in Southern and Eastern Europe. The present war will have a further effect in that direction — whatever its outcome.
And when more than three years later the Frankfurter Zeitung menaced the Czechs with German supremacy and domination if they dared to destroy the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, he wrote in the Action Française with equal clear-sightedness: “In these few lines is contained an entire philosophy of history. It is obvious therefrom that the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy would improve nothing in Europe because it would only result in the transposing of the national fights from one territory to another. In the name of the same principle, which up to now permitted them to form their own national unity, and which other peoples invoked in turn, the German people will complain of being persecuted and will come back to demand its rights. It would simply be the beginning of endless conflicts.”
Keynes makes here a mistake. Central Europe of 1920 resembled far more the status of that region in A.D. 660 than in 1870. The tribal regions of “noble savages” was obviously the pattern.
The old Tiger knew obviously better than our historians who take their cues from the columnists what it “was all about.”
These mistakes cost England very dearly. Czechoslovakia and Rumania, pampered for years with money and privileges, surrendered without firing a shot. Yugoslavia crumbled from inner dissent; even the Serbs who are good fighters had to give up because the Germans were able to attack from the flank, via Bulgaria. If Bulgaria would not have been driven into the enemy camp a line could have been established along the Danube and the Carst (always excluding Croatia) which could have been successfully defended. Yet blunder followed blunder and these can be traced back solidly to the arrangements of 1919 and 1920.
(Criticism of the peace arrangement, in a short outline, can be found in Algernon Cecil’s pertinent Facing the Facts in Foreign Policy, London, 1941—a brilliant short study of Britain’s disastrous dealings with the Continent.)
Further reference material:
On Italy in the First World War:
Guglielmo Ferrero, Pouvoir, New York, 1942, pp. 289, 297.
About the legal position of the ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary:
Das Nationalitätenrecht des Alten Österreich, edited by K. G. Hugelmann, Vienna, 1934.
About mass mentality in the war (First World War):
Caroline F. Playne, Society at War (1914–1916), London, 1931.
Gert Schreiner, Die Republik der 14 Jahre, Bilthoven, 1938, p. 114.
H. D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, London, 1927.
On the treatment of the German peace delegation 1919:
Sisley Huddleston, Peacemaking at Paris, London, 1919, p. 226.
“Allied” anti-German war literature paralleling Bernhardi’s book in aggressiveness:
Homer Lea, The Day of the Saxon, London, 1912. Specially pp. 204, 213, 226, 233, 241, 10, 15, 146. (This book was dedicated to Field Marshall Roberts.)
The anonymous anti-German article in the Saturday Review, September, 1897.
La France victorieuse dans la guerre de demain, by Colonel Arthur Boucher.
La guerre de demain, by M. Keller.
On the war propaganda of Italian freemasonry prior to 1915:
Gino Bandini, La Massoneria per la guerra nazionale, Discorso detto a Palazzo Giustiniani il 24 maggio, 1924. (Pubished by the freemasons as a defense against the accusation of lacking patriotism.) Cf. p. 97. (Roma, a cura della Massoneria Romana, 1924.)
On the prowar attitude of certain leading Americans in 1915:
Dr. Eliot of Harvard to a meeting of Baptist ministers: “Do not pray for peace now.
I cannot conceive a worse catastrophe for the human race than peace in Europe now.” (The Nation, April 17, 1915.)
On Germany and the Papal peace plan and the Papal peace effort:
Reverend Henry G. E. Rope, M.A., Benedict XV, London, 1941.
The article of L. J. S. Wood in the Dublin Review, April, 1922, gives, on p. 199, the details of Sonnino’s clause XV of the London Protocol (stipulating that the Vatican should be excluded from a participation in the peace conference).
On a French protest against the Treaty of Versailles:
Édouard Dujardin (Professor of the Sorbonne) in Les Cahiers idéalistes, May-June-July, 1919.
On the myth of the economic origin of wars:
Sidney Fay, Origins of the World War, New York, 1938, p. 46.
Albert Guérard, The France of Tomorrow, Cambridge, 1942, p. 31.
On the character of a good peace treaty cf.
Fénélon, Oeuvres, Paris, 1787, Tôme III, p. 489.
On the peace treaties and Austria-Hungary:
Algernon Cecil, Facing Facts in Foreign Policy, London, 1941, p. 69.
Sir Charles Petrie, 20 Years Armistice and After, London, 1940, pp. 10–11, 12, 126, 21, 165, 285.
Austria-Hungary as “run by Jews” decried by:
H. Wickham Steed, A Programme for Peace, Reprint from the Edinburgh Review, 1916, p. 19.
T. G. Masaryk, The Making of a State (edited by H. Wickham Steed), p. 439.
