II. Structural Weaknesses, Economic and Political

As good children of our age, we are bound to start any such study as this with the economic situation. All of us, no matter how little sympathy we may have with organized communism, betray the extent of Marx’s influence in the social studies—and of the influences that influenced Marx—by the naturalness with which we ask the question: “What had economic interests to do with it all?” Now it is incontestable that in all four of the societies we are studying the years preceding the outbreak of revolution witnessed unusually serious economic, or at least financial, difficulties of a special kind. The first two Stuarts were in perpetual conflict with their parliaments over taxes, and the years just before 1640 resounded with complaints about Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage and other terms now strange to us, but once capable of making a hero of a very rich Buckinghamshire gentleman named John Hampden, who was financially quite able to pay much larger taxes than he did. Americans need not be reminded of the part trouble over taxation played in the years just before the shot fired at Concord defied all the laws of acoustics. “No taxation without representation” may be rejected by all up-to-date historians as in itself an adequate explanation of the beginnings of the American revolution, but the fact remains that it was in the 1770’s a slogan capable of exciting our fathers to action. In 1789 the French Estates-General, the calling of which precipitated the revolution, was made unavoidable by the bad financial state of the government. Official France in 1789 was financially in as unhappy a way as, until our own times, one would have believed it possible for a government to be. In Russia in 1917 financial collapse did not perhaps stand out so prominently because the Czarist regime had achieved an all-round collapse in all fields of governmental activity, from war to village administration. But three years of war had put such a strain on Russian finances that, even with the support of the Allies, high prices and scarcity were by 1917 most obvious factors in the general tension.

Yet in all of these societies, it is the government that is in financial difficulties, not the societies themselves. To put the matter negatively, our revolutions did not occur in societies economically backward, nor in societies undergoing widespread economic misery or depression. You will not find in these societies of the old regime anything like unusually widespread economic want. In a specific instance, of course, the standard against which want or depression is measured must be the standard of living more or less acceptable to a given group at a given time. What satisfied an English peasant in 1640 would be misery and want for an Iowa farmer of 1938. It is possible that certain groups in a society may be in unusual want even though statistically that abstraction “society as a whole” is enjoying an increasing—and almost equally abstract—“national income.” Nevertheless, when national income is rapidly increasing, someone does get the benefit. We must look more carefully at our four societies in this respect.

France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government. The eighteenth century had begun to collect statistics about itself, and though these would not satisfy a modern economist they enable us to be very certain about the increasing prosperity of eighteenth-century France. Any series of indices—foreign trade, population growth, building, manufactures, agricultural production—will show a general upward trend all through the eighteenth century. Here are a few examples: wastelands all over France were being brought under the plow and in the élection of Melun alone in two years from 1783 to 1785 uncultivated land was reduced from 14,500 to 10,000 arpents; Rouen in 1787 produced annually cotton cloth worth fifty millions of livres, having at least doubled its production in a generation; French trade with North Africa (the Barbary Coast) increased from about 1,000,000 livres in 1740 to 6,216,000 livres in 1788; the total French foreign trade had in 1787 increased nearly 100,000,000 livres in the dozen years since the death of Louis XV in 1774.

Even in our imperfect statistics we can distinguish short-term cyclical variations, and it seems clear that in some respects, notably in the wheat harvest, 1788-89 was a bad year. It was, however, by no means a deep trough year like 1932 for this country. If business men in eighteenth-century France had kept charts and made graphs, the lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of the period preceding the French revolution. Now this prosperity was certainly most unevenly shared. The people who got the lion’s share of it seem to have been the merchants, bankers, business men, lawyers, peasants who ran their own farms as businesses; the middle class, as we have come to call it. It was precisely these prosperous people who in the 1780’s were loudest against the government, most reluctant to save it by paying taxes.

In America, of course, with an empty continent available for the distressed, general economic conditions in the eighteenth century show increasing wealth and population, with economic distress a purely relative matter. There can be no talk of starvation, of grinding poverty in the New England of the Stamp Act. Even the minor fluctuations of the business cycle fail to coincide with the revolution, and the early years of the 1770’s were distinctly years of prosperity. There were economic stresses and strains in colonial America, as we shall soon see, but no class ground down with poverty.

