Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/208

196 self. 2. A power over others. 3. A public function exercised in the name of the whole nation. Most democratic theorists see only the first of these characteristics. The function of preserving individual liberty within the state is, indeed, one of the ends of suffrage; but, in voting, I not only vote for myself, I also exercise a power over the domain of other persons as they do over mine, just as much as though the question were one of the conveyance of an estate, or the division of its proceeds. This power over another, multiplied by the number of the voters, or of the majority, may become something formidable. Hence arises a second opinion that regards suffrage as a part of the power allotted by a reciprocal contract to each associate in the great civil and political society. Although this conception has a relative degree of truth, it appears to us to rest on an incomplete idea of the state. The state is not an arbitrary association, but one in which the members are bound in an historical and organic solidarity. Suffrage further acquires a third character, and appears as a social function, or a function of the collective consciousness. By means of it, we may say, all the cells of the political body are invoked to take their part in the intellectual and voluntary life. But the idea of function involves the idea of capacity to perform the function.

To see in suffrage, as is nearly always done, only a single aspect—whether it be the individual, or the contractual, or the social side—is to lose sight of one of its three constituent relations; the relation of the individual to himself, that of the individual to other individuals as such, or that of the individual to the state as an organic whole. In these three points of view, the right supposes a capacity—1. To govern one's self; 2. To exercise by the ballot a power over another; and, 3. To exercise a social function in the name of the state. This, if we are not mistaken, is the real and complete conception that embodies in the germ the whole philosophy of universal suffrage.

The part of the state is not generally better comprehended than that of the individual. The omnipotence of the state, falsely asserted by the radical school, becomes in practice the omnipotence of majorities. Actual democracies are simply the government of all by the largest number, instead of the government of all by all. The confusion which democrats here make of the universal right of suffrage with the practical expedient of majorities involves grave consequences and deserves to be examined.

The ideal of a perfectly free society would be that every law in it be the work of the unanimous will. Unanimity, the only adequate form of general liberty, already exists upon a number of points. We all desire to live in society, and to enter into the social contract; and we all prefer to live in that particular society which constitutes our nationality. There are also some things within that nationality on which unanimity exists. We all want roads and railroads; and, excepting the thieves, we all want police and courts. But there is a