THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING
But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking
upon those forms of inference by immediate association which come so
easily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes. The whole
progress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been made
possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to
interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we
could if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of
our minds.
These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent a
difficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effects
with mechanical accuracy.
When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for valid reasoning,
they had, it is true, the needs of politics specially in their minds.
After the prisoners in Plato's cave of illusion should be unbound by
true philosophy it was to the service of the State that they were to
devote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control of
passion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet if Plato could visit
us now, he would learn that while our glass-makers proceed by rigorous
and confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the
glass-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims and
personal skill. Why is it, he would ask us, that valid reasoning has
proved to be so much more difficult in politics than in the physical
sciences?
Our first answer might be found in the character of the material with
which political reasoning has to deal. The universe which presents
itself to our reason is the same as that which presents itself to our
feelings and impulses--an unending stream of sensations and memories,
every one of which is different from every other, and before which,
unless we can select and recognise and simplify, we must stand helpless
and unable either to act or think. Man has therefore to create entities
that shall be the material of his reasoning, just as he creates entities
to be the objects of his emotions and the stimulus of his instinctive
inferences.
Exact reasoning requires exact comparison, and in the desert or the
forest there were few things which our ancestors could compare exactly.
The heavenly bodies seem, indeed, to have been the first objects of
consciously exact reasoning, because they were so distant that nothing
could be known of them except position and movement, and their position
and movement could be exactly compared from night to night.
In the same way the foundation of the terrestrial sciences came from two
discoveries, first, that it was possible to abstract single qualities,
such as position and movement, in all things however unlike, from the
other qualities of those things and to compare them exactly; and
secondly, that it was possible artificially to create actual
uniformities for the purpose of comparison, to make, that is to say, out
of unlike things, things so like that valid inferences could be drawn as
to their behaviour under like circumstances. Geometry, for instance,
came into the service of man when it was consciously realised that all
units of land and water were exactly alike in so far as they were
extended surfaces. Metallurgy, on the other hand, only became a science
when men could actually take two pieces of copper ore, unlike in shape
and appearance and chemical constitution, and extract from them two
pieces of copper so nearly alike that they would give the same results
when treated in the same way.
This second power over his material the student of politics can never
possess. He can never create an artificial uniformity in man. He cannot,
after twenty generations of education or breeding render even two human
beings sufficiently like each other for him to prophesy with any
approach to certainty that they will behave alike under like
circumstances.
How far has he the first power? How far can he abstract from the facts
of man's state qualities in respect of which men are sufficiently
comparable to allow of valid political reasoning?
On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the Bastille John Adams,
then American Ambassador to England, and afterwards President of the
United States, wrote to a friend describing the 'fermentation upon the
subject of government' throughout Europe. 'Is Government a science or
not?' he describes men as asking. 'Are there any principles on which it
is founded? What are its ends? If indeed there is no rule, no standard,
all must be accident and chance. If there is a standard, what is it?'[25]
[25] _Memoir of T. Brand Hollis_, by J. Disney, p. 32.
Again and again in the history of political thought men have believed
themselves to have found this 'standard,' this fact about man which
should bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all things
can be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can be
measured bears to geometry.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in the
final causes of man's existence. Every man differed, it is true, from
every other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type of
perfect manhood which, though few men approached, and none attained it,
all were capable of conceiving. May not, asked Plato, this type be the
pattern--the 'idea'--of man formed by God and laid up 'in a heavenly
place'? If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics
when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know
that pattern. Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense
would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable
purposes of God.
Or the relation of man to God's purpose was thought of not as that
between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a
legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to
which the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on the
moral facts of the world, learn God's law. That law confers on us
certain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which a
valid political science can be deduced. We know our rights with the same
certainty that we know his law.
'Men,' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and
infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent
into the world by his order and about his business; they are his
property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one
another's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing
all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such
subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if
we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures
are for ours.'[26]
[26] Locke, _Second Treatise of Government_, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191.
When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty in
their argument against George the Third they too found it in the fact
that men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'
Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed
social contract. Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant
upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was
apt to stand upon nothing at all.
At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept
aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural
right. 'What sort of a thing,' he asked, 'is a natural right, and where
does the maker live, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are most
rife?'[27]
[27] _Escheat vice Taxation_, Bentham's Works, vol. ii. p. 598.
Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that
all men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men were
measurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be
made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or
chemistry. 'The present work,' wrote Bentham, 'as well as any other work
of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of
legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to
extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to
the moral.'[28]
[28] MS. in University College, London, quoted by Halévy, _La Jeunesse
de Bentham_, pp. 289-290.
Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' constituted in many ways an
important advance upon 'natural right.' It was in the first place
founded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel both
pleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable. One
could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year
from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who
suffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were
more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a
given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain.
Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the
political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of
all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist,
all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of
appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader
to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.'[29]
[29] Bentham's _Works_, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's _England and
the English_ (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf.
preface.
A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like
Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising
politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about
'rights of property,' 'mischievous agitators,' 'spirit of the
Constitution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining
statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours
of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and
races who inhabited the British Empire.
But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible.
Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are not
the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites,
by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives as
instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial
idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and
the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again,
among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of
the complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success.
In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim at
finding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature as
possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in
political reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for a
political science, we must adopt the method of the biologist, who tries
to discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in a
group of related beings, rather than that of the physicist, who
constructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single quality
common to the whole material world.
The facts when collected must, because they are many, be arranged. I
believe that it would be found convenient by the political student to
arrange them under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the human
type; quantitative facts as to inherited variations from that type
observed either in individuals or groups of individuals; and facts, both
quantitative and descriptive, as to the environment into which men are
born, and the observed effect of that environment upon their political
actions and impulses.
A medical student already attempts to master as many as possible of
those facts about the human type that are relevant to his science. The
descriptive facts, for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which he
has to learn before he can hope to pass his examinations must number
many thousands. If he is to remember them so that he can use them in
practice, they must be carefully arranged in associated groups. He may
find, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical facts about the
human eye most easily and correctly by associating them with their
evolutionary history, or the facts about the bones of the hand by
associating them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray photograph.
The quantitative facts as to variations from the anatomical human type
are collected for him in statistical form, and he makes an attempt to
acquire the main facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takes
the Diploma of Public Health.
The student teacher, too, during his period of training acquires a
series of facts about the human type, though in his case they are as yet
far less numerous, less accurate and less conveniently arranged than
those in the medical text-books.
If the student of politics followed such an arrangement, he would at
least begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containing
all those facts about the human type which have been shown by experience
to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student's knowledge
could be most easily recalled when wanted.
At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by
reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the
condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or
Galen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about
the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association of
ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected
from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly
on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is
left to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that they
cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also a
few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after
he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political
education is complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefers
old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young
doctors who remember theirs.[30]
[30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to
discuss the method of approaching political science with two young
Oxford students. In each case I suggested that it would be well to read
a little psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his
tutor and had been told that psychology was 'useless' or 'nonsense.' One
tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added
the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science nor
philosophy.'
A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the
conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a
separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of
experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not
permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in
1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on _Democracy
and the Organisation of Political Parties_, containing the results of
fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and
England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the
basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which
are of importance to the politician--the nature of our impulses, the
necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the
methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past,
and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But no
indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered
in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he
started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with
'free reason,'[31] 'the general idea of liberty,'[32] 'the sentiments
which inspired the men of 1848,'[33] and the book ends with a sketch of a
proposed constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote for
candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all
mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[34] One seems to be reading a
series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a
loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy.
[31] _Passim_, e.g., vol. ii. p. 728.
[32] _Ibid_., p. 649.
[33] _Ibid_., p. 442.
[34] _Ibid_., p. 756.
Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the Constitutional
Democratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas II., and must have learnt
for himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind
them to contend on equal terms with the Russian autocracy they must be a
party, trusted and obeyed as a party, and not a casual collection of
free individuals. Some day the history of the first Duma will be
written, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's
experience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of that
great struggle.
The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced by
an introduction from Mr. James Bryce. This introduction shows that even
in the mind of the author of _The American Constitution_ the conception
of human nature which he learnt at Oxford still dwells apart.
'In the ideal democracy,' says Mr. Bryce, 'every citizen is intelligent,
patriotic, disinterested. His sole wish is to discover the right side in
each contested issue, and to fix upon the best man among competing
candidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge of the constitution
of his country, enables him to judge wisely between the arguments
submitted to him, while his own zeal is sufficient to carry him to the
polling booth.'[35]
[35] Ostrogorski, vol. i. p. xliv.
A few lines further on Mr. Bryce refers to 'the democratic ideal of the
intelligent independence of the individual voter, an ideal far removed
from the actualities of any State.'
What does Mr. Bryce mean by 'ideal democracy'? If it means anything it
means the best form of democracy which is consistent with the facts of
human nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr.
Bryce means by those words the kind of democracy which might be possible
if human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was
taught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the passage is a good
instance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics.
No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, 'the ideal man
requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this
ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.' No
modern treatise on pedagogy begins with the statement that 'the ideal
boy knows things without being taught them, and his sole wish is the
advancement of science, but no boys at all like this have ever existed.'
