CHAPTER V

THE METHOD OF POLITICAL REASONING

The traditional method of political reasoning has inevitably shared the

defects of its subject-matter. In thinking about politics we seldom

penetrate behind those simple entities which form themselves so easily

in our minds, or approach in earnest the infinite complexity of the

actual world. Political abstractions, such as Justice, or Liberty, or

the State, stand in our minds as things having a real existence. The

names of political species, 'governments,' or 'rights,' or 'Irishmen,'

suggest to us the idea of single 'type specimens'; and we tend, like

medieval naturalists, to assume that all the individual members of a

species are in all respects identical with the type specimen and with

each other.

In politics a true proposition in the form of 'All A is B' almost

invariably means that a number of individual persons or things possess

the quality B in degrees of variation as numerous as are the individuals

themselves. We tend, however, under the influence of our words and the

mental habits associated with them to think of A either as a single

individual possessing the quality B, or as a number of individuals

equally possessing that quality. As we read in the newspaper that 'the

educated Bengalis are disaffected' we either see, in the half-conscious

substratum of visual images which accompanies our reading, a single Babu

with a disaffected expression or the vague suggestion of a long row of

identical Babus all equally disaffected.

These personifications and uniformities, in their turn, tempt us to

employ in our political thinking that method of _a priori_ deduction

from large and untried generalisations against which natural science

from the days of Bacon has always protested. No scientist now argues

that the planets move in circles, because planets are perfect, and the

circle is a perfect figure, or that any newly discovered plant must be a

cure for some disease because nature has given healing properties to all

plants. But 'logical' democrats still argue in America that, because all

men are equal, political offices ought to go by rotation, and 'logical'

collectivists sometimes argue from the 'principle' that the State should

own all the means of production to the conclusion that all railway

managers should be elected by universal suffrage.

In natural science, again, the conception of the plurality and

interaction of causes has become part of our habitual mental furniture;

but in politics both the book-learned student and the man in the street

may be heard to talk as if each result had only one cause. If the

question, for instance, of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is raised, any

two politicians, whether they are tramps on the outskirts of a Hyde Park

crowd or Heads of Colleges writing to the _Times_, are not unlikely to

argue, one, that all nations are suspicious, and that therefore the

alliance must certainly fail, and the other that all nations are guided

by their interests, and that therefore the alliance must certainly

succeed. The Landlord of the 'Rainbow' in _Silas Marner_ had listened to

many thousands of political discussions before he adopted his formula,

'The truth lies atween you: you're both right and both wrong, as I

allays say.'

In Economics the danger of treating abstract and uniform words as if

they were equivalent to abstract and uniform things has now been

recognised for the last half century. When this recognition began, it

was objected by the followers of the 'classical' Political Economy that

abstraction was a necessary condition of thought, and that all dangers

arising from it would be avoided if we saw clearly what it was that we

were doing. Bagehot, who stood at the meeting-point of the old Economics

and the new, wrote about 1876:--

'Political Economy ... is an abstract science, just as statics and

dynamics are deductive sciences. And in consequence, it deals with an

unreal and imaginary subject, ... not with the entire real man as we

know him in fact, but with a simpler imaginary man....'[41]

[41] _Economic Studies_ (Longmans, 1895), p. 97.

He goes on to urge that the real and complex man can be depicted by

printing on our minds a succession of different imaginary simple men.

'The maxim of science,' he says, 'is that of common-sense--simple cases

first; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little

as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add

to it in succession the separate effects of each of the encumbering and

interfering agencies.'[42]

[42] _Ibid._, p. 98.

But this process of mental chromolithography, though it is sometimes a

good way of learning a science, is not a way of using it; and Bagehot

gives no indication how his complex picture of man, formed from

successive layers of abstraction, is to be actually employed in

forecasting economic results.

When Jevons published his _Theory of Political Economy_ in 1871, it was

already widely felt that a simple imaginary man, or even a composite

picture made up of a series of different simple imaginary men, although

useful in answering examination questions, was of very little use in

drafting a Factory Act or arbitrating on a sliding scale of wages.

Jevons therefore based his economic method upon the variety and not the

uniformity of individual instances. He arranged the hours of labour in

a working day, or the units of satisfaction from spending money, on

curves of increase and decrease, and employed mathematical methods to

indicate the point where one curve, whether representing an imaginary

estimate or a record of ascertained facts, would cut the others to the

best advantage.

Here was something which corresponded, however roughly, to the process

by which practical people arrive at practical and responsible results. A

railway manager who wishes to discover the highest rate of charges which

his traffic will bear is not interested if he is told that the rate when

fixed will have been due to the law that all men seek to obtain wealth

with as little effort as possible, modified in its working by men's

unwillingness to break an established business habit. He wants a method

which, instead of merely providing him with a verbal 'explanation' of

what has happened, will enable him to form a quantitative estimate of

what under given circumstances will happen. He can, however, and, I

believe, now often does, use the Jevonian method to work out definite

results in half-pennies and tons from the intersection of plotted curves

recording actual statistics of rates and traffic.

Since Jevons's time the method which he initiated has been steadily

extended; economic and statistical processes have become more nearly

assimilated, and problems of fatigue or acquired skill, of family

affection and personal thrift, of management by the _entrepreneur_ or

the paid official, have been stated and argued in quantitative form. As

Professor Marshall said the other day, _qualitative_ reasoning in

economics is passing away and _quantitative_ reasoning is beginning to

take its place.[43]

[43] _Journal of Economics_, March 1907, pp. 7 and 8. 'What by chemical

analogy may be called qualitative analysis has done the greater part of

its work.... Much less progress has indeed been made towards the

quantitative determination of the relative strength of different

economic forces. That higher and more difficult task must wait upon the

slow growth of thorough realistic statistics.'

How far is a similar change of method possible in the discussion not of

industrial and financial processes but of the structure and working of

political institutions?

It is of course easy to pick out political questions which can obviously

be treated by quantitative methods. One may take, for instance, the

problem of the best size for a debating hall, to be used, say, by the

Federal Deliberative Assembly of the British Empire--assuming that the

shape is already settled. The main elements of the problem are that the

hall should be large enough to accommodate with dignity a number of

members sufficient both for the representation of interests and the

carrying out of committee work, and not too large for each member to

listen without strain to a debate. The resultant size will represent a

compromise among these elements, accommodating a number smaller than

would be desirable if the need of representation and dignity alone were

to be considered, and larger than it would be if the convenience of

debate alone were considered.

A body of economists could agree to plot out or imagine a succession of

'curves' representing the advantage to be obtained from each additional

unit of size in dignity, adequacy of representation, supply of members

for committee work, healthiness, etc., and the disadvantage of each

additional unit of size as affecting convenience of debate, etc. The

curves of dignity and adequacy might be the result of direct estimation.

The curve of marginal convenience in audibility would be founded upon

actual 'polygons of variation' recording measurements of the distance at

which a sufficient number of individuals of the classes and ages

expected could hear and make themselves heard in a room of that shape.

The economists might further, after discussion, agree on the relative

importance of each element to the final decision, and might give effect

to their agreement by the familiar statistical device of 'weighting.'

The answer would perhaps provide fourteen square feet on the floor in a

room twenty-six feet high for each of three hundred and seventeen

members. There would, when the answer was settled, be a 'marginal' man

in point of hearing (representing, perhaps, an average healthy man of

seventy-four), who would be unable or just able to hear the 'marginal'

man in point of clearness of speech--who might represent (on a polygon

specially drawn up by the Oxford Professor of Biology) the least audible

but two of the tutors at Balliol. The marginal point on the curve of the

decreasing utility of successive increments of members from the point of

view of committee work might show, perhaps, that such work must either

be reduced to a point far below that which is usual in national

parliaments, or must be done very largely by persons not members of the

assembly itself. The aesthetic curve of dignity might be cut at the

point where the President of the Society of British Architects could

just be induced not to write to the _Times_.

