POLITICAL ENTITIES
Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the relation between
his nature and the environment into which he is born. The last chapter
approached that relation (in so far as it affects politics) from the
side of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same relation from
the side of man's political environment.
The two lines of approach have this important difference, that the
nature with which man is born is looked on by the politician as fixed,
while the environment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitely
changing. It is not to changes in our nature, but to changes in our
environment only--using the word to include the traditions and
expedients which we acquire after birth as well as our material
surroundings--that all our political development from the tribal
organisation of the Stone Ages to the modern nation has apparently been
due.
The biologist looks on human nature itself as changing, but to him the
period of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years which constitute
the past of politics is quite insignificant. Important changes in
biological types may perhaps have occurred in the history of the world
during comparatively short periods, but they must have resulted either
from a sudden biological 'sport' or from a process of selection fiercer
and more discriminating than we believe to have taken place in the
immediate past of our own species. The present descendants of those
races which are pictured in early Egyptian tombs show no perceptible
change in their bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believe
that the mental faculties and tendencies with which they are born have
changed to any greater degree.
The numerical proportions of different races in the world have, indeed,
altered during that period, as one race proved weaker in war or less
able to resist disease than another; and races have been mingled by
marriage following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be exchanged
at birth with one born of the same breeding-stock even a hundred
thousand years ago, one may suppose that neither the ancient nor the
modern mother would notice any startling difference. The child from the
Stone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than our children if he
caught measles, or might show somewhat keener instincts in quarrelling
and hunting, or as he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellows
of the 'will to live' and 'the joy of life.' Conversely, a transplanted
twentieth-century child would resist infectious disease better than the
other children in the Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be found to
have a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable character. But
there apparently the difference would end. In essentials the type of
each human stock may be supposed to have remained unchanged throughout
the whole period. In the politics of the distant future that science of
eugenics, which aims at rapidly improving our type by consciously
directed selective breeding, may become a dominant factor, but it has
had little influence on the politics of the present or the past.
Those new facts in our environment which have produced the enormous
political changes which separate us from our ancestors have been partly
new habits of thought and feeling, and partly new entities about which
we can think and feel.
It is of these new political entities that this chapter will treat. They
must have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almost
entirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other
animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, of
innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deed
or thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How then
did the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and become
sufficiently significant to produce political results?
The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate us toward impulse
or action is that it should be recognisable--that it should be like
itself when we met it before, or like something else which we have met
before. If the world consisted of things which constantly and
arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anything
else, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings as
at present constituted would not act at all. They would drift like
seaweed among the waves.
The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one
hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is
like another; and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut and
blade of grass is like the rest.
But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus
to action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be felt
in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens,
but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action
by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a
tortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb.
Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature.
The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child in
distress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from the
stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement
or glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at once
from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers.
Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the
individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the
significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip
(provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by
experience and association.
In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their
significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if
ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper
at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one before
were invariably seized with a desire to vote.
The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages,
therefore, illustrates the process of creating artificial and easily
recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a
chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like unto
himself.' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do
the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If a
marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be
carried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures. In
some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and
made recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those
biologically inherited associations which enable man and other animals
to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and
wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man,
appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our
instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of
artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of
stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life. A child who
had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down
before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the
king, or the stone by association.
Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether
naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such
points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary
facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating
insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to
induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow
bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep
off birds.[11] In early political society most recognition is guided by
such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all
respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can
tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less
painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man
himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged
until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king
is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek:
skêptouchos basileús]). Such a staff is very like a name, and there
may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which
a model of a staff stood for a king.
[11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p.
392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is
the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of
everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill
them.'
At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole
process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the
eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal
man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the
original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and
pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and
royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of
reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.
When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language,
it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association
with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects
of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a
process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other
effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use
of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of
sensations--one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection
of a single quality--kingship, for instance--shared by other such
bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the
use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When
we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all
this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of
voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of
colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will
explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a
description of that which actually happens when language is used for the
purpose of stimulating us to action.
