at hand, and, by a sufficient spice of references to actual affairs,
can work up into any number of pointed leading articles. I will only
observe that such arguments seem to me to illustrate that curious
unreality of political theories of which I have spoken. It seems to be
tacitly assumed on both sides, that votes are determined by a process
of genuine reasoning. One side may be ignorant and the other
prejudiced; but the arguments I have recapitulated seem to imply the
assumption that the constituents really reflect upon the reasons for
and against the measures proposed, and make up their minds accordingly.
They are spoken of as though they were a body of experts, investigating
a scientific doctrine, or at least a jury guided by the evidence laid
before them. Upon that assumption, as it seems to me, the moral would
be that the whole system is a palpable absurdity. The vast majority of
voters scarcely think at all, and would be incapable of judging if they
did. Hundreds of thousands care more for Dr. Grace's last score or the
winner of the Derby than for any political question whatever. If they
have opinions, they have neither the training nor the knowledge
necessary to form any conclusion whatever. Consider the state of mind
of the average voter--of nine men out of ten, say, whom you meet in the
Strand. Ask yourselves honestly what value you would attach to his
opinion upon any great question--say, of foreign politics or political
economy. Has he ever really thought about them? Is he superficially
acquainted with any of the relevant facts? Is he even capable of the
imaginative effort necessary to set before him the vast interests often
affected? And would the simple fact that he said "Yes" to a given
question establish in your mind the smallest presumption against the
probability that the right answer would be "No"? What are the chances
that a majority of people, of whom not one in a hundred has any
qualifications for judging, will give a right judgment? Yet that is the
test suggested by most of the conventional arguments on both sides; for
I do not say this as intending to accept the anti-democratic
application. It is just as applicable, I believe, to the educated and
the well-off. I need not labour the point, which is sufficiently
obvious. I am quite convinced that, for example, the voters for a
university will be guided by unreasonable prejudices as the voters for
a metropolitan constituency. In some ways they will be worse. To find
people who believe honestly in antiquated prejudices, you must go to
the people who have been trained to believe them. An ecclesiastical
seminary can manage to drill the pupils into professing absurdities
from which average common sense would shrink, and only supply logical
machinery for warring against reason. The reference to enlightened
aristocracies is common enough; but I cannot discover that, "taken in a
lump," any particular aristocracy cannot be as narrow-minded,
short-sighted, and selfish, as the most rampant democracy. In point of
fact, we all know that political action is determined by instinct
rather than by reason. I do not mean that instinct is opposed to
reason: it is simply a crude, undeveloped, inarticulate form of reason;
it is blended with prejudices for which no reason is assigned, or even
regarded as requisite. Such blind instincts, implying at most a kind of
groping after error, necessarily govern the majority of men of all
classes, in political as in other movements. The old apologists used to
argue on the hypothesis that men must have accepted Christianity on the
strength of a serious inquiry into the evidences. The fallacy of the
doctrine is sufficiently plain: they accepted it because it suited them
on the whole, and was fitted, no doubt, to their intellectual needs,
but was also fitted to their emotional and moral needs as developed
under certain social conditions. The inference from the general
acceptance of any theory is not that it is true, but that it is true
enough to satisfy the very feeble demand for logic--that it is not
palpably absurd or self-contradictory; and that, for some reason or
other, it satisfies also the imagination, the affections, and the
aspirations of the believers. Not to go into other questions, this
single remark indicates, I think, the attitude which the scientific
observer would adopt in regard to this ancient controversy. He would
study the causes as well as the alleged reasons assignable for any
general instinct, and admit that its existence is one of the primary
data which have to be taken into account. To denounce democracy or
aristocracy is easy enough; and it saves trouble to assume that God is
on one side and the devil on the other. The true method, I take it, is
that which was indicated by Tocqueville's great book upon democracy in
America; a book which, if I may trust my own impressions, though
necessarily imperfect as regards America, is a perfectly admirable
example of the fruitful method of studying such problems. Though an
aristocrat by birth and breeding, Tocqueville had the wisdom to examine
democratic beliefs and institutions in a thoroughly impartial spirit;
and, instead of simply denouncing or admiring, to trace the genesis of
the prevalent ideas and their close connection with the general state
of social development. An inquiry conducted in that spirit would not
lead to the absolute dogmatic conclusions in which the superficial
controversialist delights. It would show, perhaps, that there was at
least this much truth in the democratic contention, that the masses
are, by their position, exempt from some of the prejudices which are
ingrained in the members of a smaller caste; that they are therefore
more accessible to certain moral considerations, and more anxious to
promote the greatest happiness of the greater number. But it might also
show how the weakness of the ignorant and untrained mind produces the
characteristic evils of sentimentalism and impatience, of a belief in
the omnipotence of legislation, and an excessive jealousy of all
superiorities; and might possibly, too, exhibit certain merits which
are impressed upon the aristocrat by his sense of the obligations of
nobility. I do not in the least mean to express any opinion about such
questions; I desire only to indicate the temper in which I conceive
that they should be approached.
