FROM “The Heresy of Democracy: A Study in the History of Government,” by Lord Percy of Newcastle (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954):
Religion always asserts the Equality of all men. In a sense, that is what religion is for. But obviously, no two human beings can be equated in their totality. To assert their equality is to make a judgment of value, to believe that certain characteristics common to both have a special importance to each. To make such a judgement is an essential function of religion. Primitive or debased religion asserts the equal liability of all men to the arbitrary action of the gods, or their equal dependence upon the processes of nature. From that, at ascending levels, religions have asserted the equal subjection of all men to a divine moral law, or their equal son-ship to the fatherhood of a single or a supreme God. At the Christian level, the assertion has been expressed in a more compelling language, which has been the origin of all that seems to most of us most lovely in the social life of the Western Continents, and most enduring in their law….
But it is also possible for the lawgiver, not thus to ascertain and register men’s essential equalities, but, in despair at their intractable inequalities, to give them an equality of his own for his own purposes, as equal subjects of a king, or equal voters in a republic, or equal members of a nation. Up to a point, the argument for such a levelling policy is overwhelmingly strong; distinctions between citizens, carried beyond fairly narrow limits, are incompatible with the business efficiency of governments. But ‘equality before the law’, based on these grounds alone, is a spiritless thing. Its two chief agents are the tax-gatherer and the technologist: the one seeking to reduce men to manageable units of assessment for the collection of revenue, the other to manageable units of labour for handling the instruments of production. Thence, it is easy, as the business of the State grows, to extend the field of levelling to reduce all children, for instance, to manageable units for the purposes of a comprehensive system of State schooling. Equality of this kind for ‘reasons of State’ seems to be the almost necessary condition of all State action; and that, to many minds, is the main objection to the indefinite extension of the field of State action which is the characteristic of all modern ‘progressive’ governments.
But democracy makes a virtue of this necessity. In its philosophy, the ‘reason of State’ becomes a religion of the State. The equality of all men is a necessary assumption if all men are to be assimilated into one citizen body and their wills into a single General Will. It is a ‘sentiment of sociability’ more fundamental even than belief in a Supreme Being. And if the facts contradict the assumption, they must be changed. The unassimilable must be eliminated; eccentricities and superiorities are alike ‘anti-social’; indeed, every form of life is anti-social which is differentiated in any way from the mass of life of common citizenship. All such life is ‘privilege’, and as such it must be rooted out. The latest example of this argument today (1953) is the proposal of the English Labour Party to abolish, first, all Grammar Schools and, eventually, all independent schools.
This is, indeed, democracy’s characteristic Mark of the Beast. As we shall see, of all the means of assimilation, the most essential to democracy is a uniform State-controlled education.
(pp. 29-31)
