LABOUR AND PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY 109
equality. It failed to realize the significance of equality, and did not even endeavour to strike a balance between Liberty and Equality, with the result that liberty swallowed equality and has left a progeny of inequities.
I have referred to the wrong ideologies which in my judgment have been responsible for the failure of Parliamentary Democracy. But I am equally certain that more than bad ideology it has bad organization which has been responsible for the failure of Democracy. All political societies get divided into two classes— the Rulers and the Ruled. This is an evil. If the evil stopped here it would not matter much. But the unfortunate part of it is that the division becomes stereotyped and stratified so much so that the Rulers are always drawn from the Ruling Class and the class of the Ruled never becomes the Ruling class. People do not govern themselves, they establish a government and leave it to govern them, forgetting that is not their government. That being the situation. Parliamentary Democarcy has never been a government of the people or by the people, and that is why it has never been a government for the people. Parliamentary Democracy, notwithstanding the paraphernalia of a popular government, is in reality a government of a hereditary subject class by a hereditary ruling class. It is this vicious organization of political life which has made Parliamentary Democracy such a dismal failure. It is because of this that Parliamentary Democracy has not fulfilled the hope it held out the common man of ensuring to him liberty, property and pursuit of happiness.
The question is who is responsible for this ? There is no doubt that if Parliamentary Democracy has failed to benefit the poor, the labouring and the down trodden classes, it is these classes who are primarily responsible for it. In the first place, they have shown a most appalling indifference to the effect of the economic factor in the making of men’s life. Someone very recently wrote a book called the ‘End of the Economic Man’. We cannot really talk of the End of the Economic Man for the simple reason that the Economic Man was never born. The common retort to Marx that man does not live by bread alone is unfortunately a fact. I agree with Carlyle that the aim of civilization can not be merely to fatten men as we do pigs. But we are far off from that stage. The labouring class far from being fat like pigs are starving, and one wishes that they thought of bread first and everything else afterwards.