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Human Nature in Politics

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Title: Human Nature in Politics

Author: Graham Wallas


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11634]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS ***

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

BY

GRAHAM WALLAS



PREFACE


I offer 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. Muirhead, 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 beginning with the
literature of applied political psychology. But readers who are not
politicians will find particular points dealt with in the works of the
late Monsieur G. Tarde, especially _L'Opinion et la Foule_ and _Les Lois
de l'Imitation_ and in the books quoted in the course of an interesting
article on 'Herd Instinct,' by Mr. W. Trotter in the _Sociological
Review_ 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 OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, CLARE MARKET, LONDON,
W.C.,

_30th December 1909._




PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1920)


This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a reprint, with a few
verbal corrections, of the first edition (1908). I tried in 1908 to make
two main points clear. My first point was the danger, for all human
activities, but especially for the working of democracy, of the
'intellectualist' assumption, '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' (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for that
assumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The whole
progress,' I argued, '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
resistance in the use of our minds' (p. 114).

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary as it was in
1908. The assumption that men are automatically guided by 'enlightened
self-interest' has been discredited by the facts of the war and the
peace, the success of an anti-parliamentary and anti-intellectualist
revolution in Russia, the British election of 1918, the French election
of 1919, the confusion of politics in America, the breakdown of
political machinery in Central Europe, and the general unhappiness which
has resulted from four years of the most intense and heroic effort that
the human race has ever made. One only needs to compare the
disillusioned realism of our present war and post-war pictures and poems
with the nineteenth-century war pictures at Versailles and Berlin, and
the war poems of Campbell, and Berenger, and Tennyson, to realise how
far we now are from exaggerating human rationality.

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

The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century have given us
an opportunity of choosing for ourselves our way of living such as men
have never had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of mankind
have had enough to do to keep themselves alive, and to satisfy the blind
instinct which impels them to hand on life to another generation. An
effective choice has only been given to a tiny class of hereditary
property owners, or a few organisers of other men's labour. Even when,
as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, nature offered whole populations
three hundred free days in the year if they would devote two months to
ploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent themselves in
unwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, or equipping armies, for a
native monarch or a foreign conqueror. The monarch could choose his
life, but his choice was poor enough. 'There is,' says Aristotle, 'a way
of living so brutish that it is only worth notice because many of those
who can live any life they like make no better choice than did
Sardanapalus.'

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

Before the war, there were in London and New York, and Berlin, thousands
of rich men and women as free to choose their way of life as was
Sardanapalus, and as dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of the
sons and daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and rubber
plantations were 'fed up' with motoring or bridge, or even with the
hunting and fishing which meant a frank resumption of palaeolithic life
without the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work brought me into
contact with an unprivileged class, whose degree of freedom was the
special product of modern industrial civilisation, and on whose use of
their freedom the future of civilisation may depend. A clever young
mechanic, at the age when the Wanderjahre of the medieval craftsman used
to begin, would come home after tending a 'speeded up' machine from 8
A.M., with an hour's interval, till 5 P.M. At 6 P.M. he had finished his
tea in the crowded living-room of his mother's house, and was 'free' to
do what he liked. That evening, perhaps, his whole being tingled with
half-conscious desires for love, and adventure, and knowledge, and
achievement. On another day he might have gone to a billiard match at
his club, or have hung round the corner for a girl who smiled at him as
he left the factory, or might have sat on his bed and ground at a
chapter of Marx or Hobson. But this evening he saw his life as a whole.
The way of living that had been implied in the religious lessons at
school seemed strangely irrelevant; but still he felt humble, and kind,
and anxious for guidance. Should he aim at marriage, and if so should he
have children at once or at all? If he did not marry, could he avoid
self-contempt and disease? Should he face the life of a socialist
organiser, with its strain and uncertainty, and the continual
possibility of disillusionment? Should he fill up every evening with
technical classes, and postpone his ideals until he had become rich? And
if he became rich what should he do with his money? Meanwhile, there was
the urgent impulse to walk and think; but where should he walk to, and
with whom?

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

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

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

Within each nation, industrial organisation may cease to be a confused
and wasteful struggle of interests, if it is consciously related to a
chosen way of life for which it offers to every worker the material
means. International relations may cease to consist of a constant
plotting of evil by each nation for its neighbours, if ever the youth of
all nations know that French, and British, and Germans, and Russians,
and Chinese, and Americans, are taking a conscious part in the great
adventure of discovering ways of living open to all, and which all can
believe to be good.

GRAHAM WALLAS.

_August_ 1920.




CONTENTS


  INTRODUCTION


  PART I
  _THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM_

  CHAPTER I
  IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS

  CHAPTER II
  POLITICAL ENTITIES

  CHAPTER III
  NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

  CHAPTER IV
  THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING

  CHAPTER V
  THE METHOD OF POLITICAL REASONING


  PART II
  _POSSIBILITIES OF PROGRESS_

  CHAPTER I
  POLITICAL MORALITY

  CHAPTER II
  REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

  CHAPTER III
  OFFICIAL THOUGHT

  CHAPTER IV
  NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY




SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS


_(Introduction, page 1)_

The study of politics is now in an unsatisfactory position. Throughout
Europe and America, representative democracy is generally accepted as
the best form of government; but those who have had most experience of
its actual working are often disappointed and apprehensive. Democracy
has not been extended to non-European races, and during the last few
years many democratic movements have failed.

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

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


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

Any examination of human nature in politics must begin with an attempt
to overcome that 'intellectualism' which results both from the
traditions of political science and from the mental habits of ordinary
men.