Nor is it easy to argue that early Stuart England was less prosperous than late Tudor England had been. There is rather evidence that, especially in the years of personal government which preceded the Long Parliament, England was notably prosperous. Ramsay Muir writes that “England had never known a more steady or more widely diffused prosperity and the burden of taxation was less than in any other country. The coming revolution was certainly not due to economic distress.” Even in the Russia of 1917, apart from the shocking breakdown of the machinery of government under war-strain, the productive capacity of society as a whole was certainly greater than at any other time in Russian history; and to take again the long view, the economic graphs had all been mounting for Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the progress in trade and production since the abortive revolution of 1905 had been notable.

Our revolutions, then, clearly were not born in societies economically retrograde; on the contrary, they took place in societies economically progressive. This does not, of course, mean that no groups within these societies cherished grievances mainly economic in character. Two main foci for economic motives of discontent seem to stand out. First, and much the less important, is the actual misery of certain groups in a given society. No doubt in all our societies, even in America, there was a sort of submarginal group of poor people whose release from certain forms of restraint is a very important feature of revolution itself. But in studying the preliminary signs of revolution, these people are not very important. French republican historians have long insisted on the importance of the bad harvest of 1788, the cold winter of 1788-89, and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Bread was relatively dear in that spring when the Estates-General first assembled. There was apparently a tightening up of business conditions in America in 1774-75, but certainly nothing like widespread distress or unemployment. The local sufferings of Boston, considerable under the Port Bill, were really a part of the revolution itself, and not a sign. The winter of 1916-17 was certainly a bad one in Russia, with food rationing in all the cities.

The important thing to note, however, is that French and Russian history are filled with famines, plagues, bad harvests, sometimes local, sometimes national in sweep, many of which were accompanied by sporadic rioting, but in each case only one by revolution. In neither the English nor the American revolution do we find even this degree of localized want or famine. Clearly, then, the economic distress of the under-privileged, though it may well accompany a revolutionary situation, is not one of the symptoms we need dwell upon. This the subtler Marxists themselves recognize, and Trotsky has written: “In reality, the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”

Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups, of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity. We are especially aware of this element in our American revolution, and Professor A. M. Schlesinger has shown how the prosperous merchants, their immediate interests damaged by the new imperial policy of the British government, led an agitation against the legislation of 1764 and 1765 and helped stir up a discontent among the less well-to-do which these merchants later found a bit embarrassing. No doubt, too, that many of the firm spots in the very uneven and wavering policy of the British government—the Stamp Act and subsequent disorders, the announced intention of enforcing the Navigation Act, and so on—did have momentary ill effects on business, did throw men out of work. The currency question was of course mismanaged in a day when common sense did not very effectively supplement ignorance of economic processes. The colonies were always lacking in specie, and business enterprise suffered from this lack. Paper money, to which recourse was inevitable, was also an inevitable source of further quarrels between governors and governed.

The working of economic motives to revolt among possessing classes normally inclined to support existing institutions is especially clear among the aristocrats of tidewater Virginia. Largely dependent on a single crop, tobacco, used to a high standard of living, increasingly indebted to London bankers, many of the planters hoped to recoup their fortunes in the western lands they regarded as clearly belonging to Virginia. George Washington’s own involvements in western land speculations make one of the favorite topics of the debunkers. By the Quebec Act of 1774, however, the British government took the trans-Allegheny lands north of the Ohio from Virginia and other claimant colonies, and incorporated them with Canada. This act gave a grievance to others besides the planter-speculator. The closing of this frontier was also an offense to a class perhaps normally more inclined to revolt—the restless woodsmen and fur traders, and the only slightly less restless small pioneer farmers who had already occupied the Appalachian valleys, and were ready to pour over into the Kentucky and Ohio country. The Quebec Act in itself does not, of course, explain the American revolution; but taken with a long series of other acts, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, the Molasses Act, it accounts for the feeling so evident among active and ambitious groups in America that British rule was an unnecessary and incalculable restraint, an obstacle to their full success in life.

In France the years preceding 1789 are marked by a series of measures which antagonized different groups. With striking awkwardness, the government offered with one hand what it withdrew with the other. Tax-reform efforts, never carried through, offended privileged groups without pleasing the unprivileged. Turgot’s attempted introduction of laissez-faire into labor relations offended all the vested interests of the old guilds. The famous tariff reduction treaty with England in 1786 directly affected French textiles for the worse, increased unemployment in Normandy and other regions, and gave the employer class a grievance against the government. So, too, in seventeenth-century England, there is no doubt that the attempt to revive obsolete forms of taxation seemed to London or Bristol merchants a threat to their rising prosperity and importance.