Indeed the 'brass-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work
in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of
significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a
friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political
terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before
a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise
observation of the associations which successively enter his
consciousness. The first associations revealed will be automatic and
obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black
marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser,' produce
at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious
emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance
of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile,' the marks will
first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction
may be associated. I am a 'visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a
blurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me the
picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway
carriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After the
automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional
accompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knows
about England, which are presented to the memory by a process
semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe
effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each
stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past
life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of the
experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.
A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language.
If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be
substituted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go
on--the automatic 'image,' automatically accompanied by emotional
association, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the
voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort
of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet
and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain
occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his
account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged
into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes
the succession which I have been discussing:--
'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,
That beat to battle where he stands.
Thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands:
A moment, while the trumpets blow,
He sees his brood about thy knee;
The next, like fire he meets the foe,
And strikes him dead for thine and thee.'
'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the change
from the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective mood
in which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised.
But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again,
as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarily
earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later
intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits
in one's chair one can feel that that is so.
Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena of
religion. The only religion of any importance which has ever been
consciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste
Comte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensure
moral action among the distractions and temptations of daily life, he
required each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image of
Humanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for a
definite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known and
loved woman--his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figure
always in the same attitude and dress, so that it should always present
itself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate association
with the word Humanité.[12] With that would be automatically associated
the original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As soon as
possible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller
but less cogent emotional associations connected with that meaning. This
invention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in
the Roman Catholic Church and partly suggested by Comte's own
experiences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de Vaux. One of
the reasons that it has not come into greater use may have been that men
in general are not quite such good 'visualisers' as Comte found himself
to be.
[12] _The Catechism of Positive Religion_ (Tr. by Congreve), First Part,
'Explanation of the Worship,' e.g. p. 65: 'The Positivist shuts his eyes
during his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.'
Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his _Apologia_, explains
how he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints that
behind his belief in the real existence of such images was his sense of
the convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the
'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments of
religious communities,' from which he suffered so much, with spirits
'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or
malicious, as the case might he.... My preference of the Personal to the
Abstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenanced
by the mention of the "Prince of Persia" in the prophet Daniel: and I
think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the
Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced "the angels of the seven
churches."'[13] In 1837 ... I said ... 'Take England with many high
virtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a
spirit neither of Heaven nor Hell.'
[13] Newman, _Apologia_ (1864), pp. 91, 92.
Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion of
Christianity, lays stress on the use of the word 'church' and the
'possibilities of personification which it offered.'[14] This use may
have owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction
applied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of all
Christian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a half
conscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term. But
when it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most men
to the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and not
to those which would follow on a full analysis of the meaning. Religious
history affords innumerable such instances. The 'truth embodied in a
tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual
realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale
itself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which 'every knee shall
bow,' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be
uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling
than the realisation of its meaning. Things of the senses--the sacred
food which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see and
touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types.
[14] Harnack, _Expansion of Christianity_ (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11.
If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover
how much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education,
to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional
experiences. For most men the central political entity is their country.
When a man dies for his country, what does he die for? The reader in his
chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, of
some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his
relation to all these things. But what seems to happen in the crisis of
battle is not the logical building up or analysing of the idea of one's
country, but that automatic selection by the mind of some thing of sense
accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection which I have
already described. Throughout his life the conscript has lived in a
stream of sensations, the printed pages of the geography book, the sight
of streets and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds or
rivers, all of which go to make up the infinity of facts from which he
might abstract an idea of his country. What comes to him in the final
charge? Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birth-place. More
likely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom or
imagination for enabling an entity which one can love to stand out from
the unrealised welter of experience. If he is an Italian it may be the
name, the musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it may be
the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the
market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the
'Marseillaise.' Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff,
Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.
Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after the
fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles
abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the
present and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to the
world. But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence of
Pericles' voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother
of the dead.
