But how far are such quantitative methods possible when a statesman is dealing, neither with an obviously quantitative problem, like the building of halls or schools, nor with an attempt to give quantitative meaning to abstract terms like Socialism or Individualism, but with the enormous complexity of responsible legislation?
In approaching this question we shall be helped if we keep before us a description of the way in which some one statesman has, in fact, thought of a great constitutional problem.
Take, for instance, the indications which Mr. Morley gives of the thinking done by Gladstone on Home Rule during the autumn and winter of 1885-86. Gladstone, we are told, had already, for many years past, pondered anxiously at intervals about Ireland, and now he describes himself as ‘thinking incessantly about the matter’ (vol. iii. p. 268), and ‘preparing myself by study and reflection’ (p. 273).
He has first to consider the state of feeling in England and Ireland, and to calculate to what extent and under what influences it may be expected to change. As to English feeling, ‘what I expect,’ he says, ‘is a healthy slow fermentation in many minds working towards the final product’ (p. 261). The Irish desire for self-government, on the other hand, will not change, and must be taken, within the time-limit of his problem, as ‘fixed’ (p. 240). In both England and Ireland, however, he believes that ‘mutual attachment’ may grow (p. 292).
Before making up his mind in favour of some kind of Home Rule, he examines every thinkable alternative, especially the development of Irish County Government, or a Federal arrangement in which all three of the united kingdoms would be concerned. Here and there he finds suggestions in the history of Austria-Hungary, of Norway and Sweden, or of the ‘colonial type’ of government. Nearly every day he reads Burke, and exclaims ‘what a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America’ (p. 280). He gets much help from ‘a chapter on semi-sovereign assemblies in Dicey’s _Law of the Constitution_ (p. 280). He tries to see the question from fresh points of view in intimate personal discussions, and by imagining what ‘the civilised world’ (p. 225) will think. As he gets nearer to his subject, he has definite statistical reports made for him by ‘Welby and Hamilton on the figures’ (p. 306), has ‘stiff conclaves about finance and land’ (p. 298), and nearly comes to a final split with Parnell on the question whether the Irish contribution to Imperial taxation shall be a fifteenth or a twentieth.
Time and persons are important factors in his calculation. If Lord Salisbury will consent to introduce some measure of Irish self-government, the problem will be fundamentally altered, and the same will happen if the general election produces a Liberal majority independent of both Irish and Conservatives; and Mr. Morley describes as underlying all his calculations ‘the irresistible attraction for him of all the grand and eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government’ (p. 260).
It is not likely that Mr. Morley’s narrative touches on more than a fraction of the questions which must have been in Gladstone’s mind during these months of incessant thought. No mention is made, for instance, of religion, or of the military position, or of the permanent possibility of enforcing the proposed restrictions on self-government. But enough is given to show the complexity of political thought at that stage when a statesman, still uncommitted, is considering what will be the effect of a new political departure.
What then was the logical process by which Gladstone’s final decision was arrived at?
Did he for instance deal with a succession of simple problems or with one complex problem? It is, I think, clear that from time to time isolated and comparatively simple trains of reasoning were followed up; but it is also clear that Gladstone’s main effort of thought was involved in the process of co-ordinating all the laboriously collected contents of his mind onto the whole problem. This is emphasised by a quotation in which Mr. Morley, who was closely associated with Gladstone’s intellectual toil during this period, indicates his own recollection.
‘Historians,’ he quotes from Professor Gardiner, ‘coolly dissect a man’s thoughts as they please; and label them like specimens in a naturalist’s cabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal aggrandisement; such a thing for national objects, such a thing from high religious motives. In real life we may be sure it was not so’ (p. 277).
And it is clear that in spite of the ease and delight with which Gladstone’s mind moved among ‘the eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government,’ he is seeking throughout for a quantitative solution. ‘Home Rule’ is no simple entity for him. He realises that the number of possible schemes for Irish government is infinite, and he attempts to make at every point in his own scheme a delicate adjustment between many varying forces.
A large part of this work of complex co-ordination was apparently in Mr. Gladstone’s case unconscious. Throughout the chapters one has the feeling–which any one who has had to make less important political decisions can parallel from his own experience–that Gladstone was waiting for indications of a solution to appear in his mind. He was conscious of his effort, conscious also that his effort was being directed simultaneously towards many different considerations, but largely unconscious of the actual process of inference, which went on perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else, than when he was awake and attentive. A phrase of Mr. Morley’s indicates a feeling with which every politician is familiar. ‘The reader,’ he says,’knows in what direction the main current of Mr. Gladstone’s thought must have been setting’ (p. 236).
That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than of science, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of conscious method.
But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partial substitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired in youth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as the half-conscious result of experience. Our problem therefore involves the further question, whether those forms of political thought which correspond to the complexity of nature are teachable or not? At present they are not often taught. In every generation thousands of young men and women are attracted to politics because their intellects are keener, and their sympathies wider than those of their fellows. They become followers of Liberalism or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or the Rights of Men or Women. To them, at first, Liberalism and the Empire, Rights and Principles, are real and simple things. Or, like Shelley, they see in the whole human race an infinite repetition of uniform individuals, the ‘millions on millions’ who ‘wait, firm, rapid, and elate.'[44]
[44] Shelley, _Poetical Works_ (H.B. Forman), vol. iv. p. 8.
About all these things they argue by the old _a priori_ methods which we have inherited with our political language. But after a time a sense of unreality grows upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difficult world forces itself into their minds. Like the old Chartists with whom I once spent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been ‘all talk’–all words–and there are few among them, except those to whom politics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until through weariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from new knowledge. Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habit or party spirit for their political opinions and actions. Having ceased to think of their unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of a simple type, they cease to think of them at all; and content themselves with using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising the individual existence of their casual neighbours.
Wordsworth’s _Prelude_ describes with pathetic clearness a mental history, which must have been that of many thousands of men who could not write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces have been blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He tells us that the ‘man’ whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still at its dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely ‘the composition of the brain.’ After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw ‘the individual man … the man whom we behold with our own eyes.'[45] But in that change from a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation of the individual, Wordsworth’s power of estimating political forces or helping in political progress was gone for ever.
[45] _The Prelude_, Bk. XIII., ll. 81-84.
If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitative method must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and the associations of that mental world into which the young politician enters. Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. Every year larger and more exact collections of detailed political facts are being accumulated; and collections of detailed facts, if they are to be used at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively. The intellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on by permanent officials or Royal Commissions or Cabinet Ministers takes every year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form.
