IF CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE DATE DUE ■_ ^.xMaa'Hm mRmiiiitfiii:i:a^ •«- i CAYLORO Cornell University Library JF2049 .W19 1916 Human nature In politics 3 1924 030 491 181 Cornell University Library The original of tlnis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924030491 1 81 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS BY GRAHAM WALLAS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY I 9 I 6 CTF V/,9 A. 377757 FOURTH IMPRESSION PREFACE I OFFEE my thanks to several friends who have been kind enough to read the proofs of this book, and to send me corrections and suggestions; among whom I will mention Professors John Adams and J. H. Muir- head, Dr. A. Wolf, and Messrs. W. H. Winch, Sidney Webb, L. Pearsall Smith, and A. E. Zimmern. It is, for their sake, rather more necessary than usual for me to add that some statements still remain in the text which one or more of them would have desired to see omitted or differently expressed. I have attempted in the footnotes to indicate those writers whose books I have used. But I should like to record here my special obligation to Professor William James's Principles of Psychology, which gave me, a good many years ago, the conscious desire to think psychologically about my work as politician and teacher. I have been sometimes asked to recommend a list of books on the psychology of politics. I believe that at the present stage of the science, a politician will gain more from reading, in the light of his own experience, those treatises on psychology which have been written without special reference to politics, than by begin- ning with the literature of applied political psychology. vi HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS But readers who are not politicians will find particular points dealt with in the works of the late Monsieur Gr. Tarde, especially L'Opinion et la Foule and Zes Lois de I'Imitation and in the books quoted in the course of an interesting article on ' Herd Instinct,' by Mr. W. Trotter in the Sociological Bcview for July 1908. The political psychology of the poorer inhabitants of a great city is considered from an individual and fascinating 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, beyond the correction of a few verbal slips. The important political developments which have occurred during the last eighteen months in the English Parliament, in Turkey, Persia, and India, and in Germany, have not altered my conclusions as to the psychological problems raised by modern forms of government ; and it would involve an impossible and, undesirable amount of rewriting to substitute 'up-to- date' illustrations for those which I drew from the current events of 1907 and 1908. I should 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 op Economics and Political Sciencb, Clabb Market, London, W.C, 30io nm-nnsal arrain t.n P.Yt.And t.hft franchise tO 6 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS women is met by that sort of hesitation and evasion which is characteristic of politicians who are not sure of their intellectual ground. A candidate who has just been speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he is heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify the continued exclusion of women from the franchise. Accordingly a large majority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at the general election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage. But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave that pledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out. There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionally dishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final decision is apparently genuine. They are aware that certain differences exist between men and women, though they do not know what those differences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question of the franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future, probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on the other. This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in our explicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by the growing urgency of the problem of race. The fight for democracy in Europe and America during the eighteenth and early INTEODUCTION 7 nineteenth centuries was carried on by men who were thinking only of the European races. But, during the extension of democracy after 1870, almost all the Great Powers were engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvements in the means of com- munication were bringing all the races of the world into close contact. The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote has (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined to nations of European origin. But there is nothing in the form or history of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government. Nor can he draw any intelligible and consistent conclusion from the practice of democratic States in giving or refusing the vote to their non-European subjects. The United States, for instance, have silently and almost unanimously dropped '' the experiment of negro suffrage. In that case, owing to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African negro and the white man from North- West Europe, the problem was comparatively simple ; but no serious attempt has yet been made at a new solution of it, and the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing with the more subtle racial questions created by the immigration of Chinese and Japanese and Slavs, or by the government of the mixed populations in the Philippines. England and her colonies show a like uncertainty in 8 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS the presence of the political questions raised both by the migration of non-white races and by the acquisition of tropical dependencies. Even when we discuss the political future of independent Asiatic States we are not clear whether the principle, for instance, of ' no taxation without representation ' should be treated as applicable to them. Our own position as an Asiatic power depends very largely on the development of China and Persia, which are inhabited by races who may claim, in some respects, to be our intellectual superiors. When they adopt our systems of engineering, mechanics, or armament we have no doubt that they are doing a good thing for themselves, even though we may fear their commercial or military rivalry. But no follower of Bentham is now eager to export for general Asiatic use our latest inventions in political machinery. We hear that the Persians have established a parliament, and watch the development of their experiment with a complete suspension of judgment as to its probable result. We have helped the Japanese to preserve their independence as a constitutional nation, and most Englishmen vaguely sympathise with the desire of the Chinese progressives both for national independence and internal reform. Pew of us, however, would be willing to give any definite advice to an individual Chinaman who asked whether he ought to throw him- self into a movement for a representative parliament on European lines. INTEODUOTION 9 Within our own Empire this uncertainty as to the limitations of our political principles may at any moment produce actual disaster. In Africa, for in- stance, the political relationship between the European inhabitants of our territories and the non-European majority of Kaffirs, Negroes, Hindoos, Copts, or Arabs is regulated on entirely different lines in Natal, Basutoland, Egypt, or East Africa. In each case the constitutional difference is due not so much to the character of the local problem as to historical accident, and trouble may break out anywhere and at any time, either from the aggression of the Europeans upon the rights reserved by the Home Government to the non- Europeans, or from a revolt of the non-Europeans themselves. Blacks and whites are equally irritated by the knowledge that there is one law in Nairobi and another in Durban. This position is, of course, most dangerous in the case of India. For two or three generations the ordinary English Liberal postponed any decision on Indian politics, because he believed that we were educating the inhabitants for self-government, and that in due time they would all have a vote for an Indian parliament. Now he is becoming aware that there are many races in India, and that some of the most important differences between those races among themselves, and between any of them and ourselves, are not such as can be obliterated by education. He 10 HUMAN" NATUEE IN POLITICS is told by men whom he respects that this fact makes it certain that the representative system which ii suitable for England will never be suitable for India and therefore he remains uneasily responsible for th( permanent autocratic government of three hundrec million people, remembering from time to time thai some of those people or their neighbours may have much more definite political ideas than his own, and that he ultimately may have to fight for a power whicl he hardly desires to retain. Meanwhile, the existence of the Indian problem loosens half-consciously his grip upon democratic principle in matters nearer home. Newspapers and magazines and steamships are constantly making India more real to him, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immigrants or London ' latch-key ' lodgers ought to have a vote is less decided than it would have been if he had not acquiesced in the decision that Eajputs, and Bengalis, and Parsees should be refused it. Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to stop in the middle of a campaign merely because they have an uncomfortable feeling that the rules of the game require re-stating and possibly re-casting. But the winning or losing of elections does not exhaust the whole political duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has been a time in which the disinterested examination of political principles has been more urgently required. Hitherto the main stimulus to INTEODUCTION 11 political speculation has been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight of the Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous struggle for supremacy among themselves, or by the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the American and French Eevolutions in the eighteenth century. The outstanding social events in Europe in our own time have, however, been so far the failures rather than the successes of great movements; the apparent wasting of devotion and courage in Eussia, owing to the deep- seated intellectual divisions among the reformers, and the military advantage which modern weapons and means of communication give to any government however tyrannous and corrupt; the baffling of the German social-democrats by the forces of religion and patriotism and by the infertility of their own creed; the weakness of the successive waves of American Democracy when faced by the political power of capital. But failure and bewilderment may present as stern a demand for thought as the most successful revolu- tion, and, in many respects, that demand is now being well answered. Political experience is recorded and examined with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. The history of political action in the past, instead of being left to isolated scholars, has become the subject of organised and minutely subdivided labour. The new political developments of the present, Australian 12 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Federation, the Eeferendum in Switzerland, German Public Finance, the Party system in England and America, and innumerable others, are constantly recorded, discussed and compared in the monographs and technical magazines which circulate through all the universities of the globe. The only form of study which a political thinker of one or two hundred years ago would now note as missing is any attempt to deal with politics in its' relation to the nature of man. The thinkers of the- past, from Plato to Bentham and Mill, bad each his own view of human nature, and they made those views the basis of their speculations on government. But no modern treatise on political science, whether dealing with institutions or finance, now begins with anything corresponding to the opening words of Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation — ' Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure ' ; or to the ' first general proposition ' of Nassau Senior's Political Economy, 'Every man desires to obtain additional wealth with as little sacrifice as possible.'^ In most cases one cannot even discover whether the writer is - conscious of possessing any conception of human nature at all. It is easy to understand how this has come about. 1 Political Economy (in the Encyclopedia MetropoUtana), 2nd edition (1850), p. 26. INTEODUCTIOIT 13 Political science is just beginning to regain some measure of authority after the acknowledged failure of its confident professions during the first half of the nineteenth century. Bentham's Utilitarianism, after superseding both Natural Eight and the blind tradition of the lawyers, and serving as the basis of innumerable legal and constitutional reforms throughout Europe, was killed by the unanswerable refusal of the plain man to believe that ideas of pleasure and pain are the only sources of human motive. The ' classical ' political economy of the universities and the news- papers, the political economy of MacCuUoch and Senior and Archbishop Whately, was even more unfortunate in its attempt to deduce a whole industrial polity from a ' few simple principles ' of human nature. It became identified with the shallow dogmatism by which well- to-do people in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign tried to convince working men that any change in the distribution of the good things of life was ' scientifically impossible.' Marx and Euskin and Carlyle were masters of sarcasm, and the process is not yet forgotten by which they slowly compelled even the newspapers to abandon the ' laws of political economy ' 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 ' few simple principles ' seemed 14 HUMAN IfATUEE IN POLITICS a little absurd, and nothing has hitherto taken their place. Mr. Herbert Spencer, indeed, attempted to turn a single hasty generalisation from the history of biological evolution into a complete social philosophy of his own, and preached a ' beneficent private war ' ^ which he conceived as exactly eq_uivalent to that degree of trade competition which prevailed among English provincial shopkeepers about the year 1884. Mr. Spencer failed to secure even the whole-hearted support of the newspapers ; but in so far as his system gained currency it helped further to discredit any attempt to connect political science with the study of human nature. For the moment, therefore, nearly aU students of« politics analyse institutions and avoid the analysis of man. The study of human nature by the psychologists has, it is true, advanced enormously since the discovery of human evolution, but it has advanced without affecting or being affected by the study of politics. Modern text-books of psychology are illustrated with innumerable facts from the home, the school, the hospital, and the psychological laboratory; but in them politics are hardly ever mentioned. The pro- fessors of the new science of sociology are beginning, it is true, to deal with human nature in its relation > Man versos the State, p. 69. 'The beneficent private war which makes one man strive to climb over the shoulders of another man.' INTKODUCTION 15 not only to the family and to religion and industry, but also to certain political institutions. Sociology, however, has had, as yet, little influence on political science. I believe myself that this tendency to separate the study of politics from that of human nature will prove to be only a momentary phase of thought, that while it lasts its effects, both on the science and the conduct of politics, are likely to be harmful, and that there are already signs that it is coming to an end. It is sometimes pleaded that, if thorough work is to be done, there must, in the moral as in the physical sciences, be division of labour. But this particular division cannot, in fact, be kept up. The student of politics must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he is to be domi- nated by it. If he has had wide personal experience of political life his unconscious assumptions, may be helpful ; if he has not they are certain to be mislead- ing. Mr. Eoosevelt's little book of essays on American Ideals is, for instance, useful, because when he thinks about mankind in politics, he thinks about the politi- cians whom he has known. After reading it one feels that many of the more systematic books on politics by American university professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men, formed on as- sumptions of which they were unaware and which 16 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS they had never tested either by experience or by study. In the other sciences which deal with human actions, this division between the study of the thing ' done and the study of the being who does it is not found. In criminology Beccaria and Bentham long ago showed how dangerous that jurisprudence was which separated the classification of crimes from the study of the criminal. The conceptions of human nature which they held have been superseded by evolutionary psychology, but modern thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology into the service of a new and fruitful criminology. In pedagogy also, Locke, and Eousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sided Bentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions of human nature. Those conceptions were the same as those which underlay their political theories, and have been affected in the same way by modern knowledge. For a short time it even looked as if the lecturers in the English training colleges would make the same separation between the study of human institutions and human nature as has been made in politics. Lectures on School Method were distinguished during this period from those on the Theory of Education. The first became mere descriptions and comparisons of the organisation and teaching in the best schools. The second consisted of expositions, with occasional comment and criticism, INTEODUCTION 17 of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke, or Eousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory of Politics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxford course of Humaner Letters. But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, I believe, survive almost unchanged, the Training College lectures on the Theory of Education are beginning to show signs of a change as great as that which took place in the train- ing of medical students, when the lecturers on ana- tomy, instead of expounding the classical authorities, began to give, on their own responsibility, the best account of the facts of human structure of which they were capable. The reason for this difference is, apparently, the fact that while Oxford lecturers on the Theory of Politics are not often politicians, the Training College lecturers on the Theory of Teaching have always been teachers, to whom the question whether any new knowledge could be made useful in their art was one of living and urgent importance. One finds accordingly that under the leadership of men like Professors William James, Lloyd Morgan, and Stanley Hall, a progressive science of teaching is being developed, which combines the study of types of school organisation and method with a determined attempt to learn from special 18 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS experiments, from introspection, and from other sciences, what manner of thing a chUd is. Modern pedagogy, based on modern psychology, is already influencing the schools whose teachers are trained for their profession. Its body of facts is being yearly added to ; it has already caused the abandon- ment of much dreary waste of time ; has given many thousands of teachers a new outlook on their work, and has increased the learning and happiness of many tens of thousands of children. This essay of mine is offered as a plea that a corre- sponding change in the conditions of political science is possible. In the great University whose constituent colleges are the universities of the world, there is a steadily growing body of professors and students of poUtics who give the whole day to their work. I can- not but think that as years go on, more of them will isaU to their aid that study of mankind which is the ancient ally of the moral sciences. Within every great city there are groups of men and women who are brought together in the evenings by the desire to find something more satisfying than current political controversy. They have their own unoficial leaders and teachers, and among these one can already detect an impatience with the alternative offered, either of working by the bare comparison of existing institutions, or of discussing the fitness of socialism or individual- INTEODUCTION 19 ism, of democracy or aristocracy for human beings whose nature is taken for granted. If my book is read by any of those official or un- official thinkers, I would urge that the study of human nature in politics, if ever it comes to be undertaken by the united and organised efforts of hundreds of learned men, may not only deepen and widen our knowledge of political institutions, but open an un- worked mine of political invention. PART I The Conditions of the Problem CHAPTEE I IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS "Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on a re-examination of the working of human nature, must begin by trying to overcome his own tendency J to exaggerate the intellectuality of mankind. We are apt to assume that every human action is the result of an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained. An investor, for instance, desires good security combined with five per cent, interest. He spends an hour in studying with an open mind the price-list of stocks, and finally infers that the purchase of Brewery Debentures will enable him most com- pletely to realise his desire. Given the original desire for good security, his act in purchasing the Debentures appears to be the inevitable result of his inference. 21 22 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS The desire for good security itself may further appear to be merely an intellectual inference as to the means of satisfying some more general desire, shared by all mankind, for 'happiness,' our own 'interest,' or the like. The satisfaction of this general desire can then be treated as the supreme ' end ' of life, from -which aU our acts and impulses, great and small, are derived by the same intellectual process as that by which the conclusion is derived from the premises of an argument. This way of thinking is sometimes called ' common sense.' A good example of its application to politics may be found in a sentence from Macaulay's celebrated attack on the Utilitarian followers of Bentham in the Edinburgh Review of March 1829. This extreme instance of the foundation of politics upon dogmatic psychology is, curiously enough, part of an argument intended to show that 'it is utterly impossible to deduce the science of government from the principles of human nature.' ' "What proposition,' Macaulay asks, ' is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one; and that is not only true, but identical; that men always act from self-interest. . . . When we see the actions of a man, we know with ceriairdy whai he thinks his interest to be.'^ Macaulay believes himself to be opposing Benthamism root and branch, but is ' Edinburgh Review, March 1829, p. 185. (The italica are mine.) IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS 23 unconsciously adopting and exaggerating the assump- tion which Bentham shared with most of the other eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophers — :that all motives result from the idea of some pre- ,^ conceived end. If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably have admitted that there are cases in which human acts and impulses to act occur independently of any idea of an end to be gained by them. If I have a piece of grit in my eye 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, and always feel a strong impulse to do so. Nobody supposes that I close my eye because, after due con- sideration, I think it my interest to do so. Nor do most men choose to run away in battle, to fall in love, or to talk about the weather in order to satisfy their desire for a preconceived end. If, indeed, a man were followed through one ordinary day, without his know- ing it, by a cinematographic camera and a phonograph, and if all his acts and sayings were reproduced before " him next day, he would be astonished to find how few of them were the result of a deliberate search for the • means of attaining ends. He would, of course, see that mach of his activity consisted in the half-conscious repetition, under the influence of habit, of movements which were originally more fully conscious. But even if all cases of habit were excluded he would find that 24 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS only a small proportion of the residue could be < explained as being directly produced by an intellectual calculation. If a record were also kept of those of his impulses and emotions which did not result in ■ action, it would be seen that they were of the same kind as those which did, and that very few of them were preceded by that process which Macaulay takes for granted. If Macaulay had been pressed still further, he would probably have admitted that even when an act is preceded by a calculation of ends and means, it is not * the inevitable result of, that calculation. Even when we know what a man thinks it his interest to do, we do not know for certain what he will do. The man who studies the Stock Exchange list does not buy his Debentures, unless, apart from his intellectual infer- ence on the subject, he has an impulse to write to his stockbroker sufficiently strong to overcome another impulse to put the whole thing off till the next day. Macaulay might even further have admitted that the mental act of calculation itself results from, or is > accompanied by, an impulse to calculate, which impulse may have nothing to do with any anterior considera- tion of means and ends, and may vary from the half- conscious yielding to a train of reverie up to the obstinate driving of a tired brain onto the difficult task of exact thought. The text-books of psychology now warn every IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS 25 student against the ' intellectualist ' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, -it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual pro- cesses by which it is often directed and modified. Our inherited organisation inclines us to re-act in certain < ways to certain stimuli because such reactions have been useful in the past in preserving our species. Some of the reactions are what we call specifically ' instincts,' that is to say, impulses towards definite , acts or series of acts, independent of any conscious \ anticipation of their probable effects.^ Those instincts are sometimes unconscious and involuntary; and sometimes, in the case of ourselves and apparently of other higher animals, they are conscious and voluntary. But the connection between means and ends which they exhibit is the result not of any contrivance by the actor, but of the survival, in the past, of the 'fittest' of many varying tendencies to act. Indeed the instinct persists when it is obviously useless, as in the case of a dog who turns round to flatten the grass before lying down on a carpet ; and even when it is known to be dangerous, as when a man recovering from typhoid hungers for solid food. The fact that impulse is not always the result of ' ' Instinct is usually defined aa the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends without foresight of the ends and without previous education in the performance.' — W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 383. 26 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS conscious foresight is most clearly seen in the case of children. The first impulses of a baby to suck, or to grasp, are obviously ' instinctive.' But even when the unconscious or unremembered condition of infancy has been succeeded by the connected consciousness of childhood, the child will fly to his mother 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, or steal fruit, or climb trees, though no one has suggested such actions to him, and though he may expect disagreeable results from them. We generally think of ' instinct ' as consisting of a number of such separate tendencies, each towards some distinct act or series of acts. But there is no reason to suppose that the whole body^f inherited impulse even among non-human animals has ever been divisible in that way. The evolutionary history of impulse must have been very complicated. An impulse which sur- vived because it produced one result may have per- sisted with modifications because it produced another result; and side by side with impulses towards- specific acts we can detect in all animals vague and* generalised tendencies, often overlapping and contra- dictory, like curiosity and shyness, sympathy and cruelty, imitation and restless activity. It is possible, therefore, to avoid the ingenious dilemma by which Mr. Balfour argues that we must either demonstrate that the desire, e.g. for scientific truth, is lineally IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS 27 descended from some one of the specific instincts which teach us 'to fight, to eat, and to bring up children,' or must admit the supernatural authority of the Shorter Catechism.^ The prerational character of many of our impulses is, however, disguised by the fact that during the lifetime ' of each individual they are increasingly modified by memory and habit and thought. Even the non-human animals are able to adapt and modify their inherited impulses either by imitation or by habits founded on Individual experience. When telegraph wires, for instance, were first put up many birds flew against them and were killed. But although the number of those that were killed was obviously insufficient to produce a change in the biological inheritance of the species, very few birds fly against the wires now. The young birds must have imitated their elders, who had learnt to avoid the wires; just as the young of many hunting animals are said to learn devices and precautions which are the result of their parents' experience, and later to make and hand down by imitation inventions of their own. Many of the directly inherited impulses, again, appear both in man and other animals at a certain point in the growth of the individual, and then, if they are checked, ' Seflectiona suggested hy the New Theory of Matter, 1904, p. 21. ' So far aa natural science can teU us, every quality of sense or intellect which does not help us to fight, to eat, and to bring up children, is but a by-product of the qualities which do.' 28 HUMAJSr NATUEE IN POLITICS die away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits ; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience and thought. With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster has to deal. In Macaulay's time he used to be guided by his ' common-sense,' and to intellectualise the whole process. The unfortunate boys who acted upon an ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, or to mimic their teacher, were asked, with repeated threats of punishment, ' why ' they had done so. They, being ignorant of their own evolutionary history, were forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punished for that as well. The trained schoolmaster of to-day takes the existence of such impulses as a normal fact ; and decides how far, in each case, he shall check them by relying on that half- conscious imitation which makes the greater part of class-room discipline, and how far by stimulating a conscious recognition of the connection, ethical or penal, between acts and their consequences. In any case his power of controlling instinctive impulse is due to his recognition of its * non-intellectual origin. He may even be able to extend this recognition to his own impulses, and to overcome the conviction that his irritability during IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS 29 afteiDoon school in July is the result of an intellectual conclusion as to the need of special severity in dealing with a set of unprecedentedly wicked boys. The politician, however, is still apt to intellectualise impulse as completely as the schoolmaster did fifty 1 years ago. He has two excuses, that he deals entirely with adults, whose impulses are more deeply modified by experience and thought than those of children, and that it is very difficult for any one who thinks about politics not to confine his consideration to those political actions and impulses which are accompanied by the greatest amount of conscious thought, and which therefore come first into his mind. But the politician thinks about men in large communities, and it is in the forecasting of the action of large com- munities that the intellectualist fallacy is most mis- leading. The results of experience and thought are often confined to individuals or small groups, and when they differ may cancel each other as political forces. The original human impulses are, with per- sonal variations, common to the whole race, and increase in their importance with an increase in the number of those influenced by them. It may be worth while, therefore, to attempt a de- scription of some of the more obvious or more important political impulses, remembering always that in politics we are dealing not with such clear-cut separate instincts as we may find in children and animals, 30 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS but with tendencies often weakened by the course of human evolution, still more often transferred to new uses, and acting not simply but in combination or counteraction, Aristotle, for instance, says that it is 'affection' (or ' friendship,' for the meaning of 8piiirots . . . fooce Si xal tAs ir6X«s amixay i) (pCKia, Kal ol vonodirai. /iSKKov wepl airiiv must also be significant, must be felt in some way to matter to us. The stars re-appear nightly in the heavens, but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a tortoise, 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 in distress, stand out, with- POLITICAL ENTITIES 63 out need of experience or teaching, from the stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement or glimpse of a rabbit among the under- growth separates itself at once from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers. Some- times the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip (provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by experience and association. In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot- paper at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never hejird of one before were 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 easily recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, ' be exceedingly like unto himself.' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If a marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be carried out in the customary place and with the 64 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS customary gestures. In some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and made recognis- able still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited associations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life. A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by association. Eecognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolu- tionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smeU is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep' off birds.^ In early poli- ' Gf. William James, Principlea of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 392:— 'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is POLITICAL ENTITIES 65 tical society most recognition is guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king is then recognised as king because he is the ' staff-bearer ' (o-zo^tttoO^o? /3acriX,ev?). Such a staff is very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a model of a staff stood for a king. At this point it is already difficult not to intellec- tualise the whole process. Our own ' common-sense ' and the systematised common-sense of the eighteenth- century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the original social contract be- tween ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and royal punishments, and that he there- fore decided by a process of reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king. the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them.' 66 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS "When the symbol by which our impulse is stimu- lated is actual language, it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use of language, the breaking up by abstrac- tion of a bundle of sensations — one's memory, for instance, of a royal person ; the selection of a single quality — kingship, for instance — shared by other such bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When we are con- sciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for *the purpose of stimulating us to action. Indeed the ' brass-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a friend POLITICAL ENTITIES 67 to write in large letters on cards a series of common political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of the associations which successively enter his conscious- ness. The first associations revealed will be automatic and obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a ' visualiser,' produce at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half con- scious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is ' audile,' the marks will first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction may be associated. I am a ' visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a blurred triangular outline. Other ' visualisers ' have described to me the picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway carriage), as - automatically called up by the word England. After the automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional accompaniment comes the ' meaning ' of the word, the things one knows about England, which are presented to the memory by a process semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at 68 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS least of the experiment, before we have time con- sciously to reflect or choose. A corresponding process may he set up by other symbols besides language. If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be substituted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go on — the automatic ' image,' automatically accompanied « by emotional association, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the voluntary realisation of ' meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recol- lection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet, and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the 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 cornea, 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 change from the automatic images of ■ voice ' and ' face ' to the reflective mood in which POLITICAL ENTITIES 69 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 evolutionarily earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits in one's chair one can feel that that is so. Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena of religion. The only religion of any im- portance which has ever been consciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste Comte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensure moral action among the distractions and tempta- tions of daily life, he required each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image of Humanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for a definite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known and loved woman — his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figure always in the same attitude and dress, so that it should always present itself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate association with the word Humanit^.^ With that would be automatically associated the ' The Catechism of Positive Edigion (Tr. by Congrevo), First Part, 'Explanation of the Worship, e.g. p. 65: 'The Positivist shuts hia eyes daring his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.' 70 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS original impulse of affection for the person imaged. Aa soon as possible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller but less cogent emotional associations connected with that meaning. This inven- tion was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in the Eoman Catholic Church and partly suggested by Comte's own experiences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de Vaux. One of the reasons that it has not come into greater use may have been that men in general are not quite such good ' visualisers ' as Coiiate found himself to be. Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his Apologia, explains how, he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints that behind his belief in the real existence of such ima<^es was his sense of the convenience of creating them. He says that he identi- fied the 'character and institict' of 'states' and of those 'governments of religious communities,' from which he suffered sor-much, with spirits 'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. . . . My preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of the " Prince of Persia " in the prophet Daniel : and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced " the angels of the seven churches." ' ^ ' Newman, Apologia (1864), pp. 91, 92. POLITICAL ENTITIES 71 In 1837 ... I said . . . 