In the evolution of politics, among the most important events have been
the successive creations of new moral entities--of such ideals as
justice, freedom, right. In their origin that process of conscious
logical abstraction, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation
of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to the
historical fact. We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of the
conversations in which Socrates compared and analysed the unwilling
answers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice was
made by his work an infinitely more effective political term. It is
certain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation
of the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by some
forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort of
conscious thought. But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and
Justice, like a rock statue on whom successive generations of artists
have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as an
abstraction but as a direct revelation. It is true that this revelation
made the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame them
seemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparison
and analysis. Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice the
command which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacred
person of his herald. But Justice to her was a goddess, 'housemate of
the nether gods'--and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded
the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned
the gods back into abstractions.
The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to the
fact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotional
force without stiffening it into a personification; but that was because
they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all gods. Amos
wrote, 'I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savour
of your assemblies.... Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs;
for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down
as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.'[15] 'Judgment'
and 'righteousness' are not goddesses, but the voice which Amos heard
was not the voice of an abstraction.
[15] Amos, ch. v., vv. 21, 23, 24 (R.V.M.).
Sometimes a new moral or political entity is created rather by immediate
insight than by the slow process of deliberate analysis. Some seer of
genius perceives in a flash the essential likeness of things hitherto
kept apart in men's minds--the impulse which leads to anger with one's
brother, and that which leads to murder, the charity of the widow's mite
and of the rich man's gold, the intemperance of the debauchee and of the
party leader. But when the master dies the vision too often dies with
him. Plato's 'ideas' became the formulae of a system of magic, and the
command of Jesus that one should give all that one had to the poor
handed over one-third of the land of Europe to be the untaxed property
of wealthy ecclesiastics.
It is this last relation between words and things which makes the
central difficulty of thought about politics. The words are so rigid, so
easily personified, so associated with affection and prejudice; the
things symbolised by the words are so unstable. The moralist or the
teacher deals, as a Greek would say, for the most part, with 'natural,'
the politician always with 'conventional' species. If one forgets the
meaning of motherhood or childhood, Nature has yet made for us
unmistakable mothers and children who reappear, true to type, in each
generation. The chemist can make sure whether he is using a word in
precisely the same sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work in
his laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always changing, may
indeed disappear and may require hundreds of years to restore. Aristotle
defined the word 'polity' to mean a state where 'the citizens as a body
govern in accordance with the general good.'[16] As he wrote,
self-government in those States from which he abstracted the idea was
already withering beneath the power of Macedonia. Soon there were no
such States at all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle's
conception, the name which he defined is borne by the 'police' of
Odessa. It is no mere accident of philology that makes 'Justices'
Justice' a paradox. From the time that the Roman jurisconsults resumed
the work of the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and answer
built up the conception of 'natural justice, it, like all other
political conceptions, was exposed to the two dangers. On the one hand,
since the original effort of abstraction was in its completeness
incommunicable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed its
use. On the other hand, the actions and institutions of mankind, from
which the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Even
although the manuscripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law and
Roman institutions had both ceased to be. When the phrases of Justinian
were used by a Merovingian king or a Spanish Inquisitor not only was the
meaning of the words changed, but the facts to which the words could
have applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emotional power of
the bare words remained. The civil law and canon law of the Middle Ages
were able to enforce all kinds of abuses because the tradition of
reverence still attached itself to the sound of 'Rome.' For hundreds of
years, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful than
his neighbours by the fact that he was 'Roman Emperor,' and was called
by the name of Caesar.
[16] _Politics_, ch. vii., [Greek: hotan tò plêthos pròs tò koinòn
politeúê tai symphéron.]
The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which influence the
history of a political entity when once formed confront the statesman
who is engaged in making a new one. The great men, Stein, Bismarck,
Cavour, or Metternich, who throughout the nineteenth century worked at
the reconstruction of the Europe which Napoleon's conquests shattered,
had to build up new States which men should respect and love, whose
governments they should willingly obey, and for whose continued
existence they should be prepared to die in battle. Races and languages
and religions were intermingled throughout central Europe, and the
historical memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishoprics into
which the map was divided were confused and unexciting. Nothing was
easier than to produce and distribute new flags and coins and national
names. But the emotional effect of such things depends upon associations
which require time to produce, and which may have to contend against
associations already existing. The boy in Lombardy or Galicia saw the
soldiers and the schoolmaster salute the Austrian flag, but the real
thrill came when he heard his father or mother whisper the name of Italy
or Poland. Perhaps, as in the case of Hanover, the old associations and
the new are for many years almost equally balanced.