Compare for instance the methods of the present Commission on the Poor Law with those of the celebrated and extraordinarily able Commission which drew up the new Poor Law in 1833-34. The argument of the earlier Commissioners’ Report runs on lines which it would be easy to put in _a priori_ syllogistic form. All men seek pleasure and avoid pain. Society ought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure to social conduct. This may be done by making every man’s livelihood and that of his children normally dependent upon his own exertions, by separating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the community from those who can, and by presenting these last with the alternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction. This leads to ‘a principle which we find universally admitted, even by those whose practice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.'[46] The _a priori_ argument is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by the sub-commissioners or given in evidence before the Commission, indicating that labouring men will not exert themselves unless they are offered the alternative of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt is made to estimate the proportion of the working population of England whose character and conduct is represented by each instance.
[46] _First Report of the Poor Law Commission_, 1834 (reprinted 1894), p. 187.
This _a priori_ deduction, illustrated, but not proved by particular instances, is throughout so clear and so easily apprehended by the ordinary man that the revolutionary Bill of 1834, which affected all sorts of vested interests, passed the House of Commons by a majority of four to one and the House of Lords by a majority of six to one.
The Poor Law Commission of 1905, on the other hand, though it contains many members trained in the traditions of 1834, is being driven, by the mere necessity of dealing with the mass of varied evidence before it, onto new lines. Instead of assuming half consciously that human energy is dependent solely on the working of the human will in the presence of the ideas of pleasure and pain, the Commissioners are forced to tabulate and consider innumerable quantitative observations relating to the very many factors affecting the will of paupers and possible paupers. They cannot, for instance, avoid the task of estimating the relative industrial effectiveness of health, which depends upon decent surroundings; of hope, which may be made possible by State provision for old age; and of the imaginative range which is the result of education; and of comparing all these with the ‘purely economic’ motive created by ideas of future pleasure and pain.
The evidence before the Commission is, that is to say, collected not to illustrate general propositions otherwise established, but to provide quantitative answers to quantitative questions; and instances are in each case accumulated according to a well-known statistical rule until the repetition of results shows that further accumulation would be useless.
In 1834 it was enough, in dealing with the political machinery of the Poor Law, to argue that, since all men desire their own interest, the ratepayers would elect guardians who would, up to the limit of their knowledge, advance the interests of the whole community; provided that electoral areas were created in which all sectional interests were represented, and that voting power were given to each ratepayer in proportion to his interest. It did not then seem to matter much whether the areas chosen were new or old, or whether the body elected had other duties or not.
In 1908, on the other hand, it is felt to be necessary to seek for all the causes which are likely to influence the mind of the ratepayer or candidate during an election, and to estimate by such evidence as is available their relative importance. It has to be considered, for instance, whether men vote best in areas where they keep up habits of political action in connection with parliamentary as well as municipal contests; and whether an election involving other points besides poor-law administration is more likely to create interest among the electorate. If more than one election, again, is held in a district in any year it may be found by the record of the percentage of votes that electoral enthusiasm diminishes for each additional contest along a very rapidly descending curve.
The final decisions that will be taken either by the Commission or by Parliament on questions of administrative policy and electoral machinery must therefore involve the balancing of all these and many other considerations by an essentially quantitative process. The line, that is to say, which ultimately cuts the curves indicated by the evidence will allow less weight either to anxiety for the future as a motive for exertion, or to personal health as increasing personal efficiency, than would be given to either if it were the sole factor to be considered. There will be more ‘bureaucracy’ than would be desirable if it were not for the need of economising the energies of the elected representatives, and less bureaucracy than there would be if it were not desirable to retain popular sympathy and consent. Throughout the argument the population of England will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill would have said) ‘on the average or _en masse_,'[47] but as consisting of individuals who can be arranged in ‘polygons of variation’ according to their nervous and physical strength, their ‘character’ and the degree to which ideas of the future are likely to affect their present conduct.
[47] See p. 132.
Meanwhile the public which will discuss the Report has changed since 1834. Newspaper writers, in discussing the problem of destitution, tend now to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the ‘poor,’ ‘the working class,’ or ‘the lower orders,’ but terms expressing quantitative estimates of individual variations, like ‘the submerged tenth,’ or the ‘unemployable’; while every newspaper reader is fairly familiar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns which record seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment among Trade Unionists.
One could give many other instances of this beginning of a tendency in political thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms of argument. But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to international politics. ‘Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simple question of quality. Austin had demonstrated that there must be a sovereign everywhere, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an autocracy or a republic, must be absolute. But the Congress which in 1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of Africa from causing a series of European wars as long as those caused by the partition of America, was compelled by the complexity of the problems before it to approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines. Since 1885 therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented to express gradations of sovereignty: ‘Effective occupation,’ ‘Hinterland,’ ‘Sphere of Influence’–to which the Algeciras Conference has perhaps added a lowest grade, ‘Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.’ It is already as unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory or not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain percentage of carbon should be called iron or steel.
Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of observed political fact some men escape the temptation to ignore individual differences. I remember that the man who has perhaps done more than any one else in England to make a statistical basis for industrial legislation possible, once told me that he had been spending the whole day in classifying under a few heads thousands of ‘railway accidents,’ every one of which differed in its circumstances from any other; and that he felt like the bewildered porter in _Punch_, who had to arrange the subleties of nature according to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company. ‘Cats,’ he quoted the porter as saying, ‘is dogs, and guinea-pigs is dogs, but this ‘ere tortoise is a hinsect.’
But it must constantly be remembered that quantitative thinking does not necessarily or even generally mean thinking in terms of numerical statistics. Number, which obliterates all distinction between the units numbered, is not the only, nor always even the most exact means of representing quantitative facts. A picture, for instance, may be sometimes nearer to quantitative truth, more easily remembered and more useful for purposes of argument and verification than a row of figures. The most exact quantitative political document that I ever saw was a set of photographs of all the women admitted into an inebriate home. The photographs demonstrated, more precisely than any record of approximate measurements could have done, the varying facts of physical and nervous structure. It would have been easily possible for a committee of medical men to have arranged the photographs in a series of increasing abnormality, and to have indicated the photograph of the ‘marginal’ woman in whose case, after allowing for considerations of expense, and for the desirability of encouraging individual responsibility, the State should undertake temporary or permanent control. And the record was one which no one who had ever seen it could forget.