'Take England with many high virtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of Heaven nor Hell.' Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion of Christianity, lays stress on the use of the word ' church ' and the ' possibilities of personification which it offered.'^ This use may have owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction applied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of all Christian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a half conscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term. But when it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most men to the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and not to those which would follow on a full analysis of the meaning. Keligious history affords innumerable such instances. The 'truth embodied in a tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which ' every knee shall bow,' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling than the realisation of its meaning. Things of the senses — the sacred food ' Eamack, Expansion of Christianity (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11. 72 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS whifth one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see 'and touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types. If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover how much harder it is there than in > religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional experi- ences. 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 his chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, of some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his relation to all these things. But what seems to happen in the crisis of battle is not the logical building up or analysing of the idea of one's country, but that automatic selection by the mind of some thing of sense accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection which I have already described. Throughout his life the conscript has lived in a stream of sensations, the printed pages of the geography book, the, sight of streets and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds or rivers, all of which go to make up the infinity " of facts from which he might abstract an idea of his country. What comes to him in the final charge? Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birth-place. More likely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom or imagination for enabling an entity which one can love to stand out from the un- POLITICAL ENTITIES 73 realised welter of experience. If he is an Italian it may be the name, the musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the ' Marseillaise.' Eomans 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 the fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the present and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to the world. ' But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence of Pericles' voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother of the dead. In the evolution of politics, among the most import- ant events have been the successive creations of new moral entities — of such ideals as justice, freedom, right. In their origin that process of conscious logical abstrac- tion, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to the historical fact. We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of the conversations in which Socrates compared and analysed the unwilling answers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice was made by his work an infinitely more effec- 74 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS tive political term. It is certain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation of the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by some forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort of conscious thought. But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and Justice, like a rock statue on whom succes- sive generations of artists have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as an abstraction but as a direct revelation. It is true that this revela- tion made the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame them seemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparison and analysis. Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice the command which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacred person of his herald. But Justice to her was a goddess, * housemate of the nether gods ' — and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned the gods back into abstractions. The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to the fact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotional force without stiffening it into a personification; but that was because they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all gods. Amos wrote, ' I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your assemblies. , . . Take thou away from me the noise of POLITICAL ENTITIES 75 thy songs ; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteous- ness as an ever-flowing stream.' ^ 'Judgment' and ' righteousness ' are not goddesses, but the voice which Amos heard was not the voice of an abstraction. Sometimes a new moral or political entity is created rather by immediate insight than by the slow process of deliberate analysis. Some seer of genius perceives in a flash the essential likeness of things hitherto kept apart in men's minds — the impulse which leads to anger with one's brother, and that which leads to murder, the charity of the widow's mite and of the rich man's gold, the intemperance of the debauchee and of the party leader. But when the master dies the vision too often dies with him. Plato's 'ideas' became the formulae of a system of magic, and the command of Jesus that one should give all that one had to the poor handed over one-third of the land of Europe to be the untaxed property of wealthy ecclesi- astics. It is this last relation between words and things which makes the central difficulty of thought about , politics. The words are so rigid, so easily personified, so associated with affection and prejudice ; the things symbolised by the words are so unstable. The moralist or the teacher deals, as a Greek would say, for the most part, with ' natural,' the politician always with ' con- > Amos, oh. v., TV. 21, 23, 24 (R. V. M.). 76 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS ventional ' species. If one forgets the meaning of , motherhood or childhood, Nature has yet made for us unmistakable mothers and children who reappear, true to type, in each generation. The chemist can make sure whether he is using a word in precisely the same sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work in his laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always changing, may indeed disappear and may require hun- dreds of years to restore. Aristotle defined the word ' polity ' to mean a state where ' the citizens as a body govern in accordance with the general good.'^ As he wrote, self-government in those States from which he abstracted the idea was already withering beneath the power of Macedonia. Soon there were no such States at all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle's conception, the name which he defined is borne by the ' police ' of Odessa. It is no mere accident of philology that makes ' Justices' Justice ' a paradox. From the time that the Eoman jurisconsults resumed the work of the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and answer built up the conception of ' natural justice, it, like all other political conceptions, was exposed to the two dangers. On the one hand, since the original effort of abstraction was in its completeness incom- municable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed its use. On the other hand, the actions and ' Politics, Bk. III. oh. vii., brav ri wX^8os wpbs tA Koivbii ToXiT£ii)j- rat ffvu^ipov. POLITICAL ENTITIES 77 institutions of mankind, from which the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Even although the manuscripts of the Eoman lawyers survived, Eoman law and Eoman institutions had both ceased to be. When the phrases of Justinian were used by a Merovingian king or a Spanish Inquisitor not only was the meaning of the words changed, but the facts to which the words could have applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emotional power of the bare words remained. The civil law and canon law of the Middle Ages were able to enforce all kinds of abuses because the tradition of reverence still attached itself to the sound of ' Eome.' For hundreds of years, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful than his neighbours by the fact that he was ' Eoman Emperor,' and was called by the name of Caesar. The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which influence the history of a political entity when once formed confront the statesman who is engaged in making a new one. The great men, Stein, Bismarck, Cavour, or Metternich, who throughout the nineteenth century worked at the reconstruction of the Europe which Napoleon's conquests shattered, had to build up new States which men should respect and love, whose governments they should willingly obey, and for whose continued existence they should be prepared to die in battle. Eaces and languages and religions were inter- 78 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS mingled throughout central Europe, and the historical memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishop- rics into which the map was divided were confused and unexciting. Nothing was easier than to produce and distribute new flags and coins and national names. But the emotional effect of such things depends upon associations which require time to produce, and which may have to contend against associations already existing. The boy in Lombardy or Galicia saw the soldiers and the schoolmaster salute the Austrian flag, but the real thrill came when he heard his father or mother whisper the name of Italy or Poland. Perhaps, as in the case of Hanover, the old associations and the new are for many years almost equally balanced. In such times men fall back from the immediate emotional associations of the national name and search for its meaning. They ask what is the Austrian or the German Empire. As long as there was only one Pope men handed on unexamined the old reverence from father to son. When for forty years there had been two Popes, at Eome and at Avignon, men began to ask what constituted a Pope. And in such times some men go further stilL They may ask not only what is the meaning of the word Austrian Empire, or Pope, but what in the nature of things is the ultimate reason why the Austrian Empire or the Papacy should exist. The work therefore of nation-building must be POLITICAL ENTITIES 79 carried forward on each plane. The national name and flag and anthem and coinage all have their entirely non-logical effect based on habitual association. Mean- while the statesmen strive to create as much meaning as possible for such symbols. If all the subjects of a State serve in one army and speak, or understand, one language, or even use a black-letter alphabet which has been abandoned elsewhere, the national name will mean more to them. The Saxon or the Savoyard will have a fuller answer to give himself when he asks 'What does it mean, that I am a German or a Frenchman ? ' A single successful 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 the past, to revive and intensify the emotional associations connected with older national areas — and behind all this will go on the deliberate philosophical discussion of the advantages to be derived from large or small, racial or regional States, which will reach the statesman at second-hand and the citizen at third-hand. As a result, Italy, Belgium, and the German Empire succeed in establishing themselves as States resting 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 nineteenth century was difi&cult, still more difficult 80 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS is the task before the English statesmen of the twentieth century of creating an imperial patriotism, "We have not even a name, with any emotional associa- tions, for the United Kingdom itself. No Englishman is stirred by the name ' British,' the name ' English ' irritates all Scotchmen, and the Irish are irritated by both alike. Our national anthem is a peculiarly flat and uninspiring specimen of eighteenth-century opera libretto and opera music. The little naked St. George on the gold coins, or the armorial pattern on the silver coins never inspired any one. The new copper coin- age bears, it is true, a graceful figure of Miss Hicks Beach. But we have made it so small and ladylike that it has none of the emotional force of the glorious portrait heads of France or Switzerland. The only personification of his nation which the artisan of Oldham or Middlesbrough can recognise is the picture of John Bull as a fat, brutal, early nine- teenth-century Midland farmer. One of our national symbols alone, the 'Union Jack,' though it is as destitute of beauty as a patchwork quilt, is fairly satisfactory. But all its associations so far are with naval warfare. When we go outside the United Kingdom we are in still worse case. 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together with its Colonies and Dependencies ' has no shorter or more inspiring name. Throughout the Colonial Conference of 1907 statesmen POLITICAL ENTITIES 81 and leader writers tried every expedient of periphrasis and allusion to avoid hurting any one's feelings even by using such a term as 'British Empire.' To the Sydney Bulletin, and to the caricaturists of Europe, the fact that any territory on the map of the world is coloured red still recalls nothing but the little greedy eyes, huge mouth, and gorilla hands of ' John Bull.' If, again, the young Boer or Hindoo or ex- American Canadian asks himself what is the meaning of member- ship ('citizenship,' as applied to five-sixths of the inhabitants of the Empire, would be misleading) of the Empire, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to give an answer. When he goes deeper and asks for what purpose the Empire exists, he is apt to be told that the inhabitants of Great Britain conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind and have not yet had v/ time to think out an «b post facto justification for so doing. The only product of memory or reflection that , can stir in him the emotion of patriotism is the state- ment that so far the tradition of the Empire has been to encourage and trust to political freedom. But political freedom, even in its noblest form, is a negative quality, and the word is apt to bear different meanings in Bengal and Ehodesia and Australia. States, however, constitute only one among many types of political entities. As soon as any body of men have been grouped under a common political name, that name may acquire emotional associations as F 82 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS well as an intellectually analysable meaning. For the convenience, for instance, of local government the suburbs of Birmingham are divided into separate boroughs. Partly because these boroughs occupy the site of ancient villages, partly because football teams of Scotch professionals are named after them, partly because human emotions must have something to attach themselves to, they are said to be developing a fierce local patriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as the Blues hated the Greens in the Byzantine theatre. In London, largely under the influence of the Birmingham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs were created in 1899, with names — at least in the case of the City of Westminster — deliberately selected in order to revive half-forgotten emotional associations. However, in spite of Mr. Chesterton's prophecy in Hie Napoleon of Netting Hill, very few Londoners have learnt to feel or think primarily as citizens of their boroughs. Town Halls are built which they never see, coats of arms are invented which they would not recognise; and their boroughs are mere electoral wards in which they vote for a list of unknown names grouped under the general title adopted by their political party. The party is, in fact, the most effective political^ entity in the modern national State. It has come into existence with the appearance of representative govern- ment on a large scale ; its development has been un- POLITICAL ENTITIES 83 ' hampered by legal or constitutional traditions, and it represents the most vigorous attempt which has been made to adapt the form of our political institutions to" the actual facts of human nature. In a modern State there may be ten million or more voters. Every one of them has an equal right to come forward as a candidate and to urge either as candidate or agitator the particular views which he may hold on any possible political question. But to each citizen, living as he does in the infinite stream of things, only a few of his ten million fellow-citizens could exist as separate objects of political thought or feeling, even if each one of them held only one opinion on one subject without change during his life. Something is required simpler and more permanent, something which can be loved ' and trusted, and which can be recognised at successive elections as being the same thing that was loved and trusted before ; and a party is such a thing. The origin of any particular party may be due to a deliberate intellectual process. It may be formed, as Burke said, by ' a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.'^ I But when a party has once come into existence its fortunes depend upon facts of human nature of which 'deliberate thought is only one. It is primarily a name, which, like other names, calls up when it is ' Thoughts on the Present Discontents (Maomillan, 1902), p. 81. 84 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS heard or seen an 'image' that shades imperceptibly into the voluntary realisation of its meaning. As in other cases, emotional reactions can be set up by ■ the name and its automatic mental associations. It is - the business of the party managers to secure that these automatic associations shall be as clear as possible, shall be shared by as large a number as possible, and shall call up as many and as strong emotions as possible. For this purpose nothing is more i generally useful than the party colour. Our distant ancestors must have been able to recognise colour before they recognised language, and the simple and stronger emotions more easily attach themselves to a colour than to a word. The poor boy who died the other day with the ribbon of the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club on his pillow loved the colour itself with a direct and intimate affection. A party tune is equally automatic in its action," and, in the case of people with a musical ' ear,' even more effective than a party colour as an object of emotion. As long as the Marseillaise, which is now the national tune of France, was the party tune of the revolution its influence was enormous. Even now, outside of France, it is a very valuable party asset. It was a wise suggestion which an experienced political organiser made in the Westminster Gazette at the time of Gladstone's death, that part of the money collected in his honour should be spent in paying for the com- POLITICAL ENTITIES 85 position of the best possible marching tune, which should be identified for all time with the Liberal Party.^ One of the few mistakes made by the very able men who organised Mr. Chamberlain's Tariff Eeform Campaign was their failure to secure even a tolerably good tune. Only less automatic than those of colour or tune 1 come the emotional associations called up by the first and simplest meaning of the word or words used for the party name. A Greek father called his baby ' Very Glorious ' or ' Good in Counsel/ and the makers of parties in the same way choose names whose : primary meanings possess established emotional asso- ciations. From the beginning of the existence and . activity of a party new associations are, however, being created which tend to take the place, in association, of the original meaning of the name. No one in America when he uses the terms Eepublican or Democrat thinks of their dictionary meanings. Any one, indeed, who did so would have acquired a mental habit as useless and as annoying as the habit of reading Greek history with a perpetual recognition of the dictionary meanings of names like Aristobulus and Theocritus. Long and precise names which make definite assertions as to party policy are therefore soon shortened into mean- wingless syllables with new associations derived from the actual history of the party. The Constitutional ' Westminster Gazette, June 11, 1898. 86 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Democrats in Eussia become Cadets, and the Inde- pendent Labour Party becomes the I.L.P. On the ' other hand, the less conscious emotional associations which are automatically excited by less precise political names may last much longer. The German National Liberals were valuable allies for Bisiaarck during a whole generation because their name vaguely suggested a combination of patriotism and freedom. When the mine-owners in the Transvaal decided some years ago to form a political party they chose, probably after considerable discussion, the name of ' Progressive.' It was an excellent choice. In South Africa the original associations of the word were apparently soon super- seded, but elsewhere it long suggested that Sir Percy Fitzpatrick and his party had the same sort of demo- cratic sympathies as Mr. M'Kinnon Wood and his followers on the London County Coimcil. No one speaking to an audience whose critical and logical faculties were fully aroused would indeed contend that because a certain body of people had chosen to call themselves Progressives, therefore a vote against them was necessarily a vote against progress. But in the dim and shadowy region of emotional association a ^ good name, if its associations are sufficiently sub- conscious, has a real political value. Conversely, the opponents of a party attempt to " label it with a name that will excite feelings of opposition. The old party terms of Whig and Tory POLITICAL ENTITIES 87 are striking instances of such names given by opponents and lasting perhaps half a century before they lost their original abusive associations. More modern attempts have been less successful, because they have been more precise. ' Jingo ' had some of the vague suggestiveness of an effectively bad name, but ' Separatist,' ' Little Englander,' ' Eood Taxer,' remain as assertions to be consciously accepted or rejected. The whole relation between party entities and political impulse can perhaps be best illustrated from the art of advertisement. In advertisement the intel- lectual process can be watched apart from its ethical '' implications, and advertisement and party politics are becoming more and more closely assimilated in method. The political poster is placed side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on the hoardings, it is drawn by the same artist and follows the same empirical rules of art. Let us suppose therefore that a financier thinks that there 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 and unstable as the actual political opinions of man- kind. Every leaf in every tea-garden is different from every other leaf, and a week of damp weather may change the whole stock in any warehouse. What therefore should the advertiser do to create a com- mercial ' entity,' a ' tea ' which men can think and feel about ? A hundred years ago he would have made a 88 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS number of optimistic and detailed statements with regard to his opportunities and methods of trade. He would have printed in the newspapers a statement that ' William Jones, assisted by a staff of experienced buyers, will attend the tea-sales of the East India Company, and wUl lay in parcels from the best Chinese Gardens, which he will retail 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 the critical intellect it would now be judged. We should not consider Mr. Jones to be an unbiassed witness as to the excellence of his choice, or think that he would have sufficient motive to adhere to his pledge about his rate of profit if he thought he could get more. Nowadays, therefore, such an advertiser would practice on our automatic and sub-conscious associa- tions. He would choose some term, say 'Parramatta Tea,' which would' produce in most men a vague suggestion of the tropical East, combined with the sub-conscious memory of a geography lesson on Australia. He would then proceed to create in connection with the word an automatic picture-image having previous emotional associations of its own. By the time that a hundred thousand pounds had been 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 a day-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the POLITICAL ENTITIES 89 British fleet, or of a pretty young English matron, or of any other subject that the advertiser had chosen for its association with the emotions of trust or affection. When music plays a larger part in English public education it may be possible to use it effectively for advertisement, and a ' Parramatta Motif ' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, in connection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Eeturn, and would be squeaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop. This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid to clearness of thought, that up to this point no Parramatta Tea exists, and no one has even settled what sort of tea shall be provided under that name. Parramatta tea is still a commercial entity pure and simple. It may later on be decided to sell very poor tea at a large profit until the original associations of the name have been gradually superseded by the association of disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment by selling different teas under that name in different places, and to push the sale of the flavour which ' takes on.' But there are other attrac- tive names of teas on the hoardings, with associations of babies, and bull-dogs, and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop a permanent trade in competition with these it will probably be found wisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform quality, and with a distinctive flavour which may act as its 'meaning.' The great difficulty will then come when there is a change of 90 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS public taste, and when the sales fall off because the chosen flavour no longer pleases. The directors may think it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminishing number of customers, or they may gradu- ally substitute another flavour, taking the risk that the number of housewives who say, ' This is not the real Parramatta Tea,' may be balanced by the number of those who say, 'Parramatta Tea has improved.' If people will not buy the old flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parra- matta Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles. All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are to the advertiser. The party v candidate is, at his first appearance, to most of his con- stituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Conservative upon it. That name has associations of colour and music, of traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist independently of the party policy. Unless he bears the party label — unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate — not only wiU those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible entity to the electors at all. A proportion of the electors, varying greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the ■ regular ' nominee of their party without reference to POLITICAL ENTITIES 91 bis programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he must also present a programme which can be identified with the party policy. But, in any case, as long as he is a party can- didate, be must remember that it is in that character that be speaks and acts. The party prepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make it possible for them to think and feel with him. When he speaks there is between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the part with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the mask of another party. Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. This does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals they can indeed only pre- serve their political life by being in constant readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the exist- ence of their party itself. When Sir Kobert Peel was converted to Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it might not be recognised, even in the half- 92 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS conscious logic of habit and association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four years before. In either case Peel was doing something other and more serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of the moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost. If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what that Socialism is which influences so many lives ? He might answer himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as ' a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of con- scious and deliberate contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective adminis- tration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be abandoned, either be- POLITICAL ENTITIES 93 cause no nation could be persuaded to try them or because when tried they failed. But he would also see that this definition of a many-sided and ever- varying movement drawn by abstraction from in- numerable socialistic proposals and desires is not a description of ' Socialism ' as it exists for the greater number of its supporters. The need of something ■' which one may love and for which one may work has created for thousands of working men a personified 'Socialism,' a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need of some engine of thought which one may use with absolute V faith and certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but a ' final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in 1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from Mr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimly educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine humility in his eyes, ' How strange it is that this glorious truth has been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown to me.' Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and writing. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its predecessors — Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism — and may survive only in histories of a movement which has 94 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS since undergone other transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand, remain, as the Eepublic has remained in France, to be the title on coins and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and disillusionments has suc- ceeded in establishing itself as a government. But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as a 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 the movement wiU have no political existence, yet its use creates a constant series of diffi- cult problems in conduct. Any one who applies the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist' Eoman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term ' Catholic Church ' to mean a society which has gone through various intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. He there- fore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the other hand, the Church is an unchang- POLITICAL ENTITIES 95 ing miracle based on an unchanging revelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he ' believes ' in the Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual occurrence of most of the facts which constitute the original revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their name for his own fraudulent pur- poses. They can no more understand him than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Demo- crats understand Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use of 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 of thought. Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression is, so to speak, a party — a political entity — in himself. He may fashion a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intel- lectual career is to exist for the mass of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent. The indifferent and half ' attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is Uke a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the 96 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS same attitude for a long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark. 'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigil- ance ; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.' ^ Most statesmen avoid this choice between the loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of character resulting from the public persist- ence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own con- clusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word remains, and becomes part of that entity outside him- self which the stateman is always building or destroy- ing or transforming. The same conditions affect other political entities besides parties and statesmen. If a newspaper is to live as a political force it must impress itself on men's minds as holding day by day to a consistent view. The writers, not only from editorial discipline, ' Gleanings, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's Life, vol. i. p. 211. POLITICAL ENTITIES 97 but from the instinctive desire to be understood, write in tbe character of their paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wishing to advocate different opinions, it must either frankly pro- claim itself as a new thing or must make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative steps that the new attitude is a necessary development of the old. It is therefore rightly felt that a capitalist who buys a paper for the sake of using its old influence to strengthen a new movement is doing something to be judged by other moral standards than those which apply to the purchase of so much printing-machinery and paper. He may be destroying something which has been a stable and intelligible entity for thousands of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible world, and which has collected round it affection and trust as real as was ever inspired by an orator or a monarch. 98 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS CHAPTER III NON-EATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS The assumption — which is so closely interwoven with our habits of political and economic thought — that men always act on a reasoned opinion as to their c interests, may be divided into two separate assumptions: , first, that men always act on some kind of inference as to the best means of reaching a preconceived end, and secondly, that all inferences are of the same kind, and are produced by a uniform process of ' reasoning.' In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first assumption, and attempted to show that it is important for a politician to realise that men do not always act on inferences as to means and ends. I argued that men often act in politics under the immediate stimulus ' of affection and instinct, and that affection and interest may be directed towards political entities which are very different from those facts in the world around us which we can discover by deliberate observation and analysis. In this chapter I propose to consider the second NON-EATIONAL INFEEENCE 99 assumption, and to inquire how far it is true that men, when they do form inferences as to the result of their political actions, always form them by a process of reasoning. In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary difficulty that it is very hard to arrive at a clear defini- tion of reasoning. Any one who watches the working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology. The mind of man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb ' together ; so that emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a single mental experience. This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when we are sitting in passive con- templation we would often find it hard to say whether our successive states of consciousness are best described as emotions or inferences. And when our thought clearly belongs to the type of inference it is often hard to say whether its steps are controlled by so definite a purpose of discovering truth that we are entitled to call it reasoning. Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind. If we forget a name we say the 100 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to see if the name we want will be suggested to us. When we receive bad news we strive to realise it by allowing successive mental associations to arise of them- selves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in The Tempest the connection between the successive images-^the baseless fabric of this vision — the cloud-capped towers — the gorgeous palaces — the solemn temples — the great globe itself — is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated 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 higher forms of non- inferential association. Many of our inferences, like the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take place when we are making no conscious effort at all. In such a purely instinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply two names for a single automatic and uncon- scious process. We can speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse ; we draw, for instance, J^ON-RATIONAL INFEEENOE 101 by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the distance and solidity of objects from the movements of our eye-muscles in focussing,^ and from the difference between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two converging sheets of looking-glass beneath his table, we can only say that the photograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see right under the table. The whole process of inference, rational or non- rational, is indeed built up from the primary fact that one mental state may call up another, either because the two have been associated together in the history of the individual, or because a connection between the two has proved useful in the history of the race. If a man and his dog stroll together down the street they turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon the bicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process of inference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposes of his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rational thought where the 102 HUMAN" NATUEE IN POLITICS dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and is more or less conscious of his own logical methods. But the weakness of inference by automatic associa- tion as an instrument of thought consists in the fact that either of a pair of associated ideas may call up the other without reference to their logical connection. The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause caUs up the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is wonderfully rapid and fertile in drawing inferences, but he hunts the scent backward as easily as he does forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes that he has committed a murder. The sight of an empty plate convinces him that he has had dinner. If left to himself he will probably go through routine actions well enough. But any one who understands his condition can 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 belief that we are about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid our notes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in a night-shirt. Even when men are awake, those parts of their mind to which for the moment they are not giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfounded inferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the attention of his audience concentrated on the observa- tion of what he is doing with his right hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movements NON-EATIONAL IKFEEENCE 103 of his left hand. People in a state of strong religious emotion sometimes become conscious of a throbbing sound in their ears, due to the increased force of their circulation. An organist, by opening the thirty- two foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can thereby induce in the congregation a vague and half- conscious belief that they are experiencing religious emotion. The political importance of all this consists in the fact that most of the political opinions of most men are the result, not of reasoning tested by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious inference fixed by habit. It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks of thought that habit shows its power in politics. In our other activities habit is largely a matter of muscular adaptation, but the bodily movements of politics occur so seldom that nothing like a habit can be set up by them. One may see a respectable voter, whose political opinions have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits of thirty years, fumbling over the act of marking and folding his ballot paper like a child with its first copybook. Some men even seem to reverence most those of their , opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate reasoning. When Mr. Barrie's Bowie Haggart said: ' I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,' ^ he was comparing the merely 1 Auld Licht Idylls, p. 220. 