I have lived long enough to be utterly unable to believe--though some
older politicians than I seem still to believe, especially on the eve
of a dissolution--that any of our party lines coincide with the lines
between good and bad, wise and foolish. Every one, of course, will
repudiate the abstract theory. Yet we may notice how constantly it is
assumed; and can see to what fallacies it leads when we look for a
moment at the historical questions which no longer unite party feeling.
Few, indeed, even of our historians, can write without taking party
views of such questions. Even the candid and impartial seem to deserve
these epithets chiefly because they want imagination, and can cast
blame or applaud alternately, because they do not enter into the real
spirit of either party. Their views are sometimes a medley of
inconsistent theories, rather than a deeper view which might reconcile
apparent inconsistencies. I will only mention one point which often
strikes me, and may lead to a relevant remark. Every royalist
historian, we all know, labours to prove that Charles I. was a saint,
and Cromwell a hypocrite. The view was natural at the time of the civil
wars; but it now should suggest an obvious logical dilemma. If the
monarchical theory which Charles represented was sound, and Charles was
also a wise and good man, what caused the rebellion? A perfect man
driving a perfect engine should surely not have run it off the rails.
The royalist ought to seek to prove that Charles was a fool and a
knave, to account for the collapse of royalty; and the case against
royalty is all the stronger, if you could show that Charles, in spite
of impeccable virtue, was forced by his position to end on the
scaffold. Choose between him and the system which he applied. So
Catholics and conservatives are never tired of denouncing Henry VIII.
and the French revolutionists. So far as I can guess (I know very
little about it), their case is a very strong one. I somehow believe,
in spite of Froude, that Henry VIII. was a tyrant; and eulogies upon
the reign of terror generally convince me that a greater set of
scoundrels seldom came to the surface, than the perpetrators of those
enormities. But then the real inference is, to my mind, very different.
Henry VIII. was the product of the previous time; the ultimate outcome
of that ideal state of things in which the church had its own way
during the ages of truth. Must not the system have been wrong, when it
had so lost all moral weight as to be at the mercy of a ruffianly
plunderer? And so, as we all admit now, the strongest condemnation of
the old French _régime_ is the fact that it had not only produced
such a set of miscreants as those who have cast permanent odium even
upon sound principles; but that its king and rulers went down before
them without even an attempt at manly resistance. A revolution does
not, perhaps, justify itself; it does not prove that its leaders judged
rightly and acted virtuously: but, beyond a doubt, it condemns the
previous order which brought it about. What a horrid thing is the
explosion! Why, is the obvious answer, did you allow the explosive
materials to accumulate, till the first match must fire the train? The
greatest blot upon Burke, I need hardly say, is that his passions
blinded him in his age, to this, as we now see, inevitable conclusion.
The old-fashioned view, I fancy, is a relic of that view of history in
which all the great events and changes were personified in some
individual hero. The old "legislators," Lycurgus and Solon and the
like, were supposed to have created the institutions which were really
the products of a slow growth. When a favourable change due to
economical causes took place in the position of the French peasantry,
the peasants, says Michelet somewhere, called it "good king Henry".
Carlyle's theory of hero worship is partly an application of the same
mode of thought. You embody your principle in some concrete person;
canonise him or damn him, as he represents truth or error; and take
credit to yourself for insight and for a lofty morality. It becomes a
kind of blasphemy to suggest that your great man, who thus stands for
an inspired leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best
very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a
producer. The crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its
morality. Your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or
white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and
plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he
labels the adherents and opponents of his party. And yet we know as a
fact, how absurd are such judgments. We know how men are betrayed into
bad causes from good motives, or put on the right side because it
happens to harmonise with their lower interests. Saints--so we are
told--have been the cruellest persecutors; and kings, acting from
purely selfish ambition, have consolidated nations or crushed effete
and mischievous institutions. If we can make up our minds as to which
was, on the whole, the best cause,--and, generally speaking, both sides
represented some sound principle,--it does not follow that it was also
the cause of all the best men. Before we can judge of the individual,
we must answer a hundred difficult questions: If he took the right
side, did he take it from the right motives? Was it from personal
ambition or pure patriotism? Did he see what was the real question at
issue? Did he foresee the inevitable effect of the measures which he
advocated? If he did not see, was it because he was human, and
therefore short-sighted; or because he was brutal, and therefore
wanting in sympathy; or because he had intellectual defects, which made
it impossible for him to escape from the common illusions of the time?
