If the sole object of an election were to discover and record the exact

proportion of the electorate who are prepared to vote for candidates

nominated by the several party organisations Lord Courtney's scheme

might be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a longer

experience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidate

nominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that a

parliament of well-selected members who represent somewhat roughly the

opinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selected

members who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quote

Lord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, a

reflection of the community.'[79]

[79] Address at Stockport, p. 11.

To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a wide

choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that

choice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan will

soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of

the Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests,

will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting to

see whether the growing substitution of the new quantitative and

psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about

elections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House of

Commons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they will adopt

the transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered

elections, while retaining single-member constituencies, and therewith

the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the

whole of his constituents.

A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of the

electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the

system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number

of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency.

The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of

elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902

the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain

that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural Parish

Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion

by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been

a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective,

because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we

omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon

vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant

of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote

for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the

average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.

In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral

concentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility. In

Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which

seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in

psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of

economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of

political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the

Philadelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallel

columns of party 'tickets,' contained some four hundred names. The

resulting effects on the _personnel_ of Philadelphian politics were as

obvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however,

concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of the

elected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a single

elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, and

whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to

all the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by his

nominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute a

quantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the

electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by

the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election

(or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to

themselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if

allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the

electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the

House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. Lord

Robert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that

term, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "will of the

people,"'[80] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should

not defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so

that he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrel

between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public

control of the methods of producing political opinion by the

substitution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our

present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national

excitement.

[80] _Times_, June 25, 1907.

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not

hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general

intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through

all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing

difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my

last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour

before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very

poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the

end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of

this book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally'

of the canvassers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid but

irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and

inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw

hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered,

having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of

match-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public

house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemed

to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for

which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few

were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung

to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact

which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and

inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense

conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently

satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million

inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing

of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable

us to improve it.

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to

abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public houses

could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness and

casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness.

It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have

in France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or

twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of

asserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whose

hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who

have just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibility

half consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would also

be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined

anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to

the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in

England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of

the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the

traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act

of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place

some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were

available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now

used. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day,

however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of small

effect.

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the

electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social

equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive

for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on

it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or

politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of

unspoilt impulse.

If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed

come. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities

under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among

those who profit, and those who suffer by them. But no one who is near

to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of

greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear

away all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation.

A mere numerical increase in the number of persons in England who are

interested in politics would indeed itself introduce a new and difficult

political factor. The active politicians in England, those who take any

part in politics beyond voting, are at present a tiny minority. I was to

speak not long ago at an election meeting, and having been misdirected

as to the place where the meeting was to be held, found myself in an

unknown part of North London, compelled to inquire of the inhabitants

until I should find the address either of the meeting-hall or of the

party committee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at last a cabman

on his way home to tea told me that there was a milkman in his street

who was 'a politician and would know.' There are in London seven hundred

thousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by the man who is in

the best position to know that it would be safe to say that less than

ten thousand persons actually attend the annual ward meetings of the

various parties, and that not more than thirty thousand are members of

the party associations. That division of labour which assigns politics

to a special class of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neighbours

as well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far in most other parts of

England as in London. But in no county in England, as far as I am aware,

does the number of persons really active in politics amount to ten per

cent. of the electorate.

There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to be true. The

English Elementary Education Act was passed in 1870, and the elementary

schools may be said to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those who

entered them, being six years old, at that date are now aged

thirty-four. The statistics as to the production and sale of newspapers

and cheap books and the use of free libraries, show that the younger

working men and women in England read many times as much as their

parents did. This, and the general increase of intellectual activity in

our cities of which it is only a part, may very probably lead, as the

social question in politics grows more serious, to a large extension of

electoral interest. If so, the little groups of men and women who now

manage the three English parties in the local constituencies will find

themselves swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on taking

some part in the choice of candidates and the formation of programmes.

That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process by

which the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local party

association are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled,

as many of the American States have been compelled, to pass a series of

Acts for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties.

The ordinary citizen would find then, much more obviously than he does

at present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not only

the marking of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an active

share in that work of appointing and controlling party committees from

which many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an

instinctive dread.

But the most important difficulties raised by the extension of political

interest from a very small to a large fraction of the population would

be concerned with political motive rather than political machinery. It

is astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed that

individual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics,

assumed, without realising the nature of their own assumption, that the

representative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably

feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community.[81] At

present there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination and

sympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to

undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for the

general good. But every organiser of elections knows that the supply is

never more than sufficient, and payment of members, while it would

permit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would also

make it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective. The

concentration both of administrative and legislative work in the hands

of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is making

the House of Commons yearly a less interesting place; and members have

of late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the _personnel_ of the

House should seriously deteriorate.

[81] E.g. James Mill, _Essay on Government_ (1825), 'We have seen in

what manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of

an interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely,

by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties'

(p. 27).

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that,

owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of

legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the

members and candidates may be drawn from the class of 'hustling'

company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand,

can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its

difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual

selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of

working-class life. During the last twenty years I have been associated,

for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English

political working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a

great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real

to them. It is, for instance, the 'class-conscious' working men who, in

England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrors

of a general European war. But as their number and responsibility

increase they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as

to the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a large

scale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is very

difficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of an expansive

temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his

mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds

them--and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue therefore

which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured

tolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware of

the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and

receive help, and very unwilling to 'do' any man 'out of his job.' His

parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a

home with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read,

things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy for

him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not

understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is

already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of

abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his

daily life.

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising

that things whose existence we infer from reading are as important as

the things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a

list of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications of

the man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the man

whom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding on

an improvement with complete impartiality as between the district one

knows of on the map and the district one sees every morning. If a

representative elected to govern a large area allows personal

acquaintance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaintance and

liking will he schemed for and exploited by those who have their own

ends to gain. The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, where

the interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from the

inefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of the

known official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed; as well

as in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance the

dimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimate

sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen.

The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, very

great in the parliamentary Labour Party. The working men who have been

sent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked

intelligence and morale and of considerable political experience. But

the success or failure of any scheme aiming at social equality will

depend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which the

working classes must necessarily send men of less exceptional ability

and experience. I have never myself served on an elected local body the

majority of whose members were weekly wage earners. But I have talked

with men, both of working-class and middle-class origin, who have been

in that position. What they say confirms that which I have inferred from

my own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level of

enthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with a

difficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing

with sectional interests and official discipline.

One is told that on such a body many members feel it difficult to

realise that the way in which a well-intentioned man may deal with his

own personal expenditure, his continued patronage, for instance, of a

rather inefficient tradesman because he has a large family, or his

refusal to contest an account from a dislike of imputing bad motives, is

fatal if applied in the expenditure of the large sums entrusted to a

public body. Sometimes there are even, one learns, indications of that

good-humoured and not ill-meant laxity in expending public money which

has had such disastrous results in America, and which lends itself so

easily to exploitation by those in whom the habit of giving and taking

personal favours has hardened into systematic fraud. When one of the

West Ham Guardians, two years ago, committed suicide on being charged

with corruption, the _Star_ sent down a representative who filled a

column with the news. 'His death,' we were told, 'has robbed the

district of an indefatigable public worker. County Council, Board of

Guardians, and Liberal interests all occupied his leisure time.' 'One of

his friends' is described as saying to the _Star_ reporter, 'You do not

need to go far to learn of his big-souled geniality. The poor folks of

the workhouse will miss him badly.'[82] When one has waded through masses

of evidence on American municipal corruption, that phrase about

'big-souled geniality' makes one shudder.

[82] _Star_, November 28th, 1906.

The early history of the co-operative and trade-union movements in

England is full of pathetic instances of this kind of failure, and both

movements show how a new and more stringent ideal may be slowly built

up. But such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, and

must be part of the conscious organised thought of each generation if it

is to be permanently effective.

