Political Science means nothing else than the devizing of the best ways
of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is skilled work.
Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down, and the machinery
provided, the work of the statesman is done, and that of the official
begins. To illustrate, there is no need for the police officer who
governs the street traffic to be or to know any better than the
people who obey the wave of his hand. All concerted action involves
subordination and the appointment of directors at whose signal the
others will act. There is no more need for them to be superior to the
rest than for the keystone of an arch to be of harder stone than the
coping. But when it comes to devizing the directions which are to be
obeyed: that is, to making new institutions and scraping old ones, then
you need aristocracy in the sense of government by the best. A military
state organized so as to carry out exactly the impulses of the average
soldier would not last a year. The result of trying to make the Church
of England reflect the notions of the average churchgoer has reduced it
to a cipher except for the purposes of a petulantly irreligious
social and political club. Democracy as to the thing to be done may
be inevitable (hence the vital need for a democracy of supermen); but
democracy as to the way to do it is like letting the passengers drive
the train: it can only end in collision and wreck. As a matter of act,
we obtain reforms (such as they are), not by allowing the electorate
to draft statutes, but by persuading it that a certain minister and his
cabinet are gifted with sufficient political sagacity to find out how to
produce the desired result. And the usual penalty of taking advantage of
this power to reform our institutions is defeat by a vehement "swing of
the pendulum" at the next election. Therein lies the peril and the glory
of democratic statesmanship. A statesman who confines himself to popular
legislation--or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines
himself to popular plays--is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever
the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to
the same place.