Political impulses are not mere intellectual inferences from
calculations of means and ends; but tendencies prior to, though modified
by, the thought and experience of individual human beings. This may be
seen if we watch the action in politics of such impulses as personal
affection, fear, ridicule, the desire of property, etc.

All our impulses and instincts are greatly increased in their immediate
effectiveness if they are 'pure,' and in their more permanent results if
they are 'first hand' and are connected with the earlier stages of our
evolution. In modern politics the emotional stimulus which reaches us
through the newspapers is generally 'pure,' but 'second hand,' and
therefore is both facile and transient.

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

Political emotions are sometimes pathologically intensified when
experienced simultaneously by large numbers of human beings in physical
association, but the conditions of political life in England do not
often produce this phenomenon.

The future of international politics largely depends on the question
whether we have a specific instinct of hatred for human beings of a
different racial type from ourselves. The point is not yet settled, but
many facts which are often explained as the result of such an instinct
seem to be due to other and more general instincts modified by
association.


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

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

Those facts of our environment which stimulate impulse and action reach
us through our senses, and are selected from the mass of our sensations
and memories by our instinctive or acquired knowledge of their
significance. In politics the things recognised are, for the most part,
made by man himself, and our knowledge of their significance is not
instinctive but acquired.

Recognition tends to attach itself to symbols, which take the place of
more complex sensations and memories. Some of the most difficult
problems in politics result from the relation between the conscious use
in reasoning of the symbols called words, and their more or less
automatic and unconscious effect in stimulating emotion and action. A
political symbol whose significance has once been established by
association, may go through a psychological development of its own,
apart from the history of the facts which were originally symbolised by
it. This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems of nations and
parties; and still more clearly in the history of those commercial
entities--'teas' or 'soaps'--which are already made current by
advertisement before any objects to be symbolised by them have been made
or chosen. Ethical difficulties are often created by the relation
between the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician and
such slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the
traditional personality of a newspaper which he may control.


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

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

It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non-rational
inferences in the stream of mental experience, but it is clear that many
of the half-conscious processes by which men form their political
opinions are non-rational. We can generally trust non-rational
inferences in ordinary life because they do not give rise to conscious
opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of
undesigned coincidences. But conjurers and others who study our
non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form
absurd beliefs. The empirical art of politics consists largely in the
creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious
non-rational inference. The process of inference may go on beyond the
point desired by the politician who started it, and is as likely to take
place in the mind of a passive newspaper-reader as among the members of
the most excited crowd.


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

But men can and do reason, though reasoning is only one of their mental
processes. The rules for valid reasoning laid down by the Greeks were
intended primarily for use in politics, but in politics reasoning has in
fact proved to be more difficult and less successful than in the
physical sciences. The chief cause of this is to be found in the
character of its material. We have to select or create entities to
reason about, just as we select or create entities to stimulate our
impulses and non-rational inferences. In the physical sciences these
selected entities are of two types, either concrete things made exactly
alike, or abstracted qualities in respect of which things otherwise
unlike can be exactly compared. In politics, entities of the first type
cannot be created, and political philosophers have constantly sought for
some simple entity of the second type, some fact or quality, which may
serve as an exact 'standard' for political calculation. This search has
hitherto been unsuccessful, and the analogy of the biological sciences
suggests that politicians are most likely to acquire the power of valid
reasoning when they, like doctors, avoid the over-simplification of
their material, and aim at using in their reasoning as many facts as
possible about the human type, its individual variations, and its
environment. Biologists have shown that large numbers of facts as to
individual variations within any type can be remembered if they are
arranged as continuous curves rather than as uniform rules or arbitrary
exceptions. On the other hand, any attempt to arrange the facts of
environment with the same approach to continuity as is possible with the
facts of human nature is likely to result in error. The study of history
cannot be assimilated to that of biology.


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

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

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

Some political questions can obviously be argued quantitatively. Others
are less obviously quantitative. But even on the most complex political
issues experienced and responsible statesmen do in fact think
quantitatively, although the methods by which they reach their results
are often unconscious.

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

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of Royal
Commissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons who
have to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of specially
collected evidence. Their methods and vocabulary, even when not
numerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative.

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


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

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

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of
the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later
influence the moral judgments of the working politician. A young
candidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation to
those whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence. He will
start, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmen
who have been made cynical by experience.

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political morality
might be changed for the worse. But the change will go deeper. When men
become conscious of psychological processes of which they have been
unconscious or half-conscious, not only are they put on their guard
against the exploitation of those processes in themselves by others, but
they become better able to control them from within.

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong enough to
overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of political
exploitation, the conception of control from within must be formed into
an ideal entity which, like 'Science,' can appeal to popular
imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. The
difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the
varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide
extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased
intensity of moral passion.


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

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

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer be accepted
as valid, and it is probable that many political thinkers (especially
among those who have been educated in the natural sciences) will return
to Plato's proposal of a despotic government carried on by a selected
and trained class, who live apart from the 'ostensible world'; though
English experience in India indicates that even the most carefully
selected official must still live in the 'ostensible world,' and that
the argument that good government requires the consent of the governed
does not depend for its validity upon its original intellectualist
associations.

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

Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the old
intellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and new
difficulties in the working of representative government will arise from
the wider extension of political power. But that conception of
representation may spread which desires both to increase the knowledge
and public spirit of the voter and to provide that no strain is put upon
him greater than he can bear.


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

A quantitative examination of the political force created by popular
election shows the importance of the work of non-elected officials in
any effective scheme of democracy.