Those difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed out by the

opponents of democracy. But if democracy is to succeed they must be

frankly considered by the democrats themselves; just as it is the

engineer who is trying to build the bridge, and not the ferry-owner,

who is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate the

strain which the materials will stand. The engineer, when he wishes to

increase the margin of safety in his plans, treats as factors in the

same quantitative problem both the chemical expedients by which he can

strengthen his materials and the structural changes by which the strain

on those materials can be diminished. So those who would increase the

margin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire except

to arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength of

the individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually increased by

moral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving or

extending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy as

may prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength.

CHAPTER III

OFFICIAL THOUGHT

It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under any conceivable

system of representation cannot do the whole work of government

themselves.

If all elections are held in single member constituencies of a size

sufficient to secure a good supply of candidates; if the number of

elections is such as to allow the political workers a proper interval

for rest and reflection between the campaigns; if each elected body has

an area large enough for effective administration, a number of members

sufficient for committee work and not too large for debate, and duties

sufficiently important to justify the effort and expense of a contest;

then one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best number of men

and women to be elected by the existing population of the United

Kingdom--or rather less than one to every two thousand of the

population.[83]

[83] I arrive at this figure by dividing the United Kingdom into single

member parliamentary constituencies, averaging 100,000 in population,

which gives a House of Commons of 440--a more convenient number than the

existing 670. I take the same unit of 100,000 for the average municipal

area. Large towns would contain several parliamentary constituencies,

and small towns would, as at present, be separate municipal areas,

although only part of a parliamentary constituency. I allow one local

council of 50 on the average to each municipal area.

This proportion depends mainly on facts in the psychology of the

electors, which will change very slowly if they change at all. At

present the amount of work to be done in the way of government is

rapidly increasing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, the

number of elected persons available for each unit of work must tend to

decrease. The number of persons now elected in the United Kingdom

(including, for instance, the Parish Councillors of rural parishes, and

the Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, larger than my

estimate, though it has been greatly diminished by the Acts of 1888,

1894 and 1902. Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers are

still somewhat uneconomically distributed it represents a smaller actual

working power than would be given by the plan which I suggest.

On the other hand, the number of persons (excluding the Army and Navy)

given in the Census Returns of 1901 as professionally employed in the

central and local government of the United Kingdom was 161,000. This

number has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing rate, and

consists of persons who give on an average at least four times as many

hours a week to their work as can be expected from the average elected

member.

What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, of twenty-three

thousand elected, and, say, two hundred thousand non-elected persons? To

begin with, ought the elected members be free to appoint the non-elected

officials as they like? Most American politicians of Andrew Jackson's

time, and a large number of American politicians to-day, would hold, for

instance, as a direct corollary from democratic principles, that the

elected congressman or senator for a district or State has a right to

nominate the local federal officials. There may, he would admit, be some

risk in that method, but the risk, he would argue, is one involved in

the whole scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy as a

whole are greater than its disadvantages.

Our political logic in England has never been so elementary as that of

the Americans, nor has our faith in it been so unflinching. Most

Englishmen, therefore, have no feeling of disloyalty to the democratic

idea in admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency of

officials to depend upon the personal character of individual

representatives. At the General Election of 1906 there were at least two

English constituencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) which

returned candidates whose personal unfitness had been to most men's

minds proved by evidence given in the law courts. Neither constituency

was markedly unlike the average in any respect. The facts were well

known, and in each case an attempt was made by a few public-spirited

voters to split the party vote, but both candidates were successful by

large majorities. The Borough of Croydon stands, socially and

intellectually, well above the average, but Mr. Jabez Balfour

represented Croydon for many years, until he was sentenced to penal

servitude for fraud. No one in any of these three cases would have

desired that the sitting member should appoint, say, the postmasters, or

collectors of Inland Revenue for his constituency.

But though the case against the appointment of officials by individual

representatives is clear, the question of the part which should be taken

by any elected body as a whole in appointing the officials who serve

under it is much more difficult, and cannot be discussed without

considering what are to be the relative functions of the officials and

the representatives after the appointment has taken place. Do we aim at

making election in fact as well as in constitutional theory the sole

base of political authority, or do we desire that the non-elected

officials shall exert some amount of independent influence?

The fact that most Englishmen, in spite of their traditional fear of

bureaucracy, would now accept the second of these alternatives, is one

of the most striking results of our experience in the working of

democracy. We see that the evidence on which the verdict at an election

must be given is becoming every year more difficult to collect and

present, and further removed from the direct observation of the voters.

We are afraid of being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers or

election leaflets for our knowledge, and we have therefore come to

value, even if for that reason only, the existence of a responsible and

more or less independent Civil Service. It is difficult to realise how

short a time it is since questions for which we now rely entirely on

official statistics were discussed by the ordinary political methods of

agitation and advocacy. In the earlier years of George the Third's

reign, at a time when population in England was, as we now know, rising

with unprecedented rapidity, the question of fact whether it was rising

or falling led to embittered political controversy.[84] In the spring of

1830 the House of Commons gave three nights to a confused party debate

on the state of the country. The Whigs argued that distress was general,

and the Tories (who were, as it happened, right) that it was local[85]. In

1798 or 1830 the 'public' who could take part in such discussions

numbered perhaps fifty thousand at the most. At least ten million people

must, since 1903, have taken part in the present Tariff Reform

controversy; and that controversy would have degenerated into mere

Bedlam if it had not been for the existence of the Board of Trade

Returns, with whose figures both sides had at least to appear to square

their arguments.

[84] Bonar's _Malthus_, chap. vii.

[85] _Hansard_, Feb. 4th, 5th, 6th, 1830.

If official figures did not exist in England, or if they did not possess

or deserve authority, it is difficult to estimate the degree of

political harm which could be done in a few years by an interested and

deliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for the

personal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, for instance, that our

Civil Service were either notoriously inefficient or believed to be

dominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent

'currency agitation' should suddenly spring up. A powerful press

syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring that

the privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserve

are 'strangling British Industry.' The contents bills of two hundred

newspapers denounce every day the 'monopolists' and the 'gold-bugs,' the

'lies and shams' of the Bank Returns, and the 'paid perjurers of

Somerset House.' The group of financiers who control the syndicate stand

to win enormous sums by the creation of a more 'elastic' currency, and

subscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincere

paper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of the

professional economists. A vigorous and well-known member of

parliament--a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, or some one loosely

connected with the Labour movement--whom everybody has hitherto feared

and no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at the

head of the movement, denounces the 'fossils' and 'superior persons' who

at present lead Conservative and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and,

with the help of the press syndicate and the subscription fund of the

'Free Money League,' begins to capture the local associations, and

through them the central office of the party which is for the moment in

opposition, Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were opposed

only by counter-electioneering, might not succeed, even although its

proposals were wholly fraudulent and its leaders so ignorant or so

criminal that they could only come into power by discrediting two-thirds

of the honest politicians in the country and by replacing them with

'hustlers' and 'boodlers' and 'grafters,' and the other species for whom

American political science has provided names? How is the ordinary

voter--a market-gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter--to

distinguish by the help of his own knowledge and reasoning power between

the various appeals made to him by the 'Reformers' and the 'Safe Money

Men' as to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the note

issue--the 'ten per cent.' on the blue posters and the 'cent. per cent.'

on the yellow? Nor will his conscience be a safer guide than his

judgment. A 'Christian Service Wing' of the Free Money League may be

formed, and his conscience may be roused by a white-cravatted orator,

intoxicated by his own eloquence into something like sincerity, who

borrows that phrase about 'Humanity crucified on a cross of gold' which

Mr. W.J. Bryan borrowed a dozen years ago from some one else. In an

optimistic mood one might rely on the subtle network of confidence by

which each man trusts, on subjects outside his own knowledge, some

honest and better-informed neighbour, who again trusts at several

removes the trained thinker. But does such a personal network exist in

our vast delocalised urban populations?