Any discussion which took place on such lines, even although the curves

were mere forms of speech, would be real and practical. Instead of one

man reiterating that the Parliament Hall of a great empire ought to

represent the dignity of its task, and another man answering that a

debating assembly which cannot debate is of no use, both would be forced

to ask 'How much dignity'? and 'How much debating convenience'? As it

is, this particular question seems often to be settled by the architect,

who is deeply concerned with aesthetic effect, and not at all concerned

with debating convenience. The reasons that he gives in his reports seem

convincing, because the other considerations are not in the minds of

the Building Committee, who think of one element only of the problem at

a time and make no attempt to co-ordinate all the elements. Otherwise it

would be impossible to explain the fact that the Debating Hall, for

instance, of the House of Representatives at Washington is no more

fitted for debates carried on by human beings than would a spoon ten

feet broad be fitted for the eating of soup. The able leaders of the

National Congress movement in India made the same mistake in 1907, when

they arranged, with their minds set only on the need of an impressive

display, that difficult and exciting questions of tactics should be

discussed by about fifteen hundred delegates in a huge tent, and in the

presence of a crowd of nearly ten thousand spectators. I am afraid that

it is not unlikely that the London County Council may also despise the

quantitative method of reasoning on such questions, and may find

themselves in 1912 provided with a new hall admirably adapted to

illustrate the dignity of London and the genius of their architect, but

unfitted for any other purpose.

Nor is the essence of the quantitative method changed when the answer is

to be found, not in one, but in several 'unknown quantities.' Take, for

instance, the question as to the best types of elementary school to be

provided in London. If it were assumed that only one type of school was

to be provided, the problem would be stated in the same form as that of

the size of the Debating Hall. But it is possible in most London

districts to provide within easy walking distance of every child four or

five schools of different types, and the problem becomes that of so

choosing a limited number of types as to secure that the degree of

'misfit' between child and curriculum shall be as small as possible. If

we treat the general aptitude (or 'cleverness') of the children as

differing only by more or less, the problem becomes one of fitting the

types of school to a fairly exactly ascertainable polygon of

intellectual variation. It might appear then that the best results would

come from the provision, say, of five types of schools providing

respectively for the 2 per cent, of greatest natural cleverness, the

succeeding 10 per cent., the intermediate 76 per cent., the

comparatively sub-normal 10 per cent., and the 2 per cent, of 'mentally

deficient.' That is to say the local authority would have to provide in

that proportion Secondary, Higher Grade, Ordinary, Sub-Normal, and

Mentally Deficient schools.

A general improvement in nutrition and other home circumstances might

tend to 'steepen' the polygon of variation, i.e. to bring more children

near the normal, or it might increase the number of children with

exceptional inherited cleverness who were able to reveal that fact, and

so 'flatten' it; and either case might make a change desirable in the

best proportion between the types of schools or even in the number of

the types.

It would be more difficult to induce a committee of politicians to agree

on the plotting of curves, representing the social advantage to be

obtained by the successive increments of satisfaction in an urban

industrial population of those needs which are indicated by the terms

Socialism and Individualism. They could, however, be brought to admit

that the discovery of curves for that purpose is a matter of observation

and inquiry, and that the best possible distribution of social duties

between the individual and the state would cut both at some point or

other. For many Socialists and Individualists the mere attempt to think

in such a way of their problem would be an extremely valuable exercise.

If a Socialist and an Individualist were required even to ask themselves

the question, 'How much Socialism'? or 'How much Individualism'? a basis

of real discussion would be arrived at--even in the impossible case that

one should answer, 'All Individualism and no Socialism,' and the

other, 'All Socialism and no Individualism.'

The fact, of course, that each step towards either Socialism or

Individualism changes the character of the other elements in the

problem, or the fact that an invention like printing, or representative

government, or Civil Service examinations, or the Utilitarian

philosophy, may make it possible to provide greatly increased

satisfaction both to Socialist and Individualist desires, complicates

the question, but does not alter its quantitative character. The

essential point is that in every case in which a political thinker is

able to adopt what Professor Marshall calls the quantitative method of

reasoning, his vocabulary and method, instead of constantly suggesting a

false simplicity, warn him that every individual instance with which he

deals is different from any other, that any effect is a function of many

variable causes, and, therefore, that no estimate of the result of any

act can be accurate unless all its conditions and their relative

importance are taken into account.

But how far are such quantitative methods possible when a statesman is

dealing, neither with an obviously quantitative problem, like the

building of halls or schools, nor with an attempt to give quantitative

meaning to abstract terms like Socialism or Individualism, but with the

enormous complexity of responsible legislation?

In approaching this question we shall be helped if we keep before us a

description of the way in which some one statesman has, in fact, thought

of a great constitutional problem.

Take, for instance, the indications which Mr. Morley gives of the

thinking done by Gladstone on Home Rule during the autumn and winter of

1885-86. Gladstone, we are told, had already, for many years past,

pondered anxiously at intervals about Ireland, and now he describes

himself as 'thinking incessantly about the matter' (vol. iii. p. 268),

and 'preparing myself by study and reflection' (p. 273).

He has first to consider the state of feeling in England and Ireland,

and to calculate to what extent and under what influences it may be

expected to change. As to English feeling, 'what I expect,' he says, 'is

a healthy slow fermentation in many minds working towards the final

product' (p. 261). The Irish desire for self-government, on the other

hand, will not change, and must be taken, within the time-limit of his

problem, as 'fixed' (p. 240). In both England and Ireland, however, he

believes that 'mutual attachment' may grow (p. 292).

Before making up his mind in favour of some kind of Home Rule, he

examines every thinkable alternative, especially the development of

Irish County Government, or a Federal arrangement in which all three of

the united kingdoms would be concerned. Here and there he finds

suggestions in the history of Austria-Hungary, of Norway and Sweden, or

of the 'colonial type' of government. Nearly every day he reads Burke,

and exclaims 'what a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America' (p.

280). He gets much help from 'a chapter on semi-sovereign assemblies in

Dicey's _Law of the Constitution_ (p. 280). He tries to see the question

from fresh points of view in intimate personal discussions, and by

imagining what 'the civilised world' (p. 225) will think. As he gets

nearer to his subject, he has definite statistical reports made for him

by 'Welby and Hamilton on the figures' (p. 306), has 'stiff conclaves

about finance and land' (p. 298), and nearly comes to a final split with

Parnell on the question whether the Irish contribution to Imperial

taxation shall be a fifteenth or a twentieth.

Time and persons are important factors in his calculation. If Lord

Salisbury will consent to introduce some measure of Irish

self-government, the problem will be fundamentally altered, and the same

will happen if the general election produces a Liberal majority

independent of both Irish and Conservatives; and Mr. Morley describes as

underlying all his calculations 'the irresistible attraction for him of

all the grand and eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government'

(p. 260).

It is not likely that Mr. Morley's narrative touches on more than a

fraction of the questions which must have been in Gladstone's mind

during these months of incessant thought. No mention is made, for

instance, of religion, or of the military position, or of the permanent

possibility of enforcing the proposed restrictions on self-government.

But enough is given to show the complexity of political thought at that

stage when a statesman, still uncommitted, is considering what will be

the effect of a new political departure.

What then was the logical process by which Gladstone's final decision

was arrived at?

Did he for instance deal with a succession of simple problems or with

one complex problem? It is, I think, clear that from time to time

isolated and comparatively simple trains of reasoning were followed up;

but it is also clear that Gladstone's main effort of thought was

involved in the process of co-ordinating all the laboriously collected

contents of his mind onto the whole problem. This is emphasised by a

quotation in which Mr. Morley, who was closely associated with

Gladstone's intellectual toil during this period, indicates his own

recollection.

'Historians,' he quotes from Professor Gardiner, 'coolly dissect a man's

thoughts as they please; and label them like specimens in a naturalist's

cabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal

aggrandisement; such a thing for national objects, such a thing from

high religious motives. In real life we may be sure it was not so' (p.

277).

And it is clear that in spite of the ease and delight with which

Gladstone's mind moved among 'the eternal commonplaces of liberty and

self-government,' he is seeking throughout for a quantitative solution.

'Home Rule' is no simple entity for him. He realises that the number of

possible schemes for Irish government is infinite, and he attempts to

make at every point in his own scheme a delicate adjustment between

many varying forces.

A large part of this work of complex co-ordination was apparently in Mr.

Gladstone's case unconscious. Throughout the chapters one has the

feeling--which any one who has had to make less important political

decisions can parallel from his own experience--that Gladstone was

waiting for indications of a solution to appear in his mind. He was

conscious of his effort, conscious also that his effort was being

directed simultaneously towards many different considerations, but

largely unconscious of the actual process of inference, which went on

perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else,

than when he was awake and attentive. A phrase of Mr. Morley's indicates

a feeling with which every politician is familiar. 'The reader,' he

says,'knows in what direction the main current of Mr. Gladstone's

thought must have been setting' (p. 236).

That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than of

science, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of conscious

method.

