HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

BY

GRAHAM WALLAS

PREFACE

I offer my thanks to several friends who have been kind enough to readthe proofs of this book, and to send me corrections and suggestions;among whom I will mention Professors John Adams and J. H. Muirhead, Dr. A. Wolf, and Messrs. W. H. Winch, Sidney Webb, L. Pearsall Smith, andA. E. Zimmern. It is, for their sake, rather more necessary than usualfor me to add that some statements still remain in the text which one ormore of them would have desired to see omitted or differently expressed. 

I have attempted in the footnotes to indicate those writers whose booksI have used. But I should like to record here my special obligation toProfessor William James's _Principles of Psychology_, which gave me, agood many years ago, the conscious desire to think psychologically aboutmy work as politician and teacher. 

I have been sometimes asked to recommend a list of books on thepsychology of politics. I believe that at the present stage of thescience, a politician will gain more from reading, in the light of hisown experience, those treatises on psychology which have been writtenwithout special reference to politics, than by beginning with theliterature of applied political psychology. But readers who are notpoliticians will find particular points dealt with in the works of thelate Monsieur G. Tarde, especially _L'Opinion et la Foule_ and _Les Loisde l'Imitation_ and in the books quoted in the course of an interestingarticle on 'Herd Instinct, ' by Mr. W. Trotter in the _SociologicalReview_ for July 1908. The political psychology of the poorerinhabitants of a great city is considered from an individual andfascinating point of view by Miss Jane Addams (of Chicago) in her_Democracy and Social Ethics_. 

GRAHAM WALLAS. 

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I have made hardly any changes in the book as it first appeared, beyondthe correction of a few verbal slips. The important politicaldevelopments which have occurred during the last eighteen months in theEnglish Parliament, in Turkey, Persia, and India, and in Germany, havenot altered my conclusions as to the psychological problems raised bymodern forms of government; and it would involve an impossible andundesirable amount of rewriting to substitute 'up-to-date' illustrationsfor those which I drew from the current events of 1907 and 1908. Ishould desire to add to the books recommended above Mr. W. M'Dougall's_Social Psychology_, with special reference to his analysis of Instinct. 

G. W. 

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, CLARE MARKET, LONDON, W. C. , _30th December 1909. _

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1920)

This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a reprint, with a fewverbal corrections, of the first edition (1908). I tried in 1908 to maketwo main points clear. My first point was the danger, for all humanactivities, but especially for the working of democracy, of the'intellectualist' assumption, 'that every human action is the result ofan intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end whichhe desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can beattained' (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for thatassumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The wholeprogress, ' I argued, 'of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages, has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought whichenable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature moresuccessfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of leastresistance in the use of our minds' (p. 114). 

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary as it was in1908. The assumption that men are automatically guided by 'enlightenedself-interest' has been discredited by the facts of the war and thepeace, the success of an anti-parliamentary and anti-intellectualistrevolution in Russia, the British election of 1918, the French electionof 1919, the confusion of politics in America, the breakdown ofpolitical machinery in Central Europe, and the general unhappiness whichhas resulted from four years of the most intense and heroic effort thatthe human race has ever made. One only needs to compare thedisillusioned realism of our present war and post-war pictures and poemswith the nineteenth-century war pictures at Versailles and Berlin, andthe war poems of Campbell, and Berenger, and Tennyson, to realise howfar we now are from exaggerating human rationality. 

It is my second point, which, in the world as the war has left it, ismost important. There is no longer much danger that we shall assume thatman always and automatically thinks of ends and calculates means. Thedanger is that we may be too tired or too hopeless to undertake theconscious effort by which alone we can think of ends and calculatemeans. 

The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century have given usan opportunity of choosing for ourselves our way of living such as menhave never had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of mankindhave had enough to do to keep themselves alive, and to satisfy the blindinstinct which impels them to hand on life to another generation. Aneffective choice has only been given to a tiny class of hereditaryproperty owners, or a few organisers of other men's labour. Even when, as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, nature offered whole populationsthree hundred free days in the year if they would devote two months toploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent themselves inunwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, or equipping armies, for anative monarch or a foreign conqueror. The monarch could choose hislife, but his choice was poor enough. 'There is, ' says Aristotle, 'a wayof living so brutish that it is only worth notice because many of thosewho can live any life they like make no better choice than didSardanapalus. '

The Greek thinkers started modern civilisation, because they insistedthat the trading populations of their walled cities should forcethemselves to think out an answer to the question, what kind of life isgood. 'The origin of the city-state, ' says Aristotle, 'is that itenables us to live; its justification is that it enables us to livewell. '

Before the war, there were in London and New York, and Berlin, thousandsof rich men and women as free to choose their way of life as wasSardanapalus, and as dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of thesons and daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and rubberplantations were 'fed up' with motoring or bridge, or even with thehunting and fishing which meant a frank resumption of palaeolithic lifewithout the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work brought me intocontact with an unprivileged class, whose degree of freedom was thespecial product of modern industrial civilisation, and on whose use oftheir freedom the future of civilisation may depend. A clever youngmechanic, at the age when the Wanderjahre of the medieval craftsman usedto begin, would come home after tending a 'speeded up' machine from 8A. M. , with an hour's interval, till 5 P. M. At 6 P. M. He had finished histea in the crowded living-room of his mother's house, and was 'free' todo what he liked. That evening, perhaps, his whole being tingled withhalf-conscious desires for love, and adventure, and knowledge, andachievement. On another day he might have gone to a billiard match athis club, or have hung round the corner for a girl who smiled at him ashe left the factory, or might have sat on his bed and ground at achapter of Marx or Hobson. But this evening he saw his life as a whole. The way of living that had been implied in the religious lessons atschool seemed strangely irrelevant; but still he felt humble, and kind, and anxious for guidance. Should he aim at marriage, and if so should hehave children at once or at all? If he did not marry, could he avoidself-contempt and disease? Should he face the life of a socialistorganiser, with its strain and uncertainty, and the continualpossibility of disillusionment? Should he fill up every evening withtechnical classes, and postpone his ideals until he had become rich? Andif he became rich what should he do with his money? Meanwhile, there wasthe urgent impulse to walk and think; but where should he walk to, andwith whom?

The young schoolmistress, in her bed-sitting-room a few streets off, wasin no better case. She and a friend sat late last night, agreeing thatthe life they were living was no real life at all; but what was thealternative? Had the 'home duties' to which her High Church sisterdevoted herself with devastating self-sacrifice any more meaning? Oughtshe, with her eyes open, and without much hope of spontaneous love, toenter into the childless 'modern' marriage which alone seemed possiblefor her? Ought she to spend herself in a reckless campaign for thesuffrage? Meanwhile, she had had her tea, her eyes were too tired toread, and what on earth should she do till bedtime?

Such moments of clear self-questioning were of course rare, but thenerve-fretting problems always existed. Industrial civilisation hadgiven the growing and working generation a certain amount of leisure, and education enough to conceive of a choice in the use of that leisure;but had offered them no guidance in making their choice. 

We are faced, as I write, with the hideous danger that fighting mayblaze up again throughout the whole Eurasian continent, and that theyoung men and girls of Europe may have no more choice in the way theyspend their time than they had from 1914 to 1918 or the serfs of Pharaohhad in ancient Egypt. But if that immediate danger is avoided, I dreamthat in Europe and in America a conscious and systematic discussion bythe young thinkers of our time of the conditions of a good life for anunprivileged population may be one of the results of the new vision ofhuman nature and human possibilities which modern science and modernindustry have forced upon us. 

Within each nation, industrial organisation may cease to be a confusedand wasteful struggle of interests, if it is consciously related to achosen way of life for which it offers to every worker the materialmeans. International relations may cease to consist of a constantplotting of evil by each nation for its neighbours, if ever the youth ofall nations know that French, and British, and Germans, and Russians, and Chinese, and Americans, are taking a conscious part in the greatadventure of discovering ways of living open to all, and which all canbelieve to be good. 

GRAHAM WALLAS. 

_August_ 1920. 

CONTENTS

 INTRODUCTION

 PART I _THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM_

 CHAPTER I IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS

 CHAPTER II POLITICAL ENTITIES

 CHAPTER III NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

 CHAPTER IV THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING

 CHAPTER V THE METHOD OF POLITICAL REASONING

 PART II _POSSIBILITIES OF PROGRESS_

 CHAPTER I POLITICAL MORALITY

 CHAPTER II REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

 CHAPTER III OFFICIAL THOUGHT

 CHAPTER IV NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS

_(Introduction, page 1)_

The study of politics is now in an unsatisfactory position. ThroughoutEurope and America, representative democracy is generally accepted asthe best form of government; but those who have had most experience ofits actual working are often disappointed and apprehensive. Democracyhas not been extended to non-European races, and during the last fewyears many democratic movements have failed. 

This dissatisfaction has led to much study of political institutions;but little attention has been recently given in works on politics to thefacts of human nature. Political science in the past was mainly based, on conceptions of human nature, but the discredit of the dogmaticpolitical writers of the early nineteenth century has made modernstudents of politics over-anxious to avoid anything which recalls theirmethods. That advance therefore of psychology which has transformedpedagogy and criminology has left politics largely unchanged. 

The neglect of the study of human nature is likely, however, to proveonly a temporary phase of political thought, and there are already signsthat it, is coming to an end. 

_(PART I. --Chapter I. --Impulse and Instinct in Politics, page 21)_

Any examination of human nature in politics must begin with an attemptto overcome that 'intellectualism' which results both from thetraditions of political science and from the mental habits of ordinarymen. 

Political impulses are not mere intellectual inferences fromcalculations of means and ends; but tendencies prior to, though modifiedby, the thought and experience of individual human beings. This may beseen if we watch the action in politics of such impulses as personalaffection, fear, ridicule, the desire of property, etc. 

All our impulses and instincts are greatly increased in their immediateeffectiveness if they are 'pure, ' and in their more permanent results ifthey are 'first hand' and are connected with the earlier stages of ourevolution. In modern politics the emotional stimulus which reaches usthrough the newspapers is generally 'pure, ' but 'second hand, ' andtherefore is both facile and transient. 

The frequent repetition of an emotion or impulse is often distressing. Politicians, like advertisers, must allow for this fact, which again isconnected with that combination of the need of privacy with intoleranceof solitude to which we have to adjust our social arrangements. 

Political emotions are sometimes pathologically intensified whenexperienced simultaneously by large numbers of human beings in physicalassociation, but the conditions of political life in England do notoften produce this phenomenon. 

The future of international politics largely depends on the questionwhether we have a specific instinct of hatred for human beings of adifferent racial type from ourselves. The point is not yet settled, butmany facts which are often explained as the result of such an instinctseem to be due to other and more general instincts modified byassociation. 

_(Chapter II. --Political Entities, page: 59)_

Political acts and impulses are the result of the contact between humannature and its environment. During the period studied by the politician, human nature has changed very little, but political environment haschanged with ever-increasing rapidity. 

Those facts of our environment which stimulate impulse and action reachus through our senses, and are selected from the mass of our sensationsand memories by our instinctive or acquired knowledge of theirsignificance. In politics the things recognised are, for the most part, made by man himself, and our knowledge of their significance is notinstinctive but acquired. 

Recognition tends to attach itself to symbols, which take the place ofmore complex sensations and memories. Some of the most difficultproblems in politics result from the relation between the conscious usein reasoning of the symbols called words, and their more or lessautomatic and unconscious effect in stimulating emotion and action. Apolitical symbol whose significance has once been established byassociation, may go through a psychological development of its own, apart from the history of the facts which were originally symbolised byit. This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems of nations andparties; and still more clearly in the history of those commercialentities--'teas' or 'soaps'--which are already made current byadvertisement before any objects to be symbolised by them have been madeor chosen. Ethical difficulties are often created by the relationbetween the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician andsuch slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or thetraditional personality of a newspaper which he may control. 

_(Chapter III. --Non-Rational Inference in Politics, page 98)_

Intellectualist political thinkers often assume, not only that politicalaction is necessarily the result of inferences as to means and ends, butthat all inferences are of the same 'rational' type. 

It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non-rationalinferences in the stream of mental experience, but it is clear that manyof the half-conscious processes by which men form their politicalopinions are non-rational. We can generally trust non-rationalinferences in ordinary life because they do not give rise to consciousopinions until they have been strengthened by a large number ofundesigned coincidences. But conjurers and others who study ournon-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us formabsurd beliefs. The empirical art of politics consists largely in thecreation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconsciousnon-rational inference. The process of inference may go on beyond thepoint desired by the politician who started it, and is as likely to takeplace in the mind of a passive newspaper-reader as among the members ofthe most excited crowd. 

_(Chapter IV. --The Material of Political Reasoning, page 114)_

But men can and do reason, though reasoning is only one of their mentalprocesses. The rules for valid reasoning laid down by the Greeks wereintended primarily for use in politics, but in politics reasoning has infact proved to be more difficult and less successful than in thephysical sciences. The chief cause of this is to be found in thecharacter of its material. We have to select or create entities toreason about, just as we select or create entities to stimulate ourimpulses and non-rational inferences. In the physical sciences theseselected entities are of two types, either concrete things made exactlyalike, or abstracted qualities in respect of which things otherwiseunlike can be exactly compared. In politics, entities of the first typecannot be created, and political philosophers have constantly sought forsome simple entity of the second type, some fact or quality, which mayserve as an exact 'standard' for political calculation. This search hashitherto been unsuccessful, and the analogy of the biological sciencessuggests that politicians are most likely to acquire the power of validreasoning when they, like doctors, avoid the over-simplification oftheir material, and aim at using in their reasoning as many facts aspossible about the human type, its individual variations, and itsenvironment. Biologists have shown that large numbers of facts as toindividual variations within any type can be remembered if they arearranged as continuous curves rather than as uniform rules or arbitraryexceptions. On the other hand, any attempt to arrange the facts ofenvironment with the same approach to continuity as is possible with thefacts of human nature is likely to result in error. The study of historycannot be assimilated to that of biology. 

_(Chapter V. --The Method of Political Reasoning, page 138)_

The method of political reasoning has shared the traditionalover-simplification of its subject-matter. 

In Economics, where both method and subject-matter were originallystill more completely simplified, 'quantitative' methods have sinceJevons's time tended to take the place of 'qualitative'. How far is asimilar change possible in politics?

Some political questions can obviously be argued quantitatively. Othersare less obviously quantitative. But even on the most complex politicalissues experienced and responsible statesmen do in fact thinkquantitatively, although the methods by which they reach their resultsare often unconscious. 

When, however, all politicians start with intellectualist assumptions, though some half-consciously acquire quantitative habits of thought, many desert politics altogether from disillusionment and disgust. Whatis wanted in the training of a statesman is the fully consciousformulation and acceptance of those methods which will not have to beunlearned. 

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of RoyalCommissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons whohave to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of speciallycollected evidence. Their methods and vocabulary, even when notnumerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative. 

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition ofover-simplification is apt to persist. 

_(PART II. --Chapter I. --Political Morality, page 167)_

But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actualtrend of political forces?

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers ofthe intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or laterinfluence the moral judgments of the working politician. A youngcandidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation tothose whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence. He willstart, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmenwho have been made cynical by experience. 

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political moralitymight be changed for the worse. But the change will go deeper. When menbecome conscious of psychological processes of which they have beenunconscious or half-conscious, not only are they put on their guardagainst the exploitation of those processes in themselves by others, butthey become better able to control them from within. 

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong enough toovercome, as a political force, the advancing art of politicalexploitation, the conception of control from within must be formed intoan ideal entity which, like 'Science, ' can appeal to popularimagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. Thedifficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of thevaried reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wideextension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increasedintensity of moral passion. 

_(Chapter II. --Representative Government, page 199)_

The changes now going on in our conception of the psychological basis ofpolitics will also re-open the discussion of representative democracy. 

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer be acceptedas valid, and it is probable that many political thinkers (especiallyamong those who have been educated in the natural sciences) will returnto Plato's proposal of a despotic government carried on by a selectedand trained class, who live apart from the 'ostensible world'; thoughEnglish experience in India indicates that even the most carefullyselected official must still live in the 'ostensible world, ' and thatthe argument that good government requires the consent of the governeddoes not depend for its validity upon its original intellectualistassociations. 

Our new way of thinking about politics will, however, certainly changethe form, not only of the argument for consent, but also of theinstitutions by which consent is expressed. An election (like ajury-trial) will be, and is already beginning to be, looked upon ratheras a process by which right decisions are formed under right conditions, than as a mechanical expedient by which decisions already formed areascertained. 

Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the oldintellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and newdifficulties in the working of representative government will arise fromthe wider extension of political power. But that conception ofrepresentation may spread which desires both to increase the knowledgeand public spirit of the voter and to provide that no strain is put uponhim greater than he can bear. 

_(Chapter III. --Official Thought, page 241)_

A quantitative examination of the political force created by popularelection shows the importance of the work of non-elected officials inany effective scheme of democracy. 

What should be the relation between these officials and the electedrepresentatives? On this point English opinion already shows a markedreaction from the intellectualist conception of representativegovernment. We accept the fact that most state officials are appointedby a system uncontrolled either by individual members of parliament orby parliament as a whole, that they hold office during good behaviour, and that they are our main source of information as to some of the mostdifficult points on which we form political judgments. It is largely anaccident that the same system has not been introduced into our localgovernment. 

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially independent CivilService as an existing fact is not enough. We must set ourselves torealise clearly what we intend our officials to do, and to consider howfar our present modes of appointment, and especially our present methodsof organising official work, provide the most effective means forcarrying out that intention. 

_(Chapter IV. --Nationality and Humanity, page 269)_

What influence will the new tendencies in political thought have on theemotional and intellectual conditions of political solidarity?

In the old city-states, where the area of government corresponded to theactual range of human vision and memory, a kind of local emotion couldbe developed which is now impossible in a 'delocalised' population. Thesolidarity of a modern state must therefore depend on facts not ofobservation but of imagination. 

The makers of the existing European national states, Mazzini andBismarck, held that the possible extent of a state depended on nationalhomogeneity, _i. E. _ on the possibility that every individual member of astate should believe that all the others were like himself. Bismarckthought that the degree of actual homogeneity which was a necessarybasis for this belief could be made by 'blood and iron'; Mazzini thoughtthat mankind was already divided into homogeneous groups whose limitsshould be followed in the reconstruction of Europe. Both were convincedthat the emotion of political solidarity was impossible betweenindividuals of consciously different national types. 

During the last quarter of a century this conception of the world ascomposed of a mosaic of homogeneous nations has been made more difficult(a) by the continued existence and even growth of separate nationalfeelings within modern states, and (b) by the fact that the European andnon-European races have entered into closer political relationships. Theattempt, therefore, to transfer the traditions of national homogeneityand solidarity either to the inhabitants of a modern world-empire as awhole, or to the members of the dominant race in it, disguises the realfacts and adds to the danger of war. 

Can we, however, acquire a political emotion based, not upon a belief inthe likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition oftheir unlikeness? Darwin's proof of the relation between individual andracial variation might have produced such an emotion if it had not beenaccompanied by the conception of the 'struggle for life' as a moralduty. As it is, inter-racial and even inter-imperial wars can berepresented as necessary stages in the progress of the species. Butpresent-day biologists tell us that the improvement of any one race willcome most effectively from the conscious co-operation, and not from theblind conflict of individuals; and it may be found that the improvementof the whole species will also come rather from a consciousworld-purpose based upon a recognition of the value of racial as well asindividual variety, than from mere fighting. 

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

The study of politics is just now (1908) in a curiously unsatisfactoryposition. 

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form of governmentappears to have been finally settled in favour of representativedemocracy. Forty years ago it could still be argued that to base thesovereignty of a great modern nation upon a widely extended popular votewas, in Europe at least, an experiment which had never been successfullytried. England, indeed, by the 'leap in the dark' of 1867, became forthe moment the only large European State whose government was democraticand representative. But to-day a parliamentary republic based uponuniversal suffrage exists in France without serious opposition orprotest. Italy enjoys an apparently stable constitutional monarchy. Universal suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the GermanEmperor after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as thesuccessful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritorof a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionatelydesires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itselfsteadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The mostultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, nolonger as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient forsecuring in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of actionfor the directors of a church almost all of whose members will remainvoting citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals for anon-representative democracy which were associated with the communistand anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at allwidely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructivescheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by whichthe results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenlydistributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the workingclasses. 

And yet, in the very nations which have most whole-heartedly acceptedrepresentative democracy, politicians and political students seempuzzled and disappointed by their experience of it. The United States ofAmerica have made in this respect by far the longest and most continuousexperiment. Their constitution has lasted for a century and a quarter, and, in spite of controversy and even war arising from opposinginterpretations of its details, its principles have been, and still are, practically unchallenged. But, as far as an English visitor can judge, no American thinks with satisfaction of the electoral 'machine' whosepower alike in Federal, State, and Municipal politics is stillincreasing. 

In England not only has our experience of representative democracy beenmuch shorter than that of America, but our political traditions havetended to delay the full acceptance of the democratic idea even in theworking of democratic institutions. Yet, allowing for differences ofdegree and circumstance, one finds in England among the most loyaldemocrats, if they have been brought into close contact with the detailsof electoral organisation, something of the same disappointment whichhas become more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a goodmany parliamentary contests, and have myself been a candidate in aseries of five London municipal elections. In my last election I noticedthat two of my canvassers, when talking over the day's work, usedindependently the phrase, 'It is a queer business. ' I have heard muchthe same words used in England by those professional political agentswhose efficiency depends on their seeing electoral facts withoutillusion. I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italianelectioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my hosts of the ParisMunicipal Council, I seemed to detect in some of them indications ofgood-humoured disillusionment with regard to the working of a democraticelectoral system. 

In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is thegrowing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the mostdisquieting problems. In America the 'machine' takes its worst form inthose great new cities whose population and wealth and energy representthe goal towards which the rest of American civilisation is apparentlytending. In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant briberyof the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruptionof the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils. The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newestinventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, thepower and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrialcapital, the organised political passions of working men who have passedthrough the standards of the elementary schools, and who live inhundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburbanstreets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, andif it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, thetactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rulesintended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and menfeel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely towin may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed. 

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as new questionsforce themselves into politics, that the existing electoral system willnot bear the strain of an intensified social conflict. Many of thearguments used in the discussion of the tariff question in England, orof the concentration of capital in America, or of social--democracy inGermany, imply this. Popular election, it is said, may work fairly wellas long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders ofwealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. Butif the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, inorder to secure a tariff, or legalise a trust, or oppose a confiscatorytax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, noCorrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it. If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art ofusing skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for thefuture. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fundor discovered some other new source of political strength, would haveany chance of permanent success. 

The appeal, however, in the name of electoral purity, to protectionists, trust-promoters, and socialists that they should drop their variousmovements and so confine politics to less exciting questions, falls, naturally enough, on deaf ears. 

The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women is met by thatsort of hesitation and evasion which is characteristic of politicianswho are not sure of their intellectual ground. A candidate who has justbeen speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he isheckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify thecontinued exclusion of women from the franchise. Accordingly a largemajority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at thegeneral election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage. But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave thatpledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out. There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionallydishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a finaldecision is apparently genuine. They are aware that certain differencesexist between men and women, though they do not know what thosedifferences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question ofthe franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than intheir pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future, probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting onthe other. 

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in ourexplicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by thegrowing urgency of the problem of race. The fight for democracy inEurope and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centurieswas carried on by men who were thinking only of the European races. But, during the extension of democracy after 1870, almost all the GreatPowers were engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvementsin the means of communication were bringing all the races of the worldinto close contact. The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign votehas (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined tonations of European origin. But there is nothing in the form or historyof the representative principle which seems to justify this, or tosuggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government. Nor canhe draw any intelligible and consistent conclusion from the practice ofdemocratic States in giving or refusing the vote to their non-Europeansubjects. The United States, for instance, have silently and almostunanimously dropped the experiment of negro suffrage. In that case, owing to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African negro andthe white man from North-West Europe, the problem was comparativelysimple; but no serious attempt has yet been made at a new solution ofit, and the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing with themore subtle racial questions created by the immigration of Chinese andJapanese and Slavs, or by the government of the mixed populations in thePhilippines. 

England and her colonies show a like uncertainty in the presence of thepolitical questions raised both by the migration of non-white races andby the acquisition of tropical dependencies. Even when we discuss thepolitical future of independent Asiatic States we are not clear whetherthe principle, for instance, of 'no taxation without representation'should be treated as applicable to them. Our own position as an Asiaticpower depends very largely on the development of China and Persia, whichare inhabited by races who may claim, in some respects, to be ourintellectual superiors. When they adopt our systems of engineering, mechanics, or armament we have no doubt that they are doing a good thingfor themselves, even though we may fear their commercial or militaryrivalry. But no follower of Bentham is now eager to export for generalAsiatic use our latest inventions in political machinery. We hear thatthe Persians have established a parliament, and watch the development oftheir experiment with a complete suspension of judgment as to itsprobable result. We have helped the Japanese to preserve theirindependence as a constitutional nation, and most Englishmen vaguelysympathise with the desire of the Chinese progressives both for nationalindependence and internal reform. Few of us, however, would be willingto give any definite advice to an individual Chinaman who asked whetherhe ought to throw himself into a movement for a representativeparliament on European lines. 

Within our own Empire this uncertainty as to the limitations of ourpolitical principles may at any moment produce actual disaster. InAfrica, for instance, the political relationship between the Europeaninhabitants of our territories and the non-European majority of Kaffirs, Negroes, Hindoos, Copts, or Arabs is regulated on entirely differentlines in Natal, Basutoland, Egypt, or East Africa. In each case theconstitutional difference is due not so much to the character of thelocal problem as to historical accident, and trouble may break outanywhere and at any time, either from the aggression of the Europeansupon the rights reserved by the Home Government to the non-Europeans, orfrom a revolt of the non-Europeans themselves. Blacks and whites areequally irritated by the knowledge that there is one law in Nairobi andanother in Durban. 

This position is, of course, most dangerous in the case of India. Fortwo or three generations the ordinary English Liberal postponed anydecision on Indian politics, because he believed that we were educatingthe inhabitants for self-government, and that in due time they would allhave a vote for an Indian parliament. Now he is becoming aware thatthere are many races in India, and that some of the most importantdifferences between those races among themselves, and between any ofthem and ourselves, are not such as can be obliterated by education. Heis told by men whom he respects that this fact makes it certain thatthe representative system which is suitable for England will never besuitable for India, and therefore he remains uneasily responsible forthe permanent autocratic government of three hundred million people, remembering from time to time that some of those people or theirneighbours may have much more definite political ideas than his own, andthat he ultimately may have to fight for a power which he hardly desiresto retain. 

Meanwhile, the existence of the Indian problem loosens half-consciouslyhis grip upon democratic principle in matters nearer home. Newspapersand magazines and steamships are constantly making India more real tohim, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immigrants or London'latch-key' lodgers ought to have a vote is less decided than it wouldhave been if he had not acquiesced in the decision that Rajputs, andBengalis, and Parsees should be refused it. 

Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to stop in themiddle of a campaign merely because they have an uncomfortable feelingthat the rules of the game require re-stating and possibly re-casting. But the winning or losing of elections does not exhaust the wholepolitical duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has been a time inwhich the disinterested examination of political principles has beenmore urgently required. Hitherto the main stimulus to politicalspeculation has been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight ofthe Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous struggle forsupremacy among themselves, or by the wars of religion in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, and the American and French Revolutions inthe eighteenth century. The outstanding social events in Europe in ourown time have, however, been so far the failures rather than thesuccesses of great movements; the apparent wasting of devotion andcourage in Russia, owing to the deep-seated intellectual divisions amongthe reformers, and the military advantage which modern weapons and meansof communication give to any government however tyrannous and corrupt;the baffling of the German social-democrats by the forces of religionand patriotism and by the infertility of their own creed; the weaknessof the successive waves of American Democracy when faced by thepolitical power of capital. 

But failure and bewilderment may present as stern a demand for thoughtas the most successful revolution, and, in many respects, that demand isnow being well answered. Political experience is recorded and examinedwith a thoroughness hitherto unknown. The history of political action inthe past, instead of being left to isolated scholars, has become thesubject of organised and minutely subdivided labour. The new politicaldevelopments of the present, Australian Federation, the Referendum inSwitzerland, German Public Finance, the Party system in England andAmerica, and innumerable others, are constantly recorded, discussed andcompared in the monographs and technical magazines which circulatethrough all the universities of the globe. 

The only form of study which a political thinker of one or two hundredyears ago would now note as missing is any attempt to deal with politicsin its relation to the nature of man. The thinkers of the past, fromPlato to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, andthey made those views the basis of their speculations on government. Butno modern treatise on political science, whether dealing withinstitutions or finance, now begins with anything corresponding to theopening words of Bentham's _Principles of Morals andLegislation_--'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of twosovereign masters, pain and pleasure'; or to the 'first generalproposition' of Nassau Senior's _Political Economy, _ 'Every man desiresto obtain additional wealth with as little sacrifice as possible. '[1] Inmost cases one cannot even discover whether the writer is conscious ofpossessing any conception of human nature at all. 

[1] _Political, Economy_ (in the _Encyclopedia Metropolitana_), 2ndedition (1850), p. 26. 

It is easy to understand how this has come about. Political science isjust beginning to regain some measure of authority after theacknowledged failure of its confident professions during the first halfof the nineteenth century. Bentham's Utilitarianism, after supersedingboth Natural Right and the blind tradition of the lawyers, and servingas the basis of innumerable legal and constitutional reforms throughoutEurope, was killed by the unanswerable refusal of the plain man tobelieve that ideas of pleasure and pain are the only sources of humanmotive. The 'classical' political economy of the universities and thenewspapers, the political economy of MacCulloch and Senior andArchbishop Whately, was even more unfortunate in its attempt to deduce awhole industrial polity from a 'few simple principles' of human nature. It became identified with the shallow dogmatism by which well-to-dopeople in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign tried to convinceworking men that any change in the distribution of the good things oflife was 'scientifically impossible. ' Marx and Buskin and Carlyle weremasters of sarcasm, and the process is not yet forgotten by which theyslowly compelled even the newspapers to abandon the 'laws of politicaleconomy' which from 1815 to 1870 stood, like gigantic stuffed policemen, on guard over rent and profits. 

When the struggle against 'Political Economy' was at its height, Darwin's _Origin of Species_ revealed a universe in which the 'fewsimple principles' seemed a little absurd, and nothing has hithertotaken their place. Mr. Herbert Spencer, indeed, attempted to turn asingle hasty generalisation from the history of biological evolutioninto a complete social philosophy of his own, and preached a 'beneficentprivate war'[2] which he conceived as exactly equivalent to that degreeof trade competition which prevailed among English provincialshopkeepers about the year 1884. Mr. Spencer failed to secure even thewhole-hearted support of the newspapers; but in so far as his systemgained currency it helped further to discredit any attempt to connectpolitical science with the study of human nature. 

[2] _Man versus the State_, p. 69. 'The beneficent private war whichmakes one man strive to climb over the shoulders of another man. '

For the moment, therefore, nearly all students of politics analyseinstitutions and avoid the analysis of man. The study of human nature bythe psychologists has, it is true, advanced enormously since thediscovery of human evolution, but it has advanced without affecting orbeing affected by the study of politics. Modern text-books of psychologyare illustrated with innumerable facts from the home, the school, thehospital, and the psychological laboratory; but in them politics arehardly ever mentioned. The professors of the new science of sociologyare beginning, it is true, to deal with human nature in its relationnot only to the family and to religion and industry, but also tocertain political institutions. Sociology, however, has had, as yet, little influence on political science. 

I believe myself that this tendency to separate the study of politicsfrom that of human nature will prove to be only a momentary phase ofthought, that while it lasts its effects, both on the science and theconduct of politics, are likely to be harmful, and that there arealready signs that it is coming to an end. 

It is sometimes pleaded that, if thorough work is to be done, theremust, in the moral as in the physical sciences, be division of labour. But this particular division cannot, in fact, be kept up. The student ofpolitics must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of humannature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likelyhe is to be dominated by it. If he has had wide personal experience ofpolitical life his unconscious assumptions may be helpful; if he has notthey are certain to be misleading. Mr. Roosevelt's little book of essayson _American Ideals_ is, for instance, useful, because when he thinksabout mankind in politics, he thinks about the politicians whom he hasknown. After reading it one feels that many of the more systematic bookson politics by American university professors are useless, just becausethe writers dealt with abstract men, formed on assumptions of which theywere unaware and which they had never tested either by experience or bystudy. 

In the other sciences which deal with human actions, this divisionbetween the study of the thing done and the study of the being who doesit is not found. In criminology Beccaria and Bentham long ago showed howdangerous that jurisprudence was which separated the classification ofcrimes from the study of the criminal. The conceptions of human naturewhich they held have been superseded by evolutionary psychology, butmodern thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology into theservice of a new and fruitful criminology. 