It is the vague apprehension of such dangers, quite as much as the

merely selfish fears of the privileged classes, which preserves in

Europe the relics of past systems of non-elective government, the House

of Lords, for instance, in England, and the Monarchy in Italy or Norway.

Men feel that a second base in politics is required, consisting of

persons independent of the tactics by which electoral opinion is formed

and legally entitled to make themselves heard. But political authority

founded on heredity or wealth is not in fact protected from the

interested manipulation of opinion and feeling. The American Senate,

which has come to be representative of wealth, is already absorbed by

that financial power which depends for its existence on manufactured

opinion; and our House of Lords is rapidly tending in the same

direction. From the beginning of history it has been found easier for

any skilled politician who set his mind to it, to control the opinions

of a hereditary monarch than those of a crowd.

The real 'Second Chamber,' the real 'constitutional check' in England,

is provided, not by the House of Lords or the Monarchy, but by the

existence of a permanent Civil Service, appointed on a system

independent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and holding

office during good behaviour. If such a service were, as it is in Russia

and to a large extent in India, a sovereign power, it would itself, as I

argued in the last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulating

opinion. But the English Civil servants in their present position have

the right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity of

making their will, by fair means or foul, prevail.

The creation of this Service was the one great political invention in

nineteenth-century England, and like other inventions it was worked out

under the pressure of an urgent practical problem. The method of

appointing the officials of the East India Company had been a critical

question in English politics since 1783. By that time it had already

become clear that we could not permanently allow the appointment of the

rulers of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet and army

to depend upon the irresponsible favour of the Company's directors.

Charles James Fox in 1783, with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cut

the knot, by making Indian appointments, in effect, part of the ordinary

system of parliamentary patronage; and he and Lord North were beaten

over their India Bill, not only because George the Third was obstinate

and unscrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political dangers

involved in their proposal. The question, in fact, could only be solved

by a new invention. The expedient of administering an oath to the

Directors that they would make their appointments honestly, proved to be

useless, and the requirements that the nominees of the Directors should

submit to a special training at Hayleybury, though more effective, left

the main evil of patronage untouched.

As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill introduced by Macaulay

for the renewal and revision of the Company's charter contained a clause

providing that East India cadetships should be thrown open to

competition.[86] For the time the influence of the Directors was

sufficient to prevent so great a change from being effected, but in

1853, on a further renewal of the Charter, the system of competition was

definitely adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships took

place in 1855.

[86] It would be interesting if Lord Morley, now that he has access to

the records of the East India House, would tell us the true intellectual

history of this far-reaching suggestion. For the facts as now known, cf.

A.L. Lowell, _Colonial Civil Service_, pp. 243-256.

In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distinguished Indian Civilian

who had married Macaulay's sister, had been asked to inquire, with the

help of Sir Stafford Northcote, into the method of appointment in the

Home Civil Service. His report appeared in the spring of 1854,[87] and is

one of the ablest of those State Papers which have done so much to mould

the English constitution during the last two generations. It showed the

intolerable effects on the _personnel_ of the existing Service of the

system by which the Patronage Secretary of the Treasury distributed

appointments in the national Civil Service among those members of

parliament whose votes were to be influenced or rewarded, and it

proposed that all posts requiring intellectual qualifications should be

thrown open to those young men of good character who succeeded at a

competitive examination in the subjects which then constituted the

education of a gentleman.

[87] _Reports and Papers on the Civil Service_, 1854-5.

But to propose that members of parliament should give up their own

patronage was a very different thing from asking them to take away the

patronage of the East India Company. Sir Charles Trevelyan, therefore,

before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a number of

distinguished persons both inside and outside the Government service,

and printed their very frank replies in an appendix.

Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was hopelessly

impracticable. It seemed like the intrusion into the world of politics

of a scheme of cause and effect derived from another universe--as if one

should propose to the Stock Exchange that the day's prices should be

fixed by prayer and the casting of lots. Lingen, for instance, the

permanent head of the Education Office, wrote considering that, as

matter of fact, patronage is one element of power, and not by any means

an unreal one; considering the long and inestimably valuable habituation

of the people of this country to political contests in which the share

of office ... reckons among the legitimate prizes of war; considering

that socially and in the business of life, as well as in Downing Street,

rank and wealth (as a fact, and whether we like it or not) hold the keys

of many things, and that our modes of thinking and acting proceed, in a

thousand ways, upon this supposition, considering all these things, I

should hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of the Civil

Service as that proposed by yourself and Sir Stafford Northcote.'[88] Sir

James Stephen of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, 'The world we

live in is not, I think, half moralised enough for the acceptance of

such a scheme of stern morality as this.'[89] When, a few years later,

competition for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, Queen

Victoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that it reduced the

sovereign to a mere signing machine.'[90]

[88] _Reports and Papers on the Civil Service_, pp. 104, 105.

[89] _Ibid._, p. 78

[90] _Life of Queen Victoria_, vol. iii. p. 377 (July 29, 1858).

In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan's Report, Gladstone

established open competition throughout the English Civil Service, by an

Order in Council which was practically uncriticised and unopposed; and

the parliamentary government of England in one of its most important

functions did in fact reduce itself 'to a mere signing machine.'

The causes of the change in the political atmosphere which made this

possible constitute one of the most interesting problems in English

history. One cause is obvious. In 1867 Lord Derby's Reform Act had

suddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House of Commons from

the 'ten pound householders' in the boroughs to the working men. The old

'governing classes' may well have felt that the patronage which they

could not much longer retain would be safer in the hands of an

independent Civil Service Commission, interpreting, like a blinded

figure of Justice, the verdict of Nature, than in those of the dreaded

'caucuses,' which Mr. Schnadhorst was already organising.

But one seems to detect a deeper cause of change than the mere

transference of voting power. The fifteen years from the Crimean War to

1870 were in England a period of wide mental activity, during which the

conclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin or Newman were

discussed and popularised by a crowd of magazine writers and preachers

and poets. The conception was gaining ground that it was upon serious

and continued thought and not upon opinion that the power to carry out

our purposes, whether in politics or elsewhere, must ultimately depend.

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled into

suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself

accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real,' and had

answered, 'Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of

voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the

most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get

round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and

fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are

entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting,

ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get

round the Cape: if you cannot--the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back

again.'[91]

[91] _Latter Day Pamphlets, No. I, The Present Time_. (Chapman and Hall,

1894, pp. 12 and 14.)

By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started on its course from

paradox to platitude. The most important single influence in that course

had been the growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870

that Huxley's _Lay Sermons_ were collected and published. People who

could not in 1850 understand Carlyle's distinction between the Delusive

and the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley's comparison of life

and death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes a

mistake.[92] And Huxley's impersonal Science seemed a more present aid in

the voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impossible Hero.

[92] _Lay Sermont_, p. 31, 'A Liberal Education' (1868).

But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when it had once been

made and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficult

thought in which it originated, and took its place in our habitual

political psychology. We now half-consciously conceive of the Civil

Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be taken

or left as a whole. Open competition has by the same process become a

principle, conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has been

in fact applied, and to no others. What is therefore for the moment most

needed, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we should

in our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinite

possible variations. We must think of the expedient of competition

itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by

imperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of the

posts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, as

overlapping those posts for which competition in some form is suitable

though it has not yet been tried, and as touching, at the marginal point

on their curve, those posts for which competition is unsuitable.