104 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know how it was produced. Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe •■ guide in the affairs of our daily life. The material- world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of many hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious. But even in our personal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember the association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which created that association. "We discover in our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any reason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness. When the connec- tion is remembered in a telling phrase, and when its origin has never been consciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really vivid belief for 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 without further evidence. NON-EATIONAL INFEEENCE 105 Under ordinary circumstances not much harm is done by this fact ; because a name would not be likely to ' catch on ' unless a good many people really thought it appropriate, and unless it ' caught on ' we should not be likely to hear it more than once or twice. But in politics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while for some people to take a great deal of trouble in order to produce such an effect without waiting for the idea to enforce itself by merely accidental repetition. I have already said that political parties try to give each other bad names by an organised system of mental suggestion. If the word ' Wastrel,' for instance, appears on the contents bills of the Daily Mail one morning as a name for the Progressives during a County Council election, a passenger riding on an omnibus from Putney to the Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred times, and will have formed a fairly stable mental association by the end of the journey. If he reflected, he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the 106 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS 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 pro- duction of impulse. Things that are nearer sense, nearer to our more ancient evolutionary past, produce a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse. When a new candidate on his first appear- ance smiles at his constituents exactly as if he were an old friend, not only does he appeal, as I said in an earlier chapter, to an ancient and immediate instinct of human affection, hut he produces at the same time a shadowy belief that he is an old friend; and his agent may even imply this, provided that he says nothing definite enough to arouse critical and rational attention. By the end of the meeting one can safely go as far as to call for three cheers for 'good old Jones.' ^ Mr. G. K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article on American elections a sentence ^ Three-quarters of the art of the trained salesman depends upon his empirical knowledge of this group of psychological facts. A small girl of my acquaintance, explaining why she had brought back from her first independent shopping expedition a photograph frame which she herself found to be distressing, said : ' The shop- man seemed to suppose I had chosen it, and so I paid for it and came away.' But her explanation was the result of memory and reflection. At the moment, in a shadowy way which was suflicieat for the shopman, she supposed that she had chosen it. NON-EATIONAL INFEEEISTCE 107 which said : ' A little sound commoii-sense often goes further with an audience of American working men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential election.' ^ The 'sound common-sense' consisted, not, as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presentation of the hammering as a logical argument, but in the orator's knowledge of the way in which force is given to non-logical inference and his willingness to use that knowledge. When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass of our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do. I have been told that when an English agitation against the importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important per- sonage said that ' there was not a vote in it.' But the agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics. Any one, how- ever, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of the voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type, ' Heretics, p. 122. 108 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would have aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour. After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them. I had at the general election worked in a constituency in which many such posters were displayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A year later I stood for the London County Council in the same constituency. An hour before the close of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clear- ness of polling-day fatigue, 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 off last time: and now we'll put it round your bloody neck and strangle you.' In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared on the London hoardings thousands of posters which were intended to create a belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personal livelihood by defrauding the rate- payers. If a statement had been published to that effect it would have been an appeal to the critical intellect, and could have been met by argument, or in NON-EATIONAL INFEEENCE 109 the law courts. But the appeal was made to the process of sub-conscious inference. The poster con- sisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent the Progressive Party, pointing a foreshortened finger and saying, with sufficient ambiguity to escape the law of libel : ' It 's your money we want.' Its effective- ness depended on its exploitation of the fact that most men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by a series of rapid and unconscious inferences from the appear- ance of the man accused. The person represented was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fashion of his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his teeth, and the redness of his nose, obviously a pro- fessional sharper. He was, I believe, drawn by an American artist, and his face and clothes had a vaguely American appearance, which, in the region of sub- conscious association, further suggested to most on- lookers the idea of Tammany Hall. This poster was brilliantly successful, but, now that the election is over, it, like the Chinese pictures, seems likely to con- tinue a career of irrational transference. One notices that one Progressive evening paper uses a reduced copy of it whenever it wishes to imply that the Moderates are influenced by improper pecuniary motives. I myself find that it tends to associate itself in my mind with the energetic politician who induced the railway companies and others to pay for it, and who, for all I know, may in his own personal 110 HUMAN" NATUEE IN POLITICS appearance recall the best traditions of the English gentleman. Writers on the 'psychology of the crowd' have pointed out the effect of excitement and numbers in substituting non-rational for rational inference. Any cause, however, which prevents a man from giving full attention to his mental processes may produce the phenomena of non-rational inference in an extreme degree. I have often watched in some small sub- committee the method by which either of the two men with a real genius for committee work whom I know could control his colleagues. The process was most successful towards the end of an afternoon, when the members were tired and somewhat dazed with the effort of following a rapid talker through a mass of unfamiliar detail. If at that point the operator slightly quickened the flow of his information, and slightly em- phasised the assumption that he was being thoroughly understood, he could put some at least of his colleagues into a sort of waking trance, in which they would have cheerfully assented to the proposition that the best means of securing, e.g., the permanence of private schools was a large and immediate increase in the number of public schools. It is sometimes argued that such non-rational inferences are merely the loose fringe of our political thinking, and that responsible decisions in politics, whether they are right or wrong, are always the result NON-EATIONAL INFEEENCE 111 of conscious ratiocination. American political writers, for instance, of the traditional intellectualist type are sometimes faced with the fact that the delegates to national party conventions, when they select candi- dates and adopt programmes for Presidential elections, are not in a condition in which they are likely to examine the logical validity of their own mental processes. Such writers fall back on the reflection that the actual choice of President is decided not by excited conventions, but by voters coming straight from the untroubled sanctuary of the American home. President Garfield illustrated this point of view in an often-quoted passage of his speech to the Eepublican Convention of 1880 :— 'I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. . . . Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of the Eepublic to be decreed for the next four years . . . but by four millions of Eepublican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home and country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and knowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by. There God 112 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS prepares the verdict that shall determine the wisdom of our work to-night.' ^ But the divine oracle, whether in America or in England, turns out, too often, only to be a tired house- holder, reading the headlines and personal paragraphs of his party newspaper, and half-consciously forming mental habits of mean suspicion or national arrogance. Sometimes, indeed, during an election, one feels that it is, after all, in big meetings, where big thoughts can be given with all their emotional force, that the deeper things of politics have the best chance of recognition. The voter as he reads his newspaper may adopt by suggestion, and make habitual by repetition, not only political opinions but whole trains of political argument; and he does not necessarily feel the need of comparing them with other trains of argu- ment already in his mind. A lawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles argue for the most extreme trade-unionism in his own profession, while he thoroughly agrees with a denunciation of trade- unionism addressed to him as a railway shareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can sometimes be led by way of ' parental rights ' to cheer for denomina- tional religious instruction, and by way of ' religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled political ob- server that I know, speaking of an organised news- paper attack, said, 'As far as I can make out every I Life of J. A, Garfidd, by R. H. Conwell, p. 328. NON-EATIONAL INFEEENCE 113 argument used in attack and in defence has its separate and independent effect. They hardly ever meet, even if they are brought to bear upon the same mind.' From the purely tactical point of view there is therefore much to be said for Lord Lyndhurst's maxim, ' Never defend yourself before a popular assemblage, except with and by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which the assault gives them, will forget the previous charge.' ^ 1 Morley's Lift of Gladstone, vol. L p. 122. lU HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS CHAPTER IV THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONINQ But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking upon those forms of inference hy immediate association which come so easily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes. The whole progress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could if we merely followed the line of least resist- ance in the use of our minds. These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent a difficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effects with 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 by true philosophy it was to the service of the State that they MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL EEASONING 115 were to devote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control of passion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet if Plato could visit us now, he would learn that while our glass-makers proceed by rigorous and confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the glass-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims and personal skill. Why is it, he would ask us, that valid reasoning has proved to be so much more difiEicult in politics than in the physical sciences ? Our first answer might be found in the character of ■. the material with which political reasoning has to deal. The universe which presents itself to our reason is the same as that which presents itself to our feelings and impulses — an unending stream of sensations and memories, every one of which is difi^erent from every other, and before which, unless we can select and recognise and simplify, we must stand helpless and unable either to act or think. Man has therefore to create entities that shall be the material of his reason- ing, just as he creates entities to be the objects of his emotions and the stimulus of his instinctive inferences. Exact reasoning requires exact comparison, and in the desert or the forest there were few things which our ancestors could compare exactly. The heavenly bodies seem, indeed, to have been the first objects of consciously exact reasoning, because they were so distant that nothing could be known of them except 116 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS position and movement, and their position and move- ment could be exactly compared from night to night. In the same way the foundation of the terrestrial sciences came from two discoveries, first, that it was possible to abstract single qualities, such as position and movement, in all things however unlike, from the other qualities of- those things and to compare them exactly ; and secondly, that it was possible artificially to create actual uniformities for the purpose of comparison, to make, that is to say, out of unlike things, things so like that valid inferences could be drawn as to their behaviour under like circumstances. Geometry, for instance, came into the service of man when it was consciously realised that all units of land and water were exactly alike in so far as they were extended surfaces. Metallurgy, on the other hand, only became a science when men could actually take two pieces of copper ore, unlike in shape and appear- ance and chemical constitution, and extract from them two pieces of copper so nearly alike that they would give the same results when treated in the same way. This second power over his material the student of i politics can never possess. He can never create an ■ artificial uniformity in man. He cannot, after twenty generations of education or breeding render even two human beings sufficiently like each other for him to MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL EEASONING 117 prophesy with any approach to certainty that they will behave alike under like circumstances. How far has he the first power ? How far can he abstract from the facts of man's state qualities in respect of which men are sufficiently comparable 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 the United States, wrote to a friend describing the ' fermentation upon the subject of government' throughout Europe. ' Is Government a science or not ? ' he describes men as asking. ' Are there any principles on which it is 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 ? ' ^ Again and again in the history of political thought men have believed themselves to have found this 'standard,' this fact about man which should bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all things can be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can be measured bears to geometry. Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in the final causes of man's existence. Every man differed, it is true, from every other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type of perfect manhood which, though few men approached, and > Memoir of T. Brand Sollii, by J. Disney, p. 32. 118 HUMAN NATTJEE IN POLITICS none attained it, all were capable of conceiving. May not, asked Plato, this type be the pattern — the ' idea ' — of man formed by God and laid up 'in a heavenly place'? If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know that pattern. Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable purposes of God. Or the relation of man to God's purpose was thought of not as that between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to which the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflect- ing on the moral facts of the world, learn God's law. That law confers on us certain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which a valid political science can be deduced. We know our rights with the same certainty that we know his law. ' Men,' wrote Locke, ' being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business; they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one com- munity of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL KEASONING 119 destroy another as if we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.' ^ When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty in their argument against George the Third they too found it in the fact that men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.' Eousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed social contract. Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all. At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right. ' What sort of a thing,' he asked, ' is a natural right, and where does the maker Uve, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are most rife ? ' ^ Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men were measurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or chemistry. ' The present work,' wrote Bentham, ' as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject 1 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191. ' Eicheat vice Taxation, Bentham's Works, vol. ii. p. 598. 120 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral.' ^ Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' con- stituted in many ways an important advance upon • natural right.' It was in the first place founded upon a universally accepted fact ; all men obviously do feel both pleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable. One could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who suffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain. Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed with his Utili- tarianism: 'They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.' ^ ' MS. in UniverBity College, London, quoted by Haldvy, La Jeunesse de Bentham, pp. 289-290. ' Bentham'a Works, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's England and the English (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, of. preface. MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL SEASONING 121 A ' Benthamite/ therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an of&cial like Chadwick, or an organising politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about ' rights of property,' ' mischievous agitators,' ' spirit of the Constitution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining statistical facts as to the numerical pro- portion, the income, the hours of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and races 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 not the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives as instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again, among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of the complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success. In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim at finding as many relevant and measur- able facts about human nature as possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in political reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for a political science, we must adopt the 122 HUMAN NATUKE IN POLITICS method of the biologist, who tries to discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in a group of related beings, rather than that of the physicist, who constructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single quality common to the whole material world. The facts when collected must, because they are many, be arranged. I believe that it would be found convenient by the political student to arrange them under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the human type ; quantitative facts as to inherited varia- tions from that type observed either in individuals or groups of individuals ; and facts, both quantitative and descriptive, as to the environment into which men are born, and the observed effect of that environment upon their political actions and impulses. A medical student already attempts to master as many as possible of those facts about the human type that are relevant to his science. The descriptive facts, for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which he has to learn before he can hope to pass his examina- tions must number many thousands. If he is to remember them so that he can use them in practice, they must be carefully arranged in associated groups. He may find, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical facts about the human eye most easily and correctly by associating them with their evolu- tionary history, or the facts about the bones of the MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING 123 hand by associating them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray photograph. The quantitative facts as to variations from the anatomical human type are collected for him in statis- tical form, and he makes an attempt to acquire the main facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takes the Diploma of Public Health. The student teacher, too, during his period of train- ing acquires a series of facts about the human type, though in his case they are as yet far less numerous, less accurate and less conveniently arranged than those in the medical text-books. If the student of politics followed such an arrange- ment, he would at least begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containing all those facts about the human type which have been shown by experience to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student's knowledge could be most easily recalled when wanted. At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association of ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think 124 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS clearly on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is left to discover for him- self; but he is likely to assume that they cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political education is com- plete, It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book- learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.^ A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski pub- lished, for instance, in 1902, an important and extra- ordinarily interesting book on Democracy and the, Organisation of Political Parties, containing the results of fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the basis of a fairly full ^ In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occaaiong, to discuaa the method of approaching political science with two young Oxford students. In each case I suggested that it would be well to read a little psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his tutor and had been told that psychology was ' useless' or 'nonsense.' One tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science nor philosophy,' MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING 125 account of those facts in the human type which are of importance to the politician — the nature of our im- pulses, the necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the methods 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 no indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully con- trasted with ' free reason,'^ 'the general idea of liberty,' * 'the sentiments which inspired the men of 1848,'* and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed constitu- tion in which the voters are to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy ' from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.' * One seems to be reading a series of con- scientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy. Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas ii., and must have learnt for himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind them to contend on equal terms with the Eussian autocracy they must be a party, trusted and obeyed as ' Passim, e.g., vol. ii. p. 728. ^ Ibid., p. 649 • Ibid., p. 442. * Ibid., p. 756. 126 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS a party, and not a casual collection of free individuals. Some day the history of the first Duma will be written, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's experience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of that great struggle. The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced by an introduction from Mr. James Bryce. This introduction shows that even in the mind of the author of The American Constitution the con- ception of 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 in each contested issue, and to fix upon the best man among competing candidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge of the constitution of his country, enables him to judge wisely between the arguments submitted to him, while his own zeal is sufiicient to carry him to the polling booth.' 1 A. few lines further on Mr. Bryce refers to 'the democratic ideal of the intelligent independence of the individual voter, an ideal far removed from the actuali- ties of any State.' What does Mr. Bryce mean by ' ideal democracy ' ? If it means anything it means the best form of democracy which is consistent with the facts of human ' Ostrogorski, vol. i. p. xliv. MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL EEASONING 127 nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr. Bryce means by those words the kind of democracy which might be possible if human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was taught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the passage is a good instance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin ^ a medical treatise by saying, ' the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.' E"o modern treatise on pedagogy begins with the statement that ' the ideal boy knows things without being taught them, and his sole wish is the advancement 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 at Oxford, 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 wUl ever be determined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the more refined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract political philoso- phy. The sense of national honour ; the pride of blood, the tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to spread our civilisation 128 HUMAN NATUEE, IN POLITICS and our religion over the world; these are impulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but the statesman dares not. . . .' ^ What does ' abstract political philosophy ' here mean ? No medical writer would speak of an ' abstract ' anatomical science in which men have no livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not. Apparently Merivale means the same thing by ' abstract ' political philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by ' ideal ' democracy. Both refer to a conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe. The fact that this or that writer speaks of a con- ception of human nature in which he is ceasing to believe as ' abstract ' or ' ideal ' may seem to be of merely academic interest. But such half -beliefs pro- duce immense practical effects. Because Merivale saw that the political philosophy which his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and because he had nothing to substitute for it, he frankly abandoned any 1 Herman Merivale, Oolonisation, 1861, 2nd edition. The book is a re-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. The passage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675. MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL EEASONING 129 attempt at valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the white colonies to the rest of the British Empire. He therefore decided in effect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of ' cutting the painter ' ; and, since he was the chief official in the Colonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was right or wrong, was not unimportant. Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of such a half-belief from making that constructive contribution to general political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of his time. 'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, ' an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he can.' ^ Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who, finding that experi- ment did not bear out some traditional formula, should speak of himself as nevertheless ' grimly resolved ' to see things from the old and comfortable point of view! The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating would be the quantitative study of the inherited variations of individual men when compared with the ' normal ' or ' average ' man who had so far served for the study of the type. ' Loc. cit., p. xliii. I 130 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS How is the student to approach this part of the course ? Every man differs quantitatively from every other man in respect of every one of his qualities. The student obviously cannot carry in his mind or use for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a single inherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are in existence. Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relation of thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in which 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 Modern Utopia. His answer is that the difficulty is 'of the very smallest importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it matters profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for break- fast, up come two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose.' ^ To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the ■ individual is of enormous importance, not only when he is dealing with 'philosophy and wide generalisa- tions ' but in the practical affairs of his daily activity. • A Modem Utopia, p. 381. MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING 131 Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for 'two eggs' to put under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and the politician, who ig responsible for actual results in an amazingly com- plicated world, has to deal with more delicate dis- tinctions than the breeder. A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals, or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic sup- port from nonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for ' two men.' On this point, however, most writers on political science seem to suggest that after they have described human nature as if all men were in all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readers of the inexactness of their description, they can do no more. All knowledge of individual variations must be left to individual experience. John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the Moral Sciences at the end of his System of Logic implies this, and seems also to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgments and forecasts made by students and professors of politics does not involve a large element of error. 'Excepting,' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists as to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical circumstances on which these may be dependent, (considerations which are of secondary importance 132 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS when we are considering mankind in the average or en masse), I believe most competent judges will agree that the general laws of the different constituent elements of human nature are even now sufQciently understood to render it possible for a competent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the particular type of character which would be formed, in mankind generally, by any assumed set of circumstances.' ^ Tew people nowadays would be found to share Mill's belief. It is just because we feel ourselves unable to deduce with any ' approach to certainty ' the effect of circumstances upon character, that we all desire to obtain, if it is possible, a more exact idea of human variation than can be arrived at by thinking of mankind ' in the average or en masse.' Fortunately the mathematical students of biology, of whom Professor Karl Pearson is the most dis- tinguished leader, are already showing us that facts of inherited variation can be so arranged that we can re- member them without having to get by heart millions of isolated instances. Professor Pearson and the other writers in the periodical Biom^triha have measured innumerable beech leaves, snails' tongues, human skulls, etc. etc., and have recorded in each case the variations of any quality in a related group of in- dividuals by that which Professor Pearson calls an ' System of Logic, Book vi. vol. ii. (1875), p. 462. MATEEIAL OP POLITICAL EEASONING 133 ■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 of 25,878 recruits for the United States army. 75 74 73 72 63 62 The line ABG records, by its distance at successive points from the line AG, the number of recruits reach- ing successive inches of height. It shows, e.g. (as indicated by the dotted lines) that the number of recruits between 5 ft. 11 in. and 6 ft. was about 1600, and the number of those between 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 8 in. about 4000.1 ' 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 the curves resulting from mathematical calculation of known causes of variation, see ibid., chap, viii., the paper by the same author on ' Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Evolu- tion,' in vol. 186 (a) of the Boyal Society's Philosophical Transactions (1896), and the chapters on evolution in his Orammar of Science, 2nd edition. 134 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Such figures, when they simply record the results of the fact that the likeness of the offspring to the parent in evolution is constantly inexact, are (like the records of other cases of 'chance' variation) fairly sym- metrical, the greatest number of instances being found at the mean, and the descending curves of those above and those below the mean corresponding pretty closely with each other. Boot manufacturers, as the result' of experience, construct in effect such a curve, making a large number of boots of the sizes which in length or breadth are near the mean, and a symmetrically diminishing number of the sizes above and below it. In the next chapter I shall deal with the use in reasoning of such curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because -• our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our minds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated instances; and secondly, that we can by imagining such curves form a roughly accurate idea ", of the character of the variations to be expected as to any inherited quality among groups of individuals not yet born or not yet measured. The third and last division under which knowledge . of man can be arranged for the purposes of political MATERIAL OF POLITICAL EEASONING 135 study consists of the facts of man's environment, and of the effect of environment upon his character and actions. It is the extreme instability and uncertainty of this element which constitutes the special difficulty of politics. The human type and the quantitative 1 distribution of its variations are for the politician, who deals with a few generations only, practically ■ permanent. Man's environment changes with ever- increasing rapidity. The inherited nature of every human being varies indeed from that of every other, but the relative frequency of the most important variations can be forecasted for each generation. The > difference, on the other hand, between one man's en- vironment and that of other men can be arranged on no curve and remembered or forecasted by no expedient. Buckle, it is true, attempted to explain the present and prophesy the future intellectual history of modern nations by the help of a few generalisations as to the effect of that small fraction of their environment which consisted of climate. But Buckle failed, and no one has attacked the problem again with anything like his confidence. We can, of course, see that in the environment of any nation or class at any given time there are some 1 facts which constitute for all its members a common experience, and therefore a common influence. Climate is such a fact, or the discovery of America, or the invention of printing, or the rates of wages and prices. 