Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something
like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day. For the point is
generally a very sharp point; and is, moreover, sharp at both ends.
That is to say that both parties would probably impale themselves in an
uncomfortable manner if they did not manage to avoid it altogether. I
have just been looking at the election address of the official Liberal
candidate for the part of the country in which I live; and though it
is, if anything, rather more logical and free from cant than most other
documents of the sort it is an excellent example of missing the point.
The candidate has to go boring on about Free Trade and Land Reform and
Education; and nobody reading it could possibly imagine that in the town
of Wycombe, where the poll will be declared, the capital of the Wycombe
division of Bucks which the candidate is contesting, centre of the
important and vital trade on which it has thriven, a savage struggle
about justice has been raging for months past between the poor and rich,
as real as the French Revolution. The man offering himself at Wycombe as
representative of the Wycombe division simply says nothing about it at
all. It is as if a man at the crisis of the French Terror had offered
himself as a deputy for the town of Paris, and had said nothing about
the Monarchy, nothing about the Republic, nothing about the massacres,
nothing about the war; but had explained with great clearness his views
on the suppression of the Jansenists, the literary style of Racine,
the suitability of Turenae for the post of commander-in-chief, and the
religious reflections of Madame de Maintenon. For, at their best, the
candidate’s topics are not topical. Home Rule is a very good thing, and
modern education is a very bad thing; but neither of them are things
that anybody is talking about in High Wycombe. This is the first and
simplest way of missing the point: deliberately to avoid and ignore it.