The political thinker has indeed sometimes to imitate the cabinet-maker, who discards his most finely divided numerical rule for some kinds of specially delicate work, and trusts to his sense of touch for a quantitative estimation. The most exact estimation possible of a political problem may have been contrived when a group of men, differing in origin, education, and mental type, first establish an approximate agreement as to the probable results of a series of possible political alternatives involving, say, increasing or decreasing state interference, and then discover the point where their ‘liking’ turns into ‘disliking.’ Man is the measure of man, and he may still be using a quantitative process even though he chooses in each case that method of measurement which is least affected by the imperfection of his powers. But it is just in the cases where numerical calculation is impossible or unsuitable that the politician is likely to get most help by using consciously quantitative conceptions.
An objection has been urged against the adoption of political reasoning either implicitly or explicitly quantitative, that it involves the balancing against each other of things essentially disparate. How is one, it is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national honour involved in the continuance of a war with that marginal unit of extra taxation which is supposed to be its exact equivalent? How is one to balance the final sovereign spent on the endowment of science with the final sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased scientist, or on the final detail in a scheme of old age pensions? The obvious answer is that statesmen have to act, and that whoever acts does somehow balance all the alternatives which are before him. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in his annual allocation of grants and remissions of taxation balances no stranger things than does the private citizen, who, having a pound or two to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to a Chinese Mission and providing a revolving hatch between his kitchen and his dining-room.
A more serious objection is that we ought not to allow ourselves to think quantitatively in politics, that to do so fritters away the plain consideration of principle. ‘Logical principles’ may be only an inadequate representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon them is, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist.
In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductive thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince Buelow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is reported to have said:–‘Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible dogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its Constitution or of its franchise. Herr Bebel had once said that on the whole he preferred English conditions even to conditions in France. But in England the franchise was not universal, equal, and direct. Could it be said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular suffrage at all, was governed worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard such strange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universal suffrage?'[48]
[48] _Times_, March 27, 1908.
But what Prince Buelow’s speech showed, was that he was either deliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he did not agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception of quantitative political thought. If the ‘dogma’ of universal suffrage means the assertion that all men who have votes are thereby made identical with each other in all respects, and that universal suffrage is the one condition of good government, then, and then only, is his attack on it valid. If, however, the desire for universal suffrage is based on the belief that a wide extension of political power is one of the most important elements in the conditions of good government–racial aptitude, ministerial responsibility, and the like, being other elements–then the speech is absolutely meaningless.
But Prince Buelow was making a parliamentary speech, and in parliamentary oratory that change from qualitative to quantitative method which has so deeply affected the procedure of Conferences and Commissions has not yet made much progress. In a ‘full-dress’ debate even those speeches which move us most often recall Mr. Gladstone, in whose mind, as soon as he stood up to speak, his Eton and Oxford training in words always contended with his experience of things, and who never made it quite clear whether the ‘grand and eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government’ meant that certain elements must be of great and permanent importance in every problem of Church and State, or that an _a priori_ solution of all political problems could be deduced by all good men from absolute and authoritative laws.
PART II
_Possibilities of Progress_
CHAPTER I
POLITICAL MORALITY
In the preceding chapters I have argued that the efficiency of political science, its power, that is to say, of forecasting the results of political causes, is likely to increase. I based my argument on two facts, firstly, that modern psychology offers us a conception of human nature much truer, though more complex, than that which is associated with the traditional English political philosophy; and secondly, that, under the influence and example of the natural sciences, political thinkers are already beginning to use in their discussions and inquiries quantitative rather than merely qualitative words and methods, and are able therefore both to state their problems more fully and to answer them with a greater approximation to accuracy.
In this argument it was not necessary to ask how far such an improvement in the science of politics is likely to influence the actual course of political history. Whatever may be the best way of discovering truth will remain the best, whether the mass of mankind choose to follow it or not.
But politics are studied, as Aristotle said, ‘for the sake of action rather than of knowledge,'[49] and the student is bound, sooner or later, to ask himself what will be the effect of a change in his science upon that political world in which he lives and works.
[49] _Ethics_, Bk. I. ch. iii. (6). [Greek: epeide to telos [tes politikes] estin ou gnesis alla praxis.]
One can imagine, for instance, that a professor of politics in Columbia University, who had just taken part as a ‘Mugwump’ in a well-fought but entirely unsuccessful campaign against Tammany Hall, might say: ‘The finer and more accurate the processes of political science become, the less do they count in politics. Astronomers invent every year more delicate methods of forecasting the movements of the stars, but cannot with all their skill divert one star an inch from its course. So we students of politics will find that our growing knowledge brings us only a growing sense of helplessness. We may learn from our science to estimate exactly the forces exerted by the syndicated newspaper press, by the liquor saloons, or by the blind instincts of class and nationality and race; but how can we learn to control them? The fact that we think about these things in a new way will not win elections or prevent wars.’
I propose, therefore, in this second part of my book to discuss how far the new tendencies which are beginning to transform the science of politics are likely also to make themselves felt as a new political force. I shall try to estimate the probable influence of these tendencies, not only on the student or the trained politician, but on the ordinary citizen whom political science reaches only at second or third hand; and, with that intention, shall treat in successive chapters their relation to our ideals of political morality, to the form and working of the representative and official machinery of the State, and to the possibilities of international and inter-racial understanding.
This chapter deals from that point of view with their probable influence on political morality. In using that term I do not mean to imply that certain acts are moral when done from political motives which would not be moral if done from other motives, or _vice versa_, but to emphasise the fact that there are certain ethical questions which can only be studied in close connection with political science. There are, of course, points of conduct which are common to all occupations. We must all try to be kind, and honest, and industrious, and we expect the general teachers of morals to help us to do so. But every occupation has also its special problems, which must be stated by its own students before they can be dealt with by the moralist at all.
In politics the most important of these special questions of conduct is concerned with the relation between the process by which the politician forms his own opinions and purposes, and that by which he influences the opinions and purposes of others.
A hundred or even fifty years ago, those who worked for a democracy of which they had had as yet no experience felt no misgivings on this point They looked on reasoning, not as a difficult and uncertain process, but as the necessary and automatic working of man’s mind when faced by problems affecting his interest. They assumed, therefore, that the citizens under a democracy would necessarily be guided by reason in the use of their votes, that those politicians would be most successful who made their own conclusions and the grounds for them most clear to others, and that good government would be secured if the voters had sufficient opportunities of listening to free and sincere discussion.