But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partial

substitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired in

youth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as the

half-conscious result of experience. Our problem therefore involves the

further question, whether those forms of political thought which

correspond to the complexity of nature are teachable or not? At present

they are not often taught. In every generation thousands of young men

and women are attracted to politics because their intellects are keener,

and their sympathies wider than those of their fellows. They become

followers of Liberalism or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or the

Rights of Men or Women. To them, at first, Liberalism and the Empire,

Rights and Principles, are real and simple things. Or, like Shelley,

they see in the whole human race an infinite repetition of uniform

individuals, the 'millions on millions' who 'wait, firm, rapid, and

elate.'[44]

[44] Shelley, _Poetical Works_ (H.B. Forman), vol. iv. p. 8.

About all these things they argue by the old _a priori_ methods which we

have inherited with our political language. But after a time a sense of

unreality grows upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difficult world

forces itself into their minds. Like the old Chartists with whom I once

spent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been 'all

talk'--all words--and there are few among them, except those to whom

politics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until through

weariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from new

knowledge. Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habit

or party spirit for their political opinions and actions. Having ceased

to think of their unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of a

simple type, they cease to think of them at all; and content themselves

with using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising the

individual existence of their casual neighbours.

Wordsworth's _Prelude_ describes with pathetic clearness a mental

history, which must have been that of many thousands of men who could

not write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces have

been blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He tells us that

the 'man' whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still at

its dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely 'the composition of the brain.'

After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw 'the individual

man ... the man whom we behold with our own eyes.'[45] But in that change

from a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation of

the individual, Wordsworth's power of estimating political forces or

helping in political progress was gone for ever.

[45] _The Prelude_, Bk. XIII., ll. 81-84.

If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitative

method must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and the

associations of that mental world into which the young politician

enters. Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. Every

year larger and more exact collections of detailed political facts are

being accumulated; and collections of detailed facts, if they are to be

used at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively. The

intellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on by

permanent officials or Royal Commissions or Cabinet Ministers takes

every year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form.

Compare for instance the methods of the present Commission on the Poor

Law with those of the celebrated and extraordinarily able Commission

which drew up the new Poor Law in 1833-34. The argument of the earlier

Commissioners' Report runs on lines which it would be easy to put in _a

priori_ syllogistic form. All men seek pleasure and avoid pain. Society

ought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure to

social conduct. This may be done by making every man's livelihood and

that of his children normally dependent upon his own exertions, by

separating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the

community from those who can, and by presenting these last with the

alternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction. This leads to 'a

principle which we find universally admitted, even by those whose

practice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] on

the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the

situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.'[46] The _a

priori_ argument is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by the

sub-commissioners or given in evidence before the Commission, indicating

that labouring men will not exert themselves unless they are offered the

alternative of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt is

made to estimate the proportion of the working population of England

whose character and conduct is represented by each instance.

[46] _First Report of the Poor Law Commission_, 1834 (reprinted 1894),

p. 187.

This _a priori_ deduction, illustrated, but not proved by particular

instances, is throughout so clear and so easily apprehended by the

ordinary man that the revolutionary Bill of 1834, which affected all

sorts of vested interests, passed the House of Commons by a majority of

four to one and the House of Lords by a majority of six to one.

The Poor Law Commission of 1905, on the other hand, though it contains

many members trained in the traditions of 1834, is being driven, by the

mere necessity of dealing with the mass of varied evidence before it,

onto new lines. Instead of assuming half consciously that human energy

is dependent solely on the working of the human will in the presence of

the ideas of pleasure and pain, the Commissioners are forced to tabulate

and consider innumerable quantitative observations relating to the very

many factors affecting the will of paupers and possible paupers. They

cannot, for instance, avoid the task of estimating the relative

industrial effectiveness of health, which depends upon decent

surroundings; of hope, which may be made possible by State provision for

old age; and of the imaginative range which is the result of education;

and of comparing all these with the 'purely economic' motive created by

ideas of future pleasure and pain.

The evidence before the Commission is, that is to say, collected not to

illustrate general propositions otherwise established, but to provide

quantitative answers to quantitative questions; and instances are in

each case accumulated according to a well-known statistical rule until

the repetition of results shows that further accumulation would be

useless.

In 1834 it was enough, in dealing with the political machinery of the

Poor Law, to argue that, since all men desire their own interest, the

ratepayers would elect guardians who would, up to the limit of their

knowledge, advance the interests of the whole community; provided that

electoral areas were created in which all sectional interests were

represented, and that voting power were given to each ratepayer in

proportion to his interest. It did not then seem to matter much whether

the areas chosen were new or old, or whether the body elected had other

duties or not.

In 1908, on the other hand, it is felt to be necessary to seek for all

the causes which are likely to influence the mind of the ratepayer or

candidate during an election, and to estimate by such evidence as is

available their relative importance. It has to be considered, for

instance, whether men vote best in areas where they keep up habits of

political action in connection with parliamentary as well as municipal

contests; and whether an election involving other points besides

poor-law administration is more likely to create interest among the

electorate. If more than one election, again, is held in a district in

any year it may be found by the record of the percentage of votes that

electoral enthusiasm diminishes for each additional contest along a very

rapidly descending curve.

The final decisions that will be taken either by the Commission or by

Parliament on questions of administrative policy and electoral machinery

must therefore involve the balancing of all these and many other

considerations by an essentially quantitative process. The line, that is

to say, which ultimately cuts the curves indicated by the evidence will

allow less weight either to anxiety for the future as a motive for

exertion, or to personal health as increasing personal efficiency, than

would be given to either if it were the sole factor to be considered.

There will be more 'bureaucracy' than would be desirable if it were not

for the need of economising the energies of the elected representatives,

and less bureaucracy than there would be if it were not desirable to

retain popular sympathy and consent. Throughout the argument the

population of England will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill would

have said) 'on the average or _en masse_,'[47] but as consisting of

individuals who can be arranged in 'polygons of variation' according to

their nervous and physical strength, their 'character' and the degree to

which ideas of the future are likely to affect their present conduct.

[47] See p. 132.

Meanwhile the public which will discuss the Report has changed since

1834. Newspaper writers, in discussing the problem of destitution, tend

now to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the

'poor,' 'the working class,' or 'the lower orders,' but terms expressing

quantitative estimates of individual variations, like 'the submerged

tenth,' or the 'unemployable'; while every newspaper reader is fairly

familiar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns which

record seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment among

Trade Unionists.

One could give many other instances of this beginning of a tendency in

political thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms of

argument. But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to

international politics. 'Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simple

question of quality. Austin had demonstrated that there must be a

sovereign everywhere, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an

autocracy or a republic, must be absolute. But the Congress which in

1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of Africa from causing a

series of European wars as long as those caused by the partition of

America, was compelled by the complexity of the problems before it to

approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines. Since 1885

therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented to

express gradations of sovereignty: 'Effective occupation,' 'Hinterland,'

'Sphere of Influence'--to which the Algeçiras Conference has perhaps

added a lowest grade, 'Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.' It is already

as unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory or

not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain percentage of

carbon should be called iron or steel.

Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of observed political fact

some men escape the temptation to ignore individual differences. I

remember that the man who has perhaps done more than any one else in

England to make a statistical basis for industrial legislation possible,

once told me that he had been spending the whole day in classifying

under a few heads thousands of 'railway accidents,' every one of which

differed in its circumstances from any other; and that he felt like the

bewildered porter in _Punch_, who had to arrange the subleties of nature

according to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company. 'Cats,' he

quoted the porter as saying, 'is dogs, and guinea-pigs is dogs, but this

'ere tortoise is a hinsect.'

But it must constantly be remembered that quantitative thinking does

not necessarily or even generally mean thinking in terms of numerical

statistics. Number, which obliterates all distinction between the units

numbered, is not the only, nor always even the most exact means of

representing quantitative facts. A picture, for instance, may be

sometimes nearer to quantitative truth, more easily remembered and more

useful for purposes of argument and verification than a row of figures.

The most exact quantitative political document that I ever saw was a set

of photographs of all the women admitted into an inebriate home. The

photographs demonstrated, more precisely than any record of approximate

measurements could have done, the varying facts of physical and nervous

structure. It would have been easily possible for a committee of medical

men to have arranged the photographs in a series of increasing

abnormality, and to have indicated the photograph of the 'marginal'

woman in whose case, after allowing for considerations of expense, and

for the desirability of encouraging individual responsibility, the State

should undertake temporary or permanent control. And the record was one

which no one who had ever seen it could forget.