136 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS All nonconformists are influenced by their memory of certain facts of which very few churchmen are aware, and all Irishmen by facts which most Englishmen try to forget. The student of politics must therefore read ^ history, and particularly the history of those events and habits of thought in the immediate past which are likely to influence the generation in which he will work. But he must constantly be on his guard against the expectation that his reading will give him much power of accurate forecast. Where history shows him ' that such and such an experiment has succeeded or failed he must always attempt to ascertain how far success or failure was due to facts of the human type, , which he may assume to have persisted into his own time, and how far to facts of environment. When he can show that failure was due to the ignoring of some fact of the type and can state definitely what that fact is, he will be able to attach a real meaning to the repeated and unheeded maxims by which the elder members of any generation warn the younger that their ideas are ' against human nature.' But if it is possible that the cause was one of mental environment, that is to say, of habit or tradition, or memory, he should be constantly on his guard against generalisations about national or racial ' character.' One of the most fertile sources of error in modern political thinking consists, indeed, in the ascription to collective habit of that comparative permanence which MATEEIAL OF POLITICAL SEASONING 137 only belongs to biological inheritance. A whole science can be based upon easy generalisations about Celts and Teutons, or about East and West, and the facts from which the generalisations are drawn may all disappear in a generation. National habits used to change slowly in the past, because new methods of life were seldom invented and only gradually introduced, and because the means of communicating ideas between man and man or nation and nation were extremely imperfect ; so that a true statement about a national habit might, and probably would, remain true for centuries. But now an invention which may produce profound changes in social or industrial life is as likely to be taken up with enthusiasm in some country on the other side of the globe as in the place of its origin. A statesman who has anything important to say says it to an audience of five hundred millions next morning, and great events like the Battle of the Sea of Japan begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off within a few hours of their happening. Enough has already occurred under these new conditions to show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon a period of revolution, and that English indifference to ideas or French military ambition are habits which, under a sufficiently extended stimulus, nations can shake off as completely as can individual men. 138 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS CHAPTEE V THE METHOD OF POLITICAL EBASONING The traditional method of political reasoning has inevitably shared the defects of its subject-matter. In thinking about politics we seldom penetrate behind those simple entities which form themselves so easily in our minds, or approach in earnest the infinite complexity of the actual world. Political abstractions, such as Justice, or Liberty, or the State, stand in our minds as things having a real existence. The names of political species, ' governments,' or ' rights,' or ' Irish- men,' suggest to us the idea of single ' type specimens ' ; and we tend, like medieval naturalists, to assume that all the individual members of a species are in all respects identical with the type specimen and with each other. In politics a true proposition in the form of ' All A is B ' almost invariably means that a number of in- dividual persons or things possess the quality B in degrees of variation as numerous as are the individuals themselves. We tend, however, under the influence of METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 139 our words and the mental habits associated with them to think of A either as a single individual possessing the quality B, or as a number of individuals equally possessing that quality. As we read in the newspaper that ' the educated Bengalis are disaffected ' we either see, in the half- conscious substratum of visual images which accompanies our reading, a single Babu with a disaffected expression or the vague suggestion of a long row of identical Babus all equally disaffected. These personifications and uniformities, in their turn, tempt us to employ in our political thinking that method of a priori deduction from large and untried generalisations against which natural science from the days of Bacon has always protested. No scientist now argues that the planets move in circles, because planets are perfect, and the circle is a perfect figure, or that any newly discovered plant must be a cure for some disease because nature has given healing properties to all plants. But 'logical' democrats still argue in America that, because all men are equal, political offices ought to go by rotation, and 'logical' coUec- tivists sometimes argue from the ' principle ' that the State should own all the means of prodtiction to the conclusion that all railway managers should be elected by universal suffrage. In natural science, again, the conception of the plurality and interaction of causes has become part of our habitual mental furniture ; but in politics both the 140 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS book-learned student and the man in the street may be heard to talk as if each result had only one cause. If the question, for instance, of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is raised, any two politicians, whether they are tramps on the outskirts of a Hyde Park crowd or Heads of Colleges writing to the Times, are not un- likely to argue, one, that all nations are suspicious, and that therefore the alliance must certainly fail, and the other that all nations are guided by their interests, and that therefore the alliance must certainly succeed. The Landlord of the ' Eainbow ' in Silas Marner had listened to many thousands of political discussions before he adopted his formula, ' The truth lies atween you: you're both right and both wrong, as I allays say.' In Economics the danger of treating abstract and^^ uniform words as if they were equivalent to abstract and uniform things has now been recognised for the last half century. When this recognition began, it was objected by the followers of the 'classical' Political Economy that abstraction was a necessary condition of thought, and that all dangers arising from it would be avoided if we saw clearly what it was that we were doing. Bagehot, who stood at the meeting-point of the old Economics and the new, wrote about 1876: — ' Political Economy ... is an abstract science, just as statics and dynamics are deductive sciences. And in METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING Ul consequence, it deals with an unreal and imaginary subject, . . . not with the entire real man as we know him in fact, but with a simpler imaginary man. . . .' ^ He goes on to urge that the real and complex man can be depicted by printing on our minds a succession of different imaginary simple men. "The maxim of science," he says, "is that of common-sense — simple cases first ; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the encum- bering and interfering agencies.' * But this process of mental chromolithography, though it is sometimes a good way of learning a science, is not a way of using it ; and Bagehot gives no indication how his complex picture of man, formed from successive layers of abstraction, is to be actually employed in fore- casting economic results. When Jevons published his Theory of Political Economy in 1871, it was already widely felt that a simple imaginary man, or even a composite picture made up of a series of different simple imaginary men, although useful in answering examination questions, was of very little use in drafting a Factory Act or arbitrating on a sliding scale of wages. Jevons there- fore based his economic method upon the variety and not the uniformity of individual instances. He 1 Sconomic Studies (Longmans, 1895), p. 97. ' Ibid., p. 98. U2 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS arranged the hours of labour in a working day, or the units of satisfaction from spending money, on curves of increase and decrease, and employed mathematical methods to indicate the point where one curve, whether representing an imaginary estimate or a record of ascertained facts, would cut the others to the best advantage. Here was something which corresponded, however roughly, to the process by which practical people arrive at practical and responsible results. A railway manager who wishes to discover the highest rate of charges which his traffic will bear is not interested if he is told that the rate when fixed will have been due to the law that all men seek to obtain wealth with as little effort as possible, modified in its working by men's unwillingness to break an established business habit. He wants a method which, instead of merely providing him with a verbal 'explanation' of what has happened, will enable him to form a quantitative estimate of what under given circumstances will happen. He can, however, and, I believe, now often does, use the Jevonian method to work out definite results in half-pennies and tons from the intersection of plotted curves recording actual statistics of rates and traffic. Since Jevons's time the method which he initiated has been steadily extended; economic and statistical processes have become more nearly assimilated, and METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 143 problems of fatigue or acquired skill, of family affection and personal thrift, of management by the entrepreneur or the paid of&cial, have been stated and argued in quantitative form. As Professor Marshall said the other day, qualitative reasoning in economics is passing away and quantitative reasoning is beginning to take its place.^ How far is a similar change of method possible in the discussion not of industrial and financial pro- cesses but of the structure and working of political institutions ? It is of course easy to pick out political questions which can obviously be treated by quantitative methods. One may take, for instance, the problem of the best size for a debating hall, to be used, say, by the Federal Delibe- rative Assembly of the British Empire — assuming that the shape is already settled. The main elements of the problem are that the hall should be large enough to accommodate with dignity a number of members sufficient both for the representation of interests and the carrying out of committee work, and not too large for each member to listen without strain to a debate. The resultant size will represent a compromise among ' Journal of Economics, March 1907, pp. 7 and 8. ' What by chemical analogy may be called qualitative analysis has done the greater part of its work. . . . Much less progress has indeed been made towards the quantitative determination of the relative strength of different economic forces. That higher and more difficult task must wait upon the slow growth of thorough realistic statistics,' 144 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS these elements, accommodating a number smaller than would be desirable if the need of representation and dignity alone were to be considered, and larger than it would be if the convenience of debate 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 additional unit of size in dignity, adequacy of representation, supply of members for committee work, healthiness, etc., and the disadvantage of each additional unit of size as affect- ing convenience of debate, etc. The curves of dignity and adequacy might be the result of direct estimation. The curve of marginal convenience in audibility would be founded upon actual ' polygons of variation ' record- ing measurements of the distance at which a sufficient number of individuals of the classes and ages expected could hear and make themselves heard in a room of that shape. The economists might further, after dis- cussion, agree on the relative importance of each element to the final decision, and might give effect to their agreement by the familiar statistical device of ' weighting.' The answer would perhaps provide fourteen square feet on the floor in a room twenty-six feet high for each of three hundred and seventeen members. There would, when the answer was settled, be a ' marginal ' man in point of hearing (representing, perhaps, an METHOD or POLITICAL EEASONING 145 average healthy man of seventy-four), who would be unable or just able to hear the ' marginal ' man in point of clearness of speech — who might represent (on a polygon specially drawn up by the Oxford Professor of Biology) the least audible but two of the tutors at Balliol. The marginal point on the curve of the decreasing utility of successive increments of members from the point of view of committee work might show, perhaps, that such work must either be reduced to a point far below that which is usual in national parlia- ments, or must be done very largely by persons not members of the assembly itself. The aesthetic curve of dignity might be cut at the point where the President of the Society of British Architects could just be induced not to write to the Times. Anj discussion which took place on such lines, even although the curves were mere forms of speech, would be real and practical. Instead of one man reiterating that the Parliament Hall of a great empire ought to represent the dignity of its task, and another man answering that a debating assembly which cannot debate is of no use, both would be forced to ask ' How much dignity ' ? and ' How much debating conveni- ence ' ? As it is, this particular question seems often to be settled by the architect, who is deeply concerned with aesthetic effect, and not at all concerned with debating convenience. The reasons that he gives in his reports seem convincing, because the other con- K 146 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS siderations are not in the minds of the Building Com- mittee, who think of one element only of the problem at a time and make no attempt to co-ordinate aU the ' elements. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain the fact that the Debating Hall, for instance, of the House of Eepresentatives at Washington is no more fitted for debates carried on by human beings than would a spoon ten feet broad be fitted for the eating of soup. The able leaders of the National Congress movement in India made the same mistake in 1907, when they arranged, with their minds set only on the need of an impressive display, that difficult and excit- ing questions of tactics should be discussed by about fifteen hundred delegates in a huge tent, and in the presence of a crowd of nearly ten thousand spectators. I am afraid that it is not unlikely that the London County Council may also despise the quantitative method of reasoning on such questions, and may find themselves in 1912 provided with a new hall admir- ably adapted to illustrate the dignity of London and the genius of their architect, but unfitted for any other purpose. Nor is the essence of the quantitative method changed when the answer is to be found, not in one, but in several 'unknown quantities.' Take, for instance, the question as to the best types of elemen- tary school to be provided in London. If it were assumed that only one type of school was to be pro- METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 147 vided, the problem would be stated in the same form as that of the size of the Debating Hall. But it is possible in most London districts to provide within easy walking distance of every child four or five schools of different types, and the problem becomes that of so choosing a limited number of types as to secure that the degree of 'misfit' between child and curriculum shall be as small as possible. If we treat the general aptitude (or 'cleverness') of the children as differing only by more or less, the problem becomes one of fitting the types of school to a fairly exactly ascertainable polygon of intellectual variation. It might appear then that the best results would come from the provision, say, of five types of schools providing respectively for the 2 per cent, of greatest natural cleverness, the succeeding 10 per cent., the intermediate 76 per cent., the comparatively sub-normal 10 per cent., and the ,2 per cent, of 'mentally deficient.' That is to say the local authority would have to provide in that pro- portion Secondary, Higher Grade, Ordinary, Sub- Normal, and Mentally Deficient schools. A general improvement in nutrition and other home circumstances might tend to ' steepen ' the polygon of variation, i.e. to bring more children near the normal, or it might increase the number of children with exceptional inherited cleverness who were able to reveal that fact, and so 'flatten' it; and either case might make a change desirable in the best proportion 148 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS between the types of schools or even in the number of the types. It would be more difficult to induce a committee of politicians to agree on the plotting of curves, represent- ing the social advantage to be obtained by the succes- sive increments of satisfaction in an urban industrial population of those needs which are indicated by the terms Sociali.-m and Individualism, They could, how- ever, be brought to admit that the discovery of curves for that purpose is a matter of observation and inquiry, and that the best possible distribution of social duties between the individual and the state would cut both at some point or other. For many Socialists and Individualists the mere attempt to think in such a way of their problem would be an extremely valuable exercise. If a Socialist and an Individualist were required even to ask themselves the question, 'How much Socialism ' ? or ' How much Individualism ' ? a basis of real discussion would be arrived at — even in the impossible case that one should answer, 'All Individualism and no Socialism,' and the other, ' All Socialism and no Individualism.' The fact, of course, that each step towards either Socialism or Individualism changes the character of the other elements in the problem, or the fact that an invention like printing, or representative govern- ment, or Civil Service examinations, or the Utilitarian philosophy, may make it possible to provide greatly METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 149 increased satisfaction both to Socialist and Individualist desires, complicates the question, but does not alter its quantitative character. The essential point is that in every case in which a political thinker is able to adopt what Professor Marshall calls the quantitative method of reasoning, his vocabulary and method, instead of constantly suggesting a false simplicity, warn him that every individual instance with which he deals is different from any other, that any effect is a function of many variable causes, and, therefore, that no estimate of the result of any act can be accurate unless all its conditions and their relative importance are taken into account. But how far are such quantitative methods possible when a statesman is dealing, neither with an ob- viously quantitative problem, like the building of halls or schools, nor with an attempt to give quantitative meaning to abstract terms like Socialism or Indivi- dualism, but with the enormous complexity of respon- sible legislation ? In approaching this question we shall be helped if we keep before us a description of the way in which some one statesman has, in fact, thought of a great constitutional problem. Take, for instance, the indications which Mr. Morley gives of the thinking done by Gladstone on Home Eule during the autumn and winter of 1885-86. Gladstone, we are told, had already, for many years 150 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS past, pondered anxiously at intervals about Ireland, and now he describes himself 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 Eng- land and Ireland, and to calculate to what extent and under what influences it may be expected to change. As to English feeling, ' what I expect,' he says, ' is a healthy slow fermentation in many minds working towards the final product' (p. 261). The Irish desire for self-government, on the other hand, will not change, and must be taken, within the time-limit of his problem, as 'fixed' (p. 240). In both England and Ireland, however, he believes that 'mutual attach- ment' may grow (p. 292). Before making up his mind in favour of some kind of Home Eule, he examines every thinkable alterna- tive, especially the development of Irish County Government, or a Federal arrangement in which all three of the united kingdoms would be concerned. Here and there he finds suggestions in the history of Austria-Hungary, of Norway and Sweden, or of 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 in Dicey's Law of the Constitution (p. 280). He tries to see the question from fresh points of view in intimate per- METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 151 sonal discussions, and by imagining what ' the civilised world ' (p. 225) will think. As he gets nearer to his subject, he has definite statistical reports made for him by 'Welby and Hamilton on the figures' (p. 306), has •stiff conclaves about finance and land' (p. 298), and nearly comes to a final split with Parnell on the question whether the Irish contribution to Imperial taxation shall be a fifteenth or a twentieth. Time and persons are important factors in his cal- culation. If Lord Salisbury will consent to introduce some measure of Irish self-government, the problem will be fundamentally altered, and the same will happen if the general election produces a Liberal majority independent of both Irish and Conservatives ; and Mr. Morley describes as underlying all his calcula- tions 'the irresistible attraction for him of all 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 a fraction of the questions which must have been in Gladstone's mind during these months of incessant thought. No mention is made, for in- stance, of religion, or of the military position, or of the permanent possibility of enforcing the proposed restrictions on self-government. But enough is given to show the complexity of political thought at that stage when a statesman, still uncommitted, is considering what will be the effect of a new political departure. 152 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS What then was the logical process hy which Glad- stone's final decision was arrived at 1 Did he for instance deal with a succession of simple problems or with one complex problem ? It is, I think, clear that from time to time isolated and comparatively simple trains of reasoning were followed up ; but it is also clear that Gladstone's main effort of thought was involved in the process of co-ordinating all the labori- ously collected contents of his mind onto the whole problem. This is emphasised by a quotation in which Mr. Morley, who was closely associated with Gladstone's intellectual toil during this period, indi- cates his own recollection. 'Historians,' he quotes from Professor Gardiner, ' coolly dissect a man's thoughts as they please ; and label them like specimens in a naturalist's cabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal aggrandisement; such a thing for national objects, such a thing from high 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 which Gladstone's mind moved among ' the eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government,' he is seeking throughout for a quantitative solution. ' Home Eule ' is no simple entity for him. He realises that the number of possible schemes for Irish govern- ment is infinite, and he attempts to make at every METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONINa 153 point in his own scheme a delicate adjustment between many 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 the feeling — which any one who has had to make less important political decisions can parallel from his own experience — that Gladstone was waiting for indications of a solution to appear in his mind. He was conscious of his effort, conscious also that his effort was being directed simultaneously towards many different considerations, but largely unconscious of the actual process of in- ference, which went on perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else, than when he was awake and attentive. A phrase of Mr. Morley's indicates a feeling with which every politician is familiar. ' The reader,' he says, ' knows in what direc- tioh the main current of Mr. Gladstone's thought must have been setting' (p. 236). That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than of science, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of conscious method. But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partial substitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired in youth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as the half-conscious result of experience. Our problem therefore involves the further question, whether those 154 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS forms of political thought which correspond to the complexity of nature are teachable or not? At present they are not often taught. In every generation thousands of young men and women are attracted to politics because their intellects are keener, and their sympathies wider than those of their fellows. They become followers of Liberalism or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or the Eights of Men or Women. To them, at first, Liberalism and the Empire, Eights and Principles, are real and simple things. Or, like Shelley, they see in the whole human race an infinite repetition of uniform individuals, the ' millions on millions ' who ' wait, firm, rapid, and elate.' ^ About aU these things they argue by the old a priori methods which we have inherited with our political language. But after a time a sense of un- reality grows upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difiScult world forces itself into, their minds. Like the old Chartists with whom 1 once spent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been ' aU talk ' — all words — and there are few among them, except those to whom politics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until through weariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from new knowledge. Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habit or party spirit for their political opinions and actions. Having ceased to think of their 1 Shelley, Poetical Works (H. B. Forinan), vol. iv. p. 8. METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 155 unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of a simple type, they cease to think of them at all ; and content themselves with using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising the individual exist- ence of their casual neighbours. Wordsworth's Prelude describes with pathetic clear- ness a mental history, which must have been that of many thousands of men who could not write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces have been blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He tells us that the 'man' whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still at its dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely 'the composition of the brain.' After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw 'the individual man . . . the man whom we behold with our own eyes.' ^ But in that change from a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation of the individual, Wordsworth's power of estimating political forces or helping in political progress was gone for ever. If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitative method must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and the associations of that mental world into which the young politician enters. Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. Every year larger and more exact collec- tions of detailed political facts are being accumulated j 1 TU Prelude, Bk. xiii., 11. 81-84. 156 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS and collections of detailed facts, if they are to be used at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively. The intellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on by permanent officials or Royal Com- missions or Cabinet Ministers takes every year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form. Compare for instance the methods of the present Commission on the Poor Law with those of the cele- brated and extraordinarily able Commission which drew up the new Poor Law in 1833-34. The argument of the earlier Commissioners' Eeport runs on lines which it would be easy to put in a 'priori syllogistic form. All men seek pleasure and avoid pain. Society ought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure to social conduct. This may be done by making every man's livelihood and that of bis children normally dependent upon his own exertions, by separating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the community from those who can, and by presenting these last with the alternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction. This leads to ' a principle which we find universally admitted, even by those whose practice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the indepen- dent labourer of the lowest class.' ^ The a pi-iori argu- 1 First Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834 (reprinted 1S94), p. 187. METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 157 ment is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by the sub-commissioners or given in evidence before the Commission, indicating that labouring men will not exert themselves unless they are offered the alternative of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt is made to estimate the proportion of the working population of England whose character and conduct is represented by each instance. This a priori deduction, illustrated, but not proved by particular instances, is throughout so clear and so easily apprehended by the ordinary man that the revolutionary Bill of 1834, which affected all sorts of vested interests, passed the House of Commons by a majority of four 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 contains many members trained in the traditions of 1834, is being driven, by the mere necessity of dealing with the mass of varied evidence before it, onto new lines. Instead of assuming half consciously that human energy is dependent solely on the working of the human will in the presence of the ideas of pleasure and pain, the Commissioners are forced to tabulate and consider innumerable quantitative observa- tions relating to the very many factors affecting the will of paupers and possible paupers. They cannot, for instance, avoid the task of estimating the relative in- dustrial effectiveness of health, which depends upon 158 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS decent surroundings; of hope, which may be made possible by State provision for old age; and of the imaginative range which is the result of education ; and of comparing all these with the 'purely economic' motive created by ideas of future pleasure and pain. The evidence before the Commission is, that is to say, collected not to illustrate general propositions otherwise established, but to provide quantitative answers to quantitative questions; and instances are in each case accumulated according to a well-known statistical rule until the repetition of results shows that further accumulation would be useless. In 1834 it was enough, in dealing with the political machinery of the Poor Law, to argue that, since all men desire their own interest, the ratepayers would elect guardians who would, up to the limit of their knowledge, advance the interests of the whole community; pro- vided that electoral areas were created in which all sectional interests were represented, and that voting power were given to each ratepayer in proportion to his interest. It did not then seem to matter much whether the areas chosen were new or old, or whether the body elected had other duties or not. In 1908, on the other hand, it is felt to be necessary to seek for all the causes which are likely to influence the mind of the ratepayer or candidate during an election, and to estimate by such evidence as is avail- able their relative importance. It has to be considered, METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 159 for instance, whether men vote best in areas where they keep up habits of political action in connection with parliamentary as well as municipal contests ; and whether an election involving other points besides poor-law administration is more likely to create interest among the electorate. If more than one election, again, is held in a district in any year it may be found by the record of the percentage of votes that electoral enthusiasm diminishes for each additional contest along a very rapidly descending curve. The final decisions that will be taken either by the Commission or by Parliament on questions of administrative policy and electoral machinery must therefore involve the balancing of all these and many other considerations by an essentially quantitative process. The line, that is to say, which ultimately cuts the curves indicated by the evidence will allow less weight either to anxiety for the future as a motive for exertion, or to personal health as increasing per- sonal efficiency, than would 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 not for the need of economising the energies of the elected representatives, and less bureaucracy than thftr«* would be if it were not desirable to retain popular sympathy and consent. Throughout the argument the population of England will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill would have said) ' on 160 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS the average or en masse' ^ but as consisting of indivi- duals who can be arranged in ' polygons of variation ' according to their nervous and physical strength, their ' character ' and the degree to which ideas of the future are likely to affect their present conduct. Meanwhile the public which will discuss the Eeport has changed since 1834. Newspaper writers, in dis- cussing the problem of destitution, tend now to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the ' poor,' ' the working class,' or ' the lower orders,' but terms expressing quantitative estimates of in- dividual variations, like ' the submerged tenth,' or the 'unemployable'; while every newspaper reader is fairly familiar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns which record seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment among Trade Unionists. One could give many other instances of this begin- ning of a tendency in political thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms of argument. But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to international politics. Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simple question of quality. Austin had demonstrated that there must be a sovereign every- where, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an autocracy or a republic, must be absolute. But the Congress which in 1885 sat at Berlin to ' See p. 132. METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 161 prevent the partition of Africa from causing a series of European wars as long as those caused by the partition of America, was compelled by the com- plexity of the problems before it to approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines. Since 1885 therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented to express gradations of sover- eignty: 'Effective occupation,' 'Hinterland,' 'Sphere of Influence ' — to which the AlgeQiras Conference has perhaps added a lowest grade, 'Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.' It is already as unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory or not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain per- centage of carbon should be called iron or steel. Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of observed political fact some men escape the tempta- tion to ignore individual differences. I remember that the man who has perhaps done more than any one else in England to make a statistical basis for industrial legislation possible, once told me that he had been spending the whole day in classifying under a few heads thousands of ' railway accidents,' every one of which differed in its circumstances from any other; and that he felt like the bewildered porter in Punch, who had to arrange the subleties of nature according to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company. ' Cats,' he quoted the porter as saying, 'is dogs, and guinea- pigs is dogs, but this 'ere tortoise is a hinsect.' I. 162 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS But it must constantly be remembered that quan- titative thinking does not necessarily or even generally mean thinking in terms of numerical statistics. Num- ber, which obliterates all distinction between the units numbered, is not the only, nor always even the most exact means of representing quantitative facts. A picture, for instance, may be sometimes nearer to quantitative truth, more easily remembered and more useful for purposes of argument and verification than a row of figures. The most exact quantitative political document that I ever saw was a set of photographs of all the women admitted into an inebriate home. The photographs demonstrated, more precisely than any record of approximate measurements could have done, the varying facts of physical and nervous structure. It would have been easily possible for a committee of medical men to have arranged the photographs in a series of increasing abnormality, and to have indicated the photograph of the 'marginal' woman in whose case, after allowing for considerations of expense, and for the desirability of encouraging individual respon- sibility, the State should undertake temporary or per- manent control. And the record was one which 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 of specially delicate work, and trusts to his sense of touch for a quan- METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 163 titative estimation. The most exact estimation possible of a political problem may have been contrived when a group of men, differing in origin, education, and mental type, first establish an approximate agreement as to the probable results of a series of possible political alternatives involving, say, increasing or de- creasing state interference, and then discover the point where their 'liking' turns into 'disliking.' Man is the measure of man, and he may still be using a quantitative process even though he chooses in each case that method of measurement which is least affected by the imperfection of his powers. But it is just in the cases where numerical calculation is im- possible or unsuitable that the politician is likely to get most help by using consciously quantitative conceptions. An objection has been urged against the adoption of political reasoning either implicitly or explicitly quantitative, that it involves the balancing against each other of things essentially disparate. How is one, it is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national honour involved in the continuance of a war with that marginal unit of extra taxation which is supposed to be its exact equivalent ? How is one to balance the final sovereign spent on the endowment of science with the final sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased scientist, or on the final detail in a scheme of old age pensions ? The obvious answer is that statesmen have 164 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS to act, and that wlioever acts does somehow balance aU the alternatives which are before him. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in his annual allocation of grants and remissions of taxation balances no stranger things than does the private citizen, who, having a pound or two to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to a Chinese Mission and providing a revolving hatch between his kitchen and his dining-room. A more serious objection is that we ought not to allow ourselves to think quantitatively in politics, that to do so fritters away the plain consideration of prin- ciple. ' Logical principles ' may be only an inadequate representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon them is, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist. In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductive thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince Biilow, in his speech in the Eeichstag on universal suffrage. He is reported to have said : — ' Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible dogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its Constitution or of its franchise. Herr Bebel had once said that on the whole he preferred English conditions even to con- ditions in Prance. But in England the franchise was METHOD OF POLITICAL EEASONING 165 not universal, equal, and direct. Could it be said that Mecklenburg, which had no pe^ar sutfrage at all, was governed worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard such strange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universal suffrage ? ' ^ But what Prince Billow's speech showed, was that he was either deliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he did not agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception of quan- titative political thought. If the ' dogma ' of universal suffrage means the assertion that all men who have votes are thereby made identical with each other in all respects, and that universal suffrage is the one condi- tion of good government, then, and then only, is his attack on it valid. If, however, the desire for univer- sal suffrage is based on the belief that a wide extension of political power is one of the most important elements in the conditions of good government — racial aptitude, ministerial responsibility, and the like, being other elements — then the speech is absolutely meaningless. But Prince Billow was making a parliamentary speech, and in parliamentary oratory that change from qualitative to quantitative method which has so deeply affected the procedure of Conferences and Commissions has not yet niade much progress. In a 'full-dress' debate even those speeches which move us most often recall Mr. Gladstone, in whose mind, as soon 1 Times, March 27, 1908. 166 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS as he stood up to speak, his Eton and Oxford train- ing in words alwa^'s contended with his experience of things, and who never made it quite clear whether the 'grand and eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government ' meant that certain elements must be of great and permanent importance in every problem of Church and State, or that an a priori solution of all political problems could be deduced by aU good men from absolute and authoritative laws. PART II Possibilities of Progress CHAPTEE I POLITICAL MORALITY In the preceding chapters I have argued that the efficiency of political science, its power, that is to say, of forecasting the results of political causes, is likely to increase. I based my argument on two facts, firstly, that modern psychology offers us a conception of human nature much truer, though more complex, than that which is associated with the -traditional English political philosophy; and secondly, that, under the influence and example of the natural sciences, poli- tical thinkers are already beginning to use in their discussions and inquiries quantitative rather than merely qualitative words and methods, and are able therefore both to state their problems more fully and to answer them with a greater approximation to accuracy. In this argument it was not necessary to ask how 167 168 HUMAN NATUKE IN" POLITICS far such an improvement in the science of politics is likely to influence the actual course of political history. Whatever may be the best way of discovering truth will remain the best, whether the mass of mankind choose to follow it or not. But politics are studied, as Aristotle said, ' for the sake of action rather than of knowledge,'^ and the student is bound, sooner or later, to ask himself what will be the effect of a change in his science upon that political world in which he lives and works. One can imagine, for instance, that a professor of politics in Columbia University, who had just taken part as a ' Mugwump ' in a well-fought but entirely unsuccessful campaign against Tammany Hall, might say : ' The finer and more accurate the processes of political science become, the less do they count in politics. Astronomers invent every year more delicate methods of forecasting the movements of the stars, but cannot with all their skill divert one star an inch from its course. So we students of politics will find that our growing knowledge brings us only a growing sense of helplessness. We may learn from our science to estimate exactly the forces exerted by the syndicated newspaper press, by the liquor saloons, or by the blind instincts of class and nationality and race; but how can we learn to control them ? The fact that we ^ Ethics, Bk. I. oh. ili. (6). ^TreiS?) rd tAos [rfii iroXiriK^s] iariv o4 POLITICAL MOEALITY 169 think about these things in a new way will not win elections or prevent wars.' I propose, therefore, in this second part of my book to discuss how far the new tendencies which are beginning to transform the science of politics are likely also to make themselves felt as a new political force. I shall try to estimate the probable influence of these tendencies, not only on the student or the trained politician, but on the ordinary citizen whom political science reaches only at second or third hand ; and, with that intention, shall treat in successive chapters their relation to our ideals of political morality, to the form and working of the representative and of&cial machinery of the State, and to the possibilities of international and inter-racial understanding. This chapter deals from that point of view with their probable influence on political morality. In using that term I do not mean to imply that certain acts are moral when done from political motives which would not be moral if done from other motives, or vice versd, but to emphasise the fact that there are certain ethical questions which can only be studied in close connection with political science. There are, of course, points of conduct which are common to all occupations. We must all try to be kind, and honest, and industrious, and we expect the general teachers of morals to help us to do so. But every occupation has also its special problems, which must be stated by 170 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITIOS its own students before they can be dealt with by the moralist at all. In politics the most important of these special questions of conduct is concerned with the relation between the process by which the politician forms his own opinions and purposes, and that by which he influences the opinions and purposes of others. A hundred or even fifty years ago, those who worked for a democracy of which they had had as yet no experience felt no misgivings on this point. They looked on reasoning, not as a difficult and uncertain process, but as the necessary and automatic working of man's mind when faced by problems affecting his interest. They assumed, therefore, that the citizens under a democracy would necessarily be guided by reason in the use of their votes, that those politicians would be most successful who made their own con- clusions and the grounds for them most clear to others, and that good government would be secured if the voters had sufficient opportunities of listening to free and sincere discussion, A candidate to-day who comes fresh from his books to the platform almost inevitably begins by making the same assumption. He prepares his speeches and writes his address with the conviction that on his demonstration of the relation between political causes and effects will depend the result of the election. Perhaps his first POLITICAL MOEALITY 171 shock will come from that majiim which every pro- fessional agent repeats over and over again to every candidate, ' Meetings are no good.' Those who attend meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already loyal and habitual supporters of his party. If his speeches are logically unanswerable the chief political importance of that fact is to be found, not in his power of convincing those who are already convinced, but in the greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass which may be produced among his supporters by their admiration of him as a speaker. Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his address and that of his opponent appeal to the constituents. He may, for instance, become suddenly aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself opens the envelopes containing other candidates' ad- dresses in some election (of Poor Law Guardians, for instance), in which he is not specially interested, and of the fact that his attention is either nod aroused at all, or is only aroused by words and phrases which recall some habitual train of thought. By the time that he has become sufficiently confident or important to draw up a political programme for himself, he understands the limits within which any utterance must be confined that is addressed to large numbers of voters — the fact that proposals are only to be brought 'within the sphere of practical politics' which are simple, striking, and carefully adapted to 172 HUMAN NATUEE IE POLITICS the half-conscious memories and likes and dislikes of busy men. All this means that his own power of political reasoning is being trained. He is learning that every man differs from every other man in his interests, his intellectual habits and powers, and his experience, and that success in the control of political forces depends on a recognition of this and a careful ap- preciation of the common factors of human nature. But meanwhile it is increasingly difficult for him to believe that he is appealing to the same process of reasoning in his hearers as that by which he reaches his own conclusions. He tends, that is to say, to think of the voters as the subject-matter rather than the sharers of his thoughts. He, like Plato's sophist, is learning what the public is, and is beginning to understand 'the passions and desires' of that 'huge and powerful brute, how to approach and handle it, at what times it becomes fiercest and most gentle, on what occasions it utters its several cries, and what sounds made by others soothe or irritate it.' ^ If he resolutely guards himself against the danger of passing from one illusion to another, he may still remember that he is not the only man in the constituency who has reasoned and is reasoning about politics. If he does personal canvassing he may meet sometimes a middle-aged working man, living nearer than himself 1 Plato, Republic, p. 493. POLITICAL MOEALITY 173 to the facts of life, and may find that this constituent of his has reasoned patiently and deeply on politics for thirty years, and that he himself is a rather absurd item in the material of that reasoning. Or he may talk with a business man, and be forced to understand some one who sees perhaps more clearly than himself the results of his proposals, but who is separated from him by the gulf of a difference of desire : that which one hopes the other fears. Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect the process by which the more thoughtful both of those who vote for him and of those who vote against him reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that his own part in the election has little to do with any reasoning process at all. I remember that before my first election my most experienced political friend said to me, 'Eemember that you are undertaking a six weeks' advertising campaign." Time is short, there are innumerable details to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from the rare intervals of mental contact with individual electors to that advertising campaign which deals with the electors as a whole. As long as he is so engaged, the maxim that it is wrong to appeal to any- thing but the severest process of logical thought in his constituents will seem to him, 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 his constituents, and may come to 174 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS regard them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational ' over- man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of ' that staring timid creature man.' ^ A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few ' among the societies of men . . . who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.' ' For the rest, ' Eeason has small effect upon numbers : a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct.' * The greatest of Bolingbroke's disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, ' We are not indebted to the Eeason of man for any of the great achievements which are the land- marks of human action and human progress. . . . Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions ; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votaries than Bentham.' * 1 Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, etc. (ed. of 1785), p. 70. '/Sid., p. 2. 'iitU.p. 165. * Ooningshy, oh. xiii. POLITICAL MOEALITY 175 It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria 'like a woman,' and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he never fully recovered, who treated her ' like a public meeting.' In spite of Disraeli's essentially kindly spirit, his calculated play upon the instincts of the nation which he governed seemed to many in his time to introduce a cold and ruthless element into politics, which seemed colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the less kindly character of his disciple Lord Eandolph Churchill. But the same ruthlessness is often found now, and may perhaps be more often found in the future, whenever any one is sufficiently concentrated on some political end to break through all intellectual or ethical conventions that stand in his way. I remember a long talk, a good many years ago, with one of the leaders of the Eussian terrorist movement. He said, 'It is 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 Grand Duke, or a minister, our movement becomes something which exists and counts with them, otherwise, as far as they are concerned, it does not exist at all.' In war, the vague political tradition that there is something unfair in influencing the will of one's fellow- men otherwise than by argument does not exist. This was what Napoleon meant when he said, ' A la guerre, tout est moral, et le moral et I'opinion font plus de la 176 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS moiti^ de la r^alit^.'^ And it is curious to observe that when men are consciously or half-consciously determining to ignore that tradition they drop into the language of warfare. Twenty years ago, the expression 'Class-war' was constantly used among English Socialists to justify the proposal that a Socialist party should adopt those methods of parliamentary terrorism (as opposed to parliamentary argument) which had been invented by Parnell. When Lord Lansdowne in 1906 proposed to the House of Lords that they should abandon any calculation of the good or bad adminis- trative effect of measures sent to them from the Liberal House of Commons, and consider only the psychological effect of their acceptance or rejection on the voters at the next general election, he dropped at once into military metaphor. 'Let us' he said, 'be sure that if we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possible to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable to this House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were to win for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end.' * At first sight, therefore, it might appear that the change in political science which is now going on will simply result in the abandonment by the younger ' Maximes de Ghierre et Penseia de Napoleon /"• (Chapelot), p. 230. 2 Hansard (Trades Disputes Bill, House of Lords, Deo. 4, 1906), p. 703. POLITICAL MOEALITY 177 politicians of all ethical traditions, and the adoption by them, as the result of their new book-learning, of those methods of exploiting the irrational elements of human nature which have hitherto been the trade secret of the elderly and the disillusioned. I have been told, for instance, that among the little group of women who in 1906 and 1907 brought the question of Women's Suffrage within the sphere of practical politics, was one who had received a serious academic training in psychology, and that the tactics actually employed were in large part due to her plea that in order to make men think one must begin by making them feel.'- A Hindoo agitator, again, Mr. Chandra Pal, who alsc had read psychology, imitated Lord Lansdowne a few months ago by saying, 'Applying the principles of psychology to the consideration of political problems we find it is necessary that we . . . should do nothing that will make the Government a power for us. Because if the Government becomes easy, if it becomes pleasant, if it becomes good government, then our signs of separation from it will be gradually lost.'^ Mr. Chandra Pal, unlike Lord Lansdowne, was shortly ' Mrs. Pankhurst is reported, in the Observer of July 26, 1908, to have said, 'Whatever the women who were called Suffragists might be, they at least understood how to bring themselves in touch with the public. They had caught the spirit of the age, learnt the art of advertising.' ^ Quoted in Times, tTune 3, 1907. M 178 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS afterwards imprisoned, but his words have had an important political effect in India. If this mental attitude and the tactics based on it succeed, they must, it may be argued, spread with con- stantly increasing rapidity ; and just as, by Grresham's Law in commerce, base coin, if there is enough of it, must drive out sterling coin, so in politics, must the easier and more immediately effective drive out the more difficult and less effective method of appeal One cannot now answer such an argument by a mere statement that knowledge will make men wise. It was easy in the old days to rely on the belief that human life and conduct would become perfect if men only learnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most political speculators used to sketch a perfect polity which would result from the complete adoption of their principles, the republics of Plato and of More, Bacon's Atlantis, Locke's plea for a government which should consciously realise the purposes of God, or Bentham's Utilitarian State securely founded upon the Table of the Springs of Action. "We, however, who live after Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not expect knowledge, however full, to lead us to perfection. The modern student of physiology believes that if his work is successful, men may have better health than they would have if they were more ignorant, but he does not dream of producing a per- fectly healthy nation; and he is always prepared to POLITICAL MOEALITY 179 face the discovery that biological causes which he cannot control may be tending to make health worse. Nov does the writer on education now argue that be can make perfect characters in his schools. If our imaginations ever start on the old road to Utopia, we are checked by remembering that we are blood-rela- tions of the other animals, and that we have no more right than our kinsfolk to suppose that the mind of the universe has contrived that we can find a perfect life by looking for it. The bees might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, and of the waste of life and toil which goes on in the best ordered hive. And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation was possible for crea- tures hampered by such limited powers of observation and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. They might be forced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life must remain bewildered and violent and short. Political inquiry deals with man as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his life that can be made during the next few centuries. It may be that some scores of generations hence, we shall have discovered that the improvements in govern- ment which can be brought about by such inquiry, are insignificant when compared with the changes which will be made possible when, through the hazardous experiment of selective breeding, we have altered the human type itself. 180 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS But however anxious we are to see the facts of our existence without illusion, and to hope nothing with- out cause, we can still draw some measure of comfort from the recollection that during the few thousand years through which we can trace political history in the past, man, without changing his nature, has made enormous improvements in his polity, and that those improvements have often been the result of new moral ideals formed under the influence of new knowledge. The ultimate and wider effect on our conduct of any increase in our knowledge may indeed be very different from, and more important than, its immediate and narrower effect. We each of us live our lives in a pictured universe, of which only a small part is contributed by our. own observation and memory, and by far the greater part by what we have learnt from others. The changes in that mental picture of our environment made for instance by the discovery of America, or the ascertainment of the true movements of the nearer heavenly bodies, exercised an influence on men's general conception of their place in the universe, which proved ultimately to be more important than their immediate effect in stimulating explorers and improving the art of navigation. But none of the changes of outlook in the past have approached in their extent and significance those which have been in progress during the last fifty years, the new history of man and his surroundings, stretching back through POLITICAL MOEALITY 181 hitherto unthought-of ages, the substitution of an illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for the imagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above all the intrusion of science into the most intimate regions of ourselves. The effects of such changes often come, it is true, more slowly than we hope. I was talking not long ago to one of the ablest of those who were beginning their intellectual life when Darwin published the Origin of Species. He told me how he and his philosopher brother expected that at once all things should become new, and how unwillingly as the years went on they had accepted their disappointment. But though slow, they are far-reaching. To myself it seems that the most important political result of the vast range of new knowledge started by Darwin's work may prove to be the extension of the idea of conduct so as to include the control of mental processes of which at present most men are either unconscious or unobservant. The limits of our con- scious conduct are fixed by the limits of our self- knowledge. Before men knew anger as something separable from the self that knew it, and before they had made that knowledge current by the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question of conduct. Anger was a part of the angry man himself, and could only be checked by the invasion of some other passion, love, for instance, or fear, which was equally, while it lasted, a part of self. The man survived to 182 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS continue his race if anger or fear or love came upon him at the right time, and with the right intensity. But when man had named his anger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger came within the region of conduct. Henceforth, in that respect, man could choose either the old way of half-conscious obedience to an impulse which on the whole had proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way of fully conscious control directed by a calculation of results. A man who has become conscious of the nature of fear, and has acquired the power of controlling it, if he sees a boulder bounding towards him down a torrent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to leap to one side, or may substitute conduct for instinct, and stand where he is because he has calcu- lated that at the next bound the course of the boulder will be deflected. If he decides to stand he may be wrong. It may prove by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, owing to the imperfection of his powers of conscious inference, a safer guide than the process of calculation. But because he has the choice, even the decision to follow impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sincerely convinced that men's power of political reasoning was so utterly inadequate to their task, that all his life long he urged the English nation to follow prescription, to obey, that is to say, on principle their habitual political impulses. But the deliberate following of prescription which POLITICAL MOEALITY 183 Burke advocated was something different, because it was 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 tree is now spreading further over our lives. Whether we will or not, the old unthinking obedience to appetite in eating is more and more affected by our knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physio- logical results of the quantity and kind of our food. Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us to eat ' caviare on impulse,' instead of ' grape nuts on principle.' 1 But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on principle. The physician, when he knows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it. He finds himself watching the unintended effects of his words and tones and gestures, until he realises that in spite of himself he is calculating the means by which such effects can be produced. After a time, even his patients may learn to watch the effect of 'a good bedside manner' on themselves. So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer impulses of mankind is being spread (if only by the 1 Heretics, 1905, p. 136. 184 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS currency of new ■words), the relation both of the poli- tician and the voter to those impulses is changing. As soon as American politicians called a certain kind of specially paid orator a ' spell-binder,' the word pene- trated through the newspapers from politicians to audiences. The man who knows that he has paid two dollars to sit in a hall and be ' spell-bound,' feels, it is true, the old sensations, but feels them with a subtle and irrevocable difference. The English newspaper reader who has once heard the word ' sensational,' may try to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary of his consciousness to the trained psychologists of the halfpenny journals. He may, according to the sug- gestion of the day, loathe the sixty million crafty scoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at a coming comet, pity the cowards on the Government Front Bench, or tremble lest a pantomime lady should throw up her part. But he cannot help the existence in the background of his consciousness of a self which watches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his ' sensations.' Even the rapidly growing psychological complexity of modern novels and plays helps to com- plicate the relation of the men of our time to their emotional impulses. The young tradesman who has been reading either Evan Harrington, or a novel by some writer who has read Evan Harrington, goes to shake hands with a countess at an entertainment given by the Primrose League, or the Liberal Social POLITICAL MOEALITY 185 Council, conscious of pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure. His father, who read John Halifax, Gentleman, would have been carried away by a tenth part of the condescension which is necessary in the case of the son. A voter who has seen John Bull's Other Island at the theatre, is more likely than his father, who only saw The Shaughraun, to realise that one's feelings on the Irish question can be thought about as well as felt. In so far as this change extends, the politician may find in the future that an increasing proportion of his constituents half-consciously ' see through ' the cruder arts of emotional exploitation. But such an unconscious or half-conscious extension of self-knowledge is not likely of itself to keep pace with the parallel development of the political art of controlling impulse. The tendency, if it is to be effective, must be strengthened by the deliberate adop- tion and inculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions — new ideal entities 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 conception of ' Science,' of scientific method and the scientific spirit, was built up in successive generations by a few students. At first their conception was confined to themselves. Its effects were seen in the discoveries which they actually 186 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS made ; but to the mass of mankind they seemed little better than magicians. Now it has spread to the whole world. In every class-room and laboratory in Europe and America the conscious idea of Science forms the minds and wills of thousands of men and women who could never have helped to create it. It has penetrated, as the poKtical conceptions of Liberty or of Natural Eight never penetrated, to. non-European races. Arab engineers in Khartoum, doctors and nurses and generals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinese students make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired by absolute submission to Science, and not only English or American or German town working men, but villagers in Italy or Argentina are learning to respect the authority and sympathise with the methods of that organised study which may double at any moment the produce of their crops or check a plague among their cattle. ' Science,' however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only with things exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubes and micro- scopes. They are dimly aware that there exists a science of the mind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct. It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt more successfully than elsewhere the art of con- trolling other men's unconscious impulses from with- out, there have been of late some noteworthy declara- POLITICAL MOEALITY 187 tions as to the need of conscious control from within. Some of those especially who have been trained in scientific method at the American Universities are now attempting to extend to politics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct. But it seems to me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes the old form of an opposition between ' reason ' and 'passion.' The President of the University of Yale saidj for instance, the other day in a powerful address, ' Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals to the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers . . . attacks our political life at a most vulnerable point.' ^ If forty years ago Huxley 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 their feelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science has been that it does touch men's feelings, and draws motive power for thought from the passions of rever- ence, of curiosity, and of limitless hope. The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men must become passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to that section of the Eepublic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of the State realises itself in men's hearts by a 'harmony' which strengthens the motive force of ' A. T. Hadley in Munsey'a Magazine, 1907. 188 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS passion, because the separate passions no longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an end discovered by the intellect.^ In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling is peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only provide a motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values which must be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying to realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from current language) upon Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In music the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise intensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely their own 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 his hearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring of those who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sit enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions. But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conception of such a harmony of reason ' Cf. Plato's Repvhlic, Book iv. POLITICAL MOEALITT 189 and passion, of thought and impulse, in political motive ? One thinks of education, and particularly of scientific education. But the imaginative range which is necessary if students are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from the laboratory to the public meeting is not common. It would perhaps more often exist if part of all scientific education were given to such a study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mental history as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the young biologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great reputation 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 the conception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even more directly. I my- self believe that a very simple course on the well- ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, be quite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who had received 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 weU within their range. A town child, again, lives nowadays in the constant presence of the psycho- logical art of advertisement, and could easily be made 190 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get a bar of soap, he feels inclined to get that which is most widely advertised, and what relation his inclination has to that mental process which is most likely to result in the buying of good soap. The basis of know- ledge necessary for the conception of intellectual duty could further be enlarged at school by the study in pure literature of the deeper experiences of the mind. A child of twelve might understand Carlyle's Essay on Burns if it were carefuUy read in class, and a good sixth form might learn much from Wordsworth's Prelude. The whole question, however, of such deliberate in- struction in the emotional and intellectual facts of man's nature as may lead men to conceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal is one on which much steady thinking and observa- tion is still required. The instincts of sex, for in- stance, are becoming in all civilised countries more and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasing degree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has found the way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before or during the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instincts themselves. Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends not only upon the chemical compo- POLITICAL MOEALITY 191 sition of food but upon our appetite, and that we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control and direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, ' We cannot properly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a free mind with the prospect of enjoyment.' ^ But it would not be easy to create by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse at which Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why food is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is there- fore our duty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made both wholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing except his sense of humour. So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say that the teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of the existence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finally at subordin- ating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on the consequences of political action. But it is extra- ordinarily difl&cult to discover how this can be done under the actual conditions of school teaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, in- troduced into the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life and Duties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played in social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accom- 1 British Medical Journal, Oct. 8, 1904. 192 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS panied by a moral for each section, such as 'serving personal interest is not enough/ ' need of public spirit and intelligence for good Government,' ' need of honesty in giving a vote,' ' the vote a trust as well as a right.' Almost every school publisher rushed out a text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an acknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the time to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless col- lection of printed pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed to stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths and maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must apparently approach their task with something of Socrates' passionate love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic. If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught what Mr. Wells calls ' the sense of the State,' ^ we may, by remembering Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends. Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If their love is to be 1 The. FiUure in America, chapter iz. POLITICAL MOEALITY 193 roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the Oedipus Goloneus. But such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself somewhat more lovely. The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words but by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, they shauld either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those aspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, if it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the buildings of Tpres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, b^ in truth im- pressive.. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortun- ately not to be found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of Landport; though boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in personal motive than in external pomp. More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberate intensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions. A life-long worker for educa- tion on the London School Board once told me that when he wearied of his work — when the words of reports become mere words, and the figures in the N 194 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS returns mere figures — lie used to go down to a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class after class, till the freshness of his impulse came back. But for a man who is about to try such an experiment on himself even the word 'emotion' is dangerous. The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hot and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus of his energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level of full consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by every sight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted to his work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house. But all that he is conscious of during the working hours is the one pur- pose of healing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and hand are harmoniously concen- trated. Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becoming conscious of new vices than of new virtues. Some day, for instance, the word ' opinion ' itself may become the recognised name of the most dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit and association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they neglect 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 by any clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulated State in the world would be POLITICAL MOEALITY 195 one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men who never followed up a train of political reason- ing in their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was a matter of ' con- science ' and therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation. But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato's conception of the Harmony of the Soul — the intensification both of passion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination — can ever become a part wf the general political ideals of a modern nation/ Perhaps most men before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes. Many men would now answer. No. The Japanese are apparently in some respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual morality than, say, the French. One hears, for instance, of incidents which seem to show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japanese universities. But both during the years of preparation for the war, and during the war itself, there was something in what one was told of the combined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to a European seemed wholly new. Napoleon contended against the ' ideologues ' who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submitted to his own illusions he ground them to powder. But we associate Napoleon's clearness of 196 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS vision with personal selfishness. Here was a nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in his determination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesque traditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism was hotter than Gambetta's. Something of this may have been due to the inherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be the effect of their mental environment. They had whole-heartedly welcomed that conception of Science which in Europe, where it was first elaborated, still struggles with older ideals. Science with them had allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural law which, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had always underlain their various religions.^ They had acquired, therefore, a mental out- look which was determinist without being fatalist, and which combined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy in thought and action. One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might take place between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion, and the new con- ception of intellectual duty introduced by Science, The political effect of such a fusion would be enor- mous. But for the moment that hope is not easy. The inevitable conflict between old faith and new knowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a division not only between the con- ' See Okakura, The Japanese Spirit (1905). POLITICAL MOEALITY 197 elusions of religion and science, but also between the religious and the scientific habit of mind. The scientific men of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine of probability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most perfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an English clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his Times or Mail, his attitiide towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or doubt that he who uttered certain command- ments about non-resistance and poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has. been trained to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is. Dr. Jameson's prepared manifesto on the Johannes- burg Eaid stirred most clergymen like a trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine disgust and despair. 198 HUiMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of new ideals of intellectual conauct will have to wait for a still wider change of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day the con- ception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, in the deepest regions of our moral conscious- ness, of our present dreary confusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics which is now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able not only to control and direct in him- self the impulses of whose nature he is more fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of his aim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their most effective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which in the best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, and citizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanese army looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind by which alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature. EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 199 CHAPTEE II KEPKESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change not only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our political institutions. I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which produced the constitutions under which most civilised nations now live, was inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked, representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of the conditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have been itself a mistake ? Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditional democratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting again from the beginning, and considering what are the ends repre- sentation is intended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to good government. 200 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essence of a representative government is that it depends on the periodically renewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and the degree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance of accomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by a majority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey. The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representative democracy was a mistake, raises the pre- liminary question whether the consent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of good government. To this question Plato, who among the political philosophers of the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of a modern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered. No. To him it was incredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleeting shadows of popular opinion. He proposed, tlierefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his Eepublic should live under the despotic government of those who by ' slaving for it ' ^ had acquired a know- ledge of the reality which lay behind appearance. Comte, writing when modern science was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the same proposal. Mr. H. G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous speculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia 1 SovKeia-avTi ry KT'fiaa airov {Republic, p. 494). EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 201 which is the result of the forcible overthrow of repre- sentative government by a voluntary aristocracy of trained men of science. He appeals, in a phrase consciously influenced by Plato's metaphysics, to ' the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind the shams and patriot- isms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible world. . . .' ^ There are some signs, in America as well as in England, that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both passionately in earnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in their experience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-blooded manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians, turn 'back to Plato ' ; and when once this question is started, neither our existing mental habits nor our loyalty to demo- cratic tradition will prevent it from being fully discussed. To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an experience of government without consent larger than any other that has ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. The Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a ' Wells, A Modern Utopia, p. 263. ' 1 know of no case for the elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon count- less important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference ; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers. . . .' Wells, Anticipations, p. 147. 