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THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL.—Ko. I.
|B? A COLONIST OF 1839.J
J l
Mrs. Carlyle tolls us of
a
domestic
servant whom
she
liad
brought
from
rural
Scotland who, 011 being
token
to '
the Royal Academy, could only
express
her admiration of the pictures, including
d
no doubt the frames in which they were
o
eiehibited, by the repeated exclamation,
S
Oh, how expensive! How expensive J"
y
Although educated people generally think
c
this is an inappropriate adjective to
apply to works of
art, at the
bottom
of
our
Fhilistine
hearts
we
are
all
too
apt
to
measure
the
preciousness
and
the
beauty
of
all
things
by their exchangeable money value.
Mr.
Grant Allen is not far wrong when he
says that America, in spite of her democratic
Constitution, is further from the
democratic ideal than the older nations of
Europe.
The
plutocrat
sins
against
democratic simplicity even
more
than
the aristocrat.
The United States
may
be regarded as the final home of
that
form
of
conservatism
which
he
calls
barbaric.
The Oriental barbarism of the
Jewess,
bedizened
with
rings, is
outstripped
by the Occidental barbarism of
the Californian heiress, bedecked from
morning to night with vulgar profusion
of diamonds.
The people who gaze and
admire and say "How
beautiful" really
mean
" How expensive."
Far
more
beautiful things than these costly brilliants
call forth little or no admiration.
The barbaric type of mind loves to use
"wealth for display, and when this display
is paraded in an educated society it is not
only barbaric but
vulgar.
The
palace
and
pyramid
forms
of
expenditure—
great houses, wide parks, many footmen,
many horses and carriages,
gold plate,
massive silver,
diamond
tiaras,
costly
furs, — are meant to show by outward and
visible
signs that no one can
mistake
that a man his wealth and can waste it.
.Newport, the chief, or rather the
most
fashionable watering-place for New York,
is
frequented
by
millionaire
families
whose
average
expenditure
for
the
season only is reckoned at £30,000 sterling
—not dollars.
These people can scarcely
conceive thai there are men and women
in the world who dislike and despise these
things.
Anything that is said or written
in deprecation of this ostentation they
set down to envy, which is the passion
which Oriental and Occidental barbarians
love to excite.
And yet the American plutosrat calls
liimself either Republican or Democrat,
and both of these words imply simplicity
and even
frugality
of
life.
Both
are
associated in history and tradition with
natural
hours,
simple
housing,
little
waste;
and
the
democratic
ideal
is
that thingB are beautiful
nen made so
by human taste and skill working under
pleasant and natural conditions.
In the
impassioned words of the late Walt Whitman,
the poet of democracy, not profane,
but earnestly appealing to the great Maker
and Father of us all—
I speak the password primeval—I give tha
sign of democracy.
By Ucd. I will accept nothing which all cannot
have their counterpart of on the same terms
This
is
the vital
distinction.
The
plutocrat,
like
the
aristocrat, loves to
monopolize what is pleasant and beautiful
and luxurious; the true democrat wishes
for nothing
which
his
fellows
cannot
share with him, or possess as absolutely
as lie does.
Tha growth of luxury in the
United States during the last fifty years
lias far exceeded anytliing seen anywhere
else in the world.
The old Republican
simplicity of the founders of the
Union
was combined with fine manners and with
much dignity and culture.
Life in
New
England
fifty
years
ago
was
much
less
luxurious
than
in
old
England.
The
factory
system had
its
birth
at
Lowell, Massachusetts, where girls
well
born and fairly educated worked for long
hours in the cotton-mills for slender pay,
but
uttder
wholesome
and
respectable
conditions.
Miss Lucy Larcom's description
of how she worked, and how middleclass
people lived, reminds
me of
the
simplicity of
life in the early days
of
South Australia.
And
in
this
simple
bomely society the influx of immigration
was small.
It
was
not
till
this
century
was
well advanced that the people
pressed
from the Atlantic seaboard to the virgin
lands of the interior, and found ample
scope for industry and enterprise.
" To
the West! To the West!" was not
only
the
popular
cry
of
Europe,
but
the
natural trend of the people of America.
As England planted colonies over the seas
in various regions with various climates, so
did the originalthirteen States, andespecially
the more northerly of them, stretch out
towards the Mississippi, founding what
were really inland colonies, governed in
ruder ways than those oversea colonies of
Britain, till the fulness of time brought
sufficient population to entitle the new
territory to be erected into a sovereign
State.
The slave question increased in
urgency when each State as it was recognised
was marshalled under one or the
other banner, and when, according to the
decision
of
the
tentative
Legislature,
there were two more votes in the Senate
for or against that domestic
institution.
It puzzled us then, and it puzzles many
people now, to understand why those who
upheld chattel slavery called themselves
Democrats, and why the democratic ideal
for Southern Americans was not even the
equality of white men.
