Oxford economist, with whom I disagree in almost everything else that
he ever wrote. He said: "Consider not only the process by which the
machinery of our social condition has been made, but much more the
opinion and action which has developed and moulded the character of
the English people." Do not ever forget the character of the English
people, in which character and in love of which character pursue your
work and help them.
I want to see the spirit of service to the whole nation the
birthright of every member of the Unionist Party--Unionist in the
sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which
Disraeli spoke two generations ago; union among our own people to
make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing
else matters in the world. I urge on you all as workers in that
great Unionist Party to render all the service you can to the common
weal in the districts in which you live. There is always work and to
spare for human betterment in every parish in the country. And to
all those workers for the Party and members of Parliament, I say this
in conclusion: You cannot better serve your Party, and through the
Party your country, than in dedicating your lives to that service.
TRUTH AND POLITICS
ON INAUGURATION AS LORD RECTOR OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
6_th November_, 1925
The first duty of a Lord Rector is to thank his constituents for the
honour they have done him in electing him to that great and historic
office.
But beyond the honour, of which they are no less conscious than he,
lies the unique service unconsciously rendered to a Rector who is
normally immersed in public affairs.
Though "to be at sea" is a phrase used by landsmen to denote
instability of purpose and absence of sense of direction, it must be
acknowledged that we landsmen have much to learn when we are at sea,
if we will. We learn that there are two things on a ship that are
not done. A sailor does not spit on the deck, thereby strengthening
his self-control and saving unnecessary work for someone else; nor
does he speak to the man at the wheel, thereby leaving him to devote
his whole mind to his task and increasing the probability of the ship
arriving at or near her destination. In matters of State, having
selected a man for the wheel, we do everything we can to distract his
attention and to prevent him, if possible, from having time in which
he may consider for a moment where he is going.
Therein is the service of which I spoke, that you compel your Rector
to make time, though it be out of fragments, in which he may reflect
on the course of national affairs in a more objective and detached
way than is usually possible for him. You force him to pause and
ponder and present his reflections for your consideration. It is not
surprising if the result is that his thoughts should turn towards you
and that he should find himself driven to ask: what is the special
contribution which men and women educated at our universities can
make to the world?
You who are students in Edinburgh have a high reputation to maintain.
It was of this University that it was once declared by a competent
witness:
"I may truly say that it is not easy to conceive a university where
industry is more general, where reading is more fashionable, where
indolence and ignorance are more disreputable."
I hope you recognise yourselves to-day in the words of Sir James
Macintosh, written a hundred years ago.
I shall not pitch my expectations too high. The fraction of life
which you spend at the University is small, and there have been other
forces continuously at work before you came here moulding your lives.
It is the education received unconsciously that counts for most in
the making of a man. The University can only work within the limits
of the human material which it receives from the homes and schools of
the country. It can provide a favourable soil for the developing
intelligence under the supervision of expert gardeners, but it cannot
grow figs from thistles.
The University is a rich storehouse of knowledge, and some fragments
of its treasures do somehow find their way into the possession of the
students. The University is also an instrument for increasing
knowledge, and some students, a small proportion, do contrive to add
to the accumulated learning of the ages. They settle "οτι's]
business, properly base ουν, and give us the
doctrine of the enclitic γε."
But, besides, or rather in the process of, transmitting and
increasing knowledge and training ability, the University is a school
of character. That is true not only of the common room and the
playing field; it is also true of the lecture room and laboratory.
The ideal character is a harmony of many virtues, and it is a
tradition amongst us to give to truthfulness the position of the
cardinal virtue. Hence, for example, the curious power of Lord
Althorp, who was known to have said to the House of Commons, "I know
this to be right. I cannot remember why--but you may take it that it
is so," and they believed him. And if the noblest exercise of
freedom is the pursuit of truth, the best equipment for the search is
to be truthful. The inculcation of the practice of truthfulness, no
less than the acquisition of knowledge, is the motive force of our
educational system. The student is here to learn habits of accuracy
in measurement, precision in statement, honesty in handling evidence,
fairness in presenting a cause--in a word, to be true in word and
deed. That is the goal of British education, because it is
recognised that no man can be a worthy citizen whose word cannot be
trusted and whose deed is compounded of deceit.
Men think by means of words and communicate with each other through
their medium. This "most noble and profitable invention of speech is
man's proudest triumph over nature, without which there had been
amongst men neither commonwealth nor society, nor contract nor peace,
no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves."[1] Words are the
currency of love and friendship, of making and marketing, of peace
and war. Nations are bound and loosed by them. Three or four simple
words can move waves of emotion through the hearts of multitudes like
great tides of the sea: "Lest we forget." "Patriotism is not enough."