What should be the relation between these officials and the elected
representatives? On this point English opinion already shows a marked
reaction from the intellectualist conception of representative
government. We accept the fact that most state officials are appointed
by a system uncontrolled either by individual members of parliament or
by parliament as a whole, that they hold office during good behaviour,
and that they are our main source of information as to some of the most
difficult points on which we form political judgments. It is largely an
accident that the same system has not been introduced into our local
government.

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially independent Civil
Service as an existing fact is not enough. We must set ourselves to
realise clearly what we intend our officials to do, and to consider how
far our present modes of appointment, and especially our present methods
of organising official work, provide the most effective means for
carrying out that intention.


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

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

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

The makers of the existing European national states, Mazzini and
Bismarck, held that the possible extent of a state depended on national
homogeneity, _i.e._ on the possibility that every individual member of a
state should believe that all the others were like himself. Bismarck
thought that the degree of actual homogeneity which was a necessary
basis for this belief could be made by 'blood and iron'; Mazzini thought
that mankind was already divided into homogeneous groups whose limits
should be followed in the reconstruction of Europe. Both were convinced
that the emotion of political solidarity was impossible between
individuals of consciously different national types.

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

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




HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS



INTRODUCTION


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

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form of government
appears to have been finally settled in favour of representative
democracy. Forty years ago it could still be argued that to base the
sovereignty of a great modern nation upon a widely extended popular vote
was, in Europe at least, an experiment which had never been successfully
tried. England, indeed, by the 'leap in the dark' of 1867, became for
the moment the only large European State whose government was democratic
and representative. But to-day a parliamentary republic based upon
universal suffrage exists in France without serious opposition or
protest. Italy enjoys an apparently stable constitutional monarchy.
Universal suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the German
Emperor after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as the
successful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor
of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionately
desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself
steadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The most
ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, no
longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for
securing in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of action
for the directors of a church almost all of whose members will remain
voting citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals for a
non-representative democracy which were associated with the communist
and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at all
widely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructive
scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by which
the results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenly
distributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the working
classes.

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

In England not only has our experience of representative democracy been
much shorter than that of America, but our political traditions have
tended to delay the full acceptance of the democratic idea even in the
working of democratic institutions. Yet, allowing for differences of
degree and circumstance, one finds in England among the most loyal
democrats, if they have been brought into close contact with the details
of electoral organisation, something of the same disappointment which
has become more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a good
many parliamentary contests, and have myself been a candidate in a
series of five London municipal elections. In my last election I noticed
that two of my canvassers, when talking over the day's work, used
independently the phrase, 'It is a queer business.' I have heard much
the same words used in England by those professional political agents
whose efficiency depends on their seeing electoral facts without
illusion. I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italian
electioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my hosts of the Paris
Municipal Council, I seemed to detect in some of them indications of
good-humoured disillusionment with regard to the working of a democratic
electoral system.

In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is the
growing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the most
disquieting problems. In America the 'machine' takes its worst form in
those great new cities whose population and wealth and energy represent
the goal towards which the rest of American civilisation is apparently
tending. In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery
of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption
of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils.
The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest
inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the
power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial
capital, the organised political passions of working men who have passed
through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in
hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban
streets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, and
if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, the
tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules
intended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and men
feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to
win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.

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

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

The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women is met by 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 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 communication 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 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. Few of us, however, would be willing
to give any definite advice to an individual Chinaman who asked whether
he ought to throw himself into a movement for a representative
parliament on European lines.

Within our own Empire this uncertainty as to the limitations of our
political principles may at any moment produce actual disaster. In
Africa, for instance, 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
is told by men whom he respects that this fact makes it certain that
the representative system which is suitable for England will never be
suitable for India, and therefore he remains uneasily responsible for
the permanent autocratic government of three hundred million people,
remembering from time to time that 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 which 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 Rajputs, 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 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 Revolutions 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 Russia, 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 revolution, 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 Federation, the Referendum 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, had 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.'[1] In
most cases one cannot even discover whether the writer is conscious of
possessing any conception of human nature at all.

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

It is easy to understand how this has come about. 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 Right 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
newspapers, the political economy of MacCulloch 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 Buskin 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 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'[2] which he conceived as exactly equivalent 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.

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

For the moment, therefore, nearly all 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 professors of the new science of sociology
are beginning, it is true, to deal with human nature in its relation
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 dominated 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 misleading. Mr. Roosevelt's little book of essays
on _American Ideals_ is, for instance, useful, because when he thinks
about mankind in politics, he thinks about the politicians 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 assumptions of which they
were unaware and which 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 Rousseau, 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 of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke,
or Rousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle,
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory 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 training of medical students, when the
lecturers on anatomy, 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
experiments, from introspection, and from other sciences, what manner
of thing a child 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 abandonment 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 corresponding 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 politics who give
the whole day to their work. I cannot but think that as years go on,
more of them will call to their aid that study of mankind which is 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 unofficial 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
individualism, of democracy or aristocracy for human beings whose
nature is taken for granted.

If my book is read by any of those official or unofficial 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 unworked mine of political invention.



PART I

_The Conditions of the Problem_




CHAPTER I

IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS


Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on a re-examination
of the working of human nature, must begin by trying to overcome his own
tendency 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 completely 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. 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 all 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
certainty what he thinks his interest to be_.'[3] Macaulay believes
himself to be opposing Benthamism root and branch, but is unconsciously
adopting and exaggerating the assumption which Bentham shared with most
of the other eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophers--that
all motives result from the idea of some preconceived end.