And what, in a world where causes have effects and effects causes, does
'intelligent independence' mean?
Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of Political Economy at
Oxford, under-Secretary for the Colonies, and under-Secretary for India,
wrote in 1861:
'To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue which will ever be
determined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the more
refined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract political
philosophy. The sense of national honour; the pride of blood, the
tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities,
the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to
spread our civilisation and our religion over the world; these are
impulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but the
statesman dares not....'[36]
[36] Herman Merivale, _Colonisation_, 1861, 2nd edition. The book is a
re-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. The
passage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675.
What does 'abstract political philosophy' here mean? No medical writer
would speak of an 'abstract' anatomical science in which men have no
livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may
disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not.
Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 'abstract' political
philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to a
conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain
eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed
in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises
a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe.
The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human nature
in which he is ceasing to believe as 'abstract' or 'ideal' may seem to
be of merely academic interest. But such half-beliefs produce immense
practical effects. Because Merivale saw that the political philosophy
which his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and because
he had nothing to substitute for it, he frankly abandoned any attempt
at valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the white
colonies to the rest of the British Empire. He therefore decided in
effect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of
'cutting the painter'; and, since he was the chief official in the
Colonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was right
or wrong, was not unimportant.
Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of such
a half-belief from making that constructive contribution to general
political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of
his time. 'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist,
almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable
were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue
sky he can.'[37] Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who,
finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula,
should speak of himself as nevertheless 'grimly resolved' to see things
from the old and comfortable point of view!
[37] _Loc. cit._, p. xliii.
The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating
would be the quantitative study of the inherited variations of
individual men when compared with the 'normal' or 'average' man who had
so far served for the study of the type.
How is the student to approach this part of the course? Every man
differs quantitatively from every other man in respect of every one
of his qualities. The student obviously cannot carry in his mind or
use for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a single
inherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundred
millions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are in
existence. Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relation
of thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in
which individuals are at every moment dying and being born.
Mr. H.G. Wells faces this fact in that extremely stimulating essay on
'Scepticism of the Instrument,' which he has appended to his _Modern
Utopia_. His answer is that the difficulty is 'of the very smallest
importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation
to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy
it matters profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up
come two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances
are they serve my rude physiological purpose.'[38]
[38] _A Modern Utopia_, p. 381.
To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the individual is of
enormous importance, not only when he is dealing with 'philosophy and
wide generalisations' but in the practical affairs of his daily
activity. Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for 'two eggs' to
put under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and the
politician, who is responsible for actual results in an amazingly
complicated world, has to deal with more delicate distinctions than the
breeder. A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals,
or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic support from
nonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for 'two men.'
On this point, however, most writers on political science seem to
suggest that after they have described human nature as if all men were
in all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readers
of the inexactness of their description, they can do no more. All
knowledge of individual variations must be left to individual
experience.
John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the Moral
Sciences at the end of his _System of Logic_ implies this, and seems
also to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgments
and forecasts made by students and professors of politics does not
involve a large element of error.
'Excepting,' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists as
to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the
physical circumstances on which these may be dependent, (considerations
which are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind in
the average or _en masse_), I believe most competent judges will agree
that the general laws of the different constituent elements of human
nature are even now sufficiently understood to render it possible for a
competent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerable
approach to certainty, the particular type of character which would be
formed, in mankind generally, by any assumed set of circumstances.'[39]
[39] _System of Logic_, Book vi. vol. ii. (1875), p. 462.
Few people nowadays would be found to share Mill's belief. It is just
because we feel ourselves unable to deduce with any 'approach to
certainty' the effect of circumstances upon character, that we all
desire to obtain, if it is possible, a more exact idea of human
variation than can be arrived at by thinking of mankind 'in the average
or _en masse_.'
Fortunately the mathematical students of biology, of whom Professor Karl
Pearson is the most distinguished leader, are already showing us that
facts of inherited variation can be so arranged that we can remember
them without having to get by heart millions of isolated instances.
Professor Pearson and the other writers in the periodical _Biometrika_
have measured innumerable beech leaves, snails' tongues, human skulls,
etc. etc., and have recorded in each case the variations of any quality
in a related group of individuals by that which Professor Pearson calls
an 'observation frequency polygon,' but which I, in my own thinking,
find that I call (from a vague memory of its shape) a 'cocked hat.'
Here is a tracing of such a figure, founded on the actual measurement of
25,878 recruits for the United States army.
[Illustration:
[Transcriber's Description:
A line graph of number of recruits vs. height. The horizontal axis is
AC, and the line itself is ABC, which is roughly normal.]]