There is a well-known passage in the writings of John Stuart Mill,
where he doubts whether all the inventions of machinery have on
balance added to human happiness. I am always reminded by that
passage of another in John Locke, where he is so impressed with the
defects of language as to affirm that if anyone "shall well consider
the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that are spread
in the world by an ill-use of words, he will find some reason to
doubt whether language, as it has been employed, has contributed more
to the improvement or hindrance of knowledge among mankind."[2]
The Scottish are cautious, it has been said, because they have lived
with one another for so long. You are capable of practising great
restraint and economy in the use of words, but I do not think that
even you will go as far as Locke and wish to put us all into a
Trappist monastery. Such knowledge as there is in the world has been
built up by the help of words. A civilisation without words is
perhaps conceivable, but under it the life of man would be "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But if we cannot go all the way
with Locke, we can agree with his successor, Bentham, that "error is
never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its roots in
language." "Improper terms are the chains which bind men to
unreasonable practices. Every improper term contains the germ of
fallacious propositions; it forms a cloud, which conceals the nature
of the thing, and presents a frequently invincible obstacle to the
discovery of truth."[3] It is in a similar mood that Mr. Wells
complains of the fluidity of thought and the fixity of language.
Master of English as he is, he finds its terms solid, opaque, and
stable, and therefore "incurably inaccurate." That is not merely a
defence of philosophic doubt, but a conclusion of despair which, if
we accepted it literally, would close all universities to-morrow and
destroy all foundations of belief.
No small part of education lies in learning the right use of words,
in tracing their birth and behaviour, in fitting them closely to
facts and ideas. That is why you are here invited to study the
Humanities not only for their own fair sake, but for the discipline
which is experienced in the manipulation of two of the finest
instruments ever devised to express the minds of men. Through the
Humanities you should learn not only something of the polity and law,
the poetry and eloquence of the ancient world, but you should learn
the value of the words of your own native tongue. No man who can do
good Greek and Latin prose can deceive people with words except he
sin against the light. He can no longer be deceived himself. He
will know that to use words equivocally is prostitution. Nor does he
need to use italics in speech or writing. Headlines cannot hypnotise
him, and the latest sensation is already stale.
Through mathematics we learn on the very threshold a lesson which, if
universally known and applied, would prevent most of the ills to
which the world is heir. To know and realise that two and two make
four and can in no circumstances make anything else is to be equipped
with knowledge that will save us daily from mistakes, unpleasant to
ourselves, and possibly disastrous to others. I know that some of
Euclid's axioms, which appear to common sense to be necessary, are
now declared by mathematicians "to derive their appearance of
necessity from our mere familiarity with actual space, and not from
any _a priori_ logical foundation. By imagining worlds in which
these axioms are false, the mathematicians have used logic to show
the possibility of spaces differing from that in which we live."[4]
But even these daring speculators assure us that in any possible
world they feel that two and two would be four and that this is not a
mere fact, but a necessity to which everything actual and possible
must conform.[5] Whatever be the case in a world of Einsteins, or in
Russia, over most part of the world two and two are still believed to
make four. Without that knowledge or in the belief that two and two
may in a certain environment make five, you may indeed upset a
constitution, but you will never make an engine, nor, if you were in
possession of a ship, could you bring it into any port in the world.
Those, therefore, who would navigate the ship of State, if they would
avoid shipwreck, had better base their sailing orders on this
platitudinous verity.
Through all your studies of the physical sciences you are being
taught a similar lesson. Principles are constantly being subjected
to the test of fact, purified in the furnace of experiment. Working
hypotheses are being confronted with masses of detail, and as a
result are discarded, revised, or quickened. You strive to compel
the material facts of the world to reveal their nature, you watch and
record their behaviour, and truth is the accurate statement of the
facts observed. By means of this discipline you learn that things
are what they are and the consequences will be what they will be. In
other words, that as you sow you will reap, and a wrong combination
of elements will send you through the roof when your desire is to
remain with your feet firmly planted on the earth.
Lastly, there is the study of the ultimate science, the science of
sciences, of moral philosophy for which this University has been so
justly famous. There was a time when it might be said that the chief
export of Scotland, measured in values, was metaphysics. It was to
this University that more than one Prime Minister came from England
to sit at the feet of Dugald Stewart. The penetration of English
practice by Scottish reflection was one of the most fruitful results
of the Union, and is still happily proceeding in the person of our
distinguished Chairman (the Earl of Balfour).