202 HUMAN NATUKE IN POLITICS body of about a thousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensures that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of government ; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern. Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, however carefully selected and trained, must still inhabit ' the ostensible world.' The Anglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours — when he is toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or famine-prevention — may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science which is far removed from the jealousies and superstitions of the villagers in his district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by his efficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on life which decides his choice of ends ; and the Anglo-Indian outlook on life is conditioned, not by the problem of British India as history will see it a thousand years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in the little government stations, with their trying climates, their narrow society, and the continual presence of an alien and possibly hostile race. We have not, it is true, yet followed the full rigour of Plato's system, and chosen EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 203 the wives of ABglo-Indian officials by the same process as that through which their husbands pass. But it may be feared that even if we did so, the lady would still remain typical who said to Mr. Nevinson, ' To us in India a pro-native is simply a rank outsider.' ^ What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom the Anglo- Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion depends even more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not on things as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. The avowed tactics of our empire in the East have there- fore always been based by many of our high officials upon psychological and not upon logical considera- tions. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, we blow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our rights in dealing with neigh- bouring Powers, all with reference to ' the moral effect upon the native mind.' And, if half what is hinted at by some ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religious antipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if not encouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintain our dominant position. The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore one that would exist at least equally » Tht Nation, December 21, 1907. 204 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS in Plato's corporate despotism as in the most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay on The First Principles of Government, says : ' It is ... on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and the most popular.'^ It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat then becomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, or religious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic State. Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that the loyalty of the subject-classes in his Eepublic should be secured once for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach a religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell their people ' one magnificent lie ' ; ^ a remedy which in its ultimate effect on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease which it was intended to cure. But even if it is admitted that government without ' Hume's Essays, chap. iv. ■' yevvaUf tl in fcvdo/i^rovs (Republic, p. 414), EEPEESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 205 consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary repre- sentation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method of securing consent. Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than anything else which can be substituted for it. And representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. lu England at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in constituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given to the repre- sentative, variation is possible. If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by Fdnelon and Helv^tius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of constitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but 206 HUMAN NATUEE IN" POLITICS where the machinery of British parliamentary govern- ment would not work. In Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary local con- stituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go to the poU.i As long as that is the case repre- sentative government is impossible. A slow process of education might increase the proportion of voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, who understand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, to discover other methods by which the vague desires of the native population can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made in some measure to depend on them. The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an 'advisory Council of Notables';^ with the possible result that we may be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealings with the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in our regulation of factory labour. 1 Times, January 6, 1908. 2 Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6 1907, p. 885. EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 207 In England itself, though great political inventions are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable tendencies. A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex process by which that decision is formed ; and that this is done not in the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of securing them by regulation. The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing it with the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has taken place in the conditions under which that decision is formed which is expressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.^ The various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters beyond the ' See, e.g., Stephen, History of the Criminal Law, vol. i. pp. 260-72. 208 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS cognisance of the royal official who called the jury together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in England might therefore have devel- oped on the same lines as it did in Athens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jury might have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hired advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the Private Orations of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the witnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they should tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. If such an institution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would have taken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own version of the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reserved for the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of the prisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly party vote. But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a long series of imperceptible and for- gotten changes, that the opinion of the jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is produced has been more and more completely KEPRESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 209 controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the essential 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 of the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all precon- ceived inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolled inferences 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 here banished on the ground that they are ' not evidence,' and witnesses are compelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations of sight and hearing. The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, if they are well-intentioned men, often find themselves giving, to their own surprise, perfectly consistent accounts of the events at issue. The barristers' tricks of advocacy are to some extent restrained by pro- 210 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS fessional custom and by the authority of the judge, and they are careful to point out to the jury each other's fallacies. Newspapers do not reach the jury box, and in any case are prevented by the law as to contempt of court from commenting on a case which is under trial. The judge sums up, carefully describing the conditions of valid inference on questions of dis- puted fact, and warning the jury against those forms of irrational and unconscious inference to which experience has shown them to be most liable. They then retire, all carrying in their minds the same body of simplified and dissected evidence, and all having been urged with every circumstance of solemnity to form their conclusions by the same mental process. It constantly happens therefore that twelve men, selected by lot, will come to a unanimous verdict as to a question on which in the outside world they would have been hopelessly divided, and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions of fact so difficult as to leave the practised intellect of the judge unde- cided, will very generally be right. An English law court is indeed during a well-governed jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules of valid reason- ing are illustrated by experiment; and when, as threatens to occur in some American States and cities, it becomes impossible to enforce those rules, the jury system itself breaks down.^ 1 On the jury system see Mr. Wells's Mankind in the Making, EEPKESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 211 At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree of economy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do not make good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order that popular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may not be unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing class or person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced to death or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of a jury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are now taken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by special fitness for their task. In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine the tentative changes which, since the Eeform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear upon electors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practise open bribery the whole system of representation would break down at once. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several genera- chapter vii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where it is desirable that goyemment should be supported by popular consent. 212 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS tions on the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was the serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of 1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definite bargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavish expenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personally popular, and create an impres- sion that his connection with the constituency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 there- fore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candi- date at a parliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and later Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties after death, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paid for by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, no election meeting may be held in a building where any form of food or drink is habitually sold, although that building may be only a Co-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room. The existing laws against Corrupt Practices repre- sent, it is true, rather the growing purpose of the State to Vmtrol the conditions under which electoral opinion is formed, than any large measure of success in carrying out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion of the expenditure at any English election EEPEESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 213 is now incurred by bodies enrolled outside the con- stituency, and nominally engaged, not in winning the election for a particular candidate, but in propagating their own principles. Sometimes the candidate whom they support, and whom they try to commit as deeply as possible, would be greatly relieved if they with- drew. Generally their agents are an integral part of his fighting organisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election is covered by a special sub- scription made by him to the central fund. Every one sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clauses in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbid the employment of paid canvassers, though no one as yet has put forward any plan for preventing it. But it is acknow- ledged that unless the whole principle is to be aban- doned, new legislation must take place; and Lord Eobert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a 'stringent and far-reaching Corrupt Practices Act.'^ If, however, an act is carried stringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development of electoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new and hitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty of political appeal. A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituency for three or four weeks of excite- ment and horseplay, during which the voters were > Times, June 26, 1907. 214 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS every day further removed from the state of mind in which serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Now no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper of&ces, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to effective political reasoning. A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of the Ballot. Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful and public-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly or secretly ? Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. Since men acted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and since landlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws against intimidation, to bring ' sinister ' motives to bear upon voters whose votes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow as a corollary from utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole philosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiance till the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved the abandonment of EEPEESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 215 the whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure and pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can be summed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, that even under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause which induce the ordinary citizen to vote. ' Once in a thousand times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may cross him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year's expenditure if the side he votes for wins.' He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. ' His motive, when it is an honour- able one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter's frame of mind a solemnity that does not ' belong to it.' But ideas of right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our neighbours. ' Since then the real motive which induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an interested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decided is whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense of social duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when the act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. But this question is answered as soon as stated. When in every other act of a man's life which concerns his 216 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is the single case in which he will act better for being sheltered against all comment.' ^ Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot ; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of politi- cal impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which publicity would lend an added weight, as it 1 Letter to the Reader, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J. S. M., quoted aa Mill's by Henry Romilly in pamphlet. Public RespomiUUty and Vote by Ballot, pp. 89, 90. EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEKNMENT 217 does in those ' acts of a man's life which concern his duty to others,' to which Mill refers — the paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treat- ment of one's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense. Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the excitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one's opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of one's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shade vyy and uncertain conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the canvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it is a promise. Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign in favour of 'pro- portional representation,' in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing system of the 'single ballot ' a minority in any single-member constituency 218 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS may, if there are more candidates than two, return its representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them — the Free- Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High- Church Liberals — have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large con- stituencies, each of which returns six or seven mem- bers, Manchester with its eight seats being given as an example. This system, according to Lord Courtney, ' will lead to the dropping of the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'^ But the argu- ments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at the 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 a trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were examined simultane- ously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the accidental composition of the separate juries ; but the ' Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics' Institute, Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6. EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 219 process of forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective. The English experiment on which the Proportional Eepresentation Society mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society and through eight newspapers. 'The con- stituency,' we are told, ' was supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some of the main divisions of public opinion,' ^ The names were, in fact. Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner- man. Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Eichard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Win- ston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Hender- son, Bonar Law, and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected. I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty ' Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6. 220 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS whose faces the caricaturists of the Christinas numbers expect their readers to recognise. At our dinner party not much unreality was intro- duced by the intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, ' to us,' as they were ' in themselves.' But an ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is ' to him ' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told. The Proportional Eepresentation Society seem to assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to ' the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad KEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 221 party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular con- tests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each constituency, i.e. by meetings and canvassing and the distribution of ' election litera- ture.' 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 effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were pre- pared to spend six . times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day. These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Pro- portional Eepresentation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Caven- dish induced the House of Commons to adopt ' plural voting ' for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal 222 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them. This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative 'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French scrutin de liste. The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates. EEPEESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 223 Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Eoman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers. If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parlia- mentary elections, it is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be gener- ally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked of&cial paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons. Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his Municipal Eepresentation Bill in the House of Lords,^ contrasted his proposed system with that used in the London Borough Council elections, accord- ing to which a number of seats are assigned to each ward and the voter may give one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number of candidates. 1 April 30, 1907. 224 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS It is true that the electoral machinery for the London Boroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of America. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how to vote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were six seats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was told by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not one of which I remem- bered to have seen before. If there had been one seat to be filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enough about one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote ; and the local party committees would have known that I and others would do so. Each party would then have circulated a portrait and a printed account of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had a strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I could not give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteen candidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. I therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who voted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket.' If for any reason the party committee put, to use an Americanism, a ' yellow dog ' among the list of names, I voted for the yellow dog. Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 225 marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord Court- ney's proposed system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the two systems until the votes are counted. If the sole object of an election were to discover and record the exact proportion of the electorate who are prepared to vote for candidates nominated by the several party organisations Lord Courtney's scheme might be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a longer experience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidate nominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that a parliament of well-selected members who repre- sent somewhat roughly the opinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selected members who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quote Lord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, a reflection of the community.' ^ To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally essential parts of his plan ; and that plan will ^ Address at Stockport, p. 11. P 226 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests, will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting to see whether the growing substitution of the new quantita- tive and psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about elections wUl have advanced sufSiciently far to enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they wiU adopt the transferable vote, and so get over the diffi- culty of three-cornered elections, while retaining single- member constituencies, and therewith the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the whole of his constituents. A further effect of the way in which we are begin- ning to think of the electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency. The Local G-overnment Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902 the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain that the Gruardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Kural Parish Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 227 been a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year. In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral concentration as a means of increasing elec- toral responsibility. In Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the Philadelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallel columns of party ' tickets,' contained some four hundred names. The resulting effects on the personnel of Philadelphian politics were as obvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however, concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of the elected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a single elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated 228 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS commissions, and whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to all the voters, and therefore must be seriouslyconsidered by his nominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to sub- stitute a quantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election (or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to themselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. Lord Eobert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that term, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "wiU of the people,'"^ and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should not defend demo- cracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so that he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrel between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public control of the methods of producing political opinion by the substitu- tion of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national excitement. > Timea, June 25, 1907. REPRESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 229 But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half- conscious changes in the general intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this 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 but irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of match- boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemed to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely 230 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS tremendous fact which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable us to improve it. Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public houses could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunken- ness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness. It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of asserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whose hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who have just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibility half consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined anti- clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 231 day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desir- able they may be in themselves, can only be of small effect. Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor super- fluity of money to spend on it ; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of unspoilt impulse^ If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed come. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among those who profit, and those who suifer by them. But no one who is near to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away 232 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation. A mere numerical increase in the number of persons in England who are interested in politics would indeed itself introduce a new and difficult political factor. The active politicians in England, those who take any part in politics beyond voting, are at present a tiny minority. I was to speak not long ago at an election meeting, and having been misdirected as to the place where the meeting was to be held, found my- self in an unknown part of North London, compelled to inquire of the inhabitants until I should find the address either of the meeting-hall or of the party committee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at last a cabman on his way home to tea told me that there was a milkman in his street who was ' a politician and would know.' There are in London seven hundred thousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by the man who is in the best position to know that it would be safe to say that less than ten thousand persons actually attend the annual ward meetings of the various parties, and that not more than thirty thousand are members of the party associations. That division of labour which assigns politics to a special class of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neigh- bours as well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far in most other parts of England as in London. Bat in no county in England, as far as I am aware, EEPEESENTATIVE aOVEENMENT 233 does the number of persons really active in politics amount to ten per cent, of the electorate. There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to be true. The English Elementary Education Act was passed in 1870, and the elementary schools may be said to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those who entered them, being six years old, at that date are now aged thirty-four. The statistics as to the pro- duction and sale of newspapers and cheap books and the use of free libraries, show that the younger working men and women in England read many times as much as their parents did. This, and the general increase of intellectual activity in our cities of which it is only a part, may very probably lead, as the social question in politics grows more serious, to a large extension of electoral interest. If so, the little groups of men and women who now manage the three English parties in the local constituencies will find themselves swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on taking some part in the choice of candidates and the formation of programmes. That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process by which the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local party association are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled, as many of the American States have been compelled, to pass a series of Acts for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties. The ordinary citizen would find then, much 234 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS more obviously than he does at present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not only the marking of a baUot paper on the day of the election, but an active share in that work of appointing and controlling party committees from which many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an instinctive dread. But th^ most important difficulties raised by the extension of political interest from a very small to a large fraction of the population would be concerned with political motive rather than political machinery. It is astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed that individual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics, assumed, without realising the nature of their own assumption, that the representative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community.^ At present there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination and sympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for the general good. But every organiser of elections knows that the supply is never more than sufficient, and payment of members, while ^ E.g. James Mill, Essay on Oovernment (1825), 'We have seen in what manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of an interest diflfereut from that of the parties who choose them, namely, by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties ' (p. 27). EEPEESENTATIVE GOVEENMENT 235 it would permit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would also make it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective. The con- centration both of administrative and legislative work in the hands of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is making the House of Commons yearly a less interesting place ; and members have of late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the personnel of the House should seriously deteriorate. 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 of legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the members 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 its difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calcu- lated individual selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of working-class life. During the last twenty years I have been associated, for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English political working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real to them. It is, for instance, the 'class-conscious' working men who, in England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard- against the horrors of a general European 236 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS war. But as their number and responsibility increase tbey will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as to the intellectual conditions of represen- tative government upon a large scale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is very difficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of an expansive temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds them — and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue therefore which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured tolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware of the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and receive help, and very unwill- ing to ' do ' any man ' out of his job.' His parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a home with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read, things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadov?y for him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his daily life. Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising that things whose existence we infer EEPEESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 237 from reading are as important as the things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a list of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications of the man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the man whom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before ; or of deciding on an improvement with complete impartiality as between the district one knows of on the map and the district one sees every morning. If a representative elected to govern a large area allows personal acquaint- ance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaint- ance and liking will be schemed for and exploited by those who have their own ends to gain. The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, where the interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from the inefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of the known official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed ; as well as in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance the dimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimate sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen. The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, very great in the parliamentary Labour Party. The working men who have been sent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked intelligence and morale and of considerable political experience. But the success or failure of any scheme aiming at 238 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS social equality will depend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which the working classes must necessarily send men of less exceptional ability and experience. I have never myself served on an elected local body the majority of whose members were weekly wage earners. But I have talked with men, both of working-class and middle-class origin, who have been in that position. What they say confirms that which I have inferred from my own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level of enthusi- asm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with a difficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing with sectional interests and official discipline. One is told that on such a body many members feel it difficult to realise that the way in which a well- intentioned man may deal with his own personal expenditure, his continued patronage, for instance, of a rather inefficient tradesman because he has a large family, or his refusal to contest an account from a dislike of imputing bad motives, is fatal if applied in the expenditure of the large sums entrusted to a public body. Sometimes there are even, one learns, indications of that good-humoured and not ill-meant laxity in expending public money which has had such disastrous results in America, and which lends itself so easily to exploitation by those in whom the habit of giving and taking personal favours has hardened inta EEPEESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 239 systematic fraud. When one of the West Ham Guardians, two years ago, committed suicide on being charged with corruption, the Star sent down a repre- sentative who filled a column with the news. 'His death,' we were told, ' has robbed the district of an indefatigable public worker. County Council, Board of Guardians, and Liberal interests all occupied his leisure time.' 'One of his friends' is described as saying to the Star reporter, ' You do not need to go far to learn of his big-souled geniality. The poor folks of the workhouse will miss him badly. ' ^ When one has waded through masses of evidence on American muni- cipal corruption, that phrase about 'big-souled geni- ality ' makes one shudder. The early history of the co-operative and trade- union movements in England is full of pathetic instances of this kind of failure, and both movements show how a new and more stringent ideal may be slowly built up. But such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, and must be part of the con- scious organised thought of each generation if it is to be permanently effective. Those difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed out by the opponents of democracy. But if democracy is to succeed they must be frankly con- sidered by the democrats themselves ; just as it is the engineer who is trying to build the bridge, and not the ' Star, November 28th, 1906. 240 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS ferry-owner, who is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate the strain which the materials will stand. The engineer, when he wishes to increase the margin of safety in his plans, treats as factors in the same quantitative problem both the chemical ex- pedients by which he can strengthen his materials and the structural changes by which the strain on those materials can be diminished. So those who would increase the margin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire except to arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength of the individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually I increased by moral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving or extending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy as may prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength. OFPICIAL THOUaHT 241 CHAPTEE III OFFICIAL THOUGHT It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under any conceivable system of representation cannot do the whole work of government themselves. If all elections are held in single member constitu- encies of a size sufficient to secure a good supply of candidates; if the number of elections is such as to allow the political workers a proper interval for rest and reflection between the campaigns ; if each elected body has an area large enough for effective administra- tion, a number of members sufficient for committee work and not too large for debate, and duties suffi- ciently important to justify the effort and expense of a contest; then one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best number of men and women to be elected by the existing population of the United Kingdom — or rather less than one to every two thousand of the population.