the‘essentially democratic spirit’animating the‘large mass of the colony’
(Beasley 2005, pp. 69–75).
It is true that by the time of the Federation conventions, Tocqueville’s role
in Australian debates had been somewhat eclipsed by James Bryce’s more
legally oriented American Commonwealth.^3 But, as Hancock noted, while
Bryce claimed that Tocqueville’s‘brilliant generalisations [about America]
were, generally speaking, out of date’, they were not‘out of date for Australia’.
On the contrary, said Hancock,‘Australians could attempt no more useful
exercise than to read throughDemocracy in America, asking themselves: Is this
true of Australia?’(Hancock 1930, p. 269). Indeed, Manning Clark tells us that
when he received the commission to writeAustralia, Hancock:
turned away temporarily from one of his earliest intellectual loves—reading the
Italians from Dante, through Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machiavelli, and renewed his
acquaintance with a man who had lived through his experience in reverse. He read
againDemocracy in Americaby Alexis de Tocqueville, who had gone as an aristocrat
of some twenty-six years from the over-ripe salons of Restoration Paris, to tour the
vulgar, egalitarian, democratic but magnificently alive, New World America and
had come back to tell his class and his country that the future lay with equality of
conditions, with democracy, with industry, with America and Russia rather than
with the aristocratic remnants of the Old World. (Clark 1968, p. 331)YetevenmorethandirectparallelstoDemocracyinAmerica, what shines through
in Hancock are similarities in the processes at work. Nowhere is that clearer than
intheargument,which is atthe heartof Hancock’sbook,thatAustralia’sfailings
as a society arise because unbridled passions push what may be worthy aspir-
ations to excess—thereby, much as in Aristotle, transforming virtues into vices.
For example, the distinctly Australian‘sentiment of justice, the claim of right,
the conception of equality’(Hancock 1930, p. 75) were not harmful in them-
selves, any more than the ideal of wages that are‘fair and reasonable’(Hancock
1930, p. 282). But while‘Australians are generally matter of fact people who
distrustfine phrases and understand hard realities’,‘in politics they have been
incurably romantic’,and,‘even when they have ceased to believe in impossibil-
ities...continue to pursue them’(Hancock 1930, p. 277).
Equality was therefore taken too far:‘Properly anxious that everybody
should run a fair race’, Australian democracy is‘improperly resentful if any-
body runs a fast race. Indeed, it dislikes altogether the idea of a race, for in a
race victory is to the strong’(Hancock 1930, p. 183). The result was not merely
(^3) Although the founders of the Federation‘occasionally cited the classic works of political
philosophy and analysis, such as those of John Locke, James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes,
Jeremy Bentham, Montesquieu, Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill’,‘the most significant
influences were the writings of James Madison, James Bryce, Edward Freeman, A. V. Dicey and
John Burgess’(Aroney 2009, pp. 72–3).
Henry Ergas