A candidate to-day who comes fresh from his books to the platform almost inevitably begins by making the same assumption.
He prepares his speeches and writes his address with the conviction that on his demonstration of the relation between political causes and effects will depend the result of the election. Perhaps his first shock will come from that maxim which every professional agent repeats over and over again to every candidate, ‘Meetings are no good.’ Those who attend meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already loyal and habitual supporters of his party. If his speeches are logically unanswerable the chief political importance of that fact is to be found, not in his power of convincing those who are already convinced, but in the greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass which may be produced among his supporters by their admiration of him as a speaker.
Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his address and that of his opponent appeal to the constituents. He may, for instance, become suddenly aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself opens the envelopes containing other candidates addresses in some election (of Poor Law Guardians, for instance), in which he is not specially interested, and of the fact that his attention is either not aroused at all, or is only aroused by words and phrases which recall some habitual train of thought. By the time that he has become sufficiently confident or important to draw up a political programme for himself, he understands the limits within which any utterance must be confined that is addressed to large numbers of voters–the fact that proposals are only to be brought ‘within the sphere of practical politics’ which are simple, striking, and carefully adapted to the half-conscious memories and likes and dislikes of busy men.
All this means that his own power of political reasoning is being trained. He is learning that every man differs from every other man in his interests, his intellectual habits and powers, and his experience, and that success in the control of political forces depends on a recognition of this and a careful appreciation of the common factors of human nature. But meanwhile it is increasingly difficult for him to believe that he is appealing to the same process of reasoning in his hearers as that by which he reaches his own conclusions. He tends, that is to say, to think of the voters as the subject-matter rather than the sharers of his thoughts. He, like Plato’s sophist, is learning what the public is, and is beginning to understand ‘the passions and desires’ of that ‘huge and powerful brute, how to approach and handle it, at what times it becomes fiercest and most gentle, on what occasions it utters its several cries, and what sounds made by others soothe or irritate it.'[50] If he resolutely guards himself against the danger of passing from one illusion to another, he may still remember that he is not the only man in the constituency who has reasoned and is reasoning about politics. If he does personal canvassing he may meet sometimes a middle-aged working man, living nearer than himself to the facts of life, and may find that this constituent of his has reasoned patiently and deeply on politics for thirty years, and that he himself is a rather absurd item in the material of that reasoning. Or he may talk with a business man, and be forced to understand some one who sees perhaps more clearly than himself the results of his proposals, but who is separated from him by the gulf of a difference of desire: that which one hopes the other fears.
[50] Plato, _Republic_, p. 493.
Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect the process by which the more thoughtful both of those who vote for him and of those who vote against him reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that his own part in the election has little to do with any reasoning process at all. I remember that before my first election my most experienced political friend said to me, ‘Remember that you are undertaking a six weeks’ advertising campaign.’ Time is short, there are innumerable details to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from the rare intervals of mental contact with individual electors to that advertising campaign which deals with the electors as a whole. As long as he is so engaged, the maxim that it is wrong to appeal to anything but the severest process of logical thought in his constituents will seem to him, if he has time to think of it, not so much untrue as irrelevant.
After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational ‘over-man’ who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his ‘Patriot King’ how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of ‘that staring timid creature man.'[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few ‘among the societies of men … who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.'[52] For the rest, ‘Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct.'[53]
[51] _Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism_, etc. (ed. of 1785), p. 70.
[52] _Ibid._, p. 2.
[53] _Ibid._, p. 165.
The greatest of Bolingbroke’s disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, ‘We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress…. Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votaries than Bentham.'[54] It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria ‘like a woman,’ and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he never fully recovered, who treated her ‘like a public meeting.’
[54] _Coningsby_, ch. xiii.
In spite of Disraeli’s essentially kindly spirit, his calculated play upon the instincts of the nation which he governed seemed to many in his time to introduce a cold and ruthless element into politics, which seemed colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the less kindly character of his disciple Lord Randolph Churchill. But the same ruthlessness is often found now, and may perhaps be more often found in the future, whenever any one is sufficiently concentrated on some political end to break through all intellectual or ethical conventions that stand in his way. I remember a long talk, a good many years ago, with one of the leaders of the Russian terrorist movement. He said, ‘It is no use arguing with the peasants even if we were permitted to do so. They are influenced by events not words. If we kill a Tzar, or a Grand Duke, or a minister, our movement becomes something which exists and counts with them, otherwise, as far as they are concerned, it does not exist at all.’
In war, the vague political tradition that there is something unfair in influencing the will of one’s fellow-men otherwise than by argument does not exist. This was what Napoleon meant when he said, ‘A la guerre, tout est moral, et le moral et l’opinion font plus de la moitie de la realite.'[55] And it is curious to observe that when men are consciously or half-consciously determining to ignore that tradition they drop into the language of warfare. Twenty years ago, the expression ‘Class-war’ was constantly used among English Socialists to justify the proposal that a Socialist party should adopt those methods of parliamentary terrorism (as opposed to parliamentary argument) which had been invented by Parnell. When Lord Lansdowne in 1906 proposed to the House of Lords that they should abandon any calculation of the good or bad administrative effect of measures sent to them from the Liberal House of Commons, and consider only the psychological effect of their acceptance or rejection on the voters at the next general election, he dropped at once into military metaphor. ‘Let us’ he said, ‘be sure that if we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possible to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable to this House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were to win for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end.'[56]
[55] _Maximes de Guerre et Pensees de Napoleon Ier_ (Chapelot), p. 230.
[56] Hansard (Trades Disputes Bill, House of Lords, Dec. 4, 1906), p. 703.
At first sight, therefore, it might appear that the change in political science which is now going on will simply result in the abandonment by the younger politicians of all ethical traditions, and the adoption by them, as the result of their new book-learning, of those methods of exploiting the irrational elements of human nature which have hitherto been the trade secret of the elderly and the disillusioned.
I have been told, for instance, that among the little group of women who in 1906 and 1907 brought the question of Women’s Suffrage within the sphere of practical politics, was one who had received a serious academic training in psychology, and that the tactics actually employed were in large part due to her plea that in order to make men think one must begin by making them feel.[57]
[57] Mrs. Pankhurst is reported, in the _Observer_ of July 26, 1908, to have said, ‘Whatever the women who were called Suffragists might be, they at least understood how to bring themselves in touch with the public. They had caught the spirit of the age, learnt the art of advertising.’