The line _ABC_ records, by its distance at successive points from the
line _AC_, the number of recruits reaching successive inches of height.
It shows, e.g. (as indicated by the dotted lines) that the number of
recruits between 5 ft. 11 in. and 6 ft. was about 1500, and the number
of those between 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 8 in. about 4000.[40]
[40] This figure is adapted (by the kind permission of the publishers)
from one given in Professor K. Pearson's _Chances of Death_, vol. i. p.
277. For the relation between such records of actual observation and the
curves resulting from mathematical calculation of known causes of
variation, see _ibid._, chap, viii., the paper by the same author on
'Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Evolution,' in vol. 186 (A)
of the _Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions_ (1896), and the
chapters on evolution in his _Grammar of Science_, 2nd edition.
Such figures, when they simply record the results of the fact that the
likeness of the offspring to the parent in evolution is constantly
inexact, are (like the records of other cases of 'chance' variation)
fairly symmetrical, the greatest number of instances being found at the
mean, and the descending curves of those above and those below the mean
corresponding pretty closely with each other. Boot manufacturers, as the
result of experience, construct in effect such a curve, making a large
number of boots of the sizes which in length or breadth are near the
mean, and a symmetrically diminishing number of the sizes above and
below it.
In the next chapter I shall deal with the use in reasoning of such
curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I
point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because
our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black
line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our
minds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormously
beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated
instances; and secondly, that we can by imagining such curves form a
roughly accurate idea of the character of the variations to be expected
as to any inherited quality among groups of individuals not yet born or
not yet measured.
The third and last division under which knowledge of man can be arranged
for the purposes of political study consists of the facts of man's
environment, and of the effect of environment upon his character and
actions. It is the extreme instability and uncertainty of this element
which constitutes the special difficulty of politics. The human type and
the quantitative distribution of its variations are for the politician,
who deals with a few generations only, practically permanent. Man's
environment changes with ever-increasing rapidity. The inherited nature
of every human being varies indeed from that of every other, but the
relative frequency of the most important variations can be forecasted
for each generation. The difference, on the other hand, between one
man's environment and that of other men can be arranged on no curve and
remembered or forecasted by no expedient. Buckle, it is true, attempted
to explain the present and prophesy the future intellectual history of
modern nations by the help of a few generalisations as to the effect of
that small fraction of their environment which consisted of climate. But
Buckle failed, and no one has attacked the problem again with anything
like his confidence.
We can, of course, see that in the environment of any nation or class at
any given time there are some facts which constitute for all its members
a common experience, and therefore a common influence. Climate is such a
fact, or the discovery of America, or the invention of printing, or the
rates of wages and prices. All nonconformists are influenced by their
memory of certain facts of which very few churchmen are aware, and all
Irishmen by facts which most Englishmen try to forget. The student of
politics must therefore read history, and particularly the history of
those events and habits of thought in the immediate past which are
likely to influence the generation in which he will work. But he must
constantly be on his guard against the expectation that his reading will
give him much power of accurate forecast. Where history shows him that
such and such an experiment has succeeded or failed he must always
attempt to ascertain how far success or failure was due to facts of the
human type, which he may assume to have persisted into his own time, and
how far to facts of environment. When he can show that failure was due
to the ignoring of some fact of the type and can state definitely what
that fact is, he will be able to attach a real meaning to the repeated
and unheeded maxims by which the elder members of any generation warn
the younger that their ideas are 'against human nature.' But if it is
possible that the cause was one of mental environment, that is to say, of
habit or tradition, or memory, he should be constantly on his guard
against generalisations about national or racial 'character.'
One of the most fertile sources of error in modern political thinking
consists, indeed, in the ascription to collective habit of that
comparative permanence which only belongs to biological inheritance. A
whole science can be based upon easy generalisations about Celts and
Teutons, or about East and West, and the facts from which the
generalisations are drawn may all disappear in a generation. National
habits used to change slowly in the past, because new methods of life
were seldom invented and only gradually introduced, and because the
means of communicating ideas between man and man or nation and nation
were extremely imperfect; so that a true statement about a national
habit might, and probably would, remain true for centuries. But now an
invention which may produce profound changes in social or industrial
life is as likely to be taken up with enthusiasm in some country on the
other side of the globe as in the place of its origin. A statesman who
has anything important to say says it to an audience of five hundred
millions next morning, and great events like the Battle of the Sea of
Japan begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off within a few
hours of their happening. Enough has already occurred under these new
conditions to show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon a
period of revolution, and that English indifference to ideas or French
military ambition are habits which, under a sufficiently extended
stimulus, nations can shake off as completely as can individual men.