In such times men fall back from the immediate emotional associations of
the national name and search for its meaning. They ask what _is_ the
Austrian or the German Empire. As long as there was only one Pope men
handed on unexamined the old reverence from father to son. When for
forty years there had been two Popes, at Rome and at Avignon, men began
to ask what constituted a Pope. And in such times some men go further
still. They may ask not only what is the meaning of the word Austrian
Empire, or Pope, but what in the nature of things is the ultimate reason
why the Austrian Empire or the Papacy should exist.
The work therefore of nation-building must be carried forward on each
plane. The national name and flag and anthem and coinage all have their
entirely non-logical effect based on habitual association. Meanwhile the
statesmen strive to create as much meaning as possible for such symbols.
If all the subjects of a State serve in one army and speak, or
understand, one language, or even use a black-letter alphabet which has
been abandoned elsewhere, the national name will mean more to them. The
Saxon or the Savoyard will have a fuller answer to give himself when he
asks 'What does it mean, that I am a German or a Frenchman?' A single
successful war waged in common will create not only a common history,
but a common inheritance of passionate feeling. 'Nationalists,'
meanwhile, may be striving, by songs and pictures and appeals to the
past, to revive and intensify the emotional associations connected with
older national areas--and behind all this will go on the deliberate
philosophical discussion of the advantages to be derived from large or
small, racial or regional States, which will reach the statesman at
second-hand and the citizen at third-hand. As a result, Italy, Belgium,
and the German Empire succeed in establishing themselves as States
resting upon a sufficient basis of patriotism, and Austria-Hungary may,
when the time of stress comes, be found to have failed.
But if the task of State building in Europe during the nineteenth
century was difficult, still more difficult is the task before the
English statesmen of the twentieth century of creating an imperial
patriotism. We have not even a name, with any emotional associations,
for the United Kingdom itself. No Englishman is stirred by the name
'British,' the name 'English' irritates all Scotchmen, and the Irish are
irritated by both alike. Our national anthem is a peculiarly flat and
uninspiring specimen of eighteenth-century opera libretto and opera
music. The little naked St. George on the gold coins, or the armorial
pattern on the silver coins never inspired any one. The new copper
coinage bears, it is true, a graceful figure of Miss Hicks Beach. But we
have made it so small and ladylike that it has none of the emotional
force of the glorious portrait heads of France or Switzerland.
The only personification of his nation which the artisan of Oldham or
Middlesbrough can recognise is the picture of John Bull as a fat,
brutal, early nineteenth-century Midland farmer. One of our national
symbols alone, the 'Union Jack,' though it is as destitute of beauty as
a patchwork quilt, is fairly satisfactory. But all its associations so
far are with naval warfare.
When we go outside the United Kingdom we are in still worse case. 'The
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together with its Colonies
and Dependencies' has no shorter or more inspiring name. Throughout the
Colonial Conference of 1907 statesmen and leader writers tried every
expedient of periphrasis and allusion to avoid hurting any one's
feelings even by using such a term as 'British Empire.' To the _Sydney
Bulletin_, and to the caricaturists of Europe, the fact that any
territory on the map of the world is coloured red still recalls nothing
but the little greedy eyes, huge mouth, and gorilla hands of 'John
Bull.'
If, again, the young Boer or Hindoo or ex-American Canadian asks himself
what is the meaning of membership ('citizenship,' as applied to
five-sixths of the inhabitants of the Empire, would be misleading) of
the Empire, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to give an answer.
When he goes deeper and asks for what purpose the Empire exists, he is
apt to be told that the inhabitants of Great Britain conquered half the
world in a fit of absence of mind and have not yet had time to think out
an _ex post facto_ justification for so doing. The only product of
memory or reflection that can stir in him the emotion of patriotism is
the statement that so far the tradition of the Empire has been to
encourage and trust to political freedom. But political freedom, even in
its noblest form, is a negative quality, and the word is apt to bear
different meanings in Bengal and Rhodesia and Australia.