A Hindoo agitator, again, Mr. Chandra Pal, who also had read psychology, imitated Lord Lansdowne a few months ago by saying, ‘Applying the principles of psychology to the consideration of political problems we find it is necessary that we … should do nothing that will make the Government a power for us. Because if the Government becomes easy, if it becomes pleasant, if it becomes good government, then our signs of separation from it will be gradually lost.'[58] Mr. Chandra Pal, unlike Lord Lansdowne, was shortly afterwards imprisoned, but his words have had an important political effect in India.
[58] Quoted in _Times_, June 3, 1907.
If this mental attitude and the tactics based on it succeed, they must, it may be argued, spread with constantly increasing rapidity; and just as, by Gresham’s Law in commerce, base coin, if there is enough of it, must drive out sterling coin, so in politics, must the easier and more immediately effective drive out the more difficult and less effective method of appeal.
One cannot now answer such an argument by a mere statement that knowledge will make men wise. It was easy in the old days to rely on the belief that human life and conduct would become perfect if men only learnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most political speculators used to sketch a perfect polity which would result from the complete adoption of their principles, the republics of Plato and of More, Bacon’s Atlantis, Locke’s plea for a government which should consciously realise the purposes of God, or Bentham’s Utilitarian State securely founded upon the Table of the Springs of Action. We, however, who live after Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not expect knowledge, however full, to lead us to perfection. The modern student of physiology believes that if his work is successful, men may have better health than they would have if they were more ignorant, but he does not dream of producing a perfectly healthy nation; and he is always prepared to face the discovery that biological causes which he cannot control may be tending to make health worse. Nor does the writer on education now argue that he can make perfect characters in his schools. If our imaginations ever start on the old road to Utopia, we are checked by remembering that we are blood-relations of the other animals, and that we have no more right than our kinsfolk to suppose that the mind of the universe has contrived that we can find a perfect life by looking for it. The bees might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, and of the waste of life and toil which goes on in the best ordered hive. And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation was possible for creatures hampered by such limited powers of observation and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. They might be forced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life must remain bewildered and violent and short. Political inquiry deals with man as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his life that can be made during the next few centuries. It may be that some scores of generations hence, we shall have discovered that the improvements in government which can be brought about by such inquiry, are insignificant when compared with the changes which will be made possible when, through the hazardous experiment of selective breeding, we have altered the human type itself.
But however anxious we are to see the facts of our existence without illusion, and to hope nothing without cause, we can still draw some measure of comfort from the recollection that during the few thousand years through which we can trace political history in the past, man, without changing his nature, has made enormous improvements in his polity, and that those improvements have often been the result of new moral ideals formed under the influence of new knowledge.
The ultimate and wider effect on our conduct of any increase in our knowledge may indeed be very different from, and more important than, its immediate and narrower effect. We each of us live our lives in a pictured universe, of which only a small part is contributed by our own observation and memory, and by far the greater part by what we have learnt from others. The changes in that mental picture of our environment made for instance by the discovery of America, or the ascertainment of the true movements of the nearer heavenly bodies, exercised an influence on men’s general conception of their place in the universe, which proved ultimately to be more important than their immediate effect in stimulating explorers and improving the art of navigation. But none of the changes of outlook in the past have approached in their extent and significance those which have been in progress during the last fifty years, the new history of man and his surroundings, stretching back through hitherto unthought-of ages, the substitution of an illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for the imagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above all the intrusion of science into the most intimate regions of ourselves. The effects of such changes often come, it is true, more slowly than we hope. I was talking not long ago to one of the ablest of those who were beginning their intellectual life when Darwin published the _Origin of Species_. He told me how he and his philosopher brother expected that at once all things should become new, and how unwillingly as the years went on they had accepted their disappointment. But though slow, they are far-reaching.
To myself it seems that the most important political result of the vast range of new knowledge started by Darwin’s work may prove to be the extension of the idea of conduct so as to include the control of mental processes of which at present most men are either unconscious or unobservant. The limits of our conscious conduct are fixed by the limits of our self-knowledge. Before men knew anger as something separable from the self that knew it, and before they had made that knowledge current by the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question of conduct. Anger was a part of the angry man himself, and could only be checked by the invasion of some other passion, love, for instance, or fear, which was equally, while it lasted, a part of self. The man survived to continue his race if anger or fear or love came upon him at the right time, and with the right intensity. But when man had named his anger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger came within the region of conduct, Henceforth, in that respect, man could choose either the old way of half-conscious obedience to an impulse which on the whole had proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way of fully conscious control directed by a calculation of results.
A man who has become conscious of the nature of fear, and has acquired the power of controlling it, if he sees a boulder bounding towards him down a torrent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to leap to one side, or may substitute conduct for instinct, and stand where he is because he has calculated that at the next bound the course of the boulder will be deflected. If he decides to stand he may be wrong. It may prove by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, owing to the imperfection of his powers of conscious inference, a safer guide than the process of calculation. But because he has the choice, even the decision to follow impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sincerely convinced that men’s power of political reasoning was so utterly inadequate to their task, that all his life long he urged the English nation to follow prescription, to obey, that is to say, on principle their habitual political impulses. But the deliberate following of prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past. Those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget.
In other matters than politics the influence of the fruit of that tree is now spreading further over our lives. Whether we will or not, the old unthinking obedience to appetite in eating is more and more affected by our knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physiological results of the quantity and kind of our food. Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us to eat ‘caviare on impulse,’ instead of ‘grape nuts on principle.'[59] But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on principle. The physician, when he knows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it. He finds himself watching the unintended effects of his words and tones and gestures, until he realises that in spite of himself he is calculating the means by which such effects can be produced. After a time, even his patients may learn to watch the effect of ‘a good bedside manner’ on themselves.
[59] _Heretics_, 1905, p. 136.
