CHAPTER I

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.