DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT.

BY THE

REV. A. L. LILLEY, M.A.

"He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.”—Prov. xxv. 28.

THAT is to say, the man who is not master of himself is in a fair way to become the slave of others. Not to be master of one's self is to be defenceless, and open to all attacks. The man who does not know his own mind has no criterion of value by which he may appraise the convictions of others. And so he is the prey of every mind with more grip and tenacity of conviction than his own. He is the man carried about by every wind of doctrine. Or the man who is wanting in firmness of will, in stability of purpose, has no criterion by which to estimate the importance of his own experiences, of the events in the world outside him which affect his life. He is always attaching a quite undue importance to the shocks and assaults of fortune. He is the man of moods. Fortune seems to assail him more bitterly than others, not because fortune is really fiercer in its assaults upon him, but because he is weaker than others to resist them. Or, again, the man who is without the spirit of order, who has no instinctive plan of life arranged on lines of clear design, is without a criterion of value among the claims made upon his thought, or his feeling, or his action. He does

not know where to yield and where to insist. He is obstinate where he ought to make allowances. He is facile and yielding where he ought to be firm. We say of him that he has no judgment. In each case alike is it true that the man who is not master of himself is on the way to be a slave to others. The man who does not know his own mind will most certainly be the slave of those who do. The man of moods is the miserable slave of his own impressions. The man who lacks judgment is the baffled slave of events rather than their master. "He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls."

That is the vision of failure and defeat and despair in the individual life. And the vision of success and mastery in the individual life is the contrast to all this. Success is to the man who knows his own mind, who has a firm will and a steady purpose, whose judgment is sane, who has rule over his spirit. Self-government is of the very essence of successof all success, and especially of the highest spiritual success. To be able to evoke order out of the world's disorder, you must first have established some kind of order amid the complex tangle of motive and desire which you feel within. But when you have become ever so slightly master of yourself, when you have even begun to rule your spirit, you have a kind of magical effect upon the world without you. It is not so much that you laboriously seek to do the things you desire, as that the things you desire get themselves done because you are there, with your clear insight, and your keen judgment, and your absolute certainty of what you want. Even on the highest plane of human activity, success depends not so much on great gifts of intellect, or on great gifts of heart, or on great powers of mere endurance, as on a singleness of aim, a directness of attack, a unity of purpose

among even moderate gifts of intellect and of heart and of work. It is the youth just emerging into manhood who thinks that the whole world is open to the man of mere intellect, and who despises every practical suggestion which does not answer to the most rigid intellectual tests. It is the young man in the first glow of enthusiastic ardour for a noble cause who thinks that his mere enthusiasm must carry all before it; that there is a limitless power in deep and sincere emotion. But the man of riper wisdom very soon discovers that the real secret of strength is a strange gift of self-knowledge and selfmastery which defies analysis; that the world is in some degree taken by storm by the man who can rule his own spirit. The highest spiritual faculty is not intellect alone, is not heart alone. It is selfgovernment. It is the possession of one's self, the transcendent gift of an easy and perfect mastery of the powers of mind and heart one has. It is the single eye which fills the whole body with light. It is that true might which alone can create, and which creates only the true right. Carlyle was never more fatally misunderstood and never more worthy of being understood than when he insisted with characteristic vehemence that might was right. If God is in this world at all, in it effectively as the Spirit that fills it with life and assures it of victory, then assuredly that which has in it the greatest power of success must have in it also the greatest force of right. The man who is lord of himself is God's man of might. He must be also the man who can best work out God's plan of right.

And what is true for the individual life of each of us is true also for the life of the state, and preeminently for the life of the democratic state. Indeed, I ought not to distinguish between them, for the democratic state is only the state come of age, the

state just entered into the full heritage of manhood. The history of political development so far has been only the history of the liberation of all the elements of the national life, the giving free play to all the forces that make up the national character. The ideal of politics has been an insistence upon and a struggle for the rights of subject classes. But now the state has finally emerged. All classes in the state have become articulate. And so the old political ideals have become obsolete. With the advent of the democratic state, a new keynote must be struck in politics. A new idea of government is already dimly getting itself formulated. Government is no longer what it has been-the rule of one part of the body politic by another; a rule met with endless protest, and finally successful protest. For the future government will be the attempt of the nation to rule itself, to get to know its own mind, to brace its will and steady its aims, and to acquire an instinct of sane and ready judgment.

Our imaginations have hardly got hold as yet of the fact that government in the true sense, selfgovernment, is only just beginning for the modern state. In a kind of dim way we have come to realize the dangers without having at all caught the inspiration of this new political fact. And the dangers are all too real. There is, first of all, the danger of our altogether failing to appreciate the change, of our clinging to antiquated notions of government, of our looking upon it as somehow hostile and foreign to us-a thing to be assailed by claims of rights and privileges. That is to say, there is the danger of our not seeing that the democratic state has arrived. But even when we have learned something of the extent of the change, there are dangers still. The democratic state may not aim at ruling itself at all. Self-government may be the very last ideal it will

set before itself. Almost certainly the state will follow the development of the individual. Heady youth will be for it too, most probably, the season of the pride of intellect. There are signs of such a tendency among us even now. There is too great a tendency, perhaps, among the most ardent spirits of the new movements in the sphere of politics to pin their entire faith to cut-and-dried systems which have been elaborated in the schools, which, as Walt Whitman says, "may prove very well in lecturerooms, but may not prove at all in the open air."

Such a danger, however, is not really serious, for the very obvious reason that the ordinary democracy, like the ordinary youth, is not severely intellectual. But there is a real danger of the state in its new self-consciousness being driven into perilous courses by great moods of passion or emotion. Emotion may be the cheapest thing in the world, and it is the most satisfying to that higher vanity of the spirit which we all find it so difficult to get rid of. There is a great deal too much of flabby sentiment, already in the process of degeneration into a hideous semi-religious cant, mingled with the movements which represent our nascent national self-consciousness. And it is dangerous not only because it is so cheap, and makes us so self-satisfied, but also because it is uncontrolled and irrational, and may sweep us as readily into evil courses as into good. And, above all, sentiment so easily becomes unreal, so easily degenerates into sentimentality—and especially in public life. Each of us is for himself ashamed of pretending to a sentiment he does not feel, or of pretending to it in a degree greater than he does feel it. The more genuine our personal emotions are, the less likely are they to emerge in any self-conscious parade, the more likely to be hidden away as the silent secret springs of action. But in public life we easily lose