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

If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably have admitted that 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 consideration, 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 knowing 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 much 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 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 inference 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
consideration 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 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 processes 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.[4] 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.

[4] 'Instinct is usually defined as 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.

The fact that impulse is not always the result of 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 of 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 survived because it produced one result
may have persisted 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 contradictory, 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 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.[5]

[5] _Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter_, 1904, p. 21.
'So far as natural science can tell us, every quality of sense 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.'

The pre-rational 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, 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 afternoon 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 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 communities that the intellectualist fallacy is most misleading.
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 personal 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 description 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, 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 [Greek: philía] stands half way between the
two words) which 'makes political union possible,' and 'which law-givers
consider more important than justice.' It is, he says, a hereditary
instinct among animals of the same race, and particularly among men.[6]
If we look for this political affection in its simplest form, we see it
in our impulse to feel 'kindly' towards any other human being of whose
existence and personality we become vividly aware. This impulse can be
checked and overlaid by others, but any one can test its existence and
its prerationality in his own case by going, for instance, to the
British Museum and watching the effect on his feelings of the discovery
that a little Egyptian girl baby who died four thousand years ago rubbed
the toes of her shoes by crawling upon the floor.

[6] _Ethics_, Bk. viii. chap. I. [Greek: phýsei t' enypárchein éoike ...
ou pónon en anthrôpois allà kaì en órnisi kaì tois pleístois tôn zôôn,
kaì tois homoethnési pròs állêla, kaì málista tois anthrôpois ... éoike
dè kaì tàs póleis synéchein hê philía, kaì hoi nomothétai mallon perì
autên spoudázein ê tên dikaiosýnên].

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

A simple-minded supporter whose affection has been so worked up will
probably try to give an intellectual explanation of it. He will say that
the man, of whom he may know really nothing except that he was
photographed in a Panama hat with a fox-terrier, is 'the kind of man we
want,' and that therefore he has decided to support him; just as a child
will say that he loves his mother because she is the best mother in the
world,[7] or a man in love will give an elaborate explanation of his
perfectly normal feelings, which he describes as an intellectual
inference from alleged abnormal excellences in his beloved. The
candidate naturally intellectualises in the same way. One of the most
perfectly modest men I know once told me that he was 'going round' a
good deal among his future constituents 'to let them see what a good
fellow I am.' Unless, indeed, the process can be intellectualised, it is
for many men unintelligible.

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

A monarch is a life-long candidate, and there exists a singularly
elaborate traditional art of producing personal affection for him. It is
more important that he should be seen than that he should speak or act.
His portrait appears on every coin and stamp, and apart from any
question of personal beauty, produces most effect when it is a good
likeness. Any one, for instance, who can clearly recall his own emotions
during the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, will remember a
measurable increase of his affection for her, when, in 1897, a
thoroughly life-like portrait took the place on the coins of the
conventional head of 1837-1887, and the awkward compromise of the first
Jubilee year. In the case of monarchy one can also watch the
intellectualisation of the whole process by the newspapers, the official
biographers, the courtiers, and possibly the monarch himself. The daily
bulletin of details as to his walks and drives is, in reality, the more
likely to create a vivid impression of his personality, and therefore to
produce this particular kind of emotion, the more ordinary the events
described are in themselves. But since an emotion arising out of
ordinary events is difficult to explain on a purely intellectual basis,
these events are written about as revealing a life of extraordinary
regularity and industry. When the affection is formed it is even
sometimes described as an inevitable reasoned conclusion arising from
reflection upon a reign during which there have been an unusual number
of good harvests or great inventions.

Sometimes the impulse of affection is excited to a point at which its
non-rational character becomes obvious. George the Third was beloved by
the English people because they realised intensely that, like
themselves, he had been born in England, and because the published facts
of his daily life came home to them. Fanny Burney describes, therefore,
how when, during an attack of madness, he was to be taken in a coach to
Kew, the doctors who were to accompany him were seriously afraid that
the inhabitants of any village who saw that the King was under restraint
would attack them.[8] The kindred emotion of personal and dynastic
loyalty (whose origin is possibly to be found in the fact that the
loosely organised companies of our prehuman ancestors could not defend
themselves from their carnivorous enemies until the general instinct of
affection was specialised into a vehement impulse to follow and protect
their leader), has again and again produced destructive and utterly
useless civil wars.

[8] _Diary of Madame D'Arblay_, ed. 1905, vol. iv. p. 184, 'If they even
attempted force, they had not a doubt but his smallest resistance would
call up the whole country to his fancied rescue.'

Fear often accompanies and, in politics, is confused with affection. A
man, whose life's dream it has been to get sight and speech of his King,
is accidentally brought face to face with him. He is 'rooted to the
spot,' becomes pale, and is unable to speak, because a movement might
have betrayed his ancestors to a lion or a bear, or earlier still, to a
hungry cuttlefish. It would be an interesting experiment if some
professor of experimental psychology would arrange his class in the
laboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to record those
pulse movements which accompany the sensation of 'thrill,' and would
then introduce into the room without notice, and in chance order, a
bishop, a well-known general, the greatest living man of letters, and a
minor member of the royal family. The resulting records of immediate
pulse disturbances would be of real scientific importance, and it might
even be possible to continue the record in each case say, for a quarter
of a minute, and to trace the secondary effects of variations in
political opinions, education, or the sense of humour among the
students.