Directly we begin this process one fact becomes obvious. There is no

reason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment of

the officials of the local as to those of the central government. It is

an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people

that we have never seriously considered this point. In America the term

Civil Service is applied equally to both groups of offices, and 'Civil

Service principles' are understood to cover State and Municipal as well

as Federal appointments. The separation of the two systems in our minds

may, indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from historical

reasons we call them by different names. As it is, the local authorities

are (with the exception that certain qualifications are required for

teachers and medical officers) left free to do as they will in making

appointments. Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan and provincial local

bodies have adopted timid and limited schemes of open competition. But

in all other cases the local civil servants, who are already probably as

numerous as those of the central government,[93] are appointed under

conditions which, if the Government chose to create a Commission of

Inquiry, would probably be found to have reproduced many of the evils

that existed in the patronage of the central government before 1855.

[93] The figures in the census of 1901 were--National, 90,000; Local,

71,000. But the local officials since then have, I believe, increased

much more rapidly than the national.

It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a separate body of Civil

Service Commissioners to hold a separate examination for each locality,

and difficulties would arise from the selection of officials by a body

responsible only to the central government, and out of touch with the

local body which controls, pays, and promotes them when appointed. But

similar difficulties have been obviated by American Civil Service

Reformers, and a few days' hard thinking would suffice to adapt the

system to English local conditions.

One object aimed at by the creation of a competitive Civil Service for

the central government in England was the prevention of corruption. It

was made more difficult for representatives and officials to conspire

together in order to defraud the public, when the official ceased to owe

his appointment to the representative. If an English member of

parliament desired now to make money out of his position, he would have

to corrupt a whole series of officials in no way dependent on his

favour, who perhaps intensely dislike the human type to which he

belongs, and who would be condemned to disgrace or imprisonment years

after he had lost his seat if some record of their joint misdoing were

unearthed.

This precaution against corruption is needed even more clearly under the

conditions of local government. The expenditure of local bodies in the

United Kingdom is already much larger than that of the central State,

and is increasing at an enormously greater rate, while the fact that

most of the money is spent locally, and in comparatively small sums,

makes fraud easier. English municipal life is, I believe, on the whole

pure, but fraud does occur, and it is encouraged by the close connection

that may exist between the officials and the representatives. A needy or

thick-skinned urban councillor or guardian may at any moment tempt, or

be tempted, by a poor relation who helped him at his election, and for

whom (perhaps as the result of a tacit understanding that similar

favours should be allowed to his colleagues), he obtained a municipal

post.

The railway companies, again, in England are coming every year more and

more under State control, but no statesman has ever attempted to secure

in their case, as was done in the case of the East India Company a

century ago, some reasonable standard of purity and impartiality in

appointments and promotion. Some few railways have systems of

competition for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried on

by municipalities; but one is told that under most of the companies

both appointment and promotion may be influenced by the favour of

directors or large shareholders. We regulate the minutiae of coupling

and signalling on the railways, but do not realise that the safety of

the public depends even more directly upon their systems of patronage.

How far this principle should be extended, and how far, for instance, it

would be possible to prevent the head of a great private firm from

ruining half a country side by leaving the management of his business to

a hopelessly incompetent relation, is a question which depends, among

other things, upon the powers of political invention which may be

developed by collectivist thinkers in the next fifty years.

We must meanwhile cease to treat the existing system of competition by

the hasty writing of answers to unexpected examination questions as an

unchangeable entity. That system has certain very real advantages. It is

felt by the candidates and their relations to be 'fair.' It reveals

facts about the relative powers of the candidates in some important

intellectual qualities which no testimonials would indicate, and which

are often unknown, till tested, to the candidates themselves. But if the

sphere of independent selection is to be widely extended, greater

variety must be introduced into its methods. In this respect invention

has stood still in England since the publication of Sir Charles

Trevelyan's Report in 1855. Some slight modifications have taken place

in the subjects chosen for examination, but the enormous changes in

English educational conditions during the last half century have been

for the most part ignored. It is still assumed that young Englishmen

consist of a small minority who have received the nearly uniform

'education of a gentleman,' and a large majority who have received no

intellectual training at all. The spread of varied types of secondary

schools, the increasing specialisation of higher education, and the

experience which all the universities of the world have accumulated as

to the possibility of testing the genuineness and intellectual quality

of 'post graduate' theses have had little or no effect.

The Playfair Commission of 1875 found that a few women were employed for

strictly subordinate work in the Post Office. Since then female

typewriters and a few better-paid women have been introduced into other

offices in accordance with the casual impulses of this or that

parliamentary or permanent chief; but no systematic attempt has been

made to enrich the thinking power of the State by using the trained and

patient intellects of the women who graduate each year in the newer, and

'qualify by examination to graduate,' in the older Universities.

To the general public indeed, the adoption of open competition in 1870

seemed to obviate any necessity for further consideration not only of

the method by which officials were appointed but also of the system

under which they did their work. The race of Tite Barnacles, they

learnt, was now to become extinct. Appointment was to be by 'merit,' and

the announcement of the examination results, like the wedding in a

middle-Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story. But in a

Government office, as certainly as in a law-court or a laboratory,

effective thinking will not be done unless adequate opportunities and

motives are secured by organisation during the whole working life of the

appointed officials. Since 1870, however, the organisation of the

Government Departments has either been left to the casual development of

office tradition in each Department or has been changed (as in the case

of the War Office) by an agitation directed against one Department only.

The official relations, for instance, between the First Division

minority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each office

vary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions and

prejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief. The same is

true of the relation between the heads of each section and the officials

immediately below them. In at least one office important papers are

brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent

down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are

given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from

getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers

should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior

accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his

own suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisation

must in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematically

compared them.

In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to see

that the published books as well as the office records on any question

are available for every official who has to report on it. In the Board

of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the importance of published

as compared with official information is even greater, room has only

just been found for a technical library which was collected many years

ago.[94] The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, the

Treasury and the Local Government Board have none.

[94] For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the

Foreign Office.

In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliberate policy has been

adopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regular

intervals to different branches of the work. The results are said to be

excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has even

been seriously discussed in any other Department which I know.

Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with the organisation

of non-departmental work more directly executive than their own, and

part of a wise system of official training would consist in 'seconding'

young officials for experience in the kind of work which they are to

organise. The clerks of the Board of Agriculture should be sent at least

once in their career to help in superintending the killing of infected

swine and interviewing actual farmers, while an official in the Railway

section of the Board of Trade should acquire some personal knowledge of

the inside of a railway office. This principle of 'seconding' might well

be extended so as to cover (as is already done in the army) definite

periods of study during which an official, on leave of absence with full

pay, should acquire knowledge useful to his department; after which he

should show the result of his work, not by the answering of examination

questions, but by the presentation of a book or report of permanent

value.

The grim necessity of providing, after the events of the Boer War, for

effective thought in the government of the British army produced the War

Office Council. The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of those

suggestions that reach him through the 'bottle-neck' of his senior

official's mind, now sits once a week at a table with half a dozen heads

of sub-departments. He hears real discussion; he learns to pick men for

higher work; and saves many hours of circumlocutory writing. At the same

time, owing to a well-known fact in the physiology of the human brain,

the men who are tired of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in the

spoken word and the presence of their fellow human beings, just as

politicians who are tired with talking, find, if their minds are still

uninjured, a new stimulus in the silent use of a pen.

If this periodical alternation of written and oral discussion is useful

in the War Office, it would probably be useful in other offices; but no

one with sufficient authority to require an answer has ever asked if it

is so.

One of the most important functions of a modern Government is the

effective publication of information, but we have no Department of

Publicity, though we have a Stationery Office; and it is, for instance,

apparently a matter of accident whether any particular Department has or

has not a Gazette and how and when that Gazette is published. Nor is it

any one's business to discover and criticise and if necessary

co-ordinate the statistical methods of the various official

publications.

On all these points and many others a small Departmental Committee

(somewhat on the lines of that Esher Committee which reorganised the War

Office in 1904), consisting perhaps of an able manager of an Insurance

Company, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a business man with

experience of commercial and departmental organisation abroad, might

suggest such improvements as would without increase of expense double

the existing intellectual output of our Government offices.