So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer impulses of mankind is being spread (if only by the currency of new words), the relation both of the politician and the voter to those impulses is changing. As soon as American politicians called a certain kind of specially paid orator a ‘spell-binder,’ the word penetrated through the newspapers from politicians to audiences. The man who knows that he has paid two dollars to sit in a hall and be ‘spell-bound,’ feels, it is true, the old sensations, but feels them with a subtle and irrevocable difference. The English newspaper reader who has once heard the word ‘sensational,’ may try to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary of his consciousness to the trained psychologists of the halfpenny journals. He may, according to the suggestion of the day, loathe the sixty million crafty scoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at a coming comet, pity the cowards on the Government Front Bench, or tremble lest a pantomime lady should throw up her part. But he cannot help the existence in the background of his consciousness of a self which watches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his ‘sensations.’ Even the rapidly growing psychological complexity of modern novels and plays helps to complicate the relation of the men of our time to their emotional impulses. The young tradesman who has been reading either _Evan Harrington_, or a novel by some writer who has read _Evan Harrington_, goes to shake hands with a countess at an entertainment given by the Primrose League, or the Liberal Social Council, conscious of pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure. His father, who read _John Halifax, Gentleman_, would have been carried away by a tenth part of the condescension which is necessary in the case of the son. A voter who has seen _John Bull’s Other Island_ at the theatre, is more likely than his father, who only saw _The Shaughraun_, to realise that one’s feelings on the Irish question can be thought about as well as felt.
In so far as this change extends, the politician may find in the future that an increasing proportion of his constituents half-consciously ‘see through’ the cruder arts of emotional exploitation.
But such an unconscious or half-conscious extension of self-knowledge is not likely of itself to keep pace with the parallel development of the political art of controlling impulse. The tendency, if it is to be effective, must be strengthened by the deliberate adoption and inculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions–new ideal entities to which our affections and desires may attach themselves.
‘Science’ has been such an entity ever since Francis Bacon found again, without knowing it, the path of Aristotle’s best thought. The conception of ‘Science,’ of scientific method and the scientific spirit, was built up in successive generations by a few students. At first their conception was confined to themselves. Its effects were seen in the discoveries which they actually made; but to the mass of mankind they seemed little better than magicians. Now it has spread to the whole world. In every class-room and laboratory in Europe and America the conscious idea of Science forms the minds and wills of thousands of men and women who could never have helped to create it. It has penetrated, as the political conceptions of Liberty or of Natural Right never penetrated, to non-European races. Arab engineers in Khartoum, doctors and nurses and generals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinese students make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired by absolute submission to Science, and not only English or American or German town working men, but villagers in Italy or Argentina are learning to respect the authority and sympathise with the methods of that organised study which may double at any moment the produce of their crops or check a plague among their cattle.
‘Science,’ however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only with things exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubes and microscopes. They are dimly aware that there exists a science of the mind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct.
It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt more successfully than elsewhere the art of controlling other men’s unconscious impulses from without, there have been of late some noteworthy declarations as to the need of conscious control from within. Some of those especially who have been trained in scientific method at the American Universities are now attempting to extend to politics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct. But it seems to me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes the old form of an opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘passion.’ The President of the University of Yale said, for instance, the other day in a powerful address, ‘Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals to the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers … attacks our political life at a most vulnerable point.'[60] If forty years ago Huxley had in this way merely preached ‘intelligence’ as against ’emotion’ in the exploration of nature, few would have listened to him. Men will not take up the ‘intolerable disease of thought’ unless their feelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science has been that it does touch men’s feelings, and draws motive power for thought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, and of limitless hope.
[60] A. T. Hadley in _Munsey’s Magazine_, 1907.
The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men must become passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to that section of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of the State realises itself in men’s hearts by a ‘harmony’ which strengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passions no longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an end discovered by the intellect.[61]
[61] Cf. Plato’s _Republic_, Book IV.
In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling is peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only provide a motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values which must be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying to realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from current language) upon Plato’s favourite metaphor of the arts. In music the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise intensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely their own feelings. The conditions under which they succeed or fail are fixed, for both, by facts in our emotional nature which they cannot change. One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of the nature of his hearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring of those who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sit enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions.
But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conception of such a harmony of reason and passion, of thought and impulse, in political motive? One thinks of education, and particularly of scientific education. But the imaginative range which is necessary if students are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from the laboratory to the public meeting is not common. It would perhaps more often exist if part of all scientific education were given to such a study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mental history as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the young biologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great reputation was based, and suspending his deepest religious convictions, in the cause of a truth not yet made clear.
But most school children, if they are to learn the facts on which the conception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even more directly. I myself believe that a very simple course on the well-ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, be quite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who had received some small preliminary training in scientific method. Mr. William James’s chapter on Habit in his _Principles of Psychology_ would, for instance, if the language were somewhat simplified, come well within their range. A town child, again, lives nowadays in the constant presence of the psychological art of advertisement, and could easily be made to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get a bar of soap, he feels inclined to get that which is most widely advertised, and what relation his inclination has to that mental process which is most likely to result in the buying of good soap. The basis of knowledge necessary for the conception of intellectual duty could further be enlarged at school by the study in pure literature of the deeper experiences of the mind. A child of twelve might understand Carlyle’s _Essay on Burns_ if it were carefully read in class, and a good sixth form might learn much from Wordsworth’s _Prelude_.
The whole question, however, of such deliberate instruction in the emotional and intellectual facts of man’s nature as may lead men to conceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal is one on which much steady thinking and observation is still required. The instincts of sex, for instance, are becoming in all civilised countries more and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasing degree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has found the way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before or during the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instincts themselves.
Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends not only upon the chemical composition of food but upon our appetite, and that we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control and direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, ‘We cannot properly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a free mind with the prospect of enjoyment.'[62] But it would not be easy to create by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse at which Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why food is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is therefore our duty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made both wholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing except his sense of humour.
[62] _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 8, 1904.
So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say that the teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of the existence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finally at subordinating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on the consequences of political action. But it is extraordinarily difficult to discover how this can be done under the actual conditions of school teaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, introduced into the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life and Duties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played in social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accompanied by a moral for each section, such as ‘serving personal interest is not enough,’ ‘need of public spirit and intelligence for good Government,’ ‘need of honesty in giving a vote,’ ‘the vote a trust as well as a right.’ Almost every school publisher rushed out a text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an acknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the time to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printed pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed to stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths and maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must apparently approach their task with something of Socrates’ passionate love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic.
If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught what Mr. Wells calls ‘the sense of the State,'[63] we may, by remembering Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends. Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If their love is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the _Oedipus Coloneus_. But such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself somewhat more lovely.
[63] _The future in America_, chapter ix.
The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words but by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, they should either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those aspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, if it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the buildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth impressive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to be found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of Landport; though boys’ eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in personal motive than in external pomp.
More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberate intensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions. A life-long worker for education on the London School Board once told me that when he wearied of his work–when the words of reports become mere words, and the figures in the returns mere figures–he used to go down to a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class after class, till the freshness of his impulse came back. But for a man who is about to try such an experiment on himself even the word ’emotion’ is dangerous. The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hot and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus of his energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level of full consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by every sight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted to his work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house. But all that he is conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose of healing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and hand are harmoniously concentrated.
Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becoming conscious of new vices than of new virtues. Some day, for instance, the word ‘opinion’ itself may become the recognised name of the most dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit and association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they neglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how, and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created by any clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulated State in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men who never followed up a train of political reasoning in their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was a matter of ‘conscience’ and therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation.
But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato’s conception of the Harmony of the Soul–the intensification both of passion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination–can ever become a part of the general political ideals of a modern nation? Perhaps most men before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes. Many men would now answer, No. The Japanese are apparently in some respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual morality than, say, the French. One hears, for instance, of incidents which seem to show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japanese universities. But both during the years of preparation for the war, and during the war itself, there was something in what one was told of the combined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to a European seemed wholly new. Napoleon contended against the ‘ideologues’ who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submitted to his own illusions he ground them to powder. But we associate Napoleon’s clearness of vision with personal selfishness. Here was a nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in his determination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesque traditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism was hotter than Gambetta’s. Something of this may have been due to the inherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be the effect of their mental environment. They had whole-heartedly welcomed that conception of Science which in Europe, where it was first elaborated, still struggles with older ideals. Science with them had allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural law which, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had always underlain their various religions.[64] They had acquired, therefore, a mental outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, and which combined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy in thought and action.
[64] See Okakura, _The Japanese Spirit_ (1905).
One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might take place between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion, and the new conception of intellectual duty introduced by Science. The political effect of such a fusion would be enormous. But for the moment that hope is not easy. The inevitable conflict between old faith and new knowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a division not only between the conclusions of religion and science, but also between the religious and the scientific habit of mind. The scientific men of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine of probability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most perfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an English clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his _Times_ or _Mail_, his attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trained to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is, Dr. Jameson’s prepared manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like a trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine disgust and despair.
It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of new ideals of intellectual conduct will have to wait for a still wider change of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day the conception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, in the deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of our present dreary confusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics which is now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able not only to control and direct in himself the impulses of whose nature he is more fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of his aim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their most effective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which in the best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, and citizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanese army looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind by which alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature.
CHAPTER II
REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change not only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our political institutions.
I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which produced the constitutions under which most civilised nations now live, was inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked, representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of the conditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have been itself a mistake?
Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditional democratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting again from the beginning, and considering what are the ends representation is intended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to good government.
The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essence of a representative government is that it depends on the periodically renewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and the degree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance of accomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by a majority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey.
The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representative democracy was a mistake, raises the preliminary question whether the consent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of good government. To this question Plato, who among the political philosophers of the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of a modern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered, No. To him it was incredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleeting shadows of popular opinion. He proposed, therefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his Republic should live under the despotic government of those who by ‘slaving for it'[65] had acquired a knowledge of the reality which lay behind appearance. Comte, writing when modern science was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the same proposal. Mr. H.G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous speculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia which is the result of the forcible overthrow of representative government by a voluntary aristocracy of trained men of science. He appeals, in a phrase consciously influenced by Plato’s metaphysics, to ‘the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible world….'[66] There are some signs, in America as well as in England, that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both passionately in earnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in their experience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-blooded manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians, turn ‘back to Plato’; and when once this question is started, neither our existing mental habits nor our loyalty to democratic tradition will prevent it from being fully discussed.
[65] [Greek: douleusanti te ktesei autou] (_Republic,_ p. 494).
[66] Wells, _A Modern Utopia_, p. 263. ‘I know of no case for the elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers….’ Wells, _Anticipations_, p. 147.
To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an experience of government without consent larger than any other that has ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. The Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about a thousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensures that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of government; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern.
Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, however carefully selected and trained, must still inhabit ‘the ostensible world.’ The Anglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours–when he is toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or famine-prevention–may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science which is far removed from the jealousies and superstitions of the villagers in his district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by his efficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on life which decides his choice of ends; and the Anglo-Indian outlook on life is conditioned, not by the problem of British India as history will see it a thousand years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in the little government stations, with their trying climates, their narrow society, and the continual presence of an alien and possibly hostile race. We have not, it is true, yet followed the full rigour of Plato’s system, and chosen the wives of Anglo-Indian officials by the same process as that through which their husbands pass. But it may be feared that even if we did so, the lady would still remain typical who said to Mr. Nevinson, ‘To us in India a pro-native is simply a rank outsider.'[67]
[67] _The Nation_, December 21, 1907.
What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom the Anglo-Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion depends even more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not on things as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. The avowed tactics of our empire in the East have therefore always been based by many of our high officials upon psychological and not upon logical considerations. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, we blow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our rights in dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference to ‘the moral effect upon the native mind.’ And, if half what is hinted at by some ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religious antipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if not encouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintain our dominant position.
The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore one that would exist at least equally in Plato’s corporate despotism as in the most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay on _The First Principles of Government_, says: ‘It is … on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and the most popular.'[68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of man’s sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat then becomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, or religious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic State.
[68] Hume’s _Essays_, chap. iv.
Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that the loyalty of the subject-classes in his Republic should be secured once for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach a religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell their people ‘one magnificent lie’;[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effect on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease which it was intended to cure.
[69] [Greek: gennaion ti en pseudomenous] (_Republic_, p. 414).
But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method of securing consent.
Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than anything else which can be substituted for it. And representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In England at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in constituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given to the representative, variation is possible.
If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by Fenelon and Helvetius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of constitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but where the machinery of British parliamentary government would not work. In Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary local constituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go to the poll.[70] As long as that is the case representative government is impossible. A slow process of education might increase the proportion of voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, who understand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, to discover other methods by which the vague desires of the native population can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made in some measure to depend on them.
[70] _Times_, January 6, 1908.
The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an ‘advisory Council of Notables’;[71] with the possible result that we may be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealings with the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in our regulation of factory labour.
[71] Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 885.
In England itself, though great political inventions are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable tendencies.
A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex process by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not in the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of securing them by regulation.
The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing it with the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has taken place in the conditions under which that decision is formed which is expressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.[72] The various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters beyond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jury together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in England might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did in Athens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jury might have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hired advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the _Private Orations_ of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the witnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they should tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. If such an institution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would have taken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own version of the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reserved for the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of the prisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly party vote.