States, however, constitute only one among many types of political
entities. As soon as any body of men have been grouped under a common
political name, that name may acquire emotional associations as well as
an intellectually analysable meaning. For the convenience, for instance,
of local government the suburbs of Birmingham are divided into separate
boroughs. Partly because these boroughs occupy the site of ancient
villages, partly because football teams of Scotch professionals are
named after them, partly because human emotions must have something to
attach themselves to, they are said to be developing a fierce local
patriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as the Blues hated
the Greens in the Byzantine theatre. In London, largely under the
influence of the Birmingham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs were
created in 1899, with names--at least in the case of the City of
Westminster--deliberately selected in order to revive half-forgotten
emotional associations. However, in spite of Mr. Chesterton's prophecy
in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_, very few Londoners have learnt to
feel or think primarily as citizens of their boroughs. Town Halls are
built which they never see, coats of arms are invented which they would
not recognise; and their boroughs are mere electoral wards in which they
vote for a list of unknown names grouped under the general title adopted
by their political party.
The party is, in fact, the most effective political entity in the modern
national State. It has come into existence with the appearance of
representative government on a large scale; its development has been
unhampered by legal or constitutional traditions, and it represents the
most vigorous attempt which has been made to adapt the form of our
political institutions to the actual facts of human nature. In a modern
State there may be ten million or more voters. Every one of them has an
equal right to come forward as a candidate and to urge either as
candidate or agitator the particular views which he may hold on any
possible political question. But to each citizen, living as he does in
the infinite stream of things, only a few of his ten million
fellow-citizens could exist as separate objects of political thought or
feeling, even if each one of them held only one opinion on one subject
without change during his life. Something is required simpler and more
permanent, something which can be loved and trusted, and which can be
recognised at successive elections as being the same thing that was
loved and trusted before; and a party is such a thing.
The origin of any particular party may be due to a deliberate
intellectual process. It may be formed, as Burke said, by 'a body of men
united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest
upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.'[17] But
when a party has once come into existence its fortunes depend upon facts
of human nature of which deliberate thought is only one. It is primarily
a name, which, like other names, calls up when it is heard or seen an
'image' that shades imperceptibly into the voluntary realisation of its
meaning. As in other cases, emotional reactions can be set up by the
name and its automatic mental associations. It is the business of the
party managers to secure that these automatic associations shall be as
clear as possible, shall be shared by as large a number as possible, and
shall call up as many and as strong emotions as possible. For this
purpose nothing is more generally useful than the party colour. Our
distant ancestors must have been able to recognise colour before they
recognised language, and the simple and stronger emotions more easily
attach themselves to a colour than to a word. The poor boy who died the
other day with the ribbon of the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club on
his pillow loved the colour itself with a direct and intimate affection.
[17] _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_ (Macmillan, 1902), p. 81.
A party tune is equally automatic in its action, and, in the case of
people with a musical 'ear,' even more effective than a party colour as
an object of emotion. As long as the Marseillaise, which is now the
national tune of France, was the party tune of the revolution its
influence was enormous. Even now, outside of France, it is a very
valuable party asset. It was a wise suggestion which an experienced
political organiser made in the _Westminster Gazette_ at the time of
Gladstone's death, that part of the money collected in his honour should
be spent in paying for the composition of the best possible marching
tune, which should be identified for all time with the Liberal Party.[18]
One of the few mistakes made by the very able men who organised Mr.
Chamberlain's Tariff Reform Campaign was their failure to secure even a
tolerably good tune.
[18] _Westminster Gazette_, June 11, 1898.