Thus we see that certain economic grievances—usually not in the form of economic distress, but rather a feeling on the part of some of the chief enterprising groups that their opportunities for getting on in this world are unduly limited by political arrangements—would seem to be one of the symptoms of revolution. These feelings must, of course, be raised to an effective social pitch by propaganda, pressure-group action, public meetings, and preferably a few good dramatic riots, like the Boston Tea Party. As we shall see, these grievances, however close they are to the pocketbook, must be made respectable, must touch the soul. What is really but a restraint on a rising and already successful group, or on several such groups, must appear as rank injustice towards everyone in the society. Men may revolt partly or even mainly because they are hindered, or, to use Dr. George Pettee’s expressive word, cramped; but to the world—and, save for a very few hypocrites, also to themselves—they must appear wronged. Revolutions cannot do without the word “justice.”

All this, however, is rather less than what the Marxists seem to mean when they talk about the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as deliberately the work of a class-conscious bourgeoisie. Not having the benefit of the writings of Marx to go by, nor indeed those of the still little known Adam Smith, even eighteenth-century revolutionists and discontented spirits used a very non-economic vocabulary. Of course the Marxist, aided by Freud, can reply neatly that economic motivation drove these bourgeois at an un- or sub-conscious level. The trouble with this, from the point of view of the person brought up in the conventions of professional historical research, is that the subconscious never, or rarely, writes documents or makes speeches. If we confine ourselves to what these bourgeois said and did, we find plenty of evidence that separate groups—the American merchants, for instance—felt specific economic grievances, but no signs that bourgeois, entrepreneurs, business men, were aware that as a class their interests in free economic expansion were blocked by existing “feudal” arrangements. Indeed in France a great many business men were more annoyed by the semi-free trade treaty of 1786 with England than by any other governmental step. Certainly one finds no trace of men in England or America or France saying: “Organized feudalism is preventing the triumph of middle-class capitalism. Let us rise against it.” Nor, as a matter of fact, were there in these countries just before the revolutions any serious economic barriers to prevent the clever lad, even in the lower classes, from making money if he possessed the money-making gifts. Dozens of careers—a Pâris-Duverney, an Edmund Burke, a John Law, a John Hancock—show this. Certainly one cannot deny that class antagonisms existed in these countries; but so far as we can judge, these class antagonisms do not seem to have a clear and simple economic basis. In twentieth-century Russia, of course, these antagonisms were expressed in the language of economics, even though here we shall probably also find that human sentiments as well as human interests are involved.

To sum up so far, if we look at economic life in these societies in the years preceding revolution, we note first, that they have been on the whole prosperous; second, that their governments are chronically short of money—shorter, that is, than most governments usually are; third, that certain groups feel that governmental policies are against their particular economic interests; fourth, that, except in Russia, class economic interests are not openly advanced in propaganda as a motive for attempting to overturn existing political and social arrangements. It is interesting to note here that Professor R. B. Merriman, in a study of six seventeenth-century revolutions in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Naples, finds that they all had in common a financial origin, all began as protests against taxation.

If now we turn from the stresses and strains of economic life to the actual workings of the machinery of government, we find a much clearer situation. Here, again, we must not posit a normal condition in which this machinery works perfectly. Government here on earth is at best a rough and ready thing, and the governed will always find something to grumble about, from favoritism in distributing low-number automobile license plates to post-office pen points. But there are obviously degrees of governmental inefficiency, and degrees of patience on the part of the governed. In our four societies the governments seem to have been relatively inefficient, and the governed relatively impatient.

Indeed, the near-bankruptcy of a government in a prosperous society might be regarded as good a priori evidence of its inefficiency, at least in the old days when governments undertook few social or “socialized” services. France in 1789 is a striking example of a society the government of which simply no longer works well. For generations French kings and their ministers had fought the particularistic tendencies of the provinces to get out of the control of Paris by devising a whole series of agencies of centralization, which may be said in a sense to run from the missi dominici of Charlemagne to the intendants of Richelieu and Louis XIV. Almost as if they had been Anglo-Saxons, however, they destroyed very little of the old in the process, so that France in 1789 was like an attic stuffed full of all kinds of old furniture—including some fine new chairs that just wouldn’t fit in the living room. We need not go too deeply into the details of the situation, which can perhaps be summed up graphically by saying that in the sense in which you could make a map of the United States showing all our administrative areas—townships, counties, states—you could not possibly make one map of the administrative areas of old France. Even the confusion added to an administrative map of the United States by the various, and relatively new, federal commissions, bureaus, agencies, administrations, does not begin to equal that of France in 1789. You would need at least half a dozen maps to show the criss-cross units of paroisse, seigneurie, baillage, sénéchaussée, généralité, gouvernement, pays d’état et d’élection, les cinq grosses fermes, pays de grande et de petite gabelle—and this is but a beginning.