These, and any number of similar difficulties, arise when we try to
judge of the great men who form landmarks in our history, from the time
of Boadicea to that of Queen Victoria. They are always amusing, and
sometimes important; but there is always a danger that they may warp
our views of the vital facts. The beauty of Mary Queen of Scots still
disqualifies many people from judging calmly the great issues of a most
important historical epoch. I will leave it to you to apply this to our
views of modern politics, and judge the value of the ordinary
assumption which assumes that all good men must be on one side.
Now we may say that the remedy for such illusions points to the
importance of a doctrine which is by no means new, but which has, I
think, bearings not always recognised. We have been told, again and
again, since Plato wrote his _Republic_, that society is an organism. It
is replied that this is at best an analogy upon which too great stress
must not be laid; and we are warned against the fanciful comparisons
which some writers have drawn between the body corporate and the actual
physical body, with its cells, tissues, nervous system, and so forth.
Now, whatever may be the danger of that mode of reasoning, I think that
the statement, properly understood, corresponds to a simple logical
canon too often neglected in historical and political reasonings. It
means, I take it, in the first place, that every man is a product as
well as a producer; that there is no such thing as the imaginary
individual with fixed properties, whom theorists are apt to take for
granted as the base of their reasoning; that no man or group of men is
intelligible without taking into account the mass of instincts
transmitted through their predecessors, and therefore without referring
to their position in the general history of human development. And,
secondly, it is essential to remember in speaking of any great man, or
of any institution, their position as parts of a complicated system of
actions and emotions. The word "if," I may say, changes its meaning.
"If" Harold had won the battle of Hastings, what would have been the
result? The answer would be comparatively simple, if we could, in the
old fashion, attribute to William the Conqueror all the results in which
he played a conspicuous part: if, therefore, we could make out a
definite list of effects of which he was the cause, and, by simply
"deducting" them, after Coleridge's fashion, from the effects which
actually followed, determine what was the precise balance. But when we
consider how many causes were actually in operation, how impossible it
is to disentangle and separate them, and say this followed from that,
and that other from something else, we have to admit that the might have
been is simply indiscoverable. The great man may have hastened what was
otherwise inevitable; he may simply have supplied the particular point,
round which a crystallisation took place of forces which would have
otherwise discovered some other centre; and the fact that he succeeded
in establishing certain institutions or laws may be simply a proof that
he saw a little more clearly than others the direction towards which
more general causes were inevitably propelling the nation. Briefly, we
cannot isolate the particular "cause" in this case, and have to remember
at every moment that it was only one factor in a vast and complex series
of changes, which would no doubt have taken a different turn without it,
but of which it may be indefinitely difficult to say what was the
precise deflection due to its action.
In trying to indicate the importance, I have had to dwell upon the
difficulty, of applying anything like scientific methods to political
problems. I shall conclude by trying once more to indicate why, in
spite of this, I hold that the attempt is desirable, and may be
fruitful.
People sometimes say that scientific methods are inapplicable because
we cannot try experiments in social matters. I remember being long ago
struck by a remark of Dr. Arnold, which has some bearing upon this
assertion. He observed upon the great advantage possessed by Aristotle
in the vast number of little republics in his time, each of which was
virtually an experiment in politics. I always thought that this was
fallacious somehow, and I fancy that it is not hard to indicate the
general nature of the fallacy. Freeman, upon whose services to thorough
and accurate study of history I am unworthy to pronounce an eulogy,
fell into the same fallacy, I fancy, when he undertook to write a
history of Federal Governments. He fancied that because the Achæan
League and the Swiss Cantons and the United States of America all had
this point in common, and that they represented the combinations of
partially independent States, their history would be in a sense
continuous. The obvious consideration that the federations differed in
every possible way, in their religions and state of civilisation and
whole social structure, might be neglected. Freeman's tendency to be
indifferent to everything which was not in the narrowest sense
political led him to this--as it seems to me--pedantic conception. If
the prosperity of a nation depended exclusively upon the form of its
government, Aristotle, as Arnold remarks, would have had before him a
greater number of experiments than the modern observer. But the
assumption is obviously wrong. Every one of these ancient States
depended for its prosperity upon a vast number of conditions--its race,
its geographical position, its stage of development, and so forth,
quite impossible to tabulate or analyse; and the form of government
which suited one would be entirely inapplicable to another. To
extricate from all these conflicting elements the precise influence due
to any institutions would be a task beyond the powers of any number of
philosophers; and indeed the perplexity would probably be increased by
the very number of experiments. To make an experiment fruitful, it is
necessary to eliminate all the irrelevant elements which intrude into
the concrete cases spontaneously offered by nature, and, for example,
to obtain two cases differing only in one element, to which we may
therefore plausibly attribute other contrasts. Now, the history of a