But such a Committee will not be appointed unless the ordinary members

of parliament, and especially the members who advocate a wide extension

of collective action, consider much more seriously than they do at

present the organisation of collective thought. How, for instance, are

we to prevent or minimise the danger that a body of officials will

develop 'official' habits of thought, and a sense of a corporate

interest opposed to that of the majority of the people? If a sufficient

proportion of the ablest and best equipped young men of each generation

are to be induced to come into the Government service they must be

offered salaries which place them at once among the well-to-do classes.

How are we to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on all

questions of administration with their economic equals? If they do, the

danger is not only that social reform will be delayed, but also that

working men in England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highly

educated permanent officials which one notices in any gathering of

working men in America.

We are sometimes told, now that good education is open to every one,

that men of every kind of social origin and class sympathy will enter to

an increasing extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place it

will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows the

development of the existing examination system knows that care is

required to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, if

only from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latin

composition, whose educational value is not higher than others, but

excellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of one

social class.

It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual efficiency to

the dogma of promotion from the ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 were

perhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the first

division of the service would be in their time so rare as to be

negligible. But things have changed since then. The competition for the

second division has become incomparably more severe, and there is no

reasonable test under which some of those second class officials who

have continued their education by means of reading and University

teaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of age, a

greater fitness for the highest work than would be shown by many of

those who had entered by the more advanced examination.

But however able our officials are, and however varied their origin, the

danger of the narrowness and rigidity which has hitherto so generally

resulted from official life would still remain, and must be guarded

against by every kind of encouragement to free intellectual

development. The German Emperor did good service the other day when he

claimed (in a semi-official communication on the Tweedmouth letter) that

the persons who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity have

as Fachmänner (experts) other and wider rights in the republic of

thought. One only wishes that he would allow his own officials after

their day's work to regroup themselves, in the healthy London fashion,

with labour leaders, and colonels, and schoolmasters, and court ladies,

and members of parliament, as individualists or socialists, or

protectors of African aborigines, or theosophists, or advocates of a

free stage or a free ritual.

The intellectual life of the government official is indeed becoming part

of a problem which every year touches us all more closely. In literature

and science as well as in commerce and industry the independent producer

is dying out and the official is taking his place. We are nearly all of

us officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on a

newspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by

restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a larger

organisation. We are little influenced by that direct and obvious

economic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or country

solicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip his

rivals or make more profit out of his employees. If we merely desire to

do as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible in our lives, we

all find that it pays us to adopt that steady unanxious 'stroke' which

neither advances nor retards promotion.

The indirect stimulus, therefore, of interest and variety, of public

spirit and the craftsman's delight in his skill, is becoming more

important to us as a motive for the higher forms of mental effort, and

threats and promises of decrease or increase of salary less important.

And because those higher efforts are needed not only for the advantage

of the community but for the good of our own souls we are all of us

concerned in teaching those distant impersonal masters of ours who are

ourselves how to prevent the opportunity of effective thought from being

confined to a tiny rich minority, living, like the Cyclops, in

irresponsible freedom. If we consciously accept the fact that organised

work will in future be the rule and unorganised work the exception, and

if we deliberately adjust our methods of working as well as our personal

ideals to that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction of

public business must be divided between an uninstructed and unstable

body of politicians and a selfish and pedantic bureaucracy.

CHAPTER IV

NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY

I have discussed, in the three preceding chapters, the probable effect

of certain existing intellectual tendencies on our ideals of political

conduct, our systems of representation, and the methods which we adopt

for securing intellectual initiative and efficiency among our

professional officials--that is to say, on the internal organisation of

the State.

In this chapter I propose to discuss the effect of the same tendencies

on international and inter-racial relations. But, as soon as one leaves

the single State and deals with the interrelation of several States, one

meets with the preliminary question, What is a State? Is the British

Empire, or the Concert of Europe, one State or many? Every community in

either area now exerts political influence on every other, and the

telegraph and the steamship have abolished most of the older limitations

on the further development and extension of that influence. Will the

process of coalescence go on either in feeling or in constitutional

form, or are there any permanent causes tending to limit the

geographical or racial sphere of effective political solidarity, and

therefore the size and composition of States?

Aristotle, writing under the conditions of the ancient world, laid it

down that a community whose population extended to a hundred thousand

would no more be a State than would one whose population was confined to

ten.[95] He based his argument on measurable facts as to the human senses

and the human memory. The territory of a State must be 'visible as a

whole' by one eye, and the assembly attended by all the full citizens

must be able to hear one voice--which must be that of an actual man and

not of the legendary Stentor. The governing officials must be able to

remember the faces and characters of all their fellow citizens.[96] He

did not ignore the fact that nearly all the world's surface as he knew

it was occupied by States enormously larger than his rule allowed. But

he denied that the great barbarian monarchies were in the truest sense

'States' at all.

[95] _Ethics_, IX., X. 3. [Greek: oúte gàr ek déka anthrôpôn génoit' àn

pólis, oút' ek déka myriádôn éti pólis estín.]

[96] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.

We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied

were both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaeval

City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the

highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment

of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and

memory. It is now only here and there, in villages outside the main

stream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours and

see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which they

work and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawling

suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some

of the older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper

realities of life.

A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard-thinking old Yorkshire

schoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale. Opposite to us was

the country-house where Charlotte Brontë was governess, and below us

ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages which

already were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatened

soon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tall

chimneys and slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the old

affection for place and home had disappeared from the district. I asked

whether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now that

men lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than in

the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and maps

might not appear which should be a better guide to life than the

patriotism of the village street.

This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, nothing, he said,

had taken its place, or would take its place, but a naked and restless

individualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and always

missing it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, he began

to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the true

riches of life by forgetting steam and electricity, and returning to the

agriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the

mediaeval town.

He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the old

conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished,

because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though

less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an

invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. For

a constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England

there is now no place where in the old sense they 'live.' Nearly the

whole of the class engaged in the direction of English industry, and a

rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pass daily in tram

or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more

sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, to

use Mr. Wells's phrase, 'delocalised.'[97]

[97] _Mankind in the Making_, p. 406.

But now that we can no longer use the range of our senses as a basis

for calculating the possible area of the civilised State, there might

seem to be no facts at all which can be used for such a calculation. How

can we fix the limits of effective intercommunication by steam or

electricity, or the area which can be covered by such political

expedients as representation and federalism? When Aristotle wished to

illustrate the relation of the size of the State to the powers of its

citizens he compared it to a ship, which, he said, must not be too large

to be handled by the muscles of actual men. 'A ship of two furlongs

length would not be a ship at all.'[98] But the _Lusitania_ is already

not very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can even

guess what is the upward limit of size which the ship-builders of a

generation hence will have reached. If once we assume that a State may

be larger than the field of vision of a single man, then the merely

mechanical difficulty of bringing the whole earth under a government as

effective as that of the United States or the British Empire has already

been overcome. If such a government is impossible, its impossibility

must be due to the limits not of our senses and muscles but of our

powers of imagination and sympathy.

[98] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.

I have already pointed out[99] that the modern State must exist for the

thoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of direct

observation but as an entity of the mind, a symbol, a personification,

or an abstraction. The possible area of the State will depend,

therefore, mainly on the facts which limit our creation and use of such

entities. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were reconstructing Europe

on the basis of nationality thought that they had found the relevant

facts in the causes which limit the physical and mental homogeneity of

nations. A State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed,

must be a homogeneous 'nation,' because no citizen can imagine his State

or make it the object of his political affection unless he believes in

the existence of a national type to which the individual inhabitants of

the State are assimilated; and he cannot continue to believe in the

existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are like

each other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarck

deliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by a

quantitative calculation as to the possibility of assimilating other

Germans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of

Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the ground

that while the Prussian type was strong enough to assimilate the Saxons

and Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to assimilate Austrians and

Bavarians. He said, for instance, in 1866: 'We cannot use these

Ultramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we can digest.'[100]

[99] Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81.

