to seek the golden mean. Honest men eschew compromises of principle though they may accept compromises in detail and in method. However firm and consistent it may seem to be self-opinionated in small, secondary, indifferent matters, it is merely petty and doctrinaire. For the maintenance and development of democracy the thought and cooperation of all are needed; and, as none is infallible, democracy, conceived as tolerant cooperation, signifies the acceptance of what is good no matter from what quarter it may come. What is hateful is the readiness of puny, short-sighted men, without aim or conviction, to make compromise an end in itself, to waver between opinion and opinion, to seek haltingly a middle course which usually runs from one wall to another.
Democracy and Dictatorship.
I defend democracy, moreover, against dictatorial absolutism, whether the right to dictate be claimed by the proletariate, the State or the Church. I know the argument that dictatorship is justified, since conscience and right, reason and science, are absolute; and I am not unfamiliar with talk about the dictatorship of “the heart.” Logic, mathematics, and some moral maxims may be absolute, that is to say, not relative as they would be if all countries, parties and individuals had a special morality, mathematics and logic of their own; but there is a difference between the epistemological absolutism of theory, and practical, political absolutism. The most scientific policy depends upon experience and induction. It can claim no infallibility. It offers no eternal truths and can form no warrant for absolutism.
Absolutism did not consist in the existence of a monarch but in his assertion of infallibility. In emancipating itself from ecclesiastical guardianship, the State claimed something of the absolute authority which had been proper to the Church and to the Pope. Of this infallibility the style “by the Grace of God” is an expression; but whereas the Pope could invoke revelation and tradition reaching back to Christ, the theories of State and monarchical absolutism were only a reflection of the principles and practice of the Church. A curious sign of waning belief in the absolute authority of the French Kings may perhaps be found in the attempt of Marcier de la Rivière, shortly before the French Revolution, to appeal to Euclid as an absolutist; for it shows how, in defence of absolutism, theorists stuck at nothing in order to demonstrate the infalli-
DD