In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sidedBentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions ofhuman nature. Those conceptions were the same as those which underlaytheir political theories, and have been affected in the same way bymodern knowledge. For a short time it even looked, as if the lecturersin the English training colleges would make the same separation betweenthe study of human institutions and human nature as has been made inpolitics. Lectures on School Method were distinguished during thisperiod from those on the Theory of Education. The first became meredescriptions and comparisons of the organisation and teaching in thebest schools. The second consisted of expositions, with occasionalcomment and criticism of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke, or Rousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory ofPolitics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxfordcourse of Humaner Letters. But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, Ibelieve, survive almost unchanged, the Training College lectures on theTheory of Education are beginning to show signs of a change as great asthat which took place in the training of medical students, when thelecturers on anatomy, instead of expounding the classical authorities, began to give, on their own responsibility, the best account of thefacts of human structure of which they were capable. 

The reason for this difference is, apparently, the fact that whileOxford lecturers on the Theory of Politics are not often politicians, the Training College lecturers on the Theory of Teaching have alwaysbeen teachers, to whom the question whether any new knowledge could bemade useful in their art was one of living and urgent importance. Onefinds accordingly that under the leadership of men like ProfessorsWilliam James, Lloyd Morgan, and Stanley Hall, a progressive science ofteaching is being developed, which combines the study of types of schoolorganisation and method with a determined attempt to learn from specialexperiments, from introspection, and from other sciences, what mannerof thing a child is. 

Modern pedagogy, based on modern psychology, is already influencing theschools whose teachers are trained for their profession. Its body offacts is being yearly added to; it has already caused the abandonment ofmuch dreary waste of time; has given many thousands of teachers a newoutlook on their work, and has increased the learning and happiness ofmany tens of thousands of children. 

This essay of mine is offered as a plea that a corresponding change inthe conditions of political science is possible. In the great Universitywhose constituent colleges are the universities of the world, there is asteadily growing body of professors and students of politics who givethe whole day to their work. I cannot but think that as years go on, more of them will call to their aid that study of mankind which is theancient ally of the moral sciences. Within every great city there aregroups of men and women who are brought together in the evenings by thedesire to find something more satisfying than current politicalcontroversy. They have their own unofficial leaders and teachers, andamong these one can already detect an impatience with the alternativeoffered, either of working by the bare comparison of existinginstitutions, or of discussing the fitness of socialism orindividualism, of democracy or aristocracy for human beings whosenature is taken for granted. 

If my book is read by any of those official or unofficial thinkers, Iwould urge that the study of human nature in politics, if ever it comesto be undertaken by the united and organised efforts of hundreds oflearned men, may not only deepen and widen our knowledge of politicalinstitutions, but open an unworked mine of political invention. 

PART I

_The Conditions of the Problem_

CHAPTER I

IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS

Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on a re-examinationof the working of human nature, must begin by trying to overcome his owntendency to exaggerate the intellectuality of mankind. 

We are apt to assume that every human action is the result of anintellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which hedesires, and then calculates the means by which that end can beattained. An investor, for instance, desires good security combined withfive per cent interest. He spends an hour in studying with an open mindthe price-list of stocks, and finally infers that the purchase ofBrewery Debentures will enable him most completely to realise hisdesire. Given the original desire for good security, his act inpurchasing the Debentures appears to be the inevitable result of hisinference. The desire for good security itself may further appear to bemerely an intellectual inference as to the means of satisfying some moregeneral desire, shared by all mankind, for 'happiness, ' our own'interest, ' or the like. The satisfaction of this general desire canthen be treated as the supreme 'end' of life, from which all our actsand impulses, great and small, are derived by the same intellectualprocess as that by which the conclusion is derived from the premises ofan argument. 

This way of thinking is sometimes called 'common sense. ' A good exampleof its application to politics may be found in a sentence fromMacaulay's celebrated attack on the Utilitarian followers of Bentham inthe _Edinburgh Review_ of March 1829. This extreme instance of thefoundation of politics upon dogmatic psychology is, curiously enough, part of an argument intended to show that 'it is utterly impossible todeduce the science of government from the principles of human nature. ''What proposition, ' Macaulay asks, 'is there respecting human naturewhich is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one: and thatis not only true, but identical; that men always act fromself-interest.... _When we see the actions of a man, we know withcertainty what he thinks his interest to be_. '[3] Macaulay believeshimself to be opposing Benthamism root and branch, but is unconsciouslyadopting and exaggerating the assumption which Bentham shared with mostof the other eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophers--thatall motives result from the idea of some preconceived end. 

[3] _Edinburgh Review_, March 1829, p. 185. (The italics are mine. )

If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably have admitted that thereare cases in which human acts and impulses to act occur independently ofany idea of an end to be gained by them. If I have a piece of grit in myeye and ask some one to take it out with the corner of his handkerchief, I generally close the eye as soon as the handkerchief comes near, andalways feel a strong impulse to do so. Nobody supposes that I close myeye because, after due consideration, I think it my interest to do so. Nor do most men choose to run away in battle, to fall in love, or totalk about the weather in order to satisfy their desire for apreconceived end. If, indeed, a man were followed through one ordinaryday, without his knowing it, by a cinematographic camera and aphonograph, and if all his acts and sayings were reproduced before himnext day, he would be astonished to find how few of them were the resultof a deliberate search for the means of attaining ends. He would, ofcourse, see that much of his activity consisted in the half-consciousrepetition, under the influence of habit, of movements which wereoriginally more fully conscious. But even if all cases of habit wereexcluded he would find that only a small proportion of the residuecould be explained as being directly produced by an intellectualcalculation. If a record were also kept of those of his impulses andemotions which did not result in action, it would be seen that they wereof the same kind as those which did, and that very few of them werepreceded by that process which Macaulay takes for granted. 

If Macaulay had been pressed still further, he would probably haveadmitted that even when an act is preceded by a calculation of ends andmeans, it is not the inevitable result of that calculation. Even when weknow what a man thinks it his interest to do, we do not know for certainwhat he will do. The man who studies the Stock Exchange list does notbuy his Debentures, unless, apart from his intellectual inference on thesubject, he has an impulse to write to his stockbroker sufficientlystrong to overcome another impulse to put the whole thing off till thenext day. 

Macaulay might even further have admitted that the mental act ofcalculation itself results from, or is accompanied by, an impulse tocalculate, which impulse may have nothing to do with any anteriorconsideration of means and ends, and may vary from the half-consciousyielding to a train of reverie up to the obstinate driving of a tiredbrain onto the difficult task of exact thought. 

The text-books of psychology now warn every student against the'intellectualist' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation fromMacaulay. Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of itsown earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which itis often directed and modified. Our inherited organisation inclines usto re-act in certain ways to certain stimuli because such reactions havebeen useful in the past in preserving our species. Some of the reactionsare what we call specifically 'instincts, ' that is to say, impulsestowards definite acts or series of acts, independent of any consciousanticipation of their probable effects. [4] Those instincts are sometimesunconscious and involuntary; and sometimes, in the case of ourselves andapparently of other higher animals, they are conscious and voluntary. But the connection between means and ends which they exhibit is theresult not of any contrivance by the actor, but of the survival, in thepast, of the 'fittest' of many varying tendencies to act. Indeed theinstinct persists when it is obviously useless, as in the case of a dogwho turns round to flatten the grass before lying down on a carpet; andeven when it is known to be dangerous, as when a man recovering fromtyphoid hungers for solid food. 

[4] 'Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a wayas to produce certain ends without foresight of the ends and withoutprevious education in the performance. '--W. James, _Principles ofPsychology_, vol. Ii. P. 383. 

The fact that impulse is not always the result of conscious foresightis most clearly seen in the case of children. The first impulses of ababy to suck, or to grasp, are obviously 'instinctive. ' But even whenthe unconscious or unremembered condition of infancy has been succeededby the connected consciousness of childhood, the child will fly to hismother and hide his face in her skirts when he sees a harmless stranger. Later on he will torture small beasts and run away from big beasts, orsteal fruit, or climb trees, though no one has suggested such actions tohim, and though he may expect disagreeable results from them. 

We generally think of 'instinct' as consisting of a number of suchseparate tendencies, each towards some distinct act or series of acts. But there is no reason to suppose that the whole body of inheritedimpulse even among non-human animals has ever been divisible in thatway. The evolutionary history of impulse must have been verycomplicated. An impulse which survived because it produced one resultmay have persisted with modifications because it produced anotherresult; and side by side with impulses towards specific acts we candetect in all animals vague and generalised tendencies, oftenoverlapping and contradictory, like curiosity and shyness, sympathy andcruelty, imitation and restless activity. It is possible, therefore, toavoid the ingenious dilemma by which Mr. Balfour argues that we musteither demonstrate that the desire, _e. G. _ for scientific truth, islineally descended from some one of the specific instincts which teachus 'to fight, to eat, and to bring up children, ' or must admit thesupernatural authority of the Shorter Catechism. [5]

[5] _Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter_, 1904, p. 21. 'So far as natural science can tell us, every quality of sense orintellect which does _not_ help us to fight, to eat, and to bring upchildren, is but a by-product of the qualities which do. '

The pre-rational character of many of our impulses is, however, disguisedby the fact that during the lifetime of each individual they areincreasingly modified by memory and habit and thought. Even thenon-human animals are able to adapt and modify their inherited impulseseither by imitation or by habits founded on individual experience. Whentelegraph wires, for instance, were first put up many birds flew againstthem and were killed. But although the number of those that were killedwas obviously insufficient to produce a change in the biologicalinheritance of the species, very few birds fly against the wires now. The young birds must have imitated their elders, who had learnt to avoidthe wires; just as the young of many hunting animals are said to learndevices and precautions which are the result of their parents'experience, and later to make and hand down by imitation inventions oftheir own. 

Many of the directly inherited impulses, again, appear both in man andother animals at a certain point in the growth of the individual, andthen, if they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, formhabits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may nolonger help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or ourteeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporaryor weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to newobjects, or to be modified by experience and thought. 

With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster has to deal. InMacaulay's time he used to be guided by his 'common-sense, ' and tointellectualise the whole process. The unfortunate boys who acted uponan ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, or to mimictheir teacher, were asked, with repeated threats of punishment, 'why'they had done so. They, being ignorant of their own evolutionaryhistory, were forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punishedfor that as well. The trained schoolmaster of to-day takes the existenceof such impulses as a normal fact; and decides how far, in each case, heshall check them by relying on that half-conscious imitation which makesthe greater part of class-room discipline, and how far by stimulating aconscious recognition of the connection, ethical or penal, between actsand their consequences. In any case his power of controlling instinctiveimpulse is due to his recognition of its non-intellectual origin. He mayeven be able to extend this recognition to his own impulses, and toovercome the conviction that his irritability during afternoon schoolin July is the result of an intellectual conclusion as to the need ofspecial severity in dealing with a set of unprecedentedly wicked boys. 

The politician, however, is still apt to intellectualise impulse ascompletely as the schoolmaster did fifty years ago. He has two excuses, that he deals entirely with adults, whose impulses are more deeplymodified by experience and thought than those of children, and that itis very difficult for any one who thinks about politics not to confinehis consideration to those political actions and impulses which areaccompanied by the greatest amount of conscious thought, and whichtherefore come first into his mind. But the politician thinks about menin large communities, and it is in the forecasting of the action oflarge communities that the intellectualist fallacy is most misleading. The results of experience and thought are often confined to individualsor small groups, and when they differ may cancel each other as politicalforces. The original human impulses are, with personal variations, common to the whole race, and increase in their importance with anincrease in the number of those influenced by them. 

It may be worth while, therefore, to attempt a description of some ofthe more obvious or more important political impulses, rememberingalways that in politics we are dealing not with such clear-cut separateinstincts as we may find in children and animals, but with tendenciesoften weakened by the course of human evolution, still more oftentransferred to new uses, and acting not simply but in combination orcounteraction. 

Aristotle, for instance, says that it is 'affection' (or 'friendship, 'for the meaning of [Greek: philía] stands half way between thetwo words) which 'makes political union possible, ' and 'which law-giversconsider more important than justice. ' It is, he says, a hereditaryinstinct among animals of the same race, and particularly among men. [6]If we look for this political affection in its simplest form, we see itin our impulse to feel 'kindly' towards any other human being of whoseexistence and personality we become vividly aware. This impulse can bechecked and overlaid by others, but any one can test its existence andits prerationality in his own case by going, for instance, to theBritish Museum and watching the effect on his feelings of the discoverythat a little Egyptian girl baby who died four thousand years ago rubbedthe toes of her shoes by crawling upon the floor. 

[6] _Ethics_, Bk. Viii. Chap. I. [Greek: phýsei t' enypárchein éoike ... Ou pónon en anthrôpois allà kaì en órnisi kaì tois pleístois tôn zôôn, kaì tois homoethnési pròs állêla, kaì málista tois anthrôpois ... éoikedè kaì tàs póleis synéchein hê philía, kaì hoi nomothétai mallon perìautên spoudázein ê tên dikaiosýnên]. 

The tactics of an election consist largely of contrivances by which thisimmediate emotion of personal affection may be set up. The candidate isadvised to 'show himself continually, to give away prizes, to 'say afew words' at the end of other people's speeches--all undercircumstances which offer little or no opportunity for the formation ofa reasoned opinion of his merits, but many opportunities for the rise ofa purely instinctive affection among those present. His portrait isperiodically distributed, and is more effective if it is a good, that isto say, a distinctive, than if it is a flattering likeness. Best of allis a photograph which brings his ordinary existence sharply forward byrepresenting him in his garden smoking a pipe or reading a newspaper. 

A simple-minded supporter whose affection has been so worked up willprobably try to give an intellectual explanation of it. He will say thatthe man, of whom he may know really nothing except that he wasphotographed in a Panama hat with a fox-terrier, is 'the kind of man wewant, ' and that therefore he has decided to support him; just as a childwill say that he loves his mother because she is the best mother in theworld, [7] or a man in love will give an elaborate explanation of hisperfectly normal feelings, which he describes as an intellectualinference from alleged abnormal excellences in his beloved. Thecandidate naturally intellectualises in the same way. One of the mostperfectly modest men I know once told me that he was 'going round' agood deal among his future constituents 'to let them see what a goodfellow I am. ' Unless, indeed, the process can be intellectualised, it isfor many men unintelligible. 

[7] A rather unusually reflective little girl of my acquaintance, felt, one day, while looking at her mother, a strong impulse of affection. Shefirst gave the usual intellectual explanation of her feeling, 'Mummy, Ido think you are the most beautiful Mummy in the whole world, ' and then, after a moment's thought, corrected herself by saying, 'But there, theydo say love is blind. '

A monarch is a life-long candidate, and there exists a singularlyelaborate traditional art of producing personal affection for him. It ismore important that he should be seen than that he should speak or act. His portrait appears on every coin and stamp, and apart from anyquestion of personal beauty, produces most effect when it is a goodlikeness. Any one, for instance, who can clearly recall his own emotionsduring the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, will remember ameasurable increase of his affection for her, when, in 1897, athoroughly life-like portrait took the place on the coins of theconventional head of 1837-1887, and the awkward compromise of the firstJubilee year. In the case of monarchy one can also watch theintellectualisation of the whole process by the newspapers, the officialbiographers, the courtiers, and possibly the monarch himself. The dailybulletin of details as to his walks and drives is, in reality, the morelikely to create a vivid impression of his personality, and therefore toproduce this particular kind of emotion, the more ordinary the eventsdescribed are in themselves. But since an emotion arising out ofordinary events is difficult to explain on a purely intellectual basis, these events are written about as revealing a life of extraordinaryregularity and industry. When the affection is formed it is evensometimes described as an inevitable reasoned conclusion arising fromreflection upon a reign during which there have been an unusual numberof good harvests or great inventions. 

Sometimes the impulse of affection is excited to a point at which itsnon-rational character becomes obvious. George the Third was beloved bythe English people because they realised intensely that, likethemselves, he had been born in England, and because the published factsof his daily life came home to them. Fanny Burney describes, therefore, how when, during an attack of madness, he was to be taken in a coach toKew, the doctors who were to accompany him were seriously afraid thatthe inhabitants of any village who saw that the King was under restraintwould attack them. [8] The kindred emotion of personal and dynasticloyalty (whose origin is possibly to be found in the fact that theloosely organised companies of our prehuman ancestors could not defendthemselves from their carnivorous enemies until the general instinct ofaffection was specialised into a vehement impulse to follow and protecttheir leader), has again and again produced destructive and utterlyuseless civil wars. 

[8] _Diary of Madame D'Arblay_, ed. 1905, vol. Iv. P. 184, 'If they evenattempted force, they had not a doubt but his smallest resistance wouldcall up the whole country to his fancied rescue. '

Fear often accompanies and, in politics, is confused with affection. Aman, whose life's dream it has been to get sight and speech of his King, is accidentally brought face to face with him. He is 'rooted to thespot, ' becomes pale, and is unable to speak, because a movement mighthave betrayed his ancestors to a lion or a bear, or earlier still, to ahungry cuttlefish. It would be an interesting experiment if someprofessor of experimental psychology would arrange his class in thelaboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to record thosepulse movements which accompany the sensation of 'thrill, ' and wouldthen introduce into the room without notice, and in chance order, abishop, a well-known general, the greatest living man of letters, and aminor member of the royal family. The resulting records of immediatepulse disturbances would be of real scientific importance, and it mighteven be possible to continue the record in each case say, for a quarterof a minute, and to trace the secondary effects of variations inpolitical opinions, education, or the sense of humour among thestudents. 

At present almost the only really scientific observation on the subjectfrom its political side is contained in Lord Palmerston's protestagainst a purely intellectual account of aristocracy: 'there is nodamned nonsense about merit, ' he said, 'in the case of the Garter. 'Makers of new aristocracies are still, however, apt to intellectualise. The French government, for instance, have created an order, 'Pour leMérite Agricole, ' which ought, on the basis of mere logic, to be verysuccessful; but one is told that the green ribbon of that order producesin France no thrill whatever. 

The impulse to laugh is comparatively unimportant in politics, but itaffords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician hasto allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effectof the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of therecognition of danger. It may have been evolved because an animal whichsuffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was morelikely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been themerely accidental result of some fact in our nervous organisation whichwas otherwise useful. Incongruity is, however, so much a matter of habitand association and individual variation, that it is extraordinarilydifficult to forecast whether any particular act will seem ridiculous toany particular class, or how long the sense of incongruity will in anycase persist. Acts, for instance, which aim at producing exaltedemotional effect among ordinary slow-witted people--Burke's dagger, Louis Napoleon's tame eagle, the German Kaiser's telegrams about Hunsand mailed fists--may do so, and therefore be in the end politicallysuccessful, although they produce spontaneous laughter in men whoseconception of good political manners is based upon the idea ofself-restraint. 

Again, almost the whole of the economic question between socialism andindividualism turns on the nature and limitations of the desire forproperty. There seem to be good grounds for supposing that this is atrue specific instinct, and not merely the result of habit or of theintellectual choice of means for satisfying the desire of power. Children, for instance, quarrel furiously at a very early age overapparently worthless things, and collect and hide them long before theycan have any clear notion of the advantages to be derived fromindividual possession. Those children who in certain charity schools arebrought up entirely without personal property, even in their clothes orpocket-handkerchiefs, show every sign of the bad effect on health andcharacter which results from complete inability to satisfy a stronginherited instinct. The evolutionary origin of the desire for propertyis indicated also by many of the habits of dogs or squirrels or magpies. Some economist ought therefore to give us a treatise in which thisproperty instinct is carefully and quantitatively examined. Is it, likethe hunting instinct, an impulse which dies away if it is not indulged?How far can it be eliminated or modified by education? Is it satisfiedby a leasehold or a life-interest, or by such an arrangement ofcorporate property as is offered by a collegiate foundation, or by theprovision of a public park? Does it require for its satisfactionmaterial and visible things such as land or houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is the absence of unlimitedproprietary rights felt more strongly in the case of personal chattels(such as furniture and ornaments) than in the case of land or machinery?Does the degree and direction of the instinct markedly differ amongdifferent individuals or races, or between the two sexes?

Pending such an inquiry my own provisional opinion is that, like a goodmany instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied byan avowed pretence; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk canbe kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinctby playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies hisinstinct of combat and adventure at golf. If this is so, and if it isconsidered for other reasons undesirable to satisfy the propertyinstinct by the possession, say, of slaves or of freehold land, onesupposes that a good deal of the feeling of property may in the futurebe enjoyed even by persons in whom the instinct is abnormally strong, through the collection of shells or of picture postcards. 

The property instinct is, it happens, one of two instances in which theclassical economists deserted their usual habit of treating all desiresas the result of a calculation of the means of obtaining 'utility' or'wealth. ' The satisfaction of the instinct of absolute property bypeasant proprietorship turned, they said, 'sand to gold, ' although itrequired a larger expenditure of labour for every unit of income thanwas the case in salaried employment. The other instance was the instinctof family affection. This also still needs a special treatise on itsstimulus, variation, and limitations. But the classical economiststreated it as absolute and unvarying. The 'economic man, ' who had nomore concern than a lone wolf with the rest of the human species, wastreated as possessing a perfect and permanent solidarity of feeling withhis 'family. ' The family was apparently assumed as consisting of thosepersons for whose support a man in Western Europe is legallyresponsible, and no attempt was made to estimate whether the instinctextended in any degree to cousins or great uncles. 

A treatise on political impulses which aimed at completeness wouldfurther include at least the fighting instinct (with the part which itplays, together with affection and loyalty, in the formation ofparties), and the instincts of suspicion, curiosity, and the desire toexcel. 

All these primary impulses are greatly increased in immediateeffectiveness when they are 'pure, ' that is to say, unaccompanied bycompeting or opposing impulses; and this is the main reason why art, which aims at producing one emotion at a time, acts on most men so muchmore easily than does the more varied appeal of real life. I once sat ina suburban theatre among a number of colonial troopers who had come overfrom South Africa for the King's Coronation. The play was 'Our Boys, 'and between the acts my next neighbour gave me, without any sign ofemotion, a hideous account of the scene at Tweefontein after De Wet hadrushed the British camp on the Christmas morning of 1901--the militiamenslaughtered while drunk, and the Kaffir drivers tied to the blazingwaggons. The curtain rose again, and, five minutes later, I saw that hewas weeping in sympathy with the stage misfortunes of two able-bodiedyoung men who had to eat 'inferior Dorset' butter. My sympathy with themilitiamen and the Kaffirs was 'pure, ' whereas his was overlaid withremembered race-hatred, battle-fury, and contempt for Britishincompetence. His sympathy, on the other hand, with the stage characterswas not accompanied, as mine was, by critical feelings about theatricalconventions, indifferent acting, and middle-Victorian sentiment. 

It is this greater immediate effect of pure and artificial as comparedwith mixed and concrete emotion which explains the traditional maxim ofpolitical agents that it is better that a candidate should not live inhis constituency. It is an advantage that he should be able to representhimself as a 'local candidate, ' but his local character should be _adhoc_, and should consist in the hiring of a large house each year inwhich he lives a life of carefully dramatised hospitality. Things in noway blameworthy in themselves--his choice of tradesmen, his childrens'hats and measles, his difficulties with his relations--will be, if he isa permanent resident, 'out of the picture, ' and may confuse theimpression which he produces. If one could, by the help of atime-machine, see for a moment in the flesh the little Egyptian girl whowore out her shoes, one might find her behaving so charmingly that one'spity for her death would be increased. But it is more probable that, even if she was, in fact, a very nice little girl, one would not. 

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set up by artisticpresentment, as compared with those resulting from concrete observationhas, however, to be studied in its relation to another fact--thatimpulses vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the nervousdisturbance which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance inour present life, but to the point at which they appeared in ourevolutionary past. We are quite unable to resist the impulse of merevascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the mouth, the jerk ofthe limb, the closing of the eye which we share with some of thesimplest vertebrates. We can only with difficulty resist the instinctsof sex and food, of anger and fear, which we share with the higheranimals. It is, on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistentlythe impulses which attend on the mental images formed by inference andassociation. A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent reasoningthat he will go to hell if he visits a certain house; and yet he will doso in satisfaction of a half conscious craving, whose existence he isashamed to recognise. It may be that when a preacher makes hell real tohim by physical images of fire and torment his conviction will acquirecoercive force. But that force may soon die away as his memory fades, and even the most vivid description has little effect as compared with atouch of actual pain. At the theatre, because pure emotion is facile, three-quarters of the audience may cry, but because second-hand emotionis shallow, very few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home, or will even lose their appetite for a late supper. My South Africantrooper probably recovered from his tears over 'Our Boys' as soon asthey were shed. The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragicemotions produced by novel reading is well known. A man may weep over anovel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same manmay be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, byactual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which hereads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor anyother obvious nervous effect. 

Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those greatmodern communities in which all the events which stimulate politicalaction reach the voters through newspapers. The emotional appeal ofjournalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it ispure, and transitory because it is second-hand. Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all arepresented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selectionof 'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at once, in thehalf-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longerinterval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper. But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidlyaway. 

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness ofthe conditions under which what Professor James calls the 'pungent senseof effective reality, '[9] reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in acivilisation based upon newspapers. I was walking along the streetduring my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, andcomparing them with the vague fog of journalistic phrases, thehalf-conscious impulses of old habit and new suspicion which make upthe atmosphere of electioneering. I came round a street corner upon aboy of about fifteen returning from work, whose whole face lit up withgenuine and lively interest as soon as he saw me. I stopped, and hesaid: 'I know you, Mr. Wallas, you put the medals on me. ' All that daypolitical principles and arguments had refused to become real to myconstituents, but the emotion excited by the bodily fact that I had at aschool ceremony pinned a medal for good attendance on a boy's coat, hadall the pungency of a first-hand experience. 

[9] 'The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the factthat the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision ofthe truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective realitywill not attach to certain ideas. ' W. James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. Ii. P. 547. 

Throughout the contest the candidate is made aware, at every point, ofthe enormously greater solidity for most men of the work-a-day worldwhich they see for themselves, as compared with the world of inferenceand secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers. A LondonCounty Councillor, for instance, as his election comes near, and hebegins to withdraw from the daily business of administrative committeesinto the cloud of the electoral campaign, finds that the officials whomhe leaves behind, with their daily stint of work, and their hopes andfears about their salaries, seem to him much more real than himself. Theold woman at her door in a mean street who refuses to believe that he isnot being paid for canvassing, the prosperous and good-natured tradesmanwho says quite simply, ' I expect you find politics rather an expensiveamusement, ' all seem to stand with their feet upon the ground. Howeveroften he assures himself that the great realities are on his side, andthat the busy people round him are concerned only with fleetingappearances, yet the feeling constantly recurs to him that it is hehimself who is living in a world of shadows. 

This feeling is increased by the fact that a candidate has constantly torepeat the same arguments, and to stimulate in himself the sameemotions, and that mere repetition produces a distressing sense ofunreality. The preachers who have to repeat every Sunday the samegospel, find also that 'dry times' alternate with times of exaltation. Even among the voters the repetition of the same political thoughts isapt to produce weariness. The main cause of the recurring swing of theelectoral pendulum seems to be that opinions which have been held withenthusiasm become after a year or two stale and flat, and that the newopinions seem fresh and vivid. 

A treatise is indeed required from some trained psychologist on theconditions under which our nervous system shows itself intolerant ofrepeated sensations and emotions. The fact is obviously connected withthe purely physiological causes which produce giddiness, tickling, sea-sickness, etc. But many things that are 'natural, ' that is to say, which we have constantly experienced during any considerable part of theages during which our nervous organisation was being developed, apparently do not so affect us. Our heartbeats, the taste of water, therising and setting of the sun, or, in the case of a child, milk, or thepresence of its mother, or of its brothers, do not seem to become, insound health, distressingly monotonous. But 'artificial' things, howeverpleasant at first--a tune on the piano, the pattern of a garment, thegreeting of an acquaintance--are likely to become unbearable if oftenexactly repeated. A newspaper is an artificial thing in this sense, andone of the arts of the newspaper-writer consists in presenting hisviews with that kind of repetition which, like the phrases of a fugue, constantly approaches, but never oversteps the limit of monotony. Advertisers again are now discovering that it pays to vary the monotonywith which a poster appeals to the eye by printing in different coloursthose copies which are to hang near each other, or still better, byrepresenting varied incidents in the career of 'Sunny Jim' or 'SunlightSue. '

A candidate is also an artificial thing. If he lives and works in hisconstituency, the daily vision of an otherwise admirable business manseated in a first-class carriage on the 8. 47 A. M. Train in the sameattitude and reading the same newspaper may produce a slight andunrecognised feeling of discomfort among his constituents, although itwould cause no such feeling in the wife whose relation to him is'natural. ' For the same reason when his election comes on, although hemay declare himself to be the 'old member standing on the old platform, 'he should be careful to avoid monotony by slightly varying his portrait, the form of his address, and the details of his declaration of politicalfaith. 

Another fact, closely connected with our intolerance of repeatedemotional adjustment, is the desire for privacy, sufficiently marked toapproach the character of a specific instinct, and balanced by acorresponding and opposing dread of loneliness. Our ancestors in theages during which our present nervous system became fixed, lived, apparently, in loosely organised family groups, associated for certainoccasional purposes, into larger, but still more loosely organised, tribal groups. No one slept alone, for the more or less monogamic familyassembled nightly in a cave or 'lean-to' shelter. The hunt for foodwhich filled the day was carried on, one supposes, neither in completesolitude nor in constant intercourse. Even if the female were left athome with the young, the male exchanged some dozen times a day roughgreetings with acquaintances, or joined in a common task. Occasionally, even before the full development of language, excited palavers attendedby some hundreds would take place, or opposing tribes would gather for afight. 

It is still extremely difficult for the normal man to endure either muchless or much more than this amount of intercourse with his fellows. However safe they may know themselves to be, most men find it difficultto sleep in an empty house, and would be distressed by anything beyondthree days of absolute solitude. Even habit cannot do much in thisrespect. A man required to submit to gradually increasing periods ofsolitary confinement would probably go mad as soon as he had been keptfor a year without a break. A settler, though he may be the son of asettler, and may have known no other way of living, can hardly endureexistence unless his daily intercourse with his family is supplementedby a weekly chat with a neighbour or a stranger; and he will go long anddangerous journeys in order once a year to enjoy the noise and bustle ofa crowd. 

But, on the other hand, the nervous system of most men will not toleratethe frequent repetition of that adjustment of the mind and sympathies tonew acquaintanceship, a certain amount of which is so refreshing and sonecessary. One can therefore watch in great modern cities men halfconsciously striving to preserve the same proportion between privacy andintercourse which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and onecan watch also the constant appearance of proposals or experiments whichaltogether ignore the primary facts of human nature in this respect. Thehabitual intellectualism of the writers of political Utopias preventsthem from seeing any 'reason' why men should not find happiness as wellas economy in a sort of huge extension of family life. The writerhimself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does notperhaps realise the need of privacy at all. His affections are in astate of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back tothe emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming assemblies of hisprehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts, to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. What he does notrealise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanentlyat this level. In William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ the customs offamily life extend to the streets, and the tired student from theBritish Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman. Iremember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the earlyChristian Socialists. He said that he had just been riding down OxfordStreet in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibuspassed over a section of the street in which macadam had beensubstituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to eachother. 'Some day, ' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, andthen, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibuswill become a delightful informal club. ' Now nearly all London is pavedwith wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses canhear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident isheld to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour. 

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of thecheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as tobring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest onterms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's_Book of Snobs_, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels, the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successfulexactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them thatno member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personalacquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier, Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want ofprivacy. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confusedpages of the _Politics_, in which Aristotle criticises from the point ofview of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out:'It is difficult to live together in community, ' communistic colonistshave always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters';'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into dailycontact with us. '[10]

[10] _Politics_, Book II. Ch. V. 

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of acomplete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, butfor the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of theirdisastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boysin the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy bythe adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more hasbeen done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses. ' Experienceseems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with itsalternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suitedthan a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature. 

This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repayspecial and detailed study. It varies very greatly among differentraces, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy whichis found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be dueto the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year undercover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in thisrespect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not theintellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easilyfatigued. Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party'gives himself away, ' is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy whichmakes some call upon the emotions. An actor who accepts the secondalternative of Diderot's paradox, and _feels_ his part, is much morelikely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulatesfeeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself. 

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected, most difficult, and most necessary. In America all observers are agreedas to the danger which results from looking on a politician as anabstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizenshave an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every oneought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome. In England ourcomparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between arepresentative and his constituents has done something to preservecustoms corresponding more closely to the actual nature of man. A tiredEnglish statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his timerather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the roomthan in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces withinnumerable unknown guests. But there is a real danger lest thistradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simplybecause of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young labourpolitician is expected to live in more than American conditions ofintimate publicity. Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, andhaving to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficultrequirements of mental work, he is expected to receive every caller atany hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to bealways ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After ayear or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, thetask is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous fatigue are atfirst accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity. Hebegins to suffer from the curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hystericalcondition in which a man talks all day long to a succession ofsympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actualill-health, though he is not making an hour's continuous exertion in theday. I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could notmake a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whosecottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise on a harmonium before hestarted. Often such a man takes to drink. In any case he is liable, asthe East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to themost pitiable forms of moral collapse. 

Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a life without privacy, do not survive. Greater political danger comes perhaps from those whoare comparatively fit. Any one who has been in America, who has stoodamong the crowd in a Philadelphian law-court during the trial of apolitical case, or has seen the thousands of cartoons in a contest inwhich Tammany is concerned, will find that he has a picture in his mindof one type at least of those who do survive. 

Powerfully built, with the big jaw and loose mouth of the dominanttalker, practised by years of sitting behind saloon bars, they havelearnt the way of 'selling cheap that which should be most dear. ' Buteven they generally look as if they drank, and as if they would not liveto old age. 

Other and less dreadful types of politicians without privacy come intoone's mind, the orator who night after night repeats the theatricalsuccess of his own personality, and, like the actor, keeps his recurringfits of weary disgust to himself; the busy organising talkative man towhom it is a mere delight to take the chair at four smoking concerts aweek. But there is no one of them who would not be the better, both inhealth and working power, if he were compelled to retire for six monthsfrom the public view, and to produce something with his own hand andbrain, or even to sit alone in his own house and think. 

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous disturbanceproduced by certain conditions of life in political communities, areagain closely connected with the one point in the special psychology ofpolitics which has as yet received any extensive consideration--theso-called 'Psychology of the Crowd, ' on which the late M. Tarde, M. LeBon, and others have written. In the case of human beings, as in thecase of many other social and semi-social animals, the simplerimpulses--especially those of fear and anger--when they are consciouslyshared by many physically associated individuals, may become enormouslyexalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances. One maysuppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originallyan accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervousreaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger wasrealised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey), a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members ofthe herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority. 

My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modernnational state, this panic effect of the combination of nervousexcitement with physical contact is not of great importance. London inthe twentieth century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, orFlorence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very difficult for anyconsiderable proportion of the citizens to be gathered undercircumstances likely to produce the special 'Psychology of the Crowd. ' Ihave watched two hundred thousand men assembled in Hyde Park for aLabour Demonstration. The scattered platforms, the fresh air, the widegrassy space, seemed to be an unsuitable environment for the productionof purely instinctive excitement, and the attitude of such an assemblyin London is good-tempered and lethargic. A crowd in a narrow street ismore likely to get 'out of hand, ' and one may see a few thousand men ina large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltationon an exciting occasion, and when they are in the hands of a practisedspeaker. But as they go out of the hall they drop into the cool ocean ofLondon, and their mood is dissipated in a moment. The mob that took theBastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming force in one of thebusiness streets of Manchester. Yet such facts vary greatly amongdifferent races, and the exaggeration which one seems to notice whenreading the French sociologists on this point may be due to theirobservations having been made among a Latin and not a Northern race. 

So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by the internalpolitics of a modern State. But perhaps the most important section inthe whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned notwith the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other, but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in internationalpolitics. The future peace of the world largely turns on the questionwhether we have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an instinctiveaffection for those human beings whose features and colour are like ourown, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. Onthis point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by thepsychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise. But I am inclined to thinkthat those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred andaffection which can certainly be found, are not instances of a specificand universal instinct but the result of several distinct andcomparatively weak instincts combined and heightened by habit andassociation. I have already argued that the instinct of politicalaffection is stimulated by the vivid realisation of its object. Sincetherefore it is easier, at least for uneducated men, to realise theexistence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, affection forone's like would appear to have a natural basis, but one likely to bemodified as our powers of realisation are stimulated by education. Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, among personsbelonging to the same race as themselves, any markedly unusual face ordress may excite the instinct of fear of that which is unknown. Achild's fear, however, of a strangely shaped or coloured face is moreeasily obliterated by familiarity than it would be if it were the resultof a specific instinct of race-hatred. White or Chinese children show, one is told, no permanent aversion for Chinese or white or Hindoo ornegro nurses and attendants. Sex love, again, even when opposed bysocial tradition, springs up freely between very different human types;and widely separated races have been thereby amalgamated. Between someof the non-human species (horses and camels, for instance) instinctivemutual hatred, as distinguished from fear, does seem to exist, butnowhere, as far as I know, is it found between varieties so nearlyrelated to each other and so readily interbreeding as the various humanraces. 

Anglo-Indian officials sometimes explain, as a case of specificinstinct, the fact that a man who goes out with an enthusiastic interestin the native races often finds himself, after a few years, unwillinglyyielding to a hatred of the Hindoo racial type. But the account whichthey give of their sensations seems to me more like the nervous disgustwhich I described as arising from a constantly repeated mental andemotional adjustment to inharmonious surroundings. At the age when anEnglish official reaches India most of his emotional habits are alreadyset, and he makes, as a rule, no systematic attempt to modify them. Therefore, just as the unfamiliarity of French cookery or German beds, which at the beginning of a continental visit is a delightful change, may become after a month or two an intolerable _gêne, _ so the servilityand untruthfulness, and even the patience and cleverness of thosenatives with whom he is brought into official contact, get after a fewyears on the nerves of an Anglo-Indian. Intimate and uninterruptedcontact during a long period, after his social habits have been formed, with people of his own race but of a different social tradition wouldproduce the same effect. 

Perhaps, however, intellectual association is a larger factor thaninstinct in the causation of racial affection and hatred. An Americanworking man associates, for instance, the Far Eastern physical type withthat lowering of the standard wage which overshadows as a dreadfulpossibility every trade in the industrial world. Fifty years ago themiddle class readers to whom _Punch_ appeals associated the same typewith stories of tortured missionaries and envoys. After the battle ofthe Sea of Japan they associated it with that kind of heroism which, owing to our geographical position, we most admire; and drawings of theunmistakably Asiatic features of Admiral Togo, which would have excitedgenuine and apparently instinctive disgust in 1859, produced a thrill ofaffection in 1906. 

But at this point we approach that discussion of the objects, sensibleor imaginary, of political impulse (as distinguished from the impulsesthemselves), which must be reserved for my next chapter. 

CHAPTER II

POLITICAL ENTITIES

Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the relation betweenhis nature and the environment into which he is born. The last chapterapproached that relation (in so far as it affects politics) from theside of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same relation fromthe side of man's political environment. 

The two lines of approach have this important difference, that thenature with which man is born is looked on by the politician as fixed, while the environment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitelychanging. It is not to changes in our nature, but to changes in ourenvironment only--using the word to include the traditions andexpedients which we acquire after birth as well as our materialsurroundings--that all our political development from the tribalorganisation of the Stone Ages to the modern nation has apparently beendue. 

The biologist looks on human nature itself as changing, but to him theperiod of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years which constitutethe past of politics is quite insignificant. Important changes inbiological types may perhaps have occurred in the history of the worldduring comparatively short periods, but they must have resulted eitherfrom a sudden biological 'sport' or from a process of selection fiercerand more discriminating than we believe to have taken place in theimmediate past of our own species. The present descendants of thoseraces which are pictured in early Egyptian tombs show no perceptiblechange in their bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believethat the mental faculties and tendencies with which they are born havechanged to any greater degree. 

The numerical proportions of different races in the world have, indeed, altered during that period, as one race proved weaker in war or lessable to resist disease than another; and races have been mingled bymarriage following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be exchangedat birth with one born of the same breeding-stock even a hundredthousand years ago, one may suppose that neither the ancient nor themodern mother would notice any startling difference. The child from theStone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than our children if hecaught measles, or might show somewhat keener instincts in quarrellingand hunting, or as he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellowsof the 'will to live' and 'the joy of life. ' Conversely, a transplantedtwentieth-century child would resist infectious disease better than theother children in the Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be found tohave a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable character. Butthere apparently the difference would end. In essentials the type ofeach human stock may be supposed to have remained unchanged throughoutthe whole period. In the politics of the distant future that science ofeugenics, which aims at rapidly improving our type by consciouslydirected selective breeding, may become a dominant factor, but it hashad little influence on the politics of the present or the past. 

Those new facts in our environment which have produced the enormouspolitical changes which separate us from our ancestors have been partlynew habits of thought and feeling, and partly new entities about whichwe can think and feel. 

It is of these new political entities that this chapter will treat. Theymust have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almostentirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like otheranimals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, ofinnumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deedor thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How thendid the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and becomesufficiently significant to produce political results?

The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate us toward impulseor action is that it should be recognisable--that it should be likeitself when we met it before, or like something else which we have metbefore. If the world consisted of things which constantly andarbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anythingelse, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings asat present constituted would not act at all. They would drift likeseaweed among the waves. 

The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because onehawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise islike another; and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut andblade of grass is like the rest. 

But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulusto action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be feltin some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens, but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to actionby recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising atortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb. 

Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature. The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child indistress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from thestream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movementor glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at oncefrom the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers. Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by theindividual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises thesignificance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip(provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) byexperience and association. 

In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn theirsignificance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter ifballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paperat about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one beforewere invariably seized with a desire to vote. 

The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, illustrates the process of creating artificial and easilyrecognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as achief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like untohimself. ' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and dothe same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If amarriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must becarried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures. Insome few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence andmade recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on thosebiologically inherited associations which enable man and other animalsto interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint andwolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to ourinstinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition ofartificial political entities must generally have owed its power ofstimulating impulse to associations acquired during life. A child whohad been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow downbefore the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or theking, or the stone by association. 

Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whethernaturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Suchpoints then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionaryfacts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eatinginsects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion toinduce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellowbands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keepoff birds. [11] In early political society most recognition is guided bysuch symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in allrespects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one cantattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and lesspainful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the manhimself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlargeduntil it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The kingis then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek:skêptouchos basileús]). Such a staff is very like a name, and theremay, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in whicha model of a staff stood for a king. 

[11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. Ii. P. 392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals isthe history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge ofeverything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or killthem. '

At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the wholeprocess. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of theeighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribalman for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of theoriginal social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure andpain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership androyal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process ofreasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king. 

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language, it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional associationwith the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effectsof those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us aprocess of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their othereffects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical useof language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle ofsensations--one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selectionof a single quality--kingship, for instance--shared by other suchbundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and theuse of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. Whenwe are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language allthis does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use ofvoice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic ofcolours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology willexplain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as adescription of that which actually happens when language is used for thepurpose of stimulating us to action. 

Indeed the 'brass-instrument psychologists, ' who do such admirable workin their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect ofsignificant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get afriend to write in large letters on cards a series of common politicalterms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit beforea watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practiseobservation of the associations which successively enter hisconsciousness. The first associations revealed will be automatic andobviously 'illogical. ' If the word be 'England' the white and blackmarks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser, ' produceat once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half consciousemotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembranceof puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile, ' the marks willfirst call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reactionmay be associated. I am a 'visualiser, ' and the picture in my case was ablurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me thepicture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railwaycarriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After theautomatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotionalaccompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knowsabout England, which are presented to the memory by a processsemi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severeeffort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at eachstage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our pastlife, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of theexperiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose. 

A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language. If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family besubstituted for the written cards, the rest of the process will goon--the automatic 'image, ' automatically accompanied by emotionalassociation, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by thevoluntary realisation of 'meaning, ' and finally by a deliberate effortof recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poetand partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brainoccasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in hisaccount of those separate mental states which for most men are mergedinto one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess, ' describesthe succession which I have been discussing:--

 'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands. Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee. '

'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the changefrom the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective moodin which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised. 

But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands. ' Here again, as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarilyearlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the laterintellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sitsin one's chair one can feel that that is so. 

Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena ofreligion. The only religion of any importance which has ever beenconsciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of AugusteComte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensuremoral action among the distractions and temptations of daily life, herequired each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image ofHumanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for adefinite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known andloved woman--his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figurealways in the same attitude and dress, so that it should always presentitself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate associationwith the word Humanité. [12] With that would be automatically associatedthe original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As soon aspossible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fullerbut less cogent emotional associations connected with that meaning. Thisinvention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline inthe Roman Catholic Church and partly suggested by Comte's ownexperiences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de Vaux. One ofthe reasons that it has not come into greater use may have been that menin general are not quite such good 'visualisers' as Comte found himselfto be. 

[12] _The Catechism of Positive Religion_ (Tr. By Congreve), First Part, 'Explanation of the Worship, ' e. G. P. 65: 'The Positivist shuts his eyesduring his private prayers, the better to see the internal image. '

Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his _Apologia_, explainshow he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints thatbehind his belief in the real existence of such images was his sense ofthe convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments ofreligious communities, ' from which he suffered so much, with spirits'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent ormalicious, as the case might he.... My preference of the Personal to theAbstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenancedby the mention of the "Prince of Persia" in the prophet Daniel: and Ithink I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that theApocalypse spoke, when it introduced "the angels of the sevenchurches. "'[13] In 1837 ... I said ... 'Take England with many highvirtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is aspirit neither of Heaven nor Hell. '

[13] Newman, _Apologia_ (1864), pp. 91, 92. 

Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion ofChristianity, lays stress on the use of the word 'church' and the'possibilities of personification which it offered. '[14] This use mayhave owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstractionapplied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of allChristian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a halfconscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term. Butwhen it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most mento the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and notto those which would follow on a full analysis of the meaning. Religioushistory affords innumerable such instances. The 'truth embodied in atale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visualrealisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the taleitself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which 'every knee shallbow, ' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not beuttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feelingthan the realisation of its meaning. Things of the senses--the sacredfood which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see andtouch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types. 

[14] Harnack, _Expansion of Christianity_ (Tr. ), vol. Ii. P. 11. 

If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discoverhow much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotionalexperiences. For most men the central political entity is their country. When a man dies for his country, what does he die for? The reader in hischair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, ofsome region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by hisrelation to all these things. But what seems to happen in the crisis ofbattle is not the logical building up or analysing of the idea of one'scountry, but that automatic selection by the mind of some thing of senseaccompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection which I havealready described. Throughout his life the conscript has lived in astream of sensations, the printed pages of the geography book, the sightof streets and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds orrivers, all of which go to make up the infinity of facts from which hemight abstract an idea of his country. What comes to him in the finalcharge? Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birth-place. Morelikely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom orimagination for enabling an entity which one can love to stand out fromthe unrealised welter of experience. If he is an Italian it may be thename, the musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it may bethe marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in themarket-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the'Marseillaise. ' Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes. 

Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after thefighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Periclesabstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in thepresent and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to theworld. But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence ofPericles' voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some motherof the dead. 

In the evolution of politics, among the most important events have beenthe successive creations of new moral entities--of such ideals asjustice, freedom, right. In their origin that process of consciouslogical abstraction, which we are tempted to accept as the explanationof all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to thehistorical fact. We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of theconversations in which Socrates compared and analysed the unwillinganswers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice wasmade by his work an infinitely more effective political term. It iscertain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptationof the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by someforgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort ofconscious thought. But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, andJustice, like a rock statue on whom successive generations of artistshave toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as anabstraction but as a direct revelation. It is true that this revelationmade the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame themseemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparisonand analysis. Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice thecommand which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacredperson of his herald. But Justice to her was a goddess, 'housemate ofthe nether gods'--and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applaudedthe Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turnedthe gods back into abstractions. 

The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to thefact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotionalforce without stiffening it into a personification; but that was becausethey saw it always in relation to the most personal of all gods. Amoswrote, 'I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savourof your assemblies.... Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs;for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll downas waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream. '[15] 'Judgment'and 'righteousness' are not goddesses, but the voice which Amos heardwas not the voice of an abstraction. 

[15] Amos, ch. V. , vv. 21, 23, 24 (R. V. M. ). 

Sometimes a new moral or political entity is created rather by immediateinsight than by the slow process of deliberate analysis. Some seer ofgenius perceives in a flash the essential likeness of things hithertokept apart in men's minds--the impulse which leads to anger with one'sbrother, and that which leads to murder, the charity of the widow's miteand of the rich man's gold, the intemperance of the debauchee and of theparty leader. But when the master dies the vision too often dies withhim. Plato's 'ideas' became the formulae of a system of magic, and thecommand of Jesus that one should give all that one had to the poorhanded over one-third of the land of Europe to be the untaxed propertyof wealthy ecclesiastics. 

It is this last relation between words and things which makes thecentral difficulty of thought about politics. The words are so rigid, soeasily personified, so associated with affection and prejudice; thethings symbolised by the words are so unstable. The moralist or theteacher deals, as a Greek would say, for the most part, with 'natural, 'the politician always with 'conventional' species. If one forgets themeaning of motherhood or childhood, Nature has yet made for usunmistakable mothers and children who reappear, true to type, in eachgeneration. The chemist can make sure whether he is using a word inprecisely the same sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work inhis laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always changing, mayindeed disappear and may require hundreds of years to restore. Aristotledefined the word 'polity' to mean a state where 'the citizens as a bodygovern in accordance with the general good. '[16] As he wrote, self-government in those States from which he abstracted the idea wasalready withering beneath the power of Macedonia. Soon there were nosuch States at all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle'sconception, the name which he defined is borne by the 'police' ofOdessa. It is no mere accident of philology that makes 'Justices'Justice' a paradox. From the time that the Roman jurisconsults resumedthe work of the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and answerbuilt up the conception of 'natural justice, it, like all otherpolitical conceptions, was exposed to the two dangers. On the one hand, since the original effort of abstraction was in its completenessincommunicable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed itsuse. On the other hand, the actions and institutions of mankind, fromwhich the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Evenalthough the manuscripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law andRoman institutions had both ceased to be. When the phrases of Justinianwere used by a Merovingian king or a Spanish Inquisitor not only was themeaning of the words changed, but the facts to which the words couldhave applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emotional power ofthe bare words remained. The civil law and canon law of the Middle Ageswere able to enforce all kinds of abuses because the tradition ofreverence still attached itself to the sound of 'Rome. ' For hundreds ofyears, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful thanhis neighbours by the fact that he was 'Roman Emperor, ' and was calledby the name of Caesar. 

[16] _Politics_, ch. Vii. , [Greek: hotan tò plêthos pròs tò koinònpoliteúê tai symphéron. ]

The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which influence thehistory of a political entity when once formed confront the statesmanwho is engaged in making a new one. The great men, Stein, Bismarck, Cavour, or Metternich, who throughout the nineteenth century worked atthe reconstruction of the Europe which Napoleon's conquests shattered, had to build up new States which men should respect and love, whosegovernments they should willingly obey, and for whose continuedexistence they should be prepared to die in battle. Races and languagesand religions were intermingled throughout central Europe, and thehistorical memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishoprics intowhich the map was divided were confused and unexciting. Nothing waseasier than to produce and distribute new flags and coins and nationalnames. But the emotional effect of such things depends upon associationswhich require time to produce, and which may have to contend againstassociations already existing. The boy in Lombardy or Galicia saw thesoldiers and the schoolmaster salute the Austrian flag, but the realthrill came when he heard his father or mother whisper the name of Italyor Poland. Perhaps, as in the case of Hanover, the old associations andthe new are for many years almost equally balanced. 

In such times men fall back from the immediate emotional associations ofthe national name and search for its meaning. They ask what _is_ theAustrian or the German Empire. As long as there was only one Pope menhanded on unexamined the old reverence from father to son. When forforty years there had been two Popes, at Rome and at Avignon, men beganto ask what constituted a Pope. And in such times some men go furtherstill. They may ask not only what is the meaning of the word AustrianEmpire, or Pope, but what in the nature of things is the ultimate reasonwhy the Austrian Empire or the Papacy should exist. 

The work therefore of nation-building must be carried forward on eachplane. The national name and flag and anthem and coinage all have theirentirely non-logical effect based on habitual association. Meanwhile thestatesmen strive to create as much meaning as possible for such symbols. If all the subjects of a State serve in one army and speak, orunderstand, one language, or even use a black-letter alphabet which hasbeen abandoned elsewhere, the national name will mean more to them. TheSaxon or the Savoyard will have a fuller answer to give himself when heasks 'What does it mean, that I am a German or a Frenchman?' A singlesuccessful war waged in common will create not only a common history, but a common inheritance of passionate feeling. 'Nationalists, 'meanwhile, may be striving, by songs and pictures and appeals to thepast, to revive and intensify the emotional associations connected witholder national areas--and behind all this will go on the deliberatephilosophical discussion of the advantages to be derived from large orsmall, racial or regional States, which will reach the statesman atsecond-hand and the citizen at third-hand. As a result, Italy, Belgium, and the German Empire succeed in establishing themselves as Statesresting upon a sufficient basis of patriotism, and Austria-Hungary may, when the time of stress comes, be found to have failed. 

But if the task of State building in Europe during the nineteenthcentury was difficult, still more difficult is the task before theEnglish statesmen of the twentieth century of creating an imperialpatriotism. We have not even a name, with any emotional associations, for the United Kingdom itself. No Englishman is stirred by the name'British, ' the name 'English' irritates all Scotchmen, and the Irish areirritated by both alike. Our national anthem is a peculiarly flat anduninspiring specimen of eighteenth-century opera libretto and operamusic. The little naked St. George on the gold coins, or the armorialpattern on the silver coins never inspired any one. The new coppercoinage bears, it is true, a graceful figure of Miss Hicks Beach. But wehave made it so small and ladylike that it has none of the emotionalforce of the glorious portrait heads of France or Switzerland. 

The only personification of his nation which the artisan of Oldham orMiddlesbrough can recognise is the picture of John Bull as a fat, brutal, early nineteenth-century Midland farmer. One of our nationalsymbols alone, the 'Union Jack, ' though it is as destitute of beauty asa patchwork quilt, is fairly satisfactory. But all its associations sofar are with naval warfare. 

When we go outside the United Kingdom we are in still worse case. 'TheUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together with its Coloniesand Dependencies' has no shorter or more inspiring name. Throughout theColonial Conference of 1907 statesmen and leader writers tried everyexpedient of periphrasis and allusion to avoid hurting any one'sfeelings even by using such a term as 'British Empire. ' To the _SydneyBulletin_, and to the caricaturists of Europe, the fact that anyterritory on the map of the world is coloured red still recalls nothingbut the little greedy eyes, huge mouth, and gorilla hands of 'JohnBull. '

If, again, the young Boer or Hindoo or ex-American Canadian asks himselfwhat is the meaning of membership ('citizenship, ' as applied tofive-sixths of the inhabitants of the Empire, would be misleading) ofthe Empire, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to give an answer. When he goes deeper and asks for what purpose the Empire exists, he isapt to be told that the inhabitants of Great Britain conquered half theworld in a fit of absence of mind and have not yet had time to think outan _ex post facto_ justification for so doing. The only product ofmemory or reflection that can stir in him the emotion of patriotism isthe statement that so far the tradition of the Empire has been toencourage and trust to political freedom. But political freedom, even inits noblest form, is a negative quality, and the word is apt to beardifferent meanings in Bengal and Rhodesia and Australia. 

States, however, constitute only one among many types of politicalentities. As soon as any body of men have been grouped under a commonpolitical name, that name may acquire emotional associations as well asan intellectually analysable meaning. For the convenience, for instance, of local government the suburbs of Birmingham are divided into separateboroughs. Partly because these boroughs occupy the site of ancientvillages, partly because football teams of Scotch professionals arenamed after them, partly because human emotions must have something toattach themselves to, they are said to be developing a fierce localpatriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as the Blues hatedthe Greens in the Byzantine theatre. In London, largely under theinfluence of the Birmingham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs werecreated in 1899, with names--at least in the case of the City ofWestminster--deliberately selected in order to revive half-forgottenemotional associations. However, in spite of Mr. Chesterton's prophecyin _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_, very few Londoners have learnt tofeel or think primarily as citizens of their boroughs. Town Halls arebuilt which they never see, coats of arms are invented which they wouldnot recognise; and their boroughs are mere electoral wards in which theyvote for a list of unknown names grouped under the general title adoptedby their political party. 

The party is, in fact, the most effective political entity in the modernnational State. It has come into existence with the appearance ofrepresentative government on a large scale; its development has beenunhampered by legal or constitutional traditions, and it represents themost vigorous attempt which has been made to adapt the form of ourpolitical institutions to the actual facts of human nature. In a modernState there may be ten million or more voters. Every one of them has anequal right to come forward as a candidate and to urge either ascandidate or agitator the particular views which he may hold on anypossible political question. But to each citizen, living as he does inthe infinite stream of things, only a few of his ten millionfellow-citizens could exist as separate objects of political thought orfeeling, even if each one of them held only one opinion on one subjectwithout change during his life. Something is required simpler and morepermanent, something which can be loved and trusted, and which can berecognised at successive elections as being the same thing that wasloved and trusted before; and a party is such a thing. 

The origin of any particular party may be due to a deliberateintellectual process. It may be formed, as Burke said, by 'a body of menunited for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interestupon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. '[17] Butwhen a party has once come into existence its fortunes depend upon factsof human nature of which deliberate thought is only one. It is primarilya name, which, like other names, calls up when it is heard or seen an'image' that shades imperceptibly into the voluntary realisation of itsmeaning. As in other cases, emotional reactions can be set up by thename and its automatic mental associations. It is the business of theparty managers to secure that these automatic associations shall be asclear as possible, shall be shared by as large a number as possible, andshall call up as many and as strong emotions as possible. For thispurpose nothing is more generally useful than the party colour. Ourdistant ancestors must have been able to recognise colour before theyrecognised language, and the simple and stronger emotions more easilyattach themselves to a colour than to a word. The poor boy who died theother day with the ribbon of the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club onhis pillow loved the colour itself with a direct and intimate affection. 

[17] _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_ (Macmillan, 1902), p. 81. 

A party tune is equally automatic in its action, and, in the case ofpeople with a musical 'ear, ' even more effective than a party colour asan object of emotion. As long as the Marseillaise, which is now thenational tune of France, was the party tune of the revolution itsinfluence was enormous. Even now, outside of France, it is a veryvaluable party asset. It was a wise suggestion which an experiencedpolitical organiser made in the _Westminster Gazette_ at the time ofGladstone's death, that part of the money collected in his honour shouldbe spent in paying for the composition of the best possible marchingtune, which should be identified for all time with the Liberal Party. [18]One of the few mistakes made by the very able men who organised Mr. Chamberlain's Tariff Reform Campaign was their failure to secure even atolerably good tune. 

[18] _Westminster Gazette_, June 11, 1898. 

Only less automatic than those of colour or tune come the emotionalassociations called up by the first and simplest meaning of the word orwords used for the party name. A Greek father called his baby 'VeryGlorious' or 'Good in Counsel, ' and the makers of parties in the sameway choose names whose primary meanings possess established emotionalassociations. From the beginning of the existence and activity of aparty new associations are, however, being created which tend to takethe place, in association, of the original meaning of the name. No onein America when he uses the terms Republican or Democrat thinks of theirdictionary meanings. Any one, indeed, who did so would have acquired amental habit as useless and as annoying as the habit of reading Greekhistory with a perpetual recognition of the dictionary meanings of nameslike Aristobulus and Theocritus. Long and precise names which makedefinite assertions as to party policy are therefore soon shortened intomeaningless syllables with new associations derived from the actualhistory of the party. The Constitutional Democrats in Russia becomeCadets, and the Independent Labour Party becomes the I. L. P. On the otherhand, the less conscious emotional associations which are automaticallyexcited by less precise political names may last much longer. The GermanNational Liberals were valuable allies for Bismarck during a wholegeneration because their name vaguely suggested a combination ofpatriotism and freedom. When the mine-owners in the Transvaal decidedsome years ago to form a political party they chose, probably afterconsiderable discussion, the name of 'Progressive. ' It was an excellentchoice. In South Africa the original associations of the word wereapparently soon superseded, but elsewhere it long suggested that SirPercy Fitzpatrick and his party had the same sort of democraticsympathies as Mr. M'Kinnon Wood and his followers on the London CountyCouncil. No one speaking to an audience whose critical and logicalfaculties were fully aroused would indeed contend that because a certainbody of people had chosen to call themselves Progressives, therefore avote against them was necessarily a vote against progress. But in thedim and shadowy region of emotional association a good name, if itsassociations are sufficiently subconscious, has a real political value. 

Conversely, the opponents of a party attempt to label it with a namethat will excite feelings of opposition. The old party terms of Whig andTory are striking instances of such names given by opponents andlasting perhaps half a century before they lost their original abusiveassociations. More modern attempts have been less successful, becausethey have been more precise. 'Jingo' had some of the vaguesuggestiveness of an effectively bad name, but 'Separatist, ' 'LittleEnglander, ' 'Food Taxer, ' remain as assertions to be consciouslyaccepted or rejected. 

The whole relation between party entities and political impulse canperhaps be best illustrated from the art of advertisement. Inadvertisement the intellectual process can be watched apart from itsethical implications, and advertisement and party politics are becomingmore and more closely assimilated in method. The political poster isplaced side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on thehoardings, it is drawn by the same artist and follows the same empiricalrules of art. Let us suppose therefore that a financier thinks thatthere is an opening for a large advertising campaign in connection, say, with the tea trade. The actual tea-leaves in the world are as varied andunstable as the actual political opinions of mankind. Every leaf inevery tea-garden is different from every other leaf, and a week of dampweather may change the whole stock in any warehouse. What thereforeshould the advertiser do to create a commercial 'entity, ' a 'tea' whichmen can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he would have made anumber of optimistic and detailed statements with regard to hisopportunities and methods of trade. He would have printed in thenewspapers a statement that 'William Jones, assisted by a staff ofexperienced buyers, will attend the tea-sales of the East India Company, and will lay in parcels from the best Chinese Gardens, which he willretail to his customers at a profit of not more than five per centum. 'This, however, is an open appeal to the critical intellect, and by thecritical intellect it would now be judged. We should not consider Mr. Jones to be an unbiassed witness as to the excellence of his choice, orthink that he would have sufficient motive to adhere to his pledge abouthis rate of profit if he thought he could get more. 

Nowadays, therefore, such an advertiser would practice on our automaticand subconscious associations. He would choose some term, say'Parramatta Tea, ' which would produce in most men a vague suggestion ofthe tropical East, combined with the subconscious memory of a geographylesson on Australia. He would then proceed to create in connection withthe word an automatic picture-image having previous emotionalassociations of its own. By the time that a hundred thousand pounds hadbeen cleverly spent, no one in England would be able to see the word'Parramatta' on a parcel without a vague impulse to buy, founded on aday-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the British fleet, orof a pretty young English matron, or of any other subject that theadvertiser had chosen for its association with the emotions of trust oraffection. When music plays a larger part in English public education itmay be possible to use it effectively for advertisement, and a'Parramatta Motif' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, inconnection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would besqueaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop. 

This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid to clearness ofthought, that up to this point no Parramatta Tea exists, and no one haseven settled what sort of tea shall be provided under that name. Parramatta tea is still a commercial entity pure and simple. It maylater on be decided to sell very poor tea at a large profit until theoriginal associations of the name have been gradually superseded by theassociation of disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment byselling different teas under that name in different places, and to pushthe sale of the flavour which 'takes on. ' But there are other attractivenames of teas on the hoardings, with associations of babies, andbull-dogs, and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop apermanent trade in competition with these it will probably be foundwisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform quality, and with a distinctiveflavour which may act as its 'meaning. ' The great difficulty will thencome when there is a change of public taste, and when the sales falloff because the chosen flavour no longer pleases. The directors maythink it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminishing numberof customers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, takingthe risk that the number of housewives who say, 'This is not the realParramatta Tea, ' may be balanced by the number of those who say, 'Parramatta Tea has improved. ' If people will not buy the old flavour atall, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the ParramattaTea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has madean unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles. 

All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they areto the advertiser. The party candidate is, at his first appearance, tomost of his constituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal orConservative upon it. That name has associations of colour and music, oftraditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, existindependently of the party policy. Unless he bears the partylabel--unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate--notonly will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he willfind it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangibleentity to the electors at all. A proportion of the electors, varyinggreatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the'regular' nominee of their party without reference to his programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, hemust also present a programme which can be identified with the partypolicy. But, in any case, as long as he is a party candidate, he mustremember that it is in that character that he speaks and acts. The partyprepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make itpossible for them to think and feel with him. When he speaks there isbetween him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile thanhis own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard inthe vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the partwith sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in themask of another party. 

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation whichthey control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotionsof the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. Thisdoes not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals theycan indeed only preserve their political life by being in constantreadiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence oftheir party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter theTory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that itmight not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit andassociation, as that entity for which men had voted and worked fouryears before. In either case Peel was doing something other and moreserious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question ofthe moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocatingcorn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as apolitician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost. 

If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on theearth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings atonce, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, whatthat Socialism is which influences so many lives? He might answerhimself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'amovement towards greater social equality, depending for its force uponthree main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and thebelief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that socialarrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberatecontrivance. ' He would see men trying to forward this movement byproposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collectiveadministration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfullyadapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end beabandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them orbecause when tried they failed. But he would also see that thisdefinition of a many-sided and ever-varying movement drawn byabstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is nota description of 'Socialism' as it exists for the greater number of itssupporters. The need of something which one may love and for which onemay work has created for thousands of working men a personified'Socialism, ' a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be thehope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need ofsome engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith andcertainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, buta final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting fromMr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimlyeducated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuinehumility in his eyes, 'How strange it is that this glorious truth hasbeen hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shownto me. '

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech andwriting. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of itspredecessors--Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism--and maysurvive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone othertransformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand, remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coinsand public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments anddisillusionments has succeeded in establishing itself as a government. 