[100] _Bismarck_ (J.W. Headlam), p. 269.

Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed

unless it consisted of a homogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy of

the artificial assimilation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to

him the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for the

reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by the

existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical

facts. 'God,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei

upon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured the

Divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked

out--at least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the great

rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical

conditions.'[101]

[101] _Life, and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written

1858), p. 275.

Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength

the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as

Canning said, 'reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards

to congregate them into mobs.'[102] Mazzini attacked the 'cosmopolitans,'

who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of

nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychological

impossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can

love, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individual

human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for

this reason: 'The cosmopolitan,' he then said, 'alone in the midst of

the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend

beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the

consciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individual

faculties--which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their

activity over the whole sphere of application constituting the aim ...

has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between

despotism and inertia.'[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he

puts out to sea, prays to God, 'Help me my God! My boat is so small and

Thy ocean so wide.'[104]

[102] Canning, _Life_ by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818).

[103] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8.

[104] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 274.

For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the

individual man and the unimaginable multitude of the human race. A man

could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like

himself 'speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and

educated by the same historical tradition,'[105] and could be thought of

as a single national entity. The nation was 'the intermediate term

between humanity and the individual,'[106] and man could only attain to

the conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of

homogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity as

individuals are the citizens of the nation,'[107] and again, 'The pact of

humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal

peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a

distinct existence.'[108]

[105] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858).

[106] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 273.

[107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274

(written 1849).

[108] _Ibid_., vol. iii. p. 15 (written 1836).

Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a

great and invaluable part in the development of the political

consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is

becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the

problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now assert with Mazzini,

that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards a

reconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous national

States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109]

Mazziui, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exaggerated the simplicity

of the question even in his own time. National types throughout the

greater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided into

homogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the direction

of the high mountains,' but were intermingled from village to village;

and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no longer, for

instance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples

of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties,

that Hungary is inhabited only by a homogeneous population of patriotic

Magyars. We can see that Mazzini was already straining his principle to

the breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece

... to become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrier

against the European encroachments of Russia.'[110] In Macedonia to-day

bands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the pure

tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rival

populations in order to establish their own claim to represent the

purposes of God as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains.

Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if the

Bismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be rejected, there

must continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitants

belonging to widely different national types.

[109] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 275.

[110] _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. vi. p. 258.

Bismarck's conception of an artificial uniformity created by 'blood and

iron' corresponded more closely than did Mazzini's to the facts of the

nineteenth century. But its practicability depended upon the assumption

that the members of the dominant nationality would always vehemently

desire to impose their own type on the rest. Now that the

Social-Democrats, who are a not inconsiderable proportion of the

Prussian population, apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian or

Danish fellow-subjects all the more because they cling to their own

national characteristics, Prince Bülow's Bismarckian dictum the other

day, that the strength of Germany depends on the existence and dominance

of an intensely national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. The

same change of feeling has also shown itself in the United Kingdom, and

both the English parties have now tacitly or explicitly abandoned that

Anglicisation of Ireland and Wales, which all parties once accepted as a

necessary part of English policy.

A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that the

area of the State should be based on homogeneity of national type,

whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extension

during the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states into

non-European territory. Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, nor

Bismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to take

into his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside

Europe. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectual

preparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by

'the scramble for the world.' Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely

expected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa,

and that the 'pact of humanity' would ultimately be 'signed' by

homogeneous and independent 'nations,' who would cover the whole land

surface of the globe. But he never indicated the political forces by

which that result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion of

Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessary

stage in the Mazzinian policy of spreading the idea of nationality to

Africa, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself.

Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never looked

forward, as Mazzini did, to a 'pact of humanity,' which should include

even the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the

attempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, as

existing between any State and the States or populations outside its

boundaries. 'The only sound principle of action,' he said, 'for a great

State is political egoism.'[111] When, therefore, after Bismarck's death

German sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with the

defenceless inhabitants of China or East Africa, they were, as the

Social-Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of the

situation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in the

fifth century A.D., by Attila and his Huns.

[111] Speech, 1850, quoted by J.W. Headlam, _Bismarck_, p. 83.

The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of

national homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From the

publication of Seeley's _Expansion of England_ in 1883 till the Peace of

Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a

'Blood,' an 'Island Race,' consisting of homogeneous English-speaking

individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole

population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white

inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the

other inhabitants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden'--the

necessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. The

idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a

homogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that

it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading of

imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckian

realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South

Africa and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron.' Lord Milner, who is perhaps

the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of

Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on

any terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve the

ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of

a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's

Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those

'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and too

cosmopolitan.'[112]

[112] _Times_, Dec. 19, 1907.

But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is

now deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be based

not upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national

variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the

Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided

from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral

chasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyal

acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or

General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt

Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial

egoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to

the question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea.

At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs of

enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English

'poor' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other

men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; and

if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because

they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial

egoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which pay

little heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, be

objected by our imperial 'Real-politiker' that cosmopolitan feeling is

at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini

thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain

facts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fight

for its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both together

during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create

that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the white

inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a

'dominant race,' that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a

natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into

a Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism.' Among the non-white

inhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperial

war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of only

employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill

those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to

fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political

rights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal

solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the

interests of our future opponents as well as those of our

fellow-subjects.

This sort of argument might of course be met by a _reductio ad

absurdum_. If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it will

be adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, the

victor in each inter-imperial war will take over the territory of the

loser. After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in the

waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, two

empires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain. Both

will possess an armament which represents the whole 'surplus value,'

beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. Both will contain

white and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across a

wavering line on the map of the world. But the struggle will go on, and,

as the result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will

exist. 'Imperial egoism,' having worked itself out to its logical

conclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of the

globe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to consider

the problems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe from

the point of view of mere humanitarianism.

Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability that we might

begin that consideration before the struggle goes any further? Fifteen

hundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousian

opinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the Homoiousians.

The generals and other 'Real-politiker' on both sides may have feared,

like Lord Milner, lest their followers should become 'too cosmopolitan,'

too ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of theology.

'This' a Homoousian may have said 'is a practical matter. Unless our

side learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate the

other side, we shall be beaten in the next battle.' And yet we can now

see that the practical interests of Europe were very little concerned

with the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriously

concerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or

'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy

metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the

continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no

longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching

towards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and 'empire'

like 'Homoousia' and 'Homoiousia' are the best that we can do in making

entities of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe,

and because having made such entities our sympathies are shut up within

them?

I have already urged, when considering the conditions of political

reasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from our

tendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensations

into homogeneous classes and species are now unnecessary and have been

avoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences. Just as the

modern artist substitutes without mental confusion his ever-varying

curves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so

the scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts of

nature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed of

identical individuals and represented to us by a single type.

Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human

race? Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible?

And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million

different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?

To the first question the publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859

offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent the

human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying

individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biological

group, every individual in which differs from every other not

arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic

evolution.[113] And, since that which exists for the imagination can

exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second

question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the

warring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have been

dissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we can

watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards

a more harmonious relation to the universe.

[113] Sir Sydney Olivier, e.g. in his courageous and penetrating book

_White Capital and Coloured Labour_ considers (in chap. ii.) the racial

distinctions between black and white from the point of view of

evolution. This consideration brings him at once to 'the infinite,

inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a

fundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating

race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling

variety' (pp. 12, 13).

But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the

discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general

love of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for ever

impossible. Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless

struggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was to

cease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore

would lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species.

