to narrow opportunities—making Australia‘a country merciful to the average’
(Hancock 1930, p. 304)—but to pursue policies to the point where they‘yield
diminishing returns, until at last, they may become a positive danger to the
national purpose which has called them into effect’(Hancock 1930, p. 128).
Moreover, while it was understandable that the harshness of Australia’s
geography and the disabilities it imposed on settlers would induce them to
expect help from colonial governments, assistance had morphed into a per-
ceived right to treat the state‘as a vast public utility’. That state’s duty‘to
provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number’meant that‘every
economic difficulty is generalized as a political issue’(Hancock 1930, pp. 72,
277); but by demanding the political system adopt ends for which it inevitably
lacked the means,‘Australian idealism has put too many of its eggs into the
political basket’, ensuring that‘government being constantly overstrained, is
constantly discredited’(Hancock 1930, p. 277).
Echoing Tocqueville’s remarks about the impatience and restlessness that
characterize democratic societies, as they‘chase after’a degree of equality that
‘invariably...eludes their grasp’, Hancock identified‘perpetual exasperation’
as‘the dominant note in [Australians’] public life...because they perpetually
pursue a quarry they can never run to earth’(Hancock 1930, p. 276). And, just
as Tocqueville thought the frustration with public life induced a‘love of
public peace’which is‘often the only political passion [democratic peoples’]
retain’and that‘becomes more active and powerful as all the others fade and
die’, so Hancock argued the‘perpetual exasperation’Australian democracy
caused induced Australia’s inward turn—the temptation to seek respite in a
‘hermit’s solitude’—which was a sign of the country’s weakness, for‘it is only
the weak who fear a stir in the shipping. The strong feel no need to close their
ports’(Hancock 1930, p. 287).
However, the longer-term threat—‘the warning [that] comes from the old
countries’—was that‘if democracy is essentially mediocre it will become
decrepit and be thrust aside’(Hancock 1930, p. 288); but the‘easy-going
good nature and intellectual laziness’of Australians bred indifference to that
warning. And it was even more difficult for it to be addressed given the
predominance of what Hancock had earlier referred to as the‘mass production
of tastes’,‘mass production of ideas’, and‘mass production of minds’, that
together created a‘respectable, comfortable, intolerant mediocrity’in which
public opinion itself was just‘massed mediocrity’(Davidson 2010, p. 104).
5.4 The Points of Contrast
It is therefore easy to see the fundamental point of convergence between
Hancock and Tocqueville: it lies in the tendency of democracy to transform
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History