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

The impulse to laugh is comparatively unimportant in politics, but it
affords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician has
to allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effect
of the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of the
recognition of danger. It may have been evolved because an animal which
suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more
likely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been the
merely accidental result of some fact in our nervous organisation which
was otherwise useful. Incongruity is, however, so much a matter of habit
and association and individual variation, that it is extraordinarily
difficult to forecast whether any particular act will seem ridiculous to
any particular class, or how long the sense of incongruity will in any
case persist. Acts, for instance, which aim at producing exalted
emotional effect among ordinary slow-witted people--Burke's dagger,
Louis Napoleon's tame eagle, the German Kaiser's telegrams about Huns
and mailed fists--may do so, and therefore be in the end politically
successful, although they produce spontaneous laughter in men whose
conception of good political manners is based upon the idea of
self-restraint.

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

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

The property instinct is, it happens, one of two instances in which the
classical economists deserted their usual habit of treating all desires
as the result of a calculation of the means of obtaining 'utility' or
'wealth.' The satisfaction of the instinct of absolute property by
peasant proprietorship turned, they said, 'sand to gold,' although it
required a larger expenditure of labour for every unit of income than
was the case in salaried employment. The other instance was the instinct
of family affection. This also still needs a special treatise on its
stimulus, variation, and limitations. But the classical economists
treated it as absolute and unvarying. The 'economic man,' who had no
more concern than a lone wolf with the rest of the human species, was
treated as possessing a perfect and permanent solidarity of feeling with
his 'family.' The family was apparently assumed as consisting of those
persons for whose support a man in Western Europe is legally
responsible, and no attempt was made to estimate whether the instinct
extended in any degree to cousins or great uncles.

A treatise on political impulses which aimed at completeness would
further include at least the fighting instinct (with the part which it
plays, together with affection and loyalty, in the formation of
parties), and the instincts of suspicion, curiosity, and the desire to
excel.

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

It is this greater immediate effect of pure and artificial as compared
with mixed and concrete emotion which explains the traditional maxim of
political agents that it is better that a candidate should not live in
his constituency. It is an advantage that he should be able to represent
himself as a 'local candidate,' but his local character should be _ad
hoc_, and should consist in the hiring of a large house each year in
which he lives a life of carefully dramatised hospitality. Things in no
way blameworthy in themselves--his choice of tradesmen, his childrens'
hats and measles, his difficulties with his relations--will be, if he is
a permanent resident, 'out of the picture,' and may confuse the
impression which he produces. If one could, by the help of a
time-machine, see for a moment in the flesh the little Egyptian girl who
wore out her shoes, one might find her behaving so charmingly that one's
pity for her death would be increased. But it is more probable that,
even if she was, in fact, a very nice little girl, one would not.

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set up by artistic
presentment, as compared with those resulting from concrete observation
has, however, to be studied in its relation to another fact--that
impulses vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the nervous
disturbance which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance in
our present life, but to the point at which they appeared in our
evolutionary past. We are quite unable to resist the impulse of mere
vascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the mouth, the jerk of
the limb, the closing of the eye which we share with some of the
simplest vertebrates. We can only with difficulty resist the instincts
of sex and food, of anger and fear, which we share with the higher
animals. It is, on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistently
the impulses which attend on the mental images formed by inference and
association. A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent reasoning
that he will go to hell if he visits a certain house; and yet he will do
so in satisfaction of a half conscious craving, whose existence he is
ashamed to recognise. It may be that when a preacher makes hell real to
him by physical images of fire and torment his conviction will acquire
coercive force. But that force may soon die away as his memory fades,
and even the most vivid description has little effect as compared with a
touch of actual pain. At the theatre, because pure emotion is facile,
three-quarters of the audience may cry, but because second-hand emotion
is shallow, very few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home,
or will even lose their appetite for a late supper. My South African
trooper probably recovered from his tears over 'Our Boys' as soon as
they were shed. The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic
emotions produced by novel reading is well known. A man may weep over a
novel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same man
may be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, by
actual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which he
reads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor any
other obvious nervous effect.

Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those great
modern communities in which all the events which stimulate political
action reach the voters through newspapers. The emotional appeal of
journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is
pure, and transitory because it is second-hand. Battles and famines,
murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all are
presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection
of 'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the
half-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longer
interval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper.
But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidly
away.

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

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

Throughout the contest the candidate is made aware, at every point, of
the enormously greater solidity for most men of the work-a-day world
which they see for themselves, as compared with the world of inference
and secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers. A London
County Councillor, for instance, as his election comes near, and he
begins to withdraw from the daily business of administrative committees
into the cloud of the electoral campaign, finds that the officials whom
he leaves behind, with their daily stint of work, and their hopes and
fears about their salaries, seem to him much more real than himself. The
old woman at her door in a mean street who refuses to believe that he is
not being paid for canvassing, the prosperous and good-natured tradesman
who says quite simply,' I expect you find politics rather an expensive
amusement,' all seem to stand with their feet upon the ground. However
often he assures himself that the great realities are on his side, and
that the busy people round him are concerned only with fleeting
appearances, yet the feeling constantly recurs to him that it is he
himself who is living in a world of shadows.

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

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

A candidate is also an artificial thing. If he lives and works in his
constituency, the daily vision of an otherwise admirable business man
seated in a first-class carriage on the 8.47 A.M. train in the same
attitude and reading the same newspaper may produce a slight and
unrecognised feeling of discomfort among his constituents, although it
would cause no such feeling in the wife whose relation to him is
'natural.' For the same reason when his election comes on, although he
may declare himself to be the 'old member standing on the old platform,'
he should be careful to avoid monotony by slightly varying his portrait,
the form of his address, and the details of his declaration of political
faith.