Only less automatic than those of colour or tune come the emotional
associations called up by the first and simplest meaning of the word or
words used for the party name. A Greek father called his baby 'Very
Glorious' or 'Good in Counsel,' and the makers of parties in the same
way choose names whose primary meanings possess established emotional
associations. From the beginning of the existence and activity of a
party new associations are, however, being created which tend to take
the place, in association, of the original meaning of the name. No one
in America when he uses the terms Republican or Democrat thinks of their
dictionary meanings. Any one, indeed, who did so would have acquired a
mental habit as useless and as annoying as the habit of reading Greek
history with a perpetual recognition of the dictionary meanings of names
like Aristobulus and Theocritus. Long and precise names which make
definite assertions as to party policy are therefore soon shortened into
meaningless syllables with new associations derived from the actual
history of the party. The Constitutional Democrats in Russia become
Cadets, and the Independent Labour Party becomes the I.L.P. On the other
hand, the less conscious emotional associations which are automatically
excited by less precise political names may last much longer. The German
National Liberals were valuable allies for Bismarck during a whole
generation because their name vaguely suggested a combination of
patriotism and freedom. When the mine-owners in the Transvaal decided
some years ago to form a political party they chose, probably after
considerable discussion, the name of 'Progressive.' It was an excellent
choice. In South Africa the original associations of the word were
apparently soon superseded, but elsewhere it long suggested that Sir
Percy Fitzpatrick and his party had the same sort of democratic
sympathies as Mr. M'Kinnon Wood and his followers on the London County
Council. No one speaking to an audience whose critical and logical
faculties were fully aroused would indeed contend that because a certain
body of people had chosen to call themselves Progressives, therefore a
vote against them was necessarily a vote against progress. But in the
dim and shadowy region of emotional association a good name, if its
associations are sufficiently subconscious, has a real political value.
Conversely, the opponents of a party attempt to label it with a name
that will excite feelings of opposition. The old party terms of Whig and
Tory are striking instances of such names given by opponents and
lasting perhaps half a century before they lost their original abusive
associations. More modern attempts have been less successful, because
they have been more precise. 'Jingo' had some of the vague
suggestiveness of an effectively bad name, but 'Separatist,' 'Little
Englander,' 'Food Taxer,' remain as assertions to be consciously
accepted or rejected.
The whole relation between party entities and political impulse can
perhaps be best illustrated from the art of advertisement. In
advertisement the intellectual process can be watched apart from its
ethical implications, and advertisement and party politics are becoming
more and more closely assimilated in method. The political poster is
placed side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on the
hoardings, it is drawn by the same artist and follows the same empirical
rules of art. Let us suppose therefore that a financier thinks that
there is an opening for a large advertising campaign in connection, say,
with the tea trade. The actual tea-leaves in the world are as varied and
unstable as the actual political opinions of mankind. Every leaf in
every tea-garden is different from every other leaf, and a week of damp
weather may change the whole stock in any warehouse. What therefore
should the advertiser do to create a commercial 'entity,' a 'tea' which
men can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he would have made a
number of optimistic and detailed statements with regard to his
opportunities and methods of trade. He would have printed in the
newspapers a statement that 'William Jones, assisted by a staff of
experienced buyers, will attend the tea-sales of the East India Company,
and will lay in parcels from the best Chinese Gardens, which he will
retail to his customers at a profit of not more than five per centum.'
This, however, is an open appeal to the critical intellect, and by the
critical intellect it would now be judged. We should not consider Mr.
Jones to be an unbiassed witness as to the excellence of his choice, or
think that he would have sufficient motive to adhere to his pledge about
his rate of profit if he thought he could get more.
Nowadays, therefore, such an advertiser would practice on our automatic
and subconscious associations. He would choose some term, say
'Parramatta Tea,' which would produce in most men a vague suggestion of
the tropical East, combined with the subconscious memory of a geography
lesson on Australia. He would then proceed to create in connection with
the word an automatic picture-image having previous emotional
associations of its own. By the time that a hundred thousand pounds had
been cleverly spent, no one in England would be able to see the word
'Parramatta' on a parcel without a vague impulse to buy, founded on a
day-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the British fleet, or
of a pretty young English matron, or of any other subject that the
advertiser had chosen for its association with the emotions of trust or
affection. When music plays a larger part in English public education it
may be possible to use it effectively for advertisement, and a
'Parramatta Motif' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, in
connection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would be
squeaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop.
This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid to clearness of
thought, that up to this point no Parramatta Tea exists, and no one has
even settled what sort of tea shall be provided under that name.