Philosophy forces the student to examine the assumptions on which all
the other sciences rest, the hypotheses by which they all work. You
ask not only How? but Why? You challenge all appearance; you doubt
science itself in your search for reality. Magic, myth, ritual,
religion; the mysterious and emotional story of human belief; the
theological speculations of mankind; the very instrument by which man
knows anything at all--all are cross-examined as facts of experience,
and an attempt is made to interpret them and fit them into some
coherent explanation of our life and destiny. You cannot go any
distance on this road without arriving at the distinction between
true assertions and false ones, and you will not need to travel much
farther before reaching the distinction between right and wrong.
Throughout all these activities in which you are engaged in this
University there is the double motive of acquiring knowledge and
learning to think truly. The latter is the more important task. The
greatest service this or any university can render the modern world
is to discharge well this duty which is laid upon it, and to send
forth year after year generations of young men and women who have not
only a stock of ideas but minds which turn on the poles of truth.
Ability to read is not synonymous with ability to reflect on what is
read. Better to doubt methodically than to think capriciously.
Education that has merely taught people to follow a syllogism without
enabling them to detect a fallacy has left them in constant peril.
And as with the fallacy so with its near relation, the half truth.
For though it has been accepted through the ages that half a loaf is
better than no bread, half a truth is not only not better than no
truth, it is worse than many lies, and the slave of lies and half
truths is ignorance. Ignorance, static and inert, is bad, but
ignorance in motion, as Goethe once observed, is the most terrible
force in nature, for it may destroy in its passage the accumulated
mental and material capital of generations.
You will need this habit of truth when you leave this home of
learning and reflection. It is our greatest national asset. The
industries and commerce of this country, its enormous foreign trade,
involving innumerable transactions with known and unknown customers,
has been made possible not only by the enterprise of our merchants,
but by their integrity. There is nowhere in the world, I believe, a
higher standard of commercial honour than that which prevails in this
country. And the same is true of our Courts of Law, which enjoy a
world-wide prestige, nowhere better exemplified than in the Admiralty
Court, to which shipowners from all over the world resort, even in
cases where no British ship is in the collision or salvage operation.
Why is it, then, that when we turn to politics a lower standard of
habitual truthfulness is alleged to prevail than in the world of
science or of business? I am not now talking of this country more
than another. I think our reputation is at least as good as that of
any other country in this regard, and it has grown in the last 100
years, and is growing. The scientist is assumed to be a truth-lover;
honesty is proverbially the best policy in business; but politicians
have been despised for hypocrisy and dishonesty in all the
literatures of the Old World and the New. I open the work of a
brilliant Cambridge scholar and theologian, and this is what I read
on the first page:
"In regard to truth, the more one reads of man's notions about the
meaning and method of civil society, the more often is one inclined
in despair to say that truth has as little to do with politics as it
has with most politicians."[6]
And this is the verdict of a learned foreign observer at the end of
an immense treatise on the pathology of party government: "To the low
types which the human race has produced from Cain down to Tartuffe,
the age of democracy has added a new one--the politician."
What is the explanation of this evil reputation which attaches not to
politicians of one party, but to the whole race? Primarily, I
suppose, it is due to the fact that ever since States began to be
they have been in peril and have trusted to force for their safety.
War has been their normal history. Savagery has never been far away
from the realm of law. How long is it since that ceased to be true
in Scotland? With war and the preparation for war go the stratagems
of diplomacy, the dropping of the ordinary code of morals, a holiday
for truth, and an aftermath of cynicism. Force and fraud are in war
the two cardinal virtues, wrote the author of _Leviathan_. The
statesman's goal is the preservation of the State, and reasons of
State have been held to justify all policies whatsoever. In the
arena of international rivalry and conflict men have placed
patriotism above truthfulness as the indispensable virtue of
statesmen. "When the entire safety of a country is at stake, no
consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel,
praiseworthy or shameful, must intervene,"[7] is a copybook maxim
from the pages of a well-known exponent of the art of Government.
And it was a statesman much nearer our own time who said to a group
of friends: "If we had done for ourselves the things which we are
doing for Italy, we should be great rascals."[8] That sounds less
shocking to our ears to-day than it would have done a dozen years
ago. Machiavelli's conception of mankind has not been dispelled or
disproved. He is, as Lord Acton said, a constant and contemporary
influence. He is in all our hearts.