This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable and

unending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generation

after 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun

hung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only by

famine and war hung over the first century of political economy. Before

Darwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of the

non-white races as 'men and brothers' who, after a short process of

education, would become in all respects except colour identical with

themselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be so

glossed over. Racial variations were shown to be unaffected by

education, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending

perhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation.

The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidence

presented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the first

half of the nineteenth century the European colonists who were in daily

contact with non-European races, although their impulses and their

knowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall,

yet could escape all thought about their own position by assuming that

the problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canada

or the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease,

and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakest

races and individuals have now died out, the surviving population are

showing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and we

are adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore our

responsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the time

when the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be done

deliberately.

But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how can

there exist a community either of affection or purpose between the

killers and the killed? No one at this moment professes, as far as I

know, to have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point of

ethics lies within the region claimed by religion. But Christianity,

which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously

failed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The official

Christian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equal

value, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether a

given territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million

converted Central African pigmies or a million equally converted

Europeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether the

stronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination of

the weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial

possibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the nineteenth

century, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though their

ruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscious

hypocrisy.

But the most immediately dangerous result of political 'Darwinism' was

not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by

European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 'struggle

for life' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European

nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been

threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations

concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill,

for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day:

'From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities,

and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggle

of empires.'[114]

[114] _Times_, Jan. 22, 1908.

The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of the

species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human

progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have

to conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Government

with a German statesman like Prince Büllow, who seems to combine the

teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching

of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a

declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national

conduct.

Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the

'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expected

from a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The

'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troops

alone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-European

allies and subjects. If it takes the first form, and if we assume, as

Lord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is

'higher' than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selected

Englishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an act

of biological retrogression. Even if the non-European races are brought

in and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars,

or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological

loss to the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving 'higher'

or 'lower' individuals will only be slightly diminished.

Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends that

the evolutionary advantage to be expected from the 'struggle of empires'

is the 'survival' not of races but of political and cultural types. Our

victory over the German Empire, for instance, would mean, it is said, a

victory for the idea of political liberty. This argument, which, when

urged by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, requires the

assumption that types of culture are in the modern world most

successfully spread by military occupation. But in the ancient world

Greek culture spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire;

Japan in our own time adopted Western culture more readily as an

independent nation than she would have done as a dependency of Russia or

France; and India is perhaps more likely to-day to learn from Japan than

from England.

Lord Ampthill's phrase, however, represents not so much an argument, as

a habit of feeling shared by many who have forgotten or never known the

biological doctrine which it echoes. The first followers of Darwin

believed that the human species had been raised above its prehuman

ancestors because, and in so far as, it had surrendered itself to a

blind instinct of conflict. It seemed, therefore, as if the old moral

precept that men should control their more violent impulses by

reflection had been founded upon a mistake. Unreflecting instinct was,

after all, the best guide, and nations who acted instinctively towards

their neighbours might justify themselves like the Parisian ruffians of

ten years ago, by claiming to be 'strugforlifeurs.'

If this habit of mind is to be destroyed it must be opposed not merely

by a new argument but by a conception of man's relation to the universe

which creates emotional force as well as intellectual conviction.

And the change that has already shown itself in our conception of the

struggle for life among individuals indicates that, by some divine

chance, a corresponding change may come in our conception of the

struggle between peoples. The evolutionists of our own time tell us that

the improvement of the biological inheritance of any community is to be

hoped for, not from the encouragement of individual conflict, but from

the stimulation of the higher social impulses under the guidance of the

science of eugenics; and the emotional effect of this new conception is

already seen in the almost complete disappearance from industrial

politics of that unwillingly brutal 'individualism' which afflicted

kindly Englishmen in the eighteen sixties.

An international science of eugenics might in the same way indicate

that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but

at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type. Such an

idea would not appeal to those for whom the whole species arranges

itself in definite and obvious grades of 'higher' and 'lower,' from the

northern Europeans downwards, and who are as certain of the ultimate

necessity of a 'white world' as the Sydney politicians are of the

necessity of a 'white Australia.' But in this respect during the last

few years the inhabitants of Europe have shown signs of a new humility,

due partly to widespread intellectual causes and partly to the hard

facts of the Russo-Japanese war and the arming of China. The 'spheres of

influence' into which we divided the Far East eight years ago, seem to

us now a rather stupid joke, and those who read history are already

bitterly ashamed that we destroyed by the sack of the Summer Palace in

1859, the products of a thousand years of such art as we can never hope

to emulate. We are coming honestly to believe that the world is richer

for the existence both of other civilisations and of other racial types

than our own. We have been compelled by the study of the Christian

documents to think of our religion as one only among the religions of

the world, and to acknowledge that it has owed much and may owe much

again to the longer philosophic tradition and the subtler and more

patient brains of Hindustan and Persia. Even if we look at the future of

the species as a matter of pure biology, we are warned by men of science

that it is not safe to depend only on one family or one variety for the

whole breeding-stock of the world. For the moment we shrink from the

interbreeding of races, but we do so in spite of some conspicuous

examples of successful interbreeding in the past, and largely because of

our complete ignorance of the conditions on which success depends.

Already, therefore, it is possible without intellectual dishonesty to

look forward to a future for the race which need not be reached through

a welter of blood and hatred. We can imagine the nations settling the

racial allocation of the temperate or tropical breeding-grounds, or even

deliberately placing the males and females of the few hopelessly

backward tribes on different islands, without the necessity that the

most violent passions of mankind should be stimulated in preparation for

a general war. No one now expects an immediate, or prophesies with

certainty an ultimate, Federation of the Globe; but the consciousness of

a common purpose in mankind, or even the acknowledgment that such a

common purpose is possible, would alter the face of world-politics at

once. The discussion at the Hague of a halt in the race of armaments

would no longer seem Utopian, and the strenuous profession by the

colonising powers that they have no selfish ends in view might be

transformed from a sordid and useless hypocrisy into a fact to which

each nation might adjust its policy. The irrational race-hatred which

breaks out from time to time on the fringes of empire, would have little

effect in world politics when opposed by a consistent conception of the

future of human progress.

Meanwhile, it is true, the military preparations for a death-struggle of

empires still go on, and the problem even of peaceful immigration

becomes yearly more threatening, now that shipping companies can land

tens of thousands of Chinese or Indian labourers for a pound or two a

head at any port in the world. But when we think of such things we need

no longer feel ourselves in the grip of a Fate that laughs at human

purpose and human kindliness. An idea of the whole existence of our

species is at last a possible background to our individual experience.

Its emotional effect may prove to be not less than that of the visible

temples and walls of the Greek cities, although it is formed not from

the testimony of our eyesight, but from the knowledge which we acquire

in our childhood and confirm by the half-conscious corroboration of our

daily life.

We all of us, plain folk and learned alike, now make a picture for

ourselves of the globe with its hemispheres of light and shadow, from

every point of which the telegraph brings us hourly news, and which may

already be more real to us than the fields and houses past which we

hurry in the train. We can all see it, hanging and turning in the

monstrous emptiness of the skies, and obedient to forces whose action we

can watch hundreds of light-years away and feel in the beating of our

hearts. The sharp new evidence of the camera brings every year nearer to

us its surface of ice and rock and plain, and the wondering eyes of

alien peoples.

It may be that we shall long continue to differ as to the full

significance of this vision. But now that we can look at it without

helpless pain it may stir the deepest impulses of our being. To some of

us it may bring confidence in that Love that Dante saw, 'which moves the

Sun and the other Stars.' To each of us it may suggest a kinder pity for

all the bewildered beings who hand on from generation to generation the

torch of conscious life.

