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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 17
Now the best that humanly speaking can be said of anything is that it requires to be reformed, for that fact implies that it is indispensable, and that it is capable of new life. The motor-car of to-day is the result of all the objections that were made against the motor-car of 1910. But the vulgar disesteem into which Parliament has fallen does not arise from such objections. We are told, for example, that it is not effective. Our question should then be, "Not effective for what?" for efficacy is the virtue an instrument possesses to bring about some finality. The finality in this case would be the solution of the public problems of each nation. Hence, we demand of the man who proclaims the inefficacy of Parliaments, that he possess a clear notion of wherein lies the solution of actual public problems. For if not, if in no country is it to-day clear, even theoretically, what it is that has to be done, there is no sense in accusing institutions of being inefficient. It would be better to remind ourselves that no institution in history has created more formidable, more efficient States, than the Parliaments of the XIXth Century. The fact is so indisputable that to forget it implies stark stupidity. We are not, then, to confuse the possibility and the urgency of thoroughly reforming legislative assemblies, in order to render them "even more" efficacious, with an assertion of their inutility. The loss of prestige by Parliaments has nothing to do with their notorious defects. It proceeds from another cause, entirely foreign to them, considered as political instruments. It arises from the fact that the European does not know in what to utilise them; has lost respect for the traditional aims of public life; in a word, cherishes no illusion about the national States in which he finds himself circumscribed and a prisoner. If this much-talked-of loss of prestige is looked into a little carefully, what is seen is that the citizen no longer feels any respect for his State, either in England, Germany, or France. It would be useless to make a change in the detail of institutions, because it is not these which are unworthy of respect, but the State itself which has become a puny thing. For the first time, the European, checked in his projects, economic, political, intellectual, by the limits of his own country, feels that those projects- that is to say, his vital possibilities- are out of proportion to the size of the collective body in which he is enclosed. And so he has discovered that to be English, German, or French is to be provincial . He has found out that he is "less" than he was before, for previously the Englishman, the Frenchman, and the German believed, each for himself, that he was the universe. This is, to my mind, the true source of that feeling of decadence which to-day afflicts the European.