Another fact, closely connected with our intolerance of repeated
emotional adjustment, is the desire for privacy, sufficiently marked to
approach the character of a specific instinct, and balanced by a
corresponding and opposing dread of loneliness. Our ancestors in the
ages during which our present nervous system became fixed, lived,
apparently, in loosely organised family groups, associated for certain
occasional purposes, into larger, but still more loosely organised,
tribal groups. No one slept alone, for the more or less monogamic family
assembled nightly in a cave or 'lean-to' shelter. The hunt for food
which filled the day was carried on, one supposes, neither in complete
solitude nor in constant intercourse. Even if the female were left at
home with the young, the male exchanged some dozen times a day rough
greetings with acquaintances, or joined in a common task. Occasionally,
even before the full development of language, excited palavers attended
by some hundreds would take place, or opposing tribes would gather for a
fight.

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

But, on the other hand, the nervous system of most men will not tolerate
the frequent repetition of that adjustment of the mind and sympathies to
new acquaintanceship, a certain amount of which is so refreshing and so
necessary. One can therefore watch in great modern cities men half
consciously striving to preserve the same proportion between privacy and
intercourse which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and one
can watch also the constant appearance of proposals or experiments which
altogether ignore the primary facts of human nature in this respect. The
habitual intellectualism of the writers of political Utopias prevents
them from seeing any 'reason' why men should not find happiness as well
as economy in a sort of huge extension of family life. The writer
himself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not
perhaps realise the need of privacy at all. His affections are in a
state of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back to
the emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming assemblies of his
prehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts,
to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. What he does not
realise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanently
at this level. In William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ the customs of
family life extend to the streets, and the tired student from the
British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman. I
remember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the early
Christian Socialists. He said that he had just been riding down Oxford
Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus
passed over a section of the street in which macadam had been
substituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to each
other. 'Some day,' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and
then, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibus
will become a delightful informal club.' Now nearly all London is paved
with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can
hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is
held to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour.

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the
cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to
bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on
terms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's
_Book of Snobs_, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels,
the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful
exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that
no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal
acquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier,
Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of
privacy. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confused
pages of the _Politics_, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of
view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out:
'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic colonists
have always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters';
'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily
contact with us.'[10]

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

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a
complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but
for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their
disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys
in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by
the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has
been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience
seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its
alternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suited
than a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature.

This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repay
special and detailed study. It varies very greatly among different
races, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy which
is found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be due
to the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year under
cover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in this
respect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not the
intellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easily
fatigued. Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party
'gives himself away,' is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy which
makes some call upon the emotions. An actor who accepts the second
alternative of Diderot's paradox, and _feels_ his part, is much more
likely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulates
feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself.

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected,
most difficult, and most necessary. In America all observers are agreed
as to the danger which results from looking on a politician as an
abstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizens
have an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every one
ought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome. In England our
comparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between a
representative and his constituents has done something to preserve
customs corresponding more closely to the actual nature of man. A tired
English statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his time
rather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the room
than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces with
innumerable unknown guests. But there is a real danger lest this
tradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simply
because of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young labour
politician is expected to live in more than American conditions of
intimate publicity. Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, and
having to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult
requirements of mental work, he is expected to receive every caller at
any hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to be
always ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After a
year or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, the
task is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous fatigue are at
first accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity. He
begins to suffer from the curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical
condition in which a man talks all day long to a succession of
sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actual
ill-health, though he is not making an hour's continuous exertion in the
day. I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could not
make a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whose
cottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise on a harmonium before he
started. Often such a man takes to drink. In any case he is liable, as
the East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to the
most pitiable forms of moral collapse.

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

Powerfully built, with the big jaw and loose mouth of the dominant
talker, practised by years of sitting behind saloon bars, they have
learnt the way of 'selling cheap that which should be most dear.' But
even they generally look as if they drank, and as if they would not live
to old age.

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

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous disturbance
produced by certain conditions of life in political communities, are
again closely connected with the one point in the special psychology of
politics which has as yet received any extensive consideration--the
so-called 'Psychology of the Crowd,' on which the late M. Tarde, M. Le
Bon, and others have written. In the case of human beings, as in the
case of many other social and semi-social animals, the simpler
impulses--especially those of fear and anger--when they are consciously
shared by many physically associated individuals, may become enormously
exalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances. One may
suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originally
an accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervous
reaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger was
realised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey),
a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members of
the herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority.

My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern
national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous
excitement with physical contact is not of great importance. London in
the twentieth century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, or
Florence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very difficult for any
considerable proportion of the citizens to be gathered under
circumstances likely to produce the special 'Psychology of the Crowd.' I
have watched two hundred thousand men assembled in Hyde Park for a
Labour Demonstration. The scattered platforms, the fresh air, the wide
grassy space, seemed to be an unsuitable environment for the production
of purely instinctive excitement, and the attitude of such an assembly
in London is good-tempered and lethargic. A crowd in a narrow street is
more likely to get 'out of hand,' and one may see a few thousand men in
a large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltation
on an exciting occasion, and when they are in the hands of a practised
speaker. But as they go out of the hall they drop into the cool ocean of
London, and their mood is dissipated in a moment. The mob that took the
Bastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming force in one of the
business streets of Manchester. Yet such facts vary greatly among
different races, and the exaggeration which one seems to notice when
reading the French sociologists on this point may be due to their
observations having been made among a Latin and not a Northern race.