^ ^ I arrive at this figure by dividing the United Kingdom into Bingle member parliamentary constituencies, averaging 100,000 in population, which gives a House of Commons of 440 — a more con- Q 242 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS This proportion depends mainly on facts in the psychology of the electors, which will change very slowly if they change at all. At present the amount of work to be done in the way of government is rapidly increasing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, the number of elected persons avail- able for each unit of work must tend to decrease. The number of persons now elected in the United Kingdom (including, for instance, the Parish Coun- cillors of rural parishes, and the Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, larger than my estimate, though it has been greatly diminished by the Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1902. Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers are still somewhat uneconomi- cally distributed it represents a smaller actual working 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 Eeturns of 1901 as professionally employed in the central and local government of the United Kingdom was 161,000. This number has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing rate, and consists of persons who give on an venient number than the existing 670. I take the same unit of 100,000 for the average municipal area. Large towns would con- tain several parliamentary constituencies, and small towns would, as at present, be separate municipal areas, although only part of a parliamentary constituency. I allow one local council of 50 on the average to each municipal area. OrnCIAL THOUGHT 243 average at least four times as many hours a week to their work as can be expected from the average elected member. What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, of twenty-three thousand elected, and, say, two hundred thousand non-elected persons ? To begin with, ought the elected members be free to appoint the non-elected officials as they like ? Most American politicians of Andrew Jackson's time, and a large number of American politicians to-day, would hold, for instance, as a direct corollary from democratic principles, that the elected congressman or senator for a district or State has a right to nominate the local federal officials. There may, he would admit, be some risk in that method, but the risk, he would argue, is one involved in the whole scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy as a whole are greater than its disadvantages. Our political logic in England has never been so elemehtary as that of the Americans, nor has our faith in it been so unflinching. Most Englishmen, therefore, have no feeling of disloyalty to the democratic idea in admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency of officials to depend upon the personal character of in- dividual representatives. At the General Election of 1906 there were at least two English constituencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) which re- turned candidates whose personal unfitness had been 244 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS to most men's minds proved by evidence given in the law courts. Neither constituency was markedly unlike the average in any respect. The facts were well known, and in each case an attempt was made by a few public-spirited voters to split the party vote, but both candidates were successful by large majorities. The Borough of Croydon stands, socially and intellect- ually, well above the average, but Mr. Jabez Balfour represented Croydon for many years, until he was sentenced to penal servitude for fraud. No one in any of these three cases would have desired that the sitting member should appoint, say, the postmasters, or collec- tors of Inland Eevenue for his constituency. But though the case against the appointment of officials by individual representatives is clear, the question of the part which should be taken by any elected body as a whole in appointing the officials who serve under it is much more difficult, and cannot be discussed without considering what are to be the relative functions of the officials and the representa- tives after the appointment has taken place. Do we aim at making election in fact as well as in constitu- tional theory the sole base of political authority, or do we desire that the non-elected officials shall exert some amount of independent influence ? The fact that most Englishmen, in spite of their traditional fear of bureaucracy, would now accept the second of these alternatives, is one of the most strik- OFFICIAL THOUGHT 245 ing results of our experience in the working of democracy. We see that the evidence on which the verdict at an election must he given is becoming every year more difficult to collect and present, and further removed from the direct observation of the voters. "We are afraid of being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers or election leaflets for our knowledge, and we have therefore come to value, even if for that reason only, the existence of a responsible and more or less independent Civil Service. It is difficult to realise how short a time it is since questions for which we now rely entirely on official statistics were discussed by the ordinary political methods of agitation and advocacy. In the earlier years of George the Third's reign, at a time when population in England was, as we now know, rising with unprecedented rapidity, the question of fact whether it was rising or falling led to embittered political controversy.^ In the spring of 1830 the House of Commons gave three nights to a confused party debate on 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.^ In 1798 or 1830 the 'public' who could take part in such discussions numbered perhaps fifty thousand at the most. At least ten million people must, since 1903, have taken part in the present ' Bonar's Malthua, ohap. vii. « Hamard, Feb. 4th, 5th, 6th, 1830. 246 HUMAN NATUKE IN POLITICS Tariff Eeform controversy; and that controversy would have degenerated into mere Bedlam if it had not been for the existence of the Board of Trade Eeturns, with whose figures both sides had at least to appear to square their arguments. If official figures did not exist in England, or if they did not possess or deserve authority, it is difficult to estimate the degree of political harm which could be done in a few years by an interested and deliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for the personal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, for instance, that our Civil Service were either notori- ously inefficient or believed to be dominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent ' cur- rency agitation ' should suddenly spring up. A power- ful press syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring that the privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserve are ' stran- gling British Industry.' The contents bills of two hundred newspapers denounce every day the ' mono- polists ' and the ' gold-bugs,' the ' lies and shams ' of the Bank Eeturns, and the 'paid perjurers of Somerset House.' The group of financiers who control the syndi- cate stand to win enormous sums by the creation of a more ' elastic ' currency, and subscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincere paper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of the professional economists. A vigorous and well-known OFFICIAL THOUGHT 247 member of parliament — a not very reputable aristoorat perhaps, or some one loosely connected with the Labour movement — whom everybody has hitherto feared and no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at the head of the movement, denounces the ' fossils ' and ' superior persons ' who at present lead Conservative and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and, with the help of the press syndicate and the subscrip- tion fund of the ' Free Money League,' begins to capture the local associations, and through them the central office of the party which is for the moment in opposition. Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were opposed only by counter-electioneering, might not suc- ceed, even although its proposals were wholly fraudulent and its leaders so ignorant or so criminal that they could only come into power by discrediting two-thirds of the honest politicians in the country and by replacing them with ' hustlers ' and ' boodlers ' and ' grafters,' and the other species for whom American political science has provided names ? How is the ordinary voter — a market-gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter — to distinguish by the help of his own know- ledge and reasoning power between the various appeals made to him by the ' Keformers ' and the ' Safe Money Men ' as to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the note issue — 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 his judgment. A 248 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS ' Christian Service Wing ' of the Tree Money League may be formed, and his conscience may be roused by a white-cravatted orator, intoxicated by his own elo- quence into something like sincerity, who borrows that phrase about ' Humanity crucified on a cross of gold ' which Mr. W. J. Bryan borrowed a dozen years ago itom some one else. In an optimistic mood one might rely on the subtle network of confidence by which each man trusts, on subjects outside his own knowledge, some honest and better-informed neighbour, who again trusts at several removes the trained thinker. But does such a personal network exist in our vast delocalised urban populations ? It is the vague apprehension of such dangers, quite as much as the merely selfish fears of the privileged 1 classes, which preserves in Europe the relics of past I systems of non-elective government, the House of Lords, !for instance, in England, and the Monarchy in Italy or Norway. Men feel that a second base in politics is required, consisting of persons independent of the tactics by which electoral opinion is formed and legally entitled to make themselves heard. But political authority founded on heredity or wealth is not in fact protected from the interested manipulation of opinion and feeling. The American Senate, which has come to be representative of wealth, is already absorbed by that financial power which depends for its existence on manufactured opinion; and our House of Lords ia OFFICIAL THOUGHT 249 rapidly tending in the same direction. From the beginning of history it has been found easier for any skilled politician who set his mind to it, to control the opinions of 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 the existence of a per- manent Civil Service, appointed on a system inde- pendent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and holding office during good behaviour. If such a service were, as it is in Kussia and to a large extent in India, a sovereign power, it would itself, as I argued in the last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulating opinion. But the English Civil servants in their pre- sent position have the right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity of making their will, by fair means or foul, prevail. The creation of this Service was the one great political invention in nineteenth-century England, and like other inventions it was worked out under the pressure of an urgent practical problem. The method of appointing the of&cials of the East India Company had been a critical question in English politics since 1783. By that time it had already become clear that we could not permanently allow the appointment of the rulers of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet and army to depend upon the irre- sponsible favour of the Company's directors. Charles 250 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS James Fox in 1783, with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cut the knot, by making Indian appoint- ments, in effect, part of the ordinary system of parlia- mentary patronage; and he and Lord North were beaten over their India BUI, not only because George the Third was obstinate and unscrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political dangers involved in their proposal. The question, in fact, could only be solved by a new invention. The expedient of admin- istering an oath to the Directors that they would make their appointments honestly, proved to be useless, and the requirements that the nominees of the Directors should submit to a special training at Hayleybury, though more effective, left the main evil of patronage untouched. As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill introduced by Macaulay for the renewal and revision of the Company's charter contained a clause providing that East India cadetships should be thrown open to competition.^ For the time the influence of the Directors was suf&cient to prevent so great a change from being effected, but in 1853, on a further renewal of the Charter, the system of competition was definitely adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships took place in 1855. ' It would be interesting if Lord Morley, now that he has access to the records of the East India House, would tell us the true intel- lectual history of this far-reaching suggestion. For the facts as now known, cf . A. L. Lowell, Colonial Civil Service, pp. 243-2S6. OFPICIAL THOUGHT 251 In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distin- guished Indian Civilian who had married Macaulay's sister, had been asked to inquire, with the help of Sir Stafford Northcote, into the method of appointment in the Home Civil Service. His report appeared in the spring of 1854,^ and is one of the ablest of those State Papers which have done so much to mould the English constitution during the last two generations. It showed the intolerable effects on the personnel of the existing Service of the system by which the Patronage Secretary of the Treasury distributed appointments in the national Civil Service among those members of parliament whose votes were to be influenced or rewarded, and it proposed that all posts requiring intellectual qualifications should be thrown open to those young men of good character who succeeded at a competitive examination in the subjects which then constituted the education of a gentleman. But to propose that members of parliament should give up their own patronage was a very different thing from asking them to take away the patronage of the East India Company. Sir Charles Trevelyan, therefore, before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a number of distinguished persons both inside and out- side the Government service, and printed their very frank replies in an appendix. Most of his correspondents thought that the idea ' Bepertt and Papers on the Civil Service, X854-5. 252 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS was hopelessly impracticable. It seemed like the intrusion into the world of politics of a scheme of cause and effect derived from another universe — as if one should propose to the Stock Exchange that the day's prices should be fixed by prayer and the casting of lots. Lingen, for instance, the per- manent head of the Education Office, wrote 'con- sidering that, as matter of fact, patronage is one element of power, and not by any means an unreal one; considering the long and inestimably valuable habituation of the people of this country to political contests in which the share of office . . , reckons among the legitimate prizes of war ; considering that 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 keys of many things, and that our modes of thinking and acting proceed, in a thousand ways, upon this supposition, considering all these things, I should hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of the Civil Service as that proposed by yourself and Sir Stafford North- cote.' ^ Sir James Stephen of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, ' The world we live in is not, I think, half moralised enough for the acceptance of such a scheme of stern morality as this.' ^ When, a few years later, competition for commissions in the Indian army * Reports and Papirs on the Civil Service, pp. 104, 105. ' Ibid., p. 78. OPFICIAL THOUGHT 253 was discussed, Queen Victoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that it ' reduced the sovereign to a mere signing machine.' ^ In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan's Eeport, Gladstone established open competition throughout the English Civil Service, by an Order in Council which was practically uncriticised and un- opposed; and the parliamentary government of England in one of its most important functions did in fact reduce itself ' to a mere signing machine.' The causes of the change in the political atmosphere which made this possible constitute one of the most interesting problems in English history. One cause is obvious. In 1867 Lord Derby's Eeform Act had suddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House of Commons from the ' ten pound householders ' in the boroughs to the working men. The old 'governing classes ' may well have felt that the patronage which they could not much longer retain would be safer in the hands of an independent Civil Service Commission, interpreting, like a blinded figure 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 mere transference of voting power. The fifteen years from the Crimean War to 1870 were in England a period of wide mental activity, during which » Life o/Qmen Victoria, vol. iii. p. 377 (July 29, 1858). 254 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS the conclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin or Newman were discussed and popularised by a crowd of magazine writers and preachers and poets. The conception was gaining ground that it was upon serious and continued thought and not upon opinion that the power to carry out our purposes, whether in politics or elsewhere, must ultimately depend. Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Eeal,' and had answered, ' Tour ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that,- above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without vot- ing, ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape : if you cannot — the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again.' ^ By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started on its course from paradox to platitude. The most im- portant single influence in that course had been the ' Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 1, The Present Time. (Chapman and Hall, 1894, pp. 12 and 14.) OFFICIAL THOUGHT 255 growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870 that Huxley's Lay Servians were collected and published. People who could not in 1850 understand Carlyle's distinction between the Delusive and the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley's compari- son of life and death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes a mistake.^ And Huxley's impersonal Science seemed a more present aid in the voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impossible Hero. But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when it had once been made and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficult thought in which it ori- ginated, and took its place in our habitual political psychology. We now half-consciously conceive of the Civil Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be taken or left as a whole. Open competition has by the same process become a 'prin- ciple,' conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has been in fact applied, and to no others. What is therefore for the moment most needed, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we should in our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinite possible variations. We must think of the expedient of competition itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by imper- ceptible gradations into other methods of appointment ; 1 Lay Sermons, p. 31, 'A Liberal Education' (1868). 256 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS and of the posts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, as overlapping those posts for which competition in some form is suitable though it has not yet been tried, and as touching^ at the mar- ginal point on their curve, those posts for which com- petition is unsuitable. Directly we begin this process one fact becomes ob- vious. There is no reason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment of the officials of the local as to those of the central government. It is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people that we have never seriously con- sidered this point. In America the term Civil Service "is applied equally to both groups of offices, and 'Civil Service principles ' are understood to cover State and Municipal as well as Federal appointments. The separation of the two systems in our minds may, indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from historical reasons we call them by different names. As it is, the local authorities are (with the exception that certain qualifications are required for teachers and medical officers) left free to do as they wiU in making appointments. Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan and provincial local bodies have adopted timid and limited schemes of open competition. But in all other cases the local civil servants, who are already probably as numerous as those of the central government,^ are ' The figures in the census of 1901 were— National, 90,000; OITICIAL THOUGHT 257 appointed under conditions which, if the Government chose to create a Commission of Inquiry, would pro- bably be found to have reproduced many of the evils that existed in the patronage of the central government before 1855. It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a separate body of Civil Service Commissioners to hold a separate examination for each locality, and difficulties would arise from the selection of officials by a body responsible only to the central government, and out of touch with the local body which controls, pays, and promotes them when appointed. But similar diffi- culties have been obviated by American Civil Service Eeformers, and a few days' hard thinking would suffice to adapt the system to English local conditions. One object aimed at by the creation of a competitive Civil Service for the central government in England was the prevention of corruption. It was made more difficult for representatives and officials to conspire together in order to defraud the public, when the official ceased to owe his appointment to the repre- sentative. If an English member of parliament desired now to make money out of his position, he would have to corrupt a whole series of officials in no way depen- dent on his favour, who perhaps intensely dislike the human type to which he belongs, and who would be Local, 71,000. But the local officials since then nave, 1 believe, increased much more rapidly than the national. K 258 HUMAN" NATUEE IN POLITICS condemned to disgrace or imprisonment years after he had lost his seat if some record of their joint misdoing were unearthed. This precaution against corruption is needed even more clearly under the conditions of local government. The expenditure of local bodies in the United Kingdom is already much larger than that of the central State, and is increasing at an enormously greater rate, while the fact that most of the money is spent locally, and in comparatively small sums, makes fraud easier. English municipal life is, I believe, on the whole pure, but fraud does occur, and it is encouraged by the close connection that may exist between the officials and the representatives. A needy or thick- skinned urban councillor or guardian may at any moment tempt, or be tempted, by a poor relation who helped him at his election, and for whom (perhaps as the result of a tacit understanding that similar favours should be allowed to his colleagues), he obtained a municipal post. The railway companies, again, in England are coming every year more and more under State control, but no statesman has ever attempted to secure in their case, as was done in the case of the East India Company a century ago, some reasonable standard of purity and impartiality in appointments and promotion. Some few railways have systems of competition for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried on OFPICIAL THOUGHT 259 by municipalities; but one is told that under most of the companies both appointment and promotion may be influenced by the favour of directors or large shareholders. We regulate the minutiae of coupling and signalling on the railways, but do not realise that the safety of the public depends even more directly upon their systems of patronage How far this principle should be extended, and how far, for instance, it would be possible to prevent the head of a great private firm from ruining half a country side by leaving the management of his business to a hopelessly incompetent relation, is a question which depends, among other things, upon the powers of poli- tical invention which may be developed by coUectivist thinkers in the next fifty years. We must meanwhile cease to treat the existing system of competition by the hasty writing of answers to unexpected examination questions as an unchangeable entity. That system has certain very real advantages. It is felt by the candidates and their relations to be ' fair.' It reveals facts about the relative powers of the candidates in some important intellectual qualities which no testimonials would indicate, and which are often unknown, till tested, to the candidates them- selves. But if the sphere of independent selection is to be widely extended, greater variety must be introduced into its methods. In this respect invention has stood still in England since the publication of Sir Charles 260 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Trevelyan's Keport in 1855. Some slight modifications have taken place in the subjects chosen for examina- tion, but the enormous changes in English educational conditions during the last half century have been for the most part ignored. It is still assumed that young Englishmen consist of a small minority who have received the nearly uniform ' education of a gentleman/ and a large majority who have received no intellectual training at all. The spread of varied types of secondary schools, the increasing specialisation of higher educa- tion, and the experience which all the universities of the world have accumulated as to the possibility of testing the genuineness and intellectual quality of 'post graduate' theses have had little or nt) effect. The Playfair Commission of 1875 found that a few women were employed for strictly subordinate work in the Post Office. Since then female typewriters and a few better-paid women have been introduced into other offices in accordance with the casual impulses of this or that parliamentary or permanent chief; but no systematic attempt has been made to enrich the thinking power of the State by using the trained and patient 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 1870 seemed to obviate any necessity for further consideration not only of the method by which OFFICIAL THOUGHT 261 ofi&cials were appointed but also of the system under which they did their work. The race of Tite Barnacles, they learnt, was now to become extinct. Appointment was to be by 'merit,' and the announcement of the examination results, like the wedding in a middle- Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story. But in a Government office, as certainly as in a law-court or a laboratory, effective thinking will not be done unless adequate opportunities and motives are secured by organisation during the whole working life of the appointed officials. Since 1870, however, the organi- sation of the Government Departments has either been left to the casual development of office tradition in each Department or has been changed (as in the case of the War Office) by an agitation directed against one Department only. The official relations, for instance, between the First Division minority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each office vary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions and prejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief. The same is true of the relation between the heads of each section and the officials immediately below them. In at least one office im- portant papers are brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are given invaluable experience, and the elder men are pre- vented from getting into an official rut by a system 262 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS which requires that all papers should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his own suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisation must in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematically compared them. In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to see that the published books as well as the office records on any question are available for every official who has to report on it. In the Boaid of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the im- portance of published as compared with official infor- mation is even greater, room has only just been found for a technical library which was collected many years ago.i The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, the Treasury and the Local Government Board have none. In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliber- ate policy has been adopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regular intervals to different branches of the work. The results are said to be excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has even been seriously discussed in any other Department which I know. Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with ' For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the Foreign Office. OrnOIAL THOUGHT 263 the organisation of non-departmental work more directly executive than their own, and part of a wise system of official training would consist in ' seconding ' young officials for experience in the kind of work which they are to organise. The clerks of the Board of Agriculture should he sent at least once in their career to help in superintending the killing of infected swine and interviewing actual farmers, while an official in the Eailway section of the Board of Trade should acquire some personal knowledge of the inside of a railway office. This principle of 'seconding' might well be extended so as to cover (as is already done in the army) definite periods of study during which an official, on leave of absence with full pay, should acquire knowledge useful to his department ; after which he should show the result of his work, not by the answering of examination questions, but by the presentation of a book or report of permanent value. The grim necessity of providing, after the events of the Boer War, for effective thought in the government of the British army produced the War Office Council. The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of those suggestions that reach him through the ' bottle- neck' of his senior official's mind, now sits once a week at a table with half a dozen heads of sub-depart- ments. He hears real discussion; he learns to pick men for higher work; and saves many hours of cir- cumlocutory writing. At the same time, owing to a 264 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS well-known fact in the physiology of the human brain, the men who are tired of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in the spoken word and the presence of their fellow human beings, just as politicians who are tired with talking, find, if their minds are still unin- jured, a new stimulus in the silent use of a pen. If this periodical alternation of written and oral discussion is useful in the War Office, it would pro- bably be useful in other offices; but no one with sufficient authority to require an answer has ever asked if it is so. One of the most important functions of a modern Government is the effective publication of information, but we have no Department of Publicity, though we have a Stationery Office ; and it is, for instance, appar- ently a matter of accident whether any particular Department has or has not a Gazette and how and when that Gazette is published. Nor is it any one's business to discover and criticise and if necessary co- ordinate the statistical methods of the various official publications. On all these points and many others a small Depart- mental Committee (somewhat on the lines of that Esher Committee which reorgianised the War Office in 1904), consisting perhaps of an able manager of an Insurance Company, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a business man with experience of com- mercial and departmental organisation abroad, might OrnCIAL THOUGHT 265 suggest such improvements as would without increase of expense double the existing intellectual output of our Government offices. But such a Committee will not be appointed unless the ordinary members of parliament, and especially the members who advocate a wide extension of collec- tive action, consider much more seriously than they do at present the organisation of collective thought. How, for instance, are we to prevent or minimise the danger that a body of officials will develop ' official ' habits of thought, and a sense of a corporate interest opposed to that of the majority of the people ? If a sufficient proportion of the ablest and best equipped young men of each generation are to be induced to come into the Government service they must be offered salaries which place them at once among the well-to-do classes. How are we to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on all questions of administration with their economic equals ? If they do, the danger is not only that social reform will be delayed, but also that working men in England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highly educated permanent officials which one notices in any gathering of working 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 to an increasing extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place 266 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS it will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows the development of the existing examina- tion system knows that care is required to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, if only from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latin composition, whose educational value is not higher than others, but excellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of one social class. It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice in- tellectual efficiency to the dogma of promotion from the, ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 were perhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the first division of the service would be in their time so rare as to be negligible. But things have changed since then. The competition for the second division has become incomparably more severe, and there is no reasonable test under which some of those second class officials who have continued their education by means of reading and University teaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of age, a greater fit- ness for the highest work than would be shown by many of those who had entered by the more advanced examination. Buti however able our officials are, and however varied their origin, the danger of the narrowness and rigidity which has hitherto so generally resulted from official life would still remain, and must be guarded OFFICIAL THOUGHT 267 against by every kind of encouragement to free in- tellectual development. The German Emperor did good service the other day when he claimed (in a semi-official communication on the Tweedmouth letter) that the persons who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity have as Fachmanner (experts) other and wider rights in the republic of thought. One only wishes that he would allow his own officials after their 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, or protectors of African aborigines, or theosophists, or advocates of a free stage or a free ritual. The intellectual life of the government official is indeed becoming part of a problem which every year touches us all more closely. In literature and science as well as in commerce and industry the independent producer is dying out and the official is taking his place. We are nearly all of us officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on a newspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a larger organisation. We are little influenced by that direct and obvious economic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or country solicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip his rivals or make more profit out of his 268 HUMAN" NATUEE IN POLITICS employees. If we merely desire to do as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible in our lives, we all find that it pays us to adopt that steady unanxious ' stroke ' which neither advances nor retards promotion. The indirect stimulus, therefore, of interest and variety, of public spirit and the craftsman's delight in his skill, is becoming more important to us as a motive for the higher forms of mental effort, and threats and promises of decrease or increase of salary less im- portant. And because those higher efforts are needed not only for the advantage of the community but for the good of our own souls we are all of us concerned in teaching those distant impersonal masters of ours who are ourselves how to prevent the opportunity of effective thought from being confined to a tiny rich minority, living, like the Cyclops, in irresponsible freedom. If we consciously accept the fact that organised work will in future be the rule and un- organised work the exception, and if we deliberately adjust our methods of working as well as our personal ideals to that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction of public business must be divided between an uninstructed and unstable body of poli- ticians and a selfish and pedantic bureaucracy. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 269 CHAPTEK IV NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY I HAVE discussed, in the three preceding chapters, the probable effect of certain existing intellectual tendencies on our ideals of political conduct, our systems of representation, and the methods which we adopt for securing intellectual initiative and efficiency among our professional officials — that is to say, on the internal organisation of the State. In this chapter I propose to discuss the effect of the same tendencies on international and interracial relations. But, as soon as one leaves the single State and deals with the interrelation of several States, one meets with the preliminary question. What is a State ? Is the British Empire, or the Concert of Europe, one State or many ? Every community in either area now exerts political influence on every other, and the tele, graph and the steamship have abolished most of the older limitations on the further development and extension of that influence. Will the process of coalescence go on either in feeling or in constitutional 270 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS form, or are there any perraanent causes tending to limit the geographical or racial sphere of effective political solidarity, and therefore the size and com- position of States ? Aristotle, writing under the conditions of the ancient •world, laid it down that a community whose popula- tion extended to a hundred thousand would no more be a State than would one whose population was confined to ten.^ He based his argument on measur- able facts as to the human senses and the human memory. The territory of a State must be ' visible as a whole ' by one eye, and the assembly attended by all the full citizens must be able to hear one voice — which must be that of an actual man and not of the legendary Stentor. The governing officials must be able to remember the faces and characters of all their fellow citizens.^ He did not ignore the fact that nearly aU the world's surface as he knew it was occupied by States enormously larger than his rule allowed. But he denied that the great barbarian monarchies were in the truest sense ' States ' at all. We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied were both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaeval City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the highest activities and emotions of mankind 1 Ethics, IX., X. 3. aire yhp Ik S^Ka &v8p{lnruiy yivoir' &.y TriXtSt oOt' ^k SiKa fivpid5o!v fn, r6\is inrlv. " Aristotle, Polit., Bk. vil. oh. iv. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 271 when the whole environment of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and memory. It is now only here and there, in villages outside the main stream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours and see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which they work and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawling suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some of the older inhabi- tants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper realities of life. A year ago I stood with a hard- walking and hard- thinking old Yorkshire schoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale. Opposite to us was the country-house where Charlotte Bronte was governess, and below us ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages which already were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatened soon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tall chimneys and slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the old affection for place and home had disappeared from the district. I asked whether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now that men lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than in the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and maps might not appear which should be a better guide to life than the patriotism of the village street. 