The political thinker has indeed sometimes to imitate the cabinet-maker,

who discards his most finely divided numerical rule for some kinds of

specially delicate work, and trusts to his sense of touch for a

quantitative estimation. The most exact estimation possible of a

political problem may have been contrived when a group of men, differing

in origin, education, and mental type, first establish an approximate

agreement as to the probable results of a series of possible political

alternatives involving, say, increasing or decreasing state

interference, and then discover the point where their 'liking' turns

into 'disliking.' Man is the measure of man, and he may still be using a

quantitative process even though he chooses in each case that method of

measurement which is least affected by the imperfection of his powers.

But it is just in the cases where numerical calculation is impossible or

unsuitable that the politician is likely to get most help by using

consciously quantitative conceptions.

An objection has been urged against the adoption of political reasoning

either implicitly or explicitly quantitative, that it involves the

balancing against each other of things essentially disparate. How is

one, it is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national honour

involved in the continuance of a war with that marginal unit of extra

taxation which is supposed to be its exact equivalent? How is one to

balance the final sovereign spent on the endowment of science with the

final sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased scientist, or on the

final detail in a scheme of old age pensions? The obvious answer is that

statesmen have to act, and that whoever acts does somehow balance all

the alternatives which are before him. The Chancellor of the Exchequer

in his annual allocation of grants and remissions of taxation balances

no stranger things than does the private citizen, who, having a pound or

two to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to a Chinese

Mission and providing a revolving hatch between his kitchen and his

dining-room.

A more serious objection is that we ought not to allow ourselves to

think quantitatively in politics, that to do so fritters away the plain

consideration of principle. 'Logical principles' may be only an

inadequate representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon them

is, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist.

In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductive

thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince

Bülow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is

reported to have said:--'Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still

regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible

dogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not

believe in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country

did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its

Constitution or of its franchise. Herr Bebel had once said that on the

whole he preferred English conditions even to conditions in France. But

in England the franchise was not universal, equal, and direct. Could it

be said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular suffrage at all, was

governed worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard such

strange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universal

suffrage?'[48]

[48] _Times_, March 27, 1908.

But what Prince Bülow's speech showed, was that he was either

deliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he did

not agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception of

quantitative political thought. If the 'dogma' of universal suffrage

means the assertion that all men who have votes are thereby made

identical with each other in all respects, and that universal suffrage

is the one condition of good government, then, and then only, is his

attack on it valid. If, however, the desire for universal suffrage is

based on the belief that a wide extension of political power is one of

the most important elements in the conditions of good government--racial

aptitude, ministerial responsibility, and the like, being other

elements--then the speech is absolutely meaningless.

But Prince Bülow was making a parliamentary speech, and in

parliamentary oratory that change from qualitative to quantitative

method which has so deeply affected the procedure of Conferences and

Commissions has not yet made much progress. In a 'full-dress' debate

even those speeches which move us most often recall Mr. Gladstone, in

whose mind, as soon as he stood up to speak, his Eton and Oxford

training in words always contended with his experience of things, and

who never made it quite clear whether the 'grand and eternal

commonplaces of liberty and self-government' meant that certain elements

must be of great and permanent importance in every problem of Church and

State, or that an _a priori_ solution of all political problems could be

deduced by all good men from absolute and authoritative laws.

PART II

_Possibilities of Progress_

CHAPTER I

POLITICAL MORALITY

In the preceding chapters I have argued that the efficiency of political

science, its power, that is to say, of forecasting the results of

political causes, is likely to increase. I based my argument on two

facts, firstly, that modern psychology offers us a conception of human

nature much truer, though more complex, than that which is associated

with the traditional English political philosophy; and secondly, that,

under the influence and example of the natural sciences, political

thinkers are already beginning to use in their discussions and inquiries

quantitative rather than merely qualitative words and methods, and are

able therefore both to state their problems more fully and to answer

them with a greater approximation to accuracy.

In this argument it was not necessary to ask how far such an

improvement in the science of politics is likely to influence the actual

course of political history. Whatever may be the best way of discovering

truth will remain the best, whether the mass of mankind choose to follow

it or not.

But politics are studied, as Aristotle said, 'for the sake of action

rather than of knowledge,'[49] and the student is bound, sooner or later,

to ask himself what will be the effect of a change in his science upon

that political world in which he lives and works.

[49] _Ethics_, Bk. I. ch. iii. (6). [Greek: epeidê tò telos [tês

politikês] estìn ou gnêsis allà praxis.]

One can imagine, for instance, that a professor of politics in Columbia

University, who had just taken part as a 'Mugwump' in a well-fought but

entirely unsuccessful campaign against Tammany Hall, might say: 'The

finer and more accurate the processes of political science become, the

less do they count in politics. Astronomers invent every year more

delicate methods of forecasting the movements of the stars, but cannot

with all their skill divert one star an inch from its course. So we

students of politics will find that our growing knowledge brings us only

a growing sense of helplessness. We may learn from our science to

estimate exactly the forces exerted by the syndicated newspaper press,

by the liquor saloons, or by the blind instincts of class and

nationality and race; but how can we learn to control them? The fact

that we think about these things in a new way will not win elections or

prevent wars.'

I propose, therefore, in this second part of my book to discuss how far

the new tendencies which are beginning to transform the science of

politics are likely also to make themselves felt as a new political

force. I shall try to estimate the probable influence of these

tendencies, not only on the student or the trained politician, but on

the ordinary citizen whom political science reaches only at second or

third hand; and, with that intention, shall treat in successive chapters

their relation to our ideals of political morality, to the form and

working of the representative and official machinery of the State, and

to the possibilities of international and inter-racial understanding.

This chapter deals from that point of view with their probable influence

on political morality. In using that term I do not mean to imply that

certain acts are moral when done from political motives which would not

be moral if done from other motives, or _vice versâ_, but to emphasise

the fact that there are certain ethical questions which can only be

studied in close connection with political science. There are, of

course, points of conduct which are common to all occupations. We must

all try to be kind, and honest, and industrious, and we expect the

general teachers of morals to help us to do so. But every occupation has

also its special problems, which must be stated by its own students

before they can be dealt with by the moralist at all.

In politics the most important of these special questions of conduct is

concerned with the relation between the process by which the politician

forms his own opinions and purposes, and that by which he influences the

opinions and purposes of others.

A hundred or even fifty years ago, those who worked for a democracy of

which they had had as yet no experience felt no misgivings on this point

They looked on reasoning, not as a difficult and uncertain process, but

as the necessary and automatic working of man's mind when faced by

problems affecting his interest. They assumed, therefore, that the

citizens under a democracy would necessarily be guided by reason in the

use of their votes, that those politicians would be most successful who

made their own conclusions and the grounds for them most clear to

others, and that good government would be secured if the voters had

sufficient opportunities of listening to free and sincere discussion.

A candidate to-day who comes fresh from his books to the platform almost

inevitably begins by making the same assumption.

He prepares his speeches and writes his address with the conviction that

on his demonstration of the relation between political causes and

effects will depend the result of the election. Perhaps his first shock

will come from that maxim which every professional agent repeats over

and over again to every candidate, 'Meetings are no good.' Those who

attend meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already loyal

and habitual supporters of his party. If his speeches are logically

unanswerable the chief political importance of that fact is to be found,

not in his power of convincing those who are already convinced, but in

the greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass which may be produced

among his supporters by their admiration of him as a speaker.

Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his address and that of

his opponent appeal to the constituents. He may, for instance, become

suddenly aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself opens the

envelopes containing other candidates addresses in some election (of

Poor Law Guardians, for instance), in which he is not specially

interested, and of the fact that his attention is either not aroused at

all, or is only aroused by words and phrases which recall some habitual

train of thought. By the time that he has become sufficiently confident

or important to draw up a political programme for himself, he

understands the limits within which any utterance must be confined that

is addressed to large numbers of voters--the fact that proposals are

only to be brought 'within the sphere of practical politics' which are

simple, striking, and carefully adapted to the half-conscious memories

and likes and dislikes of busy men.