But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its useby individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it asa party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive, will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise themovement will have no political existence, yet its use creates aconstant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who appliesthe name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different fromcommon use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a falseimpression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yetthere are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keepingwide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist'Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term'Catholic Church' to mean a society which has gone through variousintellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality uponthe existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. Hetherefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on theother hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchangingrevelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he 'believes' in theCatholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actualoccurrence of most of the facts which constitute the originalrevelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing theirname for his own fraudulent purposes. They can no more understand himthan can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understandBernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the otherhand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common useof the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion ofthought. 

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expressionis, so to speak, a party--a political entity--in himself. He may fashiona permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'TheGrand Old Man. ' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learnthe main condition of their task, the fact that if an individualstatesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the presentpublic at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence tounchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent. The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towardspolitics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to beclearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for along time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark. 

'Change of opinion, ' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whosejudgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil tothe country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in acourse which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. Butit is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged andput upon its trial. '[19] Most statesmen avoid this choice between theloss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss ofcharacter resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privatelyabandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their ownconclusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, inthe public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except thosewhich are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported wordremains, and becomes part of that entity outside himself which thestateman is always building or destroying or transforming. 

[19] _Gleanings_, vol. Vii. P. 100, quoted in Morley's _Life_, vol. I. P. 211. 

The same conditions affect other political entities besides parties andstatesmen. If a newspaper is to live as a political force it mustimpress itself on men's minds as holding day by day to a consistentview. The writers, not only from editorial discipline, but from theinstinctive desire to be understood, write in the character of theirpaper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wishing toadvocate different opinions, it must either frankly proclaim itself as anew thing or must make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative stepsthat the new attitude is a necessary development of the old. It istherefore rightly felt that a capitalist who buys a paper for the sakeof using its old influence to strengthen a new movement is doingsomething to be judged by other moral standards than those which applyto the purchase of so much printing-machinery and paper. He may bedestroying something which has been a stable and intelligible entity forthousands of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible world, and which has collected round it affection and trust as real as was everinspired by an orator or a monarch. 

CHAPTER III

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

The assumption--which is so closely interwoven with our habits ofpolitical and economic thought--that men always act on a reasonedopinion as to their interests, may be divided into two separateassumptions: first, that men always act on some kind of inference as tothe best means of reaching a preconceived end, and secondly, that allinferences are of the same kind, and are produced by a uniform processof 'reasoning. '

In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first assumption, andattempted to show that it is important for a politician to realise thatmen do not always act on inferences as to means and ends. I argued thatmen often act in politics under the immediate stimulus of affection andinstinct, and that affection and interest may be directed towardspolitical entities which are very different from those facts in theworld around us which we can discover by deliberate observation andanalysis. 

In this chapter I propose to consider the second assumption, and toinquire how far it is true that men, when they do form inferences as tothe result of their political actions, always form them by a process ofreasoning. 

In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary difficulty that it is veryhard to arrive at a clear definition of reasoning. Any one who watchesthe working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy totrace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seemso obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology. The mindof man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so thatemotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference calledreasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a singlemental experience. 

This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when weare sitting in passive contemplation we would often find it hard to saywhether our successive states of consciousness are best described asemotions or inferences. And when our thought clearly belongs to the typeof inference it is often hard to say whether its steps are controlled byso definite a purpose of discovering truth that we are entitled to callit reasoning. 

Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do notalways draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind. If we forget a namewe say the alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to seeif the name we want will be suggested to us. When we receive bad news westrive to realise it by allowing successive mental associations to ariseof themselves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. Apoet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear inhis mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in orderto attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in_The Tempest_ the connection between the successive images--the baselessfabric of this vision--the cloud-capped towers--the gorgeouspalaces--the solemn temples--the great globe itself--is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, andsubordinated to poetic intention. 

Most of the actual inferences which we draw during any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of thought than do some of the higherforms of non-inferential association. Many of our inferences, like thequasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take placewhen we are making no conscious effort at all. In such a purelyinstinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, theimpulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply twonames for a single automatic and unconscious process. We can speak ofinstinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, forinstance, by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to thedistance and solidity of objects from the movements of our eye-musclesin focussing, and from the difference between the images on our tworetinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at theseinferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in thestereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two convergingsheets of looking-glass beneath his table, we can only say that thephotograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see right under thetable. 

The whole process of inference, rational or non-rational, is indeedbuilt up from the primary fact that one mental state may call upanother, either because the two have been associated together in thehistory of the individual, or because a connection between the two hasproved useful in the history of the race. If a man and his dog strolltogether down the street they turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon thebicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process ofinference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are forthe most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen topause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It isonly when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposesof his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rationalthought where the dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and ismore or less conscious of his own logical methods. 

But the weakness of inference by automatic association as an instrumentof thought consists in the fact that either of a pair of associatedideas may call up the other without reference to their logicalconnection. The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause callsup the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is wonderfully rapidand fertile in drawing inferences, but he hunts the scent backward aseasily as he does forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes thathe has committed a murder. The sight of an empty plate convinces himthat he has had dinner. If left to himself he will probably go throughroutine actions well enough. But any one who understands his conditioncan make him act absurdly. 

In the same way when we dream we draw absurd inferences by association. The feeling of discomfort due to slight indigestion produces a beliefthat we are about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid ournotes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in a night-shirt. Evenwhen men are awake, those parts of their mind to which for the momentthey are not giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfoundedinferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the attention of hisaudience concentrated on the observation of what he is doing with hisright hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movementsof his left hand. People in a state of strong religious emotionsometimes become conscious of a throbbing sound in their ears, due tothe increased force of their circulation. An organist, by opening thethirty-two foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can therebyinduce in the congregation a vague and half-conscious belief that theyare experiencing religious emotion. 

The political importance of all this consists in the fact that most ofthe political opinions of most men are the result, not of reasoningtested by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious inferencefixed by habit. It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks ofthought that habit shows its power in politics. In our other activitieshabit is largely a matter of muscular adaptation, but the bodilymovements of politics occur so seldom that nothing like a habit can beset up by them. One may see a respectable voter, whose politicalopinions have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits of thirtyyears, fumbling over the act of marking and folding his ballot paperlike a child with its first copybook. 

Some men even seem to reverence most those of their opinions whoseorigin has least to do with deliberate reasoning. When Mr. Barrie'sBowie Haggart said: 'I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of animmoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is myopeenion, '[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion whichmight have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the convictionabout them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the moresacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know howit was produced. 

[20] _Auld Licht Idylls_, p. 220. 

Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe guide in the affairsof our daily life. The material world does not often go out of its wayto deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of manyhundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are morenumerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious. But even in ourpersonal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often rememberthe association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause whichcreated that association. We discover in our mind a vague impressionthat Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had anyreason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson hada cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness. When the connection isremembered in a telling phrase, and when its origin has never beenconsciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really vivid belieffor which we could, if cross-examined, give no account whatever. When, for instance, we have heard an early-Victorian Bishop called 'Soapy Sam'half a dozen times we get a firm conviction of his character withoutfurther evidence. 

Under ordinary circumstances not much harm is done by this fact;because a name would not be likely to 'catch on' unless a good manypeople really thought it appropriate, and unless it 'caught on' weshould not be likely to hear it more than once or twice. But inpolitics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while for somepeople to take a great deal of trouble in order to produce such aneffect without waiting for the idea to enforce itself by merelyaccidental repetition. I have already said that political parties try togive each other bad names by an organised system of mental suggestion. If the word 'Wastrel, ' for instance, appears on the contents bills ofthe _Daily Mail_ one morning as a name for the Progressives during aCounty Council election, a passenger riding on an omnibus from Putney tothe Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred times, and willhave formed a fairly stable mental association by the end of thejourney. If he reflected, he would know that only one person has oncedecided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on himis the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of eachother. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which wereoriginally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, havedeveloped in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like theadvertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychologicallaboratory for the unconscious production of permanent associations. 'Another German Insult, ' 'Keir Hardie's Crime, ' 'Balfour Backs Down, 'are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as ready-made opinions. 

In all this again the same rule holds as in the production of impulse. Things that are nearer sense, nearer to our more ancient evolutionarypast, produce a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse. When a new candidate on his first appearance smiles at his constituentsexactly as if he were an old friend, not only does he appeal, as I saidin an earlier chapter, to an ancient and immediate instinct of humanaffection, but he produces at the same time a shadowy belief that he isan old friend; and his agent may even imply this, provided that he saysnothing definite enough to arouse critical and rational attention. Bythe end of the meeting one can safely go as far as to call for threecheers for 'good old Jones. '[21]

[21] Three-quarters of the art of the trained salesman depends upon hisempirical knowledge of this group of psychological facts. A small girlof my acquaintance, explaining why she had brought back from her firstindependent shopping expedition a photograph frame which she herselffound to be distressing, said: 'The shopman seemed to suppose I hadchosen it, and so I paid for it and came away. ' But her explanation wasthe result of memory and reflection. At the moment, in a shadowy waywhich was sufficient for the shopman, she supposed that she had chosenit. 

Mr. G. K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article onAmerican elections a sentence which said: 'A little sound common-senseoften goes further with an audience of American working men than muchhigh-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at thelast Presidential election. '[22] The 'sound common-sense' consisted, not, as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presentation of thehammering as a logical argument, but in the orator's knowledge of theway in which force is given to non-logical inference and his willingnessto use that knowledge. 

[22] _Heretics_, p. 122. 

When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass ofour mental experience, and may then undergo developments andtransformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little todo. I have been told that when an English agitation against theimportation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important personage said that 'there was not a vote in it. ' But theagitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that theconditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind ofslavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics. Any one, however, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed thatthe pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of thevoters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type. 

This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards theend of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrownsuddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would havearoused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour. 

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on theposters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of theConservatives, with the Liberals who had used them. I had at the generalelection worked in a constituency in which many such posters weredisplayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A year later I stood forthe London County Council in the same constituency. An hour before theclose of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-dayfatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward committee-room, while a hoarse voice roared: 'Where's your bloody pigtail? We cut it offlast time: and now we'll put it round your bloody neck and strangleyou. '

In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared onthe London hoardings thousands of posters which were intended to createa belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personallivelihood by defrauding the ratepayers. If a statement had beenpublished to that effect it would have been an appeal to the criticalintellect, and could have been met by argument, or in the law courts. But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference. Theposter consisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent theProgressive Party, pointing a foreshortened finger and saying, withsufficient ambiguity to escape the law of libel: 'It's your money wewant. ' Its effectiveness depended on its exploitation of the fact thatmost men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by a series of rapidand unconscious inferences from the appearance of the man accused. Theperson represented was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fashionof his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his teeth, andthe redness of his nose, obviously a professional sharper. He was, Ibelieve, drawn by an American artist, and his face and clothes had avaguely American appearance, which, in the region of subconsciousassociation, further suggested to most onlookers the idea of TammanyHall. This poster was brilliantly successful, but, now that the electionis over, it, like the Chinese pictures, seems likely to continue acareer of irrational transference. One notices that one Progressiveevening paper uses a reduced copy of it whenever it wishes to imply thatthe Moderates are influenced by improper pecuniary motives. I myselffind that it tends to associate itself in my mind with the energeticpolitician who induced the railway companies and others to pay for it, and who, for all I know, may in his own personal appearance recall thebest traditions of the English gentleman. 

Writers on the 'psychology of the crowd' have pointed out the effect ofexcitement and numbers in substituting non-rational for rationalinference. Any cause, however, which prevents a man from giving fullattention to his mental processes may produce the phenomena ofnon-rational inference in an extreme degree. I have often watched insome small sub-committee the method by which either of the two men witha real genius for committee work whom I know could control hiscolleagues. The process was most successful towards the end of anafternoon, when the members were tired and somewhat dazed with theeffort of following a rapid talker through a mass of unfamiliar detail. If at that point the operator slightly quickened the flow of hisinformation, and slightly emphasised the assumption that he was beingthoroughly understood, he could put some at least of his colleagues intoa sort of waking trance, in which they would have cheerfully assented tothe proposition that the best means of securing, _e. G. , _ the permanenceof private schools was a large and immediate increase in the number ofpublic schools. 

It is sometimes argued that such non-rational inferences are merely theloose fringe of our political thinking, and that responsible decisionsin politics, whether they are right or wrong, are always the result ofconscious ratiocination. American political writers, for instance, ofthe traditional intellectualist type are sometimes faced with the factthat the delegates to national party conventions, when they selectcandidates and adopt programmes for Presidential elections, are not in acondition in which they are likely to examine the logical validity oftheir own mental processes. Such writers fall back on the reflectionthat the actual choice of President is decided not by excitedconventions, but by voters coming straight from the untroubled sanctuaryof the American home. 

President Garfield illustrated this point of view in an often-quotedpassage of his speech to the Republican Convention of 1880:--

'I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and itsgrandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it isnot the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heightsand depths are measured.... Not here, in this brilliant circle wherefifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of theRepublic to be decreed for the next four years ... But by four millionsof Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives andchildren about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home andcountry, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, andknowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation indays gone by. There God prepares the verdict that shall determine thewisdom of our work to-night. '[23]

[23] _Life of J. A. Garfield_, by R. H. Conwell, p. 328. 

But the divine oracle, whether in America or in England, turns out, toooften, only to be a tired householder, reading the headlines andpersonal paragraphs of his party newspaper, and half-consciously formingmental habits of mean suspicion or national arrogance. Sometimes, indeed, during an election, one feels that it is, after all, in bigmeetings, where big thoughts can be given with all their emotionalforce, that the deeper things of politics have the best chance ofrecognition. 

The voter as he reads his newspaper may adopt by suggestion, and makehabitual by repetition, not only political opinions but whole trains ofpolitical argument; and he does not necessarily feel the need ofcomparing them with other trains of argument already in his mind. Alawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles argue for the mostextreme trade-unionism in his own profession, while he thoroughly agreeswith a denunciation of trade-unionism addressed to him as a railwayshareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can sometimes be led by wayof 'parental rights' to cheer for denominational religious instruction, and by way of 'religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled politicalobserver that I know, speaking of an organised newspaper attack, said, 'As far as I can make out every argument used in attack and in defencehas its separate and independent effect. They hardly ever meet, even ifthey are brought to bear upon the same mind. ' From the purely tacticalpoint of view there is therefore much to be said for Lord Lyndhurst'smaxim, 'Never defend yourself before a popular assemblage, except withand by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which theassault gives them, will forget the previous charge. '[24]

[24] Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. I. P. 122. 

CHAPTER IV

THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING

But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinkingupon those forms of inference by immediate association which come soeasily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes. The wholeprogress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been madepossible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us tointerpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than wecould if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use ofour minds. 

These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent adifficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effectswith mechanical accuracy. 

When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for valid reasoning, they had, it is true, the needs of politics specially in their minds. After the prisoners in Plato's cave of illusion should be unbound bytrue philosophy it was to the service of the State that they were todevote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control ofpassion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet if Plato could visitus now, he would learn that while our glass-makers proceed by rigorousand confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like theglass-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims andpersonal skill. Why is it, he would ask us, that valid reasoning hasproved to be so much more difficult in politics than in the physicalsciences?

Our first answer might be found in the character of the material withwhich political reasoning has to deal. The universe which presentsitself to our reason is the same as that which presents itself to ourfeelings and impulses--an unending stream of sensations and memories, every one of which is different from every other, and before which, unless we can select and recognise and simplify, we must stand helplessand unable either to act or think. Man has therefore to create entitiesthat shall be the material of his reasoning, just as he creates entitiesto be the objects of his emotions and the stimulus of his instinctiveinferences. 

Exact reasoning requires exact comparison, and in the desert or theforest there were few things which our ancestors could compare exactly. The heavenly bodies seem, indeed, to have been the first objects ofconsciously exact reasoning, because they were so distant that nothingcould be known of them except position and movement, and their positionand movement could be exactly compared from night to night. 

In the same way the foundation of the terrestrial sciences came from twodiscoveries, first, that it was possible to abstract single qualities, such as position and movement, in all things however unlike, from theother qualities of those things and to compare them exactly; andsecondly, that it was possible artificially to create actualuniformities for the purpose of comparison, to make, that is to say, outof unlike things, things so like that valid inferences could be drawn asto their behaviour under like circumstances. Geometry, for instance, came into the service of man when it was consciously realised that allunits of land and water were exactly alike in so far as they wereextended surfaces. Metallurgy, on the other hand, only became a sciencewhen men could actually take two pieces of copper ore, unlike in shapeand appearance and chemical constitution, and extract from them twopieces of copper so nearly alike that they would give the same resultswhen treated in the same way. 

This second power over his material the student of politics can neverpossess. He can never create an artificial uniformity in man. He cannot, after twenty generations of education or breeding render even two humanbeings sufficiently like each other for him to prophesy with anyapproach to certainty that they will behave alike under likecircumstances. 

How far has he the first power? How far can he abstract from the factsof man's state qualities in respect of which men are sufficientlycomparable to allow of valid political reasoning?

On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the Bastille John Adams, then American Ambassador to England, and afterwards President of theUnited States, wrote to a friend describing the 'fermentation upon thesubject of government' throughout Europe. 'Is Government a science ornot?' he describes men as asking. 'Are there any principles on which itis founded? What are its ends? If indeed there is no rule, no standard, all must be accident and chance. If there is a standard, what is it?'[25]

[25] _Memoir of T. Brand Hollis_, by J. Disney, p. 32. 

Again and again in the history of political thought men have believedthemselves to have found this 'standard, ' this fact about man whichshould bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all thingscan be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can bemeasured bears to geometry. 

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in thefinal causes of man's existence. Every man differed, it is true, fromevery other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type ofperfect manhood which, though few men approached, and none attained it, all were capable of conceiving. May not, asked Plato, this type be thepattern--the 'idea'--of man formed by God and laid up 'in a heavenlyplace'? If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politicswhen by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to knowthat pattern. Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sensewould be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutablepurposes of God. 

Or the relation of man to God's purpose was thought of not as thatbetween the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of alegislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance towhich the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on themoral facts of the world, learn God's law. That law confers on uscertain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which avalid political science can be deduced. We know our rights with the samecertainty that we know his law. 

'Men, ' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmanship of one omnipotent andinfinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sentinto the world by his order and about his business; they are hisproperty whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not oneanother's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharingall in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any suchsubordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as ifwe were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creaturesare for ours. '[26]

[26] Locke, _Second Treatise of Government_, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191. 

When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty intheir argument against George the Third they too found it in the factthat men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. '

Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumedsocial contract. Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephantupon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, wasapt to stand upon nothing at all. 

At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, sweptaside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from naturalright. 'What sort of a thing, ' he asked, 'is a natural right, and wheredoes the maker live, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are mostrife?'[27]

[27] _Escheat vice Taxation_, Bentham's Works, vol. Ii. P. 598. 

Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact thatall men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men weremeasurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore bemade experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics orchemistry. 'The present work, ' wrote Bentham, 'as well as any other workof mine that has been or will be published on the subject oflegislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt toextend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch tothe moral. '[28]

[28] MS. In University College, London, quoted by Halévy, _La Jeunessede Bentham_, pp. 289-290. 

Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' constituted in many ways animportant advance upon 'natural right. ' It was in the first placefounded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel bothpleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable. Onecould, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this yearfrom an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those whosuffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures weremore intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in agiven number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain. Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to thepolitical thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying ofall philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation ofappealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the readerto accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself. '[29]

[29] Bentham's _Works_, vol. I. P. 8, quoted in Lytton's _England andthe English_ (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf. Preface. 

A 'Benthamite, ' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament likeGrote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organisingpolitician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about'rights of property, ' 'mischievous agitators, ' 'spirit of theConstitution, ' 'insults to the flag, ' and so on, by examiningstatistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hoursof work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes andraces who inhabited the British Empire. 

But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible. Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are notthe only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives asinstinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racialidiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; andthe search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again, among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples ofthe complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success. 

In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim atfinding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature aspossible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable inpolitical reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for apolitical science, we must adopt the method of the biologist, who triesto discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in agroup of related beings, rather than that of the physicist, whoconstructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single qualitycommon to the whole material world. 

The facts when collected must, because they are many, be arranged. Ibelieve that it would be found convenient by the political student toarrange them under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the humantype; quantitative facts as to inherited variations from that typeobserved either in individuals or groups of individuals; and facts, bothquantitative and descriptive, as to the environment into which men areborn, and the observed effect of that environment upon their politicalactions and impulses. 

A medical student already attempts to master as many as possible ofthose facts about the human type that are relevant to his science. Thedescriptive facts, for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which hehas to learn before he can hope to pass his examinations must numbermany thousands. If he is to remember them so that he can use them inpractice, they must be carefully arranged in associated groups. He mayfind, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical facts about thehuman eye most easily and correctly by associating them with theirevolutionary history, or the facts about the bones of the hand byassociating them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray photograph. 

The quantitative facts as to variations from the anatomical human typeare collected for him in statistical form, and he makes an attempt toacquire the main facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takesthe Diploma of Public Health. 

The student teacher, too, during his period of training acquires aseries of facts about the human type, though in his case they are as yetfar less numerous, less accurate and less conveniently arranged thanthose in the medical text-books. 

If the student of politics followed such an arrangement, he would atleast begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containingall those facts about the human type which have been shown by experienceto be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student's knowledgecould be most easily recalled when wanted. 

At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work byreading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in thecondition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates orGalen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts aboutthe human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association ofideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selectedfrom the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearlyon the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he isleft to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that theycannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also afew empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, afterhe has read a little of the history of institutions, his politicaleducation is complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefersold politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and youngdoctors who remember theirs. [30]

[30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, todiscuss the method of approaching political science with two youngOxford students. In each case I suggested that it would be well to reada little psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted histutor and had been told that psychology was 'useless' or 'nonsense. ' Onetutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have addedthe curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science norphilosophy. '

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve theconception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in aseparate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts ofexperience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are notpermitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on _Democracyand the Organisation of Political Parties_, containing the results offifteen years' close observation of the party system in America andEngland. The instances given in the book might have been used as thebasis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type whichare of importance to the politician--the nature of our impulses, thenecessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and themethods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past, and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But noindication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had alteredin the least degree the conception of human nature with which hestarted. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with'free reason, '[31] 'the general idea of liberty, '[32] 'the sentimentswhich inspired the men of 1848, '[33] and the book ends with a sketch of aproposed constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote forcandidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which allmention of party is rigorously excluded. '[34] One seems to be reading aseries of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by aloyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy. 

[31] _Passim_, e. G. , vol. Ii. P. 728. 

[32] _Ibid_. , p. 649. 

[33] _Ibid_. , p. 442. 

[34] _Ibid_. , p. 756. 

Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the ConstitutionalDemocratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas II. , and must have learntfor himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behindthem to contend on equal terms with the Russian autocracy they must be aparty, trusted and obeyed as a party, and not a casual collection offree individuals. Some day the history of the first Duma will bewritten, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski'sexperience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of thatgreat struggle. 

The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced byan introduction from Mr. James Bryce. This introduction shows that evenin the mind of the author of _The American Constitution_ the conceptionof human nature which he learnt at Oxford still dwells apart. 

'In the ideal democracy, ' says Mr. Bryce, 'every citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested. His sole wish is to discover the right side ineach contested issue, and to fix upon the best man among competingcandidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge of the constitutionof his country, enables him to judge wisely between the argumentssubmitted to him, while his own zeal is sufficient to carry him to thepolling booth. '[35]

[35] Ostrogorski, vol. I. P. Xliv. 

A few lines further on Mr. Bryce refers to 'the democratic ideal of theintelligent independence of the individual voter, an ideal far removedfrom the actualities of any State. '

What does Mr. Bryce mean by 'ideal democracy'? If it means anything itmeans the best form of democracy which is consistent with the facts ofhuman nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr. Bryce means by those words the kind of democracy which might be possibleif human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he wastaught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the passage is a goodinstance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, 'the ideal manrequires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but thisideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population. ' Nomodern treatise on pedagogy begins with the statement that 'the idealboy knows things without being taught them, and his sole wish is theadvancement of science, but no boys at all like this have ever existed. '

And what, in a world where causes have effects and effects causes, does'intelligent independence' mean?

Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of Political Economy atOxford, under-Secretary for the Colonies, and under-Secretary for India, wrote in 1861:

'To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue which will ever bedetermined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the morerefined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract politicalphilosophy. The sense of national honour; the pride of blood, thetenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire tospread our civilisation and our religion over the world; these areimpulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but thestatesman dares not.... '[36]

[36] Herman Merivale, _Colonisation_, 1861, 2nd edition. The book is are-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. Thepassage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675. 

What does 'abstract political philosophy' here mean? No medical writerwould speak of an 'abstract' anatomical science in which men have nolivers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet maydisregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not. 

Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 'abstract' politicalphilosophy that Mr. Bryce means by 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to aconception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certaineighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believedin, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercisesa kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe. 

The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human naturein which he is ceasing to believe as 'abstract' or 'ideal' may seem tobe of merely academic interest. But such half-beliefs produce immensepractical effects. Because Merivale saw that the political philosophywhich his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and becausehe had nothing to substitute for it, he frankly abandoned any attemptat valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the whitecolonies to the rest of the British Empire. He therefore decided ineffect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of'cutting the painter'; and, since he was the chief official in theColonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was rightor wrong, was not unimportant. 

Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of sucha half-belief from making that constructive contribution to generalpolitical science for which he is better equipped than any other man ofhis time. 'I am myself, ' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerablewere not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the bluesky he can. '[37] Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who, finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula, should speak of himself as nevertheless 'grimly resolved' to see thingsfrom the old and comfortable point of view!

[37] _Loc. Cit. _, p. Xliii. 

The next step in the course of political training which I am advocatingwould be the quantitative study of the inherited variations ofindividual men when compared with the 'normal' or 'average' man who hadso far served for the study of the type. 

How is the student to approach this part of the course? Every mandiffers quantitatively from every other man in respect of every oneof his qualities. The student obviously cannot carry in his mind oruse for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a singleinherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundredmillions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are inexistence. Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relationof thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race inwhich individuals are at every moment dying and being born. 

Mr. H. G. Wells faces this fact in that extremely stimulating essay on'Scepticism of the Instrument, ' which he has appended to his _ModernUtopia_. His answer is that the difficulty is 'of the very smallestimportance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relationto anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophyit matters profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, upcome two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chancesare they serve my rude physiological purpose. '[38]

[38] _A Modern Utopia_, p. 381. 

To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the individual is ofenormous importance, not only when he is dealing with 'philosophy andwide generalisations' but in the practical affairs of his dailyactivity. Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for 'two eggs' toput under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and thepolitician, who is responsible for actual results in an amazinglycomplicated world, has to deal with more delicate distinctions than thebreeder. A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals, or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic support fromnonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for 'two men. '

On this point, however, most writers on political science seem tosuggest that after they have described human nature as if all men werein all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readersof the inexactness of their description, they can do no more. Allknowledge of individual variations must be left to individualexperience. 

John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the MoralSciences at the end of his _System of Logic_ implies this, and seemsalso to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgmentsand forecasts made by students and professors of politics does notinvolve a large element of error. 

'Excepting, ' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists asto the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and thephysical circumstances on which these may be dependent, (considerationswhich are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind inthe average or _en masse_), I believe most competent judges will agreethat the general laws of the different constituent elements of humannature are even now sufficiently understood to render it possible for acompetent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerableapproach to certainty, the particular type of character which would beformed, in mankind generally, by any assumed set of circumstances. '[39]

[39] _System of Logic_, Book vi. Vol. Ii. (1875), p. 462. 

Few people nowadays would be found to share Mill's belief. It is justbecause we feel ourselves unable to deduce with any 'approach tocertainty' the effect of circumstances upon character, that we alldesire to obtain, if it is possible, a more exact idea of humanvariation than can be arrived at by thinking of mankind 'in the averageor _en masse_. '

Fortunately the mathematical students of biology, of whom Professor KarlPearson is the most distinguished leader, are already showing us thatfacts of inherited variation can be so arranged that we can rememberthem without having to get by heart millions of isolated instances. Professor Pearson and the other writers in the periodical _Biometrika_have measured innumerable beech leaves, snails' tongues, human skulls, etc. Etc. , and have recorded in each case the variations of any qualityin a related group of individuals by that which Professor Pearson callsan 'observation frequency polygon, ' but which I, in my own thinking, find that I call (from a vague memory of its shape) a 'cocked hat. '

Here is a tracing of such a figure, founded on the actual measurement of25, 878 recruits for the United States army. 

[Illustration:[Transcriber's Description:A line graph of number of recruits vs. Height. The horizontal axis isAC, and the line itself is ABC, which is roughly normal. ]]

The line _ABC_ records, by its distance at successive points from theline _AC_, the number of recruits reaching successive inches of height. It shows, e. G. (as indicated by the dotted lines) that the number ofrecruits between 5 ft. 11 in. And 6 ft. Was about 1500, and the numberof those between 5 ft. 7 in. And 5 ft. 8 in. About 4000. [40]

[40] This figure is adapted (by the kind permission of the publishers)from one given in Professor K. Pearson's _Chances of Death_, vol. I. P. 277. For the relation between such records of actual observation and thecurves resulting from mathematical calculation of known causes ofvariation, see _ibid. _, chap, viii. , the paper by the same author on'Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Evolution, ' in vol. 186 (A)of the _Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions_ (1896), and thechapters on evolution in his _Grammar of Science_, 2nd edition. 

Such figures, when they simply record the results of the fact that thelikeness of the offspring to the parent in evolution is constantlyinexact, are (like the records of other cases of 'chance' variation)fairly symmetrical, the greatest number of instances being found at themean, and the descending curves of those above and those below the meancorresponding pretty closely with each other. Boot manufacturers, as theresult of experience, construct in effect such a curve, making a largenumber of boots of the sizes which in length or breadth are near themean, and a symmetrically diminishing number of the sizes above andbelow it. 

In the next chapter I shall deal with the use in reasoning of suchcurves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter Ipoint out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly becauseour visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a blackline on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in ourminds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormouslybeyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolatedinstances; and secondly, that we can by imagining such curves form aroughly accurate idea of the character of the variations to be expectedas to any inherited quality among groups of individuals not yet born ornot yet measured. 

The third and last division under which knowledge of man can be arrangedfor the purposes of political study consists of the facts of man'senvironment, and of the effect of environment upon his character andactions. It is the extreme instability and uncertainty of this elementwhich constitutes the special difficulty of politics. The human type andthe quantitative distribution of its variations are for the politician, who deals with a few generations only, practically permanent. Man'senvironment changes with ever-increasing rapidity. The inherited natureof every human being varies indeed from that of every other, but therelative frequency of the most important variations can be forecastedfor each generation. The difference, on the other hand, between oneman's environment and that of other men can be arranged on no curve andremembered or forecasted by no expedient. Buckle, it is true, attemptedto explain the present and prophesy the future intellectual history ofmodern nations by the help of a few generalisations as to the effect ofthat small fraction of their environment which consisted of climate. ButBuckle failed, and no one has attacked the problem again with anythinglike his confidence. 

We can, of course, see that in the environment of any nation or class atany given time there are some facts which constitute for all its membersa common experience, and therefore a common influence. Climate is such afact, or the discovery of America, or the invention of printing, or therates of wages and prices. All nonconformists are influenced by theirmemory of certain facts of which very few churchmen are aware, and allIrishmen by facts which most Englishmen try to forget. The student ofpolitics must therefore read history, and particularly the history ofthose events and habits of thought in the immediate past which arelikely to influence the generation in which he will work. But he mustconstantly be on his guard against the expectation that his reading willgive him much power of accurate forecast. Where history shows him thatsuch and such an experiment has succeeded or failed he must alwaysattempt to ascertain how far success or failure was due to facts of thehuman type, which he may assume to have persisted into his own time, andhow far to facts of environment. When he can show that failure was dueto the ignoring of some fact of the type and can state definitely whatthat fact is, he will be able to attach a real meaning to the repeatedand unheeded maxims by which the elder members of any generation warnthe younger that their ideas are 'against human nature. ' But if it ispossible that the cause was one of mental environment, that is to say, ofhabit or tradition, or memory, he should be constantly on his guardagainst generalisations about national or racial 'character. '

One of the most fertile sources of error in modern political thinkingconsists, indeed, in the ascription to collective habit of thatcomparative permanence which only belongs to biological inheritance. Awhole science can be based upon easy generalisations about Celts andTeutons, or about East and West, and the facts from which thegeneralisations are drawn may all disappear in a generation. Nationalhabits used to change slowly in the past, because new methods of lifewere seldom invented and only gradually introduced, and because themeans of communicating ideas between man and man or nation and nationwere extremely imperfect; so that a true statement about a nationalhabit might, and probably would, remain true for centuries. But now aninvention which may produce profound changes in social or industriallife is as likely to be taken up with enthusiasm in some country on theother side of the globe as in the place of its origin. A statesman whohas anything important to say says it to an audience of five hundredmillions next morning, and great events like the Battle of the Sea ofJapan begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off within a fewhours of their happening. Enough has already occurred under these newconditions to show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon aperiod of revolution, and that English indifference to ideas or Frenchmilitary ambition are habits which, under a sufficiently extendedstimulus, nations can shake off as completely as can individual men. 

