Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/465

Rh now it must needs be shaped. Politics becomes awake, not merely comprehended, but reduced to comprehensible ideas. The powers of intellect and money set themselves up against blood and tradition. In place of the organic we have the organized; in place of the Estate, the Party. A party is not a growth of race, but an aggregate of heads, and therefore as superior to the old estates in intellect as it is poorer in instinct. It is the mortal enemy of naturally matured class-ordering, the mere existence of which is in contradiction with its essence. Consequently, the notion of party is always bound up with the unreservedly negative, disruptive, and socially levelling notion of equality. Noble ideals are no longer recognized, but only vocational interests. It is the same with the freedom-idea, which is likewise a negative. Parties are a purely urban phenomenon. With the emancipation of the city from the country, everywhere (whether we happen to know it evidentially or not) Estate politics gives way to party politics — in Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom, in China with the Contending States, in Baghdad and Byzantium with the Abbassid period., In the capitals of the West the parties form in the parliamentary style, in the city-states of the Classical they are forum-parties, and we recognize parties of the Magian style in the Mavali and the monks of Theodore of Studion.

But always it is the Non-Estate, the unit of protest against the essence of Estate, whose leading minority — "educated" and "well-to-do" — comes forward as a party with a program, consisting of aims that are not felt but defined, and of the rejection of everything that cannot be rationally grasped. At bottom, therefore, there is only one party, that of the bourgeoisie, the liberal, and it is perfectly conscious of its position as such. It looks on itself as coextensive with "the people." Its opponents (above all, the genuine Estates — namely, "squire and parson") are enemies and traitors to " the people," and its opinions are the "voice of the people" — which is inoculated by all the expedients of party-political nursing, oratory in the Forum, press in the West, until these opinions do fairly represent it.

The prime Estates are nobility and priesthood. The prime Party is that of money and mind, the liberal, the megalopolitan. Herein lies the profound justification, in all Cultures, of the ideas of Aristocracy and Democracy. Aristocracy despises the mind of the cities, Democracy despises the boor and hates the countryside. It is the difference between Estate politics and party politics,