All this means that his own power of political reasoning is being

trained. He is learning that every man differs from every other man in

his interests, his intellectual habits and powers, and his experience,

and that success in the control of political forces depends on a

recognition of this and a careful appreciation of the common factors of

human nature. But meanwhile it is increasingly difficult for him to

believe that he is appealing to the same process of reasoning in his

hearers as that by which he reaches his own conclusions. He tends, that

is to say, to think of the voters as the subject-matter rather than the

sharers of his thoughts. He, like Plato's sophist, is learning what the

public is, and is beginning to understand 'the passions and desires' of

that 'huge and powerful brute, how to approach and handle it, at what

times it becomes fiercest and most gentle, on what occasions it utters

its several cries, and what sounds made by others soothe or irritate

it.'[50] If he resolutely guards himself against the danger of passing

from one illusion to another, he may still remember that he is not the

only man in the constituency who has reasoned and is reasoning about

politics. If he does personal canvassing he may meet sometimes a

middle-aged working man, living nearer than himself to the facts of

life, and may find that this constituent of his has reasoned patiently

and deeply on politics for thirty years, and that he himself is a rather

absurd item in the material of that reasoning. Or he may talk with a

business man, and be forced to understand some one who sees perhaps more

clearly than himself the results of his proposals, but who is separated

from him by the gulf of a difference of desire: that which one hopes the

other fears.

[50] Plato, _Republic_, p. 493.

Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect the process by which

the more thoughtful both of those who vote for him and of those who vote

against him reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that his

own part in the election has little to do with any reasoning process at

all. I remember that before my first election my most experienced

political friend said to me, 'Remember that you are undertaking a six

weeks' advertising campaign.' Time is short, there are innumerable

details to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from the rare

intervals of mental contact with individual electors to that advertising

campaign which deals with the electors as a whole. As long as he is so

engaged, the maxim that it is wrong to appeal to anything but the

severest process of logical thought in his constituents will seem to

him, if he has time to think of it, not so much untrue as irrelevant.

After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his

constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational

creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational

'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and

able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous.

Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to

govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that

staring timid creature man.'[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift

and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his

fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few

'among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole reason of

the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who

are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.'[52] For

the rest, 'Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination,

often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their

conduct.'[53]

[51] _Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism_, etc. (ed. of 1785), p. 70.

[52] _Ibid._, p. 2.

[53] _Ibid._, p. 165.

The greatest of Bolingbroke's disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, 'We are

not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements

which are the landmarks of human action and human progress.... Man is

only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but

when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votaries

than Bentham.'[54] It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria 'like a

woman,' and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he never

fully recovered, who treated her 'like a public meeting.'

[54] _Coningsby_, ch. xiii.

In spite of Disraeli's essentially kindly spirit, his calculated play

upon the instincts of the nation which he governed seemed to many in his

time to introduce a cold and ruthless element into politics, which

seemed colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the less kindly

character of his disciple Lord Randolph Churchill. But the same

ruthlessness is often found now, and may perhaps be more often found in

the future, whenever any one is sufficiently concentrated on some

political end to break through all intellectual or ethical conventions

that stand in his way. I remember a long talk, a good many years ago,

with one of the leaders of the Russian terrorist movement. He said, 'It

is no use arguing with the peasants even if we were permitted to do so.

They are influenced by events not words. If we kill a Tzar, or a Grand

Duke, or a minister, our movement becomes something which exists and

counts with them, otherwise, as far as they are concerned, it does not

exist at all.'

In war, the vague political tradition that there is something unfair in

influencing the will of one's fellow-men otherwise than by argument

does not exist. This was what Napoleon meant when he said, 'À la

guerre, tout est moral, et le moral et l'opinion font plus de la

moitié de la réalité.'[55] And it is curious to observe that when men

are consciously or half-consciously determining to ignore that tradition

they drop into the language of warfare. Twenty years ago, the expression

'Class-war' was constantly used among English Socialists to justify the

proposal that a Socialist party should adopt those methods of

parliamentary terrorism (as opposed to parliamentary argument) which had

been invented by Parnell. When Lord Lansdowne in 1906 proposed to the

House of Lords that they should abandon any calculation of the good or

bad administrative effect of measures sent to them from the Liberal

House of Commons, and consider only the psychological effect of their

acceptance or rejection on the voters at the next general election, he

dropped at once into military metaphor. 'Let us' he said, 'be sure that

if we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possible

to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable to

this House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were to

win for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end.'[56]

[55] _Maximes de Guerre et Penseés de Napoleon Ier_ (Chapelot), p. 230.

[56] Hansard (Trades Disputes Bill, House of Lords, Dec. 4, 1906), p.

703.

At first sight, therefore, it might appear that the change in political

science which is now going on will simply result in the abandonment by

the younger politicians of all ethical traditions, and the adoption by

them, as the result of their new book-learning, of those methods of

exploiting the irrational elements of human nature which have hitherto

been the trade secret of the elderly and the disillusioned.

I have been told, for instance, that among the little group of women who

in 1906 and 1907 brought the question of Women's Suffrage within the

sphere of practical politics, was one who had received a serious

academic training in psychology, and that the tactics actually employed

were in large part due to her plea that in order to make men think one

must begin by making them feel.[57]

[57] Mrs. Pankhurst is reported, in the _Observer_ of July 26, 1908, to

have said, 'Whatever the women who were called Suffragists might be,

they at least understood how to bring themselves in touch with the

public. They had caught the spirit of the age, learnt the art of

advertising.'

A Hindoo agitator, again, Mr. Chandra Pal, who also had read psychology,

imitated Lord Lansdowne a few months ago by saying, 'Applying the

principles of psychology to the consideration of political problems we

find it is necessary that we ... should do nothing that will make the

Government a power for us. Because if the Government becomes easy, if it

becomes pleasant, if it becomes good government, then our signs of

separation from it will be gradually lost.'[58] Mr. Chandra Pal, unlike

Lord Lansdowne, was shortly afterwards imprisoned, but his words have

had an important political effect in India.

[58] Quoted in _Times_, June 3, 1907.

If this mental attitude and the tactics based on it succeed, they must,

it may be argued, spread with constantly increasing rapidity; and just

as, by Gresham's Law in commerce, base coin, if there is enough of it,

must drive out sterling coin, so in politics, must the easier and more

immediately effective drive out the more difficult and less effective

method of appeal.

One cannot now answer such an argument by a mere statement that

knowledge will make men wise. It was easy in the old days to rely on the

belief that human life and conduct would become perfect if men only

learnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most political speculators

used to sketch a perfect polity which would result from the complete

adoption of their principles, the republics of Plato and of More,

Bacon's Atlantis, Locke's plea for a government which should consciously

realise the purposes of God, or Bentham's Utilitarian State securely

founded upon the Table of the Springs of Action. We, however, who live

after Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not expect

knowledge, however full, to lead us to perfection. The modern student of

physiology believes that if his work is successful, men may have better

health than they would have if they were more ignorant, but he does not

dream of producing a perfectly healthy nation; and he is always prepared

to face the discovery that biological causes which he cannot control

may be tending to make health worse. Nor does the writer on education

now argue that he can make perfect characters in his schools. If our

imaginations ever start on the old road to Utopia, we are checked by

remembering that we are blood-relations of the other animals, and that

we have no more right than our kinsfolk to suppose that the mind of the

universe has contrived that we can find a perfect life by looking for

it. The bees might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, and

of the waste of life and toil which goes on in the best ordered hive.

And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation was

possible for creatures hampered by such limited powers of observation

and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. They might be

forced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life must

remain bewildered and violent and short. Political inquiry deals with

man as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his life

that can be made during the next few centuries. It may be that some

scores of generations hence, we shall have discovered that the

improvements in government which can be brought about by such inquiry,

are insignificant when compared with the changes which will be made

possible when, through the hazardous experiment of selective breeding,

we have altered the human type itself.

But however anxious we are to see the facts of our existence without

illusion, and to hope nothing without cause, we can still draw some

measure of comfort from the recollection that during the few thousand

years through which we can trace political history in the past, man,

without changing his nature, has made enormous improvements in his

polity, and that those improvements have often been the result of new

moral ideals formed under the influence of new knowledge.

The ultimate and wider effect on our conduct of any increase in our

knowledge may indeed be very different from, and more important than,

its immediate and narrower effect. We each of us live our lives in a

pictured universe, of which only a small part is contributed by our own

observation and memory, and by far the greater part by what we have

learnt from others. The changes in that mental picture of our

environment made for instance by the discovery of America, or the

ascertainment of the true movements of the nearer heavenly bodies,

exercised an influence on men's general conception of their place in the

universe, which proved ultimately to be more important than their

immediate effect in stimulating explorers and improving the art of

navigation. But none of the changes of outlook in the past have

approached in their extent and significance those which have been in

progress during the last fifty years, the new history of man and his

surroundings, stretching back through hitherto unthought-of ages, the

substitution of an illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for the

imagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above all the intrusion

of science into the most intimate regions of ourselves. The effects of

such changes often come, it is true, more slowly than we hope. I was

talking not long ago to one of the ablest of those who were beginning

their intellectual life when Darwin published the _Origin of Species_.