CHAPTER V

THE METHOD OF POLITICAL REASONING

The traditional method of political reasoning has inevitably shared thedefects of its subject-matter. In thinking about politics we seldompenetrate behind those simple entities which form themselves so easilyin our minds, or approach in earnest the infinite complexity of theactual world. Political abstractions, such as Justice, or Liberty, orthe State, stand in our minds as things having a real existence. Thenames of political species, 'governments, ' or 'rights, ' or 'Irishmen, 'suggest to us the idea of single 'type specimens'; and we tend, likemedieval naturalists, to assume that all the individual members of aspecies are in all respects identical with the type specimen and witheach other. 

In politics a true proposition in the form of 'All A is B' almostinvariably means that a number of individual persons or things possessthe quality B in degrees of variation as numerous as are the individualsthemselves. We tend, however, under the influence of our words and themental habits associated with them to think of A either as a singleindividual possessing the quality B, or as a number of individualsequally possessing that quality. As we read in the newspaper that 'theeducated Bengalis are disaffected' we either see, in the half-conscioussubstratum of visual images which accompanies our reading, a single Babuwith a disaffected expression or the vague suggestion of a long row ofidentical Babus all equally disaffected. 

These personifications and uniformities, in their turn, tempt us toemploy in our political thinking that method of _a priori_ deductionfrom large and untried generalisations against which natural sciencefrom the days of Bacon has always protested. No scientist now arguesthat the planets move in circles, because planets are perfect, and thecircle is a perfect figure, or that any newly discovered plant must be acure for some disease because nature has given healing properties to allplants. But 'logical' democrats still argue in America that, because allmen are equal, political offices ought to go by rotation, and 'logical'collectivists sometimes argue from the 'principle' that the State shouldown all the means of production to the conclusion that all railwaymanagers should be elected by universal suffrage. 

In natural science, again, the conception of the plurality andinteraction of causes has become part of our habitual mental furniture;but in politics both the book-learned student and the man in the streetmay be heard to talk as if each result had only one cause. If thequestion, for instance, of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is raised, anytwo politicians, whether they are tramps on the outskirts of a Hyde Parkcrowd or Heads of Colleges writing to the _Times_, are not unlikely toargue, one, that all nations are suspicious, and that therefore thealliance must certainly fail, and the other that all nations are guidedby their interests, and that therefore the alliance must certainlysucceed. The Landlord of the 'Rainbow' in _Silas Marner_ had listened tomany thousands of political discussions before he adopted his formula, 'The truth lies atween you: you're both right and both wrong, as Iallays say. '

In Economics the danger of treating abstract and uniform words as ifthey were equivalent to abstract and uniform things has now beenrecognised for the last half century. When this recognition began, itwas objected by the followers of the 'classical' Political Economy thatabstraction was a necessary condition of thought, and that all dangersarising from it would be avoided if we saw clearly what it was that wewere doing. Bagehot, who stood at the meeting-point of the old Economicsand the new, wrote about 1876:--

'Political Economy ... Is an abstract science, just as statics anddynamics are deductive sciences. And in consequence, it deals with anunreal and imaginary subject, ... Not with the entire real man as weknow him in fact, but with a simpler imaginary man.... '[41]

[41] _Economic Studies_ (Longmans, 1895), p. 97. 

He goes on to urge that the real and complex man can be depicted byprinting on our minds a succession of different imaginary simple men. 'The maxim of science, ' he says, 'is that of common-sense--simple casesfirst; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as littleas possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, addto it in succession the separate effects of each of the encumbering andinterfering agencies. '[42]

[42] _Ibid. _, p. 98. 

But this process of mental chromolithography, though it is sometimes agood way of learning a science, is not a way of using it; and Bagehotgives no indication how his complex picture of man, formed fromsuccessive layers of abstraction, is to be actually employed inforecasting economic results. 

When Jevons published his _Theory of Political Economy_ in 1871, it wasalready widely felt that a simple imaginary man, or even a compositepicture made up of a series of different simple imaginary men, althoughuseful in answering examination questions, was of very little use indrafting a Factory Act or arbitrating on a sliding scale of wages. Jevons therefore based his economic method upon the variety and not theuniformity of individual instances. He arranged the hours of labour ina working day, or the units of satisfaction from spending money, oncurves of increase and decrease, and employed mathematical methods toindicate the point where one curve, whether representing an imaginaryestimate or a record of ascertained facts, would cut the others to thebest advantage. 

Here was something which corresponded, however roughly, to the processby which practical people arrive at practical and responsible results. Arailway manager who wishes to discover the highest rate of charges whichhis traffic will bear is not interested if he is told that the rate whenfixed will have been due to the law that all men seek to obtain wealthwith as little effort as possible, modified in its working by men'sunwillingness to break an established business habit. He wants a methodwhich, instead of merely providing him with a verbal 'explanation' ofwhat has happened, will enable him to form a quantitative estimate ofwhat under given circumstances will happen. He can, however, and, Ibelieve, now often does, use the Jevonian method to work out definiteresults in half-pennies and tons from the intersection of plotted curvesrecording actual statistics of rates and traffic. 

Since Jevons's time the method which he initiated has been steadilyextended; economic and statistical processes have become more nearlyassimilated, and problems of fatigue or acquired skill, of familyaffection and personal thrift, of management by the _entrepreneur_ orthe paid official, have been stated and argued in quantitative form. AsProfessor Marshall said the other day, _qualitative_ reasoning ineconomics is passing away and _quantitative_ reasoning is beginning totake its place. [43]

[43] _Journal of Economics_, March 1907, pp. 7 and 8. 'What by chemicalanalogy may be called qualitative analysis has done the greater part ofits work.... Much less progress has indeed been made towards thequantitative determination of the relative strength of differenteconomic forces. That higher and more difficult task must wait upon theslow growth of thorough realistic statistics. '

How far is a similar change of method possible in the discussion not ofindustrial and financial processes but of the structure and working ofpolitical institutions?

It is of course easy to pick out political questions which can obviouslybe treated by quantitative methods. One may take, for instance, theproblem of the best size for a debating hall, to be used, say, by theFederal Deliberative Assembly of the British Empire--assuming that theshape is already settled. The main elements of the problem are that thehall should be large enough to accommodate with dignity a number ofmembers sufficient both for the representation of interests and thecarrying out of committee work, and not too large for each member tolisten without strain to a debate. The resultant size will represent acompromise among these elements, accommodating a number smaller thanwould be desirable if the need of representation and dignity alone wereto be considered, and larger than it would be if the convenience ofdebate alone were considered. 

A body of economists could agree to plot out or imagine a succession of'curves' representing the advantage to be obtained from each additionalunit of size in dignity, adequacy of representation, supply of membersfor committee work, healthiness, etc. , and the disadvantage of eachadditional unit of size as affecting convenience of debate, etc. Thecurves of dignity and adequacy might be the result of direct estimation. The curve of marginal convenience in audibility would be founded uponactual 'polygons of variation' recording measurements of the distance atwhich a sufficient number of individuals of the classes and agesexpected could hear and make themselves heard in a room of that shape. The economists might further, after discussion, agree on the relativeimportance of each element to the final decision, and might give effectto their agreement by the familiar statistical device of 'weighting. '

The answer would perhaps provide fourteen square feet on the floor in aroom twenty-six feet high for each of three hundred and seventeenmembers. There would, when the answer was settled, be a 'marginal' manin point of hearing (representing, perhaps, an average healthy man ofseventy-four), who would be unable or just able to hear the 'marginal'man in point of clearness of speech--who might represent (on a polygonspecially drawn up by the Oxford Professor of Biology) the least audiblebut two of the tutors at Balliol. The marginal point on the curve of thedecreasing utility of successive increments of members from the point ofview of committee work might show, perhaps, that such work must eitherbe reduced to a point far below that which is usual in nationalparliaments, or must be done very largely by persons not members of theassembly itself. The aesthetic curve of dignity might be cut at thepoint where the President of the Society of British Architects couldjust be induced not to write to the _Times_. 

Any discussion which took place on such lines, even although the curveswere mere forms of speech, would be real and practical. Instead of oneman reiterating that the Parliament Hall of a great empire ought torepresent the dignity of its task, and another man answering that adebating assembly which cannot debate is of no use, both would be forcedto ask 'How much dignity'? and 'How much debating convenience'? As itis, this particular question seems often to be settled by the architect, who is deeply concerned with aesthetic effect, and not at all concernedwith debating convenience. The reasons that he gives in his reports seemconvincing, because the other considerations are not in the minds ofthe Building Committee, who think of one element only of the problem ata time and make no attempt to co-ordinate all the elements. Otherwise itwould be impossible to explain the fact that the Debating Hall, forinstance, of the House of Representatives at Washington is no morefitted for debates carried on by human beings than would a spoon tenfeet broad be fitted for the eating of soup. The able leaders of theNational Congress movement in India made the same mistake in 1907, whenthey arranged, with their minds set only on the need of an impressivedisplay, that difficult and exciting questions of tactics should bediscussed by about fifteen hundred delegates in a huge tent, and in thepresence of a crowd of nearly ten thousand spectators. I am afraid thatit is not unlikely that the London County Council may also despise thequantitative method of reasoning on such questions, and may findthemselves in 1912 provided with a new hall admirably adapted toillustrate the dignity of London and the genius of their architect, butunfitted for any other purpose. 

Nor is the essence of the quantitative method changed when the answer isto be found, not in one, but in several 'unknown quantities. ' Take, forinstance, the question as to the best types of elementary school to beprovided in London. If it were assumed that only one type of school wasto be provided, the problem would be stated in the same form as that ofthe size of the Debating Hall. But it is possible in most Londondistricts to provide within easy walking distance of every child four orfive schools of different types, and the problem becomes that of sochoosing a limited number of types as to secure that the degree of'misfit' between child and curriculum shall be as small as possible. Ifwe treat the general aptitude (or 'cleverness') of the children asdiffering only by more or less, the problem becomes one of fitting thetypes of school to a fairly exactly ascertainable polygon ofintellectual variation. It might appear then that the best results wouldcome from the provision, say, of five types of schools providingrespectively for the 2 per cent, of greatest natural cleverness, thesucceeding 10 per cent. , the intermediate 76 per cent. , thecomparatively sub-normal 10 per cent. , and the 2 per cent, of 'mentallydeficient. ' That is to say the local authority would have to provide inthat proportion Secondary, Higher Grade, Ordinary, Sub-Normal, andMentally Deficient schools. 

A general improvement in nutrition and other home circumstances mighttend to 'steepen' the polygon of variation, i. E. To bring more childrennear the normal, or it might increase the number of children withexceptional inherited cleverness who were able to reveal that fact, andso 'flatten' it; and either case might make a change desirable in thebest proportion between the types of schools or even in the number ofthe types. 

It would be more difficult to induce a committee of politicians to agreeon the plotting of curves, representing the social advantage to beobtained by the successive increments of satisfaction in an urbanindustrial population of those needs which are indicated by the termsSocialism and Individualism. They could, however, be brought to admitthat the discovery of curves for that purpose is a matter of observationand inquiry, and that the best possible distribution of social dutiesbetween the individual and the state would cut both at some point orother. For many Socialists and Individualists the mere attempt to thinkin such a way of their problem would be an extremely valuable exercise. If a Socialist and an Individualist were required even to ask themselvesthe question, 'How much Socialism'? or 'How much Individualism'? a basisof real discussion would be arrived at--even in the impossible case thatone should answer, 'All Individualism and no Socialism, ' and theother, 'All Socialism and no Individualism. '

The fact, of course, that each step towards either Socialism orIndividualism changes the character of the other elements in theproblem, or the fact that an invention like printing, or representativegovernment, or Civil Service examinations, or the Utilitarianphilosophy, may make it possible to provide greatly increasedsatisfaction both to Socialist and Individualist desires, complicatesthe question, but does not alter its quantitative character. Theessential point is that in every case in which a political thinker isable to adopt what Professor Marshall calls the quantitative method ofreasoning, his vocabulary and method, instead of constantly suggesting afalse simplicity, warn him that every individual instance with which hedeals is different from any other, that any effect is a function of manyvariable causes, and, therefore, that no estimate of the result of anyact can be accurate unless all its conditions and their relativeimportance are taken into account. 

But how far are such quantitative methods possible when a statesman isdealing, neither with an obviously quantitative problem, like thebuilding of halls or schools, nor with an attempt to give quantitativemeaning to abstract terms like Socialism or Individualism, but with theenormous complexity of responsible legislation?

In approaching this question we shall be helped if we keep before us adescription of the way in which some one statesman has, in fact, thoughtof a great constitutional problem. 

Take, for instance, the indications which Mr. Morley gives of thethinking done by Gladstone on Home Rule during the autumn and winter of1885-86. Gladstone, we are told, had already, for many years past, pondered anxiously at intervals about Ireland, and now he describeshimself as 'thinking incessantly about the matter' (vol. Iii. P. 268), and 'preparing myself by study and reflection' (p. 273). 

He has first to consider the state of feeling in England and Ireland, and to calculate to what extent and under what influences it may beexpected to change. As to English feeling, 'what I expect, ' he says, 'isa healthy slow fermentation in many minds working towards the finalproduct' (p. 261). The Irish desire for self-government, on the otherhand, will not change, and must be taken, within the time-limit of hisproblem, as 'fixed' (p. 240). In both England and Ireland, however, hebelieves that 'mutual attachment' may grow (p. 292). 

Before making up his mind in favour of some kind of Home Rule, heexamines every thinkable alternative, especially the development ofIrish County Government, or a Federal arrangement in which all three ofthe united kingdoms would be concerned. Here and there he findssuggestions in the history of Austria-Hungary, of Norway and Sweden, orof the 'colonial type' of government. Nearly every day he reads Burke, and exclaims 'what a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America' (p. 280). He gets much help from 'a chapter on semi-sovereign assemblies inDicey's _Law of the Constitution_ (p. 280). He tries to see the questionfrom fresh points of view in intimate personal discussions, and byimagining what 'the civilised world' (p. 225) will think. As he getsnearer to his subject, he has definite statistical reports made for himby 'Welby and Hamilton on the figures' (p. 306), has 'stiff conclavesabout finance and land' (p. 298), and nearly comes to a final split withParnell on the question whether the Irish contribution to Imperialtaxation shall be a fifteenth or a twentieth. 

Time and persons are important factors in his calculation. If LordSalisbury will consent to introduce some measure of Irishself-government, the problem will be fundamentally altered, and the samewill happen if the general election produces a Liberal majorityindependent of both Irish and Conservatives; and Mr. Morley describes asunderlying all his calculations 'the irresistible attraction for him ofall the grand and eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government'(p. 260). 

It is not likely that Mr. Morley's narrative touches on more than afraction of the questions which must have been in Gladstone's mindduring these months of incessant thought. No mention is made, forinstance, of religion, or of the military position, or of the permanentpossibility of enforcing the proposed restrictions on self-government. But enough is given to show the complexity of political thought at thatstage when a statesman, still uncommitted, is considering what will bethe effect of a new political departure. 

What then was the logical process by which Gladstone's final decisionwas arrived at?

Did he for instance deal with a succession of simple problems or withone complex problem? It is, I think, clear that from time to timeisolated and comparatively simple trains of reasoning were followed up;but it is also clear that Gladstone's main effort of thought wasinvolved in the process of co-ordinating all the laboriously collectedcontents of his mind onto the whole problem. This is emphasised by aquotation in which Mr. Morley, who was closely associated withGladstone's intellectual toil during this period, indicates his ownrecollection. 

'Historians, ' he quotes from Professor Gardiner, 'coolly dissect a man'sthoughts as they please; and label them like specimens in a naturalist'scabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personalaggrandisement; such a thing for national objects, such a thing fromhigh religious motives. In real life we may be sure it was not so' (p. 277). 

And it is clear that in spite of the ease and delight with whichGladstone's mind moved among 'the eternal commonplaces of liberty andself-government, ' he is seeking throughout for a quantitative solution. 'Home Rule' is no simple entity for him. He realises that the number ofpossible schemes for Irish government is infinite, and he attempts tomake at every point in his own scheme a delicate adjustment betweenmany varying forces. 

A large part of this work of complex co-ordination was apparently in Mr. Gladstone's case unconscious. Throughout the chapters one has thefeeling--which any one who has had to make less important politicaldecisions can parallel from his own experience--that Gladstone waswaiting for indications of a solution to appear in his mind. He wasconscious of his effort, conscious also that his effort was beingdirected simultaneously towards many different considerations, butlargely unconscious of the actual process of inference, which went onperhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else, than when he was awake and attentive. A phrase of Mr. Morley's indicatesa feeling with which every politician is familiar. 'The reader, ' hesays, 'knows in what direction the main current of Mr. Gladstone'sthought must have been setting' (p. 236). 

That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than ofscience, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of consciousmethod. 

But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partialsubstitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired inyouth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as thehalf-conscious result of experience. Our problem therefore involves thefurther question, whether those forms of political thought whichcorrespond to the complexity of nature are teachable or not? At presentthey are not often taught. In every generation thousands of young menand women are attracted to politics because their intellects are keener, and their sympathies wider than those of their fellows. They becomefollowers of Liberalism or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or theRights of Men or Women. To them, at first, Liberalism and the Empire, Rights and Principles, are real and simple things. Or, like Shelley, they see in the whole human race an infinite repetition of uniformindividuals, the 'millions on millions' who 'wait, firm, rapid, andelate. '[44]

[44] Shelley, _Poetical Works_ (H. B. Forman), vol. Iv. P. 8. 

About all these things they argue by the old _a priori_ methods which wehave inherited with our political language. But after a time a sense ofunreality grows upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difficult worldforces itself into their minds. Like the old Chartists with whom I oncespent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been 'alltalk'--all words--and there are few among them, except those to whompolitics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until throughweariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from newknowledge. Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habitor party spirit for their political opinions and actions. Having ceasedto think of their unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of asimple type, they cease to think of them at all; and content themselveswith using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising theindividual existence of their casual neighbours. 

Wordsworth's _Prelude_ describes with pathetic clearness a mentalhistory, which must have been that of many thousands of men who couldnot write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces havebeen blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He tells us thatthe 'man' whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still atits dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely 'the composition of the brain. 'After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw 'the individualman ... The man whom we behold with our own eyes. '[45] But in that changefrom a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation ofthe individual, Wordsworth's power of estimating political forces orhelping in political progress was gone for ever. 

[45] _The Prelude_, Bk. XIII. , ll. 81-84. 

If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitativemethod must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and theassociations of that mental world into which the young politicianenters. Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. Everyyear larger and more exact collections of detailed political facts arebeing accumulated; and collections of detailed facts, if they are to beused at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively. Theintellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on bypermanent officials or Royal Commissions or Cabinet Ministers takesevery year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form. 

Compare for instance the methods of the present Commission on the PoorLaw with those of the celebrated and extraordinarily able Commissionwhich drew up the new Poor Law in 1833-34. The argument of the earlierCommissioners' Report runs on lines which it would be easy to put in _apriori_ syllogistic form. All men seek pleasure and avoid pain. Societyought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure tosocial conduct. This may be done by making every man's livelihood andthat of his children normally dependent upon his own exertions, byseparating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to thecommunity from those who can, and by presenting these last with thealternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction. This leads to 'aprinciple which we find universally admitted, even by those whosepractice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] onthe whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as thesituation of the independent labourer of the lowest class. '[46] The _apriori_ argument is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by thesub-commissioners or given in evidence before the Commission, indicatingthat labouring men will not exert themselves unless they are offered thealternative of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt ismade to estimate the proportion of the working population of Englandwhose character and conduct is represented by each instance. 

[46] _First Report of the Poor Law Commission_, 1834 (reprinted 1894), p. 187. 

This _a priori_ deduction, illustrated, but not proved by particularinstances, is throughout so clear and so easily apprehended by theordinary man that the revolutionary Bill of 1834, which affected allsorts of vested interests, passed the House of Commons by a majority offour to one and the House of Lords by a majority of six to one. 

The Poor Law Commission of 1905, on the other hand, though it containsmany members trained in the traditions of 1834, is being driven, by themere necessity of dealing with the mass of varied evidence before it, onto new lines. Instead of assuming half consciously that human energyis dependent solely on the working of the human will in the presence ofthe ideas of pleasure and pain, the Commissioners are forced to tabulateand consider innumerable quantitative observations relating to the verymany factors affecting the will of paupers and possible paupers. Theycannot, for instance, avoid the task of estimating the relativeindustrial effectiveness of health, which depends upon decentsurroundings; of hope, which may be made possible by State provision forold age; and of the imaginative range which is the result of education;and of comparing all these with the 'purely economic' motive created byideas of future pleasure and pain. 

The evidence before the Commission is, that is to say, collected not toillustrate general propositions otherwise established, but to providequantitative answers to quantitative questions; and instances are ineach case accumulated according to a well-known statistical rule untilthe repetition of results shows that further accumulation would beuseless. 

In 1834 it was enough, in dealing with the political machinery of thePoor Law, to argue that, since all men desire their own interest, theratepayers would elect guardians who would, up to the limit of theirknowledge, advance the interests of the whole community; provided thatelectoral areas were created in which all sectional interests wererepresented, and that voting power were given to each ratepayer inproportion to his interest. It did not then seem to matter much whetherthe areas chosen were new or old, or whether the body elected had otherduties or not. 

In 1908, on the other hand, it is felt to be necessary to seek for allthe causes which are likely to influence the mind of the ratepayer orcandidate during an election, and to estimate by such evidence as isavailable their relative importance. It has to be considered, forinstance, whether men vote best in areas where they keep up habits ofpolitical action in connection with parliamentary as well as municipalcontests; and whether an election involving other points besidespoor-law administration is more likely to create interest among theelectorate. If more than one election, again, is held in a district inany year it may be found by the record of the percentage of votes thatelectoral enthusiasm diminishes for each additional contest along a veryrapidly descending curve. 

The final decisions that will be taken either by the Commission or byParliament on questions of administrative policy and electoral machinerymust therefore involve the balancing of all these and many otherconsiderations by an essentially quantitative process. The line, that isto say, which ultimately cuts the curves indicated by the evidence willallow less weight either to anxiety for the future as a motive forexertion, or to personal health as increasing personal efficiency, thanwould be given to either if it were the sole factor to be considered. There will be more 'bureaucracy' than would be desirable if it were notfor the need of economising the energies of the elected representatives, and less bureaucracy than there would be if it were not desirable toretain popular sympathy and consent. Throughout the argument thepopulation of England will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill wouldhave said) 'on the average or _en masse_, '[47] but as consisting ofindividuals who can be arranged in 'polygons of variation' according totheir nervous and physical strength, their 'character' and the degree towhich ideas of the future are likely to affect their present conduct. 

[47] See p. 132. 

Meanwhile the public which will discuss the Report has changed since1834. Newspaper writers, in discussing the problem of destitution, tendnow to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the'poor, ' 'the working class, ' or 'the lower orders, ' but terms expressingquantitative estimates of individual variations, like 'the submergedtenth, ' or the 'unemployable'; while every newspaper reader is fairlyfamiliar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns whichrecord seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment amongTrade Unionists. 

One could give many other instances of this beginning of a tendency inpolitical thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms ofargument. But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating tointernational politics. 'Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simplequestion of quality. Austin had demonstrated that there must be asovereign everywhere, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of anautocracy or a republic, must be absolute. But the Congress which in1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of Africa from causing aseries of European wars as long as those caused by the partition ofAmerica, was compelled by the complexity of the problems before it toapproach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines. Since 1885therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented toexpress gradations of sovereignty: 'Effective occupation, ' 'Hinterland, ''Sphere of Influence'--to which the Algeçiras Conference has perhapsadded a lowest grade, 'Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration. ' It is alreadyas unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory ornot, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain percentage ofcarbon should be called iron or steel. 

Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of observed political factsome men escape the temptation to ignore individual differences. Iremember that the man who has perhaps done more than any one else inEngland to make a statistical basis for industrial legislation possible, once told me that he had been spending the whole day in classifyingunder a few heads thousands of 'railway accidents, ' every one of whichdiffered in its circumstances from any other; and that he felt like thebewildered porter in _Punch_, who had to arrange the subleties of natureaccording to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company. 'Cats, ' hequoted the porter as saying, 'is dogs, and guinea-pigs is dogs, but this'ere tortoise is a hinsect. '

But it must constantly be remembered that quantitative thinking doesnot necessarily or even generally mean thinking in terms of numericalstatistics. Number, which obliterates all distinction between the unitsnumbered, is not the only, nor always even the most exact means ofrepresenting quantitative facts. A picture, for instance, may besometimes nearer to quantitative truth, more easily remembered and moreuseful for purposes of argument and verification than a row of figures. The most exact quantitative political document that I ever saw was a setof photographs of all the women admitted into an inebriate home. Thephotographs demonstrated, more precisely than any record of approximatemeasurements could have done, the varying facts of physical and nervousstructure. It would have been easily possible for a committee of medicalmen to have arranged the photographs in a series of increasingabnormality, and to have indicated the photograph of the 'marginal'woman in whose case, after allowing for considerations of expense, andfor the desirability of encouraging individual responsibility, the Stateshould undertake temporary or permanent control. And the record was onewhich no one who had ever seen it could forget. 

The political thinker has indeed sometimes to imitate the cabinet-maker, who discards his most finely divided numerical rule for some kinds ofspecially delicate work, and trusts to his sense of touch for aquantitative estimation. The most exact estimation possible of apolitical problem may have been contrived when a group of men, differingin origin, education, and mental type, first establish an approximateagreement as to the probable results of a series of possible politicalalternatives involving, say, increasing or decreasing stateinterference, and then discover the point where their 'liking' turnsinto 'disliking. ' Man is the measure of man, and he may still be using aquantitative process even though he chooses in each case that method ofmeasurement which is least affected by the imperfection of his powers. But it is just in the cases where numerical calculation is impossible orunsuitable that the politician is likely to get most help by usingconsciously quantitative conceptions. 

An objection has been urged against the adoption of political reasoningeither implicitly or explicitly quantitative, that it involves thebalancing against each other of things essentially disparate. How isone, it is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national honourinvolved in the continuance of a war with that marginal unit of extrataxation which is supposed to be its exact equivalent? How is one tobalance the final sovereign spent on the endowment of science with thefinal sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased scientist, or on thefinal detail in a scheme of old age pensions? The obvious answer is thatstatesmen have to act, and that whoever acts does somehow balance allthe alternatives which are before him. The Chancellor of the Exchequerin his annual allocation of grants and remissions of taxation balancesno stranger things than does the private citizen, who, having a pound ortwo to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to a ChineseMission and providing a revolving hatch between his kitchen and hisdining-room. 

A more serious objection is that we ought not to allow ourselves tothink quantitatively in politics, that to do so fritters away the plainconsideration of principle. 'Logical principles' may be only aninadequate representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon themis, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist. 

In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductivethought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of PrinceBülow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He isreported to have said:--'Only the most doctrinaire Socialists stillregarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallibledogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did notbelieve in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a countrydid not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of itsConstitution or of its franchise. Herr Bebel had once said that on thewhole he preferred English conditions even to conditions in France. Butin England the franchise was not universal, equal, and direct. Could itbe said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular suffrage at all, wasgoverned worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard suchstrange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universalsuffrage?'[48]

[48] _Times_, March 27, 1908. 

But what Prince Bülow's speech showed, was that he was eitherdeliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he didnot agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception ofquantitative political thought. If the 'dogma' of universal suffragemeans the assertion that all men who have votes are thereby madeidentical with each other in all respects, and that universal suffrageis the one condition of good government, then, and then only, is hisattack on it valid. If, however, the desire for universal suffrage isbased on the belief that a wide extension of political power is one ofthe most important elements in the conditions of good government--racialaptitude, ministerial responsibility, and the like, being otherelements--then the speech is absolutely meaningless. 

But Prince Bülow was making a parliamentary speech, and inparliamentary oratory that change from qualitative to quantitativemethod which has so deeply affected the procedure of Conferences andCommissions has not yet made much progress. In a 'full-dress' debateeven those speeches which move us most often recall Mr. Gladstone, inwhose mind, as soon as he stood up to speak, his Eton and Oxfordtraining in words always contended with his experience of things, andwho never made it quite clear whether the 'grand and eternalcommonplaces of liberty and self-government' meant that certain elementsmust be of great and permanent importance in every problem of Church andState, or that an _a priori_ solution of all political problems could bededuced by all good men from absolute and authoritative laws. 

PART II

_Possibilities of Progress_

CHAPTER I

POLITICAL MORALITY

In the preceding chapters I have argued that the efficiency of politicalscience, its power, that is to say, of forecasting the results ofpolitical causes, is likely to increase. I based my argument on twofacts, firstly, that modern psychology offers us a conception of humannature much truer, though more complex, than that which is associatedwith the traditional English political philosophy; and secondly, that, under the influence and example of the natural sciences, politicalthinkers are already beginning to use in their discussions and inquiriesquantitative rather than merely qualitative words and methods, and areable therefore both to state their problems more fully and to answerthem with a greater approximation to accuracy. 

In this argument it was not necessary to ask how far such animprovement in the science of politics is likely to influence the actualcourse of political history. Whatever may be the best way of discoveringtruth will remain the best, whether the mass of mankind choose to followit or not. 

But politics are studied, as Aristotle said, 'for the sake of actionrather than of knowledge, '[49] and the student is bound, sooner or later, to ask himself what will be the effect of a change in his science uponthat political world in which he lives and works. 

[49] _Ethics_, Bk. I. Ch. Iii. (6). [Greek: epeidê tò telos [têspolitikês] estìn ou gnêsis allà praxis. ]

One can imagine, for instance, that a professor of politics in ColumbiaUniversity, who had just taken part as a 'Mugwump' in a well-fought butentirely unsuccessful campaign against Tammany Hall, might say: 'Thefiner and more accurate the processes of political science become, theless do they count in politics. Astronomers invent every year moredelicate methods of forecasting the movements of the stars, but cannotwith all their skill divert one star an inch from its course. So westudents of politics will find that our growing knowledge brings us onlya growing sense of helplessness. We may learn from our science toestimate exactly the forces exerted by the syndicated newspaper press, by the liquor saloons, or by the blind instincts of class andnationality and race; but how can we learn to control them? The factthat we think about these things in a new way will not win elections orprevent wars. '

I propose, therefore, in this second part of my book to discuss how farthe new tendencies which are beginning to transform the science ofpolitics are likely also to make themselves felt as a new politicalforce. I shall try to estimate the probable influence of thesetendencies, not only on the student or the trained politician, but onthe ordinary citizen whom political science reaches only at second orthird hand; and, with that intention, shall treat in successive chapterstheir relation to our ideals of political morality, to the form andworking of the representative and official machinery of the State, andto the possibilities of international and inter-racial understanding. 

This chapter deals from that point of view with their probable influenceon political morality. In using that term I do not mean to imply thatcertain acts are moral when done from political motives which would notbe moral if done from other motives, or _vice versâ_, but to emphasisethe fact that there are certain ethical questions which can only bestudied in close connection with political science. There are, ofcourse, points of conduct which are common to all occupations. We mustall try to be kind, and honest, and industrious, and we expect thegeneral teachers of morals to help us to do so. But every occupation hasalso its special problems, which must be stated by its own studentsbefore they can be dealt with by the moralist at all. 

In politics the most important of these special questions of conduct isconcerned with the relation between the process by which the politicianforms his own opinions and purposes, and that by which he influences theopinions and purposes of others. 

A hundred or even fifty years ago, those who worked for a democracy ofwhich they had had as yet no experience felt no misgivings on this pointThey looked on reasoning, not as a difficult and uncertain process, butas the necessary and automatic working of man's mind when faced byproblems affecting his interest. They assumed, therefore, that thecitizens under a democracy would necessarily be guided by reason in theuse of their votes, that those politicians would be most successful whomade their own conclusions and the grounds for them most clear toothers, and that good government would be secured if the voters hadsufficient opportunities of listening to free and sincere discussion. 

A candidate to-day who comes fresh from his books to the platform almostinevitably begins by making the same assumption. 

He prepares his speeches and writes his address with the conviction thaton his demonstration of the relation between political causes andeffects will depend the result of the election. Perhaps his first shockwill come from that maxim which every professional agent repeats overand over again to every candidate, 'Meetings are no good. ' Those whoattend meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already loyaland habitual supporters of his party. If his speeches are logicallyunanswerable the chief political importance of that fact is to be found, not in his power of convincing those who are already convinced, but inthe greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass which may be producedamong his supporters by their admiration of him as a speaker. 

Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his address and that ofhis opponent appeal to the constituents. He may, for instance, becomesuddenly aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself opens theenvelopes containing other candidates addresses in some election (ofPoor Law Guardians, for instance), in which he is not speciallyinterested, and of the fact that his attention is either not aroused atall, or is only aroused by words and phrases which recall some habitualtrain of thought. By the time that he has become sufficiently confidentor important to draw up a political programme for himself, heunderstands the limits within which any utterance must be confined thatis addressed to large numbers of voters--the fact that proposals areonly to be brought 'within the sphere of practical politics' which aresimple, striking, and carefully adapted to the half-conscious memoriesand likes and dislikes of busy men. 

All this means that his own power of political reasoning is beingtrained. He is learning that every man differs from every other man inhis interests, his intellectual habits and powers, and his experience, and that success in the control of political forces depends on arecognition of this and a careful appreciation of the common factors ofhuman nature. But meanwhile it is increasingly difficult for him tobelieve that he is appealing to the same process of reasoning in hishearers as that by which he reaches his own conclusions. He tends, thatis to say, to think of the voters as the subject-matter rather than thesharers of his thoughts. He, like Plato's sophist, is learning what thepublic is, and is beginning to understand 'the passions and desires' ofthat 'huge and powerful brute, how to approach and handle it, at whattimes it becomes fiercest and most gentle, on what occasions it uttersits several cries, and what sounds made by others soothe or irritateit. '[50] If he resolutely guards himself against the danger of passingfrom one illusion to another, he may still remember that he is not theonly man in the constituency who has reasoned and is reasoning aboutpolitics. If he does personal canvassing he may meet sometimes amiddle-aged working man, living nearer than himself to the facts oflife, and may find that this constituent of his has reasoned patientlyand deeply on politics for thirty years, and that he himself is a ratherabsurd item in the material of that reasoning. Or he may talk with abusiness man, and be forced to understand some one who sees perhaps moreclearly than himself the results of his proposals, but who is separatedfrom him by the gulf of a difference of desire: that which one hopes theother fears. 

[50] Plato, _Republic_, p. 493. 

Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect the process by whichthe more thoughtful both of those who vote for him and of those who voteagainst him reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that hisown part in the election has little to do with any reasoning process atall. I remember that before my first election my most experiencedpolitical friend said to me, 'Remember that you are undertaking a sixweeks' advertising campaign. ' Time is short, there are innumerabledetails to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from the rareintervals of mental contact with individual electors to that advertisingcampaign which deals with the electors as a whole. As long as he is soengaged, the maxim that it is wrong to appeal to anything but theseverest process of logical thought in his constituents will seem tohim, if he has time to think of it, not so much untrue as irrelevant. 

After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with hisconstituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrationalcreatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute andable statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how togovern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'thatstaring timid creature man. '[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swiftand Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see hisfellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few'among the societies of men ... Who engross almost the whole reason ofthe species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, whoare designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind. '[52] Forthe rest, 'Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines theirconduct. '[53]

[51] _Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism_, etc. (ed. Of 1785), p. 70. 

[52] _Ibid. _, p. 2. 

[53] _Ibid. _, p. 165. 

The greatest of Bolingbroke's disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, 'We arenot indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievementswhich are the landmarks of human action and human progress.... Man isonly truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible butwhen he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votariesthan Bentham. '[54] It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria 'like awoman, ' and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he neverfully recovered, who treated her 'like a public meeting. '

[54] _Coningsby_, ch. Xiii. 

In spite of Disraeli's essentially kindly spirit, his calculated playupon the instincts of the nation which he governed seemed to many in histime to introduce a cold and ruthless element into politics, whichseemed colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the less kindlycharacter of his disciple Lord Randolph Churchill. But the sameruthlessness is often found now, and may perhaps be more often found inthe future, whenever any one is sufficiently concentrated on somepolitical end to break through all intellectual or ethical conventionsthat stand in his way. I remember a long talk, a good many years ago, with one of the leaders of the Russian terrorist movement. He said, 'Itis no use arguing with the peasants even if we were permitted to do so. They are influenced by events not words. If we kill a Tzar, or a GrandDuke, or a minister, our movement becomes something which exists andcounts with them, otherwise, as far as they are concerned, it does notexist at all. '

In war, the vague political tradition that there is something unfair ininfluencing the will of one's fellow-men otherwise than by argumentdoes not exist. This was what Napoleon meant when he said, 'À laguerre, tout est moral, et le moral et l'opinion font plus de lamoitié de la réalité. '[55] And it is curious to observe that when menare consciously or half-consciously determining to ignore that traditionthey drop into the language of warfare. Twenty years ago, the expression'Class-war' was constantly used among English Socialists to justify theproposal that a Socialist party should adopt those methods ofparliamentary terrorism (as opposed to parliamentary argument) which hadbeen invented by Parnell. When Lord Lansdowne in 1906 proposed to theHouse of Lords that they should abandon any calculation of the good orbad administrative effect of measures sent to them from the LiberalHouse of Commons, and consider only the psychological effect of theiracceptance or rejection on the voters at the next general election, hedropped at once into military metaphor. 'Let us' he said, 'be sure thatif we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possibleto ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable tothis House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were towin for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end. '[56]

[55] _Maximes de Guerre et Penseés de Napoleon Ier_ (Chapelot), p. 230. 

[56] Hansard (Trades Disputes Bill, House of Lords, Dec. 4, 1906), p. 703. 

At first sight, therefore, it might appear that the change in politicalscience which is now going on will simply result in the abandonment bythe younger politicians of all ethical traditions, and the adoption bythem, as the result of their new book-learning, of those methods ofexploiting the irrational elements of human nature which have hithertobeen the trade secret of the elderly and the disillusioned. 

I have been told, for instance, that among the little group of women whoin 1906 and 1907 brought the question of Women's Suffrage within thesphere of practical politics, was one who had received a seriousacademic training in psychology, and that the tactics actually employedwere in large part due to her plea that in order to make men think onemust begin by making them feel. [57]

[57] Mrs. Pankhurst is reported, in the _Observer_ of July 26, 1908, tohave said, 'Whatever the women who were called Suffragists might be, they at least understood how to bring themselves in touch with thepublic. They had caught the spirit of the age, learnt the art ofadvertising. '

A Hindoo agitator, again, Mr. Chandra Pal, who also had read psychology, imitated Lord Lansdowne a few months ago by saying, 'Applying theprinciples of psychology to the consideration of political problems wefind it is necessary that we ... Should do nothing that will make theGovernment a power for us. Because if the Government becomes easy, if itbecomes pleasant, if it becomes good government, then our signs ofseparation from it will be gradually lost. '[58] Mr. Chandra Pal, unlikeLord Lansdowne, was shortly afterwards imprisoned, but his words havehad an important political effect in India. 

[58] Quoted in _Times_, June 3, 1907. 

If this mental attitude and the tactics based on it succeed, they must, it may be argued, spread with constantly increasing rapidity; and justas, by Gresham's Law in commerce, base coin, if there is enough of it, must drive out sterling coin, so in politics, must the easier and moreimmediately effective drive out the more difficult and less effectivemethod of appeal. 

One cannot now answer such an argument by a mere statement thatknowledge will make men wise. It was easy in the old days to rely on thebelief that human life and conduct would become perfect if men onlylearnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most political speculatorsused to sketch a perfect polity which would result from the completeadoption of their principles, the republics of Plato and of More, Bacon's Atlantis, Locke's plea for a government which should consciouslyrealise the purposes of God, or Bentham's Utilitarian State securelyfounded upon the Table of the Springs of Action. We, however, who liveafter Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not expectknowledge, however full, to lead us to perfection. The modern student ofphysiology believes that if his work is successful, men may have betterhealth than they would have if they were more ignorant, but he does notdream of producing a perfectly healthy nation; and he is always preparedto face the discovery that biological causes which he cannot controlmay be tending to make health worse. Nor does the writer on educationnow argue that he can make perfect characters in his schools. If ourimaginations ever start on the old road to Utopia, we are checked byremembering that we are blood-relations of the other animals, and thatwe have no more right than our kinsfolk to suppose that the mind of theuniverse has contrived that we can find a perfect life by looking forit. The bees might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, andof the waste of life and toil which goes on in the best ordered hive. And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation waspossible for creatures hampered by such limited powers of observationand inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. They might beforced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life mustremain bewildered and violent and short. Political inquiry deals withman as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his lifethat can be made during the next few centuries. It may be that somescores of generations hence, we shall have discovered that theimprovements in government which can be brought about by such inquiry, are insignificant when compared with the changes which will be madepossible when, through the hazardous experiment of selective breeding, we have altered the human type itself. 

But however anxious we are to see the facts of our existence withoutillusion, and to hope nothing without cause, we can still draw somemeasure of comfort from the recollection that during the few thousandyears through which we can trace political history in the past, man, without changing his nature, has made enormous improvements in hispolity, and that those improvements have often been the result of newmoral ideals formed under the influence of new knowledge. 

The ultimate and wider effect on our conduct of any increase in ourknowledge may indeed be very different from, and more important than, its immediate and narrower effect. We each of us live our lives in apictured universe, of which only a small part is contributed by our ownobservation and memory, and by far the greater part by what we havelearnt from others. The changes in that mental picture of ourenvironment made for instance by the discovery of America, or theascertainment of the true movements of the nearer heavenly bodies, exercised an influence on men's general conception of their place in theuniverse, which proved ultimately to be more important than theirimmediate effect in stimulating explorers and improving the art ofnavigation. But none of the changes of outlook in the past haveapproached in their extent and significance those which have been inprogress during the last fifty years, the new history of man and hissurroundings, stretching back through hitherto unthought-of ages, thesubstitution of an illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for theimagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above all the intrusionof science into the most intimate regions of ourselves. The effects ofsuch changes often come, it is true, more slowly than we hope. I wastalking not long ago to one of the ablest of those who were beginningtheir intellectual life when Darwin published the _Origin of Species_. He told me how he and his philosopher brother expected that at once allthings should become new, and how unwillingly as the years went on theyhad accepted their disappointment. But though slow, they arefar-reaching. 

To myself it seems that the most important political result of the vastrange of new knowledge started by Darwin's work may prove to be theextension of the idea of conduct so as to include the control of mentalprocesses of which at present most men are either unconscious orunobservant. The limits of our conscious conduct are fixed by the limitsof our self-knowledge. Before men knew anger as something separable fromthe self that knew it, and before they had made that knowledge currentby the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question ofconduct. Anger was a part of the angry man himself, and could only bechecked by the invasion of some other passion, love, for instance, orfear, which was equally, while it lasted, a part of self. The mansurvived to continue his race if anger or fear or love came upon him atthe right time, and with the right intensity. But when man had named hisanger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger came within theregion of conduct, Henceforth, in that respect, man could choose eitherthe old way of half-conscious obedience to an impulse which on the wholehad proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way of fullyconscious control directed by a calculation of results. 

A man who has become conscious of the nature of fear, and has acquiredthe power of controlling it, if he sees a boulder bounding towards himdown a torrent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to leap to oneside, or may substitute conduct for instinct, and stand where he isbecause he has calculated that at the next bound the course of theboulder will be deflected. If he decides to stand he may be wrong. Itmay prove by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, owing tothe imperfection of his powers of conscious inference, a safer guidethan the process of calculation. But because he has the choice, even thedecision to follow impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sincerelyconvinced that men's power of political reasoning was so utterlyinadequate to their task, that all his life long he urged the Englishnation to follow prescription, to obey, that is to say, on principletheir habitual political impulses. But the deliberate following ofprescription which Burke advocated was something different, because itwas the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past. Those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget. 

In other matters than politics the influence of the fruit of that treeis now spreading further over our lives. Whether we will or not, the oldunthinking obedience to appetite in eating is more and more affected byour knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physiological results ofthe quantity and kind of our food. Mr. Chesterton cries out, like theCyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, andtells us to eat 'caviare on impulse, ' instead of 'grape nuts onprinciple. '[59] But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chestertonis only telling us to eat caviare on principle. The physician, when heknows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, mayhate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it. Hefinds himself watching the unintended effects of his words and tones andgestures, until he realises that in spite of himself he is calculatingthe means by which such effects can be produced. After a time, even hispatients may learn to watch the effect of 'a good bedside manner' onthemselves. 

[59] _Heretics_, 1905, p. 136. 

So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer impulses of mankindis being spread (if only by the currency of new words), the relationboth of the politician and the voter to those impulses is changing. Assoon as American politicians called a certain kind of specially paidorator a 'spell-binder, ' the word penetrated through the newspapers frompoliticians to audiences. The man who knows that he has paid two dollarsto sit in a hall and be 'spell-bound, ' feels, it is true, the oldsensations, but feels them with a subtle and irrevocable difference. TheEnglish newspaper reader who has once heard the word 'sensational, ' maytry to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary of his consciousnessto the trained psychologists of the halfpenny journals. He may, according to the suggestion of the day, loathe the sixty million craftyscoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at a coming comet, pity the cowards on the Government Front Bench, or tremble lest apantomime lady should throw up her part. But he cannot help theexistence in the background of his consciousness of a self whichwatches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his 'sensations. ' Even therapidly growing psychological complexity of modern novels and playshelps to complicate the relation of the men of our time to theiremotional impulses. The young tradesman who has been reading either_Evan Harrington_, or a novel by some writer who has read _EvanHarrington_, goes to shake hands with a countess at an entertainmentgiven by the Primrose League, or the Liberal Social Council, consciousof pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure. His father, who read _John Halifax, Gentleman_, would have been carried away by atenth part of the condescension which is necessary in the case of theson. A voter who has seen _John Bull's Other Island_ at the theatre, ismore likely than his father, who only saw _The Shaughraun_, to realisethat one's feelings on the Irish question can be thought about as wellas felt. 

In so far as this change extends, the politician may find in the futurethat an increasing proportion of his constituents half-consciously 'seethrough' the cruder arts of emotional exploitation. 

But such an unconscious or half-conscious extension of self-knowledge isnot likely of itself to keep pace with the parallel development of thepolitical art of controlling impulse. The tendency, if it is to beeffective, must be strengthened by the deliberate adoption andinculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions--new idealentities to which our affections and desires may attach themselves. 

'Science' has been such an entity ever since Francis Bacon found again, without knowing it, the path of Aristotle's best thought. The conceptionof 'Science, ' of scientific method and the scientific spirit, was builtup in successive generations by a few students. At first theirconception was confined to themselves. Its effects were seen in thediscoveries which they actually made; but to the mass of mankind theyseemed little better than magicians. Now it has spread to the wholeworld. In every class-room and laboratory in Europe and America theconscious idea of Science forms the minds and wills of thousands of menand women who could never have helped to create it. It has penetrated, as the political conceptions of Liberty or of Natural Right neverpenetrated, to non-European races. Arab engineers in Khartoum, doctorsand nurses and generals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinesestudents make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired byabsolute submission to Science, and not only English or American orGerman town working men, but villagers in Italy or Argentina arelearning to respect the authority and sympathise with the methods ofthat organised study which may double at any moment the produce of theircrops or check a plague among their cattle. 

'Science, ' however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only withthings exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubesand microscopes. They are dimly aware that there exists a science of themind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct. 

It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt moresuccessfully than elsewhere the art of controlling other men'sunconscious impulses from without, there have been of late somenoteworthy declarations as to the need of conscious control fromwithin. Some of those especially who have been trained in scientificmethod at the American Universities are now attempting to extend topolitics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct. But it seemsto me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes theold form of an opposition between 'reason' and 'passion. ' The Presidentof the University of Yale said, for instance, the other day in apowerful address, 'Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals tothe emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers ... Attacksour political life at a most vulnerable point. '[60] If forty years agoHuxley had in this way merely preached 'intelligence' as against'emotion' in the exploration of nature, few would have listened to him. Men will not take up the 'intolerable disease of thought' unless theirfeelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science hasbeen that it does touch men's feelings, and draws motive power forthought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, and of limitlesshope. 

[60] A. T. Hadley in _Munsey's Magazine_, 1907. 

The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men mustbecome passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to thatsection of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose ofthe State realises itself in men's hearts by a 'harmony' whichstrengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passionsno longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an enddiscovered by the intellect. [61]

[61] Cf. Plato's _Republic_, Book IV. 

In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling ispeculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only providea motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values whichmust be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying torealise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help fromcurrent language) upon Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In musicthe noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the oneappeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realiseintensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely theirown feelings. The conditions under which they succeed or fail are fixed, for both, by facts in our emotional nature which they cannot change. One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of the nature of hishearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring ofthose who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sitenthroned among the strengthened and purified passions. 

But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conceptionof such a harmony of reason and passion, of thought and impulse, inpolitical motive? One thinks of education, and particularly ofscientific education. But the imaginative range which is necessary ifstudents are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from thelaboratory to the public meeting is not common. It would perhaps moreoften exist if part of all scientific education were given to such astudy of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mentalhistory as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the youngbiologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his greatreputation was based, and suspending his deepest religious convictions, in the cause of a truth not yet made clear. 

But most school children, if they are to learn the facts on which theconception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even moredirectly. I myself believe that a very simple course on thewell-ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, bequite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who hadreceived some small preliminary training in scientific method. Mr. William James's chapter on Habit in his _Principles of Psychology_would, for instance, if the language were somewhat simplified, come wellwithin their range. A town child, again, lives nowadays in the constantpresence of the psychological art of advertisement, and could easily bemade to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get a bar ofsoap, he feels inclined to get that which is most widely advertised, andwhat relation his inclination has to that mental process which is mostlikely to result in the buying of good soap. The basis of knowledgenecessary for the conception of intellectual duty could further beenlarged at school by the study in pure literature of the deeperexperiences of the mind. A child of twelve might understand Carlyle's_Essay on Burns_ if it were carefully read in class, and a good sixthform might learn much from Wordsworth's _Prelude_. 

The whole question, however, of such deliberate instruction in theemotional and intellectual facts of man's nature as may lead men toconceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal isone on which much steady thinking and observation is still required. Theinstincts of sex, for instance, are becoming in all civilised countriesmore and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon acalculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasingdegree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has foundthe way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before orduring the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instinctsthemselves. 

Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends notonly upon the chemical composition of food but upon our appetite, andthat we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control anddirect it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, 'We cannotproperly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a freemind with the prospect of enjoyment. '[62] But it would not be easy tocreate by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse atwhich Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason whyfood is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is therefore ourduty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made bothwholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing excepthis sense of humour. 

[62] _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 8, 1904. 

So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say thatthe teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of theexistence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finallyat subordinating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on theconsequences of political action. But it is extraordinarily difficult todiscover how this can be done under the actual conditions of schoolteaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, introducedinto the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life andDuties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played insocial life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accompanied by a moral for each section, such as 'serving personalinterest is not enough, ' 'need of public spirit and intelligence forgood Government, ' 'need of honesty in giving a vote, ' 'the vote a trustas well as a right. ' Almost every school publisher rushed out atext-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged itsintroduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was anacknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the timeto review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printedpages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and thelessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failedto stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths andmaidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State aswere the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books mustapparently approach their task with something of Socrates' passionatelove of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic. 

If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taughtwhat Mr. Wells calls 'the sense of the State, '[63] we may, by rememberingAthens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends. Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart asto the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If theirlove is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and assimple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the _Oedipus Coloneus_. Butsuch words are not written except by great poets who actually feel whatthey write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London asSophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itselfsomewhat more lovely. 

[63] _The future in America_, chapter ix. 

The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by wordsbut by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, theyshould either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or thoseaspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, ifit is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like thebuildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truthimpressive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to befound in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used tocome back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums ofLandport; though boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine inpersonal motive than in external pomp. 

More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberateintensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions. Alife-long worker for education on the London School Board once told methat when he wearied of his work--when the words of reports become merewords, and the figures in the returns mere figures--he used to go downto a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class afterclass, till the freshness of his impulse came back. But for a man who isabout to try such an experiment on himself even the word 'emotion' isdangerous. The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hotand disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus ofhis energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level offull consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by everysight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted tohis work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house. But allthat he is conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose ofhealing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and handare harmoniously concentrated. 

Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becomingconscious of new vices than of new virtues. Some day, for instance, theword 'opinion' itself may become the recognised name of the mostdangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit andassociation to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if theyneglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how, and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created byany clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulatedState in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformistbusiness men who never followed up a train of political reasoning intheir lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of astrong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it wasa matter of 'conscience' and therefore beyond the province of doubt orcalculation. 

But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato'sconception of the Harmony of the Soul--the intensification both ofpassion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination--can ever becomea part of the general political ideals of a modern nation? Perhaps mostmen before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes. Many men would now answer, No. The Japanese are apparently in somerespects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual moralitythan, say, the French. One hears, for instance, of incidents which seemto show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japaneseuniversities. But both during the years of preparation for the war, andduring the war itself, there was something in what one was told of thecombined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to aEuropean seemed wholly new. Napoleon contended against the 'idéologues'who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submittedto his own illusions he ground them to powder. But we associateNapoleon's clearness of vision with personal selfishness. Here was anation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in hisdetermination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesquetraditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism washotter than Gambetta's. Something of this may have been due to theinherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be theeffect of their mental environment. They had whole-heartedly welcomedthat conception of Science which in Europe, where it was firstelaborated, still struggles with older ideals. Science with them hadallied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural lawwhich, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had alwaysunderlain their various religions. [64] They had acquired, therefore, amental outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, and whichcombined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy inthought and action. 

[64] See Okakura, _The Japanese Spirit_ (1905). 

One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might takeplace between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion, and the new conception of intellectual duty introduced by Science. Thepolitical effect of such a fusion would be enormous. But for the momentthat hope is not easy. The inevitable conflict between old faith and newknowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a divisionnot only between the conclusions of religion and science, but alsobetween the religious and the scientific habit of mind. The scientificmen of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, astheir predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine ofprobability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of newevidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutelyon imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the mostperfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical willleave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked outin long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organicevolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do theacceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an Englishclergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his _Times_ or _Mail_, hisattitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief ordoubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance andpoverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trainedto watch the causation of his opinions. As it is, Dr. Jameson's preparedmanifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like atrumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member ofParliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuinedisgust and despair. 

It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of newideals of intellectual conduct will have to wait for a still widerchange of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day theconception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, inthe deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of our present drearyconfusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics whichis now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able notonly to control and direct in himself the impulses of whose nature he ismore fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of hisaim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their mosteffective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which inthe best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, andcitizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanesearmy looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind bywhich alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature. 

CHAPTER II

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and ofthe conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to changenot only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of ourpolitical institutions. 

I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which producedthe constitutions under which most civilised nations now live, wasinspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which isbecoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked, representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of theconditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have beenitself a mistake?

Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditionaldemocratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting againfrom the beginning, and considering what are the ends representation isintended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to goodgovernment. 

The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essenceof a representative government is that it depends on the periodicallyrenewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and thedegree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance ofaccomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by amajority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey. 

The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representativedemocracy was a mistake, raises the preliminary question whether theconsent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of goodgovernment. To this question Plato, who among the political philosophersof the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of amodern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered, No. To him it wasincredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleetingshadows of popular opinion. He proposed, therefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his Republic should live under the despoticgovernment of those who by 'slaving for it'[65] had acquired a knowledgeof the reality which lay behind appearance. Comte, writing when modernscience was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the sameproposal. Mr. H. G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageousspeculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia which is the resultof the forcible overthrow of representative government by a voluntaryaristocracy of trained men of science. He appeals, in a phraseconsciously influenced by Plato's metaphysics, to 'the idea of acomprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind theshams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensibleworld.... '[66] There are some signs, in America as well as in England, that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both passionately inearnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in theirexperience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-bloodedmanipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians, turn 'back to Plato'; and when once this question is started, neitherour existing mental habits nor our loyalty to democratic tradition willprevent it from being fully discussed. 

[65] [Greek: douleusanti tê ktêsei autou] (_Republic, _ p. 494). 

[66] Wells, _A Modern Utopia_, p. 263. 'I know of no case for theelective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knockedto pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless importantpublic issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind ofthe average man except blank indifference; that an electional systemsimply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers.... 'Wells, _Anticipations_, p. 147. 

To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring anexperience of government without consent larger than any other that hasever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. TheCovenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about athousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensuresthat practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mentalforce, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certainintellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty ofgovernment; and they are set to rule, under a system approachingdespotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite oftheir intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability togovern. 

Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, however carefullyselected and trained, must still inhabit 'the ostensible world. ' TheAnglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours--when he istoiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, orfamine-prevention--may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science whichis far removed from the jealousies and superstitions of the villagers inhis district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by hisefficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on lifewhich decides his choice of ends; and the Anglo-Indian outlook on lifeis conditioned, not by the problem of British India as history will seeit a thousand years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in thelittle government stations, with their trying climates, their narrowsociety, and the continual presence of an alien and possibly hostilerace. We have not, it is true, yet followed the full rigour of Plato'ssystem, and chosen the wives of Anglo-Indian officials by the sameprocess as that through which their husbands pass. But it may be fearedthat even if we did so, the lady would still remain typical who said toMr. Nevinson, 'To us in India a pro-native is simply a rankoutsider. '[67]

[67] _The Nation_, December 21, 1907. 

What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom theAnglo-Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion dependseven more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not onthings as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. Theavowed tactics of our empire in the East have therefore always beenbased by many of our high officials upon psychological and not uponlogical considerations. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, weblow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of ourrights in dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference to 'themoral effect upon the native mind. ' And, if half what is hinted at bysome ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religiousantipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if notencouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintainour dominant position. 

The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore onethat would exist at least equally in Plato's corporate despotism as inthe most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essayon _The First Principles of Government_, says: 'It is ... On opiniononly that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the mostdespotic and most military governments as well as to the most free andthe most popular. '[68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselvesforced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may atany moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts ofman's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat thenbecomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, orreligious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with lessscruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democraticState. 

[68] Hume's _Essays_, chap. Iv. 

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed thatthe loyalty of the subject-classes in his Republic should be securedonce for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teacha religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell theirpeople 'one magnificent lie';[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effecton the character of their rule might have been worse than the diseasewhich it was intended to cure. 

[69] [Greek: gennaión ti èn pseudoménous] (_Republic_, p. 414). 

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is acomplicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that governmentby consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentaryrepresentation is the only possible, or always the best possible, methodof securing consent. 

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himselfrestrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culturebe better than anything else which can be substituted for it. Andrepresentation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In Englandat this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons ofthe male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the sameplace of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes inconstituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power givento the representative, variation is possible. 

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not byFénelon and Helvétius, but by the study of racial psychology, he couldnot use his genius and patience better than in the invention ofconstitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree ofgovernment by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men arecapable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but wherethe machinery of British parliamentary government would not work. InEgypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinarylocal constituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go tothe poll. [70] As long as that is the case representative government isimpossible. A slow process of education might increase the proportion ofvoters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, whounderstand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, todiscover other methods by which the vague desires of the nativepopulation can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made insome measure to depend on them. 

[70] _Times_, January 6, 1908. 

The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact isapparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventiverange of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the momentappear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the EnglishHouse of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an'advisory Council of Notables';[71] with the possible result that we maybe advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealingswith the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in ourregulation of factory labour. 

[71] Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 885. 

In England itself, though great political inventions are always aglorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which willresult from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceedalong lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisabletendencies. 

A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdomduring the last thirty or forty years, each of which had littleconscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process ofascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complexprocess by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not inthe interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in thegeneral utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility ofsecuring them by regulation. 

The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing itwith the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has takenplace in the conditions under which that decision is formed which isexpressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity wassecured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case. [72] Thevarious ways in which those opinions might have been formed were mattersbeyond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jurytogether, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury inEngland might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did inAthens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jurymight have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hiredadvocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortionsof fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the _PrivateOrations_ of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that thewitnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they shouldtell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by ashow of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. Ifsuch an institution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would havetaken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own versionof the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reservedfor the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of theprisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly partyvote. 

[72] See, _e. G. _, Stephen, _History of the Criminal Law_, vol. I. Pp. 260-72. 

But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a longseries of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of thejurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should beformed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion isproduced has been more and more completely controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become theessential feature of the trial. 

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case. They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual ofthe court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest anenvironment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary lifeare unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth andjustice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceivedinferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of thewitnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result ofcenturies of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a juryhis first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolledinferences of the human brain. The 'said I's, ' and 'thought I's, ' and'said he's, ' which are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are herebanished on the ground that they are 'not evidence, ' and witnesses arecompelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations ofsight and hearing. 

The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, if they arewell-intentioned men, often find themselves giving, to their ownsurprise, perfectly consistent accounts of the events at issue. Thebarristers' tricks of advocacy are to some extent restrained byprofessional custom and by the authority of the judge, and they arecareful to point out to the jury each other's fallacies. Newspapers donot reach the jury box, and in any case are prevented by the law as tocontempt of court from commenting on a case which is under trial. Thejudge sums up, carefully describing the conditions of valid inference onquestions of disputed fact, and warning the jury against those forms ofirrational and unconscious inference to which experience has shown themto be most liable. They then retire, all carrying in their minds thesame body of simplified and dissected evidence, and all having beenurged with every circumstance of solemnity to form their conclusions bythe same mental process. It constantly happens therefore that twelvemen, selected by lot, will come to a unanimous verdict as to a questionon which in the outside world they would have been hopelessly divided, and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions of fact sodifficult as to leave the practised intellect of the judge undecided, will very generally be right. An English law court is indeed during awell-governed jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules ofvalid reasoning are illustrated by experiment; and when, as threatens tooccur in some American States and cities, it becomes impossible toenforce those rules, the jury system itself breaks down. [73]

[73] On the jury system see Mr. Wells's _Mankind in the Making_, chaptervii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where itis desirable that government should be supported by popular consent. 

At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree ofeconomy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do notmake good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order thatpopular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may notbe unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing classor person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced todeath or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of ajury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are nowtaken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by specialfitness for their task. 

In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examinethe tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have beenintroduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long beforethat date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch theprinciple of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferentas to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear uponelectors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practiseopen bribery the whole system of representation would break down atonce. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several generationson the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was theserious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definitebargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavishexpenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personallypopular, and create an impression that his connection with theconstituency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883therefore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candidate at aparliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier andlater Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties afterdeath, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paidfor by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinionmay not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, noelection meeting may be held in a building where any form of food ordrink is habitually sold, although that building may be only aCo-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room. 

The existing laws against Corrupt Practices represent, it is true, rather the growing purpose of the State to control the conditions underwhich electoral opinion is formed, than any large measure of success incarrying out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion of theexpenditure at any English election is now incurred by bodies enrolledoutside the constituency, and nominally engaged, not in winning theelection for a particular candidate, but in propagating their ownprinciples. Sometimes the candidate whom they support, and whom they tryto commit as deeply as possible, would be greatly relieved if theywithdrew. Generally their agents are an integral part of his fightingorganisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election iscovered by a special subscription made by him to the central fund. Everyone sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clausesin the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbidthe employment of paid canvassers, though no one as yet has put forwardany plan for preventing it. But it is acknowledged that unless the wholeprinciple is to be abandoned, new legislation must take place; and LordRobert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a 'stringent andfar-reaching Corrupt Practices Act. '[74] If, however, an act is carriedstringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development ofelectoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new andhitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty ofpolitical appeal. 

[74] _Times_, June 26, 1907. 

A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituencyfor three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which thevoters were every day further removed from the state of mind in whichserious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Nowno election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that allthe polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. Thesporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even nowlasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in theparty clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance toeffective political reasoning. 

A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of theBallot. Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful andpublic-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly orsecretly? Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. Since menacted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and sincelandlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws againstintimidation, to bring 'sinister' motives to bear upon voters whosevotes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow asa corollary from utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, however, whose wholephilosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feelingagainst the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiancetill the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved theabandonment of the whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure andpain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can besummed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, thateven under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause whichinduce the ordinary citizen to vote. 'Once in a thousand times, as inthe case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may crosshim that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year'sexpenditure if the side he votes for wins. ' He votes as a matter of factin accordance with ideas of right or wrong. 'His motive, when it is anhonourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term itpatriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter'sframe of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it. ' But ideas ofright and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge thatwe act under the eyes of our neighbours. 'Since then the real motivewhich induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not aninterested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decidedis whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense ofsocial duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when theact is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. But this question is answeredas soon as stated. When in every other act of a man's life whichconcerns his duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improvehis conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is thesingle case in which he will act better for being sheltered against allcomment. '[75]

[75] Letter to the _Reader_, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J. S. M. , quoted asMill's by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, _Public Responsibility and Vote byBallot_, pp. 89, 90. 

Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; sothat it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spiteof the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, hisdescription of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soonceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, alwaysremained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot theold mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account ofpolitical impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon amere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages anddisadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong inaccordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil resultsof political action. If an election were like a jury trial, suchinferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense offundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might beexpressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to whichpublicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those 'acts of aman's life which concern his duty to others, ' to which Mill refers--thepaying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment ofone's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains ofthought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion ofnewspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense. Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, theexcitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one'sopponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers ofone's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertainconclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires thecanvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shallbe genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentaryimpulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because itis a promise. 

