Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/20

10 the State, and he would insist that some qualification, other than that of age and residence, whether of property, education, or service to the community, would be a desirable safeguard (III., 13). The art of government, said Voltaire, is to make two-thirds of the community support the other third; our modern ideal—economically far more dangerous—seems to be exactly the reverse. Bagehot, Liberal as he was, saw the danger that both political parties would try to outbid each other for the support of the working man. Vox populi, if worked in that manner, he said, will be vox diaboli; which is what it appears to Dean Inge. Aristotle was well aware of the danger. For the poor to use their majority to confiscate the property of the rich is, he says, as unjust as the plunder of the masses by a tyrant or an oligarchy (III., 10).

A mainly agricultural democracy is more stable, he says, than a mainly industrial one, for large bodies of mechanics are politically restless and meddlesome (VII., 4). Is it necessary to quote the attempts of Trade Union leaders to blackmail the community and dictate to Government by means of Direct Action?

Extreme democracy, in which all citizens have an absolute equality, is suited only to some states, and will not last even in those unless founded on a sound system of laws and morals (VII., 4). To our talk of basing government in countries like India on democratic principles, Aristotle would have replied, with a smile of amused contempt, that the idea was, in the nature of things, impossible, because the necessary character and the necessary unity did not exist.

Book VIII. contains a masterly analysis of the causes and occasions of political disturbances and revolutions. Aristotle’s generalisation that the principal condition which gives rise to such ‘sedition’ is a desire for equality on the part of the many, or of superiority on the part of the few—often, of course, cloaked under democratic