Parramatta tea is still a commercial entity pure and simple. It may
later on be decided to sell very poor tea at a large profit until the
original associations of the name have been gradually superseded by the
association of disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment by
selling different teas under that name in different places, and to push
the sale of the flavour which 'takes on.' But there are other attractive
names of teas on the hoardings, with associations of babies, and
bull-dogs, and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop a
permanent trade in competition with these it will probably be found
wisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform quality, and with a distinctive
flavour which may act as its 'meaning.' The great difficulty will then
come when there is a change of public taste, and when the sales fall
off because the chosen flavour no longer pleases. The directors may
think it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminishing number
of customers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, taking
the risk that the number of housewives who say, 'This is not the real
Parramatta Tea,' may be balanced by the number of those who say,
'Parramatta Tea has improved.' If people will not buy the old flavour at
all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parramatta
Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made
an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles.
All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are
to the advertiser. The party candidate is, at his first appearance, to
most of his constituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or
Conservative upon it. That name has associations of colour and music, of
traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist
independently of the party policy. Unless he bears the party
label--unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate--not
only will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will
find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible
entity to the electors at all. A proportion of the electors, varying
greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the
'regular' nominee of their party without reference to his programme,
though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he
must also present a programme which can be identified with the party
policy. But, in any case, as long as he is a party candidate, he must
remember that it is in that character that he speaks and acts. The party
prepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make it
possible for them to think and feel with him. When he speaks there is
between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than
his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in
the vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the part
with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the
mask of another party.
Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which
they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions
of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. This
does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals they
can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant
readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence of
their party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in
1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the
Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it
might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and
association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four
years before. In either case Peel was doing something other and more
serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of
the moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating
corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a
politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.
If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the
earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at
once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what
that Socialism is which influences so many lives? He might answer
himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'a
movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon
three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes,
the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the
belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social
arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate
contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by
proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective
administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully
adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be
abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or
because when tried they failed. But he would also see that this
definition of a many-sided and ever-varying movement drawn by
abstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is not
a description of 'Socialism' as it exists for the greater number of its
supporters. The need of something which one may love and for which one
may work has created for thousands of working men a personified
'Socialism,' a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the
hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need of
some engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith and
certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but
a final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in
1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from
Mr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimly
educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine
humility in his eyes, 'How strange it is that this glorious truth has
been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown
to me.'
Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and
writing. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its
predecessors--Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism--and may
survive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone other
transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand,
remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coins
and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and
disillusionments has succeeded in establishing itself as a government.
But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use
by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as
a party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive,
will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the
movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a
constant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who applies
the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from
common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false
impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet
there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping
wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist'
Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term
'Catholic Church' to mean a society which has gone through various
intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon
the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. He
therefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the
other hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging
revelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he 'believes' in the
Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual
occurrence of most of the facts which constitute the original
revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their
name for his own fraudulent purposes. They can no more understand him
than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understand
Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the other
hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use
of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it,
because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of
thought.
Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression
is, so to speak, a party--a political entity--in himself. He may fashion
a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The
Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn
the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual
statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present
public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to
unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent.
The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards
politics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be
clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a
long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.
'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose
judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to
the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a
course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But
it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and
put upon its trial.'[19] Most statesmen avoid this choice between the
loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of
character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately
abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own
conclusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in
the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those
which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word
remains, and becomes part of that entity outside himself which the
stateman is always building or destroying or transforming.
[19] _Gleanings_, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's _Life_, vol. i.
p. 211.
The same conditions affect other political entities besides parties and
statesmen. If a newspaper is to live as a political force it must
impress itself on men's minds as holding day by day to a consistent
view. The writers, not only from editorial discipline, but from the
instinctive desire to be understood, write in the character of their
paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wishing to
advocate different opinions, it must either frankly proclaim itself as a
new thing or must make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative steps
that the new attitude is a necessary development of the old. It is
therefore rightly felt that a capitalist who buys a paper for the sake
of using its old influence to strengthen a new movement is doing
something to be judged by other moral standards than those which apply
to the purchase of so much printing-machinery and paper. He may be
destroying something which has been a stable and intelligible entity for
thousands of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible world,
and which has collected round it affection and trust as real as was ever
inspired by an orator or a monarch.