G.K. Chesterton

The other day I came upon a suggestive phrase in reading a very valuable little book by Mr. G. R. Stirling Taylor, “The Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities,” recently published by Messrs. George Allen and Unwin. The book itself would be worthy of fuller notice than I can give it here. Even those who entirely disagree with it will find it a very clear, compact, and picturesque statement of one theory of reconstruction. Many educated people, I think, will find some difficulty in deciding whether they disagree with it or not. Those who think in labels will wonder whether it is reactionary or revolutionary. Those who think in realities will respect it for being both. It contains many excellent phrases, about which one might write a good deal. For instance, Mr. Taylor says, in answer to those who dismiss medievalism as a mere romance of the imagination, “It requires more imagination to dismiss Chartres Cathedral and Westminster Abbey than to accept them.”

Or again, he says of the historical dons whose works have created most of the modern version of the past, “They are as much obsessed with the present moment and its ideals as the lightest-hearted lady at the lightest of balls.” It would be almost worth while writing merely in order to mention those two important truths. But the opinion which arrested my attention, in the present case, is one to this effect that in the age of the guilds the great part of politics was private business. It was a matter of the serious practical affairs of everyday life—not the discussion of vague sentimentalities, which newspaper editors now call politics."

In short, the lively local government of medieval times gave men a particular kind of liberty which they have now almost entirely lost. It was the right to manage their own affairs, in the vivid and vulgar sense of a right to mind their own business. These medieval men, mocked by the moderns for their fanaticism and fantastic superstition, really had something of which the newspapers are perpetually giving us the name and not the fact.

Now, whether or not this be fully accepted as a truth, it may well be accepted as a test. It can serve as a sort of corrective measure by which many constitutions, new and old, conservative and revolutionary, may be judged at least experimentally. For instance, it clarifies the real case against the Soviet system as apparently applied in Russia. And the simple case against the Bolshevist theory seems to be that it puts the worst government at the top and the best government at the bottom.

The small local Soviet seems to be, or is supposed to be, something like a small guild government more or less in the medieval style. And there is a case for saying that a guild government is literally a business government—that is, it is a trade government. But, though it would seem to be in theory the best thing in the world, it also seems to be in practice the weakest thing in the system. For the higher we rise in the hierarchy to the dominant powers in the constitution, the more we find it loaded with a type of oligarchic oppression which is actually the flat contrary of democracy.

The Bolshevists, by most accounts, have had all the higher councils elected by the lower ones, making a sort of ladder—the sort of ladder it must certainly be unlucky to walk under. In other words, the lesser parliaments elect the higher parliaments, up to the highest power in the State—which is thus representative at about ten removes. If this is really true, it is not surprising if the highest power in the State is an appalling tyranny.

When we consider how hard it is to get any representatives to represent, we can imagine how much control there can be over the representative of a representative of a representative. Anyone who has worked in a modern Parliamentary election knows that the most lamentable part of it is the person who is elected. Sometimes it seems as if everybody knew how to speak on the platform, except the man who is being sent to speak in the Parliament. The candidate often seems like a sort of wooden idol, with his livelier worshippers carrying him about, and dancing round him. But if this is a wooden idol made by men, what sort of a nightmare vision must we have of a wooden idol made by wooden idols?

This is, perhaps, the heaviest of all the charges against abstract Bolshevism; but it will be noted that it is really a charge of outrageous and preposterous parliamentarism. It is brutal, it is monstrous, it is as mad or bad as anyone can call it. But it is not an extravagance of medieval guilds or even local Soviets. It is rather an extravagant extension of modern representative government.

In that sense Bolshevism, so far from being a reform or revolution, would seem to be a mere fermentation of what is stalest and most decayed in our own society. But a real problem is raised, even by the milder form in which it exists in our own society. And the most practical example of the problem is that which Mr. Taylor calls “private business.” Modern industrialism may have made itself democratic, if we merely mean by that that the democracy is formally consulted about a great many things, including a great many things that it does not understand.

The point is that it is not consulted about the things that it does understand. For it is not asked at all whether it would like the daily life of its own civilisation altered or not. It is not asked, for instance, whether it would like its villages turned into suburbs. It is not asked whether its local shopkeepers should have their trade extinguished by the great stores of the great cities. It is not asked whether it would like its own English landscape littered with advertisements. I do not profess to say how the question would be answered; I only say the question is not asked.

The things we vote on are very seldom the things we see and smell and eat and drink and do. These are more and more controlled by vast and vague central forces, at once autocratic and anonymous. This is the real modern problem, which has nothing to do with utopias; and until it is solved there will be a real satire in self-government for men who are invited to govern everything except themselves.

First published in the October 11, 1919 issue of The Illustrated London News.