hundred or a thousand small States would probably only present the
introduction of new and perplexing elements for every new case. The
influence, again, of individuals, or accident of war, or natural
catastrophes, is greater in proportion as the State is smaller, and
therefore makes it more difficult to observe the permanent and
underlying influences. It seems to me, therefore, that the study, say
of English history, where we have a continuous growth over many
centuries, where the disturbing influences of individuals or chance are
in a greater degree cancelled by the general tendencies working beneath
them, we have really a far more instructive field for political
observation. This may help us to see what are the kinds of results
which may be anticipated from sociological study undertaken in a
serious spirit. The growth, for example, of the industrial system of
England is a profoundly interesting subject of inquiry, to which we are
even now only beginning to do justice. Historians have admitted, even
from the time of Hume, that the ideal history should give less of mere
battles and intrigues, and more account of those deeper and more
continuous processes which lie, so to speak, beneath the surface. They
have hardly, I think, even yet realised the full bearing and importance
of this observation. Yet, of late, much has been done, though much
still remains to do, in the way of a truly scientific study of the
development of institutions, political, ecclesiastical, industrial, and
so forth, of this and other countries. As this tendency grows, we may
hope gradually to have a genuine history of the English people; an
account--not of the virtues and vices of Mary Queen of Scots, or
arguments as to the propriety of cutting off Charles I.'s head--but a
trustworthy account of the way in which the actual structure of modern
society has been developed out of its simpler germs. The biographies of
great kings and generals, and so forth, will always be interesting; but
to the genuine historian of the future they will be interesting not so
much as giving room for psychological analyses or for dramatic
portraits, but as indications of the great social forces which produced
them, and the direction of which at the moment may be illustrated by
their cases. I have spoken of the history of our industrial system. To
know what was the position of the English labourer at various times,
how it was affected by the political changes or by the great mechanical
discoveries, to observe what grievances arose, what remedies were
applied or sought to be applied, and with what result,--to treat all
this with due reference to the whole social and intellectual evolution
of which it formed a part, may well call forth the powers of our
acutest and most thoroughgoing inquirers, and will, when it is done,
give essential data for some of the most vitally important problems of
the day. This is what I understand by an application of the scientific
spirit to social and political problems. We cannot try experiments, it
is said, in historical questions. We cannot help always trying
experiments, and experiments of vast importance. Every man has to try
an experiment upon himself when he chooses his career; and the results
are frequently very unpleasant, though very instructive. We have to be
our own experiments. Every man who sets up in business tries an
experiment, ending in fortune or in bankruptcy. Every strike is an
experiment, and generally a costly one. Every attempt at starting a new
charitable organisation, or a new system of socialism or co-operation,
is an experiment. Every new law is an experiment, rash or otherwise.
And from all these experiments we do at least collect a certain number
of general observations, which, though generally consigned to
copybooks, are not without value. What is true, however, is that we
cannot try such experiments as a man of science can sometimes try in
his laboratory, where he can select and isolate the necessary elements
in any given process, and decide, by subjecting them to proper
conditions, how a definite question is to be answered. Our first
experiments are all in the rough, so to speak, tried at haphazard, and
each involving an indefinite number of irrelevant conditions. But there
is a partial compensation. We cannot tabulate the countless experiments
which have been tried with all their distracting varieties. Yet in a
certain sense the answer is given for us. For the social structure at
any period is in fact the net product of all the experiments that have
been made by the individuals of which it is and has been composed.
Therefore, so far as we can obtain some general views of the successive
changes in social order which have been gradually and steadily
developing themselves throughout the more noisy and conspicuous but
comparatively superficial political disturbances, we can detect the
true meaning of some general phenomena in which the actors themselves
were unconscious of the determining causes. We can see more or less
what were the general causes which have led to various forms of
associations, to the old guilds, or the modern factory system, to the
trades unions or the co-operative societies; and correcting and
verifying our general results by a careful examination of the
particular instances, approximate, vaguely it may be and distantly, to
some such conception of the laws of development of different social
tissues as, if not properly scientific, may yet belong to the
scientific order of thought. Thus, when distracted by this or that
particular demand, by promises of the millennium to be inaugurated
to-morrow by an Act of Parliament, or threats of some social cataclysm
to overwhelm us if we concede an inch to wicked agitators, we may
succeed in placing ourselves at a higher point of view, from which it
is possible to look over wider horizons, to regard what is happening
to-day in its relations to slow processes of elaboration, and to form
judgments based upon wide and systematic inquiry, which, if they do not
entitle us to predict particular events, as an astronomer predicts an
eclipse, will at least be a guide to sane and sober minds, and suggest
at once a humbler appreciation of what is within our power, and--I
think also--a more really hopeful anticipation of genuine progress in
the future.