He told me how he and his philosopher brother expected that at once all

things should become new, and how unwillingly as the years went on they

had accepted their disappointment. But though slow, they are

far-reaching.

To myself it seems that the most important political result of the vast

range of new knowledge started by Darwin's work may prove to be the

extension of the idea of conduct so as to include the control of mental

processes of which at present most men are either unconscious or

unobservant. The limits of our conscious conduct are fixed by the limits

of our self-knowledge. Before men knew anger as something separable from

the self that knew it, and before they had made that knowledge current

by the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question of

conduct. Anger was a part of the angry man himself, and could only be

checked by the invasion of some other passion, love, for instance, or

fear, which was equally, while it lasted, a part of self. The man

survived to continue his race if anger or fear or love came upon him at

the right time, and with the right intensity. But when man had named his

anger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger came within the

region of conduct, Henceforth, in that respect, man could choose either

the old way of half-conscious obedience to an impulse which on the whole

had proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way of fully

conscious control directed by a calculation of results.

A man who has become conscious of the nature of fear, and has acquired

the power of controlling it, if he sees a boulder bounding towards him

down a torrent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to leap to one

side, or may substitute conduct for instinct, and stand where he is

because he has calculated that at the next bound the course of the

boulder will be deflected. If he decides to stand he may be wrong. It

may prove by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, owing to

the imperfection of his powers of conscious inference, a safer guide

than the process of calculation. But because he has the choice, even the

decision to follow impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sincerely

convinced that men's power of political reasoning was so utterly

inadequate to their task, that all his life long he urged the English

nation to follow prescription, to obey, that is to say, on principle

their habitual political impulses. But the deliberate following of

prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it

was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past.

Those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget.

In other matters than politics the influence of the fruit of that tree

is now spreading further over our lives. Whether we will or not, the old

unthinking obedience to appetite in eating is more and more affected by

our knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physiological results of

the quantity and kind of our food. Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the

Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and

tells us to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grape nuts on

principle.'[59] But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton

is only telling us to eat caviare on principle. The physician, when he

knows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may

hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it. He

finds himself watching the unintended effects of his words and tones and

gestures, until he realises that in spite of himself he is calculating

the means by which such effects can be produced. After a time, even his

patients may learn to watch the effect of 'a good bedside manner' on

themselves.

[59] _Heretics_, 1905, p. 136.

So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer impulses of mankind

is being spread (if only by the currency of new words), the relation

both of the politician and the voter to those impulses is changing. As

soon as American politicians called a certain kind of specially paid

orator a 'spell-binder,' the word penetrated through the newspapers from

politicians to audiences. The man who knows that he has paid two dollars

to sit in a hall and be 'spell-bound,' feels, it is true, the old

sensations, but feels them with a subtle and irrevocable difference. The

English newspaper reader who has once heard the word 'sensational,' may

try to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary of his consciousness

to the trained psychologists of the halfpenny journals. He may,

according to the suggestion of the day, loathe the sixty million crafty

scoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at a coming comet,

pity the cowards on the Government Front Bench, or tremble lest a

pantomime lady should throw up her part. But he cannot help the

existence in the background of his consciousness of a self which

watches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his 'sensations.' Even the

rapidly growing psychological complexity of modern novels and plays

helps to complicate the relation of the men of our time to their

emotional impulses. The young tradesman who has been reading either

_Evan Harrington_, or a novel by some writer who has read _Evan

Harrington_, goes to shake hands with a countess at an entertainment

given by the Primrose League, or the Liberal Social Council, conscious

of pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure. His father,

who read _John Halifax, Gentleman_, would have been carried away by a

tenth part of the condescension which is necessary in the case of the

son. A voter who has seen _John Bull's Other Island_ at the theatre, is

more likely than his father, who only saw _The Shaughraun_, to realise

that one's feelings on the Irish question can be thought about as well

as felt.

In so far as this change extends, the politician may find in the future

that an increasing proportion of his constituents half-consciously 'see

through' the cruder arts of emotional exploitation.

But such an unconscious or half-conscious extension of self-knowledge is

not likely of itself to keep pace with the parallel development of the

political art of controlling impulse. The tendency, if it is to be

effective, must be strengthened by the deliberate adoption and

inculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions--new ideal

entities to which our affections and desires may attach themselves.

'Science' has been such an entity ever since Francis Bacon found again,

without knowing it, the path of Aristotle's best thought. The conception

of 'Science,' of scientific method and the scientific spirit, was built

up in successive generations by a few students. At first their

conception was confined to themselves. Its effects were seen in the

discoveries which they actually made; but to the mass of mankind they

seemed little better than magicians. Now it has spread to the whole

world. In every class-room and laboratory in Europe and America the

conscious idea of Science forms the minds and wills of thousands of men

and women who could never have helped to create it. It has penetrated,

as the political conceptions of Liberty or of Natural Right never

penetrated, to non-European races. Arab engineers in Khartoum, doctors

and nurses and generals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinese

students make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired by

absolute submission to Science, and not only English or American or

German town working men, but villagers in Italy or Argentina are

learning to respect the authority and sympathise with the methods of

that organised study which may double at any moment the produce of their

crops or check a plague among their cattle.

'Science,' however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only with

things exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubes

and microscopes. They are dimly aware that there exists a science of the

mind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct.

It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt more

successfully than elsewhere the art of controlling other men's

unconscious impulses from without, there have been of late some

noteworthy declarations as to the need of conscious control from

within. Some of those especially who have been trained in scientific

method at the American Universities are now attempting to extend to

politics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct. But it seems

to me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes the

old form of an opposition between 'reason' and 'passion.' The President

of the University of Yale said, for instance, the other day in a

powerful address, 'Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals to

the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers ... attacks

our political life at a most vulnerable point.'[60] If forty years ago

Huxley had in this way merely preached 'intelligence' as against

'emotion' in the exploration of nature, few would have listened to him.

Men will not take up the 'intolerable disease of thought' unless their

feelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science has

been that it does touch men's feelings, and draws motive power for

thought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, and of limitless

hope.

[60] A. T. Hadley in _Munsey's Magazine_, 1907.

The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men must

become passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to that

section of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of

the State realises itself in men's hearts by a 'harmony' which

strengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passions

no longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an end

discovered by the intellect.[61]

[61] Cf. Plato's _Republic_, Book IV.

In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling is

peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only provide

a motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values which

must be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying to

realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from

current language) upon Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In music

the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one

appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers.

Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise

intensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely their

own feelings. The conditions under which they succeed or fail are fixed,

for both, by facts in our emotional nature which they cannot change.

One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of the nature of his

hearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring of

those who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sit

enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions.

But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conception

of such a harmony of reason and passion, of thought and impulse, in

political motive? One thinks of education, and particularly of

scientific education. But the imaginative range which is necessary if

students are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from the

laboratory to the public meeting is not common. It would perhaps more

often exist if part of all scientific education were given to such a

study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mental

history as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the young

biologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell,

when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great

reputation was based, and suspending his deepest religious convictions,

in the cause of a truth not yet made clear.

But most school children, if they are to learn the facts on which the

conception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even more

directly. I myself believe that a very simple course on the

well-ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, be

quite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who had

received some small preliminary training in scientific method. Mr.

William James's chapter on Habit in his _Principles of Psychology_

would, for instance, if the language were somewhat simplified, come well

within their range. A town child, again, lives nowadays in the constant

presence of the psychological art of advertisement, and could easily be

made to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get a bar of

soap, he feels inclined to get that which is most widely advertised, and

what relation his inclination has to that mental process which is most

likely to result in the buying of good soap. The basis of knowledge

necessary for the conception of intellectual duty could further be

enlarged at school by the study in pure literature of the deeper

experiences of the mind. A child of twelve might understand Carlyle's

_Essay on Burns_ if it were carefully read in class, and a good sixth

form might learn much from Wordsworth's _Prelude_.

The whole question, however, of such deliberate instruction in the

emotional and intellectual facts of man's nature as may lead men to

conceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal is

one on which much steady thinking and observation is still required. The

instincts of sex, for instance, are becoming in all civilised countries

more and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a

calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasing

degree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has found

the way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before or

during the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instincts

themselves.

Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends not

only upon the chemical composition of food but upon our appetite, and

that we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control and

direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, 'We cannot

properly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a free

mind with the prospect of enjoyment.'[62] But it would not be easy to

create by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse at

which Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why

food is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is therefore our

duty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made both

wholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing except

his sense of humour.