So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by the internal
politics of a modern State. But perhaps the most important section in
the whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned not
with the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other,
but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in international
politics. The future peace of the world largely turns on the question
whether we have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an instinctive
affection for those human beings whose features and colour are like our
own, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. On
this point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by the
psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise. But I am inclined to think
that those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred and
affection which can certainly be found, are not instances of a specific
and universal instinct but the result of several distinct and
comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened by habit and
association. I have already argued that the instinct of political
affection is stimulated by the vivid realisation of its object. Since
therefore it is easier, at least for uneducated men, to realise the
existence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, affection for
one's like would appear to have a natural basis, but one likely to be
modified as our powers of realisation are stimulated by education.
Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, among persons
belonging to the same race as themselves, any markedly unusual face or
dress may excite the instinct of fear of that which is unknown. A
child's fear, however, of a strangely shaped or coloured face is more
easily obliterated by familiarity than it would be if it were the result
of a specific instinct of race-hatred. White or Chinese children show,
one is told, no permanent aversion for Chinese or white or Hindoo or
negro nurses and attendants. Sex love, again, even when opposed by
social tradition, springs up freely between very different human types;
and widely separated races have been thereby amalgamated. Between some
of the non-human species (horses and camels, for instance) instinctive
mutual hatred, as distinguished from fear, does seem to exist, but
nowhere, as far as I know, is it found between varieties so nearly
related to each other and so readily interbreeding as the various human
races.

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

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

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




CHAPTER II

POLITICAL ENTITIES


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

The two lines of approach have this important difference, that the
nature with which man is born is looked on by the politician as fixed,
while the environment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitely
changing. It is not to changes in our nature, but to changes in our
environment only--using the word to include the traditions and
expedients which we acquire after birth as well as our material
surroundings--that all our political development from the tribal
organisation of the Stone Ages to the modern nation has apparently been
due.

The biologist looks on human nature itself as changing, but to him the
period of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years which constitute
the past of politics is quite insignificant. Important changes in
biological types may perhaps have occurred in the history of the world
during comparatively short periods, but they must have resulted either
from a sudden biological 'sport' or from a process of selection fiercer
and more discriminating than we believe to have taken place in the
immediate past of our own species. The present descendants of those
races which are pictured in early Egyptian tombs show no perceptible
change in their bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believe
that the mental faculties and tendencies with which they are born have
changed to any greater degree.

The numerical proportions of different races in the world have, indeed,
altered during that period, as one race proved weaker in war or less
able to resist disease than another; and races have been mingled by
marriage following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be exchanged
at birth with one born of the same breeding-stock even a hundred
thousand years ago, one may suppose that neither the ancient nor the
modern mother would notice any startling difference. The child from the
Stone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than our children if he
caught measles, or might show somewhat keener instincts in quarrelling
and hunting, or as he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellows
of the 'will to live' and 'the joy of life.' Conversely, a transplanted
twentieth-century child would resist infectious disease better than the
other children in the Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be found to
have a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable character. But
there apparently the difference would end. In essentials the type of
each human stock may be supposed to have remained unchanged throughout
the whole period. In the politics of the distant future that science of
eugenics, which aims at rapidly improving our type by consciously
directed selective breeding, may become a dominant factor, but it has
had little influence on the politics of the present or the past.

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

It is of these new political entities that this chapter will treat. They
must have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almost
entirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other
animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, of
innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deed
or thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How then
did the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and become
sufficiently significant to produce political results?

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

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

But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus
to action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be felt
in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens,
but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to 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, without 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 undergrowth separates itself at once
from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers.
Sometimes 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 heard 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 customary gestures. In
some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and
made recognisable 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.

Recognition 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 evolutionary
facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating
insects a putrid smell 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.[11] In early political 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' ([Greek:
skêptouchos basileús]). 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.

[11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p.
392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is
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.'

At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise 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 between 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 therefore decided by a process of
reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language,
it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional 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 abstraction 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 consciously 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 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
consciousness. 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 conscious
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 least of the
experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.

A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language.
If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family 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 recollection 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 comes,
  And gives the battle to his hands:
  A moment, while the trumpets blow,
  He sees his brood about thy knee;
  The next, like fire he meets the foe,
  And strikes him dead for thine and thee.'

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

But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again,
as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the 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 importance 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 temptations 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 Humanité.[12] With that would be automatically associated
the original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As 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
invention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in
the Roman 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 Comte found himself
to be.

[12] _The Catechism of Positive Religion_ (Tr. by Congreve), First Part,
'Explanation of the Worship,' e.g. p. 65: 'The Positivist shuts his eyes
during his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.'

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 images was his sense of
the convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the
'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments of
religious communities,' from which he suffered so much, with spirits
'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or
malicious, as the case might he.... 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."'[13] 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.'

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

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.'[14] 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. Religious
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 which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see and
touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types.

[14] Harnack, _Expansion of Christianity_ (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11.

If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover
how much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education,
to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional
experiences. 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 unrealised 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.' Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff,
Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.

Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after 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 important 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 abstraction, 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 effective 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 successive 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 revelation
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 thy songs;
for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down
as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.'[15] 'Judgment'
and 'righteousness' are not goddesses, but the voice which Amos heard
was not the voice of an abstraction.

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

Sometimes a new moral or political entity is created rather by 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 ecclesiastics.

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 'conventional' 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 hundreds 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.'[16] 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 Roman 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
incommunicable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed its
use. On the other hand, the actions and institutions of mankind, from
which the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Even
although the manuscripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law and
Roman 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 'Rome.' For hundreds of
years, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful than
his neighbours by the fact that he was 'Roman Emperor,' and was called
by the name of Caesar.