The degradation
of
labour
in
these
States
produced
a division of the people into three distinct
castes—the
slaveowners
with
large
estates cultivated by
slaves ; the
mean
whites, ignorant, violent, and barbarous,
but holding themselves infinitely above
the
compulsorily
industrious
negroes,
mulattoes, and quadroons.
What
was
called
the
Democratic
side
of
the
American
Constitution
allowed
that
slavery was a
domestic institution
for
each State to
uphold
or
reject
as
it
saw fit, and not to be interfered with by
the
Central
Republican
Government.
But democratic it was not—the democratic
spirit was with the opponents of the South.
It was the discovery of gold in Australia
that changed the simplicity of early
days,
and hastened by
fifty
years the
growth of cities, the building of railways,
and the settlement of the country.
One
cannot say that the discovery of gold and
silver on the Pacific Slope was quite so
great a factor in the extension and the
expansion of the United States, but it was
a very great one.
The railway across the
Rocky Mountains, which was hastened by
the wealth of Californian mines, opened
up a glorious inheritance, and the great
civil war, with its immense demands on
blood and treasure, for the
first
time
crected a national debt for the Republic
that demanded taxation for revenue, and
also gave a lucrative field for bulls and
bears
and Stock Exchange
operations.
America has been a much more profitable
field for the plutocrat to develop in than
Australia.
State rights are an excellent
thing in their way, but these prevented
the railways from being taken up by the
Federal
Government,
and
not
only
have
capitalists
and
speculators
built
lines
to
the
extent
of
170,000
miles
for their own profit, but in inany
cases
have been rewarded
for doing
so
by
enormous concessions of public lands on
cither side of the line.
A country with
unlimited land for agricultural settlement,
•with gold and silver, coal and iron, only
waiting for
the
working,
was
thrown
open
to
the
longest
purses
and
the
longest heads in America at a time
when
modern machinery and invention
were
every day
cheapening
production
and
Caving time.
The silver mines of Nevada
were not held by
thousands of
shareholders
like our Broken Hill mines,
but
by seven partners, who divided millions
every year amongst
them.
Wherever
things held by smaller people were worth
•wresting from them,
capital
combined
could
cither
coax or
bully them
into
Cclinquishmcnt,
,
The telegraph wires and the railway
ines, all held by capitalists, were worked
in the interests of capital, not even controlled
by the State or by the Federal
Government, andcouldbydifferential rates
on the roads, or refusal or delay of service
on the telegraph lines, crush the inividual
or the newspaper that dared to
ppose them. Thus we see in the United
tates fortunes made in ten or twenty
ears equal to the wealth « the Rothhilds,
which has been accumulated for
several generations.
" Thirty
years
ago,"
says
the
San
Francisco Star,
"there were but two or
three millionaires in the United States.
Now there are 900
who possess
more
than a million of pounds sterling, or
five
million dollars, and of these many who
possess twenty millions sterling ?"
And
we ask cm bono?
Good for what, good
for whom ?
Are the conditions of American
workers
so
much
better
than
those of their fellows in
England,
as
the virgin soil, the marvellous
natural
advantages, the
constant
effective
demand
for things produced would lead us
to
expect?
From all
hands we hear
' No.'"
I do not trust entirely to the
statements of the Marx-Avelings
as
to
labour in America, for
they
are
pronounced
Socialists ; but Sir James Kitson,
who
travelled
through
the States
as
Chairman of the Iron and Steel Institute,
holding its meeting for the year in Philadelphia,
tells the same story.
With all
the extraordinary facilities for obtaining
the best of iron and the best of coal, and
natural gas as
well, he wondered
why
American manufacturers and mineowners
demanded protection from the
outside
world, and yet
the
excuse
of
higher
wages was misleading.
Though nominally
higher,
the
worker
is
expected
to
work
more
hours
in
the
day
and
to
produce
more
in
an
hour
than
in
England.
This
stress
and strain, he admits, is also true of the
employer—he might have
said
of
the
manager, for few are the employers who
condescend to earn
even the wages of
supervision—but
the
overseer
is
paid
accordingly,- and the owner makes enormous
profits, while
the
worker has a
shortened life and nothing to show for it.
If in America, with a free market among
sixty-five millions of well-to-do
people,
and no war budget or conscription
to
press on industry, this is the best result
of freedom of
contract, one begins
to
grope after some other rule of life.
War
is ugly enough,
cruel enough, wasteful
enough in all conscience, but it calls forth
some
virtues
of
endurance,
discipline,
courage, and self-sacrifice.
If the present
system only makes plutocrats and proletaires—and
if as Sir James Kitson
says
the
Trades Unions
in
the
States
are
ouito powerless to prevent over-driving
by the boss—we in Australia have cause to
be thankful for our State-made and Statecontrolled
railways, for our State-owned
telegraph lines, for our eight-hours day,
and our strong Trades Unions.
It may be in Australia and not in
America that the dreams of Walt Whitman
may be earliest realized. Mr. J.