[62] _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 8, 1904.

So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say that

the teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of the

existence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finally

at subordinating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on the

consequences of political action. But it is extraordinarily difficult to

discover how this can be done under the actual conditions of school

teaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, introduced

into the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life and

Duties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played in

social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on,

accompanied by a moral for each section, such as 'serving personal

interest is not enough,' 'need of public spirit and intelligence for

good Government,' 'need of honesty in giving a vote,' 'the vote a trust

as well as a right.' Almost every school publisher rushed out a

text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its

introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an

acknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the time

to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printed

pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the

lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed

to stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths and

maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as

were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must

apparently approach their task with something of Socrates' passionate

love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic.

If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught

what Mr. Wells calls 'the sense of the State,'[63] we may, by remembering

Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends.

Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as

to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If their

love is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as

simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the _Oedipus Coloneus_. But

such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what

they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as

Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself

somewhat more lovely.

[63] _The future in America_, chapter ix.

The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words

but by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, they

should either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those

aspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, if

it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the

buildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth

impressive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to be

found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to

come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of

Landport; though boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in

personal motive than in external pomp.

More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberate

intensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions. A

life-long worker for education on the London School Board once told me

that when he wearied of his work--when the words of reports become mere

words, and the figures in the returns mere figures--he used to go down

to a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class after

class, till the freshness of his impulse came back. But for a man who is

about to try such an experiment on himself even the word 'emotion' is

dangerous. The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hot

and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus of

his energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level of

full consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by every

sight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted to

his work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house. But all

that he is conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose of

healing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and hand

are harmoniously concentrated.

Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becoming

conscious of new vices than of new virtues. Some day, for instance, the

word 'opinion' itself may become the recognised name of the most

dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit and

association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they

neglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how,

and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created by

any clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulated

State in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist

business men who never followed up a train of political reasoning in

their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a

strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was

a matter of 'conscience' and therefore beyond the province of doubt or

calculation.

But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato's

conception of the Harmony of the Soul--the intensification both of

passion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination--can ever become

a part of the general political ideals of a modern nation? Perhaps most

men before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes.

Many men would now answer, No. The Japanese are apparently in some

respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual morality

than, say, the French. One hears, for instance, of incidents which seem

to show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japanese

universities. But both during the years of preparation for the war, and

during the war itself, there was something in what one was told of the

combined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to a

European seemed wholly new. Napoleon contended against the 'idéologues'

who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submitted

to his own illusions he ground them to powder. But we associate

Napoleon's clearness of vision with personal selfishness. Here was a

nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in his

determination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesque

traditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism was

hotter than Gambetta's. Something of this may have been due to the

inherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be the

effect of their mental environment. They had whole-heartedly welcomed

that conception of Science which in Europe, where it was first

elaborated, still struggles with older ideals. Science with them had

allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural law

which, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had always

underlain their various religions.[64] They had acquired, therefore, a

mental outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, and which

combined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy in

thought and action.

[64] See Okakura, _The Japanese Spirit_ (1905).

One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might take

place between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion,

and the new conception of intellectual duty introduced by Science. The

political effect of such a fusion would be enormous. But for the moment

that hope is not easy. The inevitable conflict between old faith and new

knowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a division

not only between the conclusions of religion and science, but also

between the religious and the scientific habit of mind. The scientific

men of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as

their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine of

probability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed,

must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new

evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely

on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most

perfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will

leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out

in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic

evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the

acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an English

clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his _Times_ or _Mail_, his

attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or

doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and

poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trained

to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is, Dr. Jameson's prepared

manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like a

trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of

Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine

disgust and despair.

It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of new

ideals of intellectual conduct will have to wait for a still wider

change of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day the

conception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, in

the deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of our present dreary

confusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics which

is now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able not

only to control and direct in himself the impulses of whose nature he is

more fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of his

aim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their most

effective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which in

the best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, and

citizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanese

army looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind by

which alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature.

CHAPTER II

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of

the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change

not only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our

political institutions.

I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which produced

the constitutions under which most civilised nations now live, was

inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is

becoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked,

representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of the

conditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have been

itself a mistake?

Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditional

democratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting again

from the beginning, and considering what are the ends representation is

intended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to good

government.

The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essence

of a representative government is that it depends on the periodically

renewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and the

degree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance of

accomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by a

majority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey.

The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representative

democracy was a mistake, raises the preliminary question whether the

consent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of good

government. To this question Plato, who among the political philosophers

of the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of a

modern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered, No. To him it was

incredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleeting

shadows of popular opinion. He proposed, therefore, in all seriousness,

that the citizens of his Republic should live under the despotic

government of those who by 'slaving for it'[65] had acquired a knowledge

of the reality which lay behind appearance. Comte, writing when modern

science was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the same

proposal. Mr. H.G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous

speculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia which is the result

of the forcible overthrow of representative government by a voluntary

aristocracy of trained men of science. He appeals, in a phrase

consciously influenced by Plato's metaphysics, to 'the idea of a

comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind the

shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible

world....'[66] There are some signs, in America as well as in England,

that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both passionately in

earnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in their

experience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-blooded

manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians,

turn 'back to Plato'; and when once this question is started, neither

our existing mental habits nor our loyalty to democratic tradition will

prevent it from being fully discussed.

[65] [Greek: douleusanti tê ktêsei autou] (_Republic,_ p. 494).

[66] Wells, _A Modern Utopia_, p. 263. 'I know of no case for the

elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked

to pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless important

public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of

the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system

simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers....'

Wells, _Anticipations_, p. 147.

To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an

experience of government without consent larger than any other that has

ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. The

Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about a

thousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensures

that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental

force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain

intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of

government; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching

despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of

their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to

govern.

Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, however carefully

selected and trained, must still inhabit 'the ostensible world.' The

Anglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours--when he is

toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or

famine-prevention--may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science which

is far removed from the jealousies and superstitions of the villagers in

his district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by his

efficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on life

which decides his choice of ends; and the Anglo-Indian outlook on life

is conditioned, not by the problem of British India as history will see

it a thousand years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in the

little government stations, with their trying climates, their narrow

society, and the continual presence of an alien and possibly hostile

race. We have not, it is true, yet followed the full rigour of Plato's

system, and chosen the wives of Anglo-Indian officials by the same

process as that through which their husbands pass. But it may be feared

that even if we did so, the lady would still remain typical who said to

Mr. Nevinson, 'To us in India a pro-native is simply a rank

outsider.'[67]

[67] _The Nation_, December 21, 1907.

What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom the

Anglo-Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world,

his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion depends

even more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not on

things as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. The

avowed tactics of our empire in the East have therefore always been

based by many of our high officials upon psychological and not upon

logical considerations. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, we

blow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our

rights in dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference to 'the

moral effect upon the native mind.' And, if half what is hinted at by

some ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religious

antipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if not

encouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintain

our dominant position.

The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore one

that would exist at least equally in Plato's corporate despotism as in

the most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay

on _The First Principles of Government_, says: 'It is ... on opinion

only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most

despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and

the most popular.'[68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves

forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at

any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of

man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat then

becomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, or

religious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less

scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic

State.

[68] Hume's _Essays_, chap. iv.

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that

the loyalty of the subject-classes in his Republic should be secured

once for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach

a religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell their

people 'one magnificent lie';[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effect

on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease

which it was intended to cure.

[69] [Greek: gennaión ti èn pseudoménous] (_Republic_, p. 414).

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a

complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government

by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary

representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method

of securing consent.

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself

restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture

be better than anything else which can be substituted for it. And

representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity,

but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In England

at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of

the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same

place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in

constituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex,

qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given

to the representative, variation is possible.

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by

Fénelon and Helvétius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could

not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of

constitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of

government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are

capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but where

the machinery of British parliamentary government would not work. In

Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary

local constituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go to

the poll.[70] As long as that is the case representative government is

impossible. A slow process of education might increase the proportion of

voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, who

understand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, to

discover other methods by which the vague desires of the native

population can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made in

some measure to depend on them.

[70] _Times_, January 6, 1908.

The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact is

apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive

range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment

appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English

House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an

'advisory Council of Notables';[71] with the possible result that we may

be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealings

with the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in our

regulation of factory labour.

[71] Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 885.

In England itself, though great political inventions are always a

glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will

result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed

along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable

tendencies.