We have recently been celebrating the tercentenary of the publication
of the work of Grotius on International Law. Dr. Figgis, the
Cambridge historian and divine, whom I quoted a moment ago, points
out that the fundamental difference between Machiavelli and Grotius
is concerned with the question before us. The contention of Grotius,
which is denied by Machiavelli, is that human life is essentially a
society, and that certain laws, of which fidelity to plighted word is
the most important, are therefore as immutable as human nature.
These two thinkers represent two tendencies in our public life. The
principles of Machiavelli were accepted in Europe at any rate as late
as the days of Cavour and Bismarck. I wish to avoid the twentieth
century and examples from among the living. It was the prevailing
view for centuries, openly avowed and defended, that you could have
one code of morals among nations and another and much more exacting
one among individuals, that you could be a Machiavellian abroad and a
Christian at home. Whatever may have been our lapses we have never
in this country accepted this view in the bald and summary form in
which I am putting it. It was, nevertheless, a British Prime
Minister who said that "No great country was ever saved by good men,"
which is perhaps why Lord Acton said that great men were nearly
always bad men. But the shifts to which statesmen and diplomatists
have resorted in the field of foreign affairs, especially in time of
strain or open conflict, have helped to give all politicians a bad
name.
The party system is perhaps a contributory cause. The system has its
advantages, its team work, its loyalties, and others which I need not
stop to describe, especially as the whole subject was most ably
analysed by my colleague, Lord Cecil, in his address to the students
at Aberdeen a few days ago. To our sporting countrymen it appears a
game, and as such it has its rules, and these for the most part are
honourably obeyed and are an important help to probity in our public
life. But the party system does put a certain embargo on complete
frankness of speech in the arena of debate.
But it is to a third explanation that I want to direct your attention
for a few minutes more. There is a profound difference in the study
of the physical and the human sciences, between the study of
particles of matter and of men in society. You cannot measure and
weigh, combine and distribute men as you do chemical elements.
Spinoza tried something of the sort, but he did not succeed. You
remember a famous passage, where he says how he had made it his
especial care neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's
actions, but to understand them, how he had tried to consider the
emotions and agitations of men's minds, love and hatred, anger and
envy, honour and pity, just as a scientist would regard heat and
cold, storms and thunder. But though we sometimes speak of rhetoric
as hot air, the state is not a cloud, nor, I fear, do we politicians
often return in scientific showers the popular vapour which we are
said to absorb.[9]
The material of politics is human nature, its motives honourable and
base, its appetites for power and for service, its passions, its
prejudices, its memories and aspirations. But the politician cannot
work with scales and forceps, with test tube and mortar. His
instruments are the written and spoken word. Politics can never be
an exact science. Democracy is government by discussion, by talk.
Politicians must talk, and they cannot to-day, like Pitt, confine
their speeches to the House of Commons. The perils of the platform
orator have been pointed out from the days of Cleon. Words have lost
none of their equivocal character since his day. The difference
between the Greek sophist and the modern demagogue, it is said,
consists in this: the one displayed his ingenuity by appearing to
prove that which his hearers knew to be false, the other displays it
by appearing to prove that which his hearers wish to be true.[10] It
is the business of the universities to change all this, and they are
doing it.
The politician is much nearer in type to the barrister and advocate
than to the scientist. The latter has no case to prove, he sits
humbly before the facts and lets them speak. The advocate and the
politician are more interested in persuasion than in proof. They
have a client or a policy to defend. The political audience is not
dishonest in itself, nor does it desire or approve dishonesty or
misrepresentation in others, but it is an audience only imperfectly
prepared to follow a close argument, and the speaker wishes to make a
favourable impression, to secure support for a policy. It is easy to
see how this may lead to the depreciation of the verbal currency and
to the circulation of promises which cannot be cashed.
Closely allied with this is the pressure laid upon the politician in
a democratic state to speak while important negotiations are in
progress, however inconvenient the moment. The result once more is
inevitably to place a veto on complete frankness, and to tempt
recourse to words which are nebulous, hesitating, ambiguous, or
misleading. Some of us have become as adept as the Prague poet who
went to see Béranger in 1847, and had to answer a few questions. Was
Prague in Hungary or in Poland? In neither one nor the other. Was
Bohemia in Austria or in Germany? In both. Was the Prussian
monarchy absolute or conditional? Partly one, partly the other. At
last Béranger lost patience: "Frenchmen," he cried, "like things to
be clear. What is not clear is not French."[11] If the subject is
one of high foreign policy the wrong words may raise issues not
settled by dropping pieces of paper in a ballot box but by dropping
bombs on cities. That is the essential difference between the
methods of politics and of business.
In these directions we may discover some mitigation of the harsh
epithets used of the politician.