Addington Symonds, in his very penetrating
essay on " Democratic Art," published
in his recently collected volumes,
has shown what that ought to be, and
instances Walt Whitman as the one
author who has approached the problem
with It full sense of its present urgency
and iti ultimate preponderance. It is
unfortuaate that Walt Whitman is not a
popular poet. His success is rather a
success of esteem, as the French
call it, than a success with the
main body of his countrymen, or
with the greater, wider public which
he embraces in his " Democratic Yistas.''
In this work he says that democracy must
prove itself beyond cavil by creating
intellectual types which shall displace all
that previously existed. This can scarcely
be. Democracy, even American and Australian
democracy, is the child o£ modern
Europe, and that again is descended
from feudalism and medievalism. In its
language, its traditions, and even its
government it holds from the past. It
cannot escape from its ancestry. It
need not displace, while it does but
continue, expand, and enlarge. But
democracy can and ought to produce an
art and a literature differing in essential
points from those of classical antiquity
and of romantic feudalism.
We do not deny that some art and
literature have sometimes taken common
folk for their subject and treated
them
with grace, but as a rule it has been with
a kind of condescension.
In literature
perhaps the nearest to the
democratic
spirit is found in
the
rustic idylls of
George Sand and in George Eliot's " Silas
Marner."
I
do
not
think
American
authors
have
done anything
equal
to
these.
True,
we
have
Mrs.
Stowe's
" Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the
Lowly," admirable in many ways;
but
the patient, enduring slave is not the type
of the American citizen.
Miss Murfree,
who writes some noteworthy books under
the
name of Charles
Egbert
Cradock,
photographs for us the folk who live in
the mountain regions of Tennessee, in their
simplicity,
their
ignorance, their superstition,
their courage, and their revenge.
By personal enquiry from an American
lady who knows this district well, I have
ascertained that the picture is not overdrawn,
and that the descendants of the
mean whites of
Tennessee who live in
the mountains are really as poor and as
ignorant, living in the healthiest climate
and
among
the
most
beautiful
and
romantic scenery in the
world,"'without
any appreciation of the wonders around
them.
Iu the lower
and
more fertile
parts of the States the negro now works
for wages, and is in some ways
superior
to the white men on the heights.
We
see little trace of the common school
or
the
town
meeting
in
these
touching
stories.
An American citizen is educated
by many things besides the school, but
these social educators appear wanting in
the Tennessee mountains. These sketches
are
valuable
as
picturing
a
state
of
things that must pass away,
but
they
are
in
no sense democratic
literature
Bret Harte's vivid sketches are not of the
industrious,
law-abiding citizen,
of
the
skilful
artisan,
or
the
independent
farmer.
No, he harks back to the state
of
society
which
Grant
Allen
calls
savagery—that
which collects
from all
quarters of the habitable globe towards
any spot where gold or silver or diamonds
are to be found.
One of the strongest
objections to the love of barbaric display
is che unhealthy, dangerous, and immoral
conditions under which gold and gems,
feathers and costly furs are procured.
Bret
Harte's favourite heroes are sudden
in
quarrel, quick with the knife and
the
revolver, loud
and
inventive
in
oath,
deep and
fierce
in gambling.
Virtues
they have, or they would be intolerable
in fiction ; dare-devil courage,
fidelity
tc
comrades, and tenderness to women and
children—perhaps not to their own wives
and children, who may be far off and forgotten,
but a certain chivalry towards the
weak and defenceless who may need their
aid.
But this is very far from being
democratic art or literature.
Dr. O. W. Holmes, and Lowell in the
"Biglow Papers" give us occasional
glimpses of the dignity and beauty of the
regular life of labour. Longfellow's " Village
Blacksmith" has a breath of it, but
of the mass of American litterateurs
Whitman says:—"Instead of poets corresponding
to the pitch and vigour of the
race I see a parcel of dandies and cHmiyeas,
dapper little gentlemen from abroad,
who flood us with their thin sentiment of
parlours, parasols, piano songs, tinkling
rhymes—the five-hundredth importation
•—or whimpering and crying about something,
chasing one absurd conceit after
another, and for ever occupied in
dyspeptic amour* willi^dyspeptic women.
Our novels are thinner than the English,
whereas they ought to be more robust."
In America Walt Whitman sees the
materials for a great and powerful nation,
but though the body is there he looks in
vain for the souL
The amazing material
prosperity of the United States,
badly
distributed as it undoubtedly is, is like
the
magician's serpent,
devouring
all
the other
agencies
which
might
have
worked in better directions.
As
now
taught
the
processes
of
culture
in
America are rapidly creating a class of
supercilious
infidels,
who
believe
in
nothing.
Man loses himself in countless
mazes of adjustments. Literature strictly
considered
has
never
recognised
the
people.
Nothing is more rare than a fit
estimate and reverent appreciation of the
people—of
their
measureless wealth of
latent power and
capacity,
their
vast
artistic contrasts of light and shade.
To
Walt Whitman's challenge cannot
Australia
give
some
reply 1
In
another
article I propose to continue this subject.
The possibilities
of
Australian
society
have never been adequately considered.
$