A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdom

during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little

conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole,

show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of

ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex

process by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not in

the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the

general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of

securing them by regulation.

The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing it

with the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has taken

place in the conditions under which that decision is formed which is

expressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury was, in its origin,

simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was

secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.[72] The

various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters

beyond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jury

together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in

England might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did in

Athens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jury

might have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hired

advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions

of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the _Private

Orations_ of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the

witnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they should

tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a

show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. If

such an institution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would have

taken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own version

of the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reserved

for the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of the

prisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly party

vote.

[72] See, _e.g._, Stephen, _History of the Criminal Law_, vol. i. pp.

260-72.

But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a long

series of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of the

jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be

formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is

produced has been more and more completely controlled and developed,

until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the

essential feature of the trial.

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case.

They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual of

the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an

environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life

are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and

justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived

inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the

witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of

centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury

his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolled

inferences of the human brain. The 'said I's,' and 'thought I's,' and

'said he's,' which are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are here

banished on the ground that they are 'not evidence,' and witnesses are

compelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations of

sight and hearing.

The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, if they are

well-intentioned men, often find themselves giving, to their own

surprise, perfectly consistent accounts of the events at issue. The

barristers' tricks of advocacy are to some extent restrained by

professional custom and by the authority of the judge, and they are

careful to point out to the jury each other's fallacies. Newspapers do

not reach the jury box, and in any case are prevented by the law as to

contempt of court from commenting on a case which is under trial. The

judge sums up, carefully describing the conditions of valid inference on

questions of disputed fact, and warning the jury against those forms of

irrational and unconscious inference to which experience has shown them

to be most liable. They then retire, all carrying in their minds the

same body of simplified and dissected evidence, and all having been

urged with every circumstance of solemnity to form their conclusions by

the same mental process. It constantly happens therefore that twelve

men, selected by lot, will come to a unanimous verdict as to a question

on which in the outside world they would have been hopelessly divided,

and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions of fact so

difficult as to leave the practised intellect of the judge undecided,

will very generally be right. An English law court is indeed during a

well-governed jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules of

valid reasoning are illustrated by experiment; and when, as threatens to

occur in some American States and cities, it becomes impossible to

enforce those rules, the jury system itself breaks down.[73]

[73] On the jury system see Mr. Wells's _Mankind in the Making_, chapter

vii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where it

is desirable that government should be supported by popular consent.

At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree of

economy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do not

make good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order that

popular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may not

be unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing class

or person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced to

death or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of a

jury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are now

taken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by special

fitness for their task.

In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine

the tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have been

introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before

that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the

principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent

as to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear upon

electors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practise

open bribery the whole system of representation would break down at

once. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several generations

on the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was the

serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of

1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definite

bargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavish

expenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personally

popular, and create an impression that his connection with the

constituency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883

therefore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candidate at a

parliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and

later Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal elections,

intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties after

death, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paid

for by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion

may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, no

election meeting may be held in a building where any form of food or

drink is habitually sold, although that building may be only a

Co-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room.

The existing laws against Corrupt Practices represent, it is true,

rather the growing purpose of the State to control the conditions under

which electoral opinion is formed, than any large measure of success in

carrying out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion of the

expenditure at any English election is now incurred by bodies enrolled

outside the constituency, and nominally engaged, not in winning the

election for a particular candidate, but in propagating their own

principles. Sometimes the candidate whom they support, and whom they try

to commit as deeply as possible, would be greatly relieved if they

withdrew. Generally their agents are an integral part of his fighting

organisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election is

covered by a special subscription made by him to the central fund. Every

one sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clauses

in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbid

the employment of paid canvassers, though no one as yet has put forward

any plan for preventing it. But it is acknowledged that unless the whole

principle is to be abandoned, new legislation must take place; and Lord

Robert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a 'stringent and

far-reaching Corrupt Practices Act.'[74] If, however, an act is carried

stringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development of

electoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new and

hitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty of

political appeal.

[74] _Times_, June 26, 1907.

A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituency

for three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which the

voters were every day further removed from the state of mind in which

serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Now

no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all

the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. The

sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now

lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices,

the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the

party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to

effective political reasoning.

A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of the

Ballot. Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful and

public-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly or

secretly? Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. Since men

acted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and since

landlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws against

intimidation, to bring 'sinister' motives to bear upon voters whose

votes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow as

a corollary from utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole

philosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling

against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiance

till the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved the

abandonment of the whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure and

pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can be

summed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, that

even under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause which

induce the ordinary citizen to vote. 'Once in a thousand times, as in

the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may cross

him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year's

expenditure if the side he votes for wins.' He votes as a matter of fact

in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. 'His motive, when it is an

honourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it

patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter's

frame of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it.' But ideas of

right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that

we act under the eyes of our neighbours. 'Since then the real motive

which induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an

interested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decided

is whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense of

social duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when the

act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested,

nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. But this question is answered

as soon as stated. When in every other act of a man's life which

concerns his duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve

his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is the

single case in which he will act better for being sheltered against all

comment.'[75]

[75] Letter to the _Reader_, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J.S.M., quoted as

Mill's by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, _Public Responsibility and Vote by

Ballot_, pp. 89, 90.

Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so

that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite

of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his

description of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soon

ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always

remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the

old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of

political impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a

mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and

disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in

accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results

of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such

inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of

fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be

expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which

publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those 'acts of a

man's life which concern his duty to others,' to which Mill refers--the

paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of

one's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of

thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of

newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense.

Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the

excitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one's

opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of

one's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain

conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret,

gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the

canvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall

be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary

impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it

is a promise.

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal

disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign

in favour of 'proportional representation,' in which, as it seems to me,

the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He

proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing

system of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-member

constituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its

representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for

themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them--the

Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals--have,

as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they

can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of

preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large

constituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester

with its eight seats being given as an example.

This system, according to Lord Courtney, 'will lead to the dropping of

the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and

women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'[76] But the

arguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal

defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is

ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at

the assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury,

and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a

trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were

examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the

accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of

forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.

[76] Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics' Institute,

Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6.

The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Society

mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means

of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society

and through eight newspapers. 'The constituency,' we are told, 'was

supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were

politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary

newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some

of the main divisions of public opinion.'[77] The names were, in fact,

Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker,

and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain,

Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law,

and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected.

[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6.

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were

distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various

candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory

of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him

to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names

were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty

whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their

readers to recognise.

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the

intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might

have said, the same, 'to us,' as they were 'in themselves.' But an

ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'to

him' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will

either do nothing or do as he is told.

The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient

preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that

not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the

selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in

his programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is

assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one

neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of

newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control

for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads

or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to

the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news,

and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of

the electorate read between them a small number of established papers

advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during

a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the

party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until,

on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The

choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party

organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a

candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the

consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local

electioneering in each constituency, _i.e._ by meetings and canvassing

and the distribution of 'election literature.' Lord Courtney's proposal,

even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six,

would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective

electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six

times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the

range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a

day.

These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the

nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been

actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced

the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board

elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a

candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal

arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be

given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should

be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given

a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his

votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of

them.

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two

alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each

district into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urge

all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative

'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the

trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the

individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might

practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a

voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks

of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each

section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and

had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the

French _scrutin de liste_. The second method was adopted in London, and

perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they

otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates.

Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by

practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised

Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those

who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers

or school-keepers.

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it

is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling,

will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a

printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.,

according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the

numbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is to

say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme is

not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but

that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than

there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.

Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his Municipal

Representation Bill in the House of Lords,[78] contrasted his proposed

system with that used in the London Borough Council elections, according

to which a number of seats are assigned to each ward and the voter may

give one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number of

candidates. It is true that the electoral machinery for the London

Boroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of

America. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how to

vote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were six

seats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was

told by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not one

of which I remembered to have seen before. If there had been one seat to

be filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enough

about one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote;

and the local party committees would have known that I and others would

do so. Bach party would then have circulated a portrait and a printed

account of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had a

strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I could

not give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteen

candidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. I

therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who

voted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket.' If for any reason the

party committee put, to use an Americanism, a 'yellow dog' among the

list of names, I voted for the yellow dog.

[78] April 30, 1907.

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same

ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down

different marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say,

that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to

every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord

Courtney's proposed system and the existing system in the London

Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names,

there is little effective difference between the working of the two

systems until the votes are counted.