272 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS 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 restless individualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and always missing it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Euskin, he began to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the true riches of life by for- getting steam and electricity, and returning to the agriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the mediaeval town. He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the old conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished, because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. For a constantly increas- ing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England there is now no place where in the old sense they ' live.' Nearly the whole of the class engaged in the direction of English industry, and a rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pass daily in tram or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, to use Mr. Wells's phrase, ' delocalised.' ^ But now that we can no longer use the range of our ' Mankind in the Making, p. 406. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 273 senses as a basis for calculating the possible area of the civilised State, there might seem to be no facts at all which can be used for such a calculation. How can we fix the limits of efifective intercommunication by steam or electricity, or the area which can be covered by such political expedients as representation and federalism ? When Aristotle wished to illustrate the relation of the size of the State to the powers of its citizens he compared it to a ship, which, he said, must not be too large to be handled by the muscles of actual men. ' A ship of two furlongs length would not be a ship at all.' ^ But the Zusitania is already not very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can even guess what is the upward limit of size which the ship- builders of a generation hence will have reached. If once we assume that a State may be larger than the field of vision of a single man, then the merely mechanical difficulty of bringing the whole earth under a government as effective as that of the United States or the British Empire has already been overcome. If such a government is impossible, its impossibility must \ be due to the limits not of our senses and muscles but / of our powers of imagination and sympathy. I have already pointed out ^ that the modern State must exist for the thoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of direct observation but as an entity of '■ Aristotle, Polit., Bk. vii. ch. iv. " Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81. 274 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS 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 such entities. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were reconstructing Europe on the basis of nationality thought that they had found the relevant facts in the causes which limit the physical and mental homo- geneity of nations. A State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed, must be a homogeneous 'nation,' because no citizen can imagine his State or make it the object of his political affection unless he believes in the existence of a national type to which the individual inhabitants of the State are assimilated ; and he cannot continue to believe in the existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are like each other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarck deliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by a quantitative calcula- tion as to the possibility of assimilating other Germans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the ground that while the Prussian type was strong enough to assimilate the Saxons and Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to assimilate Austrians and Bavarians. He said, for instance, in 1866: 'We cannot use these Ultramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we can digest.' ^ ^ Bumarck (J. W. Headlam), p. 269. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 275 Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed unless it consisted of a homogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy of the artificial assimi- lation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to him the vilest form of tyranny ; and he based his own plans for the reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by the existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical facts. 'God,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth. . . . Evil govern- ments have disfigured the Divine design. Neverthe- less you may still trace it, distinctly marked out — at least as far as Europe is concerned — by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions.' ^ Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as Canning said, ' reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards to congregate them into mobs.' * Mazzini attacked the ' cosmopolitans,' who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of nationality, on the gi'ound that they were asking for a psychological impossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can love, mankind, if mankind means > Life wnd Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written 1858), p. 275. ' Canning, Life by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818). 276 HUMAN KATUKE IN POLITICS to him all the millions of individual human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for this reason: 'The cosmopolitan,' he then said, ' alone in the midst of the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the consciousness of his rights (often miscon- ceived) and his individual faculties — which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their activity over the whole sphere of application constituting the aim . . . has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.' ^ He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, prays to God, ' Help me my God ! My boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide.' ^ For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the individual man and the unim- aginable multitude of the human race. A man could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like himself ' speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and educated by the same historical tradition,' ^ and could be thought of as a single national entity. The nation was ' the inter- mediate term between humanity and the individual,' * and man could only attain to the conception of * Mazzini, Life and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8. 2 Ibid., vol. iv. p. 274. ' Ibid., vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858). * Ibid., vol. V. p. 273. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 277 humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of homogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the citizens of the nation,' ^ and again, TThe pact of humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal peoples, pos- sessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a distinct existence.' ^ Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now assert with Mazzini, that the ' indisputable tendency of our epoch ' is towards a reconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous national States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent.'^ Mazzini, indeed, unconsciously but enormously ex- aggerated the simplicity of the question even in his own time. National types throughout the greater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided into homogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains/ but were intermingled from village to village ; and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no 1 Mazzini, Life and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274 (written 1849). 2 Ibid., vol. iii. p. 15 (written 1836). " Ibid., vol. V. p. 275. 278 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS longer, for instance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties, that Hungary is inhabited only by a homogeneous popula- tion of patriotic Magyars. We can see that Mazzini ■was already straining his principle to the breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece ... to become, by extending itself to Con- stantinople, a powerful barrier against the European encroachments of Eussia.'^ In Macedonia to-day bands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the pure tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rival populations in order to establish their own claim to represent the purposes of God as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains. Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if the Bismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be rejected, there must continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitants belonging to widely different national types. BismarcL'i conception of an artificial uniformity created by ' blood and iron ' corresponded more closely than did Mazzini's to the facts of the nineteenth century. But its practicability depended upon the assumption that the members of the dominant nation- ality would always vehemently desire to impose their own type on the rest. Now that the Social-Democrats, ' Lif& and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. vi. p. 258. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 279 who are a not inconsiderable proportion of the Prussian population, apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian or Danish fellow-subjects all thermore because they cling to their own national characteristics, Prince Billow's Bismarckian dictum the other day, that the strength of Germany depends on the existence and dominance of an intensely national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. The same change of feeling has also shown itself in the United Kingdom, and both the English parties have now tacitly or explicitly abandoned that Anglicisation of Ireland and "Wales, which all parties once accepted as a necessary part of English policy. A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that the area of the State should be based on homogeneity of national type, whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extension during the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states into non- European territory. Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, nor Bismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to take into his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside Europe. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectual preparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by ' the scramble for the world.' Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely expected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa, and that 280 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS the 'pact of humanity' would ultimately be 'signed' by homogeneous and independent ' nations,' who would cover the whole land surface of the globe. But he never indicated the political forces by which that result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessary stage in the Mazzinian policy of spread- ing the idea of nationality to Africa, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself. Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never looked forward, as Mazzini did, to a 'pact of humanity,' which should include even the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the attempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, as existing between any State and the States or populations outside its boundaries. ' The only sound principle of action,' he said, 'for a great State is political egoism.'^ When, therefore, after Bismarck's death German sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with the defenceless inhabitants of China or East Africa, they were, as the Social- Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of the situation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in the fifth century . A.D., by Attila and his Huns. The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of national homogeneity to ' Speech, 1850, quoted by J. W. Headlam, Bismarck, p. 83. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 281 the facts of the British Empire. From the publication of Seeley's Expansion of England in 1883 till the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe iu the existence of a 'Blood/ an 'Island Eace,' con- sisting of homogeneous English-speaking individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies ; while they thought of the other inhabi- tants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden' — the necessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. The idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a homogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading of imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckian realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South Africa and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron.' Lord Milner, who is perhaps the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on any terms except such an uncon- ditional surrender as would involve the ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those 282 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS ' ideas of our youth ' which were ' at once too insular and too cosmopolitan.' ^ But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is now deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be based not upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch ; though both are to be divided from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral chasm. To imperialism so con- ceived facts lend no support. The loyal acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir "Wilfred Laurier or General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial egoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to the 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 of enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English ' poor ' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality ; and if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial egoism, • Times, Deo. 19, 1907. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 283 but by those wider religious and ethical conceptioDS which pay little heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, be objected by our imperial ' Eeal- politiker ' that cosmopolitan feeling is at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain facts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fight for its existence against a German or a Eussian Empire or both together during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the white inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a ' dominant race,' that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into a Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism.' Among the non-white inhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperial war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the con- vention of only employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political rights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the interests of our future opponents as well as those of our fellow-subjects. 284 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS This sort of argument might vi course be met by a reductio ad absurdum. If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it will be adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, the victor in each inter-imperial war will take over the territory of the loser. After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in the waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, two empires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain. Both will possess an armament which represents the whole ' surplus value,' beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. Both will contain white and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across a wavering line on the map of the world. But the struggle will go on, and, as the resiilt of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will exist. ' Imperial egoism,' having worked itself out to its logical conclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of the globe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to consider the pro- blems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe from the point of view of mere humanitarianism. Is the suggestion completely wanting in practica- bility that we might begin that consideration before the struggle goes any further ? Fifteen hundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousian opinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the Homoiousians. The generals and other ' Eeal- NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 285 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 our side learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate the other side, we shall be beaten in the next battle.' And yet we can now see that the practical interests of Europe were very little concerned with the question whether ' we ' or ' they ' won, but very seriously concerned with the question whether the division itself into ' we ' or ' they ' could not be obliter- ated by the discovery either of a less clumsy nieta- physic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching towards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and ' empire ' like ' Homoousia ' and ' Homoiousia ' are the best that we can do in making entities of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe, and because having made such entities our sympathies are shut up within them ? I have already urged, when considering the con- ditions of political reasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from our tendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensations into homogeneous classes and species are now unnecessary 286 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS and have been avoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences. Just as the modern artist sub- stitutes without mental confusion his ever-varying curves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so the scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts of nature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed of identical individuals and represented to us by a single type. Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human race ? 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 million different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think ? To the first question the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent the human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biological group, every individual in which differs from every other not arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic evolution.^ And, ' Sir Sydney Olivier, e.g. in his courageous and penetrating book White Capital and Coloured Labour considers (in chap, ii.) the racial distinctions between black and white from the point of view of evolution. This consideration brings him at once to 'the infinite, inexhaustible distinctness of personality between indivi- duals, so much a fundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling variety' (pp. 12, 13). NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 287 since that which exists for the imagination can exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the warring egoisms of nations and eiiipires might henceforth have been dissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we can watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards a more harmonious relation to the universe. But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general love of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for ever impossible. Pro- gress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless struggle for life, which mus^ still continue unless progress was to cease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore would lead inevit- ably to the degeneration of the species. This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable and unending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generation after 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun hung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only by famine and war hung over the first century of political economy. Before Darwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of the non- white races as ' men and brothers ' who, after a short process of education, would become in all respects except colour 288 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS identical with themselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be so glossed over. Eacial variations were shown to be unaffected by education, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending perhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation. The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidence presented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the first half of the nine- teenth century the European colonists who were in daily contact with non-European races, although their impulses and their knowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall, yet could escape all thought about their own position by assuming that the problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canada or the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease, and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakest races and individuals have now died out, the surviving population are showing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and we are adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore our responsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the time when the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be done deliberately. But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how can there exist a community either of affection or purpose between the killers and the killed ? No one at this moment professes, as far as I know, to NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 289 have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point of ethics lies within the region claimed by re- ligion. But Christianity, which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously failed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The official Christian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equal value, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether a given territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million con- verted Central African pigmies or a million equally converted Europeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether the stronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination of the weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial possibility, to improve it. Christians have, during the nineteenth century, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though their ruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscious hypocrisy. But the most immediately dangerous result of political ' Darwinism ' was not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the ' struggle for life ' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill, for instance, the 290 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 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 struggle of empires.' ^ The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill pro- claims that one-half of the species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have to conduct negotiations as a memher of the next Conservative Government with a German statesman like Prince Biilow, who seems to combine the teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national conduct. Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the ' struggle for life ' among individuals with that which is to be expected from a ' struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The ' struggle of empires ' must either be fought out between European troops alone, or between Europeans in com- bination with their non-European allies and subjects. If it takes the first form, and if we assume, as Lord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is 'higher' than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selected Englishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an act ' Times, Jan. 22, 1908. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 291 of biological retrogression. Even if the non-European races are brought in and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars, or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological loss to the world, as measured by the per- centage of surviving ' higher ' or ' lower ' individuals will only be slightly diminished. Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends that the evolutionary advan- tage to be expected from the ' struggle of empires ' is the ' survival ' not of races but of political and cultural types. Our victory over the German Empire, for in- stance, would mean, it is said, a victory for the idea of political liberty. This argument, which, when urged by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, requires the assumption that types of culture are in the modern world most successfully spread by military occupation. But in the ancient world Greek culture spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire ; Japan in our own time adopted Western culture more readily as an independent nation than she would have done as a dependency of Russia or France ; and India is perhaps more likely to-day to learn from Japan than from England. Lord Ampthill's phrase, however, represents not so much an argument, as a habit of feeling shared by many who have forgotten or never known the biological doctrine which it echoes. The first followers of Darwin 292 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS believed that the human species had been raised above its prehuman ancestors because, and in so far as, it had surrendered itself to a blind instinct of conflict. It seemed, therefore, as if the old moral precept that men should control their more violent impulses by reflection had been founded upon a mistake. Unreflecting in- stinct was, after all, the best guide, and nations who acted instinctively towards their neighbours might justify themselves like the Parisian ruffians of ten years ago, by claiming to be ' strugforlifeurs.' If this habit of mind is to be destroyed it must be opposed not merely by a new argument but by a con- ception of man's relation to the universe which creates emotional force as well as intellectual conviction. And the change that has already shown itself in our conception of the struggle for life among individuals indicates that, by some divine chance, a corresponding change may come in our conception of the struggle between peoples. The evolutionists of our own time tell us that the improvement of the biological inheri- tance of any community is to be hoped for, not from the encouragement of individual conflict, but from the stimulation of the higher social impulses under the guidance of the science of eugenics ; and the emotional effect of this new conception is already seen in the almost complete disappearance from industrial politics of that unwillingly brutal 'individualism' which afflicted kindly Englishmen in the eighteen sixties. NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 293 An international science of eugenics might in the same way indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type. Such an idea would not appeal to those for whom the whole species arranges itself in definite and obvious grades of ' higher ' and ' lower,' from the northern Europeans downwards, and who are as certain of the ultimate necessity of a ' white world ' as the Sydney politicians are of the necessity of a ' white Australia,' But in this respect during the last few years the inhabitants of Europe have shown signs of a new humility, due partly to widespread intellectual causes and partly to the hard facts of the Eusso- Japanese war and the arming of China. The ' spheres of influence ' into which we divided the Far East eight years ago, seem to us now a rather stupid joke, and those who read history are already bitterly ashamed that we destroyed by the sack of the Summer Palace in 1859, the products of a thousand years of such art as we can never hope to emulate. We are coming honestly to believe that the world is richer for the existence both of other civilisations and of other racial types than our own. We have been compelled by the study of the Christian documents to think of our religion as one only among the religions of the world, and to acknowledge that it has owed much and may owe much again to the longer philosophic tradi- 294 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS tion and the subtler and more patient brains of Hindustan and Persia. Even if we look at the future of the species as a matter of pure biology, we are warned by men of science that it is not safe to depend only on one family or one variety for the whole breeding-stock of the world. For the moment we shrink from the interbreeding of races, but we do so in spite of some conspicuous examples of successful interbreeding in the past, and largely because of our complete ignorance of the conditions on which success depends. Already, therefore, it is possible without intellectual dishonesty to look forward to a future for the race which need not be reached through a welter of blood and hatred. We can imagine the nations settling the racial allocation of the temperate or tropical breeding-grounds, or even deliberately placing the males and females of the few hopelessly backward tribes on different islands, without the necessity that the most violent passions of mankind should be stimu- • lated in preparation for a general war. No one now expects an immediate, or prophesies with certainty an ultimate, Federation of the Globe ; but the conscious- ness of a common purpose in mankind, or even the acknowledgment that such a common purpose is possible, would alter the face of world-politics at once. The discussion at the Hague of a halt in the race of armaments would no longer seem Utopian, and the NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 295 strenuous profession by the colonising powers that they have no selfish ends in view might be trans- formed from a sordid and useless hypocrisy into a fact to which each nation might adjust its policy. The irrational race-hatred which breaks out from time to time on the fringes of empire, would have little effect in world politics when opposed by a consistent con- ception of the, future of human progress. Meanwhile, it is true, the military preparations for a death-struggle of empires still go on, and the problem even of peaceful immigration becomes yearly more threatening, now that shipping companies can land tens of thousands of Chinese or Indian labourers for a pound or two a head at any port in the world. But when we think of such things we need no longer feel ourselves . in the grip of a Fate that laughs at human purpose and human kindliness. An idea of the whole existence of our species is at last a possible background to our individual experience. Its emo- tional effect may prove to be not less than that of the visible temples and walls of the Greek cities, although it is formed not from the testimony of our eyesight, but from the knowledge which we acquire in our child- hood and confirm by the half-conscious corroboration of our daily life. We all of us, plain folk and learned alike, now make a picture for ourselves of the globe with its hemi- spheres of light and shadow, from every point of which 296 HUMAN" NATUEE IN POLITICS the telegraph brings us hourly news, and which may already be more real to us than the fields and houses past which we hurry in the train. "We can all see it, hanging and turning in the monstrous emptiness of the skies, and obedient to forces whose action we can watch hundreds of light-years away and feel in the beating of our hearts. The sharp new evidence of the. camera brings every year nearer to us its surface of ice and rock and plain, and the wondering eyes of alien peoples. It may be that we shall long continue to differ as to the full significance of this vision. But now that we can look at it without helpless pain it may stir the deepest impulses of our being. To some of us it may bring confidence in that Love that Dante saw, ' which moves the Sun and the other Stars.' To each of us it may suggest a kinder pity for all the bewildered beings who hand on from generation to generation the torch of conscious life. INDEX Abtssinii., Italian invasion of, 280. Aclaud, Mr., 191. Adams, John Quincy, 117. Airedale, 271. America, appointment of non- elected officials in, 243. Civil Service, 256. science and politics in, 187- tendency to electoral con- centration in, 227. Amos, ^i. Arapthill, Lord, 289. Antigone, 74. Aristotle, comparison of State to a ship, 273 ; criticism of Plato's communism, 49 ; de- finition of 'polity,' 76; maxi- mum size of a State, 270 ; on action as the end of politics, 168 ; on political affection, 30. Athens, glassmakers of, 115. Sophocles' love of, 192. Austin, John, 160. Bacon, Francis, 139, 185 ; At- lantis of, 178. Bagehot, Walter, 140. Balfour, Mr. A. J., 26, 108. Mr. Jabez, 244. Balliol College, 145. Ballot, 214 et seq. Barrie, Mr. J. M., 103. Bebel, 164. Beccaria, 16. Bentham, Jeremy, 8, 174; Macaulay's attack on, 22 ; on criminology, 16; on 'natural right,' 119 et seq. ; Principles of Morals and Legislation, 12. Benthamism, as a science of politics, 121, 178. Berlin, Congress of, 1885, 160. Bernstein, 95. Bismarck, 77 ; and artificial homogeneity of national type, 274, 278 ; on political egoism, 280. Bolingbroke, Lord, 174. Botha, General, 282. Breeding, selective, 179. Brighton Parade, 102. British Empire, difficulty of conceiving as a political en- tity, 80 ; national homo- geneity in, 281 ; political status of non-European races in, 9. Bronte, Charlotte, 271. Bryan, Mr. W. J., 248. Bryce, Mr. James, 126 et seq. Buckle, H. T., 135. Billow, Prince, on dominance of Prussia, 279 ; on private and national morality, 290; on universal suffrage, 164. 297 298 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Burke, Edmund, 35, 150; on man's power of political reasoning, 182; on 'party,' 83. Burney, Fanny, 33. Bums, Bobert, 103. Butler, Bishop, 197. Canhing, George, 228, 275. Carlyle, Thomas, 13, 254 ; essay on Bums of, 190. Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 221. Cavour, 77. Cecil, Lord Robert, 213, 228. Chadwick, Sir E., 121. Chamberlain, Mr. Joseph, 85. Charity Schools, 49. Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 82, 106, 183. China, 8. Chinese Labour, agitation against, 107. Christianity and race question, 289. Harnack on expansion of, 71. Churchill, Lord Randolph, 175. Civil Service, creation of English, 249 et seq. of India, 201 et seq. importance of an indepen- dent, 245 et seq. Sir C. Trevelyan's Report on, 251 et seq. Comenius, 17. Competition, system of, in muni- cipal appointments, 256. in railway appointments. 258. variety in methods of, 259. Comte, Auguste, 69, 200. Corrupt Practices Act, 5, 212. Corrupt Practices Act, practical failure of, 213. Corruption, prevented by com- petitive Civil Service, 257. Courtney, Lord, 217 et seq. Crimean War, 253. Croydon, 244. Dantb, 296. Darwin, Charles, 174, 254; cor- respondence with Lyell, 189; effect of his work, 181 ; on persistence of racial variation, 287 et seq. ; Origin of Species of, 13. Demosthenes, 208. Derby, Lord, Reform Act of, 253. De Wet, 39. Diderot, 50. Disraeli, Benjamin, 174. Dolling, Father, 193. Education Act, 1870, 233. Egypt, 206. Esher Committee, 264. Fenelon, 205. Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, 86. Fourier, 49. Fox, Charles James, 250. Gambbtta, 196. Galen, 123. Gardiner, Professor S. R., 152. Garfield, President, 111. George III, and American Revo- lution, 119; and Fox's India Bill, 250 ; popularity of, 33. German Emperor, 267. Gladstone, W. E., and English Civil Service, 263 ; and Queen Victoria, 175; on change of INDEX 299 opinion, 96 ; on Ireland, 149 ttaeq. ; parliamentary oratory of, 165. Government Departments, or- ganisation of, 261 tt seq. Gresham's Law, 178. Grote, George, 121. Hadust, a. T., 187. Hague, The, 294. Hall, Professor Stanley, 17. Harnaok, T., 71. Helvetius, 205. Herbart, J. P., 16. Hicks-Beach, Miss, 80, Hippocrates, 123. Hobbea, Thomas, 17. Homoiousians, 284. Homoousians, 284. Hume, Joseph, 204. Hnxley, T. H., 187; Lay Sermons of, 255. Hyndman, Mr., 93. India, 291. and representative demo- cracy, 201, 206. applicability of democratic principles in, 9. appointment of East India Company officials, 249. Civil Service, 201. English dislike of natives in, 57. Individualism, curve of, 148. Ireland, Home Rule for, 150. Jackson, Andrew, 243. James, Professor William, 17, 64 (note) ; on sense of effective reality, 42; Principles of Psychology of, 189. Jameson, Dr., 197. Japan, 291. Japanese, mental environment of, 196. State Papers, 198. Jevons, Professor, 141. Jury. See Trial by Jury. Justice, conception of, as poli- tical term, 73. Justinian, 77. Kossuth, Louis, 278. Labour Party and intellectual conditions of representative government, 235. Lansdowne, Lord, 176, 177. Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 282. LeBon, G., 53. Lingen, Lord, 252. Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894, 226. Locke, John, and basis of government, 178 ; and peda- gogy, 16 ; on relation of man to God's law, 118. Lombroso, C, 16. London, Borough Council elec- tions, 223. creation of love for, 192. lack of citizenship in, 82. proportion of active regis- tered voters in, 232. provision of schools in, 146 et seq. School Board elections in, 221. County Council Debating HaU, 146. election posters, 108. Lyell, Sir Charles, 189. 300 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Lyndhurat, Lord, 113. MAoCuiioOH, J. R., 13. Macedonia, 278. Maoewen, Sir William, 191. Macaulay, Lord, 28 ; and East India Company, 250 ; Essay in Edinhv/rgh Beview on Benthamism, 22. Marseillaise, 84. Marshall, Professor, 149. Marx, Karl, 13. Mazzini, Joseph, attack on cos- mopolitanism, 275 ; on geo- graphical division of human- ity, 275 et seq. Mendel, Abbot, 197. Merivale, Mr. Herman, 127. Metternich, 77. Mill, James, 234 (note). J. S., 120; on mankind in the average, 131, 159 ; opposi- tion to the Ballot of, 214 et seq. Milner, Lord, 281, 285. Molesworth, Sir W., 121. More, Sir Thomas, Republic of, 178. Morgan, Professor Lloyd, 17. Morley, Lord, 206; on W. E. Gladstone, 149 et seq. Morris, William, 48, 93. Municipal Representation Bill, 223. Napoleon i. and psychology of war, 175, 195. Louis, 35. Negro Suffrage in United States, 7. Neviuson, Mr. H. W., 203. Newman, J. H., 254; on per- sonification, 70. Nicholas n., 125. North, Lord, 250. Northcote, Sir Stafford, 251. Olivieb, Sir Sydney, 286 (note). Owen, Robert, 49. Ostrogorski, Professor, 124 et seq. Painb, Thomas, 228. Pal, Mr. Chandra, 177. Palmerston, Lord, 34. Pankhurst, Mrs., 177 (note). Pamell, C. S., 176. Farramatta Tea, 88 et seq. Party as a political entity, 82. Patroclus, 63. Pearson, Professor Karl, 132. Peel, Sir Robert, 91. Pericles, 73. Persia, 8. Philadelphia, 227. Philippines, 7. Place, Francis, 121. Plato, 75 ; 'cave of illusion ' ot, 114; his 'harmony of the Soul ' in modern political life, 187, 195; on basis of govern- ment, 12; on government by consent, 200 ; on idea of per- fect man, 118 ; on the public, 172 ; religion in the Republlo of, 204 ; Republic of, 178. Pla3rfair Commission, 260. Poor Law Commission of 1834, 156 et seq. of 1905, 157 et seq. Proportional Representation and Lord Courtney, 217 et seq. Society, 219. INDEX 301 Prospero, 100. Putney, 105. Raob Pkoblbm and representa- tive democracy, 6. in international poli- tics, 55, 279 et seq. in India, 57. Reform Act of 1867, 211, 253. Religion of Comte, 69. in Plato's Republic, 204. Representative democracy and India, 201. and race problem, 6. in Egypt, 206. in England, 3. in United States, 2. Rome, 77. Roosevelt, Theodore, 15. Rousseau, J. J., and pedagogy, 16 ; on human rights, 119. Rural Parish Councils, 226. Ruskin, John, 13. Samuel, Mr. Heebeet, 228. Schnadhorst, Mr., 253. Science, as an entity, 185 et seq. Seeley, J. R. , Expansion oj Eng- land of, 281. Senior, Nassau, 13. Political Economy of, 12. Shelley, 154. Socialism, conception of as a working creed, 92. curve of, 148. Socrates, 73, 192. Somerset House, 246. Sophocles, 193. Spencer, Mr. Herbert, 14. Stein, H. F., 77. Stephen, S-ir James, 252. Suffrage, for women at 1906 election, 6. negro, 7. universal. Prince Billow's attack on, 164 et seq. Swift, Dean, 174. Swinburne, A. 0., 278. Tammant Hall, 109. Tarde, G., 53. Tennyson, Lord, 68. Thackeray, 49. Togo, Admiral, 58. Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 251. Trial by Jury, development of 207 et seq. Tweefontein, 39. Tyrrell, Father, 95. United Kingdom, proportion of elected to electors in, 241. United States and Negro Suff- rage, 7. and representative democracy, 2. Vaux, Madame de, 70. Vereeniging, Peace of, 281. Victoria, Queen, 175 ; on com- petition for Indian Army commissions, 253 ; portrait of, on coins, 32. Virgin of Kevlaar, 72. War Office Counoil, 263. 302 HUMAN NATUEE IN POLITICS Wells, Mr. H. G-., on delooal- ised population, 272 ; on re- presentative democracy, 200 ; on 'sense of the State,' 192; on uniqueness of the indivi- dual, 130. Whately, Archbishop, 13. Women's Suffrage at 1906 elec- tion, 6. methods of su&agists, 177. Wood, Mr. M'Kinnou, 86. Wordsworth, Prelude of, 155, 190. Printed iu Great Britain by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press, Edinburgh