INDEX

Abyssinia, Italian invasion of,

Acland, Mr.,

Adams, John Quincy,

Airedale,

America, appointment of non-elected officials in,

Civil Service,

science and politics in,

tendency to electoral concentration in,

Amos,

Ampthill, Lord,

Antigone,

Aristotle, comparison of State to a ship,

criticism of Plato's communism,

definition of 'polity',

maximum size of a State,

on action as the end of politics,

on political affection,

Athens, glassmakers of,

Sophocles' love of,

Austin, John,

Bacon, Francis,

Atlantis of,

Bagehot, Walter,

Balfour, Mr. A.J.,

Mr. Jabez,

Balliol College,

Ballot,

Barrie, Mr. J.M.,

Bebel,

Beccaria,

Bentham, Jeremy,

Macaulay's attack on,

on criminology,

on 'natural right,'

_Principles of Morals and Legislation_,

Benthamism, as a science of politics,

Berlin, Congress of, 1885,

Bernstein,

Bismarck,

and artificial homogeneity of national type,

on political egoism,

Bolingbroke, Lord,

Botha, General,

Breeding, selective,

Brighton Parade,

British Empire, difficulty of conceiving as a political entity,

national homogeneity in,

political status of non-European races in,

Brontë, Charlotte,

Bryan, Mr. W.J.,

Bryce, Mr. James,

Buckle, H.T.,

Bülow, Prince, on dominance of Prussia,

on private and national morality,

on universal suffrage,

Burke, Edmund,

on man's power of political reasoning,

on 'party,'

Burney, Fanny,

Burns, Robert,

Butler, Bishop,

Canning, George,

Carlyle, Thomas,

essay on Burns of,

Cavendish, Lord Frederick,

Cavour,

Cecil, Lord Robert,

Chadwick, Sir E.,

Chamberlain, Mr. Joseph,

Charity Schools,

Chesterton, Mr. G.K.,

China,

Chinese Labour, agitation against,

Christianity and race question,

Harnack on expansion of,

Churchill, Lord Randolph,

Civil Service, creation of English,

of India,

importance of an independent,

Sir C. Trevelyan's Report on,

Comenius,

Competition, system of, in municipal appointments,

in railway appointments,

variety in methods of,

Comte, Auguste,

Corrupt Practices Act,

Corrupt Practices Act, practical failure of,

Corruption, prevented by competitive Civil Service,

Courtney, Lord,

Crimean War,

Croydon,

Dante,

Darwin, Charles,

correspondence with Lyell,

effect of his work,

on persistence of racial variation,

_Origin of Species_ of,

Demosthenes,

Derby, Lord, Reform Act of,

De Wet,

Diderot,

Disraeli, Benjamin,

Dolling, Father,

Education Act, 1870,

Egypt,

Esher Committee,

Fénelon,

Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy,

Fourier,

Fox, Charles James,

Gambetta,

Galen,

Gardiner, Professor S.R.,

Garfield, President,

George III. and American Revolution,

and Fox's India Bill,

popularity of,

German Emperor,

Gladstone, W. E., and English Civil Service,

and Queen Victoria,

on change of

opinion,

on Ireland,

parliamentary oratory of,

Government Departments, organisation of,

Graham's Law,

Grote, George,

Hadley, A.T.,

Hague, The,

Hall, Professor Stanley,

Harnack, T.,

Helvetius,

Herbart, J.F.,

Hicks-Beach, Miss,

Hippocrates,

Hobbes, Thomas,

Homoiousians,

Homoousians,

Hume, Joseph,

Huxley, T.H.,

Lay Sermons of,

Hyndman, Mr.,

India,

and representative democracy,

applicability of democratic principles in,

appointment of East India Company officials,

Civil Service,

English dislike of natives in,

Individualism, curve of,

Ireland, Home Rule for,

Jackson, Andrew,

James, Professor William,

on sense of effective reality,

_Principles of Psychology_ of,

Jameson, Dr.,

Japan,

Japanese, mental environment of,

State Papers,

Jevons, Professor,

Jury. _See_ Trial by Jury.

Justice, conception of, as political term,

Justinian,

Kossuth, Louis,

Labour Party and intellectual conditions of representative government,

Lansdowne, Lord,

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid,

LeBon, G.,

Lingen, Lord,

Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894,

Locke, John, and basis of government,

and pedagogy,

on relation of man to God's law,

Lombroso, C.,

London, Borough Council elections,

creation of love for,

lack of citizenship in,

proportion of active registered voters in,

provision of schools in,

School Board elections in,

County Council Debating Hall,

election posters,

Lyell, Sir Charles,

Lyndhurst, Lord,

MacCulloch, J.R.,

Macedonia,

Macewen, Sir William,

Macaulay, Lord,

and East India Company,

Essay in _Edinburgh Review_ on Benthamism,

Marseillaise,

Marshall, Professor,

Marx, Karl,

Mazzini, Joseph, attack on cosmopolitanism,

on geographical division of humanity,

Mendel, Abbot,

Merivale, Mr. Herman,

Metternich,

Mill, James,

J.S.,

on mankind in the average,

opposition to the Ballot of,

Milner, Lord,

Molesworth, Sir W.,

More, Sir Thomas, Republic of,

Morgan, Professor Lloyd,

Morley, Lord,

on W.K. Gladstone,

Morris, William,

Municipal Representation Bill,

Napoleon I. and psychology of war,

Louis,

Negro Suffrage in United States,

Nevinson, Mr. H.W.,

Newman, J.H.,

on sonification,

Nicholas H.,

North, Lord,

Northcote, Sir Stafford,

Olivier, Sir Sydney,

Ostrogorski, Professor,

Owen, Robert,

Paine, Thomas,

Pal, Mr. Chandra,

Palmerston, Lord,

Pankhurst, Mrs.,

Parnell, C.S.,

Parramatta Tea,

Party as a political entity,

Patroclus,

Pearson, Professor Karl,

Peel, Sir Robert,

Pericles,

Persia,

Philadelphia,

Philippines,

Place, Francis,

Plato,

'cave of illusion' of,

his 'harmony of the Soul' in modern political life,

on basis of government,

on government by consent,

on idea of perfect man,

on the public,

religion in the Republic of,

Republic of,

Playfair Commission,

Poor Law Commission of 1834,

of 1905

Proportional Representation and Lord Courtney,

Society,

Prospero,

Putney,

Race Problem and representative democracy,

in international politics,

in India,

Reform Act of 1867

Religion of Comte,

in Plato's Republic,

Representative democracy and India,

and race problem,

in Egypt,

in England,

in United States,

Rome,

Roosevelt, Theodore,

Rousseau, J.J., and pedagogy,

on human rights,

Rural Parish Councils,

Ruskin, John,

Samuel, Mr. Herbert,

Schnadhorst, Mr.,

Science, as an entity,

Seeley, J.R., _Expansion of England_ of,

Senior, Nassau,

_Political Economy_ of,

Shelley,

Socialism, conception of as a working creed,

curve of,

Socrates,

Somerset House,

Sophocles,

Spencer, Mr. Herbert,

Stein, H.F.,

Stephen, Sir James,

Suffrage, for women at 1906 election,

negro,

universal, Prince Bülow's attack on,

Swift, Dean,

Swinburne, A.C.,

Tammany Hall,

Tarde, G.,

Tennyson, Lord,

Thackeray,

Togo, Admiral,

Trevelyan, Sir Charles,

Trial by Jury, development of

Tweefontein,

Tyrrell, Father,

United Kingdom, proportion of elected to electors in,

United States and Negro Suffrage,

and representative democracy,

Vaux, Madame De,

Vereeniging, Peace of,

Victoria, Queen,

on competition for Indian Army commissions,

portrait of,

on coins,

Virgin of Kevlaar,

War Office Council,

Wells, Mr. H.G., on delocalised population,

on representative democracy,

on 'sense of the State,'

on uniqueness of the individual

Whately, Archbishop

Women's Suffrage at 1906 election

methods of suffragists,

Wood, Mr. M'Kinnon,

Wordsworth, _Prelude_ of,

End of Project Gutenberg's Human Nature In Politics, by Graham Wallas