Democrats and Aristocrats 275
in England and Ireland in the preceding chapter. I have tried to hold the story, so
far, short of the time when the French Revolution could have had any determining
influence, though with difficulty in the case of Belgium. The events traced, in each
country, are events that had native causes and reflected internal conditions. What
pattern or comparative generalizations do they make it possible to reach?
In each of the five countries just named there had been, by 1790, a substantial
democratic movement, which among the Dutch and Belgians and at Geneva had
reached the point of revolution, and which, according to various British writers,
had amounted to “near” or “missed” revolution in England. The democratic move-
ment had identified its opponent as “aristocracy.” Aristocracy meant the rule of
certain constituted bodies, which claimed sovereignty for themselves, were self-
perpetuating in a limited number of families, and denied the right of outside
persons, or excluded classes, to have any influence on their policies or their per-
sonnel. The democratic movement, in one way or another, whether through Wil-
liam Pitt, or the student Ondaatje, or the lawyer Vonck, or the banker Clavière,
sought to broaden the basis of participation in political life, and to make the
government accountable to some kind of a public. Actual proposals were moder-
ate and even empirical: to reassign borough rights, and give a vote to long lease-
holders in England and Ireland; to set up geconstitueerden at Utrecht, and a fourth
chamber at Brussels; to grant burgher rights to third- generation Natives at Ge-
neva. Historical arguments were as common as those postulating natural right.
The most common historical idea—except in Ireland, where it could not be
used—was the belief in a trend to hereditary monopolizing, generally since the
sixteenth century, of public bodies which had been more fully representative in
their medieval origins. If this idea was not wholly true, it lay closer to the pole of
truth than to that of downright error.
No one demanded universal suffrage, except the Westminster Committee in
England, and it appears that in all these countries the mass of the population,
perhaps the bottom three- quarters of society, was politically apathetic, disinclined
to change, and attached to their customary superiors. The “people” in the new doc-
trine did not mean everyone. It meant a political community outside the govern-
ment and in some sense above it. It is here argued that the theory of the sover-
eignty of the people, in each country, as in the revolutionary American colonies,
had arisen in the needs of an actual political situation, or in answer to the actual
arguments of adversaries, more than from any special predilection for rationalistic
philosophy. The democrats and the democratically oriented reformers were not
“sectaries of J. J. Rousseau,” though it is true that Rousseau, in the Social Contract,
had laid the deepest moral foundation for a democratic theory of the state. The
point is that, at this time, and for many reasons, men of various types and in nu-
merous countries converged in their principles. In none of the countries here con-
sidered, however, had the idea of the sovereignty of the people led on, as it had in
America, to the more truly revolutionary idea of the people as a constituent power,
which the French were again to invoke in 1789. There was much talk, in Ireland,
England, Holland, and Belgium, of associations, assemblies, congresses, and con-
ventions. What was meant was a kind of public scrutiny or inspection of govern-
ment, or more freedom to elect a few representatives to existing bodies. No one