[16] _Politics_, ch. vii., [Greek: hotan tò plêthos pròs tò koinòn
politeúê tai symphéron.]

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. Races and languages
and religions were intermingled throughout central Europe, and the
historical memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishoprics 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 Rome 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 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. Meanwhile 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 difficult, still more difficult 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 associations,
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
coinage 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 nineteenth-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 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 membership ('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 time to think out
an _ex post facto_ justification for so doing. The only product of
memory or reflection that can stir in him the emotion of patriotism is
the statement 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 Rhodesia 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 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 _The Napoleon of Notting 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 government on a large scale; its development has been
unhampered 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.'[17] 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 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 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.

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

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 composition of the best possible marching
tune, which should be identified for all time with the Liberal Party.[18]
One of the few mistakes made by the very able men who organised Mr.
Chamberlain's Tariff Reform Campaign was their failure to secure even a
tolerably good tune.

[18] _Westminster Gazette_, June 11, 1898.

Only less automatic than those of colour or tune 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
associations. 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 Republican 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
meaningless syllables with new associations derived from the actual
history of the party. The Constitutional Democrats in Russia become
Cadets, and the Independent 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 Bismarck 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 superseded, but elsewhere it long suggested that Sir
Percy Fitzpatrick and his party had the same sort of democratic
sympathies as Mr. M'Kinnon Wood and his followers on the London County
Council. 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 subconscious, 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 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,' 'Food 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 intellectual 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 mankind. 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 commercial 'entity,' a 'tea' which
men can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he would have made a
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 will 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 subconscious associations. He would choose some term, say
'Parramatta Tea,' which would produce in most men a vague suggestion of
the tropical East, combined with the subconscious 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 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 Return, 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 attractive
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 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 gradually 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 Parramatta
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 candidate is, at his first appearance, to
most of his constituents 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 will 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 his 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 candidate, he must
remember that it is in that character that he 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 preserve their political life by being in constant
readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence of
their party itself. When Sir Robert 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-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 conscious and deliberate
contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by
proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective
administration; 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 because 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 innumerable 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 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 since undergone other
transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand,
remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coins
and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and
disillusionments has succeeded 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 will have no political existence, yet its use creates a
constant series of difficult 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'
Roman 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
therefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the
other hand, the Church is an unchanging 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 purposes. They can no more understand him
than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats 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 intellectual 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 like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be
clearly photographed must stand before it in the 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 vigilance; always to be challenged and
put upon its trial.'[19] 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 persistence in an opinion privately
abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own
conclusions, 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 himself which the
stateman is always building or destroying or transforming.

[19] _Gleanings_, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's _Life_, vol. i.
p. 211.

The same conditions affect other political entities besides parties 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, but from the
instinctive desire to be understood, write in the character of their
paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wishing to
advocate different opinions, it must either frankly proclaim 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.




CHAPTER III

NON-RATIONAL 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 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 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 definition 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 contemplation 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 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 themselves, 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 unconscious process. We can speak of
instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for
instance, 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 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 association 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 calls
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 observation of what he is doing with his
right hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movements
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,'[20] he was comparing the merely 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.

[20] _Auld Licht Idylls_, p. 220.

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 connection 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.

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 unconscious production of permanent associations.
'Another German Insult,' 'Keir Hardie's Crime,' 'Balfour Backs Down,'
are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as ready-made opinions.

In all this again the same rule holds as in the production of impulse.
Things that are nearer sense, nearer to our more ancient evolutionary
past, produce a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse.
When a new candidate on his first appearance 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, but 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.'[21]

[21] 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 shopman 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 sufficient for the shopman, she supposed that she had chosen
it.

Mr. G.K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article on
American elections a sentence which said: 'A little sound common-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.'[22] 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.

[22] _Heretics_, p. 122.

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 personage 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, however,
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.

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 clearness 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 ratepayers. 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 the law courts.
But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference. The
poster consisted 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 effectiveness 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 appearance 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 professional 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 subconscious
association, further suggested to most onlookers 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 continue 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 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 emphasised 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 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
candidates 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 Republican 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
Republic to be decreed for the next four years ... but by four millions
of Republican 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 prepares the verdict that shall determine the
wisdom of our work to-night.'[23]

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

But the divine oracle, whether in America or in England, turns out, too
often, only to be a tired householder, 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 argument 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 denominational religious instruction,
and by way of 'religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled political
observer that I know, speaking of an organised newspaper attack, said,
'As far as I can make out every 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.'[24]

[24] Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. i. p. 122.




CHAPTER IV

THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING


But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking
upon those forms of inference by 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 resistance 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 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 difficult 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 different 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 reasoning, 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 position and movement, and their position
and movement 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 appearance 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 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 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?'[25]

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

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 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 reflecting 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 community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such
subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if
we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures
are for ours.'[26]

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

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.'

Rousseau 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 live, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are most
rife?'[27]

[27] _Escheat vice Taxation_, Bentham's Works, vol. ii. p. 598.

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 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.'[28]

[28] MS. in University College, London, quoted by Halévy, _La Jeunesse
de Bentham_, pp. 289-290.

Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' constituted 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 Utilitarianism: '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.'[29]

[29] Bentham's _Works_, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's _England and
the English_ (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf.
preface.

A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like
Grote or Molesworth, or an official 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 proportion, 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 measurable 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 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 variations 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 examinations 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
evolutionary history, or the facts about the bones of the 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 statistical 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 training 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 arrangement, 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 clearly
on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is
left to discover for himself; 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 complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefers
old politicians, who have forgotten th

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