[72] See, _e.g._, Stephen, _History of the Criminal Law_, vol. i. pp. 260-72.
But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a long series of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of the jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is produced has been more and more completely controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the essential feature of the trial.
The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case. They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual of the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolled inferences of the human brain. The ‘said I’s,’ and ‘thought I’s,’ and ‘said he’s,’ which are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are here banished on the ground that they are ‘not evidence,’ and witnesses are compelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations of sight and hearing.
The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, if they are well-intentioned men, often find themselves giving, to their own surprise, perfectly consistent accounts of the events at issue. The barristers’ tricks of advocacy are to some extent restrained by professional custom and by the authority of the judge, and they are careful to point out to the jury each other’s fallacies. Newspapers do not reach the jury box, and in any case are prevented by the law as to contempt of court from commenting on a case which is under trial. The judge sums up, carefully describing the conditions of valid inference on questions of disputed fact, and warning the jury against those forms of irrational and unconscious inference to which experience has shown them to be most liable. They then retire, all carrying in their minds the same body of simplified and dissected evidence, and all having been urged with every circumstance of solemnity to form their conclusions by the same mental process. It constantly happens therefore that twelve men, selected by lot, will come to a unanimous verdict as to a question on which in the outside world they would have been hopelessly divided, and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions of fact so difficult as to leave the practised intellect of the judge undecided, will very generally be right. An English law court is indeed during a well-governed jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules of valid reasoning are illustrated by experiment; and when, as threatens to occur in some American States and cities, it becomes impossible to enforce those rules, the jury system itself breaks down.[73]
[73] On the jury system see Mr. Wells’s _Mankind in the Making_, chapter vii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where it is desirable that government should be supported by popular consent.
At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree of economy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do not make good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order that popular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may not be unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing class or person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced to death or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of a jury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are now taken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by special fitness for their task.
In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine the tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear upon electors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practise open bribery the whole system of representation would break down at once. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several generations on the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was the serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of 1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definite bargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavish expenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personally popular, and create an impression that his connection with the constituency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 therefore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candidate at a parliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and later Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties after death, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paid for by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, no election meeting may be held in a building where any form of food or drink is habitually sold, although that building may be only a Co-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room.
The existing laws against Corrupt Practices represent, it is true, rather the growing purpose of the State to control the conditions under which electoral opinion is formed, than any large measure of success in carrying out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion of the expenditure at any English election is now incurred by bodies enrolled outside the constituency, and nominally engaged, not in winning the election for a particular candidate, but in propagating their own principles. Sometimes the candidate whom they support, and whom they try to commit as deeply as possible, would be greatly relieved if they withdrew. Generally their agents are an integral part of his fighting organisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election is covered by a special subscription made by him to the central fund. Every one sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clauses in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbid the employment of paid canvassers, though no one as yet has put forward any plan for preventing it. But it is acknowledged that unless the whole principle is to be abandoned, new legislation must take place; and Lord Robert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a ‘stringent and far-reaching Corrupt Practices Act.'[74] If, however, an act is carried stringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development of electoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new and hitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty of political appeal.
[74] _Times_, June 26, 1907.
A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituency for three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which the voters were every day further removed from the state of mind in which serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Now no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to effective political reasoning.
A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of the Ballot. Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful and public-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly or secretly? Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. Since men acted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and since landlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws against intimidation, to bring ‘sinister’ motives to bear upon voters whose votes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow as a corollary from utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole philosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiance till the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved the abandonment of the whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure and pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can be summed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, that even under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause which induce the ordinary citizen to vote. ‘Once in a thousand times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may cross him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year’s expenditure if the side he votes for wins.’ He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. ‘His motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter’s frame of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it.’ But ideas of right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our neighbours. ‘Since then the real motive which induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an interested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decided is whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense of social duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when the act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. But this question is answered as soon as stated. When in every other act of a man’s life which concerns his duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is the single case in which he will act better for being sheltered against all comment.'[75]
[75] Letter to the _Reader_, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J.S.M., quoted as Mill’s by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, _Public Responsibility and Vote by Ballot_, pp. 89, 90.
Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of political impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those ‘acts of a man’s life which concern his duty to others,’ to which Mill refers–the paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of one’s relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense. Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the excitement of one’s friends, the look of triumph on the face of one’s opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of one’s village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain conclusions of one’s thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the canvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it is a promise.
Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign in favour of ‘proportional representation,’ in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing system of the ‘single ballot’ a minority in any single-member constituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them–the Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals–have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large constituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester with its eight seats being given as an example.
This system, according to Lord Courtney, ‘will lead to the dropping of the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'[76] But the arguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at the assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.
[76] Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics’ Institute, Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6.
The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Society mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society and through eight newspapers. ‘The constituency,’ we are told, ‘was supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some of the main divisions of public opinion.'[77] The names were, in fact, Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law, and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected.
[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6.
I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their readers to recognise.
At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, ‘to us,’ as they were ‘in themselves.’ But an ordinary list of candidates’ names presented to an ordinary voter is ‘to him’ simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told.
The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to ‘the ordinary newspaper reader,’ who is assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions ‘How to vote.’ The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each constituency, _i.e._ by meetings and canvassing and the distribution of ‘election literature.’ Lord Courtney’s proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day.
These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt ‘plural voting’ for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might ‘plump’ all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them.
This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable entity like the American ‘ticket’ and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative ‘eight’ or ‘five’ or ‘three.’ If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French _scrutin de liste_. The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates. Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers.
If Lord Courtney’s proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it is the ‘ticket’ system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney’s scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.
Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his Municipal Representation Bill in the House of Lords,[78] contrasted his proposed system with that used in the London Borough Council elections, according to which a number of seats are assigned to each ward and the voter may give one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number of candidates. It is true that the electoral machinery for the London Boroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of America. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how to vote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were six seats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was told by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not one of which I remembered to have seen before. If there had been one seat to be filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enough about one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote; and the local party committees would have known that I and others would do so. Bach party would then have circulated a portrait and a printed account of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had a strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I could not give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteen candidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. I therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who voted in the borough, voted a ‘straight ticket.’ If for any reason the party committee put, to use an Americanism, a ‘yellow dog’ among the list of names, I voted for the yellow dog.
[78] April 30, 1907.
Under Lord Courtney’s system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord Courtney’s proposed system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the two systems until the votes are counted.
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