There is told about Louis XV one of those revealing anecdotes the actual historical truth of which is unimportant, since they reflect contemporary opinion of a concrete condition. Traveling in the provinces, his majesty saw that a town hall or some such building in which he was to be received had a leaky roof. “Ah, if I were only a minister, I’d have that fixed,” he remarked. A government of which such a tale could be told was perhaps despotic, but most certainly inefficient. In general, it would seem the inefficiency is more readily recognized by those who suffer from it than is the despotism.

The incompetence of the English government under the first two Stuarts is much less clear, but one can safely say that the central government was not as well run, especially under James I, as it had been under Elizabeth. What is most striking in the English situation is the total inadequacy to modern government of a tax system based on the modest needs of a feudal central government. For the government of James I was beginning to be a modern government, to undertake certain elementary social services, and to rest on a bureaucracy and an army that had to be paid in cash. The chronic need for money which confronted James I and Charles I was by no means a result of riotous living and courtly extravagance, but was for the most part brought on by expenses no modern government could have avoided. And yet their income was on the whole determined and collected by old-fashioned medieval methods. At any rate it is clear that the Stuarts needed money; but their attempts to fill their coffers were awkward, hand-to-mouth expedients that brought them into sharp quarrels with the only people from whom they could collect money—the gentry and the middle class. Their struggles with Parliament threw the whole machinery of English government out of gear.

In America the failure of the machinery was a double one. First, the central colonial administration in Westminster had been allowed to grow in the hit-or-miss fashion Anglophiles have long regarded as the height of political wisdom. In this crisis, however, muddling through clearly was not enough. The attempted reform in colonial administration after the Seven Years’ War only made matters worse, as did Turgot’s attempted reforms in France, since it was carried out in a series of advances and retreats, cajolings and menaces, blowings-hot and blowings-cold. Second, within most of the colonies the machinery of government had never been properly adjusted to the frontier. The newer western regions of many colonies complained that representation, courts, administrative areas, were rigged in favor of the older seaboard settlements.

The breakdown of Czarist administration is now so much a commonplace that one is tempted to suspect that it has been a bit exaggerated. Looking at the decades preceding 1917—for in all these countries we have been considering the background of the revolutions and not their actual outbreaks—it seems possible to maintain that the government of Russia in peacetime, at least, was perhaps a bit more of a going concern than the other governments we have been studying. From Catherine the Great to Stolypin a great deal of actual improvement can be seen in Russian government. But one thing is clear from the hundred years preceding 1914. Russia could not organize herself for war, and failure in war had, especially in 1905, brought with it a partial collapse of the machinery of internal administration. We must be very careful here to stick to facts and to avoid judgments which have so insinuated themselves into our awareness of Russia that we regard them as facts. It may be that there is some wild oriental element in the Russian soul that makes Russians both incompetent and submissive politically, subject, however, to fits of alcoholic rebellion. This soul is certainly very hard to observe scientifically; and even in literature one may hesitate to label Dostoevski more Russian than Turgenev, who seems far from wild, oriental, drunken or mystic. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that the Russian governmental breakdown, clear in 1917 or even 1916, was by no means clear, say, in 1912.

Finally, one of the most evident uniformities we can record is the effort made in each of our societies to reform the machinery of government. Nothing can be more erroneous than the picture of the old regime as an unregenerate tyranny, sweeping to its end in a climax of despotic indifference to the clamor of its abused subjects. Charles I was working to “modernize” his government, to introduce into England some of the efficient methods of the French. Strafford is in some ways but an unlucky Richelieu. George III and his ministers were trying very hard to pull together the scattered organs of British colonial government. Indeed, it was this attempt at reform, this desire to work out a new colonial “system,” that gave the revolutionary movement in America a start. In both France and Russia, there is a series of attempted reforms, associated with names like Turgot, Malesherbes, Necker, and Stolypin. It is true that these reforms were incomplete, that they were repealed or nullified by sabotage on the part of the privileged. But they are on the record, an essential part of the process that issued in revolution in these countries.