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personaldisciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaignin favour of 'proportional representation, ' in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. Heproposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existingsystem of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-memberconstituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return itsrepresentative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think forthemselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them--theFree-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals--have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom theycan vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order ofpreference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for largeconstituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchesterwith its eight seats being given as an example. 

This system, according to Lord Courtney, 'will lead to the dropping ofthe fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men andwomen on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent. '[76] But thearguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fataldefect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion isascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If atthe assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after atrial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses wereexamined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on theaccidental composition of the separate juries; but the process offorming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective. 

[76] Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics' Institute, Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6. 

The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Societymainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by meansof ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the societyand through eight newspapers. 'The constituency, ' we are told, 'wassupposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, werepoliticians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinarynewspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of someof the main divisions of public opinion. '[77] The names were, in fact, Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law, and Philip Snowden. In all, 12, 418 votes were collected. 

[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6. 

I was one of the 12, 418, and in my case the ballot papers weredistributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the variouscandidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memoryof Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about himto my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the nameswere those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fiftywhose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect theirreaders to recognise. 

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by theintellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek mighthave said, the same, 'to us, ' as they were 'in themselves. ' But anordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'tohim' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he willeither do nothing or do as he is told. 

The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficientpreliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and thatnot only the names and party programmes but the reasons for theselection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items inhis programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader, ' who isassumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if oneneglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration ofnewspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their controlfor frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now readsor is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or tothe propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths ofthe electorate read between them a small number of established papersadvocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate duringa general election, only refer to those particular contests in which theparty leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote. ' Thechoice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local partyorganisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of acandidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of theconsciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by localelectioneering in each constituency, _i. E. _ by meetings and canvassingand the distribution of 'election literature. ' Lord Courtney's proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effectiveelectioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend sixtimes as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six therange of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in aday. 

These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of thenearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever beenactually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish inducedthe House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Boardelections. I fought in three London School Board elections as acandidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legalarrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should begiven about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats shouldbe assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was givena number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all hisvotes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any ofthem. 

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with twoalternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in eachdistrict into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urgeall voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative'eight' or 'five' or 'three. ' If they did this they were saved thetrouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to theindividual personalities of the members of the list. Or they mightpractically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by avoluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeksof the election in making one candidate for each party known in eachsection. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, andhad all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of theFrench _scrutin de liste_. The second method was adopted in London, andperhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than theyotherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates. Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon bypractically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organisedRoman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of thosewho plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachersor school-keepers. 

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, itis the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth aprinted copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. , according to the decision of his party association, and will copy thenumbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is tosay, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme isnot that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, butthat the voter would be required to arrange in order more names thanthere is time during the election to turn for him into real persons. 

Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his MunicipalRepresentation Bill in the House of Lords, [78] contrasted his proposedsystem with that used in the London Borough Council elections, accordingto which a number of seats are assigned to each ward and the voter maygive one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number ofcandidates. It is true that the electoral machinery for the LondonBoroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside ofAmerica. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how tovote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were sixseats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I wastold by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not oneof which I remembered to have seen before. If there had been one seat tobe filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enoughabout one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote;and the local party committees would have known that I and others woulddo so. Bach party would then have circulated a portrait and a printedaccount of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had astrong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I couldnot give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteencandidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. Itherefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those whovoted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket. ' If for any reason theparty committee put, to use an Americanism, a 'yellow dog' among thelist of names, I voted for the yellow dog. 

[78] April 30, 1907. 

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the sameticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied downdifferent marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known toevery voter there would be an enormous difference between LordCourtney's proposed system and the existing system in the LondonBoroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the twosystems until the votes are counted. 

If the sole object of an election were to discover and record the exactproportion of the electorate who are prepared to vote for candidatesnominated by the several party organisations Lord Courtney's schememight be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a longerexperience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidatenominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that aparliament of well-selected members who represent somewhat roughly theopinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selectedmembers who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quoteLord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, areflection of the community. '[79]

[79] Address at Stockport, p. 11. 

To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a widechoice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of thatchoice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan willsoon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise ofthe Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests, will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting tosee whether the growing substitution of the new quantitative andpsychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking aboutelections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House ofCommons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they will adoptthe transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-corneredelections, while retaining single-member constituencies, and therewiththe possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to thewhole of his constituents. 

A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of theelectoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing thesystem of English local government, has steadily diminished the numberof elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency. The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands ofelections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certainthat the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural ParishCouncils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversionby the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have beena failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if weomit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soonvote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitantof London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only votefor parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On theaverage, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year. 

In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoralconcentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility. InPhiladelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form whichseemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake inpsychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only ofeconomising political force, and had ignored the limitations ofpolitical knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that thePhiladelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallelcolumns of party 'tickets, ' contained some four hundred names. Theresulting effects on the _personnel_ of Philadelphian politics were asobvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however, concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of theelected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a singleelected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, andwhose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election toall the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by hisnominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute aquantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of theelectoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up bythe House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election(or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous tothemselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, ifallowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to theelectoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by theHouse of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. LordRobert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of thatterm, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "will of thepeople, "'[80] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel shouldnot defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, sothat he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrelbetween the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the publiccontrol of the methods of producing political opinion by thesubstitution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for ourpresent system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of nationalexcitement. 

[80] _Times_, June 25, 1907. 

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares nothope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the generalintellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry throughall the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growingdifficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At mylast contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hourbefore the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a verypoor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at theend are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking ofthis book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally'of the canvassers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid butirregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried andinefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken strawhats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making ofmatch-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the publichouse, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemedto be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name forwhich, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A fewwere drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clungto my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous factwhich just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, andinclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intenseconviction that this could not be accepted as even a decentlysatisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five millioninhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facingof the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enableus to improve it. 

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, toabolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public housescould be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness andcasual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness. It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they havein France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty ortwenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power ofasserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whosehustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men whohave just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibilityhalf consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would alsobe so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determinedanti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add tothe political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that inEngland the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest ofthe founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by thetraditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn actof citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-placesome of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings wereavailable, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms nowused. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of smalleffect. 

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of theelectoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to socialequality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motivefor corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend onit; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised orpolitically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream ofunspoilt impulse. 

If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeedcome. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge citiesunder conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both amongthose who profit, and those who suffer by them. But no one who is nearto political facts can believe that the immediate effect either ofgreater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clearaway all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation. 

A mere numerical increase in the number of persons in England who areinterested in politics would indeed itself introduce a new and difficultpolitical factor. The active politicians in England, those who take anypart in politics beyond voting, are at present a tiny minority. I was tospeak not long ago at an election meeting, and having been misdirectedas to the place where the meeting was to be held, found myself in anunknown part of North London, compelled to inquire of the inhabitantsuntil I should find the address either of the meeting-hall or of theparty committee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at last a cabmanon his way home to tea told me that there was a milkman in his streetwho was 'a politician and would know. ' There are in London seven hundredthousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by the man who is inthe best position to know that it would be safe to say that less thanten thousand persons actually attend the annual ward meetings of thevarious parties, and that not more than thirty thousand are members ofthe party associations. That division of labour which assigns politicsto a special class of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neighboursas well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far in most other parts ofEngland as in London. But in no county in England, as far as I am aware, does the number of persons really active in politics amount to ten percent. Of the electorate. 

There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to be true. TheEnglish Elementary Education Act was passed in 1870, and the elementaryschools may be said to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those whoentered them, being six years old, at that date are now agedthirty-four. The statistics as to the production and sale of newspapersand cheap books and the use of free libraries, show that the youngerworking men and women in England read many times as much as theirparents did. This, and the general increase of intellectual activity inour cities of which it is only a part, may very probably lead, as thesocial question in politics grows more serious, to a large extension ofelectoral interest. If so, the little groups of men and women who nowmanage the three English parties in the local constituencies will findthemselves swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on takingsome part in the choice of candidates and the formation of programmes. That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process bywhich the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local partyassociation are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled, as many of the American States have been compelled, to pass a series ofActs for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties. The ordinary citizen would find then, much more obviously than he doesat present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not onlythe marking of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an activeshare in that work of appointing and controlling party committees fromwhich many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with aninstinctive dread. 

But the most important difficulties raised by the extension of politicalinterest from a very small to a large fraction of the population wouldbe concerned with political motive rather than political machinery. Itis astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed thatindividual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics, assumed, without realising the nature of their own assumption, that therepresentative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitablyfeel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community. [81] Atpresent there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination andsympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready toundertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for thegeneral good. But every organiser of elections knows that the supply isnever more than sufficient, and payment of members, while it wouldpermit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would alsomake it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective. Theconcentration both of administrative and legislative work in the handsof the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is makingthe House of Commons yearly a less interesting place; and members haveof late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the _personnel_ of theHouse should seriously deteriorate. 

[81] E. G. James Mill, _Essay on Government_ (1825), 'We have seen inwhat manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise ofan interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely, by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties'(p. 27). 

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect oflegislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of themembers and candidates may be drawn from the class of 'hustling'company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and itsdifficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individualselfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment ofworking-class life. During the last twenty years I have been associated, for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with Englishpolitical working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part agreat advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were realto them. It is, for instance, the 'class-conscious' working men who, inEngland as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrorsof a general European war. But as their number and responsibilityincrease they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons asto the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a largescale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is verydifficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of an expansivetemperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take hismates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he findsthem--and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue thereforewhich is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humouredtolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware ofthe uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give andreceive help, and very unwilling to 'do' any man 'out of his job. ' Hisparents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in ahome with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read, things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy forhim, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does notunderstand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he isalready a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind ofabstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from hisdaily life. 

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realisingthat things whose existence we infer from reading are as important asthe things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through alist of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications ofthe man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the manwhom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding onan improvement with complete impartiality as between the district oneknows of on the map and the district one sees every morning. If arepresentative elected to govern a large area allows personalacquaintance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaintance andliking will he schemed for and exploited by those who have their ownends to gain. The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, wherethe interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from theinefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of theknown official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed; as wellas in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance thedimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimatesympathy with his fellow-craftsmen. 

The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, verygreat in the parliamentary Labour Party. The working men who have beensent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of pickedintelligence and morale and of considerable political experience. Butthe success or failure of any scheme aiming at social equality willdepend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which theworking classes must necessarily send men of less exceptional abilityand experience. I have never myself served on an elected local body themajority of whose members were weekly wage earners. But I have talkedwith men, both of working-class and middle-class origin, who have beenin that position. What they say confirms that which I have inferred frommy own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level ofenthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with adifficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealingwith sectional interests and official discipline. 

One is told that on such a body many members feel it difficult torealise that the way in which a well-intentioned man may deal with hisown personal expenditure, his continued patronage, for instance, of arather inefficient tradesman because he has a large family, or hisrefusal to contest an account from a dislike of imputing bad motives, isfatal if applied in the expenditure of the large sums entrusted to apublic body. Sometimes there are even, one learns, indications of thatgood-humoured and not ill-meant laxity in expending public money whichhas had such disastrous results in America, and which lends itself soeasily to exploitation by those in whom the habit of giving and takingpersonal favours has hardened into systematic fraud. When one of theWest Ham Guardians, two years ago, committed suicide on being chargedwith corruption, the _Star_ sent down a representative who filled acolumn with the news. 'His death, ' we were told, 'has robbed thedistrict of an indefatigable public worker. County Council, Board ofGuardians, and Liberal interests all occupied his leisure time. ' 'One ofhis friends' is described as saying to the _Star_ reporter, 'You do notneed to go far to learn of his big-souled geniality. The poor folks ofthe workhouse will miss him badly. '[82] When one has waded through massesof evidence on American municipal corruption, that phrase about'big-souled geniality' makes one shudder. 

[82] _Star_, November 28th, 1906. 

The early history of the co-operative and trade-union movements inEngland is full of pathetic instances of this kind of failure, and bothmovements show how a new and more stringent ideal may be slowly builtup. But such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, andmust be part of the conscious organised thought of each generation if itis to be permanently effective. 

Those difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed out by theopponents of democracy. But if democracy is to succeed they must befrankly considered by the democrats themselves; just as it is theengineer who is trying to build the bridge, and not the ferry-owner, who is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate thestrain which the materials will stand. The engineer, when he wishes toincrease the margin of safety in his plans, treats as factors in thesame quantitative problem both the chemical expedients by which he canstrengthen his materials and the structural changes by which the strainon those materials can be diminished. So those who would increase themargin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire exceptto arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength ofthe individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually increased bymoral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving orextending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy asmay prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength. 

CHAPTER III

OFFICIAL THOUGHT

It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under any conceivablesystem of representation cannot do the whole work of governmentthemselves. 

If all elections are held in single member constituencies of a sizesufficient to secure a good supply of candidates; if the number ofelections is such as to allow the political workers a proper intervalfor rest and reflection between the campaigns; if each elected body hasan area large enough for effective administration, a number of memberssufficient for committee work and not too large for debate, and dutiessufficiently important to justify the effort and expense of a contest;then one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best number of menand women to be elected by the existing population of the UnitedKingdom--or rather less than one to every two thousand of thepopulation. [83]

[83] I arrive at this figure by dividing the United Kingdom into singlemember parliamentary constituencies, averaging 100, 000 in population, which gives a House of Commons of 440--a more convenient number than theexisting 670. I take the same unit of 100, 000 for the average municipalarea. Large towns would contain several parliamentary constituencies, and small towns would, as at present, be separate municipal areas, although only part of a parliamentary constituency. I allow one localcouncil of 50 on the average to each municipal area. 

This proportion depends mainly on facts in the psychology of theelectors, which will change very slowly if they change at all. Atpresent the amount of work to be done in the way of government israpidly increasing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, thenumber of elected persons available for each unit of work must tend todecrease. The number of persons now elected in the United Kingdom(including, for instance, the Parish Councillors of rural parishes, andthe Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, larger than myestimate, though it has been greatly diminished by the Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1902. Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers arestill somewhat uneconomically distributed it represents a smaller actualworking power than would be given by the plan which I suggest. 

On the other hand, the number of persons (excluding the Army and Navy)given in the Census Returns of 1901 as professionally employed in thecentral and local government of the United Kingdom was 161, 000. Thisnumber has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing rate, andconsists of persons who give on an average at least four times as manyhours a week to their work as can be expected from the average electedmember. 

What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, of twenty-threethousand elected, and, say, two hundred thousand non-elected persons? Tobegin with, ought the elected members be free to appoint the non-electedofficials as they like? Most American politicians of Andrew Jackson'stime, and a large number of American politicians to-day, would hold, forinstance, as a direct corollary from democratic principles, that theelected congressman or senator for a district or State has a right tonominate the local federal officials. There may, he would admit, be somerisk in that method, but the risk, he would argue, is one involved inthe whole scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy as awhole are greater than its disadvantages. 

Our political logic in England has never been so elementary as that ofthe Americans, nor has our faith in it been so unflinching. MostEnglishmen, therefore, have no feeling of disloyalty to the democraticidea in admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency ofofficials to depend upon the personal character of individualrepresentatives. At the General Election of 1906 there were at least twoEnglish constituencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) whichreturned candidates whose personal unfitness had been to most men'sminds proved by evidence given in the law courts. Neither constituencywas markedly unlike the average in any respect. The facts were wellknown, and in each case an attempt was made by a few public-spiritedvoters to split the party vote, but both candidates were successful bylarge majorities. The Borough of Croydon stands, socially andintellectually, well above the average, but Mr. Jabez Balfourrepresented Croydon for many years, until he was sentenced to penalservitude for fraud. No one in any of these three cases would havedesired that the sitting member should appoint, say, the postmasters, orcollectors of Inland Revenue for his constituency. 

But though the case against the appointment of officials by individualrepresentatives is clear, the question of the part which should be takenby any elected body as a whole in appointing the officials who serveunder it is much more difficult, and cannot be discussed withoutconsidering what are to be the relative functions of the officials andthe representatives after the appointment has taken place. Do we aim atmaking election in fact as well as in constitutional theory the solebase of political authority, or do we desire that the non-electedofficials shall exert some amount of independent influence?

The fact that most Englishmen, in spite of their traditional fear ofbureaucracy, would now accept the second of these alternatives, is oneof the most striking results of our experience in the working ofdemocracy. We see that the evidence on which the verdict at an electionmust be given is becoming every year more difficult to collect andpresent, and further removed from the direct observation of the voters. We are afraid of being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers orelection leaflets for our knowledge, and we have therefore come tovalue, even if for that reason only, the existence of a responsible andmore or less independent Civil Service. It is difficult to realise howshort a time it is since questions for which we now rely entirely onofficial statistics were discussed by the ordinary political methods ofagitation and advocacy. In the earlier years of George the Third'sreign, at a time when population in England was, as we now know, risingwith unprecedented rapidity, the question of fact whether it was risingor falling led to embittered political controversy. [84] In the spring of1830 the House of Commons gave three nights to a confused party debateon the state of the country. The Whigs argued that distress was general, and the Tories (who were, as it happened, right) that it was local[85]. In1798 or 1830 the 'public' who could take part in such discussionsnumbered perhaps fifty thousand at the most. At least ten million peoplemust, since 1903, have taken part in the present Tariff Reformcontroversy; and that controversy would have degenerated into mereBedlam if it had not been for the existence of the Board of TradeReturns, with whose figures both sides had at least to appear to squaretheir arguments. 

[84] Bonar's _Malthus_, chap. Vii. 

[85] _Hansard_, Feb. 4th, 5th, 6th, 1830. 

If official figures did not exist in England, or if they did not possessor deserve authority, it is difficult to estimate the degree ofpolitical harm which could be done in a few years by an interested anddeliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for thepersonal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, for instance, that ourCivil Service were either notoriously inefficient or believed to bedominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent'currency agitation' should suddenly spring up. A powerful presssyndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring thatthe privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserveare 'strangling British Industry. ' The contents bills of two hundrednewspapers denounce every day the 'monopolists' and the 'gold-bugs, ' the'lies and shams' of the Bank Returns, and the 'paid perjurers ofSomerset House. ' The group of financiers who control the syndicate standto win enormous sums by the creation of a more 'elastic' currency, andsubscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincerepaper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of theprofessional economists. A vigorous and well-known member ofparliament--a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, or some one looselyconnected with the Labour movement--whom everybody has hitherto fearedand no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at thehead of the movement, denounces the 'fossils' and 'superior persons' whoat present lead Conservative and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and, with the help of the press syndicate and the subscription fund of the'Free Money League, ' begins to capture the local associations, andthrough them the central office of the party which is for the moment inopposition, Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were opposedonly by counter-electioneering, might not succeed, even although itsproposals were wholly fraudulent and its leaders so ignorant or socriminal that they could only come into power by discrediting two-thirdsof the honest politicians in the country and by replacing them with'hustlers' and 'boodlers' and 'grafters, ' and the other species for whomAmerican political science has provided names? How is the ordinaryvoter--a market-gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter--todistinguish by the help of his own knowledge and reasoning power betweenthe various appeals made to him by the 'Reformers' and the 'Safe MoneyMen' as to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the noteissue--the 'ten per cent. ' on the blue posters and the 'cent. Per cent. 'on the yellow? Nor will his conscience be a safer guide than hisjudgment. A 'Christian Service Wing' of the Free Money League may beformed, and his conscience may be roused by a white-cravatted orator, intoxicated by his own eloquence into something like sincerity, whoborrows that phrase about 'Humanity crucified on a cross of gold' whichMr. W. J. Bryan borrowed a dozen years ago from some one else. In anoptimistic mood one might rely on the subtle network of confidence bywhich each man trusts, on subjects outside his own knowledge, somehonest and better-informed neighbour, who again trusts at severalremoves the trained thinker. But does such a personal network exist inour vast delocalised urban populations?

It is the vague apprehension of such dangers, quite as much as themerely selfish fears of the privileged classes, which preserves inEurope the relics of past systems of non-elective government, the Houseof Lords, for instance, in England, and the Monarchy in Italy or Norway. Men feel that a second base in politics is required, consisting ofpersons independent of the tactics by which electoral opinion is formedand legally entitled to make themselves heard. But political authorityfounded on heredity or wealth is not in fact protected from theinterested manipulation of opinion and feeling. The American Senate, which has come to be representative of wealth, is already absorbed bythat financial power which depends for its existence on manufacturedopinion; and our House of Lords is rapidly tending in the samedirection. From the beginning of history it has been found easier forany skilled politician who set his mind to it, to control the opinionsof a hereditary monarch than those of a crowd. 

The real 'Second Chamber, ' the real 'constitutional check' in England, is provided, not by the House of Lords or the Monarchy, but by theexistence of a permanent Civil Service, appointed on a systemindependent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and holdingoffice during good behaviour. If such a service were, as it is in Russiaand to a large extent in India, a sovereign power, it would itself, as Iargued in the last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulatingopinion. But the English Civil servants in their present position havethe right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity ofmaking their will, by fair means or foul, prevail. 

The creation of this Service was the one great political invention innineteenth-century England, and like other inventions it was worked outunder the pressure of an urgent practical problem. The method ofappointing the officials of the East India Company had been a criticalquestion in English politics since 1783. By that time it had alreadybecome clear that we could not permanently allow the appointment of therulers of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet and armyto depend upon the irresponsible favour of the Company's directors. Charles James Fox in 1783, with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cutthe knot, by making Indian appointments, in effect, part of the ordinarysystem of parliamentary patronage; and he and Lord North were beatenover their India Bill, not only because George the Third was obstinateand unscrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political dangersinvolved in their proposal. The question, in fact, could only be solvedby a new invention. The expedient of administering an oath to theDirectors that they would make their appointments honestly, proved to beuseless, and the requirements that the nominees of the Directors shouldsubmit to a special training at Hayleybury, though more effective, leftthe main evil of patronage untouched. 

As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill introduced by Macaulayfor the renewal and revision of the Company's charter contained a clauseproviding that East India cadetships should be thrown open tocompetition. [86] For the time the influence of the Directors wassufficient to prevent so great a change from being effected, but in1853, on a further renewal of the Charter, the system of competition wasdefinitely adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships tookplace in 1855. 

[86] It would be interesting if Lord Morley, now that he has access tothe records of the East India House, would tell us the true intellectualhistory of this far-reaching suggestion. For the facts as now known, cf. A. L. Lowell, _Colonial Civil Service_, pp. 243-256. 

In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distinguished Indian Civilianwho had married Macaulay's sister, had been asked to inquire, with thehelp of Sir Stafford Northcote, into the method of appointment in theHome Civil Service. His report appeared in the spring of 1854, [87] and isone of the ablest of those State Papers which have done so much to mouldthe English constitution during the last two generations. It showed theintolerable effects on the _personnel_ of the existing Service of thesystem by which the Patronage Secretary of the Treasury distributedappointments in the national Civil Service among those members ofparliament whose votes were to be influenced or rewarded, and itproposed that all posts requiring intellectual qualifications should bethrown open to those young men of good character who succeeded at acompetitive examination in the subjects which then constituted theeducation of a gentleman. 

[87] _Reports and Papers on the Civil Service_, 1854-5. 

But to propose that members of parliament should give up their ownpatronage was a very different thing from asking them to take away thepatronage of the East India Company. Sir Charles Trevelyan, therefore, before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a number ofdistinguished persons both inside and outside the Government service, and printed their very frank replies in an appendix. 

Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was hopelesslyimpracticable. It seemed like the intrusion into the world of politicsof a scheme of cause and effect derived from another universe--as if oneshould propose to the Stock Exchange that the day's prices should befixed by prayer and the casting of lots. Lingen, for instance, thepermanent head of the Education Office, wrote considering that, asmatter of fact, patronage is one element of power, and not by any meansan unreal one; considering the long and inestimably valuable habituationof the people of this country to political contests in which the shareof office ... Reckons among the legitimate prizes of war; consideringthat socially and in the business of life, as well as in Downing Street, rank and wealth (as a fact, and whether we like it or not) hold the keysof many things, and that our modes of thinking and acting proceed, in athousand ways, upon this supposition, considering all these things, Ishould hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of the CivilService as that proposed by yourself and Sir Stafford Northcote. '[88] SirJames Stephen of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, 'The world welive in is not, I think, half moralised enough for the acceptance ofsuch a scheme of stern morality as this. '[89] When, a few years later, competition for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, QueenVictoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that it reduced thesovereign to a mere signing machine. '[90]

[88] _Reports and Papers on the Civil Service_, pp. 104, 105. 

[89] _Ibid. _, p. 78

[90] _Life of Queen Victoria_, vol. Iii. P. 377 (July 29, 1858). 

In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan's Report, Gladstoneestablished open competition throughout the English Civil Service, by anOrder in Council which was practically uncriticised and unopposed; andthe parliamentary government of England in one of its most importantfunctions did in fact reduce itself 'to a mere signing machine. '

The causes of the change in the political atmosphere which made thispossible constitute one of the most interesting problems in Englishhistory. One cause is obvious. In 1867 Lord Derby's Reform Act hadsuddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House of Commons fromthe 'ten pound householders' in the boroughs to the working men. The old'governing classes' may well have felt that the patronage which theycould not much longer retain would be safer in the hands of anindependent Civil Service Commission, interpreting, like a blindedfigure of Justice, the verdict of Nature, than in those of the dreaded'caucuses, ' which Mr. Schnadhorst was already organising. 

But one seems to detect a deeper cause of change than the meretransference of voting power. The fifteen years from the Crimean War to1870 were in England a period of wide mental activity, during which theconclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin or Newman werediscussed and popularised by a crowd of magazine writers and preachersand poets. The conception was gaining ground that it was upon seriousand continued thought and not upon opinion that the power to carry outour purposes, whether in politics or elsewhere, must ultimately depend. 

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled intosuffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itselfaccomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, ' and hadanswered, 'Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans ofvoting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in themost harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to getround Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, andfixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who areentirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will getround the Cape: if you cannot--the ruffian Winds will blow you ever backagain. '[91]

[91] _Latter Day Pamphlets, No. I, The Present Time_. (Chapman and Hall, 1894, pp. 12 and 14. )

By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started on its course fromparadox to platitude. The most important single influence in that coursehad been the growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870that Huxley's _Lay Sermons_ were collected and published. People whocould not in 1850 understand Carlyle's distinction between the Delusiveand the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley's comparison of lifeand death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes amistake. [92] And Huxley's impersonal Science seemed a more present aid inthe voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impossible Hero. 

[92] _Lay Sermont_, p. 31, 'A Liberal Education' (1868). 

But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when it had once beenmade and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficultthought in which it originated, and took its place in our habitualpolitical psychology. We now half-consciously conceive of the CivilService as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be takenor left as a whole. Open competition has by the same process become aprinciple, conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has beenin fact applied, and to no others. What is therefore for the moment mostneeded, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we shouldin our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinitepossible variations. We must think of the expedient of competitionitself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading byimperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of theposts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, asoverlapping those posts for which competition in some form is suitablethough it has not yet been tried, and as touching, at the marginal pointon their curve, those posts for which competition is unsuitable. 

Directly we begin this process one fact becomes obvious. There is noreason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment ofthe officials of the local as to those of the central government. It isan amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English peoplethat we have never seriously considered this point. In America the termCivil Service is applied equally to both groups of offices, and 'CivilService principles' are understood to cover State and Municipal as wellas Federal appointments. The separation of the two systems in our mindsmay, indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from historicalreasons we call them by different names. As it is, the local authoritiesare (with the exception that certain qualifications are required forteachers and medical officers) left free to do as they will in makingappointments. Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan and provincial localbodies have adopted timid and limited schemes of open competition. Butin all other cases the local civil servants, who are already probably asnumerous as those of the central government, [93] are appointed underconditions which, if the Government chose to create a Commission ofInquiry, would probably be found to have reproduced many of the evilsthat existed in the patronage of the central government before 1855. 

[93] The figures in the census of 1901 were--National, 90, 000; Local, 71, 000. But the local officials since then have, I believe, increasedmuch more rapidly than the national. 

It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a separate body of CivilService Commissioners to hold a separate examination for each locality, and difficulties would arise from the selection of officials by a bodyresponsible only to the central government, and out of touch with thelocal body which controls, pays, and promotes them when appointed. Butsimilar difficulties have been obviated by American Civil ServiceReformers, and a few days' hard thinking would suffice to adapt thesystem to English local conditions. 

One object aimed at by the creation of a competitive Civil Service forthe central government in England was the prevention of corruption. Itwas made more difficult for representatives and officials to conspiretogether in order to defraud the public, when the official ceased to owehis appointment to the representative. If an English member ofparliament desired now to make money out of his position, he would haveto corrupt a whole series of officials in no way dependent on hisfavour, who perhaps intensely dislike the human type to which hebelongs, and who would be condemned to disgrace or imprisonment yearsafter he had lost his seat if some record of their joint misdoing wereunearthed. 

This precaution against corruption is needed even more clearly under theconditions of local government. The expenditure of local bodies in theUnited Kingdom is already much larger than that of the central State, and is increasing at an enormously greater rate, while the fact thatmost of the money is spent locally, and in comparatively small sums, makes fraud easier. English municipal life is, I believe, on the wholepure, but fraud does occur, and it is encouraged by the close connectionthat may exist between the officials and the representatives. A needy orthick-skinned urban councillor or guardian may at any moment tempt, orbe tempted, by a poor relation who helped him at his election, and forwhom (perhaps as the result of a tacit understanding that similarfavours should be allowed to his colleagues), he obtained a municipalpost. 

The railway companies, again, in England are coming every year more andmore under State control, but no statesman has ever attempted to securein their case, as was done in the case of the East India Company acentury ago, some reasonable standard of purity and impartiality inappointments and promotion. Some few railways have systems ofcompetition for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried onby municipalities; but one is told that under most of the companiesboth appointment and promotion may be influenced by the favour ofdirectors or large shareholders. We regulate the minutiae of couplingand signalling on the railways, but do not realise that the safety ofthe public depends even more directly upon their systems of patronage. 

How far this principle should be extended, and how far, for instance, itwould be possible to prevent the head of a great private firm fromruining half a country side by leaving the management of his business toa hopelessly incompetent relation, is a question which depends, amongother things, upon the powers of political invention which may bedeveloped by collectivist thinkers in the next fifty years. 

We must meanwhile cease to treat the existing system of competition bythe hasty writing of answers to unexpected examination questions as anunchangeable entity. That system has certain very real advantages. It isfelt by the candidates and their relations to be 'fair. ' It revealsfacts about the relative powers of the candidates in some importantintellectual qualities which no testimonials would indicate, and whichare often unknown, till tested, to the candidates themselves. But if thesphere of independent selection is to be widely extended, greatervariety must be introduced into its methods. In this respect inventionhas stood still in England since the publication of Sir CharlesTrevelyan's Report in 1855. Some slight modifications have taken placein the subjects chosen for examination, but the enormous changes inEnglish educational conditions during the last half century have beenfor the most part ignored. It is still assumed that young Englishmenconsist of a small minority who have received the nearly uniform'education of a gentleman, ' and a large majority who have received nointellectual training at all. The spread of varied types of secondaryschools, the increasing specialisation of higher education, and theexperience which all the universities of the world have accumulated asto the possibility of testing the genuineness and intellectual qualityof 'post graduate' theses have had little or no effect. 

The Playfair Commission of 1875 found that a few women were employed forstrictly subordinate work in the Post Office. Since then femaletypewriters and a few better-paid women have been introduced into otheroffices in accordance with the casual impulses of this or thatparliamentary or permanent chief; but no systematic attempt has beenmade to enrich the thinking power of the State by using the trained andpatient intellects of the women who graduate each year in the newer, and'qualify by examination to graduate, ' in the older Universities. 

To the general public indeed, the adoption of open competition in 1870seemed to obviate any necessity for further consideration not only ofthe method by which officials were appointed but also of the systemunder which they did their work. The race of Tite Barnacles, theylearnt, was now to become extinct. Appointment was to be by 'merit, ' andthe announcement of the examination results, like the wedding in amiddle-Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story. But in aGovernment office, as certainly as in a law-court or a laboratory, effective thinking will not be done unless adequate opportunities andmotives are secured by organisation during the whole working life of theappointed officials. Since 1870, however, the organisation of theGovernment Departments has either been left to the casual development ofoffice tradition in each Department or has been changed (as in the caseof the War Office) by an agitation directed against one Department only. The official relations, for instance, between the First Divisionminority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each officevary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions andprejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief. The same istrue of the relation between the heads of each section and the officialsimmediately below them. In at least one office important papers arebrought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sentdown the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men aregiven invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented fromgetting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papersshould be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senioraccompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of hisown suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisationmust in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematicallycompared them. 

In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to seethat the published books as well as the office records on any questionare available for every official who has to report on it. In the Boardof Trade, which deals with subjects on which the importance of publishedas compared with official information is even greater, room has onlyjust been found for a technical library which was collected many yearsago. [94] The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, theTreasury and the Local Government Board have none. 

[94] For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at theForeign Office. 

In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliberate policy has beenadopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regularintervals to different branches of the work. The results are said to beexcellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has evenbeen seriously discussed in any other Department which I know. 

Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with the organisationof non-departmental work more directly executive than their own, andpart of a wise system of official training would consist in 'seconding'young officials for experience in the kind of work which they are toorganise. The clerks of the Board of Agriculture should be sent at leastonce in their career to help in superintending the killing of infectedswine and interviewing actual farmers, while an official in the Railwaysection of the Board of Trade should acquire some personal knowledge ofthe inside of a railway office. This principle of 'seconding' might wellbe extended so as to cover (as is already done in the army) definiteperiods of study during which an official, on leave of absence with fullpay, should acquire knowledge useful to his department; after which heshould show the result of his work, not by the answering of examinationquestions, but by the presentation of a book or report of permanentvalue. 

The grim necessity of providing, after the events of the Boer War, foreffective thought in the government of the British army produced the WarOffice Council. The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of thosesuggestions that reach him through the 'bottle-neck' of his seniorofficial's mind, now sits once a week at a table with half a dozen headsof sub-departments. He hears real discussion; he learns to pick men forhigher work; and saves many hours of circumlocutory writing. At the sametime, owing to a well-known fact in the physiology of the human brain, the men who are tired of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in thespoken word and the presence of their fellow human beings, just aspoliticians who are tired with talking, find, if their minds are stilluninjured, a new stimulus in the silent use of a pen. 

If this periodical alternation of written and oral discussion is usefulin the War Office, it would probably be useful in other offices; but noone with sufficient authority to require an answer has ever asked if itis so. 

One of the most important functions of a modern Government is theeffective publication of information, but we have no Department ofPublicity, though we have a Stationery Office; and it is, for instance, apparently a matter of accident whether any particular Department has orhas not a Gazette and how and when that Gazette is published. Nor is itany one's business to discover and criticise and if necessaryco-ordinate the statistical methods of the various officialpublications. 

On all these points and many others a small Departmental Committee(somewhat on the lines of that Esher Committee which reorganised the WarOffice in 1904), consisting perhaps of an able manager of an InsuranceCompany, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a business man withexperience of commercial and departmental organisation abroad, mightsuggest such improvements as would without increase of expense doublethe existing intellectual output of our Government offices. 

But such a Committee will not be appointed unless the ordinary membersof parliament, and especially the members who advocate a wide extensionof collective action, consider much more seriously than they do atpresent the organisation of collective thought. How, for instance, arewe to prevent or minimise the danger that a body of officials willdevelop 'official' habits of thought, and a sense of a corporateinterest opposed to that of the majority of the people? If a sufficientproportion of the ablest and best equipped young men of each generationare to be induced to come into the Government service they must beoffered salaries which place them at once among the well-to-do classes. How are we to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on allquestions of administration with their economic equals? If they do, thedanger is not only that social reform will be delayed, but also thatworking men in England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highlyeducated permanent officials which one notices in any gathering ofworking men in America. 

We are sometimes told, now that good education is open to every one, that men of every kind of social origin and class sympathy will enter toan increasing extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place itwill be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows thedevelopment of the existing examination system knows that care isrequired to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, ifonly from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latincomposition, whose educational value is not higher than others, butexcellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of onesocial class. 

It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual efficiency tothe dogma of promotion from the ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 wereperhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the firstdivision of the service would be in their time so rare as to benegligible. But things have changed since then. The competition for thesecond division has become incomparably more severe, and there is noreasonable test under which some of those second class officials whohave continued their education by means of reading and Universityteaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of age, agreater fitness for the highest work than would be shown by many ofthose who had entered by the more advanced examination. 

But however able our officials are, and however varied their origin, thedanger of the narrowness and rigidity which has hitherto so generallyresulted from official life would still remain, and must be guardedagainst by every kind of encouragement to free intellectualdevelopment. The German Emperor did good service the other day when heclaimed (in a semi-official communication on the Tweedmouth letter) thatthe persons who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity haveas Fachmänner (experts) other and wider rights in the republic ofthought. One only wishes that he would allow his own officials aftertheir day's work to regroup themselves, in the healthy London fashion, with labour leaders, and colonels, and schoolmasters, and court ladies, and members of parliament, as individualists or socialists, orprotectors of African aborigines, or theosophists, or advocates of afree stage or a free ritual. 

The intellectual life of the government official is indeed becoming partof a problem which every year touches us all more closely. In literatureand science as well as in commerce and industry the independent produceris dying out and the official is taking his place. We are nearly all ofus officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on anewspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, byrestrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a largerorganisation. We are little influenced by that direct and obviouseconomic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or countrysolicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip hisrivals or make more profit out of his employees. If we merely desire todo as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible in our lives, weall find that it pays us to adopt that steady unanxious 'stroke' whichneither advances nor retards promotion. 

The indirect stimulus, therefore, of interest and variety, of publicspirit and the craftsman's delight in his skill, is becoming moreimportant to us as a motive for the higher forms of mental effort, andthreats and promises of decrease or increase of salary less important. And because those higher efforts are needed not only for the advantageof the community but for the good of our own souls we are all of usconcerned in teaching those distant impersonal masters of ours who areourselves how to prevent the opportunity of effective thought from beingconfined to a tiny rich minority, living, like the Cyclops, inirresponsible freedom. If we consciously accept the fact that organisedwork will in future be the rule and unorganised work the exception, andif we deliberately adjust our methods of working as well as our personalideals to that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction ofpublic business must be divided between an uninstructed and unstablebody of politicians and a selfish and pedantic bureaucracy. 

CHAPTER IV

NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY

I have discussed, in the three preceding chapters, the probable effectof certain existing intellectual tendencies on our ideals of politicalconduct, our systems of representation, and the methods which we adoptfor securing intellectual initiative and efficiency among ourprofessional officials--that is to say, on the internal organisation ofthe State. 

In this chapter I propose to discuss the effect of the same tendencieson international and inter-racial relations. But, as soon as one leavesthe single State and deals with the interrelation of several States, onemeets with the preliminary question, What is a State? Is the BritishEmpire, or the Concert of Europe, one State or many? Every community ineither area now exerts political influence on every other, and thetelegraph and the steamship have abolished most of the older limitationson the further development and extension of that influence. Will theprocess of coalescence go on either in feeling or in constitutionalform, or are there any permanent causes tending to limit thegeographical or racial sphere of effective political solidarity, andtherefore the size and composition of States?

Aristotle, writing under the conditions of the ancient world, laid itdown that a community whose population extended to a hundred thousandwould no more be a State than would one whose population was confined toten. [95] He based his argument on measurable facts as to the human sensesand the human memory. The territory of a State must be 'visible as awhole' by one eye, and the assembly attended by all the full citizensmust be able to hear one voice--which must be that of an actual man andnot of the legendary Stentor. The governing officials must be able toremember the faces and characters of all their fellow citizens. [96] Hedid not ignore the fact that nearly all the world's surface as he knewit was occupied by States enormously larger than his rule allowed. Buthe denied that the great barbarian monarchies were in the truest sense'States' at all. 

[95] _Ethics_, IX. , X. 3. [Greek: oúte gàr ek déka anthrôpôn génoit' ànpólis, oút' ek déka myriádôn éti pólis estín. ]

[96] Aristotle, _Polit. _, Bk. VII. Ch. Iv. 

We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle reliedwere both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaevalCity-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of thehighest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environmentof each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses andmemory. It is now only here and there, in villages outside the mainstream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours andsee daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which theywork and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawlingsuburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, someof the older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeperrealities of life. 

A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard-thinking old Yorkshireschoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale. Opposite to us wasthe country-house where Charlotte Brontë was governess, and below usran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages whichalready were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatenedsoon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tallchimneys and slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the oldaffection for place and home had disappeared from the district. I askedwhether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now thatmen lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than inthe narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and mapsmight not appear which should be a better guide to life than thepatriotism of the village street. 

This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, nothing, he said, had taken its place, or would take its place, but a naked and restlessindividualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and alwaysmissing it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, he beganto urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the trueriches of life by forgetting steam and electricity, and returning to theagriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of themediaeval town. 

He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the oldconditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished, because they were too small to protect themselves against larger thoughless closely organised communities; and industrial progress is aninvader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. Fora constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern Englandthere is now no place where in the old sense they 'live. ' Nearly thewhole of the class engaged in the direction of English industry, and arapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pass daily in tramor train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times moresights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, touse Mr. Wells's phrase, 'delocalised. '[97]

[97] _Mankind in the Making_, p. 406. 

But now that we can no longer use the range of our senses as a basisfor calculating the possible area of the civilised State, there mightseem to be no facts at all which can be used for such a calculation. Howcan we fix the limits of effective intercommunication by steam orelectricity, or the area which can be covered by such politicalexpedients as representation and federalism? When Aristotle wished toillustrate the relation of the size of the State to the powers of itscitizens he compared it to a ship, which, he said, must not be too largeto be handled by the muscles of actual men. 'A ship of two furlongslength would not be a ship at all. '[98] But the _Lusitania_ is alreadynot very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can evenguess what is the upward limit of size which the ship-builders of ageneration hence will have reached. If once we assume that a State maybe larger than the field of vision of a single man, then the merelymechanical difficulty of bringing the whole earth under a government aseffective as that of the United States or the British Empire has alreadybeen overcome. If such a government is impossible, its impossibilitymust be due to the limits not of our senses and muscles but of ourpowers of imagination and sympathy. 

[98] Aristotle, _Polit. _, Bk. VII. Ch. Iv. 

I have already pointed out[99] that the modern State must exist for thethoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of directobservation but as an entity of the mind, a symbol, a personification, or an abstraction. The possible area of the State will depend, therefore, mainly on the facts which limit our creation and use of suchentities. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were reconstructing Europeon the basis of nationality thought that they had found the relevantfacts in the causes which limit the physical and mental homogeneity ofnations. A State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed, must be a homogeneous 'nation, ' because no citizen can imagine his Stateor make it the object of his political affection unless he believes inthe existence of a national type to which the individual inhabitants ofthe State are assimilated; and he cannot continue to believe in theexistence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are likeeach other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarckdeliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by aquantitative calculation as to the possibility of assimilating otherGermans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion ofAustria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the groundthat while the Prussian type was strong enough to assimilate the Saxonsand Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to assimilate Austrians andBavarians. He said, for instance, in 1866: 'We cannot use theseUltramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we can digest. '[100]

[99] Part I. Ch. Ii. Pp. 72, 73, and 77-81. 

[100] _Bismarck_ (J. W. Headlam), p. 269. 

Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governedunless it consisted of a homogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy ofthe artificial assimilation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed tohim the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for thereconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by theexisting correspondence of national uniformities with geographicalfacts. 'God, ' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nucleiupon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured theDivine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly markedout--at least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the greatrivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographicalconditions. '[101]

[101] _Life, and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. Iv. (written1858), p. 275. 

Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strengththe humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, asCanning said, 'reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwardsto congregate them into mobs. '[102] Mazzini attacked the 'cosmopolitans, 'who preached that all men should love each other without distinction ofnationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychologicalimpossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one canlove, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individualhuman beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari forthis reason: 'The cosmopolitan, ' he then said, 'alone in the midst ofthe immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extendbeyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than theconsciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individualfaculties--which, however powerful, are incapable of extending theiractivity over the whole sphere of application constituting the aim ... Has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose betweendespotism and inertia. '[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as heputs out to sea, prays to God, 'Help me my God! My boat is so small andThy ocean so wide. '[104]

[102] Canning, _Life_ by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818). 

[103] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. Iii. P. 8. 

[104] _Ibid. _, vol. Iv. P. 274. 

For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between theindividual man and the unimaginable multitude of the human race. A mancould comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings likehimself 'speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies andeducated by the same historical tradition, '[105] and could be thought ofas a single national entity. The nation was 'the intermediate termbetween humanity and the individual, '[106] and man could only attain tothe conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic ofhomogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity asindividuals are the citizens of the nation, '[107] and again, 'The pact ofhumanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equalpeoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of adistinct existence. '[108]

[105] _Ibid. _, vol. Iv. P. 276 (written 1858). 

[106] _Ibid. _, vol. V. P. 273. 

[107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. V. P. 274(written 1849). 

[108] _Ibid_. , vol. Iii. P. 15 (written 1836). 

Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played agreat and invaluable part in the development of the politicalconsciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it isbecoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for theproblems of the twentieth century. We cannot now assert with Mazzini, that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards areconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous nationalStates 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109]Mazziui, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exaggerated the simplicityof the question even in his own time. National types throughout thegreater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided intohomogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the directionof the high mountains, ' but were intermingled from village to village;and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no longer, forinstance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciplesof Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties, that Hungary is inhabited only by a homogeneous population of patrioticMagyars. We can see that Mazzini was already straining his principle tothe breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece... To become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrieragainst the European encroachments of Russia. '[110] In Macedonia to-daybands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the puretradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rivalpopulations in order to establish their own claim to represent thepurposes of God as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains. Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if theBismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be rejected, theremust continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitantsbelonging to widely different national types. 

[109] _Ibid. _, vol. V. P. 275. 

[110] _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. Vi. P. 258. 

Bismarck's conception of an artificial uniformity created by 'blood andiron' corresponded more closely than did Mazzini's to the facts of thenineteenth century. But its practicability depended upon the assumptionthat the members of the dominant nationality would always vehementlydesire to impose their own type on the rest. Now that theSocial-Democrats, who are a not inconsiderable proportion of thePrussian population, apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian orDanish fellow-subjects all the more because they cling to their ownnational characteristics, Prince Bülow's Bismarckian dictum the otherday, that the strength of Germany depends on the existence and dominanceof an intensely national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. Thesame change of feeling has also shown itself in the United Kingdom, andboth the English parties have now tacitly or explicitly abandoned thatAnglicisation of Ireland and Wales, which all parties once accepted as anecessary part of English policy. 

A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that thearea of the State should be based on homogeneity of national type, whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extensionduring the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states intonon-European territory. Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, norBismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to takeinto his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outsideEurope. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectualpreparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by'the scramble for the world. ' Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguelyexpected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa, and that the 'pact of humanity' would ultimately be 'signed' byhomogeneous and independent 'nations, ' who would cover the whole landsurface of the globe. But he never indicated the political forces bywhich that result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion ofAbyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessarystage in the Mazzinian policy of spreading the idea of nationality toAfrica, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself. 

Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never lookedforward, as Mazzini did, to a 'pact of humanity, ' which should includeeven the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against theattempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, asexisting between any State and the States or populations outside itsboundaries. 'The only sound principle of action, ' he said, 'for a greatState is political egoism. '[111] When, therefore, after Bismarck's deathGerman sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with thedefenceless inhabitants of China or East Africa, they were, as theSocial-Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of thesituation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in thefifth century A. D. , by Attila and his Huns. 

[111] Speech, 1850, quoted by J. W. Headlam, _Bismarck_, p. 83. 

The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea ofnational homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From thepublication of Seeley's _Expansion of England_ in 1883 till the Peace ofVereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a'Blood, ' an 'Island Race, ' consisting of homogeneous English-speakingindividuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the wholepopulation of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably whiteinhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of theother inhabitants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden'--thenecessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. Theidealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such ahomogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves thatit would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading ofimperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckianrealists among them believed that it would be brought about, in SouthAfrica and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron. ' Lord Milner, who is perhapsthe most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out ofGermany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers onany terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve theultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams ofa British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck'sPrussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and toocosmopolitan. '[112]

[112] _Times_, Dec. 19, 1907. 

But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism isnow deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be basednot upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of nationalvariation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and theDutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be dividedfrom the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moralchasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyalacceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier orGeneral Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adaptLord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperialegoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference tothe question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea. 

At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs ofenthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English'poor' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of othermen's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; andif those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be becausethey are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperialegoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which paylittle heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, beobjected by our imperial 'Real-politiker' that cosmopolitan feeling isat this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzinithought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plainfacts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fightfor its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both togetherduring the next generation, and our only chance of success is to createthat kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the whiteinhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a'dominant race, ' that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and anatural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting intoa Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism. ' Among the non-whiteinhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperialwar will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of onlyemploying European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drillthose races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected tofight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for politicalrights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatalsolvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with theinterests of our future opponents as well as those of ourfellow-subjects. 

This sort of argument might of course be met by a _reductio adabsurdum_. If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it willbe adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, thevictor in each inter-imperial war will take over the territory of theloser. After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in thewaste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, twoempires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain. Bothwill possess an armament which represents the whole 'surplus value, 'beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. Both will containwhite and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across awavering line on the map of the world. But the struggle will go on, and, as the result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire willexist. 'Imperial egoism, ' having worked itself out to its logicalconclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of theglobe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to considerthe problems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe fromthe point of view of mere humanitarianism. 

Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability that we mightbegin that consideration before the struggle goes any further? Fifteenhundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousianopinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the Homoiousians. The generals and other 'Real-politiker' on both sides may have feared, like Lord Milner, lest their followers should become 'too cosmopolitan, 'too ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of theology. 'This' a Homoousian may have said 'is a practical matter. Unless ourside learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate theother side, we shall be beaten in the next battle. ' And yet we can nowsee that the practical interests of Europe were very little concernedwith the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriouslyconcerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsymetaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made thecontinued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology nolonger intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marchingtowards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and 'empire'like 'Homoousia' and 'Homoiousia' are the best that we can do in makingentities of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe, and because having made such entities our sympathies are shut up withinthem?

I have already urged, when considering the conditions of politicalreasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from ourtendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensationsinto homogeneous classes and species are now unnecessary and have beenavoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences. Just as themodern artist substitutes without mental confusion his ever-varyingcurves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, sothe scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts ofnature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed ofidentical individuals and represented to us by a single type. 

Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole humanrace? Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible?And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred milliondifferent human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?

To the first question the publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent thehuman race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varyingindividuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biologicalgroup, every individual in which differs from every other notarbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organicevolution. [113] And, since that which exists for the imagination canexist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the secondquestion would also have been answered by evolution, and that thewarring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have beendissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we canwatch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towardsa more harmonious relation to the universe. 

[113] Sir Sydney Olivier, e. G. In his courageous and penetrating book_White Capital and Coloured Labour_ considers (in chap. Ii. ) the racialdistinctions between black and white from the point of view ofevolution. This consideration brings him at once to 'the infinite, inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much afundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamatingrace-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparklingvariety' (pp. 12, 13). 

But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that thediscovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a generallove of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for everimpossible. Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthlessstruggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was tocease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and thereforewould lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species. 

This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable andunending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generationafter 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sunhung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only byfamine and war hung over the first century of political economy. BeforeDarwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of thenon-white races as 'men and brothers' who, after a short process ofeducation, would become in all respects except colour identical withthemselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be soglossed over. Racial variations were shown to be unaffected byeducation, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tendingperhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation. 

The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidencepresented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the firsthalf of the nineteenth century the European colonists who were in dailycontact with non-European races, although their impulses and theirknowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall, yet could escape all thought about their own position by assuming thatthe problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canadaor the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease, and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakestraces and individuals have now died out, the surviving population areshowing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and weare adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore ourresponsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the timewhen the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be donedeliberately. 

But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how canthere exist a community either of affection or purpose between thekillers and the killed? No one at this moment professes, as far as Iknow, to have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point ofethics lies within the region claimed by religion. But Christianity, which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuouslyfailed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The officialChristian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equalvalue, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether agiven territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a millionconverted Central African pigmies or a million equally convertedEuropeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether thestronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination ofthe weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racialpossibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the nineteenthcentury, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though theirruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscioushypocrisy. 

But the most immediately dangerous result of political 'Darwinism' wasnot its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines byEuropean colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 'strugglefor life' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the Europeannations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has beenthreatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nationsconcerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill, for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day:'From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities, and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggleof empires. '[114]

[114] _Times_, Jan. 22, 1908. 

The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of thespecies must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of humanprogress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may haveto conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Governmentwith a German statesman like Prince Büllow, who seems to combine theteaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teachingof Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by adeclaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to nationalconduct. 

Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expectedfrom a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troopsalone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-Europeanallies and subjects. If it takes the first form, and if we assume, asLord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is'higher' than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selectedEnglishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an actof biological retrogression. Even if the non-European races are broughtin and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars, or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biologicalloss to the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving 'higher'or 'lower' individuals will only be slightly diminished. 

Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends thatthe evolutionary advantage to be expected from the 'struggle of empires'is the 'survival' not of races but of political and cultural types. Ourvictory over the German Empire, for instance, would mean, it is said, avictory for the idea of political liberty. This argument, which, whenurged by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, requires theassumption that types of culture are in the modern world mostsuccessfully spread by military occupation. But in the ancient worldGreek culture spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire;Japan in our own time adopted Western culture more readily as anindependent nation than she would have done as a dependency of Russia orFrance; and India is perhaps more likely to-day to learn from Japan thanfrom England. 

Lord Ampthill's phrase, however, represents not so much an argument, asa habit of feeling shared by many who have forgotten or never known thebiological doctrine which it echoes. The first followers of Darwinbelieved that the human species had been raised above its prehumanancestors because, and in so far as, it had surrendered itself to ablind instinct of conflict. It seemed, therefore, as if the old moralprecept that men should control their more violent impulses byreflection had been founded upon a mistake. Unreflecting instinct was, after all, the best guide, and nations who acted instinctively towardstheir neighbours might justify themselves like the Parisian ruffians often years ago, by claiming to be 'strugforlifeurs. '

If this habit of mind is to be destroyed it must be opposed not merelyby a new argument but by a conception of man's relation to the universewhich creates emotional force as well as intellectual conviction. 

And the change that has already shown itself in our conception of thestruggle for life among individuals indicates that, by some divinechance, a corresponding change may come in our conception of thestruggle between peoples. The evolutionists of our own time tell us thatthe improvement of the biological inheritance of any community is to behoped for, not from the encouragement of individual conflict, but fromthe stimulation of the higher social impulses under the guidance of thescience of eugenics; and the emotional effect of this new conception isalready seen in the almost complete disappearance from industrialpolitics of that unwillingly brutal 'individualism' which afflictedkindly Englishmen in the eighteen sixties. 

An international science of eugenics might in the same way indicatethat the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, butat encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type. Such anidea would not appeal to those for whom the whole species arrangesitself in definite and obvious grades of 'higher' and 'lower, ' from thenorthern Europeans downwards, and who are as certain of the ultimatenecessity of a 'white world' as the Sydney politicians are of thenecessity of a 'white Australia. ' But in this respect during the lastfew years the inhabitants of Europe have shown signs of a new humility, due partly to widespread intellectual causes and partly to the hardfacts of the Russo-Japanese war and the arming of China. The 'spheres ofinfluence' into which we divided the Far East eight years ago, seem tous now a rather stupid joke, and those who read history are alreadybitterly ashamed that we destroyed by the sack of the Summer Palace in1859, the products of a thousand years of such art as we can never hopeto emulate. We are coming honestly to believe that the world is richerfor the existence both of other civilisations and of other racial typesthan our own. We have been compelled by the study of the Christiandocuments to think of our religion as one only among the religions ofthe world, and to acknowledge that it has owed much and may owe muchagain to the longer philosophic tradition and the subtler and morepatient brains of Hindustan and Persia. Even if we look at the future ofthe species as a matter of pure biology, we are warned by men of sciencethat it is not safe to depend only on one family or one variety for thewhole breeding-stock of the world. For the moment we shrink from theinterbreeding of races, but we do so in spite of some conspicuousexamples of successful interbreeding in the past, and largely because ofour complete ignorance of the conditions on which success depends. 

Already, therefore, it is possible without intellectual dishonesty tolook forward to a future for the race which need not be reached througha welter of blood and hatred. We can imagine the nations settling theracial allocation of the temperate or tropical breeding-grounds, or evendeliberately placing the males and females of the few hopelesslybackward tribes on different islands, without the necessity that themost violent passions of mankind should be stimulated in preparation fora general war. No one now expects an immediate, or prophesies withcertainty an ultimate, Federation of the Globe; but the consciousness ofa common purpose in mankind, or even the acknowledgment that such acommon purpose is possible, would alter the face of world-politics atonce. The discussion at the Hague of a halt in the race of armamentswould no longer seem Utopian, and the strenuous profession by thecolonising powers that they have no selfish ends in view might betransformed from a sordid and useless hypocrisy into a fact to whicheach nation might adjust its policy. The irrational race-hatred whichbreaks out from time to time on the fringes of empire, would have littleeffect in world politics when opposed by a consistent conception of thefuture of human progress. 

Meanwhile, it is true, the military preparations for a death-struggle ofempires still go on, and the problem even of peaceful immigrationbecomes yearly more threatening, now that shipping companies can landtens of thousands of Chinese or Indian labourers for a pound or two ahead at any port in the world. But when we think of such things we needno longer feel ourselves in the grip of a Fate that laughs at humanpurpose and human kindliness. An idea of the whole existence of ourspecies is at last a possible background to our individual experience. Its emotional effect may prove to be not less than that of the visibletemples and walls of the Greek cities, although it is formed not fromthe testimony of our eyesight, but from the knowledge which we acquirein our childhood and confirm by the half-conscious corroboration of ourdaily life. 

We all of us, plain folk and learned alike, now make a picture forourselves of the globe with its hemispheres of light and shadow, fromevery point of which the telegraph brings us hourly news, and which mayalready be more real to us than the fields and houses past which wehurry in the train. We can all see it, hanging and turning in themonstrous emptiness of the skies, and obedient to forces whose action wecan watch hundreds of light-years away and feel in the beating of ourhearts. The sharp new evidence of the camera brings every year nearer tous its surface of ice and rock and plain, and the wondering eyes ofalien peoples. 

It may be that we shall long continue to differ as to the fullsignificance of this vision. But now that we can look at it withouthelpless pain it may stir the deepest impulses of our being. To some ofus it may bring confidence in that Love that Dante saw, 'which moves theSun and the other Stars. ' To each of us it may suggest a kinder pity forall the bewildered beings who hand on from generation to generation thetorch of conscious life. 

INDEX

Abyssinia, Italian invasion of, Acland, Mr. , Adams, John Quincy, Airedale, America, appointment of non-elected officials in, Civil Service, science and politics in, tendency to electoral concentration in, Amos, Ampthill, Lord, Antigone, Aristotle, comparison of State to a ship, criticism of Plato's communism, definition of 'polity', maximum size of a State, on action as the end of politics, on political affection, Athens, glassmakers of, Sophocles' love of, Austin, John, Bacon, Francis, Atlantis of, Bagehot, Walter, Balfour, Mr. A. J. , Mr. Jabez, Balliol College, Ballot, Barrie, Mr. J. M. , Bebel, Beccaria, Bentham, Jeremy, Macaulay's attack on, on criminology, on 'natural right, ' _Principles of Morals and Legislation_, Benthamism, as a science of politics, Berlin, Congress of, 1885, Bernstein, Bismarck, and artificial homogeneity of national type, on political egoism, Bolingbroke, Lord, Botha, General, Breeding, selective, Brighton Parade, British Empire, difficulty of conceiving as a political entity, national homogeneity in, political status of non-European races in, Brontë, Charlotte, Bryan, Mr. W. J. , Bryce, Mr. James, Buckle, H. T. , Bülow, Prince, on dominance of Prussia, on private and national morality, on universal suffrage, Burke, Edmund, on man's power of political reasoning, on 'party, 'Burney, Fanny, Burns, Robert, Butler, Bishop, Canning, George, Carlyle, Thomas, essay on Burns of, Cavendish, Lord Frederick, Cavour, Cecil, Lord Robert, Chadwick, Sir E. , Chamberlain, Mr. Joseph, Charity Schools, Chesterton, Mr. G. K. , China, Chinese Labour, agitation against, Christianity and race question, Harnack on expansion of, Churchill, Lord Randolph, Civil Service, creation of English, of India, importance of an independent, Sir C. Trevelyan's Report on, Comenius, Competition, system of, in municipal appointments, in railway appointments, variety in methods of, Comte, Auguste, Corrupt Practices Act, Corrupt Practices Act, practical failure of, Corruption, prevented by competitive Civil Service, Courtney, Lord, Crimean War, Croydon, Dante, Darwin, Charles, correspondence with Lyell, effect of his work, on persistence of racial variation, _Origin of Species_ of, Demosthenes, Derby, Lord, Reform Act of, De Wet, Diderot, Disraeli, Benjamin, Dolling, Father, Education Act, 1870, Egypt, Esher Committee, Fénelon, Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, Fourier, Fox, Charles James, Gambetta, Galen, Gardiner, Professor S. R. , Garfield, President, George III. And American Revolution, and Fox's India Bill, popularity of, German Emperor, Gladstone, W. E. , and English Civil Service, and Queen Victoria, on change ofopinion, on Ireland, parliamentary oratory of, Government Departments, organisation of, Graham's Law, Grote, George, Hadley, A. T. , Hague, The, Hall, Professor Stanley, Harnack, T. , Helvetius, Herbart, J. F. , Hicks-Beach, Miss, Hippocrates, Hobbes, Thomas, Homoiousians, Homoousians, Hume, Joseph, Huxley, T. H. , Lay Sermons of, Hyndman, Mr. , India, and representative democracy, applicability of democratic principles in, appointment of East India Company officials, Civil Service, English dislike of natives in, Individualism, curve of, Ireland, Home Rule for, Jackson, Andrew, James, Professor William, on sense of effective reality, _Principles of Psychology_ of, Jameson, Dr. , Japan, Japanese, mental environment of, State Papers, Jevons, Professor, Jury. _See_ Trial by Jury. Justice, conception of, as political term, Justinian, Kossuth, Louis, Labour Party and intellectual conditions of representative government, Lansdowne, Lord, Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, LeBon, G. , Lingen, Lord, Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894, Locke, John, and basis of government, and pedagogy, on relation of man to God's law, Lombroso, C. , London, Borough Council elections, creation of love for, lack of citizenship in, proportion of active registered voters in, provision of schools in, School Board elections in, County Council Debating Hall, election posters, Lyell, Sir Charles, Lyndhurst, Lord, MacCulloch, J. R. , Macedonia, Macewen, Sir William, Macaulay, Lord, and East India Company, Essay in _Edinburgh Review_ on Benthamism, Marseillaise, Marshall, Professor, Marx, Karl, Mazzini, Joseph, attack on cosmopolitanism, on geographical division of humanity, Mendel, Abbot, Merivale, Mr. Herman, Metternich, Mill, James, J. S. , on mankind in the average, opposition to the Ballot of, Milner, Lord, Molesworth, Sir W. , More, Sir Thomas, Republic of, Morgan, Professor Lloyd, Morley, Lord, on W. K. Gladstone, Morris, William, Municipal Representation Bill, Napoleon I. And psychology of war, Louis, Negro Suffrage in United States, Nevinson, Mr. H. W. , Newman, J. H. , on sonification, Nicholas H. , North, Lord, Northcote, Sir Stafford, Olivier, Sir Sydney, Ostrogorski, Professor, Owen, Robert, Paine, Thomas, Pal, Mr. Chandra, Palmerston, Lord, Pankhurst, Mrs. , Parnell, C. S. , Parramatta Tea, Party as a political entity, Patroclus, Pearson, Professor Karl, Peel, Sir Robert, Pericles, Persia, Philadelphia, Philippines, Place, Francis, Plato, 'cave of illusion' of, his 'harmony of the Soul' in modern political life, on basis of government, on government by consent, on idea of perfect man, on the public, religion in the Republic of, Republic of, Playfair Commission, Poor Law Commission of 1834, of 1905Proportional Representation and Lord Courtney, Society, Prospero, Putney, Race Problem and representative democracy, in international politics, in India, Reform Act of 1867Religion of Comte, in Plato's Republic, Representative democracy and India, and race problem, in Egypt, in England, in United States, Rome, Roosevelt, Theodore, Rousseau, J. J. , and pedagogy, on human rights, Rural Parish Councils, Ruskin, John, Samuel, Mr. Herbert, Schnadhorst, Mr. , Science, as an entity, Seeley, J. R. , _Expansion of England_ of, Senior, Nassau, _Political Economy_ of, Shelley, Socialism, conception of as a working creed, curve of, Socrates, Somerset House, Sophocles, Spencer, Mr. Herbert, Stein, H. F. , Stephen, Sir James, Suffrage, for women at 1906 election, negro, universal, Prince Bülow's attack on, Swift, Dean, Swinburne, A. C. , Tammany Hall, Tarde, G. , Tennyson, Lord, Thackeray, Togo, Admiral, Trevelyan, Sir Charles, Trial by Jury, development ofTweefontein, Tyrrell, Father, United Kingdom, proportion of elected to electors in, United States and Negro Suffrage, and representative democracy, Vaux, Madame De, Vereeniging, Peace of, Victoria, Queen, on competition for Indian Army commissions, portrait of, on coins, Virgin of Kevlaar, War Office Council, Wells, Mr. H. G. , on delocalised population, on representative democracy, on 'sense of the State, ' on uniqueness of the individualWhately, ArchbishopWomen's Suffrage at 1906 election methods of suffragists, Wood, Mr. M'